ABSTRACT
The study of primitivism has often suffered from a chronic Eurocentrism. Even when criticizing European colonialist practices, European modernity remains the horizon within which primitivism is interpreted. A problem with this approach is that it prevents us from seeing anything else. By placing modernity squarely in Europe, scholarship, by default, places the rest as non-modern (i.e., “primitive”) and thus renders invisible all other historical geo-cultural dynamics. This chapter takes a different perspective by approaching modernist primitivism from Latin America, where a liberal intellectual tradition conceived of America as the land of the future and the home of modernity, placing Europe in the past and depicting Spain, its former metropolitan center, as a primitive country. Building on that tradition and capitalizing on the opposition between a modern Latin America and a primitive Spain, modernism appropriated old Spanish forms to renew and modernize literary expression and took the old metropolis by storm. Not only was Spanish-American modernism the catalyst of Spain’s own modernism, but it also helped the formation of an inward-looking primitivism in Spain. The consequences of this postcolonial process were far-reaching. It turned Latin America into a constant modernizing force in the Spanish cultural field and granted Latin American discourse authority over Spanish and Spain. Yet, most of these groundbreaking events remain difficult to acknowledge under a Eurocentric lens. Bringing them into focus can open new ways of thinking and studying the full complexity of modernism and primitivism.
