Latin American elites mimicked European high culture, creating an unstable peripheral modernity.

Evidence

This imitation and neo-replication by national elites of European (especially French) high culture and institutional orders ranged over fashion and dress, the arts (including literature, poetry, and theater), laws and modes of civility, in short, more or less the entire social habitus. They were helped along, of course, by national policies to encourage immigration on a large scale from Southern and Central-Eastern Europe, fueled as much by a concern to promote economic development as by the fantasy to elevate the region culturally and eugenically. Quijano notes, for instance, that as the twentieth century opened the European population of Buenos Aires numbered in excess of 80 percent. The culturally cloned socio-cultural order was embedded into a dramatically different social milieu and sets of social relation, fashioning what Brunner aptly characterizes as “peripheral modernity.” In these periphractic spaces of modeled modernizing, of euro-mimesis, the social products and relations assumed new meanings, becoming conflictual and contradictory as their architects emulated models they sought but couldn’t possibly serve to satisfy and embed in conditions inconducive to nurturing the imports. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1125

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘peripheral modernity’ and ‘euro-mimesis’ as frameworks for Latin American cultural cloning.