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.
About the author
Ignacio Infante is associate professor of comparative literature and Spanish in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches 20th-century Iberian and modern transatlantic literature. His research areas include modern poetry, modernist and avant-garde poetics, Iberian cultural studies, transatlantic literary studies, comparative literature, and translation theory/history.
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