The Space of Latin American Women Modernists

By Camilla Sutherland

This book offers a fresh reading of Latin American modernism through the lenses of gender and space. By analysing the contributions of eight contemporaneous women – four writers and four plastic artists – it reveals how they constructed and conceived of their identities as cultural practitioners through distinctly spatial tactics. Organised around four spatial themes (domestic architecture, the natural world, travel and the public sphere), this multidisciplinary, comparative monograph sheds new light on the works of well-known figures such as Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, while recuperating artists that remain virtually unknown, such as Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado. Through discussion of their work within a transnational context, this study positions these Latin American women practitioners within a broader narrative of modernism from which they have often remained absent.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781837721108

Book preview

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Space of Latin American Women Modernists

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Lloyd H. Davies (Swansea University)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

Other titles in the series

Paradise in Hell: Alcohol and Drugs in the Spanish Civil War

Jorge Marco

Motherhood and Childhood in Silvina Ocampo’s Works

Fernanda Zullo-Ruiz

Jesus of Nazareth in the Literature of Unamuno

C. A. Longhurst

Latin America and Existentialism: A Pan-American Literary History (1864–1938)

Edwin Murillo

Spain is different? Historical memory and the ‘Two Spains’ in turn-of-the-millennium Spanish apocalyptic fictions

Dale Knickerbocker

Blood, Land and Power: The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Nobility and Lineages in the Early Modern Period

Manuel Perez-Garcia

Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology

Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-Pellisa

Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and Space

Ester Bautista Botello

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

Robert Mason

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

The Tlatelolco Massacre, Mexico 1968, and the Emotional Triangle of Anger, Grief and Shame: Discourses of Truth(s)

Victoria Carpenter

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

The Space of Latin American Women Modernists

CAMILLA SUTHERLAND

© Camilla Sutherland, 2024

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-83772-108-5

e-ISBN 978-1-83772-110-8

The right of Camilla Sutherland to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every endeavour has been made to secure rights of reproduction for third party materials in this book. UWP will rectify any inaccurate information at the earliest opportunity.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Frida Kahlo, El tiempo vuela (1929), oil on masonite. Reproduced by permission of Pictoright.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Negotiating Space

1Upon the Threshold: Reconsidering the Modernist Home

2Mother Earth Remapped

3Cosmopolitan Promises: Travel, Exile and Alterity

4‘On the margins of the fray’: Situating Modernist Women in Print Media

Afterword

Bibliography

Plate Section

Notes

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

Acknowledgements

It seems only fitting that writing a book about space and gender has taken place across distinct geographies and in the company of many inspiring women. My heartfelt thanks go to my first mentors, Claire Lindsay and María del Pilar Blanco, whose meticulous insights, enthusiasm and encouragement set me on this path. I am grateful to Francesca Bratton, Genevieve Helme, Kathryn Roberts and Inela Selimovic´, who have accompanied me through this process as vital conversationalists, collaborators and cheerleaders. Infinite thanks go to Luis Martín-Estudillo for his devoted readings, incomparable editing and unflagging support of my work.

This book has been nourished by the ideas and feedback of numerous colleagues whom I have had the pleasure of encountering along this journey. For informing and challenging the way that I think about space, gender and modernism, I thank Marjorie Agosín, Nicoletta Asciuto, Mieke Bal, Octavia Bright, Michelle Clayton, Lori Cole, Catherine Davies, Estrella de Diego, Ana Forcinito, Guadalupe Gerardi, Valentino Gianuzzi, Teresa Gómez Reus, Pelagia Goulimari, Fiona Mackintosh, Douglas Mao, Francine Masiello, Eamon McCarthy, the late Sylvia Molloy, Alys Moody, Harsha Ram, Stephen J. Ross, Philippa Page, Kaitlin Staudt, Andrew Thacker and Alia Trabucco Zerán.

My sincere thanks go to Pablo Valdivia and all my colleagues at the University of Groningen for providing me with such a dynamic environment in which to pursue my work. I thank Sarah Lewis and the whole team at University of Wales Press for their enthusiasm and dedication to this project. The book was also improved by the rigorous and perceptive comments of anonymous reviewers.

Funds from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as well as the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture have generously supported my research. I am indebted to Norah Borges’s grandson Fernando de Torre for kindly granting permissions to reproduce images within the book. I would also like to thank staff at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, the Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Notre Dame, the Harry Ransom Center and the Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas at Austin, the British Library and the Biblioteca Nacional, Buenos Aires for facilitating many fruitful periods of archival research.

My final and deepest thanks go to my partner, family and friends – through all these years of roving, you have and always will be my home.

List of Illustrations

Permission in reproduction of figures 1–2, 4–7 and 11 has been granted by Fernando de Torre.

Permission in reproduction of figures 3, 8–10, 12–16, 22 and 24–7 has been granted by Marcel van de Graaf, © Pictoright, Amsterdam 2022.

The author acknowledges best endeavours in securing permission from the Estate of Marina Núñez del Prado in reproduction of figures 17–21 and 28; error in this regard will be corrected by the publisher at the earliest opportunity.

Cover Frida Kahlo, El tiempo vuela (1929) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 1 Norah Borges, Retratos (1921)

Figure 2 Norah Borges, Salón (1922)

Figure 3 Ángeles Santos, Tertulia (1929) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 4 Norah Borges, Las tres hermanas (1921)

Figure 5 Norah Borges, Las tres hermanas (1922)

Figure 6 Norah Borges, Paisaje de Buenos Aires (1922)

Figure 7 Norah Borges, Paisaje de Buenos Aires (1930)

Figure 8 Remedios Varo, Ruptura (1955) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 9 Remedios Varo, Nacer de nuevo (1960) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 10 Dorothea Tanning, Birthday (1942) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 11 Norah Borges, Buenos Aires (1921)

Figure 12 Remedios Varo, La tarea (1955) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 13 Frida Kahlo, Mis abuelos, mis padres y yo (Árbol genealógico) (1936) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 14 Frida Kahlo, Mi nana y yo (1937) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 15 Frida Kahlo, Raíces , (1943) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 16 Frida Kahlo, Moisés (El núcleo de la creación) (1945) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 17 Marina Núñez del Prado, Virgen de Copacabana (1957)

Figure 18 Marina Núñez del Prado, Nocturno (1958)

Figure 19 Marina Núñez del Prado, Espíritu de la nube (1956)

Figure 20 Marina Núñez del Prado, Victoria (1958)

Figure 21 Marina Núñez del Prado, Torso (1958)

Figure 22 Frida Kahlo, La flor de la vida (1944) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 23 Acaxochitlan glyph, Mendoza Codex (1535–50)

Figure 24 Frida Kahlo, Dos desnudos en un bosque (1939) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 25 Frida Kahlo, El tiempo vuela (1929) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 26 Remedios Varo, Trasmundo (1955) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 27 Remedios Varo, Exploración de las fuentes del río Orinoco (1959) © Pictoright Amsterdam 2022

Figure 28 Marina Núñez del Prado, Mineros (1944)

Figure 29 Anonymous, photograph documenting the book launch of Norah Lange’s 45 días y 30 marineros (1933)

Introduction

Negotiating Space

The first volume of Victoria Ocampo’s six-tome autobiography begins not with the story of a woman, but with the story of a city. Buenos Aires looms large in this opening frame, with Ocampo subsuming herself among the other ‘600,000 souls’ who inhabited the city in 1890, the year of her birth. As if dramatically widening the angle of a photographic lens, she swiftly places this nascent metropolis within the context of ‘un inmenso territorio casi desierto … una patria insignificante [que] estaba in the making’ (‘an immense almost deserted territory … an insignificant country that was in the making’).¹ Ocampo carefully maps her own life onto the vertiginous transformations that Buenos Aires – and Argentina at large – underwent at the turn of the century: modern woman and modern nation emerged in parallel. This cartographic approach to the self defines much of Ocampo’s autobiographical writings. Looking at an old map of Buenos Aires she notes that:

en el año 1810, tan sagrado de consecuencias, la calle Viamonte llevaba mi apellido, y la calle San Martín, asociada con triunfos de la hora, el de Victoria … La esquina precisa de las dos calles en que la casualidad iba a hacerme nacer … en que echaría anclas esta mi vida y en que se desarrollarían … parte de los acontecimientos más importantes de mi vivir (SUR en la misma esquina), llevaba mi nombre y apellido en un momento estremecido de nuestra historia.

in the year 1810, so loaded with significance, Viamonte Street bore my surname, and San Martín Street, associated with triumphs of the hour, that of Victoria … the precise corner of the two streets on which by chance I would come to be born, in which my life would be anchored and in which … some of the most important events of my life would take place (SUR headquarters on the same corner), carried my first and last name in an earth-shaking moment in our history).²

This sort of interweaving of personal and national history (the war of independence in Argentina began in 1810) can be found across both men and women’s autobiographical works in Latin America during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century.³ Beyond an affirmation of national heritage, this technique also reveals a unique interaction with space and spatiality that is central to Ocampo’s construction of her identity as a writer. The map of the city plots out her life and persona: her birth, her professional accomplishments and her very name are visualised cartographically. Although Ocampo is at pains to emphasise the element of chance inherent to this topography of the self, its appearance in her autobiography is anything but coincidental: through mapping herself onto the cityscape of Buenos Aires, Ocampo asserts her presence within both the city’s geographical and cultural terrains.

Alongside writer and publisher Victoria Ocampo, this book examines the interventions of seven other women who made their presence felt in the landscape of Latin American artistic and literary modernism: fellow Argentines, printmaker Norah Borges and writer Norah Lange; the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado; Gabriela Mistral and María Luisa Bombal, both writers from Chile; and the Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo. These women constructed their identities as artists through distinctly spatial strategies. Their creative works dramatise these dynamic spatial negotiations at a thematic level in a preoccupation with distinct spatial symbols, the prioritisation of geographical setting and an emphasis on depictions of physical mobility. The thematic treatment of space within their literary and artistic production will be brought into dialogue with documents such as diaries, correspondence and print media. This book, thus, offers a multifaceted examination of women’s artistic self-definition as a spatial praxis.

More often than not, their spatial praxis represents a form of struggle. Ocampo likened her entrance into the cultural sphere to her great-grandfather’s 1817 diplomatic mission to obtain battleships to aid in the liberation of Peru: ‘como don Manuel Hermenegildo se trajo de Norteamérica el Horacio y el Curiacio … yo soñé con traer otros veleros, otras armas, para otras conquistas’ (‘Just as Don Manuel Hermenegildo brought the Horacio and the Curiacio from North America … I dreamed of bringing other sailboats, other weapons, for other conquests’).⁴ Ocampo conceives of both the construction of a career within the cultural sphere and the act of self-articulating an artistic identity as a woman as a process of re-territorialisation. More importantly, in evoking the armed struggles of the wars for independence, she suggests that women’s incursions into the artistic sphere must be an act of forced re-appropriation. We find comparable visions of reclaimed dominion throughout the work of these women. Just as the protagonist of María Luisa Bombal’s La última niebla (‘The Final Mist’) wishes to ‘despertar un eco’ (‘awaken an echo’) in her walk through the forest, so too does the woman modernist as she traverses the artistic sphere.⁵ Like the echo, the artwork announces presence – it is a projection outward into a public realm – and it also serves a reflexive role whereby the artist confirms her own subjectivity. To declare and thereby expand one’s public presence through artistic practices necessarily involves negotiating a distinct relationship with and entitlement to space.

Both Ocampo’s metaphorical incursion into the urban cartography of Buenos Aires and Bombal’s urge to disrupt the silent forest landscape are indicative of just such a form of spatial praxis. To negotiate is a relational process: it implies the necessity to debate and struggle over the terms and nature of a desired outcome. It additionally contains within it the suggestion of traversal – within which context the act of negotiation suggests moving across an arduous terrain. Encompassing these elements, my conception of spatial negotiation addresses the act of moving between spaces, referring to the manner in which a woman’s construction of an artistic career necessitated trespassing and inhabiting new territories, processes that are often visualised as the movement from private to public realms. It also describes these women’s struggle to carve out a space for themselves within territories that were literally and metaphorically crowded with men.

At stake here is a renegotiation of the parameters of a field of study. To speak of Latin American modernism entails a defiance of disciplinary borders and an acknowledgement of the extent to which these epistemological categories are themselves founded upon spatial hierarchies. This book positions eight Latin American women within the broader narrative of modernism from which they have often remained absent. Despite ambitious international exploits during their careers, many of these women have been relegated to consideration only within national or regional contexts, if they appear in scholarly analyses at all. Kahlo is, of course, the clearest exception, enjoying as she does a form of hypervisibility as opposed to obscurity within both academic and popular realms. Scholars such as Sharyn Udall, Tace Hedrick and Michele Greet have contributed to situating Kahlo within a distinctly transnational modernist network. In recent years, Ocampo and Mistral have also begun to be incorporated into the ever-widening modernist field, with figures such as Laura Lojo-Rodríguez, Gayle Rogers and Patricia Novillo-Corvalán analysing them in dialogue with Woolf, Tagore and Ortega y Gasset and positioning them as pioneering figures of international feminism. My own work contributes to these ongoing attempts to dramatically expand the field that in turn provokes a necessary challenge to the accepted modernist canon.

One of the longstanding problems of talking about modernism in Latin America is terminological: depending on the context, the Spanish and Portuguese term modernismo can refer to two quite distinct moments of cultural production in the region. In Spanish America, modernismo refers to a fin de siècle literary movement spearheaded by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) and characterised by its engagement with European Parnassianism and Symbolism. In the Brazilian context, however, modernismo designates the period of fervent artistic innovation that emerged out of the ground-breaking São Paulo Week of Modern Art of 1922. A comparable form of cultural innovation develops concurrently in Spanish-speaking Latin America, but, taking into account the extent to which these writers and artists were directly working against the perceived excesses and Europhilia of fin de siècle modernismo, the term vanguardia (‘vanguard’) was preferred among practitioners of the time and in subsequent scholarly accounts within the field of Latin American studies. In the present book the term ‘modernism’ is used to frame the works of the Spanish-American vanguardistas. This is not to erase the specificity of these respective regional cultural developments, nor an attempt to subsume them within a monolithic, Euro/Anglo-centric modernism – quite the opposite. What this terminological shift allows is a troubling of the monolith of modernism, revealing its plurality. Likewise, it aims to open up lines of communication across disciplinary boundaries that have until recently been hampered by linguistic and terminological obstacles.

This contribution responds to the ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies, evidenced in the recent work of Susan Stanford Friedman, Jessica Berman, Douglas Mao, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Eric Hayot, among others. Accordingly, The Space of Latin American Women Modernists challenges the centre/periphery binary that proposes modernism as a mode that radiates from a European centre, only touching regions such as Latin America at a significant delay. This redrawing of the boundary lines of modernism (or the dismantling of the boundaries altogether) defies the implicit necessity to have to prove the modernist credentials of Latin American writers and artists. José María Rodríguez García’s query as to ‘How Modernist Were Hispanic Literary and Artistic Modernities?’, discloses an insecurity stalking the work of many of us as scholars of Hispanic modernism and that it is probably time to shake off.⁶ My aim is not to measure these women practitioners against a canonical ‘yardstick’ of modernism – to borrow Friedman’s image – nor do I seek to endow them with their modernist stripes. Instead of questioning whether these women were modernist or not, this book analyses their vital contribution to modernist culture. Examining their work in dialogue with both local and international artistic production enriches both our understanding of their oeuvres and the broader story of modernism itself.

Space Reconsidered

To suggest that we view women’s artistic identities in terms of spatial praxis is founded on the notion of a reciprocal relation between individuals and their environment – one that transforms space from a neutral container or backdrop for human action into an active element in the formation of identities and social relations. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space has been pre-eminent in this reframing of space as a dynamic rather than empty arena. Lefebvre roots his conception of space in a critique of Cartesian ontology that ‘creates an abyss between the mental sphere on one side and the physical and social spheres on the other’.⁷ Through his categorisation of space according to three equally interconnected areas – perceived (physical) space, conceived (mental) space and lived (social) space – Lefebvre aims to unsettle the Cartesian model, proposing a dynamic understanding of the dialectical relationship between individuals and their physical environment.

Predominantly concerned with the ways in which space affects class relations, Lefebvre’s work opens up a useful discussion of how power can be seen to operate spatially. As per his model, societies are shown to be constructed according to a form of spatial sorting and classification, with ‘worrisome groups, the workers among others, [pushed] out towards the periphery; to make available spaces near the centers scarcer, so increasing their value’.⁸ These are not metaphorical centres and peripheries: for Lefebvre, social relations manifest themselves in the spatial organisation of the physical world. In turn these spatial configurations shape (either facilitate or restrict) human action. Crucially, Lefebvre emphasises that this process is not governed by a unidirectional causal relation, but rather exists in a state of flux:

thanks to the potential energies of a variety of groups capable of subverting homogenous space for their own purposes, a theatricalized space is liable to arise. Space is liable to be eroticized and restored to ambiguity, to the common birthplace of needs and desires.⁹

Lefebvre’s framework allows for the radical re-appropriation of spaces – of their ‘restoration to ambiguity’. My proposition that modernist women’s artistic careers involved overcoming spatial boundaries and that their thematic treatments of space contributed to a reframing of gendered spaces and identity is predicated on Lefebvre’s theorisation of the interrelationship between space and social relations.

However, the critical link between space and gender relations is absent in Lefebvre’s model. The work of feminist geographers such as Gillian Rose, Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell is rooted in the notion that spaces are both constructed by, and in turn construct, social relations. However, they highlight that this process is indelibly impacted by prevailing understandings of gender difference. ‘Spatial relations act to socialize people into the acceptance of gendered power relations’, McDowell and Joanne Sharp observe, ‘They reinforce power, privileges and oppression and literally keep women in their place’.¹⁰ Central to this book, and feminist studies of space more broadly, is an acknowledgement and interrogation of the codification of particular physical spaces according to gender. The organisation of the world into ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ spaces can be seen to assign specific forms of gendered activities to specific spaces, serving to reproduce and reinforce gender norms. The analysis of gendered spaces has traditionally centred on the following – interrelated – realms: the city, the natural world and the private versus the public sphere. This book examines how the particular shifts provoked by modernity impacted on the coding of these gendered spaces, and how Latin American women writers and artists responded to these new spatial configurations.

While highlighting the ways in which space is implicated in restrictive gender roles, the work of feminist geographers advocates for the potential malleability of spaces that allows for their re-appropriation. Quoting bell hooks, McDowell and Sharp assert that ‘one can also push against oppressive boundaries to invent spaces of radical openness within which to challenge dominant power, taking it on from the margins’.¹¹ The works examined in this book call attention to the ways in which gender is constructed spatially within locations such as the home, the public sphere and the natural world, and propose alternative, unconventional spaces that challenge the insidious ‘control of spatiality and identity’.¹² I argue that these women were involved precisely in the type of ‘battles over the power to label space-time, to impose the meaning to be attributed to a space’ that Massey identifies.¹³ In reconfiguring the gendered ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ of certain spaces, these Latin American intellectuals were able to advance a dramatic reconceptualisation of women’s role within such spaces.

This book revolves around three key terms: space, gender and modernism. Yet to link these concepts productively, it is necessary to introduce a fourth element: time. At the heart of the modern is a temporal concern – a positioning of oneself in a specific relation to the past and to what is to come. Accepting modernist cultural production as a response to and catalyst of ‘the new’, we are once again drawn into the realm of the temporal. It is important to recognise the fundamental relationship between the temporal and the spatial in modernism and the extent to which both are inherently gendered. As David Harvey rightly concedes, the experience of modernity is one that transforms the individual’s relationship to both time and space: an encounter with simultaneity, acceleration and a shrinking of distances that Harvey encompasses in the term ‘time-space compression’.¹⁴ Massey’s seminal work Space, Place and Gender (1994) also establishes an integral and interactive link between space and time. However, unlike Harvey, Massey frames this reconceptualisation within a larger feminist attempt to challenge and destabilise dichotomous oppositions: ‘It is time which is aligned with history, progress, civilization, politics and transcendence and coded masculine’, she states:

and it is the opposite of these things which have, in the traditions of western thought, been coded feminine. The exercise of rescuing space from its position, in this formulation, of stasis, passivity and depoliticization, therefore, connects directly with a wider philosophical debate in which gendering and the construction of gender relations is central.¹⁵

Once space has been ‘rescued’ from its passive neutrality, Massey highlights a further process by which space itself becomes divided and opposed to an alternative category of the spatial: place. Within such an oppositional relation, ‘space’ comes to be conceived in terms of movement and the global, while ‘place’ is associated primarily with ideas of stasis and the local. Apparently trapped by this particular binary, women often come to be aligned with the bounded nature of ‘place’ – their positioning within the domestic sphere bringing with it corresponding notions of fixity, timelessness and ultimately nostalgia.¹⁶ The binaries questioned in Massey’s work – local/global, fixity/flux, tradition/newness – likewise provide