MONIDA KAUP

NEOBAROQUE:  LATIN AMERICA'S ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY

THIS ARTICLE IS A CONTRIBUTION to new modernity studies from the third world by Enrique Dussel, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Nestor García Canclini, Arjun Appadurai, and others, studies which have challenged the notion of a singular and universal modernity modeled on European history. The goal of these studies is to describe modernity in its actual global reach: in Chakrabarty’s words, “How do we think about the global legacy of the European Enlightenment in lands far away from Europe in geography or history? . . . [H]ow would one write of forms of modernity that have deviated from all canonical understandings of the term?”  I argue that the neobaroque—the twentieth-century rescuscitation of the baroque by New World writers and theorists such as José Lezama Lima, Gonzalo Celorio, Irlemar Chiampi, Bolívar Echeverría, and others—constitutes a New World discourse of countermodernity.  The neobaroque is another piece in the emerging puzzle of global modernity—trans-modernity, in Dussel’s terms, or modernity at large, in Appadurai’s terms. Like Dussel, Chakrabarty, and Appadurai, I argue that modernity should be understood as having multiple forms generated by the complex interplay of colonial and indigenous concerns. The New World neobaroque, I contend, constitutes just such a site-specific hybrid modernity.

What is at stake in the twentieth-century recovery of seventeenth-century expressive forms of the baroque? I argue that the twentieth-century crisis of Enlightenment rationality opens the way for the rediscovery of an earlier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (baroque reason) that had become obsolete and was subsequently vilified as decadent and irrational during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Around the turn of the twentieth century, however, European and New World theorists and writers began to rediscover the modernity of the baroque—that is, the baroque’s earlier role as the first response, both in Europe and in the Americas, to the epistemological and spiritual crises of the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation. As a non-exclusive, de-centering principle, the seventeenth-century baroque constituted the West’s first modernity. Unlike Enlightenment reason, baroque reason conjoined the contradictory impulses of the pre-modern and the modern, faith and reason, the scientific and the mythic, thus marking the crisis and outer limit of modernity—a crisis and outer limit that reappears in the twentieth century under the sign of the “postmodern.”

The “postmodern” marks a bifurcation between parallel critiques of modernity in Europe, on the one hand, and in Latin America and other non-Western regions (such as India), on the other. Indeed, third world critics such as Dussel, Chakrabarty, and García-Canclini have charged that the postmodern critique of the violence of modernity and its totalizing grand narratives of rational knowledge is nothing but a “provincial” European analysis that has only limited validity in the global periphery. That is, when the center delegitimizes the modern grand narratives it imposed around the world through colonialism, the periphery seizes this moment as another kind of opportunity unthought of in Europe. Rather than once again mimic Europe as it undergoes yet another (now postmodern) cycle of modernity’s development, New World and Indian intellectuals seize the postmodern crisis of the modern as the occasion to challenge the Eurocentric historical consciousness that, as Chakrabarty points out, attempted to “measure . . . the cultural distance . . . that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West” through time.

The fundamental gesture of non-Western intellectuals is therefore to delegitimate the diagnosis of the “incomplete” or “deficient modernity” of non-Western cultures and the principle from which it derives: the idea of a universal modernity modeled on the West’s historical trajectory. The point of departure of global modernity studies is, to use the example of Irlemar Chiampi’s Latin America, the search for new paradigms for describing the “condition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment.”  For Latin America, the twentieth-century disillusionment with Enlightenment rationality opens the door for the rediscovery of what existed there in the place of the Enlightenment: the baroque. For unlike the discourses of modernity and its subsequent developments (postmodernism, poststructuralism), the baroque is historically rooted in Latin America.

Hence, the claims that I examine here: first, that the baroque and neobaroque together constitute Latin America’s eccentric modernity; second, that in Latin America the neobaroque deviates from a postmodernism that is the logic of late capitalism; and third, that the neobaroque is a twentieth-century critical archaeology investigating Latin American alternative modernity. For twentieth-century New World literature, the term neobaroque is more fitting than its twinned counterparts—the modern and the postmodern—because the latter pose an antagonistic relationship between the historical avant-garde and contemporary culture and so obscure the continuity of neobaroque expression across the twentieth century. The term neobaroque also points to the transhistorical aspect of an alternate modernity that recuperates residual forms from the archive of the early modern period.