Jose Luis Venegas – författare

Decolonizing Modernism focuses on a body of texts typically associated with the 'boom' to endorse and develop Emir Rodriguez Monegal's contention that James Joyce's Ulysses is indeed a central model for the development of contemporary Spanish American narrative.

The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.

The Sublime South: Andalusia, Orientalism, and the Making of Modern Spain is the first systematic study on cultural images of Andalusia as Spain’s “Orient” and the impact they have had on nation-building and modernization since the late nineteenth century. While a wealth of studies have examined how northern Europeans from the Romantic period viewed Spain and Andalusia as Europe’s Orient, little attention has been paid to how contemporary Spanish artists and intellectuals assimilated Romantic legacies to engage in an internal form of orientalism.José Luis Venegas deftly explores Spain’s shifting engagements with oriental identity and otherness by looking, not just beyond national, ethnic, and racial borders, but at a territory that is institutionally embedded in the nation-state while symbolically placed between inclusion and abjection. The Sublime South shifts the focus and scale of Edward Said’s notion of orientalism by examining how it evolves and manifests transnationally, as the result of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, and intra-nationally, in a European yet orientalized country. Finally, Venegas challenges ethnocentric notions of Iberian cultures and fosters an understanding of the encounters between Western and Muslim cultures beyond opposing, and often mutually negating, essentialisms.

James Joyce''s Ulysses (1922) has been recognized as a central model for the Spanish American ''New Narrative''. Joyce''s linguistic and technical influence became the unequivocal sign that literature in Spanish America had definitively abandoned narrow regionalist concerns and entered a global literary canon. In this bold and wide-ranging study, Jose Luis Venegas rethinks this evolutionary conception of literary history by focusing on the connection between cultural specificity and literary innovation. He argues that the intertextual dialogue between James Joyce and prominent authors such as Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mexican Fernando del Paso, reveals the anti-colonial value of modernist form. Venegas explores the historical similarities between Joyce''s Ireland during the 1920s and Spanish America between the 1940s and 70s to challenge depoliticized interpretations of modernist aesthetics and propose unsuspected connections between formal experimentation and the cultural transformations demanded by decolonizing societies. Jose Luis Venegas is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

James Joyce''s Ulysses (1922) has been recognized as a central model for the Spanish American ''New Narrative''. Joyce''s linguistic and technical influence became the unequivocal sign that literature in Spanish America had definitively abandoned narrow regionalist concerns and entered a global literary canon. In this bold and wide-ranging study, Jose Luis Venegas rethinks this evolutionary conception of literary history by focusing on the connection between cultural specificity and literary innovation. He argues that the intertextual dialogue between James Joyce and prominent authors such as Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar, Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mexican Fernando del Paso, reveals the anti-colonial value of modernist form. Venegas explores the historical similarities between Joyce''s Ireland during the 1920s and Spanish America between the 1940s and 70s to challenge depoliticized interpretations of modernist aesthetics and propose unsuspected connections between formal experimentation and the cultural transformations demanded by decolonizing societies. Jose Luis Venegas is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.