This book revisits the claim that a key dimension of cultural modernity - understood as a turn to the autonomy of the signs and the erasure of the 'face of man' - arose in the mid-nineteenth century. It presents an alternative to that obsession, focusing instead on the aesthetic appreciation of forms through which connections are realised across place and time. The book is one of few to offer a comparative approach to numerous major writers and artists of this period over diverse countries. Specifically, the comparative approach overcomes the constitutively ambiguous relation between the modern and the Hispanic. The Hispanic is often imagined as at once foundational for and excluded from the modern world. Its reincorporation into the story of the mid-century unsettles the notion of modernity. The book offers instead an experiment in writing, tracing commonalities across place and time, and drawing on mid-century expressions of such likenesses.
When all that was solid melted into air... For decades,intellectuals from Benjamin to Bourdieu, Berman to Foucault, have been inthrall to this vision of the mid-nineteenth century. It shaped and underpinnedtheir most influential thoughts, its legacy insinuated into institutionalizedtheories of culture. In this new book, that vision implodes, as if in acultural supernova, its exceptionalism and limitations exposed. The story ofmodernity fades before a spectacle of linkages, stretching from and into thedepths of history, the breadths of place. And, in a parallel substitution, thevast territories of the former Spanish Empire's thread through the narrative,rather than lurking on the peripheries, no longer just the fallen founders ofmodernity. Instead of Modernity goes to the very heart of comparative culturalstudy: the question of what happens when intimate, dynamic connections are madeover place and time, what it is to feel at home amid the lavish diversity ofculture. This ambitious interdisciplinary book reconsiders foundational figuresof the modern western canon, from Darwin to Cameron, Baudelaire to Whistler. Itweaves together brain images from France, preserved insects from the Americas,glass in London, poetry from Argentina, paintings from Spain. Flaubert,Whitman, and Nietzsche find themselves with Hostos from Puerto Rico and Gorritifrom Argentina. The flotsam and jetsam of history - optical toys from Madrid -sit with Melville and Marx. The book ranges over theoretical fields: trauma andsexuality studies, theories of visuality, the philosophy of sacrifice andintimacy, the thought of Wittgenstein.Instead of Modernity is an adventure in the practice of comparativewriting: resonances join suggestively over place and time, the textures ofwords, phrases and images combine to form moods. This book will be of interestto anyone concerned with the question of modernity and with the fate ofcultural theory and comparison.
