Margins of the universal: Latin American modernity and the discourses of globalization

Abstract

My dissertation "Margins of the universal. Latin American modernity and the discourses of globalization" explores the specificity of the project of modernity outside of its original European context. In particular, I ask how Latin American intellectuals such as Rubén Darío, Oswald de Andrade, Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges understood the possibility or impossibility of a modernity specifically Latin American, rather than a European modernity in Latin America. In order to address this question, I revisit crucial debates on the politics of modernity in Western Europe and Latin America, and the ways in which the literary imagination articulated and critiqued the relation between modernity and globalization. In Part One, I examine the conceptualization of modernity as the global expansion of bourgeois reason in the works of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, Jules Verne and Joseph Conrad. What characterizes the discourses of globalization is the representation of the global expansion of bourgeois institutions (usually under the form of colonialism) as the universal realization of freedom. My claim in the chapters of Part Two is that, by the turn of the twentieth century, Latin American intellectuals find themselves torn between two options: on the one hand, embracing a universality perceived as foreign, since it results from the globalization of the hegemonic particularity of modern European culture; and on the other, privileging its own particularity, even at the cost of renouncing the universal, that is, modernity. The most interesting interventions in the debates on Latin American modernity are structured as tentative solutions to this aporia that I term the "modern dilemma of the margin": the problem of cultural translation in Darío's dispute with Paul Groussac; "anthropophagy" as the cornerstone of Brazilian modernity in Oswald de Andrade; the dialectics of solitude and modern failure in Octavio Paz; and the notion of margin in Borges as the possibility of a modern culture inscribed within the tension between the universalism of the lettered elite of Sur and the particularism of the Peronist regime.