Decadent Modernity

Civilization and 'Latinidad' in Spanish America, 1880-1920. ‘This book is essential scholarship that brings to light exciting Latin America research to English-speaking readerships. It should be required reading for researchers of literary and cultural studies as well as historians interested in the intersections of race, politics and aesthetics at the turn of the twentieth century.’
Andrew Reynolds, Transmodernity. How did Latin Americans represent their own countries as modern? By treating modernity as a ubiquitous category in which ideas of progress and decadence are far from being mutually exclusive, this book explores how different groups of intellectuals, between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, drew from European sociological and medical theories to produce a series of cultural representations based on notions of degeneration. Through a comparative analysis of three country case studies − Argentina, Uruguay and Chile − the book investigates four themes that were central to definitions of Latin American modernity at the turn of the century: race and the nation, the search for the autochthonous, education, and aesthetic values. Using a transnational approach, it shows how civilizational constructs were adopted and adapted in a post-colonial context where cultural modernism foreshadowed economic modernization. In doing this, this work sheds new light on the complex discursive negotiations through which the idea of ‘Latin America’ became gradually established in the region.

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