Carlos Granés. El rugido de nuestro tiempo: Batallas culturales, trifulcas políticas. Taurus, Madrid, 2025, 204 pages.
A few afternoons ago, I was talking with the anthropologist Roger Bartra, one of the Hispano-American world’s most lucid thinkers, about the key contribution the work of Carlos Granés has come to represent, especially since Delirio americano (2022), for those of us who seek to preserve ourselves, in solitude, from the wokisms of both the left and the right, as strangers to populisms, preserving, I would say (though I don’t know if Roger would do the same) a liberal temperament now scarce and beleaguered. Bartra said you could tell Granés was trained as an anthropologist. What he does is not exactly literary criticism, nor political criticism, nor is it philology; he is not a man of letters taking a pleasant detour through sociology, nor is he just an erudite historian. He is all of these things, indubitably, but in essence, he is an anthropologist, said Bartra, and he was right. What Granés does, his thing, is the science of man.
Thus, likewise a stranger to ethnology, Granés is unconcerned with what separates the European from the Latin American; he is concerned, instead, with what unites them, in an enlightened sense: the human. Granés’s main contribution, to speak decisively, is not his wonderful, meticulously developed glimpse of how the modi operandi of the avant-garde have shifted, in the early twenty-first century, from the Manifesto of Surrealism to high politics and its tyrannical stars. If the surrealist act by nature was, for the rather naïve surrealists André Breton and Jacques Vaché, to shoot indiscriminately into the crowd, it is now the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who—since his first election campaign, a decade ago now—declared that, if he shot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue, he wouldn’t lose a single vote. The exhibitionism of the avant-garde, as useful as it was for dusting off the canon, shifted to the artists of the 1960s and, with them, to rock and pop, only to become the almost universal way of doing politics at present—stifling and often shocking, in the wake of a dangerous century, with the habits and customs established since 1945 and the end of the Second World War shattered from within the White House.
The way Granés has laid bare populist ontology already justifies his work’s translation to all major languages, if said translation is not being undertaken already, but there’s more. The Bogotá native, residing in Madrid, has pulled off another truly meaningful feat. He is the author of an “epistemological rupture,” as has been said before—a historic break in the Latin American (and even Spanish) sphere. The “solitude” that appears in the titles of works by Bartolomé Mitre (Soledad, 1847), Octavio Paz (El laberinto de la soledad, 1950), and Gabriel García Márquez (Cien años de soledad, 1967) has disappeared, to a large extent, thanks to Granés, as he makes explicit in El rugido de nuestro tiempo.
Said solitude tormented Hispano-Americans at two key moments of reflection. One was the collapse of the Spanish Empire in the Americas in 1821, which compelled us, in the face of unwanted orphanhood, to invent distorted and artificial national identities for ourselves. Today, more powerfully than ever and transformed into a condescending and racist academic doxy at U.S. and European universities, by way of “decolonialism,” these identities are a true “intervention” that entirely falsifies our history. It is a postmodern mutation of the myth of the Noble Savage, fueling what’s left of the left after the fall of marxism.
Another moment, of particular importance to Spain, came in 1898 when, with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines to the United States, the peninsula—with the exception of the melancholic and quick-witted Portuguese, who had begun to process this saudade decades earlier—realized the dream of empire had, at last, come to an end: the intellectuals of 1898 discovered that the sun now only shone on the Spanish during the daytime. The night belonged to others. Miguel de Unamuno called on the Spanish to “Africanize” themselves, as they were no longer Europeans, if indeed they ever were under Charles V and Philip II. This nostalgia feeds into the wokism of the right—in a form largely unfamiliar to Latin America—which recalls the stalest clichés of National Catholic (and Francoist) hispanidad and invites Spain to spiritually reconquer the Americas lost to the Protestant, Anglo fantasy of democracy. Yes, in 2026.
Granés invites us to forget this “extralogical imitation,” which, taken from Gabriel Tarde, still plagued the Paz of El laberinto de la soledad. Yes, I would argue, we came late to liberalism and democracy, but in essentially the same way—though following a different chronology—as the Roman Empire came late to the British Isles or Christianity hesitated to spread through Northern Europe and Russia. We did not receive liberalism—in the original and foundational Spanish sense of the word—from Europe, and only at the end of the decade prior to independence did North American republicanism take root. We “invented” liberalism—if such a term fits these concepts—at the Cortes of Cádiz in 1812, just as many other “modernities” arose from the Spanish political Thomism of the Golden Age.
Starting in Delirio americano, Granés places the American ecumene (I would include Trump in the front row) as the exporter of populism to Europe. From Juan Domingo Perón to Hugo Chávez, all populist regimes, whether on the left or right, can be recognized as part of this lineage, from French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon to Russian visionary Aleksandr Dugin. This does not mean Perón was not a disciple of Benito Mussolini (the former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, thorougly analyzed by Granés, gladly reminded us that the fascist dictator owed his first name to the Oaxacan liberal), nor that Trump does not follow in the footsteps of Silvio Berlusconi (although he doesn’t know it), nor that the world is not round.
Paz and Arturo Uslar Pietri can rest easy; through his work, Granés, born in 1975, has laid a theoretical foundation for their impatience. Latin America may be the Far West, but it is the West after all. Latin America’s mestizaje is more recent than that which gave rise to France, with the crossing of Franks, Angles, Normans, and Romans, but Mexico was a nation-state thirty years before Italy and Germany, and Mexico also separated church from state half a century before the French. Our liberalism is legitimate, historical, and of good stock, as is—like in Europe—our conservative tradition, our various and sundry miseries and barbarisms, our military coups, and—although not fascism per se, as Hitler was not Paraguayan nor was Mussolini Cuban—our notable gallery of reactionary thinkers, from Laureano Vallenilla Lanz and the García Calderón brothers to Nicolas Gómez Dávila.
Granés’s books put an end to our affected, philosophized, and ahistorical solitude. I have said this before: Paz was right, at the end of El laberinto de la soledad, to say that, in the end, we Mexicans are contemporaries of all men. Again, I will add: we always were, but we didn’t know it. After Granés, this ignorance will become anachronistic and even shameful. The same goes for Spain, which, until the Tejerazo of 1981, saw itself as undeservedly European.
But Latin America has not just exported populism to France or Hungary in the twenty-first century; since São Paulo’s Modern Art Week, in 1922, Brazil was on a par with the European avant-garde, as Granés documents in Delirio americano. Not for nothing, Mexico in the 1930s attracted a great many European intellectuals and politicians, for reasons good and bad. They came in search of exoticism, and what they got, like the conquered indigenous peoples of the sixteenth century, were mirrors in which to look at themselves.
Granés’s analysis also has a bearing on literary theory, which, as José Guilherme Merquior suspected years ago, is one source of contemporary antiliberalism. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Michel Foucault—with no prejudice to either’s greatness, nor to the complexity of their thought—relativism (“there is no one truth, just interpretations”) went from university seminars to street politics, to such an extent that readers of Jacques Derrida and Ernesto Laclau decided to “deconstruct” narratives and situate them “Gramscianly” so as to achieve “hegemony,” telling national stories alien to historical reality—presumed abolished—and offering up their famous “alternative facts”: interpretations of great nutritional value for electoral majorities eager to eat from the hand of populism. Castro (who was not a populist) and Perón, one on the far left and the other on the far right, found common ground in their hatred of “liberal modernity of Anglo origin,” against which Dugin, the Putinian ideologue, preaches too.
Decolonialism, Granés argues, did not shake off the old exoticist myths of Latin America; rather, it strengthened them, separating Latin America from Spain and from the West in general, the source of all horror and repugnance according to the bad conscience of U.S. and European academics, perhaps ignorant of the reverse racism they practice and profess. Thus, they provoke the new reactionary right to undergo an “unnatural contortion,” as we read in El rugido de nuestro tiempo, grabbing on to Trumpism through old-school National Catholicism and the absurd myth of Hispanidad.
If the political populist—whether Gustavo Petro, López Obrador, Donald Trump, or Viktor Orbán—is an actor who recreates the once-libertarian irresponsibility of the avant-garde artists, left-wing wokism has turned the intellectual (and the cultural official) into a preacher-cum-father dedicated to inquisition, cancellation, and censorship (or self-censorship) in the name of a puritanical Vulgate that seeks—once again—to deconstruct Western history. He transforms said history, surfeited with incantations, into original sin, to the benefit of (often university-dwelling) minorities, concentrated around the most outrageous cult of the Self in living memory, in which each person decides to be whatever they want and demands society and their neighbors grant them legal recognition of their eccentricities, which are highly personal at the best of times and criminal and self-destructive at the worst. Democratic society—according to Lacanian psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco, no less—should protect the victimized from themselves.
Meanwhile, the old left—having abandoned the struggle for the social and political rights of the majority—feeds its votes to the far right, which has taken its place as the representative of “the wretched of the earth” to such an extent that the anticolonialist Frantz Fanon, known for this turn of phrase, has become a moderate, as Granés tells us. European countries like Spain and Hungary, from left and right, remodel their national narrative to fit in with the populist narrative, rearranging their museums and making identitary fantasy their political priority.
“In politics and in the arts,” Granés writes in El rugido de nuestro tiempo, “things have happened that once we would not have thought possible: while presidents become rockstars, trolls, and performers, creatives take up the mission of pointing out all that is wrong with the world” and “culture, which was once the field of experimentation and unrestraint, is now beset by moral interrogation.” Likewise, “politics, which was once the field of responsibility and moral commitment, now have free reign to polarize, divide, and sow hatred among citizens.” All this to say, at present, the politician is a clown and the writer is a gravedigger.
But curiously, according to Granés, a true expert in the history of the Americas, this is all old wine in new bottles. The incessant reinvention of the nation, through new ultra-egalitarian constitutions or supposedly historical “transformations” to the nth degree, arises from a saying from the Cuban hero José Martí, who called on the governing power of Latin America to be the “creator” of a “new people”: megalomaniacal nonsense that brings to mind another figure deified by populism, Simón Bolívar, who long before and in short order turned his back on his republican dreams, staking his bets instead on a Moral Power designed especially for the unredeemed new nations “organically” incapable of becoming democracies. There is nothing new about López Obrador or Petro: they embody the Eternal Return of the Latin American sorcerer’s apprentice, who seemed doomed, before the coming of the twenty-first century, to the free domain of literature.
I detect a cutting paradox in Granés’s work. On the one hand, he has dismantled the myth of our solitude. Yes, we live in a labyrinth, but it is no longer one with a relatively easy exit due to its being modern, as Paz thought in 1950. It seems our labyrinth will not last the one hundred years that García Márquez forecast for Macondo before entering into the nightmare of History. Much to the annoyance of the gringo mumbo jumbo that is academic decolonialism, we are and will remain the West, and contrary to the beliefs of the benighted Edward Said (who, in Orientalism no less, forgot Spain’s seven Muslim centuries), our borders with the East (as well as our “inner border” with Mesoamerican civilization) are mobile, diffuse, and malformed, precisely because we live on a planet. The snake, luckily, bites its own tail, and the Manila galleon passed through New Spain on its way to the Old World.
By allowing us to leave our solitude behind, paradoxically, Granés intensifies it. There are still a few of us who, like him, believe in a democratic and liberal normality without charismatic circus charlatans making up new peoples; now there are fewer of us who aspire to return to art and literature as a land of promise with room for both San Juan de la Cruz and Balthus, each closer to the other than the Philistine inspector might judge.
In the intellectual history of Latin America (and—at least, I hope—of Spain) there is a before and after: the work of anthropologist Carlos Granés.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
