Poetics of the Hummingbird

For a long time, the travelogue was considered a companion to colonialism. This changed in Latin America in the 1920s, of which the forgotten feuilleton articles, diaries and notes of the Chilean Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, the ‘Pope of Brazilian Modernism’ Mário de Andrade and the Belgian-French avant-gardist Henri Michaux. The three travelers portray an interest in the history of knowledge about the continent and play with established forms of literary perception. With the hummingbird, which is deeply rooted in Aztec mythology, their little travel prose unites not only the compact size, but also mobility and speed.