This chapter discusses the question of cosmopolitanism and its role in the formation of the poetry of Modernismo, with a focus on the work of three major writers: Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, Amado Nervo, and José Juan Tablada. Using the notion of “strategic Occidentalism” – the deliberate and critical engagements of writers with the Western tradition – the chapter discusses the ways in which poets in the Modernismo tradition used specific literary genealogies to transition Mexican poetry into the twentieth century. The chapter also comments on the various available editions of the work of these poets.

Even if the trend of chinoiseries reached its peak in the eighteenth century, in Latin America it persisted and gained new overtones through Modernismo. While in Europe this was a strictly foreign aesthetic found in Asian luxury exports and artifacts mass-produced for a consumer audience, in the Americas it became a racial phenomenon as well. Together with consumer goods, Chinese laborers started migrating to the region, complicating orientalist impressions of China imported from Europe. This chapter reexamines characterizations of Modernismo’s Asian imaginaries as a mere aesthetics of evasion, and instead reads them as a political critique of Chinese labor. While it acknowledges the prominence of the cultural politics of orientalism in the movement’s transcultural imaginaries of chinoiserie, it shows that the portrayal of the China trade opens a discussion on the global division of labor, nineteenth-century migrations, and the desire over foreign bodies.

This chapter places Elizabeth Bishop’s work within the cross currents of the aesthetic and poetic movements that constituted modernism. While it might be expected that Bishop and her contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell would form part of the generation that would inherit the sensibilities of modernism, what quickly becomes clear, particularly in relation to Bishop, is both her reticence at being identified with any one particular school or movement and her agility in moving between the definitions produced by, and for, modernism. In part her singular position on the peripheries of modernism was a self-selected one, Bishop is happier to stand apart from the categorizing and theorizing impulses of her time. In addition, the fact that she was a gay woman

This chapter asks whether the “planetary,” a term that has gained currency in literary criticism since the 1990s, is a manageable framework through which to study modernism. Current iterations of the “planetary” signal crises in our contemporary shared human environment, while also marking a transformation in our disciplines. Addressing this bind, Blanco considers a number of different uses and versions of “planetarity,” from Gayatri Spivak’s and Enrique Dussel’s to Susan Stanford Friedman’s recent provocations within the new modernist studies. While thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of framing a center-less modernism, Blanco also asks what happens when rupture is not thought of as the principal operating principle through which to think modernism. Framing these questions around the experiences of Spanish American modernistas in fin-de-siècle Paris (especially Nicaraguan Rubén Darío and Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo), Blanco ask whether a privileging of a planetary framework effectively undoes a workable conceptualization of modernism.