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A Planetary Avant-Garde explores how experimental poetics and literature networks have aesthetically and politically responded to the legacy of Iberian colonialism across the world. The book examines avant-garde responses to Spanish and Portuguese imperialism across Europe, Latin America, West Africa, and Southeast Asia between 1909 and 1929.
Ignacio Infante critically traces the hegemony and resistance to the colonial regimes of Spain and Portugal across particular avant-garde networks, expanding our understanding of Western colonial and imperial ideologies of the early twentieth century. The book extends geopolitical dimensions of the historical avant-garde into a wider transnational and planetary framework, including divergent experiences of modernity, forms of experimental poetics, and understandings of history. It sheds light on topics, such as the relation between Portuguese futurism and European colonialism in West Africa, the Latin American avant-garde’s critique of European historicism, the development of Brazilian modernism in relation to the European avant-garde, the comparative poetics of modernism in the Philippines, and the 1929 Barcelona World’s Fair. Grounded in extensive archival research, A Planetary Avant-Garde provides a new understanding of the historical avant-garde from a global and multilingual perspective.
This book illuminates the history of experimental poetics in relation to the legacy of Iberian colonialism in the early twentieth century.
- Imprint: University of Toronto Press
- Published: April 2023
- Pages: 248
Ignacio Infante is an associate professor of comparative literature and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis.
"In this lucid and revelatory book, Infante explores formal experiments with engaging the planet by an array of early twentieth-century poets writing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. His readings of poetry are subtle and dazzling, as is his attention to the micropolitics of form, location, language, and imperial legacies: between Portugal and Africa, France and Brazil, Chile and Spain, and culminating in the Philippines. A Planetary Avant-Garde will transform our understanding of global modernist networks and the place within them of experimental poetry."
Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University
"Figures most often known to English-speakers as atomistic individuals – Marinetti, Pessoa, Huidobro, Cendrars, Oswald de Andrade, even Mies van der Rohe – here emerge in their interrelatedness and compel new readings of what it meant to desire to be modern in the first third of the twentieth century."
Haun Saussy, University Professor, East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago