Modernism in the Peripheral Metropolis : Form, Crisis and the City in Latin America

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. Acknowledgments Contents Chapter 1: Album or Book?: Form and Content of the Peripheral Metropolis Latin American Modernism in the Context of a “Collapsing Social Edifice” The (Peripheral) Metropolis, the (Uneven) Seat of the Money Economy “Dissonance Is the Truth About Harmony”: Modernist Realism Bibliography Chapter 2: “Outline of Civilization”: Maples Arce, O’Gorman, Modotti, and the Limits of the Mexican Revolution “Axeblows of Silence” in Maples Arce’s Urbe Interlude: Mexico City and the Revolution O’Gorman’s Functionalism: Does (Aesthetic) Form Follow (Capitalist) Function? The Form of Social Production, or Modotti’s Modernist Photography Bibliography Chapter 3: “Facet by Facet”: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Politics of the Modernist Essay The Essay and Inorganic Form Piecing Together the City and the Country The Eighth Essay, or the Politics of the Inorganic Bibliography Chapter 4: “The Century of Phrases”: Roberto Arlt’s Negative Dialectic of Belief and Distrust The Astrologer as “Neutral Man”: Cynicism and Madness Porteño Misery, or the Reductive City The Infringement Is the Norm; The Norm Is an Infringement Bibliography Chapter 5: “There’s Only One Crisis. The Sexual Crisis”: Modernist Dissociation and the Reserve Army in Patrícia Galvão’s Parque Industrial São Paulo and Galvão’s Relevance, Highs and Lows There Is No Sexual Revolution The Auto-Cannibalism of Peripheral Capitalism Bibliography Chapter 6: Conclusion: The Peripheralization of the Metropolis Bibliography Index