Friday, October 31, 2008

Hayden/Glissant, 10/15: Meeting Minutes

On October 15, Gabriele Hayden led our discussion of Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation and Monika Kaup's "'The Future is Entirely Fabulous': The Baroque Genealogy of Latin America's Modernity," MLQ 68, no. 2 (2007) (abstract). Many thanks to Emily Setina for taking minutes. Please e-mail Andrew Goldstone if he has mistranscribed your comments; and please use the comments function below at will.

Follow the link to the full post for the minutes of our world-spanning discussion!



Present: Anne DeWitt, Colin Gillis, Andrew Goldstone, Gabriele Hayden, Susannah Hollister, Ben LaBreche, John Muse, Justin Neuman, Emily Setina, Jordan Zweck.

GH, introduction. Poetics of Relation was throwing you in at the deep end. Glissant's earlier work is more specific about the kind of critiques he's making. You can see the elements out of which this book develops. In particular:


  1. A critique of history as an attempt to fix reality in a hierarchical discourse, with some regions of the world designated ahistorical, as in Hegel;

  2. A critique of (Eurocentric) periodization--this is what interests GH the most recently; cf. the Kaup reading--as a way of obscuring Caribbean agency and experience within history. When French history is used to periodize, the Caribbean can only be seen as responding to France. Kaup offers the idea of the Neobaroque. For Latin America, this combines modernism and post-modernism in an alternative periodicity, with a different model of what modernity and the twentieth century mean. I wonder: do these connectiosn to the baroque ever end?

  3. A critique of language in relationship to identity



Andrew Goldstone: How will this play into the work you're doing now?

GH: My first two dissertation chapters show how Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams are indebted to the Spanish baroque, the aesthetic of which they coopt for modernism. It's close to home for Williams, in his mother's mixed background; and the techniques of the baroque let him get around an Anglo model. My strategic question: should these ideas of the baroque belong just in these chapters or could I use it as a framework for the whole dissertation? For example, my original idea was to use it for thinking about Hughes as someone interested in connecting peripheries to each other.

Colin Gillis: I like the neo-baroque as an alternative to talking about "modernism," but it seems kind of like a relabelling of a standard modern vs. premodern dichotomy.

GH: Well, the historical baroque is already more complicated--is it just in Spain, or is it formed in the Americas as well?

Justin Neuman: Let's go back to a more basic question: what is the baroque denominating here? How does it relate to the Renaissance baroque? It's a troubled issue; it has a clear meaning in art-history--the monumental, the ornate--as a counterpart to the early modern era. Can we get at this question of relabelling by getting at what the baroque is engaged in?

AG: It's important to recall that there was a time when "Classicism" was important for talking about modernism, but that time has receded. So the opposition of baroque and classical doesn't seem so important for us--but in a French context, Classicism is the dominant art-historical period. The turn against it is far more revolutionary than it seems to us, in a literary history where TS Eliot lays simultaneous claim to Donne and classicism.

GH: As for defining the Baroque, it has a very concrete meaning in Spanish contexts: in literature, it's associated with the conceit (conceptismo), with wit, with outrageous erudition or cultismo. The archetypical Baroque writer is Góngora, whose language is crazy, altered in every possible way. These literary techniques are thus associated with the historical Baroque.

CG: When I say the Neobaroque looks like a relabelling, it's because it still seems to talk in terms of the same paradigm of modernism in terms of formal criteria drawn from European ideas of art and literature.

AG: Well, what else is it going to be? I don't want to defend a Eurocentric model, but you can't get around the kinds of formal changes Glissant names--the poetics of depth, language-in-itself, structure. They have to figure in any history. But when you relabel, that can get you somewhere by letting you tell other histories.

CG: Why does Europe have to be the center? Surely there must be other structures in world literature than Europe at the center and everywhere else at the periphery.

GH: You can see this dynamic at work in the historical baroque in Marvell and the Reformation. Is he authoritarian? Revolutionary? Is his baroque a liberatory cultural mixture? Or just another version of domination? If you don't go for mixture, you fall back on ideas of indigeneity--but that implies problematic ideas of purity. So is the baroque colonizing or decolonizing?

Ben Labreche: Does the fact that the historical label seem so strained mean you should keep the general idea but lose the label? Because in the historical baroque, it's definitely an aesthetic that's embraced by people in power.

GH: Well, in Latin American baroque you can see people building the baroque cathedrals but slipping in their local gods in the details. The baroque allows room for proliferation.

AG: And in any case it's hard to translate the authoritarian baroque into Anglo-American history.

BL: Consider the Counter-reformation: yes, it's using emotionalism to bring in the common people, but on the other hand it's definitely authoritarian.

GH: Well, in Latin America the Neobaroque is a strong tradition: it largely overlaps, for example, with the "marvelous real." It might be problematic for Anglo-American scholarship.

BL: How much credence do we give to the idea that Donne belongs to this baroque? The representative of the English baroque might be Dryden--but who, again, celebrates authority.

JN: Why is it important to Latin American writers to be labelling their work baroque, given its characteristics in Europe? What is at stake in this appropriation of form? Is this a relabelling of high modernism from below?

GH: It's part of the Latin American desire to declare independence from the US too, by valorizing the Spanish literary tradition. At the same time, it reminds us that, as Wallerstein says, the European baroque was set off by the influx of wealth from the colonies. So the baroque invokes colonization from the beginning.

GH: What I wonder is: at specific moments modern writers translate the Spanish baroque. But does the Baroque usefully indicate something larger?

CG: You might not need the theory at all. You have found these wonderful connections in the archive; Glissant's argument is for the Baroque as a world system. Does it really apply?

AG: It does matter to GH's account of the genealogy of Pound and Williams's poetics. Is it that their modernism was already in the air, and they fastened on the Spanish baroque texts because it resembled that modernism---or do you make the stronger claim that their modernism came out of their engagement with the Baroque?

GH: Pound read the Spanish writers eight years before he ever took an interest in Chinese. So the question becomes: did he ditch the Spanish influence for something new? Or did he hold on to something even though he stopped referring to the Spanish baroque overtly?

John Muse: The two alternatives could exist together as parallel genealogies.

GH: Somehow it's more powerful to say that there's a separate tradition in Latin America that rhymes with modernism, but differs from it.

CG: Are other scholars talking about the Baroque?

GH: It's in the pipeline, with the work of Kaup et al. coming out. There's a push toward alternate genealogies. For example, the baroque (Calderón especially) was important to German Romanticism. And that's Walter Benjamin's genealogy, why he comes to the baroque. So it's a trans-European phenomenon.

AG: And a good way to link modernist studies to Caribbean studies.

JN: Why preserve the moniker "modern" at all? I wonder this about all the alternate-modernity theorists--why keep the pre-modern/modern divide? Why do we care about expanding "modernity"? What do we mean when we talk about the modern in this way?

CG: We expand the term to explode it from within. The term "modernism" doesn't really work; there are significant and important differences between the literary movements it's applied to. Gradually, European "modernism" will become a smaller part of early twentieth century studies.

JM: How do Latin American scholars deal with the different assumptions between Anglo-American "modernism" and "modernismo"?

GH: "Modernismo" means something more like our fin de siècle: it's influenced by Mallarmé. Rubén Darío and a Symbolist poetics. So a lot of people in the Latin American context have taken on post-modernism while leaving their relationship to modernism unclear.

AG: As for JN's question: people care about begin modern because at a basic level they care about the basics of modernity--industrialization, social mobility, etc. Our own question as shcolars of culture is whether this basic idea of historical modernity really matches up with particular "modernist" cultural movements.

JN: Exactly. I was also shocked by Glissant's use of the term "errantry"--with its appalling connotations.

BL: And couldn't you also associate the Baroque with the feminine?

GH: There's the idea of the Black Legend--which feminizes people in Catholic countries by conceiving of them as subordinated to an authoritarian regime. What I took from Glissant's "errantry" was the recognition that pieces of culture can travel anyway. The history of the Caribbean is a history of violence, as Glissant knows, but he also knows that that violent history led to the foundation of the something he's celebrating. He is trying to theorize center and periphery in ways that will ultimately abolish them. That's his utopian gesture at the end: turning to the periphery will abolish the dichotomy.

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