Mapping the avant-gardes

Abstract

Starting from the premise that, as a Western cultural concept/construct, ‘avantgarde’ is a twentieth-century phenomenon involving a programmatic break with the dominant norms of a given art or medium or of transmedial cultural practices, mapping the avant-gardes involves dealing primarily with three kinds of relations: (1) those of the post-Second World War avant-gardes to the earlier avant-gardes; (2) those of the peripheral European cultures to those of the centre(s); and (3) those of the avant-gardes in post-colonial cultures to those of the European and, after the Second World War, the European and U.S.-American centres. The article will pay special attention to the third type of relations, and in particular to the conditions governing the transformative reception of models by Latin American avant-gardes after the First World War and the partially changed conditions after the Second World War. In very general terms, one can claim that the earlier Latin American avant-gardes were concerned with achievi...