“Si París no existiera, los escritores hispanoamericanos la habrían inventado"

                                                                          (If Paris didn’t exist, Spanish American writers would have invented it)

                                                                                        —Cristóbal Pera, Modernistas en París

 

                                                                        “Ici, nous sommes en terre étrangère. Le jugement dernier, c’est au pays.

                                                                        On nous attend là-bas, il n’est pas question d’y retourner les mains vides”

                                                                        (Here, we are in a foreign land. The last judgment is in the home country.    

                                                                        They are waiting for us there, it is out of the question to return there empty-handed)

                                                                                      —Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge

 

THIS ESSAY WILL EXAMINE texts from two moments of cultural transition wherein disenfranchised groups turn to a rhetorical and mythologized image of Paris in an attempt to subvert and even reorganize local social praxis. The modernistas, Spanish American writers at the turn of the twentieth century, faced a crisis of professionalization as regional modernization left increasingly fewer opportunities to receive patronage for socially disinterested writing. Without private or state funds to support them, many of these writers turned to journalism, authoring weekly columns, or crónicas, to make a living. Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century, as Walter Benjamin famously wrote, became one in a series of key topics for crónica writers: representative of everything elegant, sophisticated, and modern, Paris served as a vehicle of distance and refinement through which writers alienated by capitalism could at once elevate themselves as cultural experts and introduce local readerships to cosmopolitan modernity.

Some decades later in the post-independence Congo, groups of lower-class, unemployed youth from Brazzaville and Kinshasa developed a cult of fashion and mannerisms based on the elite sape clubs of the 1960s. (The acronym S.A.P.E. stands for Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes.) The economic stagnation and politi­cal turmoil that afflicted both the Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) in the 1970s and 1980s greatly reduced the number of viable routes for legal employment, thus triggering the emergence of alternative regimes of value that, through clandestine migration to Paris and the display of luxury goods, hinged upon the image of Paris as both colonial and cultural capital. Practitioners of these regimes, called sapeurs, Parisiens, or mikilistes —terms that I use interchangeably throughout this essay—placed Paris at the pinnacle of a hierarchical structure in which the appearance of wealth—in the form of designer clothing, a knowledge of the latest trends, and, finally, a migration to and triumphant return from Paris—becomes a powerful substitute for real class mobility.

While the phenomenon of sape issues from a society marked by fairly recent processes of decolonization and is germane to some of the most popular topics of postcolonial studies, including migration and identity, modernismo emerges from the transitional struggles of a long-independent region (with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico) and has often been described as cloyingly imitative of European, especially French, style. Recent criticism, however, hints at a changing approach to this period of Spanish American literature, an approach that recognizes the usefulness of post­colonial approaches to literature produced beyond the original historic and geographic parameters of the field.

This study, then, responds to an existing critical appeal for alternative approaches to modernista literature. Spanish American fin de siglo writers, much like Congo­lese sapeurs, clearly do not appropriate Paris as a cultural icon simply for the purpose of slavish imitation; as I will illustrate here, the study of and subsequent “pilgrimage” to the City of Light constitute part of a discursive cycle that defines a local system of social values rather than signals a dependency on foreign culture. Through a ritualized visit to Paris, the accumulation of discursive “proofs” of familiarity with it (postcards, photographs, newspaper columns), and a return home as cosmopolitan subject, these Spanish American and Congolese “pilgrims” construct an initiation to social success that has very little to do with Paris itself. In fact, traveling to Paris becomes for some modernistas unnecessary and even detrimental to the rhetorical position the city acquires in Spanish American imaginaries, in the same way that a true economic migration to Paris is distasteful to the sapeur. This process of mythical appropriation, as I explain below, resembles what Roberto Schwarz has called in the Brazilian context an “ideology of the second degree”—that is, an ideology whose function in local practice has distorted it unrecognizably from its origin in dominant (in all cases here, European) discourse. Schwarz coins his concept in order to envision a modernity born as much of local Brazilian economic and political networks as of their hegemonic counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean. I undertake here a similar rereading of mikilistes and modernistas, focusing particularly on the 1998 novel Bleu blanc rouge by Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou and a series of modernista crónicas.