Latin American Artistic Vanguards: Modernity, Utopia and Desolation

Abstract

In this article some considerations are made about the irruption of the artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century in Latin American cultural systems. Through a critical dialogue with authors such as Ángel Rama, Jorge Schwartz, Antonio Candido, José Carlos Mariategui, among others, the study focuses, above all, on the relations between coloniality, literary representation and cultural singularity to analyze some issues related to the different projects of symbolic construction of the nation at the time. In the midst of the rapid process of modernization that the region was going through, many Latin American avant-gardists in contact with European isms, proclaimed the idea of the "new", often in search of aesthetic and linguistic expedients that could finally describe, concisely, the so-called national singularities.  This kind of artistic utopia encountered, on the one hand, the resistance of a regionalism that, coming from Romanticism-Costumbrism, thought it was the keeper of the traditions that expressed its own singularities. On the other hand, it had to face its own contradictions, as it found itself, desolate, facing the social and economic hardships that also identified precisely these nations. Such conflicts, examples of an ambiguous intellectual and artistic condition, have significantly marked Latin American literature, generating, in turn, refined forms of interpretation and artistic representation of the cruel reality they have historically shared.