Divergent Modernities: Culture und Politics in Nineteenth-Century Lutin America by Julio Ramos

Abstract

Intertexts, Vol. 7, No. 1,2003 Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Culture und Politics in PHneteenth-Century Putin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. xlvi +328 pp. Todd S. Garth DivergentModernitiesisthetranslationintoEnglishofJulioRamoss groundbreakingDesencuentrosdelamodernidadenAmericattna,as publishedin1989.Thisisatimelyandvaluabletranslationofavoliunemat respondedtoafundamentalneedinthestudyofLatin.^encan and,insodoing,bothopenedfruitfulterritoryandanticipatevit questions.Whilenotappropriatefortheundergraduateclassroom,s isanessentialsourceforanyscholarpursuingagreaterimderstanS Latin American cultural paradigms. Specialists of subaltern arid postco oiu studies, even outside of LatinAmerican interests, will fin muc material here. . , Scholars have long acknowledged that Latin Amenca s^ modernity requires atheoretical apparatus that correspon rather than to the experience of modermty mthe U.S.„--uing norRamos is one of the first critics successfully to articulate an ove traitoftheoriginsofLatin Americanmodermtybasedonso evidence. He succeeds because he is an excellent student o ory,Foucaultinparticular.Ratherthan“applying”Foucas NewHistoricistreadingoftexts,Ramosisinspiredtoposequ challenge the assumptions underlying the analyses of those RaLs is thus led to two guiding ideas: first, that “.. . organized, demarcated field of identity does not exist pnor to the mter vention of agaze that seeks to represent it ( ^ ^rv^La^' America “uneven” experience of modernity in nineteenth-century Latm Amenca produced an imevenness of “autonomization r.r>««ihlp “produced an irreducible hybridity in the literary subject and made possible the proliferation of mixed forms—the chromcle, the essa Ramos accordingly then uses chronicles, apreviously overlooked form understand and analyze the elaboration of the modern Latin American subject in its social and political context. ● . r Thebookbeginswithanoverviewofcanonicalessaysofthepenodof some of the misapprehensions of Angel different’ a n of literature, which in turn a s a m e a n s t o nation formation. Ramos corrects Rama’s pioneering La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City), noting the com- I N T E R T E X T S 1 0 8 plex, evolving relationships between institutions of power and literary expression—relationships that Rama oversimplified. Ramos argues convinc¬ inglythattheemergenceofanautonomousliterarysubjectandvoicewas uneven,incompleteandfraughtwithtensions.Thesetensionsresultedfrom disagreements among influential essayists and powerful politicians (often the men)regardingthepurposeofhighereducation,theneedfor(orpos¬ sibility of) “pure” literary expression and the role of journalistic reporting in the creation of acoherent Latin American identity. Domingo F. Sarmiento, AndresBello,EugenioMariaHostosandJoseEnriqueRodo,amongothunder Ramos’s scrutiny.At the center of these tensions is the conbetween Rodo’s aestheticizing “arielismo,”'which defined Latin Ameri¬ ca’s “spiritual” identity strictly in contrast to the perceived utilitarianism of the United States, versus Sarmiento’s positivist vision of Latin American societies shaped in the mold of U.S. “progress.” But the heart of Divergent Modernitites is its extensive examination of Cubanjournalist,essayist,poet,andpatriotJoseMarti.Indeed,Ramosulti¬ mately approaches Marti’s hybrid identity as paradigmatic for modern Latin America.Marti’spositionasanexileinNewYork,servingascorrespondent for periodicals in various LatinAmerican capitals, placed him in acritical juncture with regard to the emerging literary market, its dependence on journalism, Latin America’s sense of “otherness” with respect to the U.S. and the potential for literary authority in awriter who mediates among tliese conflicting phenomena. Ramos argues that it is precisely this position that determines Marti’s heterogeneous, sometimes self-contradictory, authorial identity, an identity that both prefigures and determines the formation of a modern Latin American subject. According to Ramos, the very character of literature as aspecific “dis¬ cursive field” in Latin America, and the nature of an autonomous literary authority, was shaped by these conflicts. Marti’s style, and, by extension, the style of all Latin American chroniclers, is afunction of their will to literary specificity and autonomy. This willed style, moreover, as ameans to repre¬ sent genuine Latin American reality, was also meant to provide acritical ingredient to good government. Ramos demonstrates how Marti’s writing was driven by a“nostalgia” for the supposedly coherent society of apremod¬ ern Latin America. This nostalgia responds to the perceived severe fragmen¬ tation wrought by an impersonal, commercial, fast-changing urban moder¬ nity. Modernity threatened, among other things, the very literary autonomy it facilitated; Marti and other chroniclers, Ramos argues, were wary of being co-opted by the journalistic market that made their writing possible. Marti’s solution is to “re-invent” the city’s social and spatial landscape, using the intimacy of achronicler’s gaze to invert public and private spaces, and suc¬ ceeding in representing the “unrepresentable” incoherence of modern urban life. Ramos concludes that in addition to an...