| Ángel Rama | |
|---|---|
| Born | April 30, 1926 |
| Died | November 27, 1983 (aged 57) |
Ángel Rama (April 30, 1926 – November 27, 1983) was a Uruguayan writer, academic, and literary critic, known for his work on modernismo and for his theorization of the concept of "transculturation."
Born in Montevideo to Galician immigrants, Rama studied at the College de France of the University of Paris. He married twice: in 1950, to the poet Ida Vitale, with whom he had two children, Claudio and Amparo; and after separating from Vitale in 1969, to Marta Traba, an eminent art critic, originally from Buenos Aires.
In the 1960s, after several years teaching at the secondary and university level, he became director of the department of Hispanoamerican literature at the Universidad de la República, the Uruguayan state-run University. He also founded the publishing houses Editorial Arca in Montevideo and Editorial Galerno in Buenos Aires. During the 1970s, he held professorships at numerous universities in the Americas and served as literary adviser to the Ayacucho Library in Caracas. The coup d'état of the Uruguayan government surprised him on June 27, 1973, while residing in Venezuela, so he lived in exile for the remainder of his life. A member of Uruguay's "Generation of '45," also known as the "Critical Generation", he contributed frequently to the weekly review Marcha until its suppression in 1974 by the military government of Juan María Bordaberry. He published important studies on the writings of Ruben Darío, Jose Marti, Jose Maria Arguedas, Juan Carlos Onetti, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. Three of his seminal works are Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina, La ciudad letrada and Las mascaras democraticas del modernismo.
In 1979, Rama and Traba were given appointments as professors at University of Maryland and they settled in nearby Washington, DC. However, in 1982 they were denied resident visas and were forced to leave the United States. The couple moved to Paris, where they were living in early 1983 when they were granted Colombian citizenship by President Belisario Betancur.
He died in a plane crash at Barajas Airport, along with Marta Traba, the Mexican writer Jorge Ibargüengoitia, and Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, while all four were travelling from Paris to Colombia for an international conference of Latin American writers.