Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (review)

Even 12 years after its original publication in Spanish, there is reason to celebrate the English translation of Julio Ramos's brilliant contribution to the field of nineteenth-century Latin American cultural criticism. When it was first published back in 1989, it became one of the groundbreaking books that located the nation-building century at the center of literary studies in the field. Now, elegantly translated by John D. Blanco, and with two additional chapters, it should reach a wider audience and contribute to the growing dialogue on the literature of the Americas. In many ways, the book's power lies in Ramos's talent for combining insightful close readings of texts with original interpretive moves of considerable sweep that locate writings within the great political, social, and economic changes of the century. This allows him to contribute both to literary criticism and to cultural history broadly construed, offering exemplary articulations between writing and the contextual forces that both constrain it and constitute its conditions of possibility. Its theoretical sophistication is deployed to read literary as well as journalistic texts, often with materials taken from the archives of newspapers like La Nación of Buenos Aires.

Ramos sets out his central question clearly in his prologue: to interrogate the system of values that delineate literature's autonomy in Latin America. The answer involves tracing the complex effects produced by the various dislocations of uneven modernity upon the institution of literature and the practice of writing. Ramos's work is inflected by a postmodern sensibility that allows him to address and productively recuperate notions of fragmentation, alienation, and displacement by probing into paradoxes and contradictions that stem from the crises of change. Reading Facundo, for instance, Ramos astutely attributes Faustino Sarmiento's frequent incorporation of the word barbarian to a "civilizing" mission, which must mediate between two worlds that jeopardized the modern project. In Andrés Bello, instead, Ramos traces the conviction that the unity of language and rhetoric will consolidate the state, showing how this led to the institutionalization of intellectual labor produced from the site of the Universidad de Chile, which Bello helped found.

A major portion of the book focuses on José Martí's writing in the face of an intense experience of fragmentation during his years of exile in New York (1880-95). Studying the journalistic chronicle as the site of literature within journalism, Ramos probes the dislocations of modernity in Martí, as well as the emergence of Latinoamericanismo. He proposes compelling articulations between technological innovations, such as the 1877 inauguration of the telegraphic service for La Nación, or the engineering feat of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the tropes that connote the estrangement produced by modernity. Ramos's brilliant reading of the foundational "Our America" charts the tensions between the celebration of "natural man" and the space carved in the public sphere for an autonomous and superior intellectual authorized by his stylistic mastery. Martí proclaims culture as the defense of spiritual values in the face of the market's alienating logic, in a move which widens the horizon of aesthetic authority and whose legacy lived on in José Enrique Rodó's Ariel. Chapters 10 and 11, written after the Spanish edition of 1989, take the argument further by probing, in the first case, Martí's ambivalence about the tensions between poetry and war, and, in the second, the theme of loss in the work of two migrants, Martí and Nuyorican contemporary poet Tato Laviera. This locates the argument in today's very pressing discussion of contemporary migrant subjectivities and adds to the many reasons for admiring this important book.