Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis

Beschreibung

This book shows how Latin American writers and artists in the crisis-decades of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist techniques to explore national issues in relation to global capitalism. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary archive of novels, poetry, essays, photography, and architecture, it includes chapters on major figures and the transformations that marked Latin American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century: the poet Manuel Maples Arce and Mexico City; the essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and Lima; the novelist Roberto Arlt and Buenos Aires; the novelist Patrícia Galvão and São Paulo. Tavid Mulder argues that the Latin American city should be understood as a peripheral metropolis: a social space that is simultaneously peripheral relative to the center of the world economy and a metropolis in relation to the region’s vast, underdeveloped hinterlands. Conceiving of modernist techniques as ways of understanding how the dualisms of Latin American societies—urban and rural, wealth and poverty, cosmopolitan and national—are bound together by the internal contradictions of capitalism, this volume insists on the ability of literary and artistic works to grasp the process through which untenable situations of crisis are not overcome but stabilized in the periphery. It thereby sheds light on issues in Latin America that have become increasingly urgent in the twenty-first century: inequality, indigenous migration, surplus populations, and anomie.

Tavid Mulder teaches literature and interdisciplinary studies at Emerson College, US. His work has appeared in journals such as Revista Hispánica Moderna, Mediations, Comparative Literature Studies and A Contracorriente.

This book shows how Latin American writers and artists in the crisis-decades of the 1920s and 1930s used modernist techniques to explore national issues in relation to global capitalism. Drawing on a rich interdisciplinary archive of novels, poetry, essays, photography, and architecture, it includes chapters on major figures and the transformations that marked Latin American cities at the beginning of the twentieth century: the poet Manuel Maples Arce and Mexico City; the essayist José Carlos Mariátegui and Lima; the novelist Roberto Arlt and Buenos Aires; the novelist Patrícia Galvão and São Paulo. Tavid Mulder argues that the Latin American city should be understood as a peripheral metropolis: a social space that is simultaneously peripheral relative to the center of the world economy and a metropolis in relation to the region’s vast, underdeveloped hinterlands. Conceiving of modernist techniques as ways of understanding how the dualisms of Latin American societies—urban and rural, wealth and poverty, cosmopolitan and national—are bound together by the internal contradictions of capitalism, this volume insists on the ability of literary and artistic works to grasp the process through which untenable situations of crisis are not overcome but stabilized in the periphery. It thereby sheds light on issues in Latin America that have become increasingly urgent in the twenty-first century: inequality, indigenous migration, surplus populations, and anomie.
Argues that Latin American artists in the 1920s and 1930s used modernist forms to make sense of the city Explores a range of artistic media, including novels, poetry, essays, photography and architecture Offers new insights into urbanization in Latin America and the global interwar crisis of capitalism

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Tavid Mulder

Themen in »Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis«

Modernism Literature and Space Literature and Economics Cities Migration Rural to urban Global capitalism Urbanization 1920s 1930s Indigenous migration Surplus population Cosmopolitanism Avant-garde Architecture

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“Tavid Mulder’s brilliant book deploys a sophisticated theoretical apparatus to restore modernist aesthetic and intellectual experiments to their rightful place as the most effective and engrossing cultural form to grasp and render intelligible the historical conditions that gave rise, among other enduring social formations, to the modern Latin American city, whose growth during the 1920s and 1930s resulted from its unresolved contradictory relationship to the underdeveloped countryside and the global structures of capital. Through sharp and rigorous interpretations of texts and works of art deeply invested in the urban experiences that only peripheral cities make visible, Mulder’s groundbreaking book defines the cultural politics of modernist aesthetics in terms of its potential to represent the defining contradictions of Latin American societies (rural/urban, modern/traditional, national-popular/cosmopolitan) as a unified historical process that preserves the socio-economic inequalities that characterize the region to this day. Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis is a must-read for those of us who still think that literary criticism can shed light on the politics of form and the crisis of the present.” (Mariano Siskind, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University)

“Interweaving analyses of literature and art from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico during the pivotal moment of the 1920s-1930s, Tavid Mulder rigorously exposes the relationship between modernism, capitalist crisis, and urban space. Taking up both classic and more recent understandings of the perennially urgent problem of the Latin American city, this study illuminates how modernist form from the periphery – as it emerges in photography, poetry, novel, and the essay – is uniquely poised to grapple with the chronic crises of modernity and modernization.” (Sarah Ann Wells, author of Media Laboratories: Late Modernist Authorship in South America and Associate Professor of Literary Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)

“Moving past stale divisions between the ‘local’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ character of Latin American modernisms, Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis relocates analysis to the contradictory realm of peripheral capitalism itself. If modernism is always constituted by an interplay between unity and dissonance, Mulder shows how this dialectic gained special purchase in Latin American societies defined by brutally non-reciprocal but mutually constitutive relations between external and internal markets, city and countryside, rich and poor. Drawing vivid examples from photography, architecture, poetry and novels, Mulder analyzes how modernist form illuminates the scandalous inequalities that have come define cities such as São Paulo, Mexico City, Lima and Buenos Aires. In the present moment, when such inequalities have only deepened around theworld, Mulder’s book helps us think both modernism and the city anew. A must-read for those interested in aesthetic form, urban space, and the relationship between them.” (Ericka Beckman, Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in Hispanic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, USA)
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