Camilla Sutherland introduces The Space of Latin American Women Modernists, from our Iberian and Latin American Studies series.
Sitting on the terrace of a café in Madrid last week, a Mexican colleague shared with me that she has always felt conflicted by the idea of writing about Frida Kahlo. Having spent a good part of my academic career engaged with Kahlo’s work, I could identify with that particular push and pull. Though The Space of Latin American Women Modernists is not just about Kahlo, her presence inevitably looms large. In certain ways, this book is born out of a desire to use the hypervisibility of a figure like Kahlo to address the invisibility of so many of her female contemporaries. It does so by examining how eight women writers and visual artists carved space for themselves in the male-dominated cultural sphere of early-twentieth-century Latin America.
Based around four spatial themes – domestic architecture, the natural world, travel and the public sphere – I analyse comparatively the works of canonical artists such as Kahlo and the Nobel Prize-winning Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, alongside virtually unknown ones such as Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. Covering a broad range of regions and both textual and visual mediums, The Space of Latin American Women Modernists takes an interdisciplinary approach to topics such as liminality and the home, nature and eroticism, cosmopolitanism and cultural appropriation.
This book restores eight Latin American women to a transnational history of modernism from which they have largely remained absent. Despite successful international careers, these women have almost exclusively been examined within national or regional contexts, if they appear in scholarly analyses at all. Contributing to a broad reconsideration of the temporal and geographical limits of modernism, this book challenges accepted canons and disciplinary borders. The Space of Latin American Women Modernists, thus, introduces readers not only to the breadth and diversity of women’s cultural production in Latin America but also to a fresh conceptualisation of modernism.
Camilla Sutherland is Assistant Professor of Spanish Culture and Literature, and Co-Director of the Mexico Study Centre, at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.