Belonging Beyond Borders

Front matter

BELONGING BEYOND BORDERS

BELONGING BEYOND BORDERS: Cosmopolitan Affiliations in Contemporary Spanish American Literature

Annik Bilodeau ISBN 978-1-77385-159-4

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction Spanish America against the World | 8

Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism and Cosmopolitan Reading | 16

Introduction

“El Perú soy yo aunque a algunos no les guste" (“I am Peru even if some do not like it"), claimed Mario Vargas Llosa after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2011. And indeed, even if it is a great honour for any nation to have one of its citizens receive such a prestigious distinction, many Peruvians questioned the Nobel Foundation's decision. Vargas Llosa was not—at least in his detractors’ eyes— Peruvian enough to be celebrated for an award that news outlets often report with an emphasis on the recipient's nationality. Since he moved to Spain in the 1990s, Vargas Llosa has been seen as removed from his birth nation. There were even multiple calls for the revocation of his Peruvian citizenship, some of them made by the government itself.

If we replace Perú with México in the above quotation, the criticism levelled at Vargas Llosa could also apply to Elena Poniatowska and Jorge Volpi, the two other writers I analyze in this book. Poniatowska is, and has been for the past forty years or so, a staple of contemporary Mexican narrative. While no one called for the revocation of her citizenship when she was awarded the Premio Cervantes—the highest recognition in Hispanic literature—in 2013, as a young female author in 1960s and '70s Mexico, her aristocratic background and her harsh criticism of the Mexican government after the Tlatelolco massacre made her an outcast in national(ist) literary circles. Volpi, like Vargas Llosa, has faced calls for his citizenship to be revoked—in his case, after the publication En busca de Klingsor (In Search of Klingsor; 1999), his first work to gain international acclaim. The book's major flaws in Mexican literary critics' eyes? The protagonist is not Mexican, and the plot is not set in Mexico.

These anecdotes highlight how closely the conceptions of literature and national identity are intertwined in Latin America. The three novelists I study in Belonging Beyond Borders: Cosmopolitan Affiliations in Contemporary Spanish American Literature are acutely aware of their delicate positioning in the literary tradition. They are cosmopolitans with strong ties to their home nations, positions many critics consider irreconcilable. In spite of this, Vargas Llosa, Poniatowska, and Volpi embraced the tensions engendered by their bodies of work and political positions, and exploited them to serve their intellectual agendas, which promote contacts between cultures through rooted cosmopolitanism. One of the main concerns of Belonging Beyond Borders is reconceptualizing cosmopolitanism in order to consider the specific characteristics of Latin America's socio-historical and geopolitical contexts. It traces the shift from the rejection of cosmopolitanism to its emplotment by three contemporary Spanish American authors, and the ways this is reflected in five of their novels. I am particularly interested in how these narratives showcase characters who aspire to be cosmopolitan. The struggle they face in complex political environments and the way they strive to embody rooted cosmopolitanism can provide a template for contemporary readers.

The current political climate, both in Spanish America and around the world, highlights the necessity of discussing cosmopolitanism and its various formulations. Not only are we experiencing globalization at an increasing speed, but the rise of novel and more extreme forms of nationalism makes the study of cosmopolitanism and its new articulations more relevant than ever. In Belonging Beyond Borders, I understand cosmopolitanism as a mindset that celebrates diverse affiliations—be they local, national, or global—and I adopt the notion of rooted cosmopolitanism theorized by Anthony Kwame Appiah. Rooted cosmopolitanism—an openness to the world grounded in one's primary affiliation to the nation—illustrates how the individual's relationship to the nation and the world inform their identity, and challenges some ofthe limitations of early formulations of the concept.

Indeed, despite its pretense of universality, conceptions of cosmopolitanism are not devoid of imperial connotations, and have, since their inception in Ancient Greece, carried a certain Eurocentric and elitist bias. Derived from the extraordinarily ambitious proposition of world citizenship, traditional cosmopolitanism urges us “to recognize the equal, and unconditional, worth of all human beings, a worth grounded in reason and moral capacity, rather than on traits that depend on fortuitous natural or social arrangements" (Nussbaum, "Ihe Worth of Human Dignity" 31). It sets the ground for a universal fraternity and challenges us to reject exclusive loyalties in favour of an allegiance to humanity as a whole while also emphasizing the need to embrace one's community. By definition, the concept seeks to erase the fortuitous arrangements of class, gender, and race. In practice, however, cosmopolitanism struggles to overcome the imperial and elitist connotations it carries. Another critique the concept has faced is the erasure of the local, which is why it has been generally so vocally rejected in the developing world, and more specifically in the context of this project, in Latin America. Despite this rejection and the continent's particular relationship with colonialism, cosmopolitanism is not only reconcilable with Latin American society, but can also be a productive lens through which to analyze its artistic and literary production, as it forces contemporary readers to look outwards and involve the continent in a conversation with global trends.

One of the latest articulations of cosmopolitanism, rooted cosmopolitanism—in which the nation and the world complement each other—is particularly relevant to the study of Latin America. Unlike other forms of cosmopolitanism, rooted cosmopolitanism emphasizes a primary attachment to the nation as a necessary part of expanding one's ethical commitment to one's fellow human beings. Rooted cosmopolitanism is also a call to action, a praxis rather than a philosophy. Appiah posits that cosmopolitanism is the articulation of “universalism plus difference" (Cosmopolitanism 202); I take this as a starting point for my attempt to develop a definition of rooted cosmopolitanism that is applicable specifically to Latin America. By adding socio-historical considerations—that is, the articulation of place and time—I ground rooted cosmopolitanism in decolonial Latin American perspectives and overcome some limitations of the concept. Drawing from Walter Mignolo's theories, I also blend the concept of rooted cosmopolitanism with the concept of decoloniality. I argue that both rooted cosmopolitanism and decoloniality are praxes, as opposed to strictly philosophical concepts. Both point to concrete ways to act as a cosmopolitan and/or to develop a cosmopolitan sensibility.

Through fiction, we can better understand the necessity of developing a cosmopolitan sensibility, and take concrete steps toward an ethical cosmopolitan position. Poniatowska, Vargas Llosa, and Volpi are actively engaged in this conversation, and their interventions in Spanish America and abroad can lead readers to re-evaluate how they choose to be citizens of the world and encourage them to develop empathy for their fellow human beings. Other concepts, such as hybridity or hibridismo, third space, and glocal, could be used to analyze the narratives I examine in Belonging Beyond Borders. While the relevance of these theories and concepts to Latin American cultural studies cannot be overstated, they are mostly descriptive in nature. They express the inherent politicization of one's identity, but they are not an ethical position one can aspire to or a concrete ethical praxis. Unlike rooted cosmopolitanism, these aforementioned concepts are not ways to behave ethically toward other human beings.

Whereas most investigations of cosmopolitanism in Spanish American literature are about the influx of traditions in a given literary work, and are concerned with discerning how artists and writers try to create a universal artistic language, Belonging Beyond Borders identifies novels that express political concerns, and reads them as articulating a form of “cosmopolitics.” Poniatowska, Vargas Llosa, and Volpi offer a nuanced understanding of citizenship in which the best way to explore globalization, migration, and the rise of new nationalisms is to be a cosmopolitan, albeit a cosmopolitan who is aware of the pitfalls of the position. Unlike canonical cosmopolitan works that were produced either during Modernismo—which developed an aesthetic cosmopolitanism through the blending of traditions—or the Boom—which sought to create a universal language and a universal aesthetic expression—the works that form my corpus tackle the political aspects of cosmopolitanism. They are concerned with representing characters who are politically engaging their localities and the world.

Very few studies look at political cosmopolitanism, and those that do tend to cover the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. In recent years, Fernando Rosenberg and Mariano Siskind have each advanced theories articulated around the notions of “displacement” and deseo de mundo (“the desire for the world” or “cosmopolitan desire"). Both researchers have focused on earlier periods to conclude that cosmopolitanism, while always a lingering presence on the continent, has generally been displaced by analogous concepts that emphasize local cultures over foreign ones—transculturation, hibridismo, antropofagia—or that cosmopolitanism has always expressed a “desire for the world,” an impulse on the part of artists, including writers, to break with the asynchronicity of living at the periphery of the Western world. I agree with these authors' assessment of earlier periods, and take the notions of "displacement" and "desire for the world" as starting points for my analysis of contemporary narratives published between 1988 and 2010: Poniatowska's La "Flor de Lis” (The “Fleur-de-Lys”, 1988), Vargas Llosa's El Paraíso en la otra esquina (Ihe Way to Paradise; 2003) and El sueño del celta (Ihe Dream of the Celt; 2010), and Volpi's El fin de la locura (Ihe End of Madness; 2003) and No será la Tierra (Season of Ash; 2006). Studying them together for the first time enables the charting of the evolution from displacement to an overt affirmation of cosmopolitanism and its literary emplotment. Belonging Beyond Borders is premised on the identification of a new affirmation of cosmopolitanism in these works—both in the treatment of the concept and in narrative form. I examine these three authors together because each belongs to a different literary generation, has a body of work that spans decades, and publishes openly political works. The evolution of their cosmopolitan position can be seen in their writings. They not only represent the political and philosophical concept, they deploy it as a political tool. These novels are about the practicality of rooted cosmopolitanism, how to take concrete steps to be a good global citizen.

Naturally, these positions on cosmopolitanism have been shaped by evolving historical circumstances. Examining works published both before and after the end of the Cold War allows me to reveal this shift. In the period marked by the hegemony of the nation-state—which, in Spanish America, ends more or less in the late 1970s and '80s—the most relevant concepts with which to discuss issues of cultural identity were miscegenation and transculturation.? Writers often produced fictions that revealed the intricacies of these cultural processes, or, conversely, turned them into central themes of their fictions. However, since the late 1980s, the fading importance of the nation-state and the rise of globalization have led to the increased emplotment of cosmopolitanism. The following chapters examine this evolution through the study of the works of three authors. They show that, whereas Poniatowska's novel is a defence of transculturation, both Vargas Llosa's and and Volpi's narratives share a conception of rooted cosmopolitanism. This reflects the limitations of some metaphors of identity in Latin American discourse. Ultimately, these discourses-turned-ideologies failed to achieve emancipatory politics in the region.

Engaging with cosmopolitanism also leads writers to develop new narrative recourses to represent cosmopolitanism in changing cultural, literary, and historical circumstances. My reading is set against national and nationalist literary traditions so as to establish how Spanish American novels explicitly or implicitly represent and create a critical dialogue with various literary genres, and especially with those that have traditionally served to project notions of national identity and history. I show that Poniatowska reworks the codes of the autobiographical novel, Vargas Llosa those of the historical novel, and Jorge Volpi the global novel in order to reflect their vision of a cosmopolitanism grounded in socio-historical circumstances and to critically articulate a global consciousness.

This articulation of a global consciousness is explicit in all three authors’ works. My reading of their narratives is predicated on the notion that the representation of travelling and residence across nations always involves the emplotment of cosmopolitanism. For each protagonist, travel or dislocation—either chosen or imposed—is the starting point of his or her identity quest. The characters' dislocation from their primary setting allows them to evolve, and in some cases, to become cosmopolitan. The five texts propose worlds that combine spaces, times, and experiences, and in which cultural and historical specificities are plotted and made to interact. I follow three major lines of inquiry that aim to reveal the political in literary representations of cosmopolitanism: I examine how the emplotment of cosmopolitanism differs in authors from three literary generations; I compare how the conceptions of cosmopolitanism at work in their novels differ, and the impact this has on how the authors inscribe themselves in Spanish American intellectual and literary history; and I assess the rewriting and reframing of literary genres to show how the politics of cosmopolitanism inform aesthetic transformations.

In chapter 1, I explore the displacement of cosmopolitanism in favour of transculturation in Elena Poniatowska's 1988 novel La *Flor de Lis,” an autobiographical novel that explores cultural identity in 1950s Mexico through the figure of Mariana, a young, French-born cosmopolitan woman recently arrived in Mexico. In late twentieth-century Spanish

American literature, the first-person narrative, be it testimonial (testimonio, autobiography) or fictional (autofiction, autobiographical novel) was the genre of predilection for the representation of memories of trauma and/or the development of an individual's identity. Poniatowska uses it to discuss both the protagonist's evolution and concrete politics of identity, which is rare for this genre. I read the main character's trajectory toward the adoption of a transcultural Mexican identity as marked by tensions between two extremes, the Eurocentric cosmopolitanism of her French family and the exacerbated nationalism of mid-century Mexico. The character's evolution mirrors the adoption of transculturation in the cultural and political discourse of twentieth-century Mexico.

In chapter 2, I consider the importance of liberalism in Mario Vargas Llosa's El Paraíso en la otra esquina (2003) and El suefio del celta (2010), two historical novels that depict the cosmopolitan and nationalist trajectories of major artists and political figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both explore the dangers of socialist internationalism and nationalism, while ultimately celebrating cosmopolitan patriotism. My reading of El Paraíso en la otra esquina shows that the parallel cosmopolitan trajectories of Flora Tristán and Paul Gauguin end tragically due to their ideological shortcomings. My analysis of El sueño del celta demonstrates that the novel's protagonist, Roger Casement, who has a similar cosmopolitan trajectory, is redeemed by the narrative voice despite his turn to nationalism because he eventually acknowledges the error of his ways. However, Casement differs from Tristán and Gauguin in that he is represented as a tragic hero who is not blinded by extreme ideologies. He is, rather, a patriot who makes a mistake in trying to reconcile his cosmopolitan philosophy and the plight of his motherland. Whereas the twentieth-century historical novel's main purpose was to question, reassess, or fill the void in official versions of history, debate major political ideas and ideologies, and concentrated on the author's setting, Mario Vargas Llosa rewrites the Latin American historical novel by deterritorializing it through the introduction of figures and histories that transcend the continent, and he uses it to promote his own liberal positions.

In chapter 3, I look at Jorge Volpi's El fin de la locura (2003) and No será la tierra (2006), two global novels about major intellectual and historical events of the twentieth century. Both are set during the period of radical transformation caused by neo-liberal globalization. While El fin de la locura begins in Paris in May 1968 and concludes as the Berlin Wall is about to fall in 1989, No será la tierra starts with the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 and uses the fall of the USSR as its backdrop. I argue that these narratives articulate Latin America in a global context by erasing major indicators of identity that are conventions of the Spanish American novel. Indeed, Volpi's narrators, characters, events, and settings are removed from or only partially intertwined with the continent. In El fin de la locura, a novel about twentieth-century intellectual history, Volpi represents intellectuals as a global category whose members need to develop an international conscience to fulfill their roles in society. No será la tierra is a novel about the emergence of the so-called New World Order and the "end of history" discourse first elaborated by political scientist Francis Fukuyama in the nineties. My analysis highlights how the cosmopolitan aspirations of characters of different nationalities represent modes of universal engagement. The two works also posit rooted cosmopolitanism as a desirable mode of community membership in the global era. Volpi's novels articulate globality, and in so doing reconceptualize the relationship between Spanish America and the world.

Spanish America against the World

To this day, Spanish America has a particularly contentious relationship with cosmopolitanism dating back to its colonial situation and to the various wars of independence waged between 1810 and 1822. During the nineteenth and early parts of the twentieth century, Spanish American literature was characterized by a tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, in a context where the new nations sought to develop their own identities in opposition, first to Spain, and later the United States. Even if the vast majority of writers did not explicitly plot political cosmopolitanism in their works, their cosmopolitan works and positions were nonetheless the object of much criticism and debate. Many of these authors were interested in aesthetic cosmopolitanism and drew from multiple traditions to create a richer literary language; aesthetic cosmopolitanism has always been intensely political. Although they did not necessarily deal with the political implications of cosmopolitanism, their literary peers rejected their worldly position, for it was perceived as diluting the national tradition.

From the birth of the new Latin American nations in the 1800s up to the Boom of the 1960s, there was a clear divide between Latin American authors: either they focused on nation-building processes in their narratives and aligned with government policies, or they reached beyond the confines of their national borders and became pariahs within national literary circles. Across the continent, the debate raged; one was either open to the world and rejected the nation, or looked inwards and rejected the world. This black and white understanding of cosmopolitanism meant that it was almost impossible to have a level-headed conversation about it. Both “nationalist” and “cosmopolitan” were insults of choice, with cosmopolitan authors criticizing their colleagues supposed close-mindedness and nationalist authors and literary critics calling for the revocation of their peers citizenship.

For the former group, cosmopolitanism, understood as a productive engagement with global artistic practices, was never about rejecting the nation. It has been at the heart of every artistic and literary movement or school since the nineteenth century, whether we think of Modernismo (1888-1910), the Vanguardias (1920-30), or more recently, the Boom (1962-72). For many authors, the desire to assert their national identity was not irreconcilable with adopting the best elements from various cultural and literary traditions. For instance, Rubén Darío immersed himself in the French tradition; more than just a poet, he was a cultural translator who tried to make sense of European modernity for the continent. In his classic 1932 essay “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition"), Jorge Luis Borges, claiming the world as the repository from which he could draw inspiration, articulated his cosmopolitan position in the following manner: “Todo lo que hagamos con felicidad los escritores argentinos pertenecerá a la tradición argentina ... no debemos temer y .. . debemos pensar que nuestro patrimonio es el universo" (273-4; my emphasis) (“Anything we Argentine writers can do successfully will become part of our Argentine tradition. . .. We should not be alarmed... and we should feel that our patrimony is the universe").

Embracing aesthetic cosmopolitanism was a means to address the problems of a continent perceived as lagging behind in terms of culture, intellectual life, and political organization—a term Ángel Rama had dubbed “arritmia temporal” (“temporal arrhythmia”). Artists and writers saw themselves as involved in bridging the gap between Europe and Spanish America, and their work as a way of deconstructing the faulty perception that relegated the continent to the periphery of modernity. This asynchronicity explains why cosmopolitanism has always been at the forefront of artistic and intellectual discussions. This catching up with modernity extended to all areas of intellectual life. It was both aesthetic and political, but never political in the true sense of cosmopolitanism, since it did not involve a reflection about the universal ideas and values of a global community. Criticism of cosmopolitanism was both triggered by the aesthetic proposals authors were making in engaging various literary traditions and by the debates on identity. The mere addition of literary devices and styles was seen as diluting pure national elements, thus sparking debates about authenticity.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Modernismo was one of the first movements to attempt to bridge the gap between Latin America and Europe. It is, to this day, one of the most cosmopolitan literary movements in Spanish American letters. To their critics, the Modernistas cosmopolitanism was merely aesthethic and thus frivolous, and a strong rejection of their birth nation's culture. Artists were (seemingly) seeking “una identidad internacional . . . artística" (“an international artistic identity") and their work reflected a distancing approach (Grünfeld 35, 36). Literary scholars have long maintained that “a través de su escritura, los poetas modernistas participan en el proceso de creación de una mitología del extranjero" ("through their writing, Modernist poets participate in the creation of a mythology of the foreign”; 37), one that necessarily rejected national aspects in order to emphasize foreign ones. However, a more nuanced assessment of the Modernistas' political engagement reveals that in a context in which Spain's hegemony was fading, cosmopolitanism was one of several critical tools to rework the hemispheric dynamic, as well as to establish a stronger rapport de force with the growing cultural weight of the United States. Ultimately, the Modernistas’ openness to and integration of multiple cultures in their work was a tactic to avoid falling prey to cultural neo-colonialism, be it Spanish or American—a demonstration of what Jeff Browitt and Werner Mackenbach call a “cosmopolitismo cultural crítico" (“critical cultural cosmopolitanism"; 7). The liberalization of the "trade in contributions to Spanish American cultural autonomy” ultimately helped artists undermine the Spanish monopoly in that field (Aching 12).

Yet, the Western European culture to which cosmopolitans subscribed meant more than mere cultural products and consumerism. Scholars such as Camila Fojas maintain that such cosmopolitanism was in part a reaction to this crisis of modernity and provided writers and artists with the tools necessary not only to gain a better understanding of their own culture, but also to criticize it through a different paradigm, one that was both political and cultural: “Cosmopolitanism .. . [was] also a political sign of international diplomacy and justice, a sign of world-wide hospitality for the outcast, the exiled, migrants, foreigners, and travellers" (ix). Like Fojas, I see this cosmopolitan ideal as a way to acquire a different cultural framework that added nuance or even rejected nationalist perspectives. Writers not only felt an urge to write ground-breaking poetry, but also a need to create a new literary language, replete with new forms and techniques, that would confine them neither to a specific space nor to their own time frame. Their aesthetic cosmopolitanism was a form of political engagement, a rejection of subordination, and this dimension of their work reveals them as artists engaged in dislodging coloniality, rather than as alienated or self-absorbed, as tradition branded them. Octavio Paz is correct in stating that “Los modernistas no querían ser franceses, querían ser modernos. .. . En labios de Rubén Darío y sus amigos, modernidad y cosmopolitanismo eran términos sinónimos. No fueron anti-americanos, querían una América contemporánea de París y Londres" (“El caracol y la sirena” [“The Siren and the Seashell"] 94-5) (“The Modernists did not want to be French, they wanted to be modern. ... Modernity and cosmopolitanism were synonymous to Rubén Darío and his friends. They were not anti-Latin American; they wanted a Latin America that would be contemporaneous with Paris and London”*). The Modernistas had no interest in creating a new cultural dependency on yet another cultural metropole; they wanted to change the Spanish American literary order (Rama, Rubén Darío 22).

Modernismo's cosmopolitan impulse is present in the incorporation of the European canon in its production (Rama, Las máscaras democráticas del Modernismo [Ihe Democratic Masks of Modernism] 173; Fojas 3), which, as was already established, led the nationalists to view their work as a form of cultural amnesia and a conscious avoidance of the past. The cosmopolitans were not national enough to be integrated into a national culture that sought to rally everyone under a single identity: cosmopolitans were oddballs and outcasts, captivated by various foreign cultural metropoles. In sum, they appeared to their critics as lacking an interest in undoing colonial legacies. However, the Modernistas aimed to integrate the framework of modernity, so that Latin American cultural identity would be contemporaneous with that of Europe, and in the process rejected its colonial legacy. By doing so, they were able to enter a wider sphere of cultural influence that would later prove useful in defining the Latin American literary canon. Like the authors of the Boom and those of the later Crack movement, the Modernistas wanted to work within the Western literary tradition writ large.

The quest for contemporaneity remained at the centre of artistic and literary endeavours of the various vanguard movements that spanned the 1920s. The Vanguardias marked a period of literary experimentation, during which numerous manifestos—many attacking Western modernity itself, and exhibiting a certain tension between renewal and tradition—were published across the continent. Every nation had its own form, rooted in its particular experiences.? The ultimate objective of these movements was to renew the national artistic vision and literary references, as well as to debate the notions of national and continental identity in a changing geopolitical order. This questioning of tradition and of the function of art happened simultaneously in Europe and Latin America—a first step in reducing the deeply felt sense of arritmia temporal.

Whereas the European vanguard tended to be socially and aesthetically radical, the members of the Latin American Vanguardias were more moderate, "their function resid[ing] more in the building of cultural and artistic institutions that the European movements strove to destroy" (Rosenberg, "Cultural Theory and the Avant-Gardes" 414). These artists shared national preoccupations and were influenced by the production that had taken place during the celebrations of the centenary of independence a decade before. The alternative modernities that were being proposed by the European vanguard movements were not productive tools in Latin America, since they did not question Latin America's position at the periphery ofthe Western world (Rosenberg, The Avant-Garde 2). These authors thus engaged in a form of critical cosmopolitanism that sought to undo the colonial mindset and create works of art that took into consideration the continent's pre-Hispanic cultures. The Avant-Garde was a turning point in Latin American literature, since, unlike the Modernistas, who drew on the French tradition but never really questioned it, the Vanguardistas questioned various traditions and the function of art itself in the creation of their cultural identity. One of the major successes of the Avant-Garde was that the authors were able to reconfigure their locus of enunciation: they stopped reproducing "global cultural hierarchies that legitimated different levels of subordination" ("Cultural Theory and the Avant-Gardes" 415), and put Latin America on par with the rest of the world. This critical stance displayed both local and cosmopolitan affiliations, since artists were able to redefine their identity as one that included the best of both the native and the foreign. By incorporating modern values, they were able to acquire tools that would help them undo the colonial mindset, embracing an ideal of “non-Eurocentric, always-situated universalism" (The Avant-Garde 40). Their creation of a new modernity was grounded in a more nuanced understanding of their colonial past, as demonstrated, for example, by Brazilian antropofagia.

A few decades later, the members of the Boom were also forced into the debate over the authenticity of the Latin American author's identity. It was arguably the last literary movement compelled to engage in the debate over the adoption of aesthetic cosmopolitanism. Most Boom writers thought of their art in universal terms, and some consciously tried to develop a universal aesthetic through the introduction of international art forms such as jazz and photography (Russek 7). Like the Modernistas, the Boom writers did not necessarily want to be international; their priority was being modern, and this meant being published in Spain—indeed, this is one of the major criticisms the movement faced.* After years of Latin America literary independence, Spain acted once again as the literary metropole, since most publishing houses were located in Europe.” Nevertheless, whether they published in Latin America or Spain, their literary language was the same: as Carlos Fuentes observed in Geografía de la novela (Geography of the Novel; 1993) “A partir de la certeza de esta universalidad del lenguaje, podemos hablar con rigor de la contemporaneidad del escritor latinoamericano, quien sübitamente es parte de un presente cultural común” (“Given the certainty of this universality of language, we can truly speak of the contemporaneity of the Latin American writer, who suddenly becomes part of a common cultural present"; 34; my emphasis). For the first time in Spanish American literary history, a cultural movement broke with the asynchronicity that had characterized the dynamic between the core and the periphery of the Western world.

This central quest finally bore fruit, thus opening new possibilities for the next generation of writers. This new attitude toward cosmopolitanism coincided with the advent of globalization, with its global ethos and global consciousness. By becoming contemporaneous with their European counterparts, the Latin American writer was faced with “la necesidad de sumarse a la perspectiva del futuro a fin de dirigirse a todos los hombres" ("the need to assimilate the perspective of the future in order to address all mankind") while also remaining a writer “que debía superar varias etapas a fin de integrar una literatura que se dirigiese a los lectores de su comunidad" (^who had to survive several stages in order to integrate a literature that addressed his community of readers”, La nueva novela 23). This double process, international yet local, was a treacherous one, and unsurprisingly, many literary critics disapproved of the internationalization ofthe Spanish American literary market and the ever-growing exposure of their national authors. This supposedly meant that these authors' novels were not continental or national enough, as if living and publishing abroad somehow disconnected them from Latin America. History was repeating itself.