I take as my point of departure the moment in Alejo Carpentier's Los pasos perdidos, which is a novel about going backwards in time as one moves laterally in space, where Carpentier pictures a cantina in some forgotten provincial village in the backlands of an unnamed Latin America country, with a sign in fading letters on its façade reading, presumably as an advertisement for the narcotic pleasures it will offer, Memorias del futuro, memories of the future. I want to use that notably Baroque conceit to reflect in turn on the nature of Baroque historicism itself.

I mean by historicism the way history seems to us rather than the way it really is. I mean by Baroque historicism in particular two different things: (i) the peculiar sense of history that Baroque culture itself develops; and (ii) the Baroque as an element in the historical narrative of the emergence of the modern postcolonial nation state in Latin America.

This second sense of Baroque historicism will be familiar. It underlies among other things Carpentier's own sense of history in Los pasos perdidos and the strong tendency in modern Latin American cultural discourse generally to see the Baroque as the essential or foundational style of Latin American identity. Perhaps the most striking artistic embodiment of that idea is Paul Leduc's film Barroco, based on another novel by Carpentier, which represents the history of Latin America (and of Latin American music in particular) as a series of transculturations —the Baroque functions in the film as the metaphor for mestizajes of various sorts— ranging from the moment of contact of the Spanish and indigenous peoples to the present.

A moment's reflection, however, will suffice to show that these two senses of Baroque historicism are not only distinct, but also in some ways deeply contradictory. The Baroque's own sense of history is, notably, a cyclical one, based on the allegory of the agricultural year and the four ages of the metals, and the idea that all things are subject to a process of growth, decay, and death. The narrative of nation-formation and Latin American modernity is by contrast tied to the idea of history as progress, a process of ‘development’, or ‘unfolding’ (Entwicklung, to use a word favored by both Kant and Hegel). The Baroque sense of history is aristocratic, the modern sense of history bourgeois-liberal. For the Baroque the Kingdom of God lies outside human history; for the modern sense of history, it is at the ‘end’ of history, and thus within the possibility of human time.