(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

10: Paris on the Amazon? Postcolonial
Interrogations of Benjamin’s
European Modernism
Willi Bolle
I. Introduction
T
HE FIRST PUBLICATION OF Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk (The
Arcades Project; GS V.1 and V.2) 1 in Latin America — the Brazilian
edition, launched in 2006 under the title Passagens 2 — promises, together
with the Spanish version published in 2005 in Barcelona, to inaugurate
a new phase of reception on this continent. In this context I wish to
inquire into the usefulness and significance of Benjamin’s study on the
European metropolis of Paris for a better understanding of huge cities
on the “periphery” of the world, such as Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires,
Ciudad de Mexico, and São Paulo. To what degree, one may ask, are
the categories of the Passagen-Werk transferable and operational with
regard to these new metropolitan centers; what kind of complementary
categories should perhaps be created to take account of the difference
between these cities and the traditional European metropolis, such as
Benjamin’s Paris of the nineteenth century; and, last but not least, what
may the “hegemonic centers” learn from the specific historical experience
of peripheral cultures?
I propose to study these questions from the perspective of “histoire
croisée” or “entangled history.” Elaborated in recent years by scholars
such as Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, 3 this method
tries to overcome the concepts of unilateral “cultural transference” and
“asymmetric comparison,” which frequently continue to be tributaries
to the idea of a cultural “mission” of hegemonic countries intent
on imposing their cultural values on the rest of the world. Major components
of the “histoire croisée” are the interaction between colonial
powers and colonized countries, the crossing and reversibility of points
of view, the inclusion of the voices of the excluded, the historicity and
“constructedness” of cultural patterns, the entanglement of perspectives,
and the hybridity of cultures. Together they reflect the influence
of four decades of postcolonial studies, such as those of Frantz Fanon; 4