The Intellectual Meridian Debate and Colonialist Nostalgia

Abstract

In 1927, Guillermo de Torre, the Spanish avant-garde poet, published without signature in La Gaceta Literaria an editorial titled “Madrid, meridiano intelectual de Hispanoamérica [‘Madrid, Intellectual Meridian of Spanish America’].”¹ As we will see, this article generated an acrid polemic in which many of the foremost Spanish and Spanish American writers participated. (In addition to de Torre, an incomplete list of these participants includes Gerardo Diego, Salvador de Madariaga, Miguel de Unamuno, and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, from Spain; and from Spanish America, the Argentines Leopoldo Lugones and Jorge Luis Borges, the Cuban Alejo Carpentier, and the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui.) Given the importance of the writers involved, it is not farfetched to see in their responses a representative sample of the opinions held by some of the writers who would help shape the literature and the intellectual life of both Spanish America and Spain for the rest of the century.²