Avant-Garde Inquiries: Questioning Art and Identity in Latin American Print Culture

• In Event: Media, History, and Fiction

Abstract

Part of the function of the magazine in Latin American literary life was to forge ties to an international periodical network that lent local canon-building projects authority. Frequently issued during the 1920s and 1930s, questionnaires signaled the contemporaneity of the magazine, its editors, and its respondents and provided a forum in which to consolidate and articulate local movements. Some worked to define and stake out a place for the national artistic character (“Is there a way to be unequivocally and genuinely Puerto Rican?” Índice, 1929) and others reflected on artistic movements (“What is your opinion of estridentismo?” El Universal Ilustrado, 1923) and the avant-garde in general (“What should Latin American art be?” Revista de Avance, 1928). The use of the questionnaire was itself a recapitulation of avant-garde practices that was transmitted and transposed internationally, enabling these print communities to signal their local and global aspirations while serving as venues for debate. This paper traces a brief genealogy of the questionnaire in Latin American print culture, outlining the form’s relationship to the manifesto, art, and criticism of the magazine, to spotlight the anxieties and ambitions of artists and writers of the era who themselves grappled with the relationship between local, transnational, and international aesthetic and political platforms. Through this analysis, I hope to restore these questions and their responses to a history of the Latin American avant-garde and to assert this genre’s determinative role in articulating local, national, and artistic Latin American identities in print.

Author

• Lori Cole, New York University