SOURCE: Johnson, Randal. “Brazilian Modernism: An Idea Out of Place?” In Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, edited by Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, pp. 186-214. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999.

In the following essay, Johnson reviews the Brazilian modernist movement of the 1920s and 1930s as a response to European modernist movements as well as a cultural expression of postcolonial Brazil.

We are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarefied dialectic of not being and being someone else.

Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes

One of the central concerns of the organizers of this volume is whether dominant theories of modernism, normally based on European or “metropolitan” experience, can account for the “peripheral” expressions of Hispanic and Latin American modernism...