Center For Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Dispositio

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
INTELLECTUALS, THEORY, AND AESTHETICS: "MODERNISMO" AND LATIN AMERICAN

POSTCOLONIALITY
Author(s): Jon Beasley-Murray
Source: Dispositio, Vol. 20, No. 47, Postcolonial and the Americas (1995), pp. 17-35
Published by: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor
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Dispositio/n XX. 47 (1995): 17-35
©Department of Romance Languages, University of Michigan
INTELLECTUALS, THEORY, AND AESTHETICS:

MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIALITY
Jon Beasley-Murray
Duke University
Latin American modernismo has usually been seen as embodying a retreat

from the social and historical in favor of an aestheticist renovation of poetic form
that expresses an idealized Parnassian and pastoral past. Thus Jean Franco, in her
classic survey, underlines this conception of modernismo' s move away from the
political as she states that
[w]hereas earlier generations of Latin Americans had put the political

struggle first and believed that literature could only flourish in a
changed society, the Modernists put literary creation first and placed
the poet far above the statesman or the politician. (122)
It is indeed clear that the late nineteenth century saw a complex and wholesale change
in or reconstruction of the role of literature in Latin American society. Latin Ameri-
can literature certainly gained unprecedented (if still relative) autonomy during this
period. However, in this paper I wish, if only in a fairly tentative and preliminary
manner, to contest what is the generally accepted corollary of this argument: the idea
that with the abandonment of didacticism, modernist poets were reduced to elitist
and reactionary hermeticism - or even, as Mike Gonzalez and David Treece have
suggested, merely "a despair that contained no sense of progress or democracy"
(17). In place of this narrative I suggest a more nuanced appreciation for the strategic
I would like to thank Susan Brook, Sibylle Fischer, and Walter Mignolo for variously inspiring
and criticizing earlier versions of this paper.
1 8 JON BEASLEY-MURRAY
possibilities of modernismo' s apparent withdrawal into the aesthetic, and as such a

comparison with the recent work of those academics, mostly based in Asia or the
Anglophone world, who have elaborated what is now known as postcolonial theory.
In both modernismo and postcolonial theory I see a desire for political alliance whose
ambivalences stem not from a refusal of engagement but rather from a reconsidera-
tion of the political that acknowledges the contradictions inherent in any politics
circumscribed by the legacy of colonialism, by the post-independence state, and by
mercantile or cultural neocolonialism.
Yet I do not wish uncritically to apply postcolonial theory to this analysis of
modernismo , in a move that would thus subsume this movement in a theoretical
homogenization for some purpose of trendiness or grand theoretical ambition. In-
deed, I first attempt to delineate the stakes involved in the nomenclature of the
postcolonial and the constituents of what I call its "desire." In this way I hope rather
to comment upon postcoloniality from an examination of modernismo than to look
at Latin America from some theoretical elsewhere. Moreover, and given my defini-
tion of postcoloniality as a desire rather than as some secure theoretical tool or set of
knowledges, I underline the importance of ambivalence in postcoloniality and in
modernismo , especially insofar as this is an ambivalent relation to modernity and
modernization - and perhaps there is nothing so modern as theory. Then, I look at
the institutional bases for postcolonial production, and consider the determinations
that lead modernismo to its particular generic and formal, literary character while
elsewhere and more recently the postcolonial has become almost a byword for
"Theory."
1. The Stakes of Postcolonial Desire
The question of postcoloniality in general and of Latin American

postcoloniality in particular remains a vexed one. On one level, postcoloniality
could be taken to mean merely the cultural and economic condition of societies that
have been subject to European colonialism. In this sense, clearly, Latin America has
been marked by the postcolonial condition for some time. After all, Latin America
was the first world region to achieve decolonization from modern European impe-
rial control: its first cycle of independence was the process initiated by the Haitian
slave revolt of 1793, which continued until the full retreat of Spanish and Portu-
guese control from the continental mainland by 1826.
In these terms, then, the ascription of the label "postcolonial" would seem
generally a more or less simple affair, and its use to describe Latin America
unproblematic. However, the fact, for example, that the United States and other
former British settler colonies (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are not usually
considered under the sign "postcolonial" - although this is by no means a cast-iron
rule - indicates that there is more at stake in this nomenclature than the recognition
of a simple historical marker. On the other hand, at times even the historical fact of
MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIAL1TY 1 9
a former colonialism seems not to be a necessary condition for the use of the term.
As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin note,
We need to keep the fact of colonisation firmly in mind because the

increasingly unfocused use of the term "post-colonial" over the last
ten years... has meant that there is a danger of its losing its effective
meaning altogether. ... In particular the tendency to employ the term
"post-colonial" to refer to any kind of marginality at all runs the risk
of denying its basis in the historical process of colonialism. ("General
Introduction" 2)
In the face of such confusion, it may be most important to ask what might be the
stakes in the choice of the label "postcolonial" to describe a given cultural or politi-
cal situation. After all, Ashcroft et. al. also suggest that, as "counter-colonial resis-
tance" appropriated aspects of imperial culture from almost the very origin of the
colonial project, "'post-colonial theory' has existed for a long time before that par-
ticular name was used to describe it" ( 1 ). The question then must be what is changed
when such theory is named in this way after the fact? What new resonances or
legibility does such cultural practice acquire once it is labeled and understood as
"postcolonial"? Alternatively, what possibilities and distinctions does such a term
erase? What forms of analysis are delegitimated and displaced by the epistemologi-
ca! framework of postcoloniality?
In the study of contemporary Latin American culture, at least, the paradigm
of postcoloniality is in competition both with earlier paradigms such as neo-Marxist
dependency theory and with newer interpretive frameworks such as postmodernity
or cultural studies. Perhaps postcoloniality shares most with postmodernity insofar
as both these emphases are split between assertions that they are descriptions of a
cultural or political condition on the one hand, or that they are constituted by an
interpretive style or position on the other. Further, both emphases are taken to clash
with Marxian approaches (and here I would tentatively label cultural studies also a
neo-Marxian mode of analysis) insofar as they tend not to attach any particular im-
portance to class politics. Indeed, Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook, who
generally identify postcolonial with postmodern perspectives, suggest that any at-
tempts to articulate these to a class-conscious approach "result in ambiguity and
contradiction" (167) at best and "class or material relations [to be]... downplayed or
screened off' (165) most often.
However, by contrast to this analytic delimitation of contradictions or era-
sures, I suggest an approach to postcolonial theory along the lines suggested by
Fredric Jameson in his evaluation of cultural studies, which he terms a "desire . . .
the project to constitute a 'historic bloc,' rather than. . .the floor plan for a new disci-
pline" ("On 'Cultural Studies'" 17). This is not to say that postcolonial theory does
not exhibit precisely the ambiguities and problems foregrounded by O'Hanlon and
Washbrook - indeed, here their analysis is correct - but rather that it is more helpful
20 JON BEASLEY-MURRAY
to underline the fact that the postcolonial desire's first impulse is to accept and work
with such divisions. Thus Gyan Prakash, in his response to O'Hanlon and Washbrook,
is essentially writing in a different register from their critique when he takes up their
challenge to "ride two horses at once" (167) by replying "let us hang on to two
horses, inconstantly " ("Can the 'Subaltern' Ride?" 184). For, though it should be
clear enough that the subject of other theoretical approaches is a desiring subject -
and Marxism, for example, also gains its legitimation ultimately in terms of a politi-
cal desire for emancipation - postcolonial theory foregrounds that desire as the mode
in which the subject relates to and attempts to transcend its historical conditions of
possibility.
Thus the ascription of the term "postcoloniality" is an attempt to recognize a
local desire, shaped by the global processes of colonialism and its after-effects, and
to "constitute a 'historic bloc'" (as Jameson has it of cultural studies) by connecting
and identifying this desire with an internationalist and collective desire that recog-
nizes its own ambivalences but that wishes to use and move beyond them. Thus the
desire at least of postcolonial theory is to be able to take in particular analyses, such
as those offered by Marxism or postmodern theory, without subordinating them to
itself, under the general slogan of anti-imperialism: "not the line is important, but
the possibility for social alliances that its general slogan seems to reflect" (Jameson
17). The stake in the nomenclature of postcoloniality would therefore be the recog-
nition of local desires, defined in terms of their differential relation to the desire that
is imperialism, and their articulation into a global alliance. The ambivalence of this
project results from its attempt to differentiate itself on a global scale from the
originary global impulse against which it raises itself as a counter-desire.
In thinking of postcoloniality in terms of desire I do not suggest a radical
abstraction from questions of social and historical location; far from it. Indeed the
vocabulary of desire might go beyond the antithesis between project and condition
that otherwise plagues discussion of postcoloniality. For, just as debates on
postmodernity are often conducted at cross-purposes, torn between an identification
of the postmodern as an attitude or intellectual project on the one hand and the
definition of the postmodern as a cultural condition (associated, for example in
Jameson's work, with late capitalism) on the other, so postcoloniality attracts simi-
lar confusion. This confusion arises from a fundamental disjuncture between differ-
ent views of knowledge: as reflection or as production. Moreover, the difference
between these epistemological paradigms further implies a disjuncture between their
strategies of legitimation.
If the emphasis in the use of the term "postcolonial" is on its descriptive
capability, its interest - and, more importantly, legitimation - then centers around
its adequacy to a historical referent; if the emphasis is rather on the postcolonial as
theoretical production, then this project aims to legitimate itself in terms of its oppo-
sitional potential to read against the grain of such traditional historical referentiality.
Clearly these emphases are not absolutely distinct, however, and it is precisely on
the basis of their overlaps that the confused debate on postcoloniality can take place.
MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIALITY 2 1
Those whose emphasis is on critical productivity point to the fact that no project of
description can remain innocent or without ideological and political agenda - indeed,
for example, that the most carefully constructed objectivism of Western historiogra-
phy may be the most fully premised upon orientalist (or occidentalist) assumptions.
Meanwhile those whose emphasis is on referential adequacy can refer to the fact
that any critical project must make truth claims about the state of the world or suc-
cumb to solipsism. The confusion that arises is therefore above all the result of a
disjunction between two separate but inevitably intertwined modes of intellectual
(and, by extrapolation, political) legitimation.
It is perhaps in this sense, then, that the postcolonial and the postmodern are
most similar: not insofar as they share a common attitude nor insofar as they arise
from a common historical position and may attempt to describe the same sets of
cultural circumstances, but rather in that they equally bridge and partake of two
radically different legitimation strategies. Indeed, we are close here to Lyotard's
notion of an incommensurability of language games, and particularly of the
"resistance. . .of the prescriptive with respect to the functions of propositional logic"
( Just Gaming 22). Postcoloniality is equivalent to postmodernity in its absence of
"metaprescriptive utterances" ( The Postmodern Condition 65) that would otherwise
adjudicate between competing legitimation strategies. Perhaps, therefore, it is in
this sense that postcoloniality and postmodernity equally represent a particular cri-
sis in the legitimation strategies of Western knowledge: they both - and this is clearly
the case with postcoloniality - take opposing strategies of discursive legitimation to
their limits without offering resolution or arbitration between such competing claims.
Yet in the case of postcoloniality at least, though these two emphases are
radically different, they are not in fact - pragmatically or theoretically - incompat-
ible once we recognize the role of desire as the articulation between these two dis-
tinct registers. For if we see postcoloniality as typified by a specific, historically
rooted and culturally motivated desire that constitutes itself as a critical project on
the basis of and in opposition to its own conditions of possibility, this would not be
a claim for a new metaprescription but rather a means to take into account the libidi-
nal processes immanent to the formation of a particular language game. This might
then be a way to see a politics of location - as postcolonial theory surely is - that is
not then on that account a reflex of a cultural condition; at the same time, it could be
a way to understand a critical project as not merely a free-floating intellectual en-
deavor unconnected to and autonomous from its social conditions of enunciation.
Further, in pointing to the centrality of desire for postcoloniality we might
also understand differently the importance of ambivalence in the postcolonial project.
If the postcolonial foregrounds the tropes of ambiguity, ambivalence, mimicry, and
hybridity, this is symptomatic of the fact that the subject it presents is a desiring
subject. Such foregrounding is a means of self-recognition for postcolonial desire:
since the postcolonial refuses or rebuts absolutist legimitating strategies, maintain-
ing rather a number of possible legitimations in tension and mutual abeyance, it thus
refuses to authorize itself in terms of origins or teleology, and recognizes rather the
subject's condition of desire caught between the past and the future. By questioning
the developmental prescription of modernity while denying the possibility of return-
ing to some over-described state of nature, postcolonial desire recognizes itself as
caught within and product of this tension.
Thus postcoloniality is both condition and project: it is the critical result of
the encroachment of Western modernity and expresses itself in terms of a project for
alliance, predicated upon an ambivalent desire to articulate the local to the global. If
the postcolonial is necessarily a global - or globalizing - move because it results
from and is faced with the globalizing reach of Western imperialism, it equally finds
its resources in a local defined in terms of the precolonial or the indigenous (and
their critical consumption or anti-consumption of the colonial), even as these may
be always already incompletely dissociable from the forms of colonialism itself.
The anxiety of the postcolonial is found in its similarity to the project of colonialism
itself, which too takes the precolonial local as the resource for its own impetus of
globalization, its own productive consumption. Postcolonial desire exists in the
space of this differentiation, in that even in its attempt to distance itself from moder-
nity it must prove more modern than the modern itself, going beyond the state of
apparent modernization in which it finds itself. At the same time the postcolonial
aims to prove more effective in its use of indigenous resources, articulating them to
the full in a way that colonialism, whose own dream is (also) to convert precolonial
resistance into pliability and utility, has hitherto only inefficiently managed to do.
It is in this light (which, I should mention, is also similar to Alberto Moreiras's
recent work on "critical regionalism") that I argue that we can and should identify
the cultural and economic conditions of late nineteenth century Latin America and
mid to late twentieth century Africa and Asia as formally similar enough to warrant
the same label, that of postcoloniality, insofar as they produce such a recognizable
postcolonial desire that is expressed through a critical project of alliance and oppo-
sition. Thus, within this common configuration of postcoloniality, figures such as
Rubén Darío on the one hand, and Gay atri Spi vak on the other, perform an equiva-
lent intellectual and cultural function. Though it is striking that these two occupy
differing institutional sites - the one literature, the other academia - this is a contin-
gent result of the differing spaces open for the exercise of this intellectual function
at distinct historical and geographical conjunctures. If postcolonial desire expresses
itself in the form of a projected alliance, it is also true that the postcolonial subject is
in search of a collectivity that does not as yet exist. In some senses, therefore, the
postcolonial project must be wary of any institution insofar as this might presume an
existent identity, or even an identity in formation on the basis of the established
(neo)colonial order. Such institutional hybridity or ambivalence towards institu-
tions is further marked by the postcolonial space of travel and exchange: the desir-
ing subject is always a subject in motion rather than a fixed essence.
By comparing the different institutional and generic expressions of
postcoloniality, by seeing the formal and functional similarities between Latin Ameri-
can and other postcolonialities, we might develop an understanding of a world systems
MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIALITY 23
logic of cultural and intellectual combined and uneven development comparable to,
if relatively autonomous from, the economic world system outlined by depen-
dency theory. In other words, if dependency theory's ambition is to construct a
global counter-view, a view from the periphery of economic circuits, then an analy-
sis of the postcolonial intellectual function as it operates in diverse historical and
geographical contexts might enable the construction of a similar view for the pe-
ripheral points of impact - "contact zones" as Mary Louis Pratt has it (. Imperial
Eyes) - of the global circuits of knowledge and culture. This, then, might be the
"negative globality" to which Moreiras refers - negative in that it is also an attempt
to negate a global colonialism that will not acknowledge the local or regional. Inso-
far as the cultural always implicates as well as is implicated in the economic, this
larger model of neocolonial and postcolonial logics should also imply important
revisions to strictly economic and mercantile world systems theories that have gen-
erally received the passive acceptance of those involved in literary and cultural stud-
ies. It is such a revision - simultaneously a cultural alliance and a self-recognition
of the local autonomy of a global desire - that is perhaps the grandest stake of the
postcolonial.
II. Postcolonial Ambivalence
Jorge Klor de Alva has made the strong argument against a Latin American
postcoloniality that, because the struggle for independence was largely a revolt by
the creóles - who already held effective administrative power, and who continued
thereafter to treat indigenous peoples as colonized subjects - this process should not
be regarded as one of decolonization. Indeed, Klor de Alva suggests that neither
colonialism nor postcolonialism are terms "applicable to the set of policies and prac-
tices that defined the historical experience of nonindigenous Latin or Anglo America"
(241). Thus Klor de Alva further argues that the Latin American wars of indepen-
dence
did not result in a postcolonial aftermath that called for postcolonial

critics, anxious to rid the masses of metropolitan influences, to
decolonize the minds, souls, and practices of the indigenous
communities. Quite the opposite. The wars of independence not
only entrenched the Europeanized criollo sectors in the seats of power
but were prelude to even more devastating civil wars that by the late
nineteenth century had nearly destroyed all but the most isolated and
resilient of the surviving indigenous communities. (253-54)
If anything, Klor de Alva could here be understating his case. One aftermath both of
the wars of independence and especially, as Florencia Mallon has recently demon-
strated, of the subsequent civil wars and wars between the newly founded nation
states, was the construction of the indigenous as such, and as barbarous other, after
a period in which the Spanish authorities had in fact granted autonomous indigenous
rights through the legal concept of a separate indian republic (Mallon, Peasant and
Nation). Further, the destruction of indigenous communities was not merely a
byproduct of otherwise mestizo or creole civil wars, but was at least on occasion the
result of deliberate ethnocidal policy, as for example in Argentina.
Yet the vision of the postcolonial critic portrayed here is a peculiar exag-
geration of the supposedly vanguard intellectual's self-image - and even then, it
would not be clear that Latin America did not produce figures who at least imagined
themselves as similar to the type Klor de Alva is describing (examples might include
González Prada or Mariátegui). More importantly, few postcolonial critics of today
would imagine their audiences so naively as the "masses" or the "indigenous com-
munities" that Klor de Alva invokes in what might almost be a parody of the
unreflexive populism that has been all too much a feature of Latin American politi-
cal discourse. Rather, the project he seems to outline here is more a State project of
national consolidation than a postcolonial critical project which would be as uneas-
ily alienated from official nationalism as from colonial hegemony.
The contiguity of Klor de Alva's argument to the project of national consoli-
dation is further evident in the extent to which he understands the past in terms of
continuity rather than discontinuity. Though avowedly critical of the creole elite
and the extent to which their nation-building project involves the suppression of the
subaltern, Klor de Alva equally naturalizes this project in his effective erasure of the
process of colonization itself. If Latin America has never been colonial, then its
current state is equally (it would seem) its natural state, if problematic for the cor-
ruption and violence it would seem to generate. If Spain and imperialism are effec-
tively absolved from any significant role in the formation of Latin America, then the
creóles themselves and the structures of power within which they operated would
seem to appear from nowhere. The argument suffers from a failure of differentia-
tion, which is equally a failure to recognize the crucial element of ambivalence in
postcolonial desire; in missing the importance of such ambivalence, Klor de Alva
leaves himself open to an appropriation in terms of simple celebration or nostalgia
for empire rather than the denunciation that he wishes to convey.
Meanwhile, in the postcolonial aftermath conjectured as an hypothetical al-
ternative past for Latin America by Klor de Alva, intellectuals are unproblematically
"called for" and the only anxiety they demonstrate is a function of their eagerness
and certainty to decolonize the masses. Yet on any account postcolonial criticism is
notable for its self-reflexive and self-critical leanings, for its problematizing of any
sense of a secure identity from which the intellectual work of decolonizing the minds
of the masses could be conducted. Thus, Gayatri Spivak, in an interview entitled
"The Post-colonial Critic," while apparently accepting a description of herself as
"the post-colonial diasporic Indian who seeks to decolonize the mind" (67), equally
states "I'm always uneasy if I'm asked to speak for my space - it's the one thing that
seems to be most problematic, and something that one really only learns from other
people" (68);
I am afraid of speaking too quickly in academic situations about the

women - the tribal subaltern, the urban sub-proletariat, the
unorganized peasant - to whom I have not learned to make myself
acceptable other than as a concerned benevolent person who is free
to come and go. (70)
Indeed, it is a feature of the postcolonial condition that an easy identification of

either the mass or, perhaps more importantly still, the intellectual position becomes
increasingly untenable. Both in practice and in theory the postcolonial is a sign of
the crisis of such identities, and of the realization that there is no simple cultural
break marked by the transition from political colonization to political independence,
just as there is no easy economic break with the advent of neocolonial, market-
driven modes of exploitation. Thus to think in terms of postcoloniality rather than in
terms of post-independence is to acknowledge the ongoing presence of the colonial
past, both in terms of historical importance, given the impossibility of absolute self-
recreation, and in terms of the continuation of economic dependence or cultural
subalternity. What remains for the postcolonial intellectual is a desire for accep-
tance rather than vanguard certainty.
The distinction between post-independence and postcoloniality is also cru-
cial as a political marker. For independence is a project of the State, which seeks
stability, consolidation and national (self)governance. This project is the reverse
face of decolonization, and carries with it the concomitant cultural demand for na-
tional literature, canonical foundationalism and aesthetic order. In Latin America,
this phase can surely be identified with the work of writers such as Esteban Echeverría
or Domingo Sarmiento, precisely those politically involved writers with whom
modernismo is customarily contrasted. Postcolonial modernismo is rather a recog-
nition of the uncertainties of independence, which imply new forms of connection in
place of the populist dream of economic and political self-reliance. As Julio Ramos
suggests, then, modernista intellectuals "maintain a relation to the State that is very
distinct from that of Sarmiento or Bello, for whom writing was connected to the law
and organic to the liberal notion of the 'public' in formation" (71). Postcolonial
intellectuals cannot be "organic" in this sense, and must maintain an ambivalent
relation to the national-popular. Modernismo , for example, replaces the primacy of
legality - and of citizenship constructed in the public sphere - with the absolute value
of creativity (the foremost law for Darío).
While the state's drive for cultural consolidation is clearly a continual one,
perpetually attendant upon and adjacent to the claims of any state apparatus desiring
(usually national) political recognition and legitimacy, I suggest that it generates its
antithesis, or at least a sense of dissatisfaction and disillusion. Here then, and contra
Klor de Alva, the postcolonial is a reaction against such State-centered, nationalist
repetitions and recuperations of the administered and administrative state of Em-
pire. If the State, and none more so than that post-independence State, has already
subsumed the categories of the "people" or the "masses," in whose name it distin-
guishes itself from either the former order or the supposed barbarity that lies beyond
the purview of the State, then the postcolonial intellectual function must operate at a
distance from the terms of national populism. This is so even as this intellectual
function remains adjacent to populism insofar as the national and the popular neces-
sarily mediate conceptions of postcolonial political reality, as politically effective if
misrecognized versions of that reality.
Moreover, it is not as if the postcolonial intellectual is opposed to indepen-
dence; as the case of Marti shows, the presentiment at least of independence is a sine
qua non for postcolonial thought. Furthermore, since the State needs to claim intel-
lectual and cultural production as its own, and as those sectors of civil society that
take on the label of the popular need to claim cultural representation as a "natural"
expression of popular or national character, the postcolonial intellectual needs at
least partially to accede to these claims or risk ostracism and absolute political
delegitimation on the grounds of either barbarousness or audienceless obscurity.
This ambivalent distance plus complicity marks the alienation characteristic of the
postcolonial intellectual - an alienation that both replicates and is replicated in the
elaboration of the ambivalent cultural and economic position that is postcoloniality
itself on a more general and comprehensive scale.
It may be useful to compare this double alienation 1 am describing to the
double consciousness Paul Gilroy ascribes to the culture of the "Black Atlantic." In
his contemporary polemic against nationalism - particularly the essentialized black
nationalism that attempts to erase ambivalence and internal difference - Gilroy
stresses rather double consciousness as the product of black culture's dual status
within and outside of modernity. This ambivalent position enables what Gilroy
terms a "redemptive critique" to produce "dissident assessments of modernity's
achievements" (71). This is both a recognition of the genuine achievements of mo-
dernity, and an understanding of its failures and intrinsic violences, on the part of a
subaltern group which has had to suffer the exploitation that has made this moder-
nity possible. As both product of and producer of modernity, the subaltern - and
here this is as true of the Latin American as of those from the African diaspora - is
forever implicated in the modern, and not merely its unwitting "mass" object, but at
the same time is necessarily dissident, and thus cannot simply allow modernity's
unproblematic management by the State.
///. Institutions and Articulations of Postcoloniality
Thus if we understand postcolonial criticism as a result of this double alien-

ation from the State and from the masses, it is clear that in Latin America intellectu-
als conducted such a drawn out and ambivalent process of self-positioning and cul-
tural elaboration from shortly after the achievement of independence, and through-
out the recognition of neocolonial mercantile and indirect political control exercised
first mostly by Britain, and later clearly enough by the United States. This was an
unsystematic, hesitant but definite process of investigation and experimentation into
the contradictions of uncertain identities and multiple alienations that are also inex-
tricably multiple complicities. Yet this elaboration of a distinctly Latin American
postcolonial theory has all too often been passed over, precisely because it does not
appear as theory or criticism. For this process is not found in the institution of
criticism, nor in the universities. Rather we need to attend to the social role of
literature in Latin America, particularly in the late nineteenth century.
Roberto González Echevarría, discussing the apparent lack of any coherent
schools of Latin American and Latin Americanist criticism - indeed, in detecting a
"crisis" in such criticism - asks
whether, in the midst of this general crisis in Latin American criticism,

it is not the very lack of a system and the presence of criticism in the
work of creative writers that constitute Latin America's theoretical
contribution to present-day critical thought, whether, in short, literature
itself is not Latin America's critical thought. (35)
To the extent that González Echeverría' s analysis here is correct - and he is also
echoing Octavio Paz's observation that "it would be very difficult to find one work
in the literatures of Spanish America and Brazil in which there isn't, in one way or
another, criticism" (qtd., 35) - this is a result precisely of the early independence of
Latin America, and thus the need to establish something like postcolonial thought in
the nineteenth century, a century before the conditions for postcoloniality were met
in other continents.
For, given the necessity for the intellectual elaboration of a space of cultural
independence to accompany political independence, and given that the felt need for
such a reflection upon the vicissitudes of cultural independence would be experi-
enced all the more strongly - pace Klor de Alva - precisely among those culturally
and intellectually, if not politically, most affected by the experience of colonization
(insofar as intellectuality was figured so emphatically in a European mold), then the
question becomes where and how this intellectual function could be actualized. As
even in Europe the discipline and institutional site of critical thought had scarcely
been constituted even by the end of the nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising
that there was little avowedly critical space to serve as the basis for this intellectual
positioning. Rather, the space in which this project could develop was the institu-
tion of literature, where writers were somewhat precariously supported by careers in
the civil service, particularly the diplomatic corps, journalism, and at times at least
in the earlier nineteenth century, also by careers in politics.
Julio Ramos discusses the weakness of the educational system for the elabo-
ration of critical thought in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century. He
argues that literature, in seeking a measure of autonomy from economic processes
of modernization in the aesthetic, became "the basic channel for an anti-imperialist
ideology" precisely at the time that "the 'man of logic' was to dominate in educa-
tion" (56). Latin America's educational systems in the late nineteenth century were
in the process of conversion from the bellelettrist site for the formation of the letrado
as liberal subject of civil society to the more rigorous and professionalized State
mission to "extend the domination of 'civilization' and the incorporation of 'barbar-
ity'" (57). Even when literature or letras was incorporated into the university, it
remained very strictly subservient to this utilitarian project: in Argentina, for ex-
ample, the first literature classes were held in the faculty of Law; for Mexico, Ramos
quotes Alfonso Reyes arguing that the teaching of literature and history were valo-
rized "only [to] serve the purpose of adorning legal arguments with metaphors or
anecdotes" (61).
Moreover, the process by which post-independence intellectual and cultural
production shades into and is revolutionized by postcolonial writing need not neces-
sarily entail significant institutional shifts. Literature had been established as the
field of debate in Latin America and, as such, because of both precedent and the
relatively finite limits to institutional position-takings, literature remained the privi-
leged space for this cultural imagination. Indeed, the increased sense of political
alienation experienced in modernismo accentuated this situation, as those within the
literary field worked to increase that field's autonomy from the wider social field as
it was defined through the State at the particular moment. Again, however, I insist
that this movement was far from a retreat from politics, nor merely a passive symp-
tom of general socio-cultural dislocation, but rather a more or less self-conscious
attempt to construct a different form of political and cultural space, from which to
comment and reflect upon the realization of Latin American postcoloniality. It so
happened that the historical parameters of that stage of modernization tended to
determine literature, rather than criticism, as the avenue for this intellectual func-
tion.
Now, this new framework would clearly imply significant re-readings of
modernista poetry, which has all too often either been celebrated for its modernism
or been denounced for its lack of realism (realism being the predilection of the Latin
Americanist left, as is most marked in readings of testimonio that valorize political
and existential immediacy as some kind of supreme virtue). Let us then, by contrast,
imagine the contours of a postcolonial modernismo , a modernismo read in the light
of postcolonial theory, cathected with a postcolonial desire. I will take Rubén Darío
as a test case for such a reading, one that would not condemn his writing from a
realist position for the absence of "the contradictory reality of Latin America at the
close of the nineteenth century" (Gonzalez and Treece 14), but that would paradoxi-
cally be more tolerant of contradiction, ambiguity and irony. For in Darío is there
not a significant recognition of the contradictions and ironies necessary to cultural
production in postcolonial times?
Reading Darío as ("as if' he were) a postcolonial intellectual, tracing a
postcolonial desire, we might then also shift our attention somewhat from Dario's
Azul and Prosas Profanas and rather towards his later work, perhaps especially the
more self-critical Cantos de Vida y Esperanza. Significantly also, such a reading

would entail an emphasis on Dario's often misunderstood ambivalent irony. For
example, his most frequently discussed political poem, "A Roosevelt," has all too
often been read over-simply as either Pan-American homage or nationalist hymn.
But this is surely to ignore Dario's own commentary - which itself throws much
light on the rest of his apparently fanciful and backward-looking production - that
[i]f there is any politics in these poems, it is because it appears

universal. And if you find verses to a president, it is because they are
a continental clamor. Tomorrow we could all be yankees (and this is
most likely); in any case, my protest is written on the wings of the
immaculate swans, as illustrious as Jupiter. {Poesías Completas
530)
Darío thus describes his poetry as a protest, if of a particular kind, lodged in

the aesthetic, in a "Platonic ideal enshrined in the Swan" (Gonzalez and Treece 12).
Clearly, however, other protests may be written elsewhere, and in different forms -
Enrique González Martínez later symbolized the desire to go beyond modernismo in
his poem "Strangle the Swan." But Dario's prefaces are less manifestos than justifi-
cations of a particular practice, and implicitly, here as elsewhere, in their specifica-
tion ("in any case, my protest") predict and accept that practice's supersession. Darío
acknowledges, pessimistically but humorously, the fragile and fantastic location and
material of his own production, in a context of uncertainty and ambivalence that still
allows permanent artistic and intellectual renovation.
In "A Roosevelt" itself, Dario first turns his gaze upon Roosevelt and the US
itself, constructing it as other in a second person narrative that emphasizes both
difference and ambiguity, yet also the fact that any attempt to represent the North
needs to approach via a Western system of representation - "with the voice of the
Bible or the verse of Walt Whitman" (541). Here naming becomes denunciation -
"You are the United States, you are the future invader" - but it is soon clear that any
second person address is also necessarily recognition ; denunciation is itself com-
plicity given the poet's lack of control in the dominant system of representation.
Thus the negation with which Darío abruptly concludes this narrative is double-
edged - it is simultaneously a refusal of the style and the content of the narrative:
"You believe that life is fire, that progress is eruption, that wherever you fire your
bullet you impose the future. No." (541). Critique without ambivalence, without
irony, is in danger of reinforcing and celebrating its object, especially insofar as this
also involves the denial of Dario's own desire - ambiguous maybe - for modernity.
Darío thus performs the desiring subject's retreat from a confrontation that under-
lines dependence and towards the ambivalent construction of Latin American sub-
jectivity - what Pratt terms "autoethnography" (7).
The poem is no longer "To Roosevelt" - Roosevelt comes merely to stand in
for a United States that is stricly indescribable in terms that are not immediately
alienated. Darío therefore enacts the drama of the subaltern who cannot speak di-
rectly, but even within the same poem he turns instead to the more indirect, ambiva-
lent project of ironic autoethnography, cataloguing the characteristics and divisions
of Latin America: "the America of the great Moctezuma, of the Inca/ the fragrant
America of Christopher Columbus" (542). Indeed, Darío here performs precisely
the construction of an autoethnographic text - one which "the others construct in
response to or in dialogue with. . .metropolitan representations. . . . [A]utoethnography
involves partial collaboration with and appropriation of the idioms of the conqueror"
(Pratt 7). Darío dramatizes the attempt to engage with the US terms of representa-
tion and idiom, and acknowledges the ambivalent desire necessarily invoked in such
engagement.
It is through this necessary detour of an engagement with (neo)colonialism
that Darío can suggest a continental, postcolonial agency - or that he can manifest
his desire, articulated between critique, whose imperfections he demonstrates, and a
history that cannot be narrated solely in subaltern terms. Moreover, this Latin Ameri-
can subject is described precisely in terms of desire and hybridity - hybridity strictly
speaking, rather than mestizaje (for example), in that this is a split subject, rather
than a transcendent resolution suggested by some "cosmic race": "That America,
that shakes by hurricanes and lives by Love, men of saxon eyes and barbarian souls,
that America is alive" (542). Drawing on both indigenous and Hispanic elements -
Moctezuma and catholicism - this hybrid subjectivity is further delineated as a threat
even to the "powerful and great" United States. At this point, then, Darío can return
to a second person address: "Be careful. Spanish America is alive!"
If Darío ends this poem with a reference to divinity, this is less an assump-
tion of the divine on the part of Latin America, or even an identification of God with
arielismo - as Carlos Martin suggests (99) - than simply a critique of the neocolo-
nial claim for transcendence: "And, though you have everything, you lack one thing:
God!" (542). Postcolonial hybridity, through its ironic play with representation,
frustrates transcendence, and Darío' s desire is to register the mark of this frustration
within the colonial system of representation, thus to undo it from the inside.
Modernista linguistic transformations may also, perhaps, be seen as the desire to
effect such an undoing, to work within the literary heritage of Europe and the United
States, but in a differential rather than exact imitation. Modernismo thus desires to
introduce innovation and originality, to leave the original mark of postcolonial dif-
ference, disrupting therefore imperial claims to the divine status of self-authorizing
origin and transcendent power even over representation.
If this move into representation and apparently away from the world is still
figured as a retreat, this is perhaps a self-conciously contingent strategy, whose weak-
ness is simultaneously acknowledged and ironically undercut. The first poem in
Cantos de Vida y Esperanza is dedicated to Rodó, who attempted to define a conti-
nental Latin American subject in Ariel by inverting the Eurocentric terms that made
of Latin America brute raw material. Pratt suggests that since Alexander von
Humboldt's travel narratives of the early nineteenth century, Latin America had
MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIALITY 3 1
been conceptualized as primal nature - "dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle

capable of overwhelming human knowledge and understanding" (120) - and later
in terms of a negative aesthetic "to encode its non-capitalist landscapes and society
as manifestly in need of the rationalized exploitation the Europeans bring" (152).
Rodó, however, and following him modernismo , re-aestheticized the continent, thus
distancing it from this extractive utilitarian vision of the "economic adventurers"
(Pratt 149), while refusing to subordinate Latin American identity and agency to
"rapturous nature" (130). Rather, as Ramos also suggests, arielismo was the "mo-
ment in which the literary subject - tied to the defense of Latin American 'spirit'
against the 'material' power of the [European] other - would manage to . . . institu-
tionalize the 'margin' that was literature as critique of modernization" (60).
In the opening poem to Cantos de Vida y Esperanza , then, Darío presents an
auto-critique of his previous work, emphasizing his own subjectivity and its histori-
cal and autobiographical conditions of possibility that led to a properly literary de-
sire: "I am he who just yesterday uttered the blue verse and the profane song.... I
knew grief from my childhood; my youth. ..was youth mine?" {Poesías Completas
531). Darío presents the move to interiority as a response to such conditions, a
move that is simultaneously towards and away from the literary insofar as, Darío
recognizes, the literary is necessarily contaminated and worldly. He presents his
subjectivity as "all yearning, all anxiety, pure sensation and natural vigor; without
duplicity, without comedy and without literature... if there is a sincere soul, it is
mine" (532). Ramos comments that sincerity is the "attribute of subjectivity par
excellence " (68) and suggests that it is here that Darío responds to Rodó' s criticism
that his earlier poetry had not provided a space for the Latin American subject.
Yet the sincerity of subjectivity is inexpressible for Darío except through the
ironizing medium of the literary - or rather perhaps, through literature insofar as it
potentially recognizes the irony and ambivalence of all such attempts at self-expres-
sion. It is in the contradiction between literature as a process of purification that
constitutes the sincere soul, and literature as the medium of contamination, the bridge
between the soul and an impure world, that the ambiguity of the modernista gesture
becomes apparent. Darío writes that his aim was "to make my pure soul a star, a
resonant spring, with the horror of literature and mad from the dusk and the dawn"
(533). Neither clarity nor purity are fully realizable (night remains at hand) but it is
in the tension between these ideals and the real - and through an aesthetic sphere
that is horrific in that it both attracts and repels - that Darío hopes to construct and
resonate with a more general, continental, I would add postcolonial, subjectivity.
But if this subject is first constituted in terms of an apparent retreat into the
ideal, both into and from literature insofar as the literary both holds out the promise
of purity and the necessary fact of contamination, I would insist that this is a strate-
gic retreat, premised very much on the ambivalent desire both to spurn and to outdo
modernity. On the one hand, the aesthetic provides a space in which to negotiate
and sublimate the pressures of the real. Darío presents a double movement of ab-
sorption and resolution: "My sweet and tender heart was like the sponge... swelled
with bitterness by the world, the flesh and the inferno," but "if there was bitter gall in
my existence, Art sweetened all acrimony" (532). Thus it is not that art provides
hermeticism, protection from material effects, but rather a site in which to reverse a
negative affect.
On the other hand, it is not as if this imagined space provides simplicity and
purification; reflection and negotiation in the aesthetic sphere further act upon the
world and work to produce a new level of contradiction. Dario's Parnassian grove
of artifice is an "ideal woods that complicates the real" (532). This appears to be a
dialectical relation, then: contradictions in the world are transformed through a pro-
cess of idealization to produce a new set of more productive - less bitter - contra-
dictions that retrospectively influence the initial conditions that determined the con-
text of the original idealization. The ideal provides a Utopian possibility rooted in
the existent rather than projected into the future, which in turn, if only in the contrast
it represents, allows Darío to stage his modernista protest.
For if poetry is written in the light of dusk or dawn, and thus in the shadow of
night, Dario's "Los Cisnes" suggests, ambivalently to be sure, that hope is at hand in
the constitution of a Latin American subjectivity. Though Spanish America seems
fixed to a "fatal destiny" and Darío asks "Will so many men speak English?" (548)
with the coming of a North American modernity, poetry still offers the space of a
collective - not merely an individual - relative autonomy. Darío' apparent fatalism
(as also in "Lo Fatal") is perhaps the other side of his ironic protest. In "Los Cisnes"
Darío identifies himself with Latin America using a familial metaphor: "I am a son
of America, a grandson of Spain" (547). The poem as a whole, however, is not an
interrogation of political reality itself, which is almost taken for granted; historical
circumstances are too real, too immediate. Rather, then, Darío turns to the symbolic
figure of the swan to divine this figure's legibility, its practicality - "what sign are
you giving with your bent neck, oh Swan, at the approach of the unhappy, wander-
ing dreamers?" (547). Darío considers the option of silence or retreat and its conse-
quences, only to reject it, or rather to suggest again that apparent retreat is in fact the
registration of protest: "Will we be silent now only to weep later? I have cast my
cry among you, oh Swans, who have been faithful in disillusion" (548). The swans
themselves are differentiated between black and white, and give a finally ambigu-
ous answer: "A black swan said 'The night foretells the day' and a white that 'Dawn
is immortal, dawn is immortal!' Oh, lands of sun and harmony, Pandora's box still
holds hope!" (548). While dawn is not exactly the bright light of day for Latin
America, and the sun and the harmony are projections rather than actualities, it is in
the possibility of dawn's transition from the night of colonialism that Darío can
stake out his desire for renovation and re-invention.
It is true that in most of his poetry, however, Darío is more elusive in his
recognition of the social consequences of his reformulation of the Latin American
subject - preferring rather to elucidate on a more abstract plane a poem that "will
open itself up to the assaults of the other, of the plural, disparate, inconstant
subject... that struggles to reintroduce into the syntagmatic chain its... changing
intensities and densities, its relational mobility" (Yurkevich 85). Yet it is also im-
portant to situate the poetry - in a way I have not space to do fully here - in its wider
institutional context, by seeing it as correlative to Darío' s other activities, most no-
tably his journalism. In modernismo, literature has to be seen as part of a complex
representational system that includes, at the very least, the crónica as the other half
of a combined enunciatory production.
If, as Ramos suggests in commenting upon Darío's "De Invierno," poetry
presents the opportunity for an "entry into the closed interior... as a process of
purification for a subject that comes from a contaminated 'outside'" (91), this has to
be seen as absolutely connected to the reverse process enacted in the journalistic
crónica , "which, by contrast, presupposes an inverse movement to this itinerary"
(91). And this inverse movement does in fact occur also in some of these poems, as
I have tried to demonstrate. More generally the poetry assumes and prepares for the
possibility of and the desire for a rearticulation of the subject to the social in a project
for alliance I am calling postcolonial. A full recognition of this connection, how-
ever, is only possible by studying the representational complex as a related whole -
modernismo , a system or field that includes poetry and journalism, politics and aes-
thetics, to form a whole that always implies the possibility of constructing and utiliz-
ing its internal connections rather than the maintainance of any kind of hermetic,
immune space free from reflection and movement.
Such complex interrelations between institutions determine the historical dif-
ferences between particular manifestations of this desire I am calling postcolonial.
Elsewhere the site and means of staging such uncertain processes of subjective enun-
ciation and protest are clearly different, and in accordance with separate - if re-
lated - social and institutional histories. In contrast to the Latin American case, in
Africa and Asia, following decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, the univer-
sity, and critical work more generally, had been well established as the location for
this mode of cultural production and protest. Indeed, not only had criticism been
fully established as a function of tertiary education in the West by the Second World
War, but in the decolonizing Third World often enough it was the university and
associated student movements that provided the core support and originary base for
nationalist movements of independence in the first place. Benedict Anderson charts
this shift in the basis of nationalist sentiment from the secular administrative pil-
grimage in the pioneering case of Latin America - a pilgrimage very much under-
taken by those such as Darío and, even later, by others such as Pablo Neruda - to the
increased importance of the university and of the educational system in Africa and
Asia. Anderson's emphasis is on nationalism, and as such he tends to overlook the
ambivalent extra- or non-nationalist desire that constitutes postcoloniality. How-
ever, we can perhaps transpose his comments about nationalism and say of
postcolonialism also that "the world-historical era in which each [postcoloniality] is
born probably has a significant impact on its scope" (63). Naturally a postcolonialism
of the late nineteenth century is motivated by different circuits and different institu-
tional contexts than those available to a later incarnation of the same desire.
It should hardly therefore be surprising that the location of postcolonial in-

tellectual elaboration (or enunciation) in Asia or Africa should be that of the acad-
emy, and criticism above all. Again, precedent and availability determine this privi-
lege - though this is not uncontested. With the more advanced stage of moderniza-
tion reached by the mid to late twentieth century, the social field of institutions
available for intellectual work is more open, and this should explain the adoption of
literature as a base for postcolonial thought by a writer such as Salman Rushdie.
There are simply more (and more differentiated) positions available in an expanded
and more autonomous cultural field.
That, finally, we should return to an explanation of this postcolonial differ-
ence - or this difference in postcolonialities - in terms of different stages of mod-
ernization seems crucial. For, ultimately, postcoloniality seems to center around -
or, alternatively, to be a literally peripheral manifestation of- a fundamentally am-
bivalent desire for modernization. Nowhere perhaps is this ambivalence felt more
acutely than in Latin America, product and (with its mineral resources) motor of
modernity. If modernization provides the impetus and means for a liberation from a
history of oppression, it also renews and expands oppression in its destruction of
historical means of resistance, such as indigenous community organization or the
affective solidarities of mutual location. It is in ambivalent reaction to this contra-
diction that Néstor García Canclini opens his Hybrid Cultures by asking "What are
the strategies for entering and leaving modernity in the nineties?" (1). These strate-
gies will clearly vary from place to place and time to time according to the openings
of differing social horizons. The fact that at one time criticism and at another litera-
ture should be the vehicle of these postcolonial strategies seems but one contin-
gency among many. Rather it would seem more important to identify and acknowl-
edge the desire that articulates postcolonial history to postcolonial protest in its vari-
ous possible discursive manifestations. Modernismo , then, can be seen as one such
strategy and one such articulation - even if it is produced in the Latin American
1890s rather than the Indian or US 1990s. A reconsideration of modernismo' s at-
tempt to constitute a global subjectivity through a hybrid cosmopolitanism, an at-
tempt cut off by the rise of populism and a later emphasis on realism, might point to
new resources in this era of neopopulism and neoliberalism. Modernismo' s desire
signals both the incompletion and the overcompletion of modernity, and the will to
construct a new collectivity that will wrest and transpose modernity from its current
implication in global exploitation, even if such a collectivity seems almost as distant
now as it was in the time of Darío.
MODERNISMO AND LATIN AMERICAN POSTCOLONIAL1TY 35
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INTELLECTUALS, THEORY, AND AESTHETICS: "MODERNISMO" AND LATIN AMERICAN

INTELLECTUALS, THEORY, AND AESTHETICS:

Latin American modernismo has usually been seen as embodying a retreat

[w]hereas earlier generations of Latin Americans had put the political

possibilities of modernismo' s apparent withdrawal into the aesthetic, and as such a

1. The Stakes of Postcolonial Desire

The question of postcoloniality in general and of Latin American

We need to keep the fact of colonisation firmly in mind because the

II. Postcolonial Ambivalence

did not result in a postcolonial aftermath that called for postcolonial

I am afraid of speaking too quickly in academic situations about the

Indeed, it is a feature of the postcolonial condition that an easy identification of

///. Institutions and Articulations of Postcoloniality

Thus if we understand postcolonial criticism as a result of this double alien-

whether, in the midst of this general crisis in Latin American criticism,

more self-critical Cantos de Vida y Esperanza. Significantly also, such a reading

[i]f there is any politics in these poems, it is because it appears

Darío thus describes his poetry as a protest, if of a particular kind, lodged in

been conceptualized as primal nature - "dramatic, extraordinary nature, a spectacle

It should hardly therefore be surprising that the location of postcolonial in-

Anderson, Benedict. 1 99 1 . Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

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