A transnational reflection on avant-garde movements in non-hegemonic contexts, i.e., outside Europe – this one understood as the center of creation and, above all, of diffusion of historical vanguards. Discussions about the impact of the materiality of the new means of communication and transport of the early 20^th century on aesthetic production in non-hegemonic political and cultural contexts, and the implications of the unprecedented sense of simultaneity provided by these means, which in its turn turned upside-down traditional 19th-century notions such as belatedness, backwardness, artistic and cultural lagging.