UC Irvine FlashPoints Title Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8gx3h5hg ISBN 978-0-8101-2990-0 Author Siskind, Mariano Publication Date 2014-03-14 Peer reviewed eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Cosmopolitan Desires 8flashpoints The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly national and disciplinary frameworks, and that are distinguished both by their historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how literature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints. series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Founding Editor; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies, and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Coordinator; Catherine Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Founding Editor; Nouri Gana (Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Susan Gillman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz); Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz) 1. On Pain of Speech: Fantasies of the First Order and the Literary Rant, Dina Al-Kassim 2. Moses and Multiculturalism, Barbara Johnson, with a foreword by Barbara Rietveld 3. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature, Adam Barrows 4. Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity, Michelle Clayton 5. Disarming Words: Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, Shaden M. Tageldin 6. Wings for Our Courage: Gender, Erudition, and Republican Thought, Stephanie H. Jed 7. The Cultural Return, Susan Hegeman 8. English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India, Rashmi Sadana 9. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century, Helmut Müller-Sievers 10. Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers, Juliana Schiesari 11. Flesh and Fish Blood: Postcolonialism, Translation, and the Vernacular, S. Shankar 12. The Fear of French Negroes: Transcolonial Collaboration in the Revolutionary Americas, Sara E. Johnson 13. Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic, Erin Graff Zivin 14. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America, Mariano Siskind 15. Fiction Beyond Secularism, Justin Neuman Cosmopolitan Desires Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America Mariano Siskind northwestern university press ❘ evanston, illinois this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation. Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2014 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2014. All rights reserved. Digital Printing ISBN 978-0-8101-2990-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Siskind, Mariano, 1972– author. Cosmopolitan desires : global modernity and world literature in Latin America / Mariano Siskind. pages cm. — (FlashPoints) ISBN 978-0-8101-2990-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Latin American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Modernism (Literature)—Latin America. 3. Cosmopolitanism in literature. I. Title. II. Series: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.) PQ7081.S58 2014 860.998—dc23 2014001057 Para Analía Ivanier son tantos tus sueños que ves el cielo Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 Part I: World Literature as a Global Relation, or The Material Production of Literary Worlds 1. The Globalization of the Novel and the Novelization of the Global 25 2. The Global Life of Genres and the Material Travels of Magical Realism 59 Part II: Marginal Cosmopolitanism, Modernismo, and the Desire for the World 3. The Rise of Latin American World Literary Discourses (1882–1925) 103 4. Darío’s French Universal and the World Mappings of Modernismo 184 5. Gómez Carrillo Eastbound: Travel, Orientalism, and the Jewish Question 223 Notes 261 Works Cited 317 Index 343 Acknowledgments I wrote this book between 2007 and 2012, and during those five eventful years I incurred many debts of gratitude. Sylvia Molloy is my favorite cosmopolitan intellectual. Learning from her at New York University was a privilege that has shaped my work profoundly, and I continue to consider myself her student. I am deeply grateful to Diana Sorensen and Doris Sommer for going above and beyond the call of duty to support my research and teaching at Harvard. I benefited enor- mously from Diana’s insightful comments on the first draft of chap- ter 1, particularly regarding the materiality of literary networks, and I have learned a great deal from Doris’s incisive questions on the role of Caribbean and Jewish dislocations in chapters 2 and 5. From the moment I met him, David Damrosch has treated me with unparalleled kindness, encouraging my research on cosmopolitanism, inviting me to take part in American Comparative Literature Association panels, and including my work in anthologies. Michelle Clayton, who is one of the most generous scholars of the North Atlantic rim, took an interest in this book even before it was finished; in addition to her thought- ful comments on several chapters, I want to thank her for making my Cosmopolitan Desires part of the Flashpoints series of the Modern Languages Initiative and for taking care of the manuscript as if it were her own. Graciela Montaldo and Chris Bush read the entire manu- script and made extremely useful comments on its general structure and on global modernisms at the exact moment when I was beginning ix x ❘ Acknowledgments to rewrite numerous sections. Luis Fernández Cifuentes took me under his wing from my first days at Harvard, providing priceless advice when I most needed it. I am incredibly fortunate to work with colleagues who have always made me feel at home at the Department of Romance Lan- guages and Literatures. Thanks to Mary Gaylord, Luis Girón Negrón, Virginie Greene, Christie McDonald, Susan Suleiman, Francesco Ers- pamer, Jeffrey Schnapp, Brad Epps, José Rabasa, Tom Conley, Janet Beizer, Nicolau Sevcenko, Joaquim Coelho, Alice Jardine, and Verena Andermatt Conley, and also to Mike Holmes, Kathy Coviello, Kather- ine Killough, Susan Fuerst, Frannie Lindsay, and Walter Hryshko. I am particularly grateful to my junior colleagues with whom I have shared the trenches during all these years, Mylène Priam, Sylvaine Guyot, Ser- gio Delgado, Daniel Aguirre, and Giuliana Minghelli, and to Johanna Liander, Adriana Gutiérrez, María Luisa Parra, Clemence Jouët-Pas- tré, and Stacy Katz for their warmth and collegiality. Among the many friends who have contributed to this book, I espe- cially want to thank Alejandra Uslenghi, Gonzalo Aguilar, and Ale- jandra Laera for their lucidity as readers and for being ever-present for almost two decades. Writing books, organizing panels, presenting papers, and imagining future collaborations are all the more enjoy- able when done in the company of friends and colleagues like Erin Graff Zivin, Héctor Hoyos, Guillermina de Ferrari, César Domínguez, Víctor Goldgel, Martín Gaspar, Ximena Briceño, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Heather Cleary, Rebecca Walkowitz, Jing Tsu, Javier Uriarte, Florencia Garramuño, Ernesto Livon-Grossman, Emily Maguire, Nina Gerassi- Navarro, Nathalie Bouzaglo, Víctor Vich, Javier Guerrero, Fernando Degiovanni, Gabriela Nouzeilles, Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Martín Ber- gel, and Gabriel Giorgi. I am also extremely grateful to María Teresa Gramuglio, Beatriz Sarlo, Carlos Altamirano, and Nancy Ruttenburg for supporting this project in its preliminary and later stages, but also for their unwavering friendship. I was able to conduct archival research in the United States and Latin America thanks to two travel fellowships from the David Rockefeller Cen- ter for Latin American Studies at Harvard and a Faculty of Arts and Sci- ences Research Enabling Grant. I have learned a great deal about this book from my co-panelists and audiences at numerous conferences and invited lectures where I have presented draft portions of this project. I would like to express particular appreciation to Homi Bhabha for inviting me to speak at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center; to Franco Moretti, Margaret Cohen, and Nancy Ruttenburg for welcoming me at Stanford’s Acknowledgments ❘ xi Center for the Study of the Novel; to Hernán Feldman for his intellectual hospitality at Emory University; to Florencia Garramuño for fruitful dis- cussions of the ideas underlying this book at the Foro de Crítica Cultural at Universidad de San Andrés; and, finally, to Martín Bergel, Alejandra Laera, Adrián Gorelik, Lila Caimari, and Hugo Vezzetti for a heated and interesting debate at the Instituto Dr. Emilio Ravignani at the Universi- dad de Buenos Aires. Early versions of chapter 1 and chapter 2 appeared in Comparative Literature (Fall 2010, 62.4) and The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2012), respectively.