Modernidad de bolsillo: imágenes, consumo e imperio en el viaje a Italia de Clorinda Matto de Turner

Abstract:This article analyzes the travel account of Clorinda Matto in Italy in 1908, which is part of her posthumous publication, Viaje de recreo. The analysis of her stay in Italy focuses on Matto's combination of text and image, since the narration of her travel experience is accompanied by numerous engravings acquired as postcards by the author. This combination will be analyzed in two basic dimensions. First, in the use and consumption of photographs and postcards as a practice of modern tourism. Second, the essay investigates Viaje de recreo's practices of looking that replicate the aesthetics of both the museum's gallery and the photographic albums and scrapbooks. Finally, the article discusses the ideological dimension of the images' reproduction and selection, what I call here a "pocket modernity." Clorinda Matto reconstructs, from the engravings and from her reflections on them, an image of the Roman empire that not only refers to the foundations of Western civilization but also traces direct ties with the American empires, that of the Incas specifically. Just as at the intersection of text and image offers a new approach to women's travel writing in Latin America, in the parallels established between two civilizations, the Inca and the Roman, we can also read Clorinda Matto's views of modernity, between Europe and America.