Actualidad y Vigencia Del Barroco

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ALEJANDRO MARTÍNEZ. Actualidad y vigencia del Barroco. Madrid: Verbum.

2014. 101 pp.
Article in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos · April 2014

DOI: 10.18192/rceh.v38i3.1717
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623
Despite its somewhat dense style, the book is an important

contribution to the controversy on race, nation and place in Mexico, and
will be instrumental for further research on Mexican identity. The study of
divergent types of discourse - essay, journalistic writing and fiction - as
Lund’s sources for his interrogations and discussions is impressive and
gives the book a broad scholarly reach. This also shows the authors’s
flexibility and familiarity with a wide range of writings on Mexico - no
doubt, the result of many hours of intense research. This is a good
contribution to Latin-American scholarship.
PAULETTE A. RAMSAY
The University of the West Indies
ALEJANDRO MARTÍNEZ. Actualidad y vigencia del Barroco. Madrid: Verbum.

2014. 101 pp.
Focused on three of the twentieth century’s most prolific Cuban authors,

Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy, Alejandro
Martínez, in this slender volume, makes an important contribution to the
infinite dialogue on the place and meaning of the Baroque in the Latin
American aesthetic through a comparative reading of each author’s critical
and creative work. Much like centuries of human immigration to the New
World, Martínez argues, the Baroque too “ha experimentado una
naturalización,” that has created a very American expression of what
began as a European response to the Reformation (13). Yet, the New World
Baroque, as Carpentier maintained, does, in many ways, predate the
arrival of Europeans to the New World: “Nuestra arte siempre fue barroco”
(Carpentier quoted; 56).
Martínez opens his study with an overview of the history of the
Baroque in Spain, tracing its beginning from the works of Lope de Vega
and Góngora well into the seventeenth century where the ordered world
of the past was giving way to uncertainty, disorder, and chaos (22). He does
an excellent job of highlighting how the unique challenges of Spain in the
middle of the seventeenth century although negative in origin would help
to produce many of the most familiar characteristics of the Spanish
Baroque including the centrality of the individual, the search for new
expressions, the transitory nature of life and even the individual’s “place”
in this ever more chaotic and perpetually changing world.
In Chapter Two, Martínez explains how as the Baroque was losing
force in the Old World, it began to take root in Latin America where it
would thrive for the better part of the seventeenth century. By the dawn of
624
the 1800s, however, much of Latin America was involved in the wars of
Independence, the definition and redefinition of nations and borders, and
the creation of new modes of experience and expression. Artistic ties to
Europe were ignored or forgotten as these new countries sought to create
and consolidate national identities unencumbered by their shared colonial
pasts. Still, as both Spain and Latin American entered the twentieth
century, the Baroque would again surface on both sides of the Atlantic,
where its revival impacted a wide array of artists, musicians and writers.
One of the most influential intellectuals of this renewed appreciation,
would be the Catalan writer, Eugenio d’Ors whose treatise titled simply, Lo
Barroco (1935), became one of the most significant writings on the
Baroque. D’Ors believed the Baroque was the “revalación del secreto de
una cierta constante humana,” that existed outside of any particular history
or place (quoted; 51). The diffuse, dynamic and chaotic nature of the
Baroque, however, also means that it is impossible to definitively describe
it and/or its multiple manifestations.
While d’Ors, for instance, refers to the contemporary Baroque as “el
Barroquismo,” in Latin America it is often described as “el Nuevo Mundo
Barrroco,” or even “el Neobarroco.” It is to this plethora of meaning and
expression within Latin America that Martínez next turns in Chapter Three
as he discusses the aesthetic and artistic Baroque of Carpentier, Lezama
Lima and Sarduy and the renewed baroque expression as “un índice de
identidad cultural” (55). Basing his discussion on essays about the Baroque
by each author, Martínez highlights points of contact among the various
works and divergences. Carpentier, Lezama Lima and Sarduy share a
conviction that the Baroque is a natural outgrowth of the New World
experience. So too they see the Baroque in ahistorical terms, much like
d’Ors, arguing instead that the New World Baroque, at least, is outside of
conventional delimiters of the space/time continuum. Carpentier, for
instance, contended that both Modernism and Marvelous Realism were
simply “rebirths” of the Baroque in uniquely New World terms (58).
Lezama Lima, meanwhile, traces the origins of his Neo Baroque to pre-
Colombian times adding that it was the encounter between the
autochthonous and the European forms of the Baroque that resulted in “un
arte de la contraconquista” (61). Of the three, Sarduy’s profound
explanation of the Baroque through the use of Johannes Kepler’s
cosmology is both the most ambitious and original discussion of how and
why the Baroque is such a fitting expression of New World identity.
Focusing on Kepler’s use of the elliptical rather than circular orbit, Sarduy
argues that the decenter nature of Kepler’s cosmology, “tiene profundas
repercusiones ideológicas” in the New World including “la inarmonía [y] la
ruptura de la homogeniedad” (64).
625
In Chapter Four, Martínez analyses three novels: Concierto barroco by

Carpentier, Paradiso by Lezama Lima, and Cobra by Sarduy. For each, he
reads the novel within the context of the individual author’s Baroque
aesthetic, highlighting the instances of disorder, chaos and disregard for
convention. Of the many features of the New World Baroque that Martínez
discusses, the importance of transculturation is key. Transculturation was,
of course, first proposed by yet another prominent Cuban, Fernando Ortiz.
In 1990, Antonio Benítez Rojo, in La isla que se repite ties Ortiz’s concept to
the philosophy of quantum theory, which, interestingly enough, shares
much with the Baroque aesthetic especially in terms of diffusion,
digression and chaos. In Sarduy’s Cobra, Martínez finds the strongest
evidence of this Latin American Baroque that involves a sense of “el exilio y
la recuperación,” both disorienting and regenerative (90).
The book closes with Chapter Five, which is both a summary of and a
discourse on the present state of the Baroque in Latin America. Martínez
concludes that beginning in the 1980s, the Latin American Baroque took
yet another turn toward a new expression of identity and creativity which
resulted in a critical questioning of Modernism especially in relation to “los
desarrollos desiguales del continente hispanoamericano” (96). Ultimately,
Martínez’s critique reminds us that in Latin America the Baroque is more
than just an artistic movement. Its fluxuations, repetitions, diffusions and
continually new creations are woven into the experience and expression of
Latin American identity on many levels.
SHELLY JARRETT BROMBERG

Miami University of Ohio
C A R O L I N A R O C H A A N D G E O R G I A S E M I N E T , E D S . Screening Minors in Latin

American Cinema. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. xx + 203 pp.
Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, a collection of twelve essays,

studies the intricate representations of children and adolescents’
subjectivity, agency and self in contemporary Latin American films. If these
editors’ last collection of essays, Representing History, Class and Gender in
Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (2012), broadly
focused on children as “focalizers,” with allegorical tendencies toward
their intimate and broader social settings, Screening Minors principally
engages the socio-cultural, economic and political complexities of young
selves in the making. Screening Minors is an innovative interdisciplinary
collection that brims with relevant theoretical perspectives, heterogeneous
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

ALEJANDRO MARTÍNEZ. Actualidad y vigencia del Barroco. Madrid: Verbum.

Article in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispanicos · April 2014

Shelly Jarrett Bromberg

Book Review View project

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Despite its somewhat dense style, the book is an important

ALEJANDRO MARTÍNEZ. Actualidad y vigencia del Barroco. Madrid: Verbum.

Focused on three of the twentieth century’s most prolific Cuban authors,

In Chapter Four, Martínez analyses three novels: Concierto barroco by

SHELLY JARRETT BROMBERG

C A R O L I N A R O C H A A N D G E O R G I A S E M I N E T , E D S . Screening Minors in Latin

Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, a collection of twelve essays,

View publication stats

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