Explosion in the Cathedral: Power, Culture, and Modernity in Latin America

Abstract

The present article aims to provide a summary of key issues in the formation of the Latin American intellectual field in the twentieth century, as considered in the doctorate entitled Relações de força na passagem à modernidade na América Latina [Relationships of power in Latin America’s passage to modernity] (2016). We highlight the questions raised by Alejo Carpentier’s fiction and essays and by the (political and cultural) relationships of power present in the process by which the concepts of the Age of Enlightenment were circulated and appropriated in Latin America. We offer an analysis of what we consider to be Alejo Carpentier’s main work, El siglo de las luces, published in 1962. The Cuban writer and essayist considered the epistemological relationship between history and literature in his commitment to the modernist cultural renewal that harnessed romantic criticism in contrast to the model inspired by Newtonian physical optics – thereby confronting the mechanism by which literature is understood as a mere reflection of historical or social reality. For Carpentier, fiction should be understood as an active, constructive element of history. The recognition of relative autonomy or the irreducible nature of aesthetic experience (and the imaginary) in terms of the scientific knowledge of history prompted a recognition of Afro-American and Amerindian cultural knowledge against the civilizing sense underpinning the linear nature of the Age of Enlightenment’s scientific concept of history.