Benjamin Johnson's Dissertation. Draft for Committee

This is Also the City: Urban Literature and Modernity in Colombia, 1920-1950 Benjamin Johnson Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Benjamin Johnson All rights reserved ABSTRACT This is Also the City: Urban Literature and Modernity in Colombia, 1920-1950 Benjamin Johnson The Conservative party ruled Colombia from 1886 to 1930. During this period, a coterie of grammarians, poets, and theologians consolidated political power by appealing to literature as a form of rhetorical expertise. The Liberal party took power in 1930 and would hold it until 1946. Recent scholarship has argued that during this period Liberal intellectuals defended the political authority of literary expertise even as they endorsed a modernizing program. Although these charges of hypocrisy are well founded, they tell a limited version of the history of the so-called Liberal Republic, failing to take into full account the work of intellectuals at the edges of the Liberal party’s patronage network. This dissertation considers a series of writer-journalists—including Luis Vidales, Luis Tejada, José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, José Joaquín Jiménez, and Arnoldo Palacios— who were active in Bogotá between 1920 and 1950. It examines their essays, chronicles, novels, and poems in newspapers and magazines, and less often in books, to argue that they elaborated a new function for literature in Colombia, appealing to the genres of urban journalism and the emerging discipline of urban sociology in order to transform literature into a form of social investigation. Table of Contents Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 1. Los Nuevos: Modern Culture and Crisis in Bogotá.......................................................22 2. José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo’s Mass Culture and the Liberal Republic......................73 3. Crooked Cosmopolitans: The Chroniclers of the Revolución en Marcha ...................115 4. Espiral: A Publishing Experiment in the Age of Gaitán..............................................158 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................192 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................197 i Acknowledgments Thanks to the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University for the summer research grants. Thanks to my advisor, Graciela Montaldo, and the other members of my committee—Carlos Alonso, Alberto Medina, Ana María Ochoa, and Fernando Degiovanni—for having challenged me to see my dissertation from new angles. Thanks to Eunice Rodríguez Ferguson, Kosmas Pissakos, Jonathan Wolfe, and Luis Carlos Fernández for having cured many administrative headaches. Thanks to Shirley Matthews, Seema Golestaneh, Ama Awotwi, and Sarah Lazur for having encouraged me to press on. Thanks to Guido Herzovich and Felipe Martínez-Pinzón for having read early drafts of chapters. Their comments were a crucial guideline for later revisions. Thanks to Guido, Felipe, Juan Cárdenas, and Craig Epplin for having submitted themselves to long conversations about my dissertation. Their questions pointed me in the right direction. Thanks to my family and friends in New York, Columbus, Popayán, and elsewhere, for having kept my spirits up. And thanks above all to my wife, María Alejandra Cárdenas, for having helped me in countless ways. ii Introduction In 1925, Germán Arciniegas founded the publishing house Talleres de Ediciones Colombia. He was a member of los Nuevos, a group of young modernizers who emerged along with avant-garde movements across Latin America, and he began to publish work by Colombian authors as part of the Nuevos’s project of cultural renovation. Among the first titles he edited was La cara de la miseria (1926) by a 26-year-old journalist named José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo. The book was a compilation of chronicles that Osorio Lizarazo had written for El mundo al día, a tabloid newspaper, and was illustrated with stark, modernist etchings. The chronicles were about life in the poor neighborhoods of Bogotá. The first lines of the first chronicle, titled “El trágico gesto,” made an epistemological claim about the Colombian capital that was the premise of the chronicles to follow: También eso es la ciudad. Todas esas casas pequeñas, cuyas paredes de bahareque han visto morir de hambre a sus habitantes y los han impulsado al crimen, forman parte de la ciudad. Lo mismo que aquellas miserias que se recogen en los hospitales, en los asilos de incurables y de mendigos. Lo mismo que todos los entes amorfos que se mezclan con los habitantes de la urbe y pasean por las calles centrales, ocultando su impudicia bajo grasientos vestidos. (9) 1 Arciniegas made sure that La cara de la miseria was circulated widely. He was also a leader of the university reform movement in Colombia, and had cultivated correspondences with some of the most prominent Latin American intellectuals of the day. Enrique Gómez Carrillo, José Vasconcelos, Gabriela Mistral, Juana Ibarburou, and José Eustasio Rivera would praise Osorio Lizarazo’s book, and on November 26, 1926, El mundo al día would publish a photogravure of the author titled “J.A. Osorio, cronista ponderado en Nueva York” (qtd. in Calvo Isaza, “Literatura y nacionalismo” 99). This anecdote illustrates one of the major themes of this dissertation: the role of urban literature in the cultural modernization projects of the early-to-mid-twentieth century in Colombia. That a collection of urban chronicles published in a tabloid newspaper would be circulated throughout Latin America (and to New York) as an example of modern Colombian literature points to the need to study such writing more closely to understand how the cultural field changed in Colombia during the early-to-mid twentieth century. There has long been a critical consensus that the Colombian cultural field remained essentially static during this period. This consensus rests on the claim that the literary institutions of the era of the Conservative Hegemony, a period of rule by the Conservative party that stretched from 1884 to 1930, stayed intact until the mid-twentieth century. To be sure, some version of what José María Rodríguez-García has dubbed “the reactionary lettered city” survived the political crises of the 1920s and the Liberal governments of the 1930s and 1940s (a period known in Colombian historiography as the Liberal Republic). However, critics have focused too narrowly on what was recognized as literature during this period. The conservative character of the Colombian literary institutions is precisely why it is important to examine texts of dubious literary status, 2 such as Osorio Lizarazo’s chronicles, to gain a sense of the cultural change of these decades in which the urban masses became a major political force in Bogotá. The materials for this dissertation are drawn in large part from Colombian periodicals from the 1920s to the 1940s. Most of these texts have been absent from academic discussion; indeed, some of them have barely even been catalogued. As María Mercedes Andrade notes, “[t]he study of the press in Colombia is a field where much research still needs to be done” (“Limits of the Modern Nation” 144). Indeed, only a few reference volumes on Colombian journalism have been published, and they are both limited in their scope.1 Nonetheless, this pattern is changing. Besides the recent research that I will present, a group investigation of cultural criticism in Colombian periodicals from the first half of the twentieth century is underway at the Universidad de Antioquia.2 This dissertation, then, is part of a wider effort to incorporate cultural production from periodicals to the study of the intellectual history of Colombia. Nearly all of the texts I study were first published in newspapers or periodicals, and they were addressed to the new middle classes in Bogotá with relatively little mediation from the Liberal and Conservative parties, which otherwise dominated public life in Colombia. Although they were beholden to commercial demands—i.e., to entertain readers—these texts show a wide range of literary experimentation and a careful attention to the everyday life of a city, Bogotá, which was quickly modernizing. Osorio Lizarazo’s phrase “También eso es la ciudad”—which I have borrowed for the title of the 1 See Cacua Prado (1968) and Vallejo Mejía (2006). 2 The investigation is titled El crítico de lo cultural en las publicaciones periódicas de 1900 a 1960. Una forma histórica del intelectual colombiano. Preliminary findings from several of the participants have been published in the Spanish journal Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana. See Agudelo Ochoa (2014). 3 dissertation—embodies their revelatory ethos. The work of these writers—chroniclers, novelists, poets, and satirists—discovers another dimension of a cultural modernity that has focused too much on the intellectuals nearest to the political elite. The new working and middle classes of Bogotá emerge both as the object and the intended public of this work, which strikes a sharp contrast with the rather hazy appearance of these classes in the more elite cultural production of this period. Latin American Modernity The argument of this dissertation

Load more