Bruno Lloret Fuentes (King’s College London)
Throughout the 19th century intellectuals such as José Martí, Rubén Darío and José Enrique Rodó urged the youth of America towards a spiritual Hispanic Renaissance. This call asked future Latin American writers to engage with a wide range of cultural sources which would speak to the new postcolonial experience of the Americas. This paper discusses the ways in which Latin American notions of identity during the first half of the 20th century relied on Ancient Greece to create new modern national and continental narratives as an answer to this previous generational call. For this, I will present two case studies. Leopoldo Lugones’s (1874-1938) use of Ancient Greece for the forgery of a national myth of purity for Argentina, and Alfonso Reyes’s (1889-1959) brown notion of mestizaje for Mexico. Despite the similarity of their interests in Hellenic antiquity and Greek sources, their respective multi-format uses of Greece suggest radically different projective narratives for new national and Latin American regional identities.
Firstly, I will show their respective constructions of ancient Greece as an historic, cultural and racial entity. As the two key concepts, I want to evaluate the way how Lugones and Reyes utilize and relate with an extended and varied notion of race and ethnicity, on the one hand, and the role of institutions for the formation of a culture, on the other. Taking both on account, I want to also relate the possible historic, contemporary and future projections of the relation between race and institutions for their respective cultural projects and visions on civilization. Accordingly, I will analyze the way they engaged with theories on Greek singularity, mainly the ‘Aryan model’, the Dorian invasions theory and the Oriental influence into Greek culture. Thirdly, I will show how their characterization of the ‘Greek miracle’ is deeply linked with their particular cultural projects for Modernity. Finally, I conclude my presentation by suggesting the wider implications of this, and how debates held by Latin American intellectuals between 1880 and 1945, thus far neglected in Classical Reception scholarship’s foundational works (Martindale 1993; Goldhill 2002; Hardwick 2003; Porter 2005) and contemporary main tendencies, namely, Drama studies (Vilanova 1999; Bakogianni 2009; Hall 2010; Hardwick 2003, 2007, 2013; Valdivieso 2009; Leonard and Porter 2014) and the so-called global turn (Van Zyl Smit 2006, Watanabe 2008, Hale 2009, Simard 2018), to name just a few, anticipated key hemispheric debates around identity, while also enabling us to better understand paradoxical tensions such as center/periphery, universal/autochthonous, local/global, national/regional, tradition/rupture and technical/spiritual. The main hypothesis of this paper is that, as a particular inversion of what De Sousa Santos has defined as the hypertrophy of options, this is, the future, as a consequence of the contraction of roots (2014), for Hispano America, between 1880 and 1945, cultural Hellenisms, or phil-Hellenisms, constituted a characteristic way of hypertrophy and selection of roots as an answer for the lack of options. In other words, antiquity, particularly ancient Greece, became a crucial mirror of ‘origin’ for imagining future. By this, I want to both address to the need of an epistemological revision of the discipline in terms of what we don’t know we don’t know, as well as to give some essential context to the cultural ghosts and myths that Alberto Fernández, Argetina’s current President, recently invoked: on the 9th of June 2021, in a ceremony with Spanish authorities, he misquoted the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, stating that ‘Mexicans came out of the Indians, Brazilians out of the jungle and Argentinians out of European boats’ (New York Times, 10/06/2021)