WHEN WAS LATIN AMERICA MODERN? Studies of the Americas Edited by James Dunkerley Institute for the Study of the Americas University of London School of Advanced Study Titles in this series are multidisciplinary studies of aspects of the societies of the hemi- sphere, particularly in the areas of politics, economics, history, anthropology, sociology and the environment. The series covers a comparative perspective across the Americas, including Canada and the Caribbean as well as the USA and Latin America. Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan: Cuba’s Military 1990–2005: Revolutionary Soldiers during Counter-Revolutionary Times By Hal Klepak The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell Latin America: A New Interpretation By Laurence Whitehead Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina By Arnd Schneider America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism Edited by Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives Edited by Jens R. Hentschke When Was Latin America Modern? Edited by Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart Debating Cuban Exceptionalism Edited by Laurence Whitehead and Bert Hoffman Caribbean Land and Development Revisited Edited by Jean Besson and Janet Momsen The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life By Iván Jaksic Bolivia: Revolution and the Power of History in the Present By James Dunkerley Brazil, Portugal, and the Black Atlantic Edited by Nancy Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca and David Treece The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture By John King Democratization, Development, and Legality: Chile 1831–1973 By Julio Faundez The Republican Party and Immigration Politics in the 1990s: Take Back Your Tired, Your Poor By Andrew Wroe Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico By Matthew Butler When Was Latin America Modern? Edited by Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart WHENWASLATINAMERICAMODERN? © Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart,2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-8000-7 All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue,New York,N.Y.10010 and Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire,England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States,United Kingdom and other countries.Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-53864-5 ISBN 978-0-230-60304-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230603042 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data When was Latin America modern? / edited by Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-349-53864-5 1.Latin America—Civilization—Congresses.2.Civilization,Modern— Congresses.I.Miller,Nicola.II.Hart,Stephen M. E1408.3.W46 2007 980—dc22 2006050734 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India. First edition:April 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modernity in Latin America 1 Nicola Miller Part I Views from the Historical and Social Sciences 1 Geographies of Modernity in Latin America: Uneven and Contested Development 21 Sarah A. Radcliffe 2 Modernity and Tradition: Shifting Boundaries, Shifting Contexts 49 Peter Wade 3 Mid-Nineteenth-Century Modernities in the Hispanic World 69 Guy Thomson 4 When Was Latin America Modern? A Historian’s Response 91 Alan Knight Part II Views from Literary and Cultural Studies 5 When Was Peru Modern? On Declarations of Modernity in Peru 121 William Rowe 6 Belatedness as Critical Project: Machado de Assis and the Author as Plagiarist 147 João Cezar de Castro Rocha 7 Cuban Cinema: A Long Journey toward the Light 167 Julio García Espinosa vi CONTENTS 8 Culture and Communication in Inter-American Relations: The Current State of an Asymmetric Debate 177 Néstor García Canclini Conclusion: When Was Latin America Modern? 191 Laurence Whitehead List of Contributors 207 Index 211 Introduction Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modernity in Latin America Nicola Miller T he question was designed to provoke, and indeed it did. Debates at the interdisciplinary event behind this book turned not so much on any putative answers but on the validity of the question itself, the cri- teria for addressing it, and whether the concept of modernity could be given any meaningful analytical content at all. The strongest case against the term was made by anthropologist Peter Wade, for whom modernity’s connotations of teleology (the inevitability of the grand march of progress) and scaling (modernity as the big picture, with everything non-modern diminished to the small and insignificant) were too inescapable to make it useful or acceptable as a tool of analy- sis, even in the variant of “multiple modernities.” Most of the partici- pants, however, ultimately declared in favor of retaining the term and debating strategies for endowing it with analytical substance, although the range of referents in this collection of essays (from Enlightenment to ephemerality) is in itself testimony to the problems involved in trying to do so. Latin America’s experience of modernity has been the subject of much academic attention over the past two decades, both from Latin American scholars and from other Latin Americanists. Interest has arisen at least partly in response to debates about the relevance of postmodernism and the impact of that constellation of changes cus- tomarily referred to as “globalization” (e.g., Quijano 1990; Rincón 1995; Sáenz 2002, among others). The question of modernity has been especially prominent in the field of cultural studies, but many historians, social scientists, and specialists in film, the built environ- ment, and the visual arts have also organized their work around the theme of what it meant to be modern in Latin America. The resulting N. Miller et al. (eds.), When Was Latin America Modern? © Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart 2007 2 NICOLA MILLER literature on the topic is rich, but it is also—as Latin America’s moder- nity itself is often claimed to be—fragmented. Scholars from different disciplines (and, indeed, within each discipline) have taken widely vary- ing positions on fundamental issues such as the chronology of moder- nity, its character and its agents. It would be impossible to review the whole of this literature here, but a rapid sampling of key works from Latin Americans who have worked on “modernity” over the last decade or so should convey a sense of the variety of views in play. When was Latin America modern? If we take the question literally, the case has been made for the late fifteenth century, with the onset of European imperialism (mainly by philosophers, e.g., Quijano 1990; and Dussel 1995); the early nineteenth century, with the independ- ence struggles (mostly by historians, such as Guerra 1992, 1995; and Uribe Urán 2001); the late nineteenth century, with integration into the international economy and the emergence of modernismo (the focus of literary and cultural studies: see, e.g., Rama 1984; Ramos 1989; Jrade 1998; Geist and Monleón 1999); the mid-twentieth century, with the spread of mass technologies (social scientists such as Brunner, 1995); and the late twentieth century, with neoliberalism and democracy (political scientists and economists too numerous to list), not to mention several other periods in between. To an extent, of course, the divergence of views about Latin America’s modernity is only one manifestation of the lack of consensus about when a consciousness of modernity in general emerged: many scholars, particularly historians, gravitate toward the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (the impact of Enlightenment models of rationality coupled with the ascendancy of capitalist practices; see, e.g., Geras and Wokler 2000; Bayly 2003), but others have made valid arguments about the seventeenth century (the Reformation and the sci- entific revolution), and as early as 1200 has been proposed (Hardt and Negri 2000). However, such widespread uncertainties about the his- tory of modernity still have less immediate political significance in coun- tries widely regarded as already being modern (even if this is a condition that needs constant vigilance to maintain it), than in countries that are not regarded thus. Renato Rosaldo has commented upon the “absolute ideological divide” between so-called modernized and non-modern- ized nation-states, noting that in the United States issues such as high infant mortality rates among African Americans “are treated neither as signs of underdevelopment nor as failures of uneven modernization (as they conceivably could be in principle and no doubt would be in Latin America)” (“Foreword” to García Canclini 1995: xiii–iv). The oft- heard propositions that Latin America has had modernism without INTRODUCTION 3 modernization, or modernization without modernity, or an experience of modernity that was no more than a pseudo-modernity, are all based on what Mark Thurner has called “the metanarrative of the deficient,” that is, the persistent sense that Latin America’s distinctive history of early decolonization and early experience of neocolonialism is somehow lacking because it does not correspond to patterns discerned elsewhere. Partly to counter such assumptions, there have also been several varia- tions on the theme that Latin America has developed an alternative modernity, which, it is increasingly claimed, has sustained the original emancipatory impulse of the independence wars and offers a model for contending with twenty-first-century change. It was in order to debate the variety of views outlined here and the theoretical and methodological issues surrounding them that we con- vened an interdisciplinary workshop, which was held in February 2005 at the Institute for the Study of the Americas in London. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines to discuss a topic of com- mon interest is both fashionable and hazardous. Interdisciplinary events are looked upon favorably by funding bodies and attract a lot of interest in the academic community: there is a widespread—albeit vague—sense that they are a good thing. But they do not, as Barthes put it, offer “the calm of an easy security” (1977, 155), at least not if they actually achieve their objective of stimulating people to engage with the contributions of other disciplines (and many academics are all too familiar with attending events where the historians comment only on the history papers, the anthropologists only on the anthropologi- cal papers, and so forth, and each discipline sails serenely on its way, wholly unperturbed by the shock waves of other epistemologies, but given a fair wind by the satisfaction of having been dutifully “interdis- ciplinary”). Even when engagement does take place, as it did on this occasion, connections between disciplines can prove elusive, and it is often the differences not only between disciplines but also within them that come to the fore. Or it transpires that some connections are made but not others: historians are often willing to learn from politi- cal scientists or geographers, but find it harder to appreciate the rele- vance to them of cultural studies; anthropologists and cultural studies people tend to find a lot in common (partly because many of them are drawing on a common body of theoretical literature; and at least some of them share a basically ethnographic methodology), but both find it difficult to contend with the residual positivism of even the most the- oretically aware historians. To a greater or lesser extent, all of the aforementioned tensions were evident at the “When Was Latin America Modern?” workshop.