A Planetary Avant-Garde

This book illuminates the history of experimental poetics in relation to the legacy of Iberian colonialism in the early twentieth century.

Ignacio Infante is an associate professor of comparative literature and Spanish at Washington University in St. Louis.

"Figures most often known to English-speakers as atomistic individuals – Marinetti, Pessoa, Huidobro, Cendrars, Oswald de Andrade, even Mies van der Rohe – here emerge in their interrelatedness and compel new readings of what it meant to desire to be modern in the first third of the twentieth century."

Michelle Clayton, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown University:

"In this lucid and revelatory book, Infante explores formal experiments with engaging the planet by an array of early twentieth-century poets writing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. His readings of poetry are subtle and dazzling, as is his attention to the micropolitics of form, location, language, and imperial legacies: between Portugal and Africa, France and Brazil, Chile and Spain, and culminating in the Philippines. A Planetary Avant-Garde will transform our understanding of global modernist networks and the place within them of experimental poetry."