BRAZILIAN
POSTCOLONIALITIES
Adriana Varejão. Mapa de Lopo Homem II, 2004
Guest Editors:
Emanuelle Santos
Patricia Schor
EDITORIAL NOTE
This thematic issue of P: Portuguese Cu ltural Studies focuses on the
interactions between critiques of co lonialism and coloniality, and Brazilian
studies. We have aimed at producing analyzes of Brazilian c ult ure and society
that address power inbalances and ideo logie s related to colonial expansion at
current times of neo-liberal globalization. Our initial call for papers sought to
ellicit theoretical perspectives across disc ip lines we ll suited for an evaluation of
Brazilian contemporaneity dedicated to its (re)thinking and (re)interpreting
through fruitful (d is)encounters between Postcolonial theory and other critical
traditions, namely from the South.
By proposing an issue on Bra zilian Post colonialities it has also been
our aim to addre ss a long lasting disp ute in the Humanities around the value of
the postcolonial in/to Brazil. To wh ich e xtent do the bodies of theories and
modes of read ing offered by what h as com e to be known as Postcolonial St udies
can and cannot be useful to understand the historical and cultural processes that
frame contemporary Brazil? That is certainly one of the questions we belie ve the
article s presented here will help to discuss.
The Introduction by Patr icia Schor opens this issue of the journal. She
draws from the issue' s front cover art to reflect on the cartography of h uman
suffering printed on the canvas of Brazilian history. This point of departure
offers
possible
travel
route s
to
exploring
tentatively
de fined
Brazilian
postcolonialit ies as way s into the wound inflicted on the body of the subaltern.
A critical reflect ion around the term “Postcolonial”, its emergence and
condensation on the Postcolonial St udies field as we ll as its modes o f
employment across de Atlantic is offered by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in
the interview “Bra zil is Not Traveling Enough: On Postcolonial Theory
and its Analogous C ounter-Currents”. S hohat and Stam reflect further on the
loci of production and consumption of knowledge within the fie ld, as they
2
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
problematize the circulat ion of theories throughout the North-South axis that
continue to polarize contemporary cartographies.
The quest ion of the localit ies of theory production is assert ive ly
elaborated in “F eminis mo e Traduçã o Cultural: Sobre a Colonialidade do
Gên ero e a Descolonização do Saber”. In her article, C laudia de L ima Cost a
que stions the locus of en unciat ion of theory through the articulat ion of
Postcolonial cr itic ism and Latin American Feminist theories as she showcases
the citation practices in Brazilian Femin ist scholarship. She proposes the trope
of
translation,
foreground ing
subalter n
female
voice s
that
deco lonize
Eurocentric knowled ge, and ge ars attention to epistemologies emerging from
the South: Brazilian/Latin American’s own Postcolonial Fem inism.
Alterity is addre ssed by Kam ila Kr akowska on “O Turista Aprendiz e o
Outro: a(s) Identidade(s) Brasileira(s) em Trânsito” where postcolonial
lenses are applied to analyze the late 1920’s trave l chronicle s of the Modernist
Mário de Andrade. Krakowska explores Andrade’s satir ical dislocat ion from the
Brazilian center to its margins in the Amazonian and Northeastern regions. Such
transit is argued as a way out of an impoverished ver sion of the nation. Hereby
Andrade foregrounds Brazilian Modernism’s force to recover Other agents to
complete the mosaic of an heterogeneous Brazilian identity.
Further
exploring
indigenous emergenc ies,
Letícia Mar ia Cost a da
Nóbrega argues for a historic ally sit uated p ostcolonialism to take account of the
particular ities of the Latin Amer ican and Brazilian experiences, foregrounding
the requirement of ethnographic embeddedness for shapin g such interpretative
grid. In “Bra zilian Postcol oniality and Emerging South-South Relations: a
View
from
literat ure
on
Anthropology”
Brazil,
she
addre sses
problematizing
th e
authoritative
high
c urrency
nation
of
the
building
mult iple
modernities parad igm against postcolonialism. The author focuse s on the place
of Africa in Brazilian nat ional imagination, which feeds the advertisement of the
Brazilian suitability to play the role of development provider to the African
continent. This analy sis prompts reflection on the pitfalls and potentials o f
South-South cooperation.
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Agency and subalternity in Brazilian prose fiction is the theme of
Carolina Correia do s Santos’ analyze s in "Sobre o Olhar do Narrador e s eus
Efeitos em Os S e rt õ e s e C i d a d e d e De u s ”. She compares fundamental literary
texts of the beginning and the end of the XX century that think and enact
marginalization in Brazil. Usin g the instrumental made available by Subaltern
Studie s, she scrut inize s the act ual realization of the possibility the subaltern
subject may have to speak bac k to the nation at times of war.
Finally, Die go Santos Vieira de Jesus set s forth reflection on Brazil’s
position in the new cartography in “Not the Boy Next Door: An Essa y on
Exclusion and Bra zilian Foreign Policy”. The author traver ses cr itic al
moments and texts of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s and L ula’s Ministry of
Foreign Re lat ions toward s North and South, pointing out to the ambiguous
aspects
of
Brazilian
international
pr otagonism.
The
depreciation
and
domestication of d ifference as well as c olonial and imperial mechanisms of
assertin g hegemony are shown in their continuous renewal through the
performative practice of politics.
The collection of essays in this volume is symptomatic of the disciplin ary
diver sity of the Postcolonial field coverin g Cultural Anthropology, Literature,
Social Sc iences and International Re lat ions. Their crit ical postcolonial stance
forwards contributions not only to Brazilian Studies, b ut also to Portugue se
Studie s in its wide Lusophone span, and to Postcolonial St udie s.
We thank Paulo de Medeiros for the invit ation to edit this issue and for
the inspiration to make it into a thought-provoking endeavor. To the
contributors, thank you for accepting the challen ge. To the readers: boa viagem.
Emanuelle Santos and Patric ia Schor.
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
INTRODUCTION 1
Mapping
Mapa de Lopo Homem II, kindly made available by the artist Adr iana
Varejão, inc ites an excavat ion of Brazilian contemporaneity, in se arch for the
roots and present mechanisms causing profound inequalities and injustice s
scarring its tissue, and for new disruptive and libertarian emergencies. The
nautic al chart -here evoking the work of the XVI century cartographer of the
Portugue se Court - supported the imperial enterprise of territorial conquer and
exploitation of peoples and natur al resources in the Mundus No vus, neatly
categorize d accordin g to a system of representation that codified world regions
outside the European center in terms of naturalized subject ion to it. V arejão
appropriates this imaginary and disrupt s its ascetic t idiness, giving it a
scatological body. We have before us a desecrated map, which recovers the
obscured vio lence that accompanied colonial expansion and outlasted it. 2
The cartography of human sufferin g is a rec urrent figure in some
criticism to colonialism, which deser ves ce nter stage in postcolonial scholarship.
In the writing of the Afro-Brazilian Beatriz do Nascimento, Alex Ratts
assoc iates the corpo (body) with a map of a distant country (Ratts 61).
Nascimento works with the memory of such remote location and its resilient
sores, to find a house in the sendas (alleys) (qtd. in Ratts 71). These tropes point
out to the materiality and currency of the colonial past and its recovery, in an
attempt to make feel and reveal the usurped bodies of its sub alterns. They
affiliate with Franz Fanon’s exposure of “t he gangrene e ver present at the heart
of the colonial domination” ( 103); with Eduardo Galeano’s denouncement of
Latin America’s venas abiert as (open veins) – a region pray to colonial and
I am grateful to Emanuelle Santos’ and Flavia Dzodan’s careful reading and am indebted to their comments.
For further analysis of Mapa de Lopo Homem elucidating the relationship between the artist’s Barroc aesthetic and
criticism to colonial historiography and iconography, see the essays by Silviano Santiago, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and
Karl Erik Schøllhammer, in Isabel Diegues’ collection.
1
2
5
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
imperial exploitat ion - which resonates into Gloria Anzaldúa’s herida abierta
(open wound) that is “the US-Mexic an border … where the Third World grates
against the first and b leeds” (25) but is also “[t]he [w]ounding of the indiaMestiza” ( 44); and with the recalc itrant figure of the “colonial fr acture” in the
memorializat ion disputes in contemporary France, cr itically st udied by M ireille
Rosello (7). They enact the biopolitics of colonial life under Portuguese rule,
unrave led by Roberto Vecchi, in its intimat e assoc iat ion to the exceptionality of
Portugue se
colonialism
packed
in
a
Luso-tropical
rhetoric
of
imperial
benevolence. Vecchi enters this fissura (fissure) in order to reveal the workings
of the colonial sy stem on the flesh. This is to say that the subaltern was denie d
belonging to the body political – citizenship - and concurrently her corpo vital
(vital body) became the object of colonial politics (Vecchi 188). Altogether
these tropes act the eruption of a painful lesion on the gendered and racialized
bodies of the subaltern.
Further the map supports gazing at Brazil in search for its new position
in the reconfigur ation of global power taking place today. Yet, simultaneously to
observing this dep arture from peripherality , we want to explore dynamics in the
entrails of the periphery. This gaze is here informed by the space opened
through the injury, that is Anzaldúa’s borderland and Nascimento’s senda.
Postcoloniality attends to the conservative and boldly emancipatory acts takin g
place at such locat ions vio lently subjecte d to hegemony, where struggles for
self-representation and fair engagement with the body of humanity erupt in the
face of the nation.
Here the image and it s assoc iated metaph ors affirm their pertinence to
(re)think Brazilian cult ure and society in light of its colonial past represented as
a suture, for the actual violence was argued to occur in locations other than
“the world the Portuguese created”. On the flesh of those other (Anglophone)
colonial subjects, injuries were apparently not cared for. On the Brazilian
subaltern, despite sutured, they remain sor e, half-open. This le sion offers itse lf
to us as a window.
We invited elaborations on the postcolonial other than the straight import
of “foreign” intellectual thought to pack aspects of Br azilian contemporaneity
taken as rese arch object, a trend recurrently criticized in Brazil. Lar a Allen and
6
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Achille Mbembe have already argued for a “polit ics and ethics of mutuality”
inscribed in the postcolonial terrain as critique to E urocentrism (3). This
involves listenin g to the voices of the South as a producer of theory, revealin g
the Southern genealogie s of theory with high currency in the North and, above
all, departing from the entanglement between theories and social conditions,
enveloping North and South, however with radically different effects at each
end. It draws other routes than the overly p ursue d ones in the map of
traveling/trafficking theories, and it uncover s a ve iled direction of processes of
transformation, from the peripheries (including the South within North and
South) to the center.
Concurrently the intent of such an endeavor is twofold, on the one hand
it see ks to make use of cr itical theory that dislodge s hegemony (colonialism and
imperialism) - which is local and simultaneously inscribed in lar ger global
processes - to reveal traumatic ally silen ced, obscured or erased aspects of
Brazilian (cult ural) history haunting the present, for its transformation. On the
other hand it aims to expose processes in the periphery, however in transition
from such a loc ation and imagination, which can be seen as forebodes of
intellect ual, aesthetic al and polit ical processes in the North. This associates with
Jean Comaroff’s focus on “ex-centric visio ns” of, about and from those who are
in the vanguard of the future.
Naming
We borrowed the term postcoloniality from Achille Mbembe for his
foregrounding of the aspects of displ acement and e ntanglement. This term is
manifest ly dissociated from the temporal mark of the post-. The postcolony
calls for a perspective unarguab ly anti-esse ntialist for its enmeshed gaze to local
sensibilities – for they have been historically shaped - taking into account global
dynamics of (colonial) enlacement. It follo ws that its geography is expanded, for
the condition of postcoloniality is not exclusively experienced in former
colonies, but also continues to affect (former) metropolitan countries (Allen and
Mbembe 2). Displacement is a p aramoun t dynamics of postcolonial critiques
that depart from forced exile as an episte mological and bodily distancin g from
one’s home. This movement implies what Boaventura S antos called defamiliarizat ion with the canonical tradit ions of the imperial North, in order to
7
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
build new epistemic grounds, away from the center (Santos 367). This process
must be aware of the very hegemonic structure of knowledge production and
circulat ion. At the production end, postcolonial crit icism has re-centered the
colonial metropolis and elected master narrative s of comparison (Stam and
Shohat 29) for a pretense understanding of the periphery. At the reception end,
the peripheries continue to figure as consumers of theory produced else where,
reproducing the very order of things denounced by Galeano. With a measure of
realism concerning our minute dimension, we m ust remain aware of our very
position in this cartography.
We also fo llowe d Luís M ad ureira borrowing from Gayatri Spivak a sense
of postcoloniality as politic al agency (Madureira, "Nation, Identity and Loss of
Footing" 206), e vident in his foregrounding of Southern resistance an d
criticism. This move entails decanonizing the master narrative of progress and
dethroning its agents, and therefore provincializing the West. A critique of the
Brazilian national im aginary shaped by the hegemonic national narrat ive t argets
both Eurocentrism and “internal colonialism” (Stavenhagen), with which it is
enlaced, through the scrut iny of a powerful apparat us of mar gin alization.
Subaltern voices and epistemologies m ust be invited to shape the terms of their
engagement in an inclusive conversation born out of a “productive complicity ”
regardin g an envisioned fut ure (Spivak xiii) .
The line of continuity between colonialism and c urrent structures of
domination and exp loitation is the core aspect of Latin Amer ican co unterdiscour se on the “coloniality of power” (Quijano), which we aimed at
incorporating in this issue. From Dependencia Theory to the Coloniality o f
Knowledge, Lat in America has been offering critical thought associated with
indigenous movements that depart from its “colonial difference” (Mignolo) to
put forward a decolonial project. This project however has its own absences and
occlusions, which must be unrave led.
The
concatenation
of
African
and
L atin
Americ an
critic ism
to
Eurocentrism and imperialism to shape what we are here tentative ly callin g
Brazilian Postcolonialitie s, is informed by the common denominator between
colonialism in A fric a (and Asia) and neo-colonialism in L atin Americ a, at the
end of the XIX century, that is modern imperialism and its motor, namely
8
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
capitalist expansion (Pratt 464). This framing of postcoloniality ac knowledge s
the
historical
difference
between
suc h
experiences,
despite
of
strong
imbrications between Brazil and the African continent in terms of shaping
history and imaginat ion (Almeida; Thomaz). Ho wever it seeks explic itly to
benefit from (less explored) convergences, which might contribute to a
momentous critical endeavor protagonized by regions and agents historically
exclude d from the production of knowledge. Postcolonialitie s in the plural sign
to the myriad of contemporary experiences and expressions of the way s fo und
to deal with and surpass coloniality in Brazil.
Inviting
Our intention is to contribute to a historicized, contextual and highly
politic ized postcolonial. In this sense we are concurring with E lla Shohat’s c all
for a postcolonial artic ulated in conjunction with que stions of hegemony and
neo-colonial power relations for not running the risk of sanctify ing the fait
accompli of colonial violence (Shohat 109). It is in fact a crit ical perspective that
attends to the continuing machinery of hegemony put at work with imperial
conquest. The linkage s between postcolonial cr itic ism produced at the European
center and its engagement with subaltern enunciations from Southeast Asia,
with the political rad ic alism of the coloniality of power - with high currency in
North and Latin America - are to be explo red, as much as the articulations with
feminist, subaltern and anti-colonial struggles and critic ism, the latter noticeably
absent in the Portuguese postcolonial fie ld (Madure ira, "Nation, Identity and
Loss of Footing"). Brazil has a marke d protagonism with avant la lettre
postcolonial critique emergent with Modernism (Shohat; Gomes; Madureira,
Cannibal Modernities), and with social movements countering cultural exclusion
and resist ing socio-economic exploitative practice. This history of counterhegemonic projects invites exploring the approximations between these and
postcolonial
critic ism
and
agency.
C oncurring
with
Gustavo
Ribeiro,
“colonialism cannot become an interpretative p anacea” (290) given to the
critical d ifferences between colonial exp eriences and st ate deve lopment; we
must
then
foreground
difference
and
insist
on
artic ulation
with
other
interpretative roads and “progressive co smopolitics” (287). We are hereby
advancing an invitat ion for a “polylogue ” between such modes of critique which
9
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
is fo und fruitful to the mammoth task of decolonizing c ult ure, polit ics and
scholarship (Stam and Shohat 19).
The post- is here a utopia for surpassing coloniality through the explicit
evocation and scrut iny of colonialism with the knowledge that imperialism and
racism are very we ll alive in forceful and pervasive ways. At a time when Brazil
becomes a bola da vez (the next big thing) gainin g global protagonism and, at
instances painstakin gly, at others cosmetically, attempting to recover “Fourth
World peoples” (Shohat 105) into the body of the nation, scholar ship has the
task to gather the varied sibling cr itical pr actices to rip the wound open, enter
the alley and stic k its nails into the fissure.
Patric ia Schor.
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Works Cited
Allen, Lara, and Achille Mbembe. "Editorial: Arguing for a Southern Salon." The
Johannesburg Salo n 1 (2009): 1-3. Pr int.
Almeid a, Migue l Vale de. Um Mar da Cor da Terra: Raç a, Cult ura e Política de
Identidade. Oeiras: Celta Ed itora, 2000. Prin t.
Anzald úa, Gloria. Borderl ands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. 3rd ed. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. Print.
Comaroff, Jean. "The Uses of 'Ex-Centricity': Cool Reflections from Hot
Place s." The Johannesburg S alon 3 (2010): 32- 35. Pr int.
Diegues, Isabe l, ed. Adriana Varejão: Entre Carnes e Mares = Between Flesh and
Oceans. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Cobogó: BTG Pactual, 2009. Pr int.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Pr int.
Galeano, Eduardo H. Las Venas Abiert as de América Lat ina. [Montevideo]:
Univer sid ad Nac ional de la República, 1971. Print.
Gomes, Heloisa Toller. "Quando os Outros Somos Nós: O Lugar da Crític a PósColonial na Un iversid ade Brasile ira. " Acta Sci. Human Soc. Sci. 29.2 (2007):
99- 105. Print.
Madure ira, Luís. Cannibal Mo dernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in
Caribbean and Braz il ian Literature. New World Studies. Charlottesville:
Univer sity of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.
---. "Nation, Identity and Loss of Footing: Mia Couto's O Outro Pé Da Sereia
and the Question of Lusophone Postcolonialism." Novel: A Forum on Fiction
41. 2/ 3 Spring/S ummer (2008): 200-28. Pr int.
Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Studies on the History of Society and
Cult ure. Eds. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Univer sity of California Press, 2001. Pr int.
Mignolo, Walter. "Diferencia Colonial y Razón Postoccidental." La
Reestructuración de las Cienc ias Sociales en Amé rica Latina. Ed. Santiago CastroGómez. Bogotá: Universidad Javeliana, 2000. 3-28. Print.
Pratt, Mary Louise. "In the Neocolony: Destiny, Destination, and the Traffic of
Meaning." Colo nial ity at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial De bate. Eds.
Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel and Car los A. Jáuregui. Lat in America
Otherwise. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 459-75. Print.
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Quijano, Aníbal. "Co lonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. " Perú Indígena 13. 29
(1992): 11-20. Print.
Ratts, Alex. Eu Sou Atlântica: So bre a Trajetória de Vida de Beatriz Nascimento. São
Paulo: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo: Instituto Kuan za, 2007.
Print.
Ribeiro, Gust avo Lins. "Why (Post)Colonialism and (De)Coloniality are not
Enough: A Post-Imperialist Perspective." P ostcolonial Studies 14. 3 (2011):
285-97. Print.
Rosello, Mireille. The Reparative in Narrative s. Works of Mourning in Progress.
Contemporary French and Francophone Studie s. Liverpool: Liverpool
Univer sity Press, 2010. Print.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. A Crítica da Razão Indolente: Contra o Desperdíc io da
Experiência. Para um Novo Senso Comum: A Ciência, o Dire ito e a Política na
Transição Paradigmática. Vol. 1. São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 2000. Pr int.
Shohat, Ella. "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial'. " Social Text. 31/32, Third World
and Post-Colonial Issues ( 1992): 99-113. Print.
Spivak, Gayatr i Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of
the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Har vard Un iversity Press, 1999.
Print.
Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. "The Culture Wars in Translation." Europe in
Black and Wh ite: Interdiscipl inary Perspectives on Immigratio n, Race and Ide ntity in
the "Old Continent". Eds. Man uela Ribe iro Sanches, et al. Chicago: Intellect,
2011. 17- 35. Pr int.
Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. "Classe s, Colonialism, and Acculturat ion." Studies in
Comparat ive Internatio nal De velopment 1. 6 (1965): 53- 77. Pr int.
Thomaz, Omar Ribeiro. "Tigres de Papel: Gilberto Freyre, Portugal e os Países
Africanos de Língua Portugue sa. " Trânsitos Coloniais: Diálogos Críticos LusoBrasile iros. 2002 Lisbon: Imprensa do ICS. Eds. Cristiana Bastos, M iguel
Vale de Alme ida and Bela Feldm an-Bianco. Campinas, 2007. 45-70. Print.
Vecchi, Roberto. "Império Português e Bio política: Uma Modernidade Precoce?"
Postcolonial Theory and Lusopho ne Literatures. Ed. Paulo de Medeiros. Vol. 1.
Utrecht Portuguese Stud ies Ser ies. Utrecht: Portuguese St udie s Center Univer site it Utrecht, 2007. 177- 91. Pr int.
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“BRAZIL IS NOT TRAVELING ENOUGH”:
ON POSTCOLONIAL THEORY AND ANALOGOUS
COUNTER-CURRENTS
an interview with Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
by Emanuelle Santos and Patricia Schor
It was our pleasure to interview Professor s Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
from New York University dur ing their visit to the Netherlands to join two
events hosted by the Postcolonial Initiative and the Centre for the Humanit ies
of Utrecht University. In this interview they touch on points of critical
importance to reflect on the themes developed throughout the current issue o f
P: Portuguese Cultural Studies.
ES/PS: One of the points of departure in the Postcolonial field in
Portuguese has been eith er “we want to get out of” or “we want to offer
something different from” the Anglo- Postcolonial th eory. What do you sa y
about that?
Shohat: We will be happy to d isc uss this terminology, because I think we find it
problematic. First of all, we think Lusophone and Brazilian Studies should offer
something different from Anglophone Postcolonial theory! Our crit ique of
certain
1
aspects
of
Postcolonial
St udies
is
part
of
our
new
book
, and I think it is important because we believe that some of the occasional
rejection of Postcolonial Stud ies in France and Brazil has to do with the
projection of Postcolonial Stud ies as “Anglo-Saxon” as opposed to “Latin.” So
var ious intellectual projects which are actually quite transnational, such as
Postcolonial theory, Critical Race Studies, Multic ult ural Studie s, and e ven
Feminist Studie s get caught up in that old regional dichotomy – ultimate ly a
kind of construct, e ven a phantasm – that sees ide as as ethnically m arked as
“Latin” or “Anglo-Saxon.” We ar gue in the book that both terms are
Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic. New York: New York
University Press, 2012. Print.
1
13
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
misnomers, that “Lat in” Americ a is also in digenous and Afric an and Asian, just
as supposedly “Anglo-Saxon” Amer ica is also indigenous, Afr ican, and Asian.
The project of our book is to go beyond ethnically defined nation-states to a
relational, transnational vie w of nations as palimpse stic and multiple.
Stam: For us, all the Americas, de spite imperial hegemonies, also have much in
common,
in
both
negative
ways
(c onquest,
indigenous
disposse ssion,
transAtlantic slavery) and positive ways ( artistic syncretism, social pluralism)
and so forth. In his memoir, Verdade Tro pical 2, Caetano Veloso say s that like
Brazil, the US is f atalme nte mestiço – inevitably mestizo – but chooses, out of
racism, not to admit it. The right-wing’s vir ulent hatred of Obama, in this sense ,
betrays a fear of this mestizo character of the American nation.
Shohat: It is no coincidence that the relationship between Afric an Americ an
and other Afro-diasporas around the Americas has been quite strong. Such
collaborations
make
no
sense
within
an
“Anglo-Saxon”
versus
“Lat in”
dichotomy. We propose in the book that the word “Anglo-Saxon” – which
designates t wo extinct German tribes th at moved to England more than a
millennium ago – be retired in favor of the word “Anglo-Saxonist” as a synonym
for racism. Almost all the writers who prattled about “Anglo-Saxon” values –
Mitt Romney is the latest to trumpet this heritage – were white supremacists and
exterminationist rac ists. We see the L atin versus Anglo dichotomy as a symptom
of what we call “intercolonial narcissism.” Thus we need another vocabulary
and grammar.
Stam: It is about two versions of Eurocentrism, the Northern European version
and the South European version of E uropean superiority, Anglo-Saxonism and a
Latinité that originated, as [Walter] Mignolo and others have pointed out, in
French interventions in Mexico. Although the Southern European version was
subse quently subalternized, in the beginning the British and North Americans
actually envie d Portugal and Spain for their empires, because they were rich
thanks to South American m ineral wealth, which North America did not have. It
is interesting about Hipólito da Costa, who was a Portuguese/Brazilian diplomat
who went to Washington around the time of the American Revolution and
2
Veloso, Caetano. Verdade Tropical. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997. Print.
14
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reported that: “the people are so poor, and they marry indians, ” all traits that
are usually assoc iated more with Brazil.
Of course, much of the resistance to these academic currents comes from
legitimate re sentment about the inordinate power of the Anglophone academe.
This power, and the privile gin g of the English language , is h istorically rooted in
the power of the British Empire (Pax Brit anica), and of the US as the heir of
that Empire (Pax Americana). As Mário de Andrade pointed out long ago, the
cult ural power of a nation is in some ways correlated with the power of its
armies and its c urrency.
One of the points of our new book is to question the international
division of intellectual labor, the system which exalts the thinkers of the Global
North over the thinkers of the Global South, that sees Henry James as
“naturally” more important than Machado de Assis, Fredr ic Jameson as more
important than Roberto Schwarz, Jac que s Ranc ière as more important than
Marilen a Chaui or Ismail Xavier, and Sin atra as more important than Jobim.
Another instance of this hier archy is that concepts like “hybridity” are
attributed
to
Har vard
professor
Homi
Bhabha,
when
Latin
Americ an
intellect uals were talking about hybridity – what was “Anthropophagy” all
about? – at least a half century earlier. I n any case, we are less interested in
gur us and maîtres à penser than in the transnational c ircuitries of discourse . That
is why we sugge st that postcolonial theorists look beyond the British and
French empires look at Latin America, look at Afro-America, look at the
Francophone thinkers, look at indigenous peoples in E urope, African Amer icans
in France, all the criss-crossin g diasporic in tellectuals.
Shohat: Latin American intellect uals have been in the forefront of doing
mestiçage, métissage, Anthropophagy. Wh ile we certainly consider ourse lve s as part
of Postcolonial theory, we have also critiqued certain of it s aspects, for example
the ahistorical, uncritic al ce lebration of hybridity discourse. We were asking:
“What are the genealo gie s of such disco urses?” We prefer to emphasize the
que stion of “lin ked analogies” between and across national borders. So for us,
cross-border analysis becomes really cruc ial. It is not reduc ible to nat ion-state
formations.
15
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Stam: On the contrary, we argue in the new book that the nation-state can be
seen as highly problematic if we adapt an indigenous perspective, since native
nations were not state s, were victim ized by Europeanized nat ion-states, an d
were sometimes philosophically opposed, as Pierre Clastres points out, to the
very concept of nation-states and societ ie s based on coercion. That was what
the Brazilian modernists praised about them, that they had no police, armie s, or
puritanism.
Shohat: We also have a cr itique of Postc olonial theory, going bac k to my old
essay 3 that entails posing the quest ion “When does the postcolonial begin?”
from an indigenous perspective. Indigenous thinkers often see their situation as
colonial rather than postcolonial, or as bo th at the same time. While a certain
Postcolonial theory celebrates cosmopolitanism, indigenous discourse often
valorize s a rooted existence rather than a cosmopolitan one. While Postcolonial
and
Cultural
St udie s
reve ls
in
the
“blurr ing
of
borders,”
indigenous
communities often seek to affirm borders by demarcating land, as we see in the
Amazon, against encroaching squatters, miners, nation-states, and transnat ional
corporations.
Stam:
While
the
poststructur alism
t hat
helped
shape
postcolonialism
emphasizes the inventedness of nations and “denatur alize s the natural, ”
indigenous thinkers have insisted on love of a land regarded as “sacred, ”
another word hardly valued in the post- discour ses. While Postcolonial theory,
in a Derridean vein, milit ants against “originary” thinking …, threatened native
groups want to recover an original culture partially destroyed by conquest and
colonialism.
What
Eduardo
Viveiro s
de
Castro
calls
indigenous
“multinatur alism ” challenges not only the rhetorical antinatur alism of the
“posts” but also what might be called the primordial Orientalism, that which
separated nature from culture, an imals from human beings.
Shohat: While the beginnings of Postcolon ial Studies are usually trace d back to
Edward S aid ’s Oriental ism 4 and tend to emphasize the great European empires of
the XIX century, and to a lesser extent the American neo-empire of the XX
Shohat, Ella. "Notes on the "Post-Colonial"." Social Text. 31/32: Third World and Post-Colonial Issues (1992): 99113. Print.
4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Print.
3
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century, we prefer to forward the Americ an imperialism, b ut also go b ack to
1492, which is why our early book Unth inking Eurocentrism 5 in 1992, had a whole
chapter on 1492. A lready in Unth inking we were arguing for looking into the
lin ks between the vario us 1492s, that of the Inquisit ion, the expulsion of the
Moors, the “discovery ” i.e . the conquest of the Americas, and the beginnings of
TransAtlantic slavery, first of indians an d then of Africans. The discourse s
about Jews and Muslims, such as the limpieza de sangre, wh ich was a part of the
Reconquista discourse, actually trave led to the Americas and then were deployed
already with Columbus about the indige nous people, where the anti-Semitic
“blood libel” d isco urse was transformed into an anti-cannibalist discourse . Just
as Jews and M uslim s were d iabolize d in Europe, in the Americas the Afric an
Exu was diabolized, as was the indigenous Tupi figure Tupã.
Shohat: The point is that we can no longer segregate all the issues of antiSemitism, Islamophobia, anti-blac k rac ism, the massacres of indigenous people.
Conventionally, the Inquisition against Jews is seen as le ading to the Holocaust.
But the Inquisit ion and the expulsion of the Moors, the conquest, also lead to
the repression of African and indigenous re ligions.
Stam: A wonderful sequence in Glauber Rocha’s Terra em Transe 6 dramatize s
what Ella just said. The scene satiric ally restages C abral’ s Primeira Missa with the
Porfirio Diaz char acter as a right-wing golpista. Cabral/D iaz raises the chalice ,
we hear the music of candomblé. This is very profound and suggest ive . In a return
of the repressed, Rocha superimposes an image of the Catholic Mass over
African religious music. We are all aware of the Spanish Inquisit ion, but we
often forget that European conque st and c olonialism also c arried o ut a kind of
Inquisit ion against Afric an and indigenous religions. It is also interesting that
the famous skeleton of “Luzia” discovere d in Brazil was descr ibed as h aving
“Negroid fe atures. ” Glauber Rocha felt all this intuit ive ly. By putting candomblé
music as Cabral/D iaz is raisin g the cálice – we are reminded of Chico
[Buarque]’s af aste de mim este cálice 7- Rocha evokes all these historic al/cultur al
contradictions. We call this “trance-Brechtianism. ” He use s candomblé trance
Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London; New York: Routledge,
1994. Print.
6 Terra Em Transe. Dir. Rocha, Glauber. 1967. Film.
7 Buarque, Chico, and Gilberto Gil. "Cálice." Feijoada Completa. Philips, 1978. LP.
5
17
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music possession to go beyond Bertold Br echt. It is not just c lass against class,
but culture against culture. It is Afr ica, Europe, indigenous, all at the same
time.
One of the things we stress in the book is the immense aesthetic
contribution
of
Latin
American
artists,
with
their
endless
invention:
Anthopophagy, Magic Re alism, ae sthetic s of hunger, Tropicál ia, the AfroBrazilian manife sto Dogma Feijoada. Many of the alternative ae sthetics from
Latin America are based on anti-colonial inver sions. Tro pic ália turns upside
down the hostility to the Tropics as “primitive.” Antro pofagia valorize d the
rebellio us cannibal. M agic Realism exalted magic over western sc ience. We thin k
Postcolonial theory could le arn from t his kind of audacity and profound
rethinking of cultural values.
Shohat: Because I think that what we wo uld be worried about is precisely any
kind of meta-diffusionist narrative that sees Postcolonial Study as exclusive ly
Anglo-Saxon, or even an Anglophone thing that travels to, let us say, Br azil.
Just to take another perspective, it is not that there is nothing that the
postcolonial can teach us as a method of reading, a method of analyzing, but we
should see it as a potentially polycentric and open-ended discourse to be
defined from multiple site s and perspective s. Our key argument about the multidirectionalitie s of ide as is that the Postcolonial project and similar projects
emerge out of many, m any contexts. There are so m any antecedents alongside
the usual postcolonial triad of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatr i Spivak.
Important as they are, we have to remember figure s like Frantz Fanon, Aimé
Césaire.
In our book, we speak about the “seismic shift” that attempted to
decolonize instit utional and ac ademic cult ure. Wor ld War II, Nazism, fasc ism,
the Holocaust, decolonization, minority m ovements, all that triggered a cr isis in
the western faith in the promises of modernity and progress. All that conver ged
to make the West do ubt itse lf. The self-im age of the West and the white world
was being que stioned. As a result you find radic al challenge s within the
academic disc iplines: Dependency Theory in economics, where Latin American
thinkers playe d a key role; Third Worldist and later Postcolonial theory in
18
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Literature; Shared and Dialogic al Anthropology; Critic al Race theory in Law and
the Social Sciences and so forth. We tend to forget precursors such as the
Cubano Roberto Fernández Retamar writin g in the early 1970s.
It is not to diminish Said’ s immense contribution to point out that even
before Said’ s Oriental ism, Anouar Abde l-Malek, an E gyptian Marx ist, in the ear ly
1960s, wrote a crit ique of Orientalism, ver y much Fanonian in its voice, which
was p ublished in French 8. And you have Ab dul L atif T ibawi, another writer who
spoke of Orientalism in a critic al way. Before Postcolonial Studies emerged in
the mid, late 1980s, as a term, as a rubric, that kind of thinking was calle d AntiColonial Studie s or Third World Studies.
Stam: What postcolonialism brought was the influence of poststructuralism,
whence the influence of Fouc ault (alongside Vico and Fanon) on Said, Derrida
on Spivak, Lacan on Bhabha. The journal of which I was a part, Jump Cut, was
part of that transition from Third-worldist Marxism toward the postcolonial
trend, while still remainin g more or less post-Marxist, interested in minority
liberat ion movements, and thoroughly anti-imperialist in relat ion to the war in
Vietnam, and Americ an interventions in Latin America. So it is not as if we
move directly from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks 9 in 1952 to Oriental ism in
1978. Also, postcolonialism emerged in the context of English Studies and
Comparative Literature, so 1978 mar ks the moment that these issue s took on
major importance in those fields, where as before such work was done in
History, Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, Native Amer ican St udie s, B lac k St udies,
Latino Studies and so forth.
ES/PS: This question dialogu es with t he issues you just rais ed and your
influential “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’. ” The Postcolonial label rema ins
contested, and your t ext is a continuous reference for this contestation and
criticism. Despit e the fa ct that postcolonial canonic authors (e.g. Bhabha
and Spivak) are frequ ently quoted, the term “post colonial” is oft en
rej ect ed. For this end your text is inv oked, as well as Anne M cClintock’s
Abdel-Malek, Anouar. “L’Orientalisme en Crise.” Diogène. 44 (1963): 109-142. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967. Print. [Originally published by Editions de
Seuil, France, 1952 as Peau Noire, Masques Blanc].
8
9
19
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“Th e Angel of Progress: P itfalls of th e Term ‘Post-Colonialis m’" 10 as they
are articulated by Stuart Hall’s “When is the ‘Post-Colonial’? Thinking at
the Limit.” 11 Our question to both of you is then how do you re-ev aluat e
the field, in light of the comments of Shohat’s text, twenty yea rs lat er?
After a ll you said on “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’ ” how do you see th e
field?
Shohat: Postcolonialism was par alle led by a post-nationalism that probed some
of the aporias of Third-world ist, nationalist discourse. Postcolonial, in the wake
of Fanon’s “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” chapter in The Wretched of
the Earth 12, examined the blind spots of nationalism in terms of gender and
ethnicity, questionin g the notion that the nation is a single monolithic thing. So
you have the Algerian Revolution but then the Berbers were not included, and
women are not included so, that is the very positive aspect of Postcolonial
Studie s.
My old essay “Notes on the ‘Post-colonial’” was really about unpac kin g
the term. Are we really “after” the colonial, when we think of Pale stine or of
indigenous peoples? I was making the point that the postcolonial move is a
disc ursive r ather than a historic al shift, it is what comes after anti-colonial
discour se, after nationalist and Third-wor ldist and tricontinental disco urse. Nor
is it only after, it is also actually crit iquing those discourses. At its best, the
critique exposed blind spots, at its wo rst it caricat ured Third-worldist as
dichotomous, Manichean and so forth, when we would ar gue that although
Fanon was b lind to gender, ethnic ity, and sexuality, he was not Manichean. The
colonial situation was Man ichean but he himself was not. He also spoke of
psychic “ambivalence.”
Stam: And on Blackness, Fanon was never essentialist. Au contraire. Rather, he
stressed the relational, conjunctural, disc ursive and constantly shiftin g character
of race. He would say “In France, the better your French, the whiter you are,”
that one – and this will make a lot of sense to Brazilians in the land of “money
McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfall of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’”. Social Text 0.31/32 (1992):
84-98. Print.
11
Hall, Stuart. “When was the ‘Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”. The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies,
Divided Horizons. Chambers, Iain and Lidia Curti, eds. London: Routledge, 1996. Print.
12
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1965. Print.
10
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whitens” and “brancos de Bah ia” – could be blac k in one place and not blac k in
another. He constantly stressed that blac kness and whiteness ex isted in
“relat ion.”
Shohat: In fact he called for “sit uat ional diagnosis. ” In our different
public ations, we c ite Fanon speaking ( in a footnote for Black Skin, White Masks)
about the reception of Tarzan films in Martinique, where the Martinic ans
identified with the whites against the Afr ic ans, yet disco vered that in Fr ance the
hostile or patronizing looks of the French white spectators made them aware of
their own “to-be-looked-at-ness” in the m ovie theatre, re alizing that they were
seen as allied with the very Afric ans that t hey had seen as enemie s wh ile see ing
the film in Martinique.
There was a phase at the very be ginning in which anything that was see n
as anti-colonial, all was b inarie s, essentialism. It is more complicated. Ye s, some
were, some were not. The other element, that we were addressing today 13 by
talking about the Red Atlantic, is this notion that anything that you go back to
search in the past is kind of a fetish istic n ostalgia, or going back to the origins
and thus naive ly essentialist. So we we re questionin g the unproblematized
celebration of hybridity and the dismissal o f any search into the precolonial past
as a naïve se arch for a prelapsarian origin.
Stam: We also cited the example of Video nas Alde ias and the Kayapo in Brazil
using c ameras to record and reconstit ute their so-called van ishin g culture. Are
these efforts essentialist? Are we suppose d to reject them in the name of our
postmodern sophisticat ion? That would be obscene, even racist on the part of
those who do not have to worry about the preservation or resuscitation of their
cult ure.
Shohat: I think the critique made in my essay as we ll as in our Unth inking
Eurocentrism still applie s. But that does not mean that we should not use the
term. That was my conclusion to the essay that I thought Stuart Hall
misunderstood, in my opinion, when he tried to say that I was act ually making a
Third-wordlist argument. I was not exactly makin g a Third-wordlist argument; it
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam. "Race in Translation. Cultural War Around the Postcolonial Atlantic." Utrecht
University Postcolonial Studies Initiative - Doing Gender Lectures. Utrecht. 8 June, 2012. Lecture.
13
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was more about the ide a that we h ave t o be precise about how to use this
terminology. We cannot simply eclipse the term Third Worldism even now, if we
speak about a partic ular era when that term was used. It is still rele vant to use it
to reflect a certain terminology of the tim e. If we speak about the postcolonial
as a term, yes it too is st ill highly proble matic because it all depends what we
mean by it. Do we mean postcolonial as in post-independence? And of course
then post-independence for Latin America is not ex actly as for India or Iraq or
Lebanon. Is colonialism over? Not really, as we know, look at what is happening
over the last ten years in relation to the Middle East, etc.
Stam: I think an important concept is “palimpsestic temporalities” which means
that the same nat ional/transnat ional place /site c an be sim ultaneously colonial,
postcolonial and par acolonial. The relat ion to indigenous people in most of the
Americas and in colonial settler states like Australia is still large ly colonial, an
ongoing story of dispossession. Look at the impact on indigenous people of the
Belo Monte dam in the Amazon, or of similar dams in C anada and even India,
where national deve lopmentalism goes against the interests of indigenous
peoples. Then you have the neocolonial dimension with the economic hegemony
of the US and of the Global North, which is slowly ending with the “r ise of the
Rest.” Now Brazil gives money to the IMF and An gola helps Portugal! As Lula
said, “c’est tres chic!” That kind of economic shift remolds hegemony. And then
we find the “paraco lonial” in phenomena that exist apart from and alongside the
colonial.
The postcolonial theme of “hybridity” is often thought to have emerge d
historically in the post-war per iod of colo nial karma and the migration of the
formerly colonized to the metropole. But hybridity has alway s existed, and was
only intensified by the Columbian Exc hange init iated by the “voy age s of
discovery. ” A lready in 1504, the Car ijó indian Essmoricq le ft Vera Cr uz (Brazil)
for France to study munitions technology in Normandy; he thus represented,
avant la lettre, Oswald de Andrade’ s índio tecnizado or high-tech indian. So, when
you really think in a longer durat ion and think mult i-locat ionally, you see these
issues in a new way.
22
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So it is all about the “excess see ing” (Bakhtin), the complementarity of
perspectives whereby
we
mutually
correct
and
supplement
each
other’s
provincialisms. And here the intellectuals of the Global South are in some ways
less provinc ial than those from the Global North, because they are obliged, to
invoke [W.E .B.] DuBois, to have a double or even triple consciousness, oblige d
to be aware of North and South, center and periphery. They are also more like ly
to be multilingual.
Shohat: In terms of the terminology, I still belie ve we should use the term
postcolonial in a flex ible and contingent m anner. It might be better to downplay
the term “Postcolonial theory” which implies a kind of prerequisite cultur e
capital in the form of knowledge of poststructuralism to join the postcolonial
club, and speak, r ather more democratically, of Postcolonial Studies. At this
point of history, we feel comfortable using the term as a convenient designation
for
a
partic ular
fie ld
and
especially
with
Post-str ucturalist-inflected
methodologies of reading.
Stam: In fact, we just published an essay 14, a response to essays by Robert
Young and Dipesh Chakrab arty 15 in New Literary History about the state of
Postcolonial Stud ies. In that essay, we praised the capac ity of Postcolonial
Studie s for self-crit icism and its chameleonic gift for absorbing critiques that
become part of the field itse lf. So some critics point out the critique “yo u do
not talk about politic al economy” but then people start to do it, in that sense it
becomes part of the field. But we ar gue with any maître à penser model that
produces a kind of star-sy stem that obscures the work of hundreds of scholar s
around the world.
Shohat: And that affects how we think about the position of Brazilian
intellect uals. Because e ven if some of this work has not been produced under
the rubric of Postcolonial Stud ies, it is st ill, of course, very relevant to the field.
It could be talked about and recuperated within that framework calle d
Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. “Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory?.” New Literary History 43.2 (2012): 371390. Print.
15
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History 43.1
(2012): 1-18. Print.
Young, Robert. “Postcolonial Remains.” New Literary History 43.1 (2012): 19-42. Print.
14
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Postcolonial Studie s. So it is not about inventing the wheel, it is not about
going bac k to zero, as if there were no Brazilian antecedents for such work –
think of Mário de Andrade, or Oswald de Andrade, or Abdias do Nascimento
and Roberto Schwarz and countle ss others. If we think from the Global South,
we think in a polyperspectival way, whe re the center is disp laced to form
multip le centers – whence “polycentrism” – and with a stress on multip le
diasporas and transc ult ural connectivitie s. So we really belie ve in intellect ual
plurilogue and decentered interlocution across borders.
Stam: And that also means that Postcolonial St udie s must be multilin gual. So
one of the points in our book is “let’ s talk about the work in Portuguese and
French” and not just English as is too often the case in Postcolonial Studie s and
Cult ural Stud ies. We have long sect ions on the debates about race and
coloniality in Br azil, the debate on affirmative action, and a long section on
Tropicália.
Whatever the positions of Caetano Velo so and Gilberto Gil on loc al
politics, their work in songs like “A Mão de Limpeza”, “Manhat ã”, and “Haiti ” 16
is absolutely cosmopolitan and brilliant. And you can dance to it! It would be
hard to say what I value more – one of the books by a maître à penser or those
songs, which forge ideas, but do it musically, lyric ally, performatically. A s
Caetano says in “Língua,” 17 in an allusion to Heidegger, “some say that one can
only philosophize in German, but if yo u h ave a brilliant idea, put it in a song”!
“Haiti” say s so much about the Black Atlantic, class and race and what Stuart
Hall said about r ace as the modality wit hin which class is lived. “Manhatã, ”
similar ly, addresses what we call the Red Atlantic by p lac ing cunh ã – Tup i for
“young woman” – in a canoe in the Hudson. It connects indigenous Brazil to
indigenous North America, in a brilliant transoceanic gest ure. When I play the
song for my students (as we did here in Utr echt) I superimpose digital images of
Manahatta – the ind igenous name, as C aetano notes in Verdade Tropical, for
Manhattan.
Gil, Gilberto. “Mão de Limpeza.” Raça Humana. WEA, 1984. LP.
Veloso, Caetano. “Manhatã.” Livro. Universal, 1997. CD.
Gil, Gilberto and Caetano Veloso. “Haiti.” Tropicálica 2. Universal, 1993. CD.
17
Veloso, Caetano. "Língua." Noites do Norte. Universal, 2001. CD.
16
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ES/PS: You have been discussing the traveling of theories. Given to th e
new position of hegemony that Bra zil is gaining internationally, do you
expect or hop e for changes in the dyn amics of the s ystem of p roduction
and reception of theory?
Stam: I think it is partly happening just through economics. The so-called “r ise
of the Rest” means that Brazil… Már io de Andrade talked about that. He said
“Our literature is gre at but no one knows it because to have a great literat ure is
easier if you also have a great currency, if you have a great army.” So, partly
economics affects that, while the US is cle arly in decline, as is Europe in the age
of the crisis of the Euro. This is c lear ly, finally, to touch on a note of subaltern
nationalism, Brazil’s moment.
Shohat: Of course English still remains the dominant lingua fr anca in ac ademic
exchanges aro und the world. That is a re sidue of colonialism and something not
so easy to change.
Stam: At the same t ime, even that slowly c hanges, for instance, LASA, i.e. Lat in
American Stud ies Associat ion, and B RAS A (Brazilian St udies A ssociation) are
by now almost completely bilingual. Participants go easily back and forth
between Spanish and English or Portugue se and English, which used not to be
the case.
ES/PS: How do you s ee Bra zil’s current position vis-à-vis South America
and Africa within what you termed “cult ural wars ”?
Shohat: Maybe I can start to answer t he que stion by speakin g of Afr ican
Americans and the Afro-diaspora. Our project began with the response of Pierre
Bourdieu and Loic Wac quant to a book (Orpheus and Power 18) by Michael
Hanchard, an Afric an Americ an polit ical scientist who studied the Black Power
movement in Brazil. In two reviews, 19 Bourdieu and Wacquant attac ked the book
Hanchard, Michael George. Orpheus and Power: The “Movimento Negro” of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil, 19451988. Princenton: Princenton University Press, 1994. Print.
19 Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperial Reason,” Theory, Culture, and Society 16, no. I
(1999) 51. Print. And Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc Wacquant, “La Nouvelle Vulgate Planétaire,” Le Monde Diplomatique.
May 2000. 6-7. Print.
18
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as a case of North American exportation of “ethnocentric poison” into a
Brazilian society completely free of racism.
Stam: Needless to say , this was a very o ne-sided, provinc ial and un informed
interpretation that returned to the idealizin g nostrums of Gilberto Freyre in the
1930s. In Brazil, a special issue of Revista Afro-As iática 20 was dedicated to the
Bourdieu/Wacquant crit ique of Hanchard’ s book, which we summarize in our
book. They generally lamented the lack of cultur al knowledge of Brazil behind
the attacks and noted that although B ourdie u/Wacquant denounce North
American
scholarsh ip
as ethnocentric,
they
cite,
in
their
refutation
of
Hanchard’s book, only North American sc holars, hardly acknowledging the long
tradition of Brazilian scholarsh ip on these issue s.
Shohat: Bourdieu/Wacquant implied that the critique of racism in Brazil could
only come from outside Brazil, when our bookshelves contained countle ss
Brazilian books on racism and discrim ination by authors like Abdias do
Nascimento (Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro 21), Lélia Gonzale s, Clóvis Mour a, Sérgio
Costa, Antonio Guimarãe s, Nei Lopes, and countless others.
Stam: So, it becomes an issue of cover tly nationalist wh ite narcissism that
projects racism onto a single site, forgetting slavery and conquest existed all
around the Blac k Atlantic and that as a consequence rac ism and discrimin ation
too can be found all around the Black Atlantic.
Shohat: We speak in our new book of “intercolonial narc issism, ” the ide a that
all the colonial powers, and too often their intellectuals, want to see their
colonialism, or their slavery, or their discr imination, as better than that of the
others.
Stam: So the American form of narcissism is to say: “we are not colonialists”
like the others. Apart from the obvious colonialism of conquering the
indigenous we st of the country, apart from the “imperial binge” of the 1890s,
the US practice s and imperialism of milit ary bases, it c an invade country after
country and always say: “We do not want one inch of Korean land, Vietnamese
Special issue on “On the Cunning of Imperial Reason” essay, Estudos Afro-Asiáticos January-April 2002. Print.
Nascimento, Abdias do. O genocídio do negro Brasileiro: Processo de um Racismo Mascarado. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra,
1978. Print.
20
21
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land, Laotian land, Cambodian land, Grenadian land, Iraqi land, Afghan land,
etc..” But it keeps invading and m ain taining base s. So that is the US
exceptionalist narcissism. And then you have the French “mission civilisatrice”
narcissism – “we only c are about c ulture and educat ion” – the Brit ish “its just
about free trade” narcissism, and then the Luso-Tropicalist Portuguese “we are
all mixed and love mul atas” narcissism, so every country has its exceptionalism.
We make the point that the intellectuals of empowered countries love
“other people’s vict ims, ” thus the Germans historic ally adored indians (Native
Americans) but were not so fond of the Jews. So they wo uld supposedly ne ver
have d isposse ssed the Native Americans, but they kille d the Herero in Afr ica,
exterminating them in 1904. The French loved American blacks but not Alger ian
Arabs. Everybody feels good by thinking so. This is very much a white debate:
“we are le ss rac ist than those other racists. ”
Shohat: It is in this sense that we quest ion Ali Kamel’s pop book Não So mos
Racistas. 22 He is a “Global, ” i.e. literally one of the important figures at
Globoand a Syrian immigr ant. It’s a superfic ial, jo urnalist ic book but its thesis
is ultimately the same as that of Bo urdie u/Wac quant. And then, of course, the
resistance to multic ulturalism and postcolonialism was connected to the idea
that it only applies to places where you have race issues, and therefore it applies
to the US, but it cannot be applicable to France or to Brazil.
ES/PS: On the topic of ot h e r p e op l e ’ s ot h e rs and blindness to ra cis m, do
you find th e association between the repres entation of the J ew and the
representation of the black a fruitful wa y to decolonize Eurocentric bodies
of theory?
Shohat: Definitely, it is key and it is one of the discussions in our new book.
We already brought up that issue in U nthinking Eurocentrism and bring it up again
in Race in Transl ation. In both books, we lament the segregation of the Jewish
que stion from the colonial race quest ion. For us it always has been important to
connect the Jew, the Muslim, the diasporic black/Afric an, to these debates. A ll
of the issue s can be traced back to the var ious 1492s
the Inquisition, the
Ali Kamel, Não Somos Racistas: Uma Reação aos que quere nos Transformar numa Nação Bicolor. Rio de Janeiro: Nova
fronteira, 2006. Print.
22
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expulsion of the Moors, the “d isco very” i. e. the conquest of the Americas, and
the beginnings of TransAtlantic slavery, first of indians and then of Africans.
All those issue s were related then, and they are still related now. In terms of
Jews and blacks – and of co urse it is not a simple opposition since many Je ws
are blac k – Yeminis, Ethiopians, converts etc. – and many blacks are Jews. It is
not an accident that the activist movement about Arab Jews in Israel called
themselves the Blac k Panthers. But this disc ussion goes way back. Just in the
post-war period, Fanon in Bl ack Skin, White Mask begins to think about the
racialization of the black vis-à- vis that of the Jew. In Race in Translat ion, we have
a disc ussion of his comparative study of the Jew and the black, and in Taboo
Memories 23 an essay foc uses on that issue in detail. But in our most recent book,
we lin k the Jewish que stion to the Muslim/Arab quest ion, because Fanon also
speaks about the Arab, and he did not idealize any group. He say s: “The Arab is
racist toward the blac k, the Jew is rac ist toward the black. ” He noted that in
France it was e asier to be blac k than Ar ab, and c ites instances where police
would harass h im and then apologize whe n they discovered that he was not an
Arab but a West Ind ian. What complic ates the relation, as we saw yesterday in
Forget Baghdad, 24 is the whole quest ion of Israe l, Z ionism as a project in
whitening an Europeanizing the Jew. We see it in the history of Zionist cinema
and later in Isr aeli cinema, where the casting often favors blond and blue-eye d
actors, the musc ular Jew, culminat ing in Exodus 25, where you have Paul Newman
being cast as the new kind of Jew, the polar opposite of the diaspora, shtetl,
ghetto, victimized Jew. In a sense, Jews internalized anti-Semit ic disco urses.
ES/PS: Is this the problem of the nation getting into what could be a
potentially lib erating field of the postcolonial?
Shohat: Although one could ar gue that most nation-states are anomalous, Israe l
is perhaps more anomalous than others. It is a mixed formation, on the one
hand it represents a nationalist project – an d thus analogous to Third World and
minority struggle s – but from the Palest inian point of view, it is also a colonial
Shohat, Ella. Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Next Wave. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Print
Shohat, Ella. "Postcolonial Cinema Studies Conference Session: Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - the Iraqi
Connection (Dir. Samir, 2003)." Organised by Sandra Ponzanesi Utrecht University, in collaboration with
Postcolonial Studies Initiative, Centre for the Humanities, Culture & Identities and the Gender Studies Programme.
Utrecht. 7 June, 2012. Film screening.
25 Exodus. Dir. Preminger, Otto. United Artists; MGM, 1960, Film.
23
24
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settler project, which is why Palest inians see themselves as indigenous,
comparable to native Americans, a point made in Godard’s film Notre Musique 26,
which makes this analo gy directly. Indeed, the film links the various issues –
anti-Semitism, native Americans, Jews, Pale stinians etc. by having native
American characters artic ulate the analogy. It is also set in Sar aje vo, a
multic ultural partially Muslim and distantly Jewish soc iety under sie ge by
nationalist orthodox Serbs. (There is e ve n a story about M uslims in Bosn ia
protecting the Torah even after the Jews had left.) Palest inian s in the film c ite
the poem The Red Indian 27 by Mahmoud Darwish.
Stam: At the same time, Native Americans identify with Jews as being the
vict ims of the Holocaust. Some native Am ericans such as Ward Church ill, who
wrote a blurb for our book, c laimed provocative ly that “Co lumbus was o ur
Hitler, ” at wh ich point Churchill was attacked by Jewish organizations in the
US: “How co uld he compare Hitler to Columbus,… there was no genocide… it
was unintentional, they just caught disease s” etc.. B ut in fact there was a megagenocide, some cause d by d isease but also by the massacres already reported by
[Bartolomé] de las C asas in the XVI century and continuing up through the XX
century (e.g. in Guatemala and Salvador).
Shohat: Churchill was also acc use d, as we re many writers like Edward S aid, of
“narrative envy” toward the Jewish victim ization narrative.
Stam: And in France this debate has been very lively, in volving many wr iters of
diver se bac kground s, and t aking a wide r ange of posit ions. You h ave Je wish
thinkers like Alain Fin kie lkraut associate d vague ly with the sixties Left who
subse quently bec ame anti-blac k, anti-Third World, anti-Palestin ian. On the
other hand, you have very progressive Jewish thinkers such as Edgar Morin and
Esther Benbassa who say: “No, we have been symbiotically connected to
Muslims historic ally. ” We note what we call the “rightward turn” of many
Zionist Jews in the US and Fr ance and in many other countries. It is noteworthy
Notre Musique. Dir. Godard, Jean-Luc. Wild Bunch, 2004. Film.
Darwish, Mahmoud. "The Speech of the Red Indian." Trans. Sargon Boulos. The Adam of Two Edens: Poems. Eds.
Munir Akash and Daniel Moore. Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 2000. 129-45. Print.
26
27
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that Claude Lan zsmann, the author of Shoah 28 but also of militantly pro-Israeli
documentaries, was not alway s so ardently Zionist or anti-Pale stinian.
On October 17, 1961, when the French police – following the orders of
Police Chief Maurice Papon – and here again we see the link between antiMuslim and anti-Semitic att itude s – the same man who sent Jews to the death
camps, when the police murdered two hundred or more Algerians in the streets
of Par is, Claude Lanzm ann wrote a p ublic statement sayin g: “We as members of
the Jewish community understand wh at you are going through. We know wh at it
means to be harassed and murdered on the basis of your identity. We know what
it means. ” So at that t ime, you h ad so lidarity. It is only after 1967 that you fin d
radic al, generalized Jewish-Arab polarizat ion (and of course some Jews are
Arabs).
Fanon, similar ly, had warned his fellow blacks “when people are speakin g
of Jews, they are talking about you.” You know, “You are next” or, “It is the
same process”. In the realm of scholarsh ip, meanwhile, the first work on racism
in Europe and in the US, for example, was about anti-Semitism. “The Holocaust
took place, what led to it?” Thus you get analyse s of the “authoritarian
personality” and so forth. It is only later that the discussion moves to race.
Shohat: The black-Jewish alliance becam e lar gely undone in the wake of the
Israeli victory and in the US in the wake of struggles o ver the autonomy of
schools, Pale stine and other issues. With Jean Paul Sartre writ ing in France
about the anti-Semite and the Jew 29 but later also publishes in L’Express “Une
Victoire” 30, which is about Henri Alleg, a Jewish communist who joined the
Alger ian anti-colonial struggle against the French and became a prisoner, and
was tortured, le ad ing to his censored book about torture c alled L a Question. 31
Sartre, who had also written the introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the
Earth saw the issue of torture as part of the same continuum of struggle. B ut
this changed after 1967, as Josi, Fanon’s wife who still live d in A lger ia,
Shoah. Dir. Lanzmann, Claude. New Yorker Films, 1985. Film. 9 ½ hours documentary on the Holocaust.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. Trans. George Joseph Becker. [New York]: Schocken Books, 1948. Print.
30 Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Une Victoire." Situations V: Colonialisme Et Néo-Colonialisme. 1958 [L'Express]. Paris: Gallimard,
1978. Print.
31
The Question was first published in the UK. Soon after Sartre’s “Une Victoire” a new edition was published in French
by Les Éditions de Minuit.
28
29
30
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explained, she d id not want Jean Paul S artre’s introduction to be included in the
new edition of The Wretched of the Earth because he took a pro-Israel position
and thus showed that he supported colonialism. Jean Genet, in contrast,
supported not only the Black Panthers in the US but also the Palestin ians.
1967 marks a d ivision, where some Jews made what we c all a “rightwar d
turn,” splitt ing off from the Third-worldist (later multic ultural) coalition,
struggle, e ven though many Jews continued to be allied with Third-worldist and
minoritarian struggles. But in the early 1980s, in the wake of the “Zionism is
Racism” proclamation in the UN 32 many Left Jews began to move to the Right
because they associated Third Worldism and later mult icultur alism with “antiIsrael” and even anti-Semitic posit ions.
ES/PS: Further within geopolitics, and back to Brazil, how do you see the
country’s position towa rds other (formally) subaltern regions, as it
emerges as a potentiall y hegemonic power? For example, Bra zil has been
investing in African countries and gearing its attention to the African
countries that hav e Portugues e as th eir official language through the
CPLP 33.
Shohat: Well, certainly Brazil, as a huge country and the world’s sixth economy,
has a le gitim ate desire to be recognized as a global power. That was alread y
clear with Brazil’s desire to be a member of the Security Council in the UN. The
very fact that Sérgio de Mello 34 was se lected as the Brazilian representative to
Iraq – with tragic conse quences – he also represented something very positive
for Iraq. But Brazil has at times played an ambiguo us convoluted role in the
Middle East, as when it sold, not unlike the US, airplanes to Iraq durin g the
Saddam H ussein er a. Husse in was a fasc ist dictator, not so different from the
Brazil of the junta. Be ing completely opposed to the American invasion does not
prevent me, as an Iraqi-Arab Jew from denouncing Hussein as a dictator. But
overall, we think that Brazil, unlike the perpetually warring arms-se lling US, has
been a pacifying force in the world.
On November 10, 1975 the United Nations General Assembly adopted its Resolution 3379, which states as its
conclusion: “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”. After years of US and Israeli pressure, on
December 16, 1991 the UN General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379.
33 Comunidade dos Países Africanos de Língua Portuguesa.
34 Brazilian employee of the United Nations killed during an attack to Canal Hotel in Bagdad in 2003.
32
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Stam: We also have the que stion, of course, of Blackness and black identity visà-vis Afric a and the Afro-diaspora. On the one hand, you have the Brazilian
economic outreach to Africa. You also find more and more African students
coming from Angola and Mozambique to Brazilian universities, a phenomenon
we also find in the US with what are called the neo-Africans from Senegal,
Nigeria, Kenya and so forth. In both Brazil and the US, yo u have the problem
of Eurocentric educ ational sy stems that tend to treat Africa, when they don’t
ignore it completely, as a victim continent, a slave s’ continent, without any
autonomous history. These ideas have been challenged by many scholars in both
countries, for example people like [Luiz Felipe de] A lencastro who studies the
South Atlantic in such a way as to emphasize African agency.
ES: Recently, affirmative-action policie s have been gain ing ground in Brazil, in
a way, to come to terms with the subalte rn state of A fric an descendants; but
there is no real public recollection towards the violence deployed against blac k
individ uals dur ing and after colonization.
Shohat: The question is: within which kind of metanarrative ? Is it about the
narrative of bringing modernity to Africa? Is it the same kind of resc ue trope
narrative ? Is Brazil now to be seen as almost the Western country vis-à- vis
“backward ” Afr ica? Lula’ s surprised reaction to African modernity – “nem parece
África! ” 35 is in this sense symptomatic. Apart from candomblé and capoeir a and
the Afro-blocos – which are also very imp ortant – how does Africa figure in
contemporary Brazilian polit ical discourse ? These would be cruc ial quest ions for
our kind of thinking.
Stam: One of the points of our new book is transnational interconnectedness
in terms of the exchange of ideas. For example, Brazil and the US have been
connected from the beginning. The word “negro” in English comes from
Portugue se. Some of the first blacks in Manhattan were “Afro-Brazilians” of
Bantu background, whose names – Simon Congo, Paulo d’Angola – betray their
origins. The Dutch, in their fight against the Native Americans and the British,
decided to have some blac ks with them from the Portuguese areas and give them
freedom and land in exchan ge for them fighting against the British. For example
Lula notoriously declared, upon his arrival in Windhook in 2003, that the capital was so clean, beautiful and its
people so extraordinary, it did not even feel he was in an African country.
35
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the land on which exists SOBs (Sounds of Brazil), the nightclub where Brazilian
music ian s like G ilberto Gil, M artinho da Vila, and Djavan often play, belonged,
in a remarkable continuity, to Simon Congo.
Shohat: The New York/Brazil [connection] also in volves the Jews from Rec ife
who came to then New Amsterdam with the Dutch to found the fir st synagogue
in New York. We often forget that the Inquisition continued in the Americas,
includin g in Brazil. A [Luso-]Brazilian film, called O Judeu 36, by Jom Tob Azulay
[treats this link]. So the Dutch did not have Inquisit ion, and in fact, a lot of
Portugue se Jews came here [to the Netherlands] Sp inoza, etc.. So in the North
of Brazil with Pernambuco, the Dutch domination was a haven for a lot of
persecuted Jews and when New Amsterdam was happening and as the Dutch
were retreating from Pernambuco, they kept to New Amsterdam that is New
York, which is why the first synagogue in New York is a Portugue se synago gue :
because of the Jews that came from Pernambuco.
Stam: And that synagogue was the fir st place in what is now the US to teach the
Portugue se language. There is another expression in English, by the way, that is
“pickaninny” to refer to a little black c hild, which comes from Portuguese
pequininho. So through language you see a certain cultural interconnectedness,
despite myths of separateness.
Shohat: That is why translation was also a key issue for us. Not just literal
translat ion but also as a trope to evoke all the fluidit ies and transformat ions and
indigenizations that occur when ide as “fora de lugar” 37 cross borders and travel
from one place to another. In intellectual life also, navegar é preciso.
ES/PS: Race, however, is not usually an issue, a qu estion in Cultural
Translation Studies, which became an important field of s chola rship. Is
this absence the reas on wh y you chos e the title Ra ce in Translation t o
your new book? Is it a provocation?
Stam: Not really. We tried so many tit les so it is almost an accident that race
ended up so foregrounded.
O Judeu. Dir. Azulay, Jom Tob. Tatu Filmes, Metrofilme Actividades Cinematográficas, A&B Produções, 1996.
Film.
37
Schwartz, Roberto. ‘Idéias fora do lugar,’ Estudos Cebrap, 3 (1973). Print.
36
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Shohat: We actually had C ult ural Wars in Translat ion originally but the
publisher did not like it, finding it too heavy, so we ended up with Race in
Translatio n. Actually r ace has been a co mmon theme in Cult ural Studies –
includin g in figures like Stuart Hall – usually as part of the “mantra” (class,
race, gender, se xuality etc.). In the fie ld of Postcult ural Studie s, you find r ace as
a theme via the references to Fanon, but it is sometimes downplayed as bein g
too tied to “identity politics” supposedly deconstructed by poststruct uralist
theory. Postcolonial Studie s, in our vie w, is sometimes rather patronizin g
toward the various forms of Ethnic Studie s and Are a St udie s (Native Amer ican
Studie s, Afro-diasporic Stud ies, Latino Studies, Lat in American Studie s, Pac ific
Studie s, Asian Stud ies etc.), ignoring their contribution, includin g in the ways
that Ethnic Studies opened up the acade me for Postcolonial Studie s to have
such an important space.
Stam: Postcolonialism sometimes presents itself as theoretically sophist icated ,
while Ethnic Studie s is unfair ly presented as lac king in theoretical aur a and
prestige. Afric an American writ ing is also theoretical; it is not as if it is only
one side that is theoretical. In the US , these issues also get caught up in the
tensions between immigrants, including African immigrants, who do very well,
while Afr ican Americ ans still remain oppressed and mar gin alized, e ven desp ite
Obama’s victory. You have immigrants fro m India, who are very prosperous and
sometimes quite conservative, and then you have blac k Americans who have
been in the US for centurie s and are not doing so well. One e ven finds tensions
between African Americans and Afric ans, and between US born blacks and
Caribbean blacks, because Car ibbeans are sometimes portrayed as “the good
minority” like Asians. (One finds these sam e divides in France)…
And then, people do not know this but, the most educated immigrants in
the US are Africans. Which is a shame for Africa, it is the brain drain, but a
boon to the US. But all these, including Francophone intellectuals do not get
jobs in France. So, they go to Canada and to the US and to the UK, but not to
France, partially because France, despite the key role of Francophone writers in
all these movements, besides having a re lative ly c losed ac ademic system, was
refractory to Cultur al Stud ies, Ethnic Studies, Postcolonial Studies. But we also
point out that there has been a huge explo sion of writ ing on these issue s dur ing
34
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the XXI century, especially after the 2005 banl ieue rebellions. Now we find B lac k
Studie s à la Française in the form of Pap Ndiaye’ s La Conditio n Noire 38.
Shohat: But the resistance to Postcolonial and M ult icultur al Studies sometimes
come
from
leftist
Leninist
radicals
like
[Slavo j]
Žiže k,
who
attacks
multic ulturalism and identity politics in a very uninformed way. (He obviously
hasn’t read the kind of work we talk about). One has to wonder why the Right
(Bush, Cheney, Cameron, Sarkosy, Merkel) and some leftists all oppose identity
politics today, although not, obviously, fro m the same angle.
Stam: And in some way s it has to do with class-over-race and economics-overcult ure arguments. Because “the real struggle is with global c apitalism,” let us
not be distracted by feminist issue s, police har assment, marginalized b lac k
people, Latinos in the US, the descendants of Arab/Muslims in France, blacks
and indigenous people in Brazil, etc..
Shohat: An issue where Postcolonial St udies is very valuable is in the critique
of the assumptions undergird ing Area Studies, wh ich unlike Cultur al Studies h ad
a very top-down origin in US foreign policy, and which often separate s Latin
America (over there) and Latinos (bac k here), the Middle East (over there) and
the Middle Easterners (spread throughout the Americas, includin g in Brazil
where it is often said that there are more Lebanese than in Lebanon itself). An
anthology I co-edited, due out soon, treats this topic. So what we are arguin g
for is to bring those things together, because Area Studies problematic ally
segregates this global flow of people, of ideas, of c ult ures; if it does not look at
diasporic back and forth movements.
Stam: We find a similar kind of Eurocentric segregat ion in how history is
recounted. Most of the books about revolution and the “age of revo lut ion,”
never talk about Haiti, wh ich was the most radical of the revolut ions, because it
was nat ional, social, anti-slavery, etc.. And we remind our readers that the first
“postcolony” and “neo-colony” was newly independent Haiti. In 1804 France
punished them for defeating the French army, by giving them huge debts. So the
38
Ndi ay e , P ap. L a Condit i on N oir e. P ari s: C al mann-Lé v y , 2 0 08 . P ri nt.
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IMF of its time was France. Later, the US invaded Hait i, and France and the US
collaborated in deposing Aristide. And that is why Hait i is so poor.
PS: Latin Americans and Caribbeans, despite excitement over concepts,
often express ambivalence about Postcolonial Studies and theory. Where is
Latin America in the discussion?
Stam: Yes, it should not be seen as “The postcolonials are over there and we
attack them”. No, we are part of that and that is part of us and we advance it,
but, I think a lot of Latin Americans have this reserve: “And what about Latin
America?” B ut in a sense we should just do our work, and not just complain
about Postcolonial Stud ies not doing it. We are part of Postcolonial Studies,
after all.
ES/PS: In your chapter in E u r op e i n B l a c k a n d Wh i t e 39 you have warn ed
against the “master narrativ es of comparison” in Postcolonial criticism,
which
impose
trav el
routes
“wit hin
rigidly
imagined
cultura l
geographies.” In your opinion, which id eas, concepts and theories are not
traveling enough?
Shohat: I think this whole que stion of making links, the method of making lin ks
and what we emphasize as linked analo gie s are missin g for us in certain
geographies of trave ling theory. We have always been against a certain kind of
isolationist and nation-state base d approach, much more in favor of a broad ,
multid irectional, more relational approach.
Stam: But in our recent book we were lim ited to what we knew—which is
France, Brazil, and the US (and for Ella, the Middle E ast, although I know a b it
about that from having lived in North Africa and now in Abu Dhabi). One
could ar gue for South-South Studies, for example embracing India and Brazil as
multi-ethnic, multi-religious countries fro m the Global South. It always occur s
to us that Brazilian theories of film wo uld be highly rele vant to Indian cinema.
In India you have this binar ism, for the intellectuals, of “the bad Bollywood”
and “the good art film,” while Brazilians were questionin g this hierarchy already
Stam, Robert, and Ella Shohat. "The Culture Wars in Translation." Europe in Black and White: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Immigration, Race and Identity in the "Old Continent". Eds. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, et al. Bristol and
Chicago: Intellect, 2011. 17-35. Print.
39
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in the 1970s by looking posit ive ly at the Chanchadas. Tro pic ália, Carmen Miranda,
da-da… So I think a lot of places could le arn from Brazil, which is why people
argue that Brazil was post-modern avant la letre. Tropicál ia was quest ioning high
and
low
c ult ure,
incorporating
global
mass-media
c ulture,
promoting
syncretisms. In terms of syncretism, you look at a 1928 novel, Mac unaíma, 40 who
was himse lf rac ially multiple, and who cre ated a character “sem nenh um c aráter. ”
The character constantly mutates like a c hameleon. If that is not postcolonial
hybridity, I don’t know what it is.
Shohat: The problem is that this type of knowledge and analysis tends to be
lim ited to Brazilian Stud ies, when it is relevant to the whole world. So it’s
Brazil, and Brazilian c ult ure and C ultural Studie s, that is not trave ling enough.
Every country has rebelle d against co lonialism, produced it s quantum of
thought and art, includin g the Arab world, Asia, and the indigenous wor ld.
Stam: Every country should be part of the postcolonial debate. Now its time for
countries like Brazil to be the source of ideas fora de lugar! So, even though
Brazil is emerging as a kind of global economic power, it remains peripheralized
as a cultur al/philosophical power when it is still too often seen as irrelevant to
Postcolonial St udie s and Cultural Studies.
Shohat: So, for us it is not only about m ult iply ing geo graphies b ut also about
multip lying the rubric s and theories and gr ids in order to see the relationalit ies
and linked analo gie s. You c an take any place on the planet; to speak of Vietnam
is to speak of French and American imperialism, to see it as ex ist ing in relation
to Senegal and T unisia as fe llow French colonies, or in relation to France and
the US as colonial/ imperial powers. B ut it does not have to pass via a center,
which is why we argued early on in Unthinking Eurocentrism for polycentrism and
multiperspectivalism with a cyber-like openness of points of entry and
departure, while also recognizin g geopolitic al asymmetries and uneven-ness.
Stam: Part of the point of our new book is to defend Brazilian intellectuals,
sugge sting that Roberto Schwarz, Ismail Xavier, Haroldo de Campos, Sérgio
Costa, Abdias do Nasc imento are just as interesting as Fredric Jameson or
Andrade, Mário de. Macunaíma, O Herói Sem Nenhum Caráter. São Paulo: Oficinas Gráficas de Eugenio Cupolo,
1928. Print
40
37
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Pierre Bourdie u. It is not a hierarchy. They should all be translated. So we talk
about the fact that Brazilian intellectuals tend to know the French and the
Americans, but how many French and Americans know the Brazilian writers?
Brazilian popular culture is a different case, but it too should be better
known, since Brazilian music, for example, is so amazingly erudite and
sophisticated, and popular, at the very same time. Caetano Veloso, for instance,
dialogues with Roberto Schwarz’ essay on Tropicália by answerin g: “Bras il é
absurdo mas não é surdo. ” 41 How many places in the world have popular music ian s
who talk about Heide gger in their songs, or write a lyrical history of a film
movement, as Caetano does in “Cinema Novo 42?” or literary intellectuals like Zé
Miguel Wisnik who compose erudite sambas and p lay Scott Joplin compositions
backwards! To us, music and art can often say as much as academ ic writ ing.
ES/PS: The Atlantic is a recurrent trope in the common analogies and
frequent routes taken in the travelin g of ideas. Do you consid er the
Atlantic, as mu ch as L u s ofon i a for insta nce, one such a mast er narrative of
comparison that dominates the Post colonial field? Is it possible to
appropriate them and use them productively or should we a im to get rid of
them in due course?
Shohat: Perhaps Lusofonia h as been visib le in Postcolonial Studies because of
the question of the Black Atlantic and slavery but in fact, if we think of the
“Lusophone world”, then we will have to connect it to India, Goa, the Indian
Ocean, Macao, e ven the remnants of Portuguese settlements in what is today
Abu Dhabi, those areas, the Gulf Area.
Stam: In the new book, we note the explosion of aquat ic metaphors to speak of
these issues – B lac k Atlantic (we speak of a Red Atlantic), circ um-Atlantic
performance
(Roach),
tidalectic s
(Kam au
Brathwaite),
liquid
modernity
(Bauman) – as a way to find a more fluid lan guage that goes beyond the
rigidit ies of n ation-state borders. It’s not a matter of “getting r id of” but of
expanding to see the currents of the Atlantic feeding into the Pacific.
41
42
Veloso, Caetano. "Love, Love, Love." Muito (Dentro da Estrela Azulada). Universal, 2007. CD.
Veloso, Caetano. "Cinema Novo." Tropicália 2. WEA, 1993. LP.
38
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Shohat: You have Pac ific Stud ies, you h ave Indian Oce an Studies, you have
Mediterranean Stud ies, and even Delt a St udie s, and Island Studies. A recent
paper stressed Ob ama as an islander – Hawai, Indonesia, Manhattan! It is also a
que stion of modesty. We cannot know everything – the Blac k and Red an d
White Atlantic s are already huge subjects. So it is more about connecting other
currents. Françoise Ver gès, who was born in Re union, but went to Alger ia to
join the Revolution and subse quently st udied in the US and France, but teache s
in England – thus incarnating this transnational approach -- always makes this
point that slavery penetrated Reunion; colonialism was everywhere so, wherever
travelers trave led and left their marks. A ctually wh at is use ful here is Jame s
Clifford’s metaphor of routes. Routes are also oceanic of co urse, so they are
important. But this is not to substitute land. It is not an either-or question; it is
a matter of focus and openness to new knowledges, languages, and grids.
ES/PS: You spoke of the “R ed Atlantic,” and about the trav eling of
indigenous epistemologies bet ween Europe and the indigenous Americas.
Could you elaborat e?
Stam:
Yes,
we
point
out
that
there
have
been
five
centuries
of
philosophical/literary/anthropological interlocution between French writers and
Brazilian ind ians, between French protestants like Jean de Léry, between three
Tupinambá in France and Montaigne, all the way up to Lévi-Strauss – who
worked with the Nambiquara – and Pierre Clastres ( “Society against the State” 43)
and René Gir ard (who talks about Tupin ambá cannibalism), and rever sing the
current, Eduardo Viveiros de C astro, who sees the Amazonian indians through a
Deleuzian gr id. We start to find a more equal dialogue between western
intellect uals and native thinkers. For example, Sandy Grande is a Quechua from
Peru who teaches in an American Unive rsity. She wrote a book called Red
Pedago gy 44, which is a cr itical d ialogue with the most radical M arxist, femin ist,
revolut ionary, multic ult ural advoc ates of a Freire-style r adical pedagogy, but she
speaks as an equal and even a cr itic who says they have a lot to learn from
indigenous
peoples.
Native
intellect uals
and
media-makers
c irculate
Clastres, Pierre. Society against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology. Trans. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein. New
York: Zone Books, 1987. Print.
44
Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Print.
43
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internationally . Kay apo filmmakers – who could not travel with passports until
the 1988 Brazilian constitution – meet aboriginal Australian and indigenous
Alaskan filmmakers in fest ivals in New York and Toronto. Davi Yanomami
relates the massacre of the Yanomami o utside of Brazil. Raoni and Stin g meet
with François Mitterrand in the 1980s. A lready in the XVI century, Paraguaç u
met French royalty. In the XVII century, Pocahontas met Brit ish royalty and
playwr iters like Ben Jonson. We forget that, in the early centuries of contact,
Native leader s like C unhambebe (portrayed in Como Era Gostoso meu Francês 45)
were received as royalty by the French. We forget that the Tupin amba went to
Rouen to perform before King Henry II and Catherine de Medici, a fact that
was celebrated by a samba school in the 1990s. We h ave an Aymara president in
Bolivia, Evo Morales, who has appeared – to wild applause – on the Jon Stewart
Daily Show. Some Andean countries have inscribed in their constitutions “the
right of nature not to be harmed.”
So without being e uphoric, as we know th ings are not going exact ly we ll
for indigenous peoples, there are nevertheless very important counter-currents.
45
Como Era Gostoso meu Francês. Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Regina Films, New York Films, 1971. Film.
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CLAUDIA DE LIMA COSTA
U ni v e rsi dade Fe de ral de Santa C atari na
FEMINISMO E TRADUÇÃO CULTURAL: SOBRE A
COLONIALIDADE DO GÊNERO E A
DESCOLONIZAÇÃO DO SABER 1
Introdução
As teorias pós-coloniais vêm exercendo uma influência significat iv a
na reconfiguraç ão da crít ica cultural. Pr ovocando um de slocamento de
abordagens d icotômicas dos conflitos sócio-políticos a favor de um
pensamento do interstício – o qual enfat iza redes de re lac ionalidades entre
forças hegemônicas e subalternas, e a pr olifer ação de temporalidades e
histórias – e ssas teorias constituem hoje um campo transdisciplinar ub íquo
e profuso. Nas páginas que se se guem, analiso as relações entre a crít ic a
pós-colonial e as teorias fem inist as da dife rença (latino-americ ana) a part ir
do processo de traduç ão c ult ural. A s teorias femin istas latino-americ anas,
articuladas por sujeitos subalternos/racializados, operam dentro de uma
referência epistemológica d ist inta do modelo que estrut ura as relações
entre
centro
e
periferia,
tradição
e
modernidade.
Produto
da
transcult uraç ão e da d iasporização que c riam disjuntur as entre tempo e
espaço, o cronotopo desses feminismos é o interstício e sua prática, a
tradução busc ando abertura para outras formas de conhecimento e
humanidade.
De que forma as teorias femin istas no contexto latino-americano
“traduzem” e de scolonizam a crít ica pós-colonial? Q ue tipos de mediaç ão
são necessár ios nessas trad uções fem inist as e latino-american as do póscolonial? Quais são se us limites? Estas são algumas indagações a respeito
Gostaria de agradecer as recomendações de revisão dos/as pareceristas anônimos/as, bem como as
inúmeras leituras e sugestões generosas de Sonia E. Alvarez.
1
41
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
das
tendências
teóricas
contemporâneas
dentro
do
feminismo
que
explorarei a se guir na tentativa de mape ar – necessar iamente de forma
abreviada – possíve is rumos par a os e studos de gênero e feminismo no
contexto latino-americano/brasile iro.
O uso que faço do termo tradução é o mesmo da acepção dada por
Niranjan a (47- 86), isto é, ele não se refe re exclusivamente às disc ussões
sobre estratégias dos processos semióticos na área dos est udos da traduç ão,
mas também aos debates sobre tradução cultural. A noção de tradução
cult ural (esboçada, em um prime iro momento, nas discussões sobre teoria e
prática etnográficas 2 e, posteriormente, exploradas pelas teorias póscoloniais) 3 se baseia na visão de que qualquer processo de descr ição,
interpretação e disseminaç ão de ide ias e visõe s de mundo está sempre
preso a relações de poder e assimetrias en tre linguagens, regiões e povos.
Não é de se e stranhar, então, que a teoria e prátic a da tradução
hegemônicas
tenham
surgido
da
necessidade
de
disseminação
do
Evange lho, quando um dos sentidos de traduzir significou converter.
Tradução cultural na virada “pós-colonial” 4
Diante das profundas mudanças ocasionadas pelos processos cada
vez mais intensific ados d a globalização, as c ategorias tradicionais de
análise da modernidade (inc luindo as marxistas) 5 já não conseguem mais
dar conta das transformações identitárias, espaciais, econômicas, cult urais
e políticas de nossa contemporaneidade. Como nos mostrou Appadurai, os
fluxos tecnológico s, financeiros, imagéticos, ideoló gicos e diaspóricos,
entre
outros,
que
caracter izam
o
mundo
globalizado
estabelecem
interconexões e fratur as t ão complexas – e em níve is t ão diversos – entre o
local e o global que tornam obsoletos os protocolos discip linare s
convencionais ut ilizados na descriç ão do mundo sociocultural. A crític a
pós-colonial sur ge, então, como uma tentativa teórica e metodológic a de
Veja, por exemplo, as discussões na antologia organizada por Clifford e Marcus.
Faço referência aqui aos escritos de Spivak (Critique of Postcolonial Reason) e de Bhabha (The Location of Culture).
4 Para as acirradas disputas sobre a adequação do termo pós-colonial no contexto da América Latina, veja a
antologia recente editada por Moraña, Dussel e Jáuregui.
5 Refiro-me às categorias tais como classe, nacão, racionalidade, etc., principalmente quando abordadas fora
do marco da interseccionalidade do gênero, raça, etnia e sexualidade, entre outras.
2
3
42
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
preencher
o
vácuo
analítico
causado
pela
proliferaç ão
de
novas
temporalidade s d isjuntivas e in stabilidades do cap italismo contemporâneo,
bem como pela complexificaç ão das relaç ões e assimetrias de poder.
O
pós-colonial busc a visibilizar os mecanism os constitutivos de ssa realidade
global (produto da convergência entre capitalismo, modernidade e uropeia e
colonialismo) e, em seu projeto maior de t ransformação radical, iluminar o
caminho para além do moderno e do ocidental. N as palavras de Venn,
ecoando Young,
postcolonial critique therefore cannot but connect with a
history of emancipatory struggle s, encompassing anti-colonial
struggle s as well as the struggles that contest economic,
religio us, ethnic, and gender forms of oppression […], on the
principle that it is possib le and imperative to create more
equal,
convivial and
just soc ieties.
It follows that the
construction of an analyt ical appar atus that enables the
necessary interdisc iplinary work to be done is a central part of
the task. (35)
À luz do remapeamento de todos os tipos de fronteiras e em um
contexto de viagens, migrações e deslocamentos sempre interconectados,
incluindo o trânsito transnacional de teorias e conceitos, a quest ão da
tradução se torna premente, constituindo, de um lado, um e spaço único
para a análise dos pontos de intersecção (ou transcult uraç ão) entre o
local/global
na
produção
de
cosmopolitismos
vernaculare s
(Hall,
“Thinking the Diaspora 11) e, de outro, um a perspectiva privilegiada para a
análise d a representação, do poder e das assimetrias entre linguagens na
formação de imaginár ios soc iais. Na cr ítica pós-colonial, a lógica da
tradução c ult ural se refere ao processo de deslocamento da noção de
diferença par a o conceito derridiano de diff érance que, segundo Hall, aponta
para “um processo que nunca se completa, mas que permanece em sua
indecibilidade ” (“Quando foi o Pós-colonial?” 74). Trata-se da noção de
tradução como relac ionamento com a diferença radical, inassimilável, do/a
outro/a. Nas palavras de Venn, agora ressoando as ideias de Bhabha (Th e
Location of Culture),
43
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
translat ions across heterolingual and c ult urally heterogeneous
and polyglot borders allow for the feints, the camouflages, the
displacements, ambivalences, mimicrie s, the appropriations,
that is to say, the complex stratagems of disidentificat ion that
leave the subaltern and the subjugated with the space for
resistance. (115)
A partir do reconhecimento da incompletude e incomensurabilidade
de qualquer perspectiva analític a ou experiencial, Santos propõe para a
crítica pós-colonial uma teoria da traduç ão como negociação dialó gic a,
articuladora de uma inteligib ilidade mút ua e não h ierárquica do mundo. A
vir ada trad utória, por assim dizer, mostra que a tradução excede o processo
linguístico de transferências de sign ificado s de uma linguagem para outra e
busca ab arcar o próprio ato de enunciação – quando falamos estamos
sempre já engajadas na trad ução, t anto para nós mesmas/os quanto para
a/o outra/o. Se falar já implic a traduzir e se a tradução é um processo de
abertura à/ ao outra/o, nele a identidade e a alteridade se mist uram,
tornando o ato tradutório um processo de des-locamento. Na tradução, h á
a obrigação moral e polític a de nos desenraizarmos, de vivermos, mesmo
que temporariamente, sem teto para que a/o outra/o possa habitar ,
também provisoriamente, nossos lugares. T raduzir significa ir e vir (‘world’traveling
para
L ugones
[“Play fulness,
‘ World’-Trave ling”]),
estar
no
entrelugar (Santiago), na zona de contato (Pratt), ou na fronteira (Anzaldúa
Borderlands/L a Frontera). Signific a, enfim, existir sempre des-locada/o.
É aqui – no tropo da tradução – que gost aria de traçar uma estreita
relação entre femin ismos e pós-colonialismos, relaç ão essa que tem sido
historicamente silenc iad a e, portanto, invisib ilizada nos debates latinoamericanos (provenientes do norte e do sul das Américas) sobre a crít ic a
pós-colonial.
Quando
mencionadas,
tan to
feministas
quanto
teorias
feminist as são apropriadas apenas como significantes de resistência e não
como produtoras de conhecimentos outros. Elas figuram, par a lembrar
Richard (“Feminismo, experiencia” 738), como um espaço vazio (corpo
concreto) para ser preenchido com o conhecimento (mente abstrata)
daque les intelectuais situados em instit uiçõ es ac adêmic as de elite. Contudo,
44
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
como saliento acima, se o conceito de tradução est á alojado no cerne da
crítica pós-colonial, e tendo em vist a que o fem inismo é uma prát ic a
teórica e política invariave lmente tradutória, engajada em um constante ir e
vir (‘world’-travel ing), então urge trazer as contribuições feministas para a
mesa da ce ia pós-colonial e, num ge sto de traição (presente em todo ato de
tradução),
subverter
sua
gastronomia
patriarcal
e
descolonizá- la.
A
invisibilid ade, não somente da crítica fe minista, mas de outros suje itos
indígenas e afro-lat ino-americanos na c onfigur ação de novos sabere s
subalternos já se tornou bus isness as usual nas antologias sobre o póscolonial pub lic adas em univer sidades de elite nas Américas.
Cabe, então, perguntar: qual o lugar das teorias feministas nos
debates sobre o pós-colonialismo latino-americano? Quais as implicações
dessas questões para geopolít icas do conhecimento e estratégias de
tradução cultur al? Par a melhor entender como a teorização feminista sobre
o pós-colonial representa uma forma de descolonização do saber, aludire i
ao
conceito
de
colonialid ade
do
poder,
abordando
uma
contenda
significat iva entre dois intelectuais: o pe ruano Anibal Quijano, quem (a
partir do sul) cunhou o conceito de colonialidade do poder, e a crítica
deste a partir da noção de colonialidade do gênero articulada pela emigr é
argentina Maria Lugones.
Feminismo e pós-col onialis mo: as colonialidades do poder e do
gênero
Colonialid ade do poder, na acepção de Quijano,
é um conceito que dá conta de um dos e le mentos fundantes do
atual padrão de poder, a c lassific ação social básic a e universal
da população do planeta em torno da ideia de “raç a”. Essa
ideia e a classificaç ão social baseada nela ( ou “racista”) foram
originadas há 500 anos junto com América, Europa e o
capitalismo. São a mais profunda e perdurável expressão da
dominação colonial e foram impostas sobre toda a populaç ão
do planeta no curso da expansão do colonialismo europeu.
Desde então, no atual p adrão mundial de poder, impregnam
45
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
todas e cad a uma das áreas de existência social e constit uem a
mais profund a e eficaz forma de dominação social, material e
intersubjet iva, e são, por isso mesmo, a base intersubjet iva
mais un iversal de dominação polític a dent ro do atual padrão
de poder. (“Colonialidade, poder” 4)
Na América, a ide ia de raç a, Quijano (“Colonialidad de l poder,
eurocentrismo”) continua,
foi uma forma de dar legitimidade às relações de dominação
impostas pela conquista. O estabe lecime nto subsequente da
Europa como uma nova id-entidade dep ois da Améric a e a
expansão do colonialismo europeu pelo resto do mundo
conduzir am ao de senvolvimento da perspectiva eurocêntric a
do conhecimento ... Desde então [a ideia de raça] provou ser o
instrumento mais eficaz, dur adouro e universal de domin ação
social, dependendo inclusive de outro, igualmente universal
porém mais antigo, o interssex ual ou de gênero. (203, minha
tradução)
Vale re ssaltar dois pontos sobre as citaç ões acim a. Pr imeiro, par a
Quijano
(‘Colonialidad
de l
poder,
eurocentrismo’),
colonialidade
e
colonialismo se referem a fenômenos diferentes, porém interrelacionados.
Colonialismo representa a dominaç ão político-econômica de alguns povo s
sobre outros e é (analit icamente falando) anterior à colonialidade que, por
sua ve z, se refere ao sistema de c lassific aç ão universal existente no mundo
há mais de 500 anos. Colonialidade do p oder, portanto, não pode existir
sem o evento do colonialismo. Segundo, e mais signific ativo para o
propósito deste ensaio, a colonialidade do gênero ficou subordinada à
colonialid ade do poder quando, no século XVI, o princípio da classific ação
racial se tornou uma forma de dominaç ão social. De acordo com Quijano
(“Colonialid ad de l poder, eurocentrismo”), a dominaç ão do gênero se
subordina, então, à hierarquia superior-infe rior da classific ação rac ial.
A produtividade do conceito de colonialidade do poder está na
articulaç ão da ideia de raça como o elemento sine qua non do colonialismo e
46
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
de suas man ifest ações neocoloniais. Quando trazemos a cate goria de
gênero para o centro do projeto colonial, podemos então traçar um a
genealo gia de sua formação e ut ilizaç ão como um mecanismo fundamental
pelo qual o capitalismo colonial global est ruturou as assimetrias de poder
no mundo contemporâneo. Ver o gênero como categoria colonial também
nos permite historicizar o patriarcado, salientando as maneiras pelas quais
a heteronormativid ade, o cap italismo e a classific ação rac ial se encontram
sempre já imbricados. Se gundo Lugones (“Heterosexualisms”),
Intersectionality re veals what is not seen when categories such
as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each
other.
The
move
to
intersect
the
categories
has
been
motivated by the difficultie s in making visible those who are
dominated and victimized in terms of both categories. Though
everyone in capitalist Eurocentered modernity is both raced
and gendered, not everyone is dominate d or victimized in
terms of their race or gender. Kimberlé Crenshaw and other
women of color femin ists have ar gue d that the categories have
been understood as homogenous and as pickin g out the
dominant in the group as the norm; thus women
picks out
white bourgeois women, men picks out white bourgeois men,
black
p icks out
black heterosexual men, and so on. It
becomes logically c lear then that the logic of categoric al
separation d istorts what ex ists at the intersection, such as
vio lence against women of color. Given the construction of
the categories, the intersection misconstrues women of color.
So, once intersectionality shows us wh at is missing, we have
ahead of us the task of reconceptualizin g the logic of the
intersection so as to avoid separability. It is only when we
perceive gender and r ace as intermeshed or fused that we
actually see women of color. (192- 3)
Para est a autora, o conceito de colonialidade do poder, introduzido
por Quijano (“Colonialidad del poder, e urocentrismo”), ainda se apoia em
uma
47
noção
bioló gic a
(e
binár ia)
de
sexo
e
em
uma
concepção
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
heterossexual/patriarc al do poder para explic ar a forma pela qual o gênero
figura nas disputas de poder par a o “co ntrol of sex, its reso urces, and
products” (190). No colonialismo e no capitalismo global e urocêntrico,
“the naturalizing of sexual differences is another product of the modern
use of science that Quijano points out in the case of ‘race’ .” ( 195).
Portanto, delimitar o conceito de gênero ao controle do sexo, seus recursos
e produtos constitui a própria colonialidade do gênero. Ou seja – e esta é
uma crít ica fundamental à visão que Quijano tem do gênero – a imposição
de um sistema de gênero binário fo i tão constitutiva da colonialidade do
poder quanto esta última foi constitutiva de um sistema moderno de
gênero. Assim sendo, tanto a raça quanto o gênero são ficções poderosas e
interdependentes. Ao trazer a colonialidade do gênero como elemento
recalc itrante na teorização sobre a colonialidade do poder, abre-se um
importante espaço para a articulação entre feminismo e pós-colonialismo
cujas metas são, entre outras, lutar por um projeto de descolonizaç ão do
saber eurocêntrico-colonial através do p oder interpretativo das teorias
feminist as, visando o que Walsh ir á chamar de pensamiento pró pio lat inoamericano. Segundo a autora,
[i]n this sense ‘pensamiento propio’ is sugge stive of a
different critic al thought,
one
that
seeks
to
mark
a
diver gence with dominant ‘ universal’ thought (includin g in it s
‘critical’, progressive, and left ist formation s). Such divergence
is not meant to simplify indigenous or blac k thought or to
relegate it to the category or status of loc alized, situated, and
cult urally specific and concrete thinking; that is to say, as
nothing more than ‘local knowle dge’ understood as mere
experience. Rather it is to put forwar d its politic al and
decolonial ch aracter, permitting a connection then among
var ious ‘pensamientos propios’ as part of a broader project of
‘other’ critical thought and knowledge. ( 231)
Apesar de Walsh não fazer nenhuma menção em seu art igo às teorias
feminist as que sur gem na América Latina como parte integrante do
movimento de descolonização do saber, de construção de “oppositional
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
politics of knowledge in terms of the gendered bodies who suffer r acism,
discr imination, re jection and violence” (Pr ada), gostar ia aqui de apropriar
sua d isc ussão – sobre a geopolític a do co nhecimento e a necessidade de
construção de novas cosmolo gias e epistemologias a partir de outros
lugare s de enunciaç ão – para inc luir a in tervenção política fem inist a de
tradução transloc al dentre esses outros esp aços de teorizaç ão, interpretação
e intervenção na América Latina.
Feminismo e tradução: ru mo à descolonizaçã o do saber
No cenário contemporâneo que marca o desaparecimento de vias de
mão únic a e o sur gimento de ‘zonas (cada vez m ais voláte is) de traduç ão,’ 6
e epistemologias de fronteira, cabe à c rítica feminista exam inar com
atenção o processo de tradução cultural das teorias e dos conceitos
feminist as de modo a desenvolver um a habilidade transnac ional para ler e
escrever (Spivak, “Po litic s of Translation ” 187- 95). Est a tarefa re quer o
mapeamento dos deslocamentos e da tradução contínua das teorias e dos
conceitos feministas, d as d inâmic as de le itura, bem como das lim itações
impostas por mecanismos de mediação e tecnologias de controle sobre o
tráfego das teorias.
Corajosamente trafic ando teorias fem inistas pelas zonas de contato,
feminist as latino-american as e latinas residindo nos Estados Unidos, por
exemplo, desenvolvem
uma polític a de
traduç ão
que
se
utiliza de
conhecimentos produzido s pelos femin ism os latinos, de cor, pós-coloniais
no norte das Américas para iluminar an álises de teorias, práticas, culturas e
políticas no sul e vice-versa. A prátic a do “world”-travel ing evidencia como a
tradução é indispensável, em termos polít icos e teóricos, para a formação
de alianças feministas pós-coloniais/pós-ocidentais, já que, conforme
argumenta Alvarez, a Améric a Latina – entendida “enquanto formação
cult ural transfronteiriç a e n ão territorialme nte delimit ada” (744) – de ve ser
vista como translocal. A noção de translocalidade possibilita, por sua ve z, a
Tomo emprestado de Emily Apter (“On Translation in a Global Market” 10) esta expressão. Zona de
tradução – uma apropriação do conceito de zona de contato, cunhado por Pratt (7) – significa um lugar
intersectado por várias fronteiras linguísticas em constante confronto e disputa. Qualquer zona de contato é
sempre já uma zona de tradução (Apter, The Translation Zone).
6
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articulaç ão da colonialidade do poder/gê nero “em várias esc alas ( locais,
nacionais, regionais, globais) a posições de suje ito (gênero/sexual, étnicoracial, classe etc.) que constituem o self” (Laó-Montes 122, m inha
tradução).
Em um artigo introdutório a um debate so bre mestiçagem, p ublic ado
na Revista Estudos Feministas, Costa e Ávila discorrem sobre a importância
dos escritos de Anzald úa (Borderlands/L a Frontera) em relação à nova
mestiça como exemplo do que seria um suje ito pós-colonial feminino no
espaço
lat ino-americano.
Marcado
por
uma
subjet ividade
nomádic a
moldada a partir de exc lusões materiais e históricas, o suje ito pós-colonial
de Anzaldúa art icula uma identidade mestiça que já antecipava a crític a
descolonial ao pensamento binário e a modelos de hibridismo cult ural
ancorados em noções de assimilaç ão e cooptação. Enfatizando que os
terrenos da diferença são mais que nun ca espaços de poder, a autora
complica rad icalmente o discurso fem inista da diferença, inclusive da
diferença colonial. M igr ando pelos entrelugares da diferença, mostra como
esta é constituíd a na história e adquire forma a partir das intersecções
sempre locais – suas mestiç agens múlt iplas reve lam simultaneamente
mecanismos de sujeiç ão e ocasiões para o exercício da liberdade. Em um
dos trechos canônicos e de grande força retórica de La conciencia de la
mestiza, Anzald úa conclama:
Como mestiza, eu não tenho país, min ha terra natal me
despejou; no entanto, todos os países são meus porque eu sou
a irmã ou a amante em potencial de todas as mulheres. (Como
lésbic a não tenho raça, meu próprio povo me rejeita; mas so u
de todas as raças porque a queer em m im existe em todas as
raças.). Sou sem cultura porque, como uma femin ista, desafio
as crenças cult urais/religiosas co letivas de origem masculin a
dos indo-hispân icos e anglos; entretanto, tenho cultura porque
estou participando da criaç ão de uma o utra cultura, uma nova
história para exp lic ar o mundo e a nossa p articipaç ão nele, um
novo sistema de valores com imagens e símbolos que nos
conectam um/a ao/à o utro/a e ao planeta. Soy um amasamiento,
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
sou um ato de juntar e unir que não apenas produz uma
criatur a tanto da luz como da e scur idão, mas também um a
criatur a que quest iona as definições de luz e de escuro e dálhes novos significado s. (707-8)
A mediação tradutória que Anzaldúa aborda neste artigo, cruzando
mundo e identid ades, tem sido vist a como uma prátic a de questionamento
de nossas certezas epistemológicas em busca de abertura para outras
formas de conhecimento e de humanidade. Como enfatiza B utler, Anzaldúa
nos mostra que “it is only through exist ing in the mode of translat ion,
constant translation, that we stand a chance of producing a multic ult ural
understandin g of women or, indeed, of society” (Undoing Ge nder 228).
Outros
subalternos
lugares
no
femininos
e
contexto
latino-americano
pós-coloniais
podem
ser
desse s
sujeito s
encontrados
nos
testemunhos da guatemalteca Rigoberta Menchú (Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú)
e da bolivian a Domitila B arrios de Chungara (Let me Speak!), nos diários da
catadora de lixo brasile ira Caro lina M aria de Jesus (Quarto de despejo), nos
escritos da femin ista afro-brasileir a Lélia Gonzalez (Lugar de negro), nas
poesias, gr afite e performances de rua do grupo boliviano anarco-feminista
Mujeres Cre ando (La Virgen de los Deseos), e nos romances autobiográficos da
escritora afro-brasile ira Conceição Evar ist o (Ponciá Vicêncio), entre tantas
outras, bem como nos escritos e relatos que jam ais chegarão aos cânones
homogeneizadores da ac ademia, 7 principalmente na fase atual de cur ioso
desencanto,
por
parte
dos
intelectuais
latino-americ anos
e
latino-
americanistas, com as promessas do teste munho como gênero literário excêntrico dos anos de lutas pela democracia na América Latina. 8 Lembrando
a famosa cr ític a de N ancy Miller (103- 7) aos teóricos estrut uralistas e pósestruturalistas – ao dizer que a morte do autor declarada por Foucault
(101-20) e Barthes (142- 8) coincidiu ironicamente com a ascensão da
mulher de objeto à condição de autora /sujeito – acredito também não ser
acaso que, por exemplo, quando mulh eres rac ializadas e subalternas
Walsh faz referência a vários intelectuais indígenas (infelizmente, seus exemplos são todos masculinos) que
estão redesenhando um pensamento crítico descolonizado a partir da própria América Latina.
8 Ver, por exemplo, os ensaios nos livros organizados por Gugelberger e por Arias.
7
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reivindic am no testemunho um lugar de enunciaç ão contra hegemônico,
este imediat amente perde sua aura, como diria Benjam in (19-57). 9
Norma Klahn, em lúc ida análise sobre o lugar da e scrita das
mulheres na época do latino americanismo 10 e da globalização, mostra como o
testemunho (bem como ficções autobio gráficas, romances, ensaios e
poesias) de autoria femin ina e ligados a lutas e mobilizações polític as e
sociais foram fundamentais na construção de uma prática feminista sui
generis. A autora argumenta que, a partir da tradução cultur al,
Latin American and L atina feminists readapted femin ist
liberat ion disco urses from the West, resignify ing them in
relation to self- generated practices an d theorizations of
gender empowerment that have emerge d from their lived
experiences, particular historie s and contestatory politic s
(Klahn).
Tomando o exemplo do testemunho, Klahn mostra como esse gênero
literár io foi mobilizado por sujeitos sub alt ernos como Menchú e Chungara
para, a partir d a interseção entre gênero, etnia e classe social, de sestabilizar
um feminismo ocidental aind a centrado na noção de mulher essencializada.
Ao desconstruir o d isc urso fem inist a dominante, os testemunhos não
apenas configuram outros lugares de e nunciaç ão e se apropriam da
representação, mas rompem também com o paradigma surrealista lat inoamericano (realismo mágico) a favor de uma estétic a realist a que traz o
referente de volta ao centro das lut as simbólicas e polít icas, documentando
as violências d a representação e da opressão: a vida não é fição. Esse s
textos, “traduzindo/translocando teorias e práticas”, im aginam formas de
descolonização d a colonialidade do poder. Leio Menchú e Chungara –
Gostaria de relatar uma anedota pessoal. Quando comecei a lecionar na Universidade Federal de Santa
Catarina uma disciplina de teoria literária na graduação (cujo objetivo era o de introduzir o cânone literário
ocidental), optei por uma abordagem não ortodoxa. Líamos escritores canônicos ao lado de testemunhos
como o de Menchú (Burgos and Menchú Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú) e Chungara, mostrando aos/as alunos/as
que esses textos ex-cêntricos solicitavam outras formas de ler. Em reunião departamental sobre mudanças do
currículo, um colega, professor titular, expressou sem qualquer tipo de embaraço que textos de “mulheres,
indígenas, negros e paraplégicos” deveriam ser ensinados em disciplinas optativas, não nas obrigatórias. Após
essa nefasta reunião, continuei desafiando o currículo disciplinar em minhas práticas docentes.
10 Latinoamericanismo se refere à produção de conhecimentos sobre a América Latina, por latino-americanos ou
não, a partir das universidades e centros de pesquisa situados no Norte global (Europa e América do Norte).
9
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atravé s de K lahn – como traduções fem inistas e latino-americanas do póscolonial que oferecem novas propostas epistemológicas a partir do sul.
Ana Rebeca Prad a, d iscorrendo sobre a circulaç ão de escritos de
Anzald úa no contexto plurinac ional boliviano, explica que qualquer
tradução, sem uma adequad a mediação, c orre o risco de se tornar uma
dupla traição: primeiro, traição que qualquer tradução já necessar iamente
implic a em re lação ao d ito original e , segundo, traição diante da
apropriação do texto trad uzido como parte de um sofistic ado apar ato
teórico proveniente do norte. O trabalho de mediação se faz necessár io
para que a trad ução desses textos, provenientes de outras latit udes no
norte, possam dialo gar com textos e práticas locais, assim contestando as
formas pelas quais o sul é consumido e conformado pelo norte –
integrando a crític a pós-colonial em diálogos não apenas norte-sul, mas
também sul-sul. Pr ada an alisa de forma instigante como o grupo de
feminist as anar quistas bolivianas, Mujeres Creando – que se autodescre vem
como cholas, chotas e birlochas (termos racist as usados em referênc ia a
mulheres ind ígenas imigrantes nas c idade s) e que também adotam outras
designações de subjetividade s abjet as (tais como puta, rechazada, desclasada,
extranjera) –, d ialogar am com Anzaldúa ao transportar Borderlands/L a
Frontera para um contexto de política feminist a além dos m uros da
academia (onde esta autora havia sido inicialmente lida), estabelecendo
afin idade s entre os dois projetos polít icos.
Assim sendo, a linguagem de
Anzald úa, enunciada ao sul do norte, foi apropriada pe lo sul do sul e
“incorporated de facto in a transnational fe minism which (as Mujeres Creando
since its beginnings st ipulated) has no frontiers but the ones which
patriarchy, rac ism and homophobia insist on” (Prada). 11 Conforme explica
Prada
Translat ing, then, becomes much more complex. It has to do
with linguistic translation, yes, b ut also with making a work
11
Mujeres Creando é um movimento feminista autônomo criado em 1992, em La Paz, Bolívia, e formado por
mulheres de diferentes origens culturais e sociais. Enfoca a criatividade como instrumento de luta e
participação social.
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
availab le (with all the consequence s this might have, all the
“betrayals” and “erasures” it might include ) to other audience s
and letting it trave l. It also has to do with opening scenarios
of conversation and proposing new horizons for dialogue. It
also means opening yo ur choices, your tastes, your affinit ie s
to others – which in politics (as in Mujeres Creando’s) can
compromise (or strengthen) your principles. Translation in
those terms becomes rigorously “strategic and selective ”.
Entretanto, segundo Prada, sabemos que nas viagens das teorias
feminist as
pelas
Américas,
principalmente
em
suas
rotas
contra
hegemônicas, ex istem vár ios postos de controle (por exemplo, public ações
e
instit uições
ac adêmic as)
e
mediadores
(intelectuais,
ativistas,
acadêmicos/as) que re gulamentam se us movimentos através das fronteiras,
facilitando ou d ific ultando acesso a text os, autoras e a debate s. Para
exemplificar como este controle opera, go staria de c itar aqui um e xemplo
que a teórica pós-colonial aymara S ilvia Rivera Cusic anqui nos dá a
respeito de tais barreiras – e que nos remete particularmente à questão da
descolonização do saber.
Falando em prol de uma economia política – ao invé s de um a
geopolític a – do conhecimento, Cusican qui (60-6) exam ina os mecanismos
materiais que operam atrás dos disc ursos, argumentando que o disc urso
pós-colonial do norte não é apenas uma e conomia de ide ias, m as também
de salários, comodidade s, privilé gios e valores. Universidades no norte se
aliam com centros de estudos no sul, atravé s de redes de trocas
intelectuais,
e
se
tornam
verdadeiros
impérios
de
conhecimentos
apropriados dos sujeitos subalternos e resignific ados sob o signo da Teoria.
Cria-se um c ânone que invisibiliza cert os temas e fontes, ocultando
outros. 12
As ide ias fluem, tais como os rios, de sul para norte e tornamse afluentes do grande s fluxos de pensame nto. Mas, como no
Cusicanqui se refere aqui ao livro de Javier Sanjinés (El espejismo del mestizaje), discípulo de Mignolo, quem
realizou um estudo sobre mestiçagem na Bolívia sem fazer qualquer menção ao debate boliviano, inclusive
entre os indígenas, sobre o tema.
12
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mercado mundial de bens materiais, as ideias também saem do
país convertidas em m atéria prima, que r etorna misturada e
regurgitad a na forma de produto acabado. Assim se constitui o
cânone de uma nova área do discur so científico social: o
pensamento “pós-colonial. ” (68, minha tradução)
A menção que Cusican qui faz ac ima é a sua discussão sobre
colonialismo interno, formulada nos anos 1980 a partir da obra pioneira de
Fausto Reinaga dos anos 1960 e que, nos anos 1990 foi (re)formulada por
Quijano (“Colonialid ad de l poder, euroce ntrismo” 201- 246) na ideia de
“colonialidade do poder” e, subse quente mente, por Mignolo (3-28) na
noção (com novos matizes) de “diferença c olonial. ” Cusic anqui explica,
Minhas ide ias sobre colonialismo interno no plano do saberpoder
surgiram
de
uma
trajetória
t otalmente
própria,
iluminada por outras le ituras - como a de Maurice Halb wach s
sobre
a memória coletiva,
a de
Fran z Fanon
sobre
a
internalizaç ão do inimigo e a de Franco Ferraroti sobre as
histórias de vida – e, sobretudo, a partir da experiência de ter
vivido e part icipado da reorganizaç ão do movimento aymara e
da revolta ind ígena nos anos setenta e oitenta. (67, minha
tradução)
Com grande força retórica, a teórica aym ara nos mostra que para a
descolonização do saber não basta articular um discurso descolonial, mas é
preciso, sobretudo, desenvolver prátic as de scolonizadoras.
Dando seguimento ao gesto dessa teórica aymara, gostaria de
argumentar que o feminismo brasile iro, em sua artic ulaç ão pós-colonial,
precisa trazer par a o centro de suas traduç ões figuras tradutoras e tr aidoras
de qualquer noção de original, de tradição, de pureza, de unicidade e de
binarismos. Porém, para tal ser ia necessár io também confrontarmos
radic almente as prátic as rac istas, sex istas e homofóbicas que insistem em
emudecer nossas mest iças, índias, negras, lésbic as e queers nos seus vários
lugare s de enunc iação, porém particular mente na academia.
55
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
espaços cr uciais par a tais intervenções/mediações é , obviamente, o das
public ações feministas, que abordarei a se guir.
Publicações feministas e media ções cult urais: des/locando o signo da
teoria
Como evadir as economias epistemológic as que inst ituc ionalizaram
os centros acadêmicos anglófonos como grades de inteligibilidade para as
teorias e, mais espec ificamente, para as teorias fem inist as?
Rosi Braidotti (715- 28), falando sobre a importação-exportação de
ideias ao longo da d ivisa transatlântica, argumenta, de forma deleuziana,
que uma percepção crítica de como nossos conceitos estão histórica e
empiricamente
encrustados,
re quer
tanto
alianças
transver sais
entre
diferentes intelect uais, bem como um exercício constante de tornarmo-nos
poliglotas, transdiscip linár ias, enfim, nômadas. Como podemos, nos vár ios
espaços feministas, de senvolver uma prática de traduç ão que responda,
simultaneamente, às contingências locais e aos fluxos globais dos disc ursos
sobre gênero e feminismo? Ou, colocado de outra forma, como expor as
lógic as perversas da hegemonia?
No papel de coeditoras de uma sessão de debates numa das
principais
revistas
femin istas
acadêm ic as
brasile iras,
Revista
Estudos
Feministas, eu e minhas colegas temos traduzido e public ado artigos
teóricos de vanguard a e convidado contribuições de feministas brasileir as e
de outros países latino-americanos na t entativa de proporcionar uma
recepção crítica destes textos. No entanto, infelizmente as respostas não
viajam de volta aos se us lugares de partida devido à falta de rec ursos p ara
sua ver são à língua franc a ac adêmic a (o inglês), re velando, portanto, um
dos muitos fatores ocultos que interferem nas prátic as de traduç ão c ult ural
e na articulação de femin ismos transnacio nais, pós-coloniais. Como Emily
Apter (“On Translation” 10) salienta com acerto, essas camadas de
intervenções invisíveis são, de forma muito óbvia, cruc iais para que o texto
tenha acesso à tradução. É nesse terreno que devemos lutar contínua e
incansave lmente para deslocar teoricamen te o signo do ocidente rumo a
novas linguagens e geografias pós-coloniais (Chow 303-4). Um outro fator
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
mais evidentemente oculto da colonialidade do poder que impede o
deslocamento do signo teórico, aludido po r Chow, se re fere às prát icas de
citação dos periódicos n a construção de um mercado transnac ional de
citações.
É sabido que as prátic as de c itação são em grande parte responsávei s
não só pela formação de cânones acadêmic os, mas são também vistas como
a medida m ais objetiva do mérito acadê mico (Lutz 261-2). Como nos
lembra Cusicanqui,
Através do jogo de quem cita quem, as hie rarquias são estruturadas
e acabamos tendo que comer, regurgitado, o pensamento
descolonizador que os povos e intelec tuais indígenas de
Bolívia,
Peru
e
Equador
haviam
produzido
de
forma
independente. (66, minha tradução)
Há um número significat ivo de estudos, na sua maioria provenientes
das áreas de linguístic a aplic ada /an álise do disc urso e da bib liometria,
sobre os usos de citações como uma atividade central na produção do
conhecimento (Lillis et al. 110-35). Quem é citado, aonde e por quem, o u
seja, a geolinguístic a das citações expõe as rotas através das quais as teorias
viajam e as maneiras pelas quais linhage ns intelectuais (masc ulinas) são
construídas no contexto global. Temos aqui um a ligação nem tão tênue
entre essas micropráticas e práticas sociais m ais amplas de produção e
circulaç ão do conhecimento.
Uma d as conclusões rele vantes – e não surpreendentes – do estudo
de Lillis par a a m inha discussão (cuja pesquisa abrange u 240 artigos da áre a
de psicologia publicados em revistas em inglês), é que
the global stat us of English is impactin g not only on the
linguistic med ium of publicat ions but on the linguist ic
medium of works that are considered citable – and hence
on
which/whose
knowledge
is
being
allowe d
to
circulate. (121)
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
À luz dessa d isc ussão, quais são as prát icas de citaç ão na Revist a
Estudos Feministas? Tendo em vista que se trata de um a pub lic ação em
português, um levantamento que realize i dos artigo s que foram ve iculado s
no periódico em um período de 10 anos (1992-2002) e videnc ia um
equilíbrio razoáve l de cit ações de autoras brasileir as e estrange iras. Entre
as autoras estrange iras, há uma c lar a predominância de referências a textos
em inglê s, se guido pelos franceses. Citaçõ es de autoras que e screvem em
espanhol são m uito e scassas no perío do estudado, ganhando maior
visib ilidade nas e dições mais recentes da revist a. Esse aumento coincidiu
com maior publicaç ão de artigos em espanhol por autoras residentes na
América Latina, conse quênc ia de uma clara intervenção editorial da Revist a
Estudos
Feministas
buscando
intensific ar
o
diálogo
com
feministas
congéneres latino-americanas. No entanto, é interessante observar que em
um número especial do periód ico sobre raça (1994), nenhum dos textos n a
área de epistemologias e/ou metodologias feminist as tinha se quer qualquer
citação a artigos em português ou espanhol.
Algumas conclusões prelim inares podem ser extraídas dessa an álise
inic ial. Primeiro, é razo áve l esperar que para uma publicaç ão acadêm ic a
brasileir a com foco no desenvolvimento e fortalecimento do campo dos
estudos femin istas e de gênero a nível nacional, a referência a autoras
brasileir as
nos
artigos
esteja
diretamente
ligada
às
espec ific idade s
contextuais. Entretanto, em uma tentativa de legitimar e consolidar o
feminismo como campo disciplinar na ac ademia, nota-se uma tendência
muito clara das autoras na Revista Es tudos Feministas de c itar mais
frequentemente
pensadores
eurocêntricos
(como
Foucault,
G iddens,
Bourdieu e Lyotard, entre outros) sempre que que stões teóricas são
abordadas. Este ach ado corrobora apenas um ponto que já havia sido fe ito
por Christian (51-63) e Lutz (249- 66), as quais e loquentemente destacaram
o colonialismo dos paradigmas teóricos na supressão de voze s sub alternas.
De acordo com Lutz,
[t]heory has ac quired a gender insofar as it is more frequently
assoc iated with male writ ing, with women’s writin g more often
58
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
seen as descr iption, data, case, personal, or, in the case of
feminism, ‘merely’ setting the record straight. (251) 13
Em segundo lugar, sempre que a balança se inclin ava para citaçõe s
de
trabalhos em
inglês,
o
tema dos artigos tinha
um
foco
mais
transnacional, principalmente aque les c ujas discussões eram sobre teorias e
metodologias na construç ão de um saber feminist a, bem como sobre a
intersecção de gênero e raça. Em terceiro lugar, com a chegada e crescente
influência do pós-estruturalismo e da teoria queer no feminismo brasile iro
na década de 2000 (particularmente por meio da tradução para o portuguê s
de Gender Tro uble, de B utler), e diante do lento declínio das abordagen s
estruturalistas, até então predominantes na soc iologia e antropologia
feminist as, a tr aduç ão ao portuguê s de te xtos em inglês em grande parte
suplantou a traduç ão daque les em francês, fazendo com que o inglê s se
tornasse a lingua franca teórica nas páginas do periódico. 14
Curiosamente, tais mud anças teóricas sísmicas coincidiram, por um
lado,
com
a proliferação
na revista
de
artigos de
outros campos
disc iplinares (tais como história, literat ura, educaç ão, filosofia, est udos
cult urais, est udos de cinema, para c itar alguns) e com a diminuição no
número de artigos a partir de perspectivas antropológicas e socioló gic as, as
quais haviam sido até então o locus prevalecente de en unciaç ão para o
feminismo brasileiro. Por outro lado, e ssa diversificaç ão das análise s
feminist as, que se abrir am para abordagens mais trans ou pós-discip linares,
também pode ser interpretada, entre outros fatores, como uma resposta à
mudança da casa instit ucional do periódico de uma un iver sidade central
(Universid ade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, o berço original da revista) par a
outra (Universidade Federal de Santa C atarina), sit uada fora do eixo (São
Paulo-Rio de Janeiro) do poder acadêmico.
Por último, a presença d as teorias pós-coloniais ainda é exígua no s
debates feminist as brasile iros, exceto nos estudos literários. Análise s
Christian (51-63) traz para esta discussão a importância do elemento racial, ou seja, como a teoria ganha
não apenas um gênero, mas também é sempre já racializada.
14 Para uma reflexão sobre os primeiros 15 anos da Revista Estudos Feministas na Universidade Federal de Santa
Catarina, veja seção especial da revista organizada por Minella e Maluf.
13
59
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
interseccionais articulando gênero a outros vetores da identidade (apesar
de suas críticas recentes na academia anglófona) 15 surgem aos pouco s na
medida em que a raç a e o rac ismo têm ocupado o centro das atenções nos
debates públicos e nas polític as govername ntais para corrigir desigualdade s
sociais e econômicas duradouras.
À guisa de conclusão, gostar ia de argume ntar, seguindo o conselho
de Nelly Richard ( “Globalizac ión” 4- 5), que, ao ex aminar o papel que as
revist as
fem inistas
desempenham
como
mediadoras
crític as
e
tradutoras/traidoras no tráfe go das teorias, torna-se imperativo a cr iaç ão
de um espaço par a textualidade s heterogêneas. Isto implica n ão só “n a
coexistência de uma d iversid ade de filiaç ões intelectuais, disciplinares e
antidiscip linare s, mas também de uma variedade de tons e formas
disc ursivas text uais autorizando vário s lugares de enunciação e re gistros de
representação” (Richard, “G lobalización”
heterogeneidade
possib ilita
uma
fértil
7-8, minha tradução). Tal
interação
entre
as
re flexões
acadêmic as e o utros tipos de práticas enun ciatórias e tradutórias no projeto
feminist a da de scolonização do saber. Outrossim, mostra que os saberes
excedem
os
limites
estreitos
da
academia
e
abarcam
o utros
topoi
disc ursivos, como ONGs e os espaços da militânc ia feminista. Somente
assim poderemos construir uma tradição de pensamiento própio feminist a do
pós-colonial (ou descolonial) latino-americ ano/brasileiro.
15
Para exemplos dessas críticas, ver Jasbir Puar e Kathy Davis.
60
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
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Walsh, Catherine. “Sh ifting the Geopolitics of Knowledge: Decolonial
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65
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
KAMILA KRAKOWSKA
Univer sidade de Coimbra
O TURISTA APRENDIZ E O OUTRO: A(S)
IDENTIDADE(S) BRASILEIRA(S) EM TRÂNSITO
O homem é um "ser ambivalente que une em si um eu e um não-eu,
ele próprio e o Outro, o seu Outro e o estranho" (Kapuściński 65). Com
estas palavr as Ryszard K apuśc iński descre ve a complexa condição humana
no mundo contemporâneo, onde se de smoronam as tradicionalmente
estabelecidas fronteiras entre as c ult uras, nações, e identidades. N a era
pós-colonial, as representações identitárias que até agora de fin iam de
maneira unívoca e exclusiva o lugar do homem dentro da sua comun idade
deixar am de ser válid as quando confrontadas com o "novo mapa-mundo,
multico lor, rico e extremamente complexo" (Kapuściń ski 62). O processo
da criação de ste novo mapa, que gradualm ente revogou as antigas relações
de poder, começou muito tempo antes do surgimento das teorias póscoloniais, que permitiram compreender mais profundamente os fenómenos
sociais e culturais em curso. A urgênc ia de repensar e reconfigurar as
identidades, tanto ao nível individual como colectivo, de retrabalhar e
readaptar a herança colonial como uma parte significat iva da c ult ura
nacional pode ser observad a, entre outros, em vár ias obras brasileir as da
época modernista. Não cabe nos objectivos deste ensaio disc utir se a
produção artístic a modernista no Brasil, vista como um sistema integral,
pode ser considerada como sendo pós-colonial. Ne ste trabalho limitaremonos a analisar apenas as configurações ide ntitárias presentes no diár io de
viagem de Már io de Andrade, O Turista Aprendiz, a partir da perspectiva
pós-colonial. Est a abordagem, na nossa opinião, permitirá desconstruir a
visão do Eu e do Outro proposta por Mário de Andrade no diário e
determinar o seu papel na construção da identidade nacional.
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A aplic ação de ferr amentas teóricas forjadas no âmbito de estudo s
pós-coloniais pode parecer surpreendente, visto que estes conceitos e
categorias são alheios ao horizonte epistemológico do escritor em causa.
No entanto, é nossa convicç ão que e sta a abordagem é ade quada par a
compreender plenamente a visão da c ultura brasileira que Már io de
Andrade projeta nas suas obras, em ge ral, e no Turista Apre ndiz, em
particular. O e scritor, como demonstraremos ao longo da análise do diário,
acredita que a identid ade cultural brasile ira é composta por várias e muito
dist intas expressões étnicas e re gionais, fr equentemente menosprezadas o u
até desconhecidas pelas e lites intelectuais do seu tempo. Na sua busca da
identidade brasileir a, o turista aprendiz r ecupera as voze s silenciosas, e
silenciadas, dos cantadores nordestinos que improvisam os cocos, dos
índios que recontam os seus mitos, dos me stres do candomblé que invocam
os seus santos com danç as dr amátic as. Neste processo, o autor não apenas
inverte as hierar quias tradic ionalmente estabelecidas entre o centro e a
periferia, entre o nacional e o local, entre a arte erudita e popular, mas de
facto constrói uma nova visão da cultura brasile ira onde procura “redefinir
o processo simbólico através do qual o imaginár io soc ial [...] se torna o
sujeito do disc urso e o objeto da identidade psíquic a” (Bhabha 2005a 217).
De acordo com João Luís Lafetá, as primeiras produções do s
modernistas brasile iros e, entre elas, o livro de poesia o Clã do Jabut i do
próprio Mário, foram profundamente marcadas pela exaltaç ão da cultur a
popular e pela busca de ser “brasileiro” “que levava o poeta a exagerar a
linguagem, que assim perdia, de novo, a naturalidade e a sutileza” (Lafet á
105). No entanto, como comentam Lafetá e mais t arde Maria Aparecida
Silva Ribe iro (20-21), Már io de Andrade rapidamente se apercebe que o
imperativo fo lclorizante é lim itador e empobrecedor. Assim, na abertura do
Ensaio sobre a Mús ica Bras ileira, publicado apenas uns meses depois do Clã do
Jabuti, o artista (e musicólogo) redime-se parante os seus le itores:
Nós, modernos, manifestamos dois defe itos grandes: bastante
ignorancia e le viandade sistematizada. É comum entre nós a
rasteira derrubando da jangada nac ional não só as obras e
autores passados como até os que atualmente empregam a
67
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
tematica brasile ira numa orque stra europea ou no quarteto de
cordas. Não é bras ileiro se fala. [...] Um dos conselhos europeus
que tenho escutado bem é que a gente si quiser fazer músic a
nacional tem que campear e lementos entre os aborigenes pois
que só mesmo êstes é que são legitimamente brasile iros. Isso é
uma
puerilidade
que
inclui
ignorancia
dos
problemas
sociologicos, etnicos, psicolo gicos e esteticos. Uma arte
nacional não se faz com escôlha discrec ionaria e dilet ante de
elementos: uma arte nacional já está fe ita na inconsciência do
povo. [Grafia original da p ublic ação de 1928] (Andrade 1928
3-4)
O Turista A prendiz, que conhecemos na ve rsão organ izada e edit ada
recentemente por Telê Ancona Lopez, relata as impressões de M ário de
Andrade de d uas viagens pe las regiões do Amazonas e do Nordeste no
Brasil, empreendidas no final da década de 20. Em 1927, o escritor parte
para o Amazonas como membro da expedição organizada por Dona Olívia
Guedes Penteado, famosa dama paulist a e mecenas dos modernistas, e
anota livremente as sensaçõe s, ide ias e im agens desta experiência, com uma
vaga intenção de transformar e ste diário pe ssoal num livro de viagem. Este
projecto, retomado de facto em 1943, n ão chegou a ser finalizado. Em
1928, Már io de Andrade viaja par a o Nordeste como jornalista do Diário
Nacional e desta ve z public a as suas impressões como crónicas re gulare s
intitulad as “O Tur ista Aprendiz”. A obra apresentada por Telê Ancona
Lopez reúne os textos relat ivos às duas viagens etnográficas: o diár io de
1927, reescrito pelo autor em 1943 sob o título longo e parodiante O
Turista Aprendiz: Viagens pelo Amazonas até o Peru, pelo Madeira até a Bol ívia e
por Marajó até dizer chega, e a sér ie de crónic as de car ácter mais object ivo, de
1928.
As d uas viagens, como destaca fortemente Telê Ancona Lopez n a
introdução ao diário, foram a re alização de um sonho de Mário de
Andrade, que considerava a Amazónia co mo “uma sede de uma vivência
tropical, marcada pelo ócio criador” (2002 17) e o Norte e o Nordeste
como “ricos repositórios de tradição e cultura popular” (2002 16). A ideia
68
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
de que é preciso conhecer o Norte – o Outro, bem distinto da realidade do
sul metropolitano do Brasil – para conseguir criar uma ric a e independente
cult ura brasileira e stá entretecida dentro de vár ias obser vações do escr itor,
que de screve as paisagens, os cost umes, a c omida e as festas, como se fosse
um verdade iro aprendiz de etnógrafo. A insistência na necessidade de
reconhecimento do valor cult ural do norte brasileiro preconiza a ide ia de
que para “se aprender a p artir do S ul, de ve mos, antes de mais, de ixar falar
o Sul, pois o que melhor identifica o S ul é o facto de ter sido silenc iado”,
proposta por Boaventura de Sousa S antos (344), resguardada a diferença de
referencial a partir do qual é traçado o azimute: no caso de BSS o Norte é
o “Prime iro Mundo” e o S ul o “Terceiro”; no contexto brasile iro é o S ul
que é r ico e o Norte pobre. No caso do Brasil visto por Mário de Andrade,
é o Norte que ficou silenciado pelo dinâmico e moderno Sul, que se tornou
no novo centro de produção cultural, ar tístic a e c ientífica, fortemento
ligado, no entanto, com os valores europeus. O chocante contraste que o
escritor sente entre o norte e o sul inc lina- o a repensar os fundamentos da
cult ura brasileir a. Na opinião de Mário de Andrade existe um dese quilíbr io
entre a herança colonial e uropeia dominante e as influências indígenas e
afric anas que representam as voze s subalternas da realidade brasile ir a
daque la alt ura, usando o termo no sentido que lhe atribui Gay atri Sp ivak
(1995), e este desequilíbrio impossibilita a construção de uma cultur a
nacional própria. O autor argumenta:
Quero resumir minhas impressões desta viagem litorânea por
nordeste e norte do Brasil, não consigo be m, estou um bocado
aturdido, maravilhado, mas não se i... Há uma e spécie de
sensação ficad a da insufic iência, de sar apintação, que me
estraga todo o europeu cinzento e bem-arranjadinho que ainda
tenho dentro de mim. Por enquanto, o que mais me parece é
que tanto a natureza como a vida destes lugares foram feito s
às pressas, com excesso de castroalves. E esta pré-noção
invencível, mas invencíve l, de que o Brasil, em vez de se
utilizar d a Á frica e da Índia que te ve em si, desperdiço u-as,
enfeitando com elas apenas a sua fisionomia, suas epidermes,
sambas, marac atus, traje s, cores, vocabulários, quitutes.. . E
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
deixou-se ficar, por dentro, justamente naquilo que, pelo
clima, pela raça, alimentação, tudo, não poderá nunca ser, mas
apenas macaque ar, a E uropa. Nos orgulhamos de ser o único
grande (grande?) país c ivilizado tropical. .. Isso é o nosso
defeito, a nossa impotência. Devíamos p ensar, sentir como
indianos, chins, gente de Benin, de Java... T alve z então
pudéssemos criar cult ura e civilização próprias. Pelo menos
seríamos mais nós, tenho certeza. (Andrade 2002 59-60)
Este longo d isc urso re vela o chocante contraste que o t urista sente
entre o Brasil imaginado pe los habitante s das gr andes metrópoles, tais
como São Paulo, que aspir am a fundar um a civilização moderna à imagem
da Europa, e o Norte e Nordeste brasile iro, culturalmente híbridos. Um
aspecto marcante nestes pensamentos da p ersonagem de Már io de Andrade
é a conceptualização d a nação. A sua visão da nação brasileir a em processo
de reformulaç ão cultural e identitár ia, aqui apresentada, é cr ucial par a
perceber o projecto nacionalista que o esc ritor propõe no seu diár io e, em
particular, a posiç ão do narrador – que assume vár ios papéis, tais como o
artista, o poeta, o fotógrafo, o jornalist a e o etnógrafo, ao longo da
narrativa 1 – frente ao mundo que o rodeia.
Ao desenvolver estas reflexões inspiradas pelo contacto com os
lugare s “fe itos muito às pressas, com excesso de castroalve s”, Már io de
Andrade
descontrói
os
fundamentos
ideológicos
e
conceptuais
do
nacionalismo ofic ial, vigente na época. Nas suas impressões, o escritor
apresenta a imagem da naç ão brasile ira c riada pelo disc urso nacionalist a
das elites intelect uais e polít icas a partir do conceito da nação moderna.
Nesta visão, o Brasil é definido como um país “gr ande”, “c ivilizado” e
“tropical”. Os adject ivos “grande” e “c ivilizado”, de c ariz claramente
positivo, conotam-se com os valores do Estado-nação moderno, com um
sistema económico e administrativo desenvolvido se gundo os princ ípios do
mundo ocidental. “Tropical”, por seu lado, é usado como um marco de
O papel do Mário de Andrade-personagem é multifacetado e vai constantemente mudando ao longo da
narrativa. No entanto, uma análise minuciosa das várias faces deste protagonista, desenvolvida na nossa tese
de doutoramento, não cabe nos objectivos deste ensaio. Em relação à construção e descontrução da narrativa
etnográfica (e da figura do etnógrafo) nas obras Turista Aprendiz e Macunaíma, veja-se o nosso artigo “As
viagens de Mário de Andrade: entre os factos e a ficção” (Krakowska, 2012).
1
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diferença, um e lemento identitário, cr ucial para a distinção do Brasil das
outras “grandes civilizações”, t anto na perspectiva dos estrange iros como
dos seus próprios cidadãos. A adaptaç ão de certas caracter ístic as locais,
descritas pela noção de “tropical”, p ara o disc urso nac ionalista demonstra
que os e lementos fund amentais para a construção da ide ia de naç ão são o
reconhecimento da identidade nac ional pe lo Outro e a criação de laços de
pertença e identificação entre os membros da comunidade. Este car ácter
bilateral do processo da formação da ide ia de nação, que se vai construindo
no espaço liminar entre o Eu e o Outro, é coerente com a análise
apresentada por Benedict Anderson em Comunidades Imaginadas, em que o
estud ioso destac a a importância da p artilha do imaginár io comum para a
edificaç ão da nação. Este imaginár io pode ser inconscientemente escolhido
pela própria comunidade, o u pode surgir como consequência do olhar
classific ador do Outro, como acontece no caso da criação de m apas, cen sos
e muse us no contexto colonial (Anderson 121). No entanto, tal como o
projecto nacionalist a dos grande s império s europeus do séc ulo XIX não
conseguiu concretizar as suas ambiçõe s unificadoras (Anderson 124), o
disc urso nacionalista, critic ado por Mário de Andrade, também falhou o
seu objectivo de conseguir foc ar o ve rdadeiro n úcleo da identidade
nacional brasile ira. O escritor enfatiza que o Brasil, ao forjar a sua c ult ura
nacional, desperd içou o elementos de origem africana ou índia, “enfe itando
com elas apenas a sua fisionomia, suas epidermes, sambas, marac atus,
trajes,
cores,
voc abulários,
quit utes... ”
(o
defeito
que
o
escritor
problematiza t ambém no trecho acima c itado do Ens aio sobre a Músic a
Brasile ira).
Na visão do turista aprendiz, é preciso desestabilizar a visão do
Brasil como um país que d á continuidade exclusivamente à sua heranç a
europeia. Sem abandonar a ideia da naç ão moderna (associada aqui à
civilizaç ão), o escritor propõe uma revisão dos seus fundamentos cult urais
num contexto multicultural. Para ele, a condição para “criar cultura e
civilizaç ão próprias” consiste em interiorizar os e lementos das vár ias
cult uras que convivem no território brasileiro. A justaposição dos termos
“cultur a” e “civilização” reforça a ide ia r ecorrente ao longo do texto de
que a naç ão é uma “forma de cultura”, usando a expressão de Anthony
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Smith (1991 118). Esta c ult ura é moldada de forma sign ificativa pe los
factores exteriores, tais como o clima, a raça, a alimentação, etc., o que
diferencia, na perspectiva de Már io de Andrade, o Brasil da Europa. Além
disso, os sambas, marac atus e vocab ulários locais, enumerados pe lo
escritor, são uma herança de toda a c omunidade, e não apenas dos
descendentes directos d as vár ias etnias que a compõem. Isto é, como no
Brasil não há um único núc leo étnico, os mitos, símbolos e memórias
comuns são necessár ios para a criação de laços de pertença. Assim, ao
analisar o discur so de Mário de Andrade sob a perspectiva da teoria etnosimbóloca de Anthony Smith, a incorporação no imaginário nacional de
tradições e costumes locais, que surgiram numa determinada re gião devido
à presença de raízes afric anas ou indígen as, é crucial para a formação da
ideia de nação, porque a naç ão “pode ser uma formação social moderna,
mas é baseada de certa forma em cultur as, identidades e heranças préexistentes” 2 (1999 175).
A ideia de comunidade é conscientemente destacada no discur so do
turista aprendiz. Na últim a parte das suas considerações, o escritor de ix a
de referir o Brasil como uma entidade abstracta e passa a dirigir-se
directamente aos membros da nação. A repetição do pronome possessivo
“nosso” e a utilizaç ão de verbos na primeira pesso a do plural (nos
orgulhamos, de víamos, pudéssemos, seríamos) cria um laço de afinidade e
fraternidade entre os cidadãos, remetendo para a ideia de Benedict
Anderson de que a nação é uma comunidade lim itada, tal como a família
(Anderson 27). Além disso, na afirmação “Deviamos pensar, sentir como
indianos, chins, gente de Benin, de Java...” reve la- se um a proximidade
epistemológic a entre as várias comunidades que nasceram nas ruínas do
sistema colonial e estão a forjar a sua c ultura e a sua identidade a partir de
e contra a cultura dominante do colonizador.
A renúncia da cultura própria em favor duma cópia irreflectida dos
valores
e
das
matrizes
ocidentais
é,
segundo
Mário
de
Andrade ,
particularmente visíve l quando se compara a cultura brasile ira com a
“The nation may be a modern social formation, but it is in some sense based on pre-existing cultures,
identities and heritages” (Smith, 1999:175).
2
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peruana. O viajante repara ao chegar ao território peruano que os
“peruanos, de scendentes de espanhóis, falam com orgulho patriótico dos
Incas, na c ivilização incaica, n a músic a in caic a” (Andrade, 2002: 105). Em
contraste, no Brasil, se gundo o autor, há apenas tentativas de “lançar o
estilo m arajo ara” (2002 105), que se refer e ao est ilo m uito e laborado das
cerâmicas criad as pelas tribos indígen as pré-colombianas que ocup avam a
Ilha de Marajó no estado do Pará 3.
A descendência Inca tornou-se, como observa o escr itor, um a
referência c ult ural cruc ial tanto para a auto-definiç ão do povo peruano
como para o reconhecimento da sua integridade pelos Outros. No entanto,
quando o turista visit a, no Peru, a povoação índia Huitôta observa um a
decadência visíve l das tradições e dos cost umes cultivado s pela tribo, que
vive na terra cedid a pelo governo e que trabalha apenas 20 dias por ano,
conforme exigido pelas autoridades. Além disso, o “aldeamento é já um
pueblo de índio se vest indo como nós, isto é calça e paletó, ou c alç a e
camisa, e hablando un s farrapos de esp anhol” (Andrade 2002 104). Nest a
descrição fragmentária de staca-se uma forte oposição entre “nós” –
supostamente civilizados, ve stidos de maneira ocidental, a falar línguas
impostas pelo colonialismo – e os “índios” – os Outros, cuja aparência e
cujo comportamento supreendemente não correspondem à visão exótic a do
índio se lvagem. A expectativa do exotismo no encontro com o Outro era
um marco das narrativas coloniais que apr esentavam as populações nativas
dos territórios explorados como curiosos objectos de estudo. No entanto,
na nossa opinião, a visão de Mário de Andrade, apesar de certas
semelhanças com a at itude colonizadora, inverte e desconstrói as antigas
relações do poder.
Enquanto nas narrativas e urocêntricas o Outro era visto como um
objecto sem agência e sem qualquer influê ncia sobre o Eu-colonizador, no
Turista Aprendiz há uma rede de interações entre o Eu e o Outro. Por um
lado, o índio é um Outro exótico, mas simultaneamente é um portador de
A existência do património marajoara foi descoberta apenas em 1871 pelos pesquisadores Charles Hartt e
Domingos Penna e até ao final da década 40 do século XX os estudos arqueológicos na área foram muito
fragmentários. Só em meados do século, já depois da morte de Mário de Andrade, começaram estudos mais
sistemáticos. Veja-se a respeito, por exemplo, a dissertação de Denise Pahl Schaan A Linguagem Iconográfica da
Cerâmica Marajoara.
3
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referências identitárias para a naç ão inteira. Por outro lado, as leis e os
costumes indígenas vão-se transformando e adaptando sob a influênc ia dos
valores cultur ais e sociais cultivados pelo resto da sociedade e também das
suas expectativas enquanto cult uras minoritárias. Um Huitôta explic a a
Mário de Andrade este processo de complexas mud anças cultur ais e sociais
numa parábola que conta como os Incas de ixar am de construir seus
palác ios impressionantes:
Huitôta nem carece imaginar se é fe liz, porque agora ele j á
passou pra d iante do tempo do palácio e da lei. Huitôta é feliz,
moço, não é gente decaída não. [...] Huitôta só sabe o que
Deus mand a porque os h uitôtas agora possuem um de us que
manda nele s. Não se amolam mais com o palácio de pedra ne m
com o palácio que tem no fundo da gente no escuro. (200 2
108)
Assim, neste processo de múltip las tran sformações identitár ias, as
comunidades subalternas (tais como os ín dios, os negros, e os orientais)
cult ivam a diferença sem renunciar às novas influências, especialmente
vind as da E uropa. De facto, a globalização da cult ura já estava presente,
embora espacialmente lim itada, no tempo das expedições de Mário de
Andrade 4. As comunid ades c ult uralment e dominantes, por se u lado,
redefinem as suas r aízes e, remetendo à metáfora de Kapuściński ac im a
citada, reconhecem “o seu Outro”; isto é, compreendem que na perspectiva
de outras comunidade s elas próprias são vistas como um “Outro”. A
reconstrução da identid ade nacional atr avés da figura do Outro, que
podemos observar no diário, é uma representação modernista e pessoal de
um fenómeno muito mais amplo, que Mar y Louise Pratt descre ve como a
“reinvenção d a Améric a”, in iciada no séc ulo XIX pelas e lites crioulas sulamericanas. A estud iosa ar gumenta:
Nos tempos de Mário de Andrade, a zona de contacto entre índios e brancos no Norte do Brasil limitava-se
às margens dos rios, visto que o transporte fluvial era o único meio de contacto com o resto do mundo.
Note-se que a Rodovia Transamazónica foi inaugurada apenas em 1972. A sua localização remota e o difícil
acesso classificam o Norte do Brasil como uma região periférica, na acepção da teoria de sistemas-mundo de
Immanuel Wallerstein (2004). A periódica extensão e retracção de zonas de influência culturais ao longo da
História foi sempre condicionada pela facilidade de contacto entre centro e periferia (Braudel, 1993).
4
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One would seriously misinterpret creole relat ions to the
European metropolis (even their neocolonial dimensions) if
one thought of creole aesthetics as simply imitatin g or
mechanically reproducing E uropean disco urses. … One can
more
accurately
think
of
creole
representation
as
transculturating E uropean materials, se lect ing and deployin g
them in ways that do not simply reproduce the hegemonic
visions of E urope
or
simply
le gitimat e
the
designs o f
European capital. (187- 188)
A estratégia de desconstruir e reformular as relações entre o Eu e o
Outro é desenvolvida no diário em dois níveis conceptuais. A lém da
dist inção baseada na c ategoria rac ial (ín dio vs. branco) que comporta
certos elementos da identidade cultural da comunidade, Már io de Andrade
mostra o forte carácter regional da c ultur a brasile ira e a ex istência duma
identidade bem-definida em cada região, cuja formação foi influenciada
pela presença das comunidade s índigenas e de origem afric ana no s
respectivos territórios. Sob a óptica do paulista, os estados do Norte como
o Pará ou o Amazonas são zonas do domín io do Outro. Assim, ao chegar a
Belém, “a cid ade princ ipal da Polinésia” (Andrade 1995 62), o viajante
estranha o ambiente exótico, as mangue iras que domin am a paisagem e os
costumes, tais como o hábito de passe ar com os porcos-de-mato de
correntinha. O contraste entre a capital do Pará e o Brasil que Mário de
Andrade conhecia até altura faz com que o turista fique com a impressão
de estar no estrangeiro exótico. Nas palavras do autor, é “engraçado” o
facto de que “a gente a todo momento imagina que vive no Brasil mas é
fantástic a a sensação de estar no Cairo que se tem” (2002 62).
A chocante sensação de estranhamento em contacto com o “outro”
Brasil repete-se, embora por razões e steticamente diferentes, também na
chegada a Santarém. Desta ve z, a c idade nortenha impressiona n ão tanto
pelo seu car ácter exótico e exuberante, como pela sua semelhança com a
Veneza italiana. O tur ista descre ve:
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Pelo an úncio da tarde, chegamos a Santarém, com estranhas
sensações venezianas, por causa do hotel ancorado no porto,
enfiando o paredão n’água, e com jan elas em ogiva! Os
venezianos falam muito bem a nossa língua e são todos dum a
cor tapuia esc ura, mui lisa. Fomos recebidos com muit a
cordialid ade pelo doge que nos mostrou a cidade que acaba derepente. (2002 70)
Nesta descr ição o e scritor conscientemente desenvolve a comparaç ão
entre as duas cid ades atrib uindo metaforic amente a identidade veneziana a
todo Santarém, incluindo os seus moradores. Este procedimento permite
não só destac ar a c urio sa semelhança, mas também, ou em partic ular,
transmitir a sensaç ão de estar no estrangeiro. Deste modo, SantarémVeneza passa a pertencer a uma realidade distinta à realidade brasile ira,
embora os seus habitantes se jam capazes de falar bem “a nossa lín gua”.
Também a pequena anotação na foto do hotel em causa, que constava entre
os materiais de M ário de Andrade par a a elaboração do livro de viagem e
foi inc luíd a na ed ição de Te lê Ancona Lopez, levanta a questão da
construção de identidade s. A inscriç ão “T o be or not to be Veneza / Eis
aqui estão o givas de Santarém” (Andrade 2002 71) satir icamente in voca o
famoso dilem a de Oswald de Andrade do Manifesto Antropófago “Tupy, or
not tupy that is the question” (Andrade 1995 419), que por se u lado
parodia o famoso dilem a do Ham let Shake speariano. A cómica interpelação
sobre as o givas de Santarém pode incitar a formulação de várias perguntas.
Como construimos a nossa identidade ? Como nos diferenciamos dos
outros? Como nos identific amos com a nossa comunidade? Como pode
uma cid ade como Santarém marcar a sua identidade dentro do panorama
cult ural brasile iro? “To be or not to be Veneza” passa a ser, nest a
perspectiva, uma que stão crucial para a compreensão dos processos
identitário s da nação brasile ira.
Tal como o Norte e o Nordeste parecem um país estrange iro nos
olhos dos paulistas, assim o parece São Paulo nos olhos dos habit antes dos
estados do norte do Brasil. O próprio turista aprendiz, sendo natural de
São Paulo, no norte do país passa vár ias veze s por um estrangeiro
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
(Andrade 2002 95). Durante a visita à missão franciscana, os frade s
italianos
explicam
ao
escritor
que
São
Paulo
é,
na
sua
opinião,
profundamente marcado pela influência italiana, de modo que até Mário de
Andrade fala com uma pronúncia muito característ ica. De facto, o fre i
Diogo dirige-se com muita firmeza à comit iva de Dona Olívia: “Vocês são
paulist as... Vocês n ão são brasile iros não! Pra ser brasile iro precisa vir no
Amazonas, aqui sim” (Andrade 2002 94).
No entanto, embora São Paulo não se ja visto como espaço de
referência na formação d a identidade aut óctone do Brasil, a metrópole é
sem dúvida considerad a como um centro de produção artístic a, política e
científica. Os jornais, tais como Estado de S. Paulo, são regularmente
adquiridos pelos frade s e outros habitantes letrados do norte do país, o que
dá a Mário de Andrade “meio orgulho estadual, meio susto da importância
do Estado” ( 2002 94). Porém, o acesso aos jornais é também um marco de
diferença que distingue as classe s e as regiõ es. O turist a observa as crianças
que fre quentam a escola primária de Marac agüera, no estado do Pará, e no
tempo livre de pesc a leem as notícias do Brasil nos jornais que ser viram
como papel de embrulho:
O recreio é pra tomar banho de brin quedo no furo. Depois se
volta pro b-a-bá e assim mais tarde aquele s pescadores somam
sozinhos o dinheiro ganhando com os camorins e as pesc adas
e lêem no jornal que veio embrulh ando a far inha d’água de
Belém, o caso de Lampeão e mais desordens dos brasileiros de
nascença. (2002 66)
A expressão “brasile iros de nascença”, aqui de car ácter claramente
irónico, reve la o o lhar crít ico e de sconstrutor sobre a nacionalidade
brasileir a por parte de Mário de Andrade. Ao destacar ironicamente o facto
de que os habitantes das grandes cidades adquirem a identidade brasile ira
logo no momento de nascença, enquan to os índios podem tornar-se
“completamente brasile iros” apenas quando “vivem por aí falando língua
nossa, sem memória talve z de suas tribos” (2002 91-92), o turista parodia
as re lações de poder entre o colonizado r e o colonizado. No sistema
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colonial,
os co lonizadores eram,
de
facto,
vistos como
civilizados
portadores de identid ade c ult ural e nac io nal, em contraste com os povos
colonizados que precisavam de passar pelo processo de assim iliaç ão e
aculturaç ão
para
serem
considerados
membros (embora de
estatuto
inferior) da comunid ade. Homi Bhabha explica e sta visão estát ica da
realidade, que reforçava o estereótipo na visão do Outro e just ificava a
situação colonial:
O
estereótipo
é,
assim,
enquanto
ponto
primeiro
de
subject ivação no disc urso co lonial, t anto para o colonizador
como para o colonizado, o cenário de uma fantasia e de fesa
similare s – o dese jo de uma originariedade que é mais uma ve z
ameaçad a pelas diferenças de raça, cor e cultura. O me u
argumento está esplendidamente contido no título de Fanon
Pele negra, máscaras brancas em que a r ecusa da diferenç a
transforma o súbdito colonial em inadaptado – numa imitaç ão
grotesca ou num “dup lo” que ameaça c indir a alm a e toda a
pele, ind iferenciado, do ego. O estere ótipo não é uma
simplificação por ser um a falsa representação de uma dad a
realidade.
É
uma
simplificaç ão
porque
é
uma
forma
imobilizada, fix a, de representação que, ao negar o jogo da
diferença ( que a negação atravé s do Outro autoriza), constit ui
um problema para a representação do sujeito nas sua s
significações d as relações psíquicas e sociais. (2005b 155)
No Turista A prendiz, M ário de Andrade desenvolve um complexo
“jogo da d iferença” que reve la múltiplo s estereótipos provenientes do
disc urso colonial que se mantiver am na sociedade brasile ira quase um
século depois d a proclamaç ão da independência. Neste novo contexto, em
que as figuras do colono e do colonizado foram oficialmente abolidas, a
simplificação da representação da realidade continua a ser visíve l na
relação entre as novas metrópoles brasile iras (nomeadamente São Paulo e
Rio de J aneiro) e as re giões culturalmente dist intas e pouco modernizadas
(Amazónia e Nordeste). A desconstrução desta relaç ão aparentemente
unívoca e unilateral é re alizad a no diário e m termos de diferenciação entre
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
as regiões inteir as e não apenas entre os indivíduos. Q uando Mário de
Andrade, por exemplo, critica a ignorância dos habitantes das metrópoles
brasileir as e dos turistas estran geiros fascinados pela Amazônia, apresent a
todos os viajantes, quer que falem português quer inglê s, como um grupo
homogéneo
que,
em
ger al,
não
conse gue
compreender
a
realidade
observada:
Todos
se
propõem
conhecedoríssimos
das
co isas
de st a
pomposa Amazônia de que tiram uma fantástica vaidade
improváve l, “terra do futuro ”... Mas quando a gente pergunta,
o que um responde que é castanheira, o outro discute pois
acha que é pato com t ucupi. Só quem sabe mesmo algum a
coisa é a gente ignorante da terceira classe. Poucas ve zes, a
não ser entre os modernistas do Rio, tenho visto in strução
mais desorientad a que a de ssa gente, no geral falando inglês.
(2002 92).
Estas profundas diferenças entre o norte e o sul do Brasil, que em
geral não são sufic ientemente conhecidas e compreendidas, são vistas pelas
autoridades como uma desvantagem que deveria ser elimin ada. Már io de
Andrade, obrigado a proferir um disc urso improvisado dur ante o almoço
com o prefeito de Belém, fic a surpreendido com o entusiasmo com que
todos os convidados recebem as suas palavras sobre a possível an iquilação
das fronteiras c ult urais entre os estados. O turista comenta:
Fale i que tudo era muito lindo, que estávamos maravilhados, e
idênticas besteiras verdade iríssimas, e soltei a idé ia: no s
sentíamos tão em casa (que mentira!) que nos parecia que
tinham se eliminado os lim ites estaduais! Sentei como quem
tinha le vado uma surra de pau. Mas a idéia t inha ... tinham
gostado. Mas isso não impediu que a c hampanha estive sse
estragada, uma porcaria. (2002 62)
Na visão de Mário de Andrade, que se vai revelando nas páginas do
diár io, a diferença é uma vantagem que deve ser est udada e c ultivada.
Apenas percebendo a riqueza das cult uras locais, influenc iadas em grão
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
diferente pela presença das tradições e dos costumes indígenas, afric anos,
orientais, e também europeus, é possível construir um a c ult ura nac ional
heterogénea, híbrida, mas sim ult aneamente coesa. Sob esta perspectiva, as
noções do Eu e do Outro de ixam de ser conceitos opostos e exclusivos,
passando a ser vistos como componentes da mesma identidade. A ideia de
criar unid ade a p artir d a d iferença é c lar amente visíve l, por exemplo, no
estudo sobre as manife stações de feit içar ia em várias re giõe s do Brasil, que
o turista aprendiz desenvo lve n as crónicas de 1928. O cronista de screve a
distrib uiç ão espacial de stas prátic as de maneira se guinte:
A feitiç aria brasileir a não é uniforme não. Até o nome das
manifestações de la m uda bem dum lugar p ra outro. Do Rio de
Janeiro pra Bahia impera a designaç ão “macumba”. As se ssões
são
chamadas
de
macumbas
e
os
feiticeiros
e
demais
assistentes, às ve zes, são os “mac umbeiros”. Os feit iceiros,
“pais-de-terreiro”, realizam as mac umbas e invocam os santos,
etc.
Já no norte as sessõe s são “paje lanç as” e é frequentíssima a
palavra “pajé” designando o pai-de-terreiro, assim como o
santo invocado.
Se vê logo as zonas onde atuaram as influê ncias dominantes
dos afric anos e ameríndios. Do Rio até a Bahia, negros; no
norte os ameríndios. Os deuses, os santos das mac umbas são
todos quase de proviniência afric ana. N o Pará quase todos
saídos da religiosidade ameríndia.
O nordeste, de Pernambuco ao Rio Grande do Norte pelo
menos, é a zona em que essas influências rac iais mist uram.
Palavr as, de use s, práticas se trançam. (2002 216).
Este pequeno e studo etnográfico-linguístico descreve as diferenças
na denominação das práticas de fe itiç aria, t ais como os nomes da cerimónia
e dos próprios feiticeiros, e indica quais são as influências cultur ais
dominantes na sua constit uiç ão. No entanto, embora haja uma c lar a
fronteira etno-cultural entre o norte e o sul litoral do país, M ário de
Andrade não fala em manife stações locais ou regionais de feit içar ia. Na sua
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
opinião, existe um fenómeno de “feitiçaria brasileir a”. O adjectivo
“brasile iro” não tem aqui sent ido apenas territorial ou político, que se
refira ao território do estado brasileiro, mas comporta toda a série de
valores emocionais relacionados com os sentimentos nacionalistas. A
“feit içar ia brasileir a” é vista como uma re ferência cultur al que pode criar
laços de pertença entre os membros da nação. Além disso, a ide ia de
trânsito
entre
identidade s
c ult urais,
n ecessár ia
p ara
construir
um a
comunidade híbr ida, é fortemente destacada nos comentários de Mário de
Andrade sobre o Nordeste. Este território, onde “palavras, de uses, prát icas
se trançam”, é uma “zona de contacto”, usando o termo de Mary L uise
Pratt (4), entre as tradições ameríndias, africanas e e uropeias, a condição
que permitiu o surgimento de novas tradições e novas manifestaçõe s
identitárias. Este e spaço pós-colonial ofer ece, segundo o tur ista aprendiz,
imensas oportunidades que precisam de ser exploradas antes de serem
abandonadas e e squecidas. Por isso, o cronista, ao assistir ao bailado
tradicional em Paraibá, ironicamente comenta o gradual dec lín io da r ique za
cult ural do Brasil:
Os gr upos e as formas de bailados são diver sos. Além do s
“Cabocolinhos”,
tem
os
“Índios
afr icanos”,
tem
os
“Canindés”, os “C aramur us”, etc. Mas tudo vai se acabando
agora que o Brasil principia... (2002 285).
No entanto, apesar da possíve l uniformização da cultur a brasile ira, a
forte diferenciação das trad ições e dos costumes locais, c ircunscr itos
frequentemente às fronteiras e staduais, constitui uma importante referência
identitária para os seus habitantes. Assim, quando os passageiros do
Vaticano, onde viaja Már io de Andrade, são solic itados pelos m issionário s
italianos a assinar o livro de visitas, in dicando as suas nac ionalidades,
aparecem design ações tais como “paulist a” ou “amazonense”. De facto, o
escritor confessa: “Dentre os brasileiros de bordo, fui o ún ico brasile iro,
sem querer” (2002 116). Esta tentativa de auto-defin ição demonstra como
as
identid ades
formadas
num
contexto
altamente
mult icultur al
e
multiétnico, como acontece no caso brasileiro, passam a ser múlt iplas e
fluid as. A s cate gorias identit árias unívoc as e exc lusivas, impostas pelo
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sistema colonial, de ix am de ser válidas quando confrontadas com o grupo
de dança “Índios afr icanos” ou com a feit içar ia pernambucana que une os
elementos de religiões indígenas, afr icanas e do catolicismo. Neste
contexto, é possível ser um escr itor paulista e brasileiro que procura as
suas origen s entre os macumbeiros da Baía, interligando as várias
identidades sobrepostas num mosaico complexo e sempre em construção.
Em conclusão, O Turista Aprendiz é um diário de busc a de um
“outro” Brasil, c uja identidade se baseia na diferença. Már io de Andrade ,
inspirado pelo exemplo do Peru que constrói a sua identidade a partir da
herança inca, procura as manifestações da cultura indígena que poderiam
servir como referências da cult ura nacional brasileir a. Nas suas viagens, o
escritor descobre sítios, tais como Belém ou Santarém, que lhe provocam
um profundo estranhamento, o que lhe pe rmite desconstruir e repensar a
unívoca visão co lonial do Outro. A lém disso, nestes encontros com o
Outro (o índio, o negro, o oriental, mas também o amazonense ou o
pernambucano) Mário de Andrade perceb e a sua própria condição de ser
um estrange iro dentro do panorama do Brasil. A ssim, o Outro passa a ser
uma d as manifestações do Eu. A dife rença passa a ser um marco
característ ico da cultura nac ional.
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Obras Citadas
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Impresso.
Andrade, Mário de. O Turista Aprendiz. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 2002.
Impresso.
---. Ensaio sobre Musica Brasileira. São Paulo: Editores I. Ch iarato & C ia,
1928. Impresso.
Andrade, Oswald de. “Man ifesto Antropófago”. L iteratura Bras ileira. Ed.
Maria Aparecid a Ribeiro. L isboa: Universidade Aberta, 1995. 419-420.
Impresso.
Bhabha, Homi K. O Local da Cult ura. B elo Horizonte: Editora UFMG,
2005a.
---.“A Questão Outra”. Deslocal izar a Euro pa. Antro pologia, Arte, Literatura e
História na Pós-Colonial idade. Ed. Manue la Ribe iro Sanches. Lisboa:
Cotovia, 2005b. 143-166. Impresso.
Braude l, Fernand. O Tempo do Mundo. Lisboa: Teorema, 1993. Impresso.
Kapuśc iński, Ry szard. O Outro. Porto: Campo das Letras, 2009. Impresso.
Krakowska, K amila. “A s viagens de Már io de Andrade: entre os factos e a
ficção ”. Dedalus – Re vista da A ssociação Portuguesa de Literatur a
Comparada. (Forthcoming 2012). Impresso.
Lafetá, João Luís. Mário de Andrade. S ão Paulo: Nova C ultura, 1988.
Impresso.
Lopez, Telê Porto Ancona. Introdução. O Turista Aprendiz. M ário de
Andrade. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 2002. 15-43. Impresso.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.
London: Routledge, 1995. Impresso.
Ribeiro, Maria Aparecid a Silva. Mário de Andrade e a cultura popul ar. Cur itiba:
Secretaria de Est ado da C ult ura: Câm ara do Livro: The Document
Company – Xerox, 1997. Impresso.
Santos, Boaventur a de So usa. A Critíca da Raz ão Indole nte – Co ntra o
desperdício da experiênc ia. 2. ed. Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2002.
Schaan, Denise Pahl. A L inguagem Iconográf ica da Cerâmica Marajoara.
Dissertaç ão. Pontifíc ia Un iversidade Católic a de Porto Alegre, 1996.
Web.
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Smith, Anthony D. Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford
Univer sity Press, 1999. Impresso.
---. A Identidade Nacio nal. Lisboa: Gradiva, 1991. Impresso.
Spivak, Gayatr i Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader. Ed. Bill A shcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin.
London: Routledge, 1995. 24- 28. Impresso.
Wallerste in, Immanuel. Worl d-Systems Analysis: An Intro duction. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004. Impresso.
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LETÍCIA MARIA COSTA DA NÓBREGA CESARINO
U ni v e rsi ty of C ali f orni a, Be rke le y
BRAZILIAN POSTCOLONIALITY AND SOUTHSOUTH COOPERATION: A VIEW FROM
ANTHROPOLOGY
In both lay and academic circ les, it is not common to find the term
postcolonial associated with Latin America, and perhaps even less so with
Brazil. Th is probably has to do with the dynamics of this idea, a relat ive ly
recent construct that was born overseas and has c irculated mostly in
Anglophone scholarly environments other than Latin America. But this lo w
currency of postcoloniality versus notions such as modernity or nationbuildin g in the subcontinent might point to some of the very issue s
postcolonial theory seeks to approach: t he constitution of postcolonial
subjects, the politics of enunciation, and so forth.
In Latin America, postcoloniality has invo lved the construction, by
Creole elites, of a corpus of political thought and social theory during
lengthy and contested processe s of state -formation and nation-building
which are partic ular to the former Iberian colonies (among wh ich, as will
be discussed here, Brazil holds an eve n more peculiar post-colonial
outlook). The contemporary approximation between Brazil and other
countries in the global So uth, those in Sub-Saharan Afric a in partic ular,
invites us to revisit this nation-building literature in terms of an
articulat ion between processes of inter nal and external colonialism.
Contemporary postcolonial theory may provide a fresh aven ue for lookin g
at this literature as an early effort to make sense of Brazil’ s post-colonial
condition.
This paper will begin by revie wing two contrastive approaches in
the anthropological and neighboring lite ratures on Lat in America: the
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postcolonial and the multiple modernities perspectives. It then discusse s
the possible p lace(s) of Brazilian classic nation-buildin g literat ure in these
debates, putting forth an argument for the need for subst antial historical
embedding when addressing the postcolonial in relation to Brazil. It
concludes with remar ks based on ongoing ethnographic research about
contemporary South-South cooperation between Brazil and the African
continent.
1.
Perspectiv es on Bra zil and Latin America: modernity, nation-
building and postcoloniality
Differently to the postcolonial, the notion of modernity is a
common one in indigenous and foreign social sc iences liter ature about
Latin America and Brazil. That modernity is no longer to be thought of in
monolithic terms seems to be by now part of scholarly commonsense:
multip le (Eisenstadt “Introduction”, “The Fir st Multip le Modernities”,
Roniger
and
Waisman),
alternative
(Gaonkar),
other
(Rofel),
global
(Featherstone, Lash and Robertson), critical (Knauft), at lar ge (Appadurai)
– and, more specific ally for Latin America or Brazil, subaltern (Coronil),
subterranean (Aldama), mauso leum (White head), cannibal (Madureir a), or
tropical (Oliven) – are among the wide r ange of ep ithets that can be foun d
in the literature.
Contemporary globalization is the preferred chronological and
epistemologic al start ing point of much of the literature on mult iple
modernities. According to one of the champions of this approach, the
adject ive multiple is meant to come to terms with the fact that “the actual
developments in modernizing societie s have refuted the homogenizing an d
hegemonic
assumptions
of
th[e]
Western
program
of
modernity”
(Eisenstadt “Introduction” 1). Modernity is thus disentangle d from “the
West”, and its unfold ing into multiple s is re garded as the outcome of
Western modernity’s intrinsic opening to reflexivity which, with the
intensification
of
global
connections,
would
have
allowed
for
the
emergence of non-Western moderns. In anthropology, the idiom of
multip le modernities is present among those working on “areas and loc ale s
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that have different cult ural histories” than the West (Knauft 1) – that is,
regions caught within the grasp of Western colonial expansion much later
than Latin America, such as A sia (Appadurai, Rofel, Tambiah) and Afric a
(Piot, Deutch et al.).
There are however fundamental differe nces between the Latin
American experience with modernity and colonialism and that of the areas
typically covered by the anthropology of multip le modernities. As a “first
multip le modernity” (Eisenst adt “The First Mult iple Modernities”), Lat in
America
entertains
a
re lat ion
with
the
West
that
vastly
predates
contemporary globalizat ion, reaching as far back as ear ly European
modernity. Historical depth is therefore a particular ly important analytical
element when reflecting on postcoloniality in Latin America, as the
subcontinent has a long colonial and post-colonial history that cannot be
reduced to the more recent accelerat ion of global processes, and e ven to
modernization and development discourse.
Thus, multiple modernities literature gene rally associate s modernity
in Latin America less with one linear, continuous process than with
periodic “modernizing moves” (Domingues xi). Replicat ing a common
argument in Brazilian h istoriogr aphy, Brazilian socio logist Ren ato Ortiz
locates the consolidat ion of Brazil’s interest in modernity in the 1930’ s,
when, according to him, it became
something present, an imperative of our times, and no longer
a
promise
dislocated
in
t ime.
Problematic
modernity,
controversial but without do ubt an integral part of day-to-day
life (tele vision set s, automobiles, airports, shopping centers,
restaurants, cab le television, advertisin g, etc.). (258)
Another important claim is that Creole elites in newly independent
states have been the key architects of Latin America’s post-colonial
versions of modernity (Roniger and Waisman). Indeed, in contrast with
European colonizat ion in Asia and e specially in A fric a, during much of the
nineteenth century the Latin American republics were, even if st ill large ly
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financially dependent on Europe (Britain in particular), relatively left alone
to carry out their own state-formation experiments.
As others (Tavolaro, Calde ira, Domingue s), Ortiz deploys the ide a of
multip le modernities to counteract the incomplete modernity paradigm
common in Brazil’ s classic social theory – briefly p ut, those works that,
implic itly or explicit ly, define modernity in Brazil in terms of a lack.
Brazilian socio logist Sérgio Tavolaro advocates the multiple modernitie s
approach as an alternative to what he calls socio logy of dependency and
sociology of the patriarchal-patrimonialist heritage, which wo uld be
“incapab le of thinkin g contemporary Brazil as a fin ished exemplar of
modernity” (6), being therefore responsible for “our permanence in a sort
of semi-modern limbo” (10). Following Eisenstadt, he argues that an
acknowledgement
that
modernity
is
“historical”,
“contingent”,
“multifaceted” and “tend ing towards the global” wo uld be enough of a way
out of Brazilian intellectuals’ – in his view wrong-headed – obsession with
unauthenticity and peripherality (11).
A quest ion can be raised here that paralle ls the one put by Ferguson
(Global Shadows) concerning multip le modernities perspectives on Afr ica.
Would the brushing away of the incomplete modernity paradigm with the
stroke of a pen, and by selectively associat ing modernity with the diffusion
of certain material and immaterial forms, 1 be enough to wipe it out of the
self-conscio usness of the actors themselves? Moreover, this would imply
dism issing an entire corpus of Brazilian classic soc ial thought that has
more to offer than being either wrong or right.
At least since independence in 1822, Brazil’s intellectual and
political elites have been struggling with the challenge of constructing a
nation-state. But it was the inception of the Republic in 1889 that
prompted an onrush of what would becom e known as ensaios de interpretação
do Brasil (essay s of interpretation of Brazil), a hybrid literary-politicalscholarly genre characterized by a quest fo r Brazil’ s uniqueness as a nation
while at the same time diagnosing obstacle s to, and proposals for, its selfLike a “modern” cultural industry, urbanization, telecommunication technologies, a “rationalizing mentality”
in public management, or greater commitment to “market efficiency” (Ortiz 257).
1
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fulfillment. The most interesting aspect of this literature is not whether it
“acc urately ” descr ibes Brazil’ s socio-cultur al configur ation or its particular
brand of modernity, but to which extent such public ly ac knowledged and
highly influential works have effect ive ly concurred for shaping their own
object.
Modernity in this case refers not to one dividing line between the
national and the foreign, or between center and periphery, but encapsulate s
a host of other cleavages that are p articular to Brazil’s historical
experience. A key c leavage refers to t he idea of the “two Brazils”.
Generally associated with Jac que s Lambe rt’s Os Do is Brasis, this notion
maps a divide between the modern and the traditional onto spatial
discontinuitie s (such as urban-rural and coast-backlands) whereby the
underdeve loped regions and peoples of the country are seen as the past of
modern ones.
Historic ally, this dualism has been tightly connected to the slow
process of occupation of the Brazilian h interlands, which c ulminated in the
country’s politico-territorial unificat ion. Although offic ially completed
with the consolidat ion of Brazil’s contemporary borders in the early
twentieth century, this integration effort persists to this day in other fronts
ranging from infr a-structure (transportation, telecommunications, energy ,
agric ulture, etc.) to c ulture (educat ion, mass media, etc.). The very forging
of a Brazilian national identity is intimately connected to these processes,
and ind igenous social theory has been a key ideologic al mediator in both
internally and externally-directed nation-building efforts.
Virtually all ensaios draw on some version of the modern-traditional
dichotomy, but often wind up complicat ing rather than reaffirming it. By
the time Gilberto Freyre was writin g Casa-Grande & Se nzal a (1933) – later
translated as The Masters and the Slaves – for instance, the Brazilian
Northeast had long lost the political and economic weight it held dur ing
colonial t imes to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the Southeast. From the
standpoint of this new domestic he gemony, the Northeast came to be seen
as a tradit ional region, the prestige of which Freyre tried to rescue by
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elevating the stat us of it s c ult ure from re gional to national. In the same
masterly tour-de-force, he appealed to nationalist appetites by providing a
language with which to talk about Brazil as a civilization in its own terms,
that is, outside of the rac ial de generation strait jac ket implic ated by
biologic al approaches to race and by the whitening ideolo gie s prevalent in
Brazil dur ing the e arly twentieth century (Skidmore). In his oeuvre,
Freyre’s regionalism – often opposed to the cosmopolitanism of São Paulo
modernists like Már io and Oswald de Andr ade, also on the spotlight dur ing
the 1920’ s and 30’s – is further coupled with Lusotropicalism, his
transnational alternative to Western European hegemony based on a
supposed c ult ural unity and superior c ivilizational potentials of the
“Portuguese wor ld” (Freyre, Um Brasileiro em Terras Portuguesas 244).
An earlier manifestat ion of the two Brazils p aradigm is even more
telling of the contradictory and complex nature of post-colonial nationbuildin g efforts: Euclide s da Cunha’s 1902 masterpiece Os Sertões –
translated as Rebell ion in the Backl ands. The key dichotomy here is between
the coast and the backlands, but the book’s core effort lies precisely in an
ambiguous reversion of the common association between the former as
civilized, and the latter as primit ive. In Da Cunha’s hands, European
scientific theories of environmental deter minism t urn into a contradictory
praise of the sertanejos (bac klanders) as a r ace better-adapted – and
therefore more authentic and in a sense superior – than the moderns of the
coast. Towards the end of the book, these paradoxes unfold into an
unprecedented
denunciation
of
the
coastal
elites’
neglect
(or
misconceiving) of their own civilizin g mission towards “our r ude native
sons, who were more alien to us in this land of o urs than were the
immigr ants who came from Europe. For it was not an ocean which
separated us from them but three whole centuries” (161). Da Cunha’ s
account is therefore set apart from Freyre’s in its refusal to think in terms
of the assumption of a harmonic whole un derpinning Brazilian culture and
society. Not by chance, Da Cunha has been framed (e.g., by Sanjinés) as a
sharp postcolonial critic avant la lettre.
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More recently, the idea of the two Brazils has been cast by Brazilian
anthropologist Cardoso de Oliveira (“A N oção de ‘Colonialismo Interno’”)
in terms of the concept of internal co lonialism (Stavenhagen), that is, the
continuance of external colonialism, this time led by national elites ove r
domestic subaltern groups. Until the 1988 Constitution, the Brazilian state
used to conceive of this relation from the perspective of indigenous
peoples’
incorporation
incorporation
has
been
to
the
national
rendered
polity.
problematic
The
both
paradigm
by
of
indigenous
movements and by scholarship inspired, among others, by postcolonial
critique. A lcid a Ramos has looke d at the Brazilian state’s re lat ions with
indigenous peoples along the lines of Edward Said’s Oriental ism. Going a
bit further, Teresa Calde ira has shifted the focus of the ethnographic
authority critique away from central, empire-building anthropologies in
order to ask the important (though barely addressed) que stion of if, and
how, national peripheral anthropologies like Brazil’s wo uld reproduce
domestically the predicaments of the colonial encounter (Asad).
On the other hand, critique s from a multip le modernities st andpoint
(e.g., Tavo laro) claiming that the ensaios essentialize a supposed Brazilian
character, might be missin g the point by reducin g their complex reflections
on what we would tod ay call the postcolonial quest ion, to an assert ion of
Brazil’s inability to become fully modern due to its Iberian roots.
Intellectuals like Freyre and Da Cunha were not simply identifyin g
obstacles to Brazil’s modernization, but unsettlin g the very grounds on
which modernity was thought of as possible in the peripheries. In this
sense,
the
nation-buildin g
liter ature
paved
the
way
for
rendering
problematic, alway s in an ambivalent fashion, the very epistemologies o f
central ideologies and instit utions – thus presagin g future postcolonial
moves. Here, moreover, a sit uated positio n is made exp lic it: these authors
were not just descr ibing some objective re ality out there, but participatin g
in the very constitution of their object, the Brazilian nation-state. 2
Even though such works came to be associated with a genre – the ensaio – that partly deprives them os
scientific status, Caldeira and others have convincingly extended the nation-building claim to Brazil’s
contemporary social sciences. The nation-building drive is here contrasted with the empire-making
implications of central anthropologies (cf. Stocking, Cardoso de Oliveira “Peripheral Anthropologies”).
2
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This literat ure has therefore a different character than a simple
either-or focus on coloniality and modernity, as it has performed the very
que stions raised by the contemporary scholarship disc ussed here. If, for
example, the foreign appears as the full-fle dged modern which opposes the
domestic as bac kward and incomplete, the latter sim ultaneously appears as
the autochthonous authentic in contrast to the foreign spurious. This
dichotomy intersects further with other cleavages that bring into relief
internal contradictions to the nation-state. Ideas of Brazilian modernity are
multifaceted dependin g, in each case , on the articulations between the
regional and the national, and the loc al an d the universal. One c an see, for
instance, how the idea of the nation is deflected by regional disposit ions in
the works of authors such as Gilberto Freyre (Northeast), Roberto
DaMatta (Rio de Janeiro), and the 1922 m odernists (São Paulo); and how
these relations can be further articulat ed with (and complicated by)
statements of un iversality, as with the 1922 modernists. Finally, Br azilian s
have seen and continue to see their
modernities
from
a
multip lic ity
of
own reality
angles:
vis-à-vis central
opposition,
hybridism,
difference, de ference, dependency, mimicry, defic it, catchin g up, creat ive
absorption, inappropriateness, and so forth. The authors approached here
are but a small (albeit influential) sample of these multiple possib ilitie s.
In general, the postcolonial literature is more sensitive to suc h
complexities than its multip le modernities counterpart. But as virt ually all
disc ussions on the question of postcoloniality in Latin Americ a sugge st
(Mignolo, Ashcroft, Moraña et al., Moraña and Jáuregui), turning the
disc iplinary lense s of postcolonial studie s to the subcontinent is not a
simple t ask. The overarchin g que stion se ems to be whether postcolonial
analy sis could be applied to e arlier post-colonial experiences such as L atin
America’s, that is, beyond the late twentieth century context from which
the field emerged, mostly in response to independence struggles in Afric a
and Asia.
Ashcroft has traced a useful picture of th e multip le layers involved
in this debate: whether it makes sense to speak of decentering modernity at
a moment (that of the conquest of America) when modernity itself was
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being formed in Europe; differences between the Spanish and Portuguese
colonialisms and the ones to which postcolonial studies normally refer
(especially Brit ish and French); whether and how the occupant of the
Empire position has changed over time (to include, chiefly , the United
States); the greater ambiguity between colonizers and colonized, often
framed in terms of hybrid or Creole cultures; the que stion of internal
colonialism in relation to black, peasant and indigenous populations; the
particular d ialectic s of acceptance-resist ance to colonial domin ation and
foreign influence by national elites; and whether the attempt to extend
postcolonial st ud ies to Latin Americ a wo uldn’t be it self a neocolonialist
move.
As is also the case e lse where, to think of Latin America from a
postcolonial standpoint requires go ing beyond the Colonial Period as
demarcated by the historiographical c anon (in the case of Brazil, from 1500
to 1822). Colonialism as a h istorical experience is, in this sense ,
dist inguished from coloniality, where the latter concerns those more
elusive yet persistent and contradictory effects of colonization on formerly
colonized peoples’ self-consciousness. M oreover, given the longer time
span elapsed since the demise of colonization, the primordial colonizer has
lost gro und to further waves of external influence that have succeeded the
period of Portugue se and Spanish dominion: most obviously Britain and
the US in geopolit ical economy, but also France and even Germany in
“softer” ( intellect ual and inst itut ional) spheres. Such lo ngue durée, couple d
with Brazilian partic ular ities within Lat in America, make the applic ation of
postcolonial theory insights to Brazil a rather complicated task indeed.
Various attempts have been made by students of (and from) the
subcontinent to bring insights from contemporary postcolonial critique to
bear on Latin American particular ities:
to expand the problem of
coloniality as conceived by postcolonial theory’s chief paradigm s (Said,
Fanon, Spivak, or Bhabba) (Moraña et al.); more focused approaches from
a subaltern stud ies (Rodrigue s) or cultural studie s (Del Sarto et al.)
perspective;
and
stud ies
connecting
c olonialism
in
Brazil
with
it s
counterparts in Lusophone Africa (Santos, Fiddian). Dependency theory
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has also been a favorite topic, be it as the object of, or in contrast to,
postcolonial approaches (Grosfogue l, Kap oor). For Brazil, popular themes
have inc lude d cultur al movements like the 1920’ s Brazilian modernism
(Madureir a) or mid-century Cinema Novo (New Cinema) (Stam). The
que stion of race, partic ular ly fraught with tension in the contestation of
Freyre’s rac ial harmony le gacy by late-century blac k activism, is extensive
enough to make up a subfie ld on its o wn (for instance, Bourdie u and
Wac quant, Sansone, and other contributors to the same issue of the
Brazilian journal Estudos Afro-Asiát icos).
In general lines, one could say that if the multiple modernitie s
approach has its ultim ate reference in contemporary globalization, views
the history of modernity as startin g in eighteenth century Europe and
unfold ing through a mult iplication of modernizin g projects mediated by
local e lite s, and privilege s modernity’s “bright side” (i.e ., its emanc ipatin g
aspects), the postcolonial approach to Latin America begins with the
Conquest and the world-system which unfolds thereof, vie ws the history of
modernity as the systemic artic ulation of coloniality’s m ult iple elements,
and privilege s modernity’s “dar k side” (i.e., its subalternizing aspects).
A collective of Latin-American scholars ( many of whom US-based)
has been particular ly vocal in these debates. According to one of it s
members, the Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (“Wor lds and
Knowledge s Otherwise ”), the group’s chief claim for innovat ion lies in the
uniqueness
of
its
“deco lonial
critique”,
firmly
grounded
in
the
particular ities of L atin America’ s experien ce. This crit ique does not claim
to be situated outside of modernity, b ut at its margins, and proposes that
modernity-coloniality (rather than modernity alone) be the unit of analysis.
One of the notions propounded by this group, that of coloniality of power ,
seeks to account for the tenacity of colonialism’ s material and discursive
structures beyond national independences, and refers to a ch ain o f
entangled global hierarchie s that extrapolates military and economic
domination to include r acial, gendered, sp iritual, epistemic , and linguistic
elements. All these forms of power are articulated in what has been
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referred
to
as
the
“modern
colonial
world
sy stem”
(Quijano
and
Wallerste in, Escobar “World and Knowledges Otherwise ” 185).
The idea of border-thinking (Mignolo) also has a subcontinental
flavor in its e vocation of the tropes of mixture and Creolization so fam iliar
to Latin-American social thought, but now stripped of connotations of
harmony (as in Freyre). If, on the one hand, border-thinking may be seen
as occ upying that
othering
space
of
alternat ive
(i.e.,
non-modern)
civilizational matrixes that was, in the case of Latin America, eventually
filled by the Creole, on the other it takes place in the epistemologic al and
political space opened up by colonial difference, from where it aims at
reaching at an outside of Western hegemony. This view is in line with that
of many postcolonial crit ics, b ut in Lat in America the idea of margins
acquire s greater prominence, since its subaltern point of view has been
historically constituted as internal to the West.
The postcolonial perspective therefore opens up a field of inquiry
for
which
most
multiple
modernities
approaches
lack
appropriate
conceptual tools. Some of the latter’s insistence in detach ing modernity
from
the
West
(Eisenstadt
“Introduction”,
“The
First
M ult iple
Modernities”, Roniger and Waisman), for instance, is tellin g of, as M ignolo
would put it, their blindness to colonial difference, or to the fact that
modernity’s claims to universality are the result of a historic al process o f
expansion of Western soc ieties predicate d on the hierarchizat ion and
subjugation of alternative worldvie ws. Moreover, multiple modernities’
focus on collective identitie s cannot addr ess the postcolonial que stion of
subaltern enunciation in all its complexity. It is no surprise, then, that the
pool of actors populating such studie s, pictured as strugglin g for the
hegemony of their own version of the modern project, is almost exclusively
lim ited to national elites, intellectuals, or organized soc ial movements. The
subaltern who does not exist as a well-defined collect ive sub ject (in other
words, who does not have an e xplic it, b ounded identity) does not find
much room in this framework. 3 Most of the multiple modernitie s
The idea of “popular culture” is one way of framing these amorphous identities (Rowe and
Schelling).
3
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approaches to Latin America only see m to be able to work against
contradiction, ambiguity, and indeterminacy. In this sense, a postcolonial
approach would have the advantage of thinking not against but thro ugh the
latter in order to make sense of sub altern subjectivity, instead of
dism issing the incomplete modernity paradigm in Latin America by
generously democratizin g modernity to the global peripheries.
A stimulat ing engagement with the questio n of Brazil’s status within
the postcolonial terrain has been put forth by the Portuguese socio logist
Boaventura
de
Sousa
S antos.
Among
Santos’s
arguments
on
the
particular ities of Portuguese colonialism are the original hybridity of
Portugue se culture; Portugal’ s status as a subaltern colonialism (vis- à-vis
the British, b ut at points also in re lation to Spain); the fact that it s
enterprise was more colonial than capitalist, result ing in that “the end of
Portugue se colonialism did not determine the end of the colonialism of
power” (10); and that, given the incompleteness of the nation-building
process in Portugal it self, Portuguese cult ure became a “borderland
cult ure” where form would prevail over content.
According to Santos, these would h ave shaped a peculiar (post-)
colonial o utlook in Portugal’ s former colonies, espec ially Brazil, which was
not only the largest of them but eventually became itself the center of the
Portugue se Empire between 1808 and 1821. The fact that the Portugue se
colonizer had to retroactively reckon with what became the new norm –
namely,
British
imperalism
–
had
paradoxical
and
long- last ing
consequences for its colonies: they came to suffer, S antos ar gue s, from
both an excess and a defic it of colonialism. Portuguese colonialism c ame
thus to be seen by those in Brazil both as a root cause of its
underdeve lopment and as a sort of “friendly colonialism”.
Santos goes on to argue that the particular itie s of Portuguese
colonialism entail a specific kind of postcolonialism. In the case of Brazil,
two points stand out in this re gard. On the one hand, the abovementioned
double colonizat ion (by Portugal and then by the Empires that followed it)
“became later the constitutive e lement of Brazil’s myth of origins and
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possibilit ies for de ve lopment. ... It divide s Brazilians between those who
are crushed by the excess of past and those that are crushed by the excess
of fut ure”
(19).
On
the
incompetence of the
other
hand,
Portuguese
the
“colonial
Prosp ero” did
persistence of neocolonialist relat ions,
not
weakness an d
allow for
the
but “by the same token it
facilitated, partic ularly in the case of Brazil, the reproduction of colonial
relations after the end of colonialism – what is known as internal
colonialism ” (34).
Indeed, the intensity with which colonialism was t urned inwards in
Brazil might have been a h istorical effect of having had a colonizer that
was itse lf subaltern (but wh ich had nonetheless the tradition of a strong
patrimonial st ate). One can think of the gap in Brazil between those
“crushed by the excess of past” and those “crushed by the excess o f
future ”
as
moving
along
the
lines
of
internal
colonialism
(most
prominently, in relation to indigenous p eoples, but also encompassing
peasants and descendents of Afr ican slaves). But it also overlaps with other
long-lasting gaps in Brazil such as those in income and education. On the
other hand, the “excess of fut ure” – eloquently encapsulated in the
recurrent motto in Brazilian cult ure: “Brazil, the land of the future” –
nourishes the long-last ing expectation of one day becoming a fully
developed country, as well as a major global player.
The particularit ies of Brazilian postcoloniality as accounted for by
Santos also seem to have shaped nation-building ideo logie s as they turned
outwards. From the point of view of double colonization, for instance ,
Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves can be re garded as a retroactive response
to Britain’s redefin ition of “the rules of colonial discourse – rac ist sc ience,
progress, the ‘white man’s burden’” (Santos 12). Freyre’s borrowing of
Franz
Boas’s
notion
of
culture
as
an
alternative
to
biological
understandin gs of race (The Masters and the Slaves xxvi) allowed him to
recast in a positive light what was until then understood as a source of
degeneration (Skidmore): miscegenat ion. Many of the dichotomies present
in the ensaios and e lse where also struggle with the perceived gap that
emerged between Brazil’ s Iberian roots an d Western European hegemony.
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Each of their poles refer, as it were, to one “colonizer”: hierarchy-equality
(DaMatta),
patrimonialism-bureaucracy
(Faoro),
or
cordiality-civility
(Holland a).
Finally, S antos invites us to think in terms not of a generic
postcolonialism accessed by means of postcolonial theory’s abstract
constructs, but of a situated postcolonial ism, which supposes “a careful
historical and comparative analysis of the different colonialisms and their
aftermaths” (20). I wo uld add to this the importance not only of historical
but
ethnographic
particular
embedding
peripheral
when
regions (or
reflecting
between
on
them,
postcoloniality
as in
in
South-South
relations). In this vein, one could t ake “situated” also in the sense p ut
forth
by
Donna
Haraway:
makin g
e xplic it
the
concrete
interests
undergird ing epistemologic al constructs and their corresponding claims to
universality. In the remainder of this paper, I will tentatively take up these
and other insights by exploring recent approximations between Brazil and
the African continent within the context of (re)emerging South-South
alignments.
2. Postcoloniality
in
Contemporary
South-South
Alignments :
Brazil and Africa
As suggested
by
Santos’s notion
of
situated
postcolonialism,
disc ussing contemporary relations between Brazil and Africa should not be
an intellect ual exercise in the abstract. M oreover, a longue durée historical
frame as we ll as Br azil’ s ambivalent position between its historical alliance
with the West and terceiromundista (Third- Worldist) alignments are key for
understandin g how such relat ions are unfo ldin g today. The trajectories o f
Brazil and the African continent have crossed each other at various points
during the half millennium of European colonialism in the Americas and in
Africa, and continue to do so along lines t hat are fundamentally sh aped by
their respective post-colonial legac ies. Fro m the very beginning, relations
between the two continents have been a constitutive part of the world
system inaugurated by We stern European expansion from the fifteenth
century onwards. These have often been framed by the historical literatur e
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in terms of the “At lantic triangle ” where by Europeans provided Afr ican
traders with manufact ured goods such as te xtiles and guns, in exchange for
slaves to work in their New World colonie s (the so-called Middle Passage),
while the latter supplie d Europe with high ly valued products as sugar and
precious metals (to be jo ined by coffee, co tton and others) (Mintz). In the
case of Brazil, howe ver, it make s more sense to think in terms of a fourvertex figure, as by the late se venteenth century Portugal itse lf had become
politically and economically dependent on the rising British empire
(Penha).
Throughout Brazil’s co lonial history, its r elations with Afric a have
been fundamentally mediated by the transatlantic slave trade, in which the
Portugue se, and later on the Brazilians t hemselves, played a prominent
role. The mid-nineteenth century, when England finally succeeded in
curbing the influx of A frican slave s to Brazil, is generally regarded as
inauguratin g a century of stalled relations between the two regions,
eventually punctuated by free and forced movements of returned slaves and
slave-descendents especially to West Afric a. Meanwhile, the Brazilian state
was busy with its own process of inter nal colonizat ion and territorial
unificat ion and, later on into the twentieth century, industrialization. It is
not until later in that century, with the African continent ushering into
independence struggles, that Brazilian diplomats (and businessmen) would
look again with interest across the Southern Atlantic (Saraiva, D’Ávila).
But regardle ss of the flow of people, goods and information between
the two regions, Afric a had an important role to play in Brazil dur ing the
early twentieth century. This was not, however, the actual Afr ica, b ut an
Africa
seen
through
the
mirror-image
of
Brazil’s
nation-building
ideologies. In the best-known and most influential version of Brazilian
nationality, Afric ans joined the Amerindians and the Portugue se to make
up the Brazilian “melting pot” – the Frey rean picture of a rac ially m ixed
society de void of se gregation and rac ism . According to another axis of
Freyre’s oeuvre (Um Brasile iro em Terras Portuguesas), which wo uld also wie ld
high influence in Brazil’s foreign policy circles, Portuguese colonies in
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Africa p articipated in the fantasy of a L usotropical c ivilization sharin g
similar character istic s with the Brazilian post-colonial experience.
Historic al works (such as Sar aiva’s, or D’Ávila’ s recent account of
Brazil’s stance on independence struggles in Portugue se colonie s in A fric a)
sugge st
that
the
power
of
Freyrean
discour se
in
Brazilian s’
self-
consciousness and its influence on the country’s international move s
should not be underestimated. This is espe cially true with regard to Brazil’ s
special relation – which some have descr ibed as sentimental (Penna Filho
and Lessa) – with Portugal, wh ich preven ted it from taking a c lear stand
opposing the last stronghold of E uropean colonization in Afr ica. Freyre
himself played a role in this respect, not only in Brazil but also in Portugal,
where he supported, sometimes in person, the ideological apparat us of the
Salazarist regime. This e ventually came at a cost to Brazil, by breeding
acrimonious resentment among leaders not only from former Portuguese
colonies in Afr ica (Mozambique in partic ular) but from the remainder of
the continent as well.
Brazil’s foreign policy for Afric a therefore reflects its fundamentally
ambivalent insert ion in the world system that gradually emerge d with the
conquest of Americ a. On the one hand, there has been an almost automatic
privileging of relations with the former empires of Portugal, Western
Europe and the US. On the other, there is an opposite drive towards
terceiromundis mo, where a closer alignment is sought with other developing
nations across what is being today calle d the global South. While the
former follows the typical dynamic s of center-periphery relations, the latter
is driven by a will to shed political and ec onomic dependence on Northern
nations (the US in particular, whom Brazilian dip lomacy has alway s
resented for being treated like a “junio r partner”) while strivin g for
regional – and more recently, global – le adership. It is not casual, then,
that closer relations with A frica were most aggressively so ught by Brazil in
moments of emergence, such as durin g t he 70’ s “economic mirac le” and
recently durin g Lula’s two terms in office (2003- 2010). 4 Therefore, by
A partial exception was the independent foreign policy pursued during Jânio Quadros and João Goulart’s
short-lived presidencies (1961-64). Attempts at approximation with Africa would be resumed during the
4
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becoming a provider of international cooperation, Brazil is addressing as
much its Southern counterparts as Northern powers, from whom it seeks
recognition as a major global player.
Such efforts at approximation with A frica, based on the doctrine of
responsible
pragmat ism
(Saraiva),
submit
foreign
relat ions
to
the
imperative s of national deve lopment to the point of sometimes clash ing
frontally with geopolitic s. Probably the most striking inst ance of this was
during the Geise l ye ars (1974- 79), when the paradoxical situation cam e
about where a harsh anti-communist military dictatorship was the first
non-African regime to recognize a Marxist government: independent
Angola under the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of
Angola). This was a late attempt at redeeming Brazil from the lac k of a
firm commitment against the persistence of colonization in Lusophone
Africa and the South-African apartheid re gime, which had bred hostilit ies
among many of the new Afr ican leader s an d put Brazil in the blac k list of
oil-producin g Afr ican nat ions and their A rab allies dur ing the 1970’s oil
shocks (Saraiva).
Much in Brazil’ s d isco urse on its re lat ions with Afric a has been
retained since then. In cooperation activit ies, the Itamaraty’s (Brazil’ s
Ministry of Foreign Relations) st andard discourse on Brazilian c ult ure
tends to follo w the Freyrean lines of rac ial mixture and harmony – e ven if
during the last dec ade or so, as happened occasionally in the past, such
hegemonic disco urse has been increasingly challenged by r ace-based
movements in Brazil (Sar aiva). As one moves however from policy to
operational staff in volve d in cooperation activities, references to race
politics (and e ven to questions of race in general) become increasingly less
common. This points to the relevance of other analytical an gle s or rather,
to the need for an articulated approach, as has been sugge sted by the Latin
American postcolonial literature discussed above.
An analyt ical an gle that stood out dur ing fie ldwor k relates to the
idea of culture, partic ularly in the central way assumptions of cult ural
Military Regime, but such efforts eventually fell apart during the 80’s under the weight of an economic crisis
that swept both sides of the Atlantic (Saraiva).
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affinitie s between Brazil and (especially West and Lusophone) Africa are
deployed in cooperation. Most typically, such affinit ies are e voked in the
spheres of music, food, d ance, sports, religion, or language. Such emphasis
on assumed affinit ies at the le vel of culture is in line with ar guments
stressin g
the
centrality
of
“non-conceptual
forms”
of
“embodie d
subject ivity” in Afr ica’ s trans-At lantic diaspora (Gilroy 76). But it co uld as
well reflect gaps in historiography that are being gradually bridge d by
stud ies focusing for instance on the African origins of agr icultural
techniques brought to the Americas (e.g. , Carney). 5 What this indic ates
most forcefully, however, is the peripheralization of both world regions
during the rise to hegemony of the West and its domin ance in “harder ”
social
dimensions
such
as
(industrial-capitalist)
economy,
(liberal-
democratic) political institut ions, and (techno-scientific) knowledge. Thus,
what would be the proper terrain for relations across the Southern Atlantic
was left to what is understood, according to Western modernity’s
normativity, as the “softer” (and autonomous) spheres of religion, culture,
and so forth.
But culture is not a pre-given essence t hat would have remained
unchanged throughout the centuries, untouched by history or politics. Th is
becomes especially evident when dissonances arise between Brazil’ s
constructed image of it s Afric an heritage and actual contemporary Africa.
Especially in the aftermath of the independence struggle s, not all A fric ans
saw such supposed cult ural legacie s in a p ositive light, connected as they
were with a trad ition that those eager to modernize wished only to le ave
behind. A telling anecdote recounted by D’Ávila (61) speaks of a Nigerian
student in Salvador who went crazy of fear of candomblé gods, 6 associated as
they are by many urban, Christianized Africans with the dangers of the
“bush” – a reve aling contradiction between Africa’s place in Brazil’ s
nation-build ing and contemporary Africa’s own processes of internal
colonialism.
An important lacuna in Gilroy’s account relates precisely to technique (and technology). In the case of
African slaves brought to Brazil, this dimension of embodied knowledge includes fields such as metallurgy,
herbal medicine, construction, textiles, and the manufacturing of sugar (cf. Furtado, Cunha Jr.).
6 Candomblé is a modality of Afro-Brazilian religion akin to the Haitian Vodou or the Cuban Santería.
5
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But cultur al polit ics m ay also t ake on a deliberate form, as in th e
invention of sh ared trad itions focuse d on Afric an returnees from Brazil.
D’Ávila tells of how visits to communitie s of returnees in Benin, Togo,
Ghana and Nigeria were mandatory in Brazilians’ m issions to Afr ica in the
60’ s and 70’s. More recently, the Brazilian government has been actively
engaged in enhancing the visib ility of these historical tie s, e ven including
them in the cooperation it provides. I have visited a house in Jamestown
(Accra) that has been turned into a small museum telling the story of one
such community of returnees, the Tabon people of Ghana. It also housed
weekly Portugue se c lasses and periodical screenings of Brazilian movie s.
President Lula visited the new m use um (named “Brazil House” and located
at “Brazil Lane ”) in one of his many official trips to Africa.
Such act ive construction of shared ident ities does not mean that
spontaneous affinitie s may not arise dur ing cooperation activities. Indeed,
I have sometimes heard from Afric an par ticipants of how their Brazilian
counterparts were more easy-going, le ss patronizing and had a better sense
of humor than – as one of them tellingly put it – “other Europeans”. But
that these are manife stations of some lingering shared c ult ure or even
consequential for the success of technical cooperation itself is far from
obvious. After all, other social dimensions at play durin g cooperation
activitie s – politic al constraints, career interests, bureaucratic protocols,
institut ional en vironments, material infr a-structure – carry sign ificant
weight.
But neither is the assumption of similar ities limited to the realm of
the social, it also include s nature in a central way. In the world of BrazilAfrica cooperation, it is common to hear of how, as in a very easy jigsaw
puzzle, the Eastern coast of Brazil and Africa’ s We st fit e ach other
perfectly, united as they once were before the Atlantic Ocean came into
existence. Thus, Brazilian technologies would be more easily adapted to
Sub-Saharan Afric a, the discourse goes, because of their shared geoclimat ic conditions. The imagery of the tropics is salient here. In the 70’s,
Brazilian manufacturers aimed at getting a piece of Nigeria’ s at the time
burgeoning consumer market (what would also help offset the rising cost
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of importing Nigerian oil) by act ive ly advertising domestic appliances
especially suited to tropical are as. According to one of the ads, which
brought soccer star Pelé as poster boy, these appliances, “te sted at the
source: a tropical country, Brazil”, were made to work “no matter the
conditions of heat, humid ity and volt age fluctuations” (D’Á vila 240- 1).
These and other arguments about how Brazil was “determined to share the
technological patrimony it has accumulate d in its experience as a tropical
country
with
these
African
nat ions”
(D’Ávila
225)
bear
strikin g
resemblance to the ones put forth by cooperation agents with respect to
agric ultural technologies being c urrently transferred to Africa.
Brazil
is
indeed
a global
le ader
in
tropical agric ulture,
an d
similar itie s in soil and climate are assumed (and advertised) as a
comparative ad vantage vis-à-vis both traditional and emerging donors. In
the practice of projects, however, such c orrespondence between contexts
has to be actively e stablished (or some would say, constructed) by the
adaptation and valid ation work carrie d out by Brazilian researchers in
partnership with their African colleagues. Moreover, such work involve s
not only overcoming technical hurdles, b ut dealing with the broad range of
social elements that also have a play in the successful transfer of
technology and knowled ge – agr ic ult ural re search, educ ation and extension
institut ions, land and labor systems, market access, availability of inputs,
credit, and risk management mechanisms, among others. And these are
elements in Brazil’s and Afr ican countries’ colonial and post-colonial
histories that are not always m arked by similarit ies, for inst ance in region s
like We st Afric a where agric ulture remains large ly a domain of polit ically
weak subsistence small-holders (in sh arp contrast with Brazil’ s influential
lobby of export-driven large landowners).
In
cooperation
discourse,
such
topography
of natur al-c ult ural
similar itie s is further articulated with a temporal dimension: if Brazil and
Africa can entertain today a potentially promisin g cooperation partnership,
it is because, as a tropical de veloping country, Brazil has already suffere d
from, and overcame, many of the problems plaguing Afr ican nations today .
This is a partic ular way of rearrangin g the developmentalist timeline of
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
modernization discussed by Fer guson (Glo bal Sh adows 188). I f, on the one
hand, it reproduces the classic modernization telos by assum ing that the
path already treaded by a more developed periphery (Brazil) could
somehow show the way for a less de veloped periphery (Africa), on the
other it claims that the kind of knowledge (in this case, in tropical
agric ulture) historically accum ulated by Brazil would be better than
alternative so lut ions offered by the de ve loped world. A s Freyre’ s, this is an
ambivalent
view
on
modernization
deflected
by
postcolonial
preoccupations about turning a peripheral historical experience into a
positive asset vis- à-vis central hegemonic models.
In a similar ve in, some versions of cooperation disco urse c laim that
Brazil, as a receiver of international aid for decades, would know how not
to provide it – for instance, by not tying conditionalities and not
interfering in the receivin g countries’ internal affairs. Moreover, Brazilian
cooperation
is deeply
shaped
by
questions related
to
international
asymmetries, especially with respect to global go vernance and trade
frameworks that are considered as no lon ger appropriately responding to
the realities of an increasingly multipolar world.
Thus, one of Brazil’ s most visib le interests in cooperating with
Africa has been to muster support for a reform of the United Nations
Security Counc il that wo uld inc lude Brazil as a permanent member. Other
prominent arenas of interest have include d other leve ls of the UN system
(the Food and Agriculture Organization, for instance, has recently elected a
Brazilian for its Director-General) and trade negotiations in the WTO
(especially over agric ult ural subsidies and market access to Europe and the
US). In this sense , it co uld be argued that South-South cooperation
presents a more situated view than the “god trick” (Har away) frequently
assoc iated 7 with Northern development institutions such as the World
Bank: that is, an interest-free view of everything that is itself situated
nowhere.
7
For instance, by Escobar (Encountering Development) or Ferguson (The Anti-Politics Machine).
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Finally, Brazil’ s rhetoric of cultur al affinities also diver ges from
Western vie ws of A fric a as “absolute otherness” (Mbembe). Rather than
being that which one is not, Africa has been incorporated in a central
(albeit
ambivalent)
way
in
Br azil’ s nation-building
ideolo gie s,
most
prominently and consequentially in the Freyrean framework on focus here.
Both Africas are no doubt imagined; but not in the same way, and not with
the same consequences. On the other hand, the fact that the racial
harmony paradigm is today under he avy fire domestic ally attests to the
precarious nat ure of ideologies that c laim to be all-encompassin g in a
world region marked by the postcolonial ambivalences and contradictions
sketched above.
As history unfolds, then, new quest ions are raised. If once Freyre
and others took serio usly the project of cr eating “future Brazils” in Afric a
(D’Ávila), in contemporary practice this seems to unfold less in the spheres
of cult ure and race relations than at the harder levels of technology
transfer, instit ution-build ing, global trade and other areas directly or
indirectly addressed by cooperation efforts. Moreover, even though
Lusophone Africa remains a privile ged tar get of Brazilian cooperation, the
alignment currently sought with the continent at large is fed not by the
dream of a transnational community heir to a common colonial Empire,
but by a long-term politic al project, sp earheaded by Brazil and other
emerging co untries, of changing global str uctures of governance and trade
along lines more congruous with the growing re levance of the so-called
global South.
In a historical sense, then, Freyre’s legac y may be seen positively ,
not so much in terms of how it came about at a time when sc ientific rac ism
and whitening polic ies were prevalent in Brazil (Skidmore), but by having
provided a necessary ideological foundation for Brazil’ s nation-buildin g
efforts in the aftermath of the inception of the Republic. In other words,
the racial harmony claim had an ideological part to play in a broader
historical process of construction of a national economy and state
institut ions durin g the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that eventually
became a firm foundation for Brazil’ s contemporary emergence as a global
106
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
player and trader. Contrastive ly, in the wake of national independences few
if any countrie s in Sub-S aharan Afric a were able to carry forward such
process in a sustained manner. In this sense, one may say (not without
some irony) that if, as race-based movements in Brazil claim today,
Freyrean discourse was a mistake, it is at le ast a mistake Brazilians did have
an opportunity to commit. If the Freyrean le gacy is today bein g rethought
and challenge d, this is done in a highly globalized context in relation to
which Brazil is less vulnerab le and dependent than most African nations,
both economically and polit ically. Meanwhile, partic ularly in weaklygoverned African states “the national ec onomy model … appears less a
threshold
of
modernity
than
a
brief,
and
large ly
aborted,
post-
independence project” (Ferguson, Glo bal Shadows 207). Today, expectat ions
of modernity in the African continent are also being shaped by re lation s
with Brazil and other emergin g donors like China or India. It seems ear ly
to assess the effects of this new state of affairs – whether it will act ually
correspond to the invariably beneficent discourses that usually accompany
and le git imize South-South cooperation. But one consequence that is
already visible is that these new presences are providing Afr ican actors at
var ious leve ls with extra leverage to deal with traditional donors.
Therefore, when looking at Brazil-Afr ica relations, Lat in American
postcolonial literature’ s insight about lo oking not at discrete le vels of
analy sis (such as race or ethnicity) but at the chain of entangled,
historically constit uted world-system hier archies (in the economy, trade,
geopolitic s, knowled ge and technology, and so forth) is most we lcome.
Moreover,
cooperation
in
spite
of
contrastively
the
to
disc ursive
construction
North-South
of
development,
South-South
it
must
be
recognized that the global South is neither homogeneous, nor external to
the world sy stem built under Western he gemony. This entails reinstat ing
the analytical re levance of margins, ambiguitie s, contradictions, and
situatedness. Insights from ethnography (e.g., Watts), which draws on the
practice
of
cooperation
rather
than
exclusive ly
on
institutionalized
discour se, also point in these directions. Finally, for all that was said about
Brazil’s perspective s on Afric a, the reve rse must also be true: Afr ica’ s
var ied post-colonial experiences and exp ectations must have a play in
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current attempts at approximation from both sides. This however has
rarely been the object of attention by scholars. For the picture to be
complete, it is in need of scrutiny by historians, anthropologists, and the
wide array of actors, from both Brazil and African countries, involved in
the design and practice of South-South cooperation.
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CAROLINA CORREIA DOS SANTOS
C ol u mbi a U ni ve rsi ty
SOBRE O OLHAR DO NARRADOR E SEUS EFEITOS
EM OS SERTÕES E CIDADE DE DEUS
Garreth Williams afirma que, devido às suas histórias comuns de
colonizaç ão, a modernizaç ão dos paíse s da América Latina, demandava e
continua a demandar o esforço de formação de um povo que, apesar de sua
heterogeneidade constitut iva, de veria e stabelecer-se “as a potentially
hegemonic formation designed to suture the totality of the nation’s
demographic and cultur al d ifferences to the formation and expansion of
the nation-state” (5). O Brasil não seria ex ceção à regra. O e stranho hábito
de entender a história brasile ira como um a espécie de exceção dentro da
América Latina, hábito que feste ja a inter ação harmônica entre os povos
constitutivo s do Brasil, vem sendo, ainda que tardiamente, contestado.
Neste sentido, José M urilo de Carvalh o afirm a que o evento
conhecido por “descobrimento do Brasil” deveria se chamar “encobrimento
do Brasil”, critic ando o fato de o termo “descobrimento” ter sido pouco
contestado no país, na ocasião da comemoração dos 500 anos. Ao contrário
dos nossos vizinhos hispano-americ anos, explica C arvalho, o debate acerca
da palavra não nos diria respe ito, ou seja, o eurocentrismo que a utilização
de “descobrimento” implic a não ser ia pro blema para os brasile iros. Uma
das r azões residir ia na crença de que no nosso caso as re lações entre os
nativos e os portugue ses foram amigáveis, diferentemente das relaçõe s
estabelecidas pelos espanhóis. Desse m odo, a carta de Pero Vaz de
Caminha, por exemplo, tem servido muito bem ao propósito de criar uma
“imagem quase idílica do encontro entre portuguese s e nativos” (400). No
entanto, muitos documentos provariam o contrário e chegariam mesmo a
igualar, em termos relativos, o genocídio de índios no Brasil com o
genocídio de índ ios na América hispânica. Segundo Carvalho, ao final de
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três
séculos
de
colonizaç ão
portugue sa
três
milhões
de
nat ivo s
desapareceram, três quartos da população original: “imenso encobrimento,
construção de memória” ( 400). Os comentários de Carvalho sobre os 5oo
anos do Brasil, paradox almente, demonstram que há, entre nós, alguma
consciência d a vio lência inerente ao processo de formação da naç ão ao
mesmo tempo em que há, talve z ainda majo ritariamente, a negação dela.
Euclides d a Cunha public a Os Sertões em 1902. Embebido do
cientificismo
que
o
séc ulo
dezenove
apresentou
e
exigiu
de
se us
intelectuais, a obra é um tratado sobre o sertão nordestino brasile iro e uma
tentativa de introduzi-lo em um rol de conhecimentos acerca do Brasil. Mas
não só isso: Os Sertões tem o intuito de ab arcar e incluir paisagens e tipos
humanos no que viria a ser o Brasil moderno. Assim, e contraditoriamente,
para Euc lide s da C unha, o sertanejo era o símbolo de um Brasil “origin al”
e talve z a únic a via por meio da qual a cult ura nac ional resist iria ao avanço
dos imperialismos e uropeu e norte-americano, desprezados pelo autor que
os via como a assimilação impensada de usos, costumes e ideias. Ao mesmo
tempo, o sertanejo desapareceria de vido à força da história. Descontadas as
superstições que os homens que povoavam o interior tinham, Euclide s
acreditava serem ele s os “sed imentos básicos da nação” (qtd. in Se vcenko
145), cap azes de livrar o Br asil das falácias de um cosmopolit ismo
insustentáve l. Nicolau Sevcen ko chega a afirmar que para o escr itor do
final do séc ulo dezenove “somente a descoberta de uma originalidade
nacional d aria condições ao país de compartilhar em igualdade de
condições
de
um
regime
de
equiparação
un iversal
das
sociedades,
envolvendo influências e assimilações recíp rocas” (122).
A supressão do sertanejo – cogitada na “N ota Prelimin ar” – não teria
portanto, o poder de apagar o fe ito hist órico do homem do sertão, que
teria sido, resumidamente, o de ajudar a construir (sedimentar) a nação
brasileir a. Assim, pode-se afirmar que par a Euclides sua própria obra deve
compor o esforço de uma formação potencialmente hegemônica. É por
meio deste entendimento do autor e sua ob ra que Euc lides passa a ser visto
como colaborador na construção de um discurso mestre hegemônico sobre
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o Brasil que prevê uma totalidade harmônica, não homogênea, mas coesa,
e, portanto, um discurso colonial.
Levando em conta que um disc urso colonial se arroga a tarefa da
criação de um d isc urso de dominação que garanta a hegemonia num
determinado espaço de alguns sobre outros, ou melhor, de determinadas
ideias sobre outras, me parece, ainda, que a c onstrução de um texto como Os
Sertões vem a corroborar uma interpretação sobre o Brasil que perdura. O
livro de E uclide s, ao mesmo tempo em que cria um núc leo étnico para a
nação brasile ira que necessitava naque le momento de uma narrativa par a
constituir-se como tal 1, não deix a de defender os ide ais europeus (e
republic anos), herança própria de um país colonizado, inculcada em toda
América Latina.
Quando muito da crític a vê, na denúncia da matança desnecessária
dos canudense s pelo exérc ito, uma inve rsão do pensamento usual do s
intelectuais lat ino-americanos, creio que essa crític a fecha os olhos para o
fato de que E uclide s censura a república por agir barbaramente, como os
sertanejos, e rejeitar, portanto, uma missão mais pedagógica e menos
vio lenta ou retrógrada, como talvez Euclide s colocasse. Ou se ja, ne m
exército e nem sertanejos seriam suf icientement e modernos p ara o autor de Os
Sertões. Euclide s não teria tomado o lado dos vencidos 2 , como se costuma
dizer, mas sim cooperado com o entendimento do Brasil como país em
falt a, sempre na busca de modernizar-se completamente. A denúncia, desse
modo, colabora com uma interpretação sobre o Brasil com contornos
hegemônicos, reiterado com nuances distintas nos trabalhos de Sérgio
Buar que de Holanda e Roberto Schwarz 3.
O argumento primeiro deste artigo, portanto, não é simples. Haveria
em Os Sertões algo contrário à car acterística que Williams enxerga no
disc urso nac ional hegemônico, ao mesmo tempo em que, major itariamente,
cooperaria com sua construção no contexto brasile iro. Ou se ja, Os Sertões
Para uma discussão sobre a necessidade de um núcleo étnico nacional, ver Smith.
Para um exemplo desta leitura de Os Sertões, ver Santiago.
3 Como ilustração, ver a famosa expressão “desterrados em nossa terra” em Raízes do Brasil de Holanda, e o
não menos conhecido início de “Nacional por subtração” de Schwarz.
1
2
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traz à tona uma situação de assimetria de poder – a obra denuncia a brutal
vio lência do estado republic ano, mais forte que os homens e mulheres de
Canudos – criando, simultaneamente,
um disc urso hegemônico mestre
sobre o Brasil. Por um lado a denúncia, por outro, a execuç ão de outro ato
vio lento, cristalizado na categor ização do s sertanejos enquanto “Outro”
bem como sua inserç ão numa re laç ão assim étrica de poder, via assimilaç ão.
Afinal, segundo o autor, os sertanejos far iam parte dos estágios inic iais de
evolução do brasileiro. Não obstante, é im portante ressaltar que a denúncia
euclid iana do atraso també m dos patríc ios mais desenvolvidos, reforça os
contornos de boa parte do pensamento intelectual sobre o Brasil: nunc a
moderno, uma falácia constante.
Finalmente, a ut ilização da forma científica de conhecer, isto é, o
uso d as t axonomias e teorias como evolucionismo para compreender o
sertão e seus hab itantes também deve ser entendido como o desejo de
filiação do escritor de Os Sertões a uma tradição ligada ao poder (da
ciência). Devemos pensar no eurocentrism o, aqui, a contragosto de grande
parte da crítica 4.
Isso posto, deve-se admitir, entretanto, que Os Sertões não se deixa
sintetizar fac ilmente. A principal obra de Euclides da Cunha parece, neste
sentido, suportar d istintas le itur as. Roberto Gonzale z-Echeverría, por
exemplo, sugere a mud ança do próprio escritor. Euclide s, assim, apelar ia “
to the rhetoric of amazement, to the language of the sublime, to account
for the presence of his fragile and transfiguring se lf before a reality that is
bewildering as well as compelling” (132). Esse apelo à “retórica do
deslumbramento”, ademais de indicar uma leitura testemunhal de Os Sertões,
ajuda a entender uma parte da recepção crítica do livro: Os Sertões é
majoritar iamente compreendido como obra híbrida ( literat ura, c iência e
história), além de a principal e origin al denúncia do curso que a recéminstaurad a república h avia tomado 5. Como aludido anteriormente, Euclides
acreditava que a república dever ia ter ensin ado os brasileiros a tornarem-se
cidad ãos e não ter optado pela eliminação do arraial de Canudos. É
4
5
Um exemplo está em trecho do primeiro capítulo de The Lettered City, de Angel Rama.
Sobre o caráter híbrido de Os Sertões, entre muitos outros, ver Ventura, Valente e Zilly.
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importante ressalt ar que para Euc lides os sertanejos sequer conformavam
um perigo à inst ituição republic ana, visto que, aos o lhos do autor, essas
pessoas não tinham consciência polític a.
O resultado d a postur a moral de Euc lides formalizada em Os Sertões
desemboca no enaltecimento da simpatia do escritor pelo sertanejo (talve z
algo realmente inédito) em quase todo texto crítico sobre Os Sertões. Da
mesma forma como sua crença no evolucio nismo é abrandada, considerada
apenas como consequência óbvia das circ unstâncias a que est ava submetido
o autor, a. retórica euc lidiana de indignação, diante do que o escr itor
considerou atrocidades cometidas pe lo exército, parece ter sido seu maior
feito.
Essa retórica t ambém está a serviço do apelo de Euc lides ao se u
leitor: no intuito de que este, brasileiro majoritariamente do litoral, se
alinhasse com sua compreensão sobre a formação da nação brasileir a 6, além
de sensibilizar-se para aquilo que considerou um cr ime. Os c anudense s
deveriam ter sido ens inados
a ser
modernos e republicanos 7 e não
barbaramente assassinados, já que faziam parte de um estágio anterior na
evolução da história. Ve jamos como o autor de Os Sertões descreve a
distânc ia temporal entre seu leitor e o sertanejo:
Ilud idos por uma c ivilizaç ão de empréstimos; respingando, em fain a
cega de copist as, tudo o que de melhor e xiste nos códigos orgânicos de
outras nações, tornamos, revolucionariamente, fugindo ao transigir mais
ligeiro com as ex igências d a nossa própria n acionalidade, mais fundo o
contraste entre o nosso modo de viver e o daqueles rudes patrícios mais
estrangeiros nesta terra do que os imigrant es da Europa. Porque não no-los
separa um mar, separam-no-los três séculos…(Cunha 209) (grifos meus)
Partha Chatterjee, ao descre ver o percurso intelectual do Subaltern
Studie s Group, afirma que um ponto importante para o grupo era a certeza
Leopoldo Bernucci sugere que haveria no próprio escritor uma cisão. Euclides não deixaria de ter o
Romantismo como paradigma literário. Como assinala Bernucci, “A impressão que temos é que ele começa a
criticar a ideologia romântica. (. . .) Mas termina, no final, exaltando essa mesma ideologia ao criar um enorme
painel de vinhetas românticas para o festejar dos nossos olhos: a imagem da formação de uma nação através
do esforço de querer buscar a especificidade do brasileiro (. . .).” (33).
7 Para um desenvolvimento dessa questão, ver Johnson, Sentencing Canudos.
6
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de que “e lite historians, even those with progressive views and sympathetic
to the cause of the rebels, sought to ignore or rationally explain away what
appeared as mythic al illusory, millenarian, or utopian in rebel actions” e
que, assim, “they were actually m issing the most powerful and sign ificant
elements of subaltern consciousness” (292). A observação de Chatterjee
sobre a revisão historiogr áfic a a que se propôs o grupo de intelectuais
indianos ajuda a compreender por que, afinal, E uclides não consegue
representar o sertanejo como sujeito. Sua visão não permitia, por exemplo,
interpretar o papel de Antonio Conselheir o em Canudos de outra maneira
que não a de excêntrico líder religioso, nem de imaginar que os sertanejo s
pudessem ter optado por seguir o Conselhe iro. N’Os Sertões, a simpatia pelo
sertanejo advém de uma atit ude paternalista, do entendimento de que
aquele
não
possuía
as
caracter ístic as
e
condições
necessárias
para
efetivamente fazer um a escolha soberana,que para E uclides só poderia ter
sido a de não aderir à excentricidade de Antonio Conselheiro, mas uma
opção a favor da ide ia moderna de nação.
Tentando recuperar a agência que haveria na formação de Canudos
pelos sertanejo s, Adr iana Johnson, em “Everydayness and Subalternity”,
discorre sobre a possibilid ade h istórica de entender os canuden ses da
mesma maneira que os subalternos indiano s de que fala o Subaltern Studie s
Group. Uma ve z que a subalternidade “forces us to think about what has
remained outside that province we call modernity” (2007 22), e que o
subalterno é sempre “misread”, os canudenses teriam sido entendidos
como pré-políticos e provocadores, ao invés de agentes, e, portanto,
sujeitos que podiam compreender as causas e consequências das suas ações
(2007 27). Para Johnson, então, os sertanejos, ao seguirem Antonio
Conselheiro, resistiam ao poder regulado r do Estado brasileiro, que se
impunha
naque le
iníc io
de
república.
Eram
sujeitos
que
agiam
historicamente e por isso tinham suas ações rasuradas pela chamada
história nacional e oficial.
Euclides, constit uindo o que viria a se c onformar história oficial,
desdenhava a ação polític a dos c anudense s ao associá-los à “religiosidade
extravagante” (a expressão é de Euclide s) de Antonio Conselheiro, ao
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extraordinário, à irrac ionalidade e à de sorganizaç ão. Esse s defe itos, par a
Euclides, ser iam próprios de povos retardatários que de veriam ter sido
abarcados pe la modernidade e não viole ntamente eliminados, como, de
fato, foram. Por serem considerados pelo escritor como o “sedimento
básico da nação”, o sertanejo ex igiu, por outro lado, a compreensão da sua
existência, o que só se dar ia atravé s de um léxico já existente. Euclides,
portanto, teve que encaixar as c aracterísticas do sertanejo dentro de um
catálo go de conhecimentos identific ado com o poder –com a linguagem
científica do séc ulo dezenove e com o discurso histórico. A conse quênc ia,
alerta Chatterjee,
often unintended, of this historiographic al pract ice was to
somehow fit the unruly facts of sub alter n politics into the
rationalist grid of e lite consc iousness and to make them
understandab le in terms of the latter. The autonomous history
of the subaltern classe s, or to put it differe ntly, the dist inctive
traces of subaltern action in history, were completely lost in
this historiography. (292)
Dessa forma, Os Sertões parece estar e m conformidade com a
constituiç ão de uma ide ia de nação que se pretende logicamente construída,
corroborando o silêncio das cam adas subalternas, no caso, dos sertanejos.
O Outro ser ia conhecido de modo a torná-lo fam iliar através dos disc urso s
identificados com o poder, e a força da história tratar ia de e liminar esse s
que formaram a naç ão mas que fazem parte de outro tempo na evolução de
uma raça:
O jagunço destemoroso, o tabaréu ingênuo e o caipira
simplório
serão
em
breve
tipos
re legados
às
tr adiçõe s
evanescentes, ou ext intas. ... A c ivilizaç ão avançará nOs Sertões
impelid a por essa implac áve l ‘força motriz da história’ que
Gumplowic z, maior do que Hobbes, lobrigou, num lance
genial, no esmagamento inevitável das raç as fracas pelas raças
fortes. (Cunha 9-10)
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Gonzalez-Echeverría chama a atenção para o entrelaçamento, devido
ao poder inerente ao d isc urso c ientífico no século de zenove, entre a
literat ura lat ino-americana de ssa época e a ciência. O crítico remonta à
importância dos cientistas viajantes com seus cadernos de anotações sobre
o continente americano e sua implicaç ão com a liter atura. A narr ativa
derivada dessa condiç ão assumir ia a forma do disc urso hegemônico. Ou
seja,
its newness and difference, are narrated through the mind of a
writer qualified by sc ience to search for the truth. That truth
is found in an e volutionary conception of nature. (...) The
capacity of truth is due not so much to the cogency of the
scientific method, as to the ideologic al con struct that supports
them, a construct whose source of strength lies outside the
text. (12)
Euclides exerceria, precisamente, a tarefa do cientista da metrópole
(europeu) de procurar pela verdade – a e ssência nacional – que , por sua
vez, sustentava-se num construto ideológico (“an evolutionary concept of
nature”) que resid iria fora do texto – ponto que Luiz Costa Lima, em Terra
Ignota, retoma com vigor.
Em relaç ão à essênc ia nacional, Gonzale z-Echeverría nos lembra
que, contribuindo para o d isc urso científico das metrópoles europeias
acerca dos territórios ainda relativamente desconhecidos de outras partes
do mundo, os viajantes cientistas b usc avam, nas suas expedições, não
somente exemplares de fauna e flora mas “specimens that represented a
backward leap into the origins of evolut ion. Hence, to travel to Latin
America
meant
to
find
the
beginning
of
h istory
preserved
–
a
contemporary, living origin ” (110). Mais uma ve z, não é preciso muit a
eluc ubração p ara ver atitudes demasiadam ente similares entre o cientista
europeu na América Latina e Euc lides da Cunha no sertão nordestino.
Além disso, o próprio uso de uma teoria – o evoluc ionismo – concebida em
e para “paíse s etnicamente estáveis” (Lima 207) e, portanto, não mestiços
como o Brasil, além de fazer surgir problemas que Euc lide s terá que
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resolver e scapando p ara o m ito – o u forjando uma ethnic ity brasile ira,
provará a sua submissão ao modo europeu de conhecimento, uma vez que
ele próprio copia os cientistas e uropeus na sua maneira de abordar a raça e
a nação. Euc lides de sperdiç a a chance de questionar a c iência ao passo que,
como coloca Lima, “paradox almente mostra seu acerto na afirmaç ão do
parasit ismo do litoral por se u próprio comportamento parasitário ante a
ciência e uropéia” (207).
Ao não quest ionar a ciênc ia e , portanto, ao aplicá-la em e par a
território e população brasileiros, os result ados dão numa “sinuc a de bico”
que E uc lide s não resolve verdade iramente, senão denega. A afirmação n a
“Nota Prelim inar” de que os sert anejos est ariam fadados a desaparecer e a
denúncia ao longo do texto de Os Sertões de que o que se sucedeu na guerr a
de Canudos foi um m assacre, um “cr ime da nacionalidade ”, soam
contraditórias, m as são exp lic áve is através da vontade de formação de um
disc urso hegemônico sobre a naç ão brasileir a que determina que sua
essência (a ser superad a) estava no homem do sertão.
Passado um séc ulo do ep isódio de Canudos e pouco mais de noventa
anos da public ação da obra de E uclides, mais uma vez o Brasil parece estar
às voltas, atravé s d a literatur a e do discurso vinculado a e la, com a
confrontação entre seu imaginário de progresso e o que parece não ter sido
incluído ne le. Re firo-me, especific amente, à publicaç ão de Cidade de Deus 8,
livro de Paulo Lins, sobre a favela de mesmo nome na cidade do Rio de
Janeiro.
Não obstante, a sit uaç ão é dist inta: difere ntemente do que pensava
Euclides, os fave lados não ser iam retardatários à espera do progresso, mas
seus
sinais
mais
vitais
e xtremados.
Eles
representariam,
assim,
o
capitalismo, se guido por pratic amente todos os paíse s do mundo, no se u
momento mais avançado.
Esses homens, além disso, estão despossuídos do que h avia de m ais
“humanit ário” ou de mít ico na interpretação de Euclides sobre o Brasil:
8
A primeira edição do livro é de 1997.
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eles não são a essência da naç ão. Pelo contrário, a fave la de maneira geral é
estigmat izada
no
ideár io
nacional
co mo
um
lugar
agregador
de
característ icas negativas. Ela é resultado do desleixo estatal e seria berço
de aberrações.
Os motivos para a comparação entre as obras de Euc lides da Cunh a
e Paulo Lins, entretanto, não residem exclusivamente neste nódulo que
uniria os dois livros em torno da ideia de arcaico e moderno ou atraso e
progresso.
Pelo
contrário,
a
comparação
nasce
da
observação
do
entrelaçamento de disc ursos que n’Os Sertões é resultado da insufic iência da
ciência (trapacead a por seu autor através da fuga para o mito) enquanto
que em Cidade de Deus a imbricaç ão dos disc ursos é ressaltada pelo ato
crítico, que recolhe alguns fios soltos da n arrativa que pretende abarcar um
todo, característica suger id a por seu próprio título.
Dessa forma, Cidade de Deus, apesar da distância temporal a que est á
do livro de Euclides da Cunha, se configur a uma obra com qualidade s
próximas às da obra sobre Canudos. Ainda que ap arente um estatuto
literár io mais bem e consensualmente delineado, é comum, também, algum a
indefin ição quanto ao caráter ficc ional de Cidade de Deus. Não por pouco, o
próprio Paulo Lin s explica a origem da obra ao final do livro: “E ste
romance baseia-se em fatos reais. Parte do material ut ilizado foi extraído
das entrevistas fe itas para o projeto ‘Crime e criminalidade nas c lasse s
populares’, da antropóloga Alba Zaluar, e de artigos nos jornais O Glo bo,
Jornal do Bras il e O Dia” (403). Ou seja, de maneira bem parecida a Euc lides
da C unha, que também se baseo u em maté rias de jornais, além do trab alho
em campo, Paulo Lins não esconde estar lidando com o que aconteceu.
Soma-se a esse panorama a principal carac terística intrínseca às narrat ivas
de Euclides da Cunha e Paulo Lins, qual seja, a tarefa de compreender
todos, de abarcar toda uma situaç ão espacial e temporal. Em Os Sertões,
essa atitude do olhar é denotada princip almente pelas três partes do livro
que visam nad a menos do que o panorama completo: “A terra”, “O
homem” e “A lut a”. Cidade de Deus, por sua vez, ainda que intitule seus
capítulos com nomes de personagens, exp lic a a história da fave la, do se u
surgimento até o possíve l ápice da violê ncia e do tráfico de drogas, ao
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longo de aproximad amente três décadas. Se a compreensão do todo é a
tarefa a qual Euc lides se dedica em tempo integral, isto é, se Euc lide s
constrói um cenário físico que justific a a presença daquele tipo hum ano,
que, por sua vez, explica o surgimento de Can udos, o dist anciamento
necessário para que aque la exista é a posiç ão ele ita pelo narrador de Cidade
de Deus. Sem nenhum compromisso com o desve lamento da “essência
nacional” ou com a explicaç ão que esta de scoberta demandaria em relação a
preceitos científicos, o narrador de Cidade de Deus consegue, boa parte do
tempo, manter uma distânc ia se gura da matéria narrada. Isso não quer dize r
que o ponto de vista interno primeiramente aludido por Roberto Schwarz,
grande catalisador das le ituras de Cidade de Deus, não esteja operando. A
ideia é que a d istância é necessária quando a narrativa pretende dar conta
de toda a favela. Ou se ja, a distância gera uma relação de igualdade entre
os personagens, onde todos importam. A narrativa não poderia, portanto,
permitir-se a dedicaç ão a um único personagem ou a um grupo exclusivo, o
que justific a tanto a prioridade conferida a certos personagens em
momentos específicos como a dedic ação à personagens “sem nomes”,
componentes do quadro geral de Cidade de Deus. Cogito que e sse olh ar
equalizador do narrador em relação às personagens também tenha ajudado
Schwarz a compreender a narrativa, que, para ele, “de ixa o juízo moral sem
chão”. Este e feito ser ia resultado just amente da proximidade do narrador à
ação, derivando o “imediatismo do recorte”, e, assim, uma lógic a causal que
não deixa espaço para julgamentos.
A aproximação entre as obras de Euc lide s e Lins, no entanto, nos
coloca um d ilema: se Os Sertões pode ser entendido como “literatura do
colonizador”, ou se ja, como um e xemplar do olhar da elite sobre o Outro –
incorporado, assim, no discurso hegemônic o sobre a nação – de que forma
Cidade de Deus, na sua “ânsia e uclidiana” de abarcar o todo, poderia ser uma
“resposta do colonizado”? Ou se ja, diante da distância do olhar do
narrador do livro de L ins, algo propriamente científico, como ver em
Cidade de De us uma possível resposta subalt erna?
Já foi mencionado que os fave lados de Cidade de Deus não dispõem
do mesmo estatuto de partic ipante na e ssência da naç ão brasileir a que é
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conferido ao sertanejo em Os Sertões. Desse modo, os homicídios cometido s
contra favelados (tanto na ficção quanto na realidade), longe de comporem
crimes, são corriqueiros, não afet ariam o discurso hegemônico sobre a
nação. A matéria da qual se encarrega o livro de Lins funcionar ia como
uma espécie de ave sso do disc urso hegemônico: ela é ou deveria ser
descartável,
diferentemente
dos
sertanejos,
que,
cujos
assassinatos
tornaram-se motivo de denúncia. Por outro lado, vale lembrar que Cidade de
Deus, se n ão apresentasse por suas car acterístic as formais a suspensão do
juízo moral, como ressalta Schwarz, poderia se ajustar bem ao discurso
crítico que vê o Brasil como país em falta c om um projeto de modernização
e com a modernidade.
Ademais, não há pretensão alguma de ajudar a compor a nação
(heterogênea, mas harmônica) e nem um disc urso que se quer coeso, ao
contrário do intento de Euclides em Os Sertões. Cidade de De us, nesse
sentido, já foi acusado, como no importante ensaio de Tânia Pe legr ini “A s
vozes d a violênc ia na c ultura brasile ira contemporânea”, de deix ar do lado
de fora a engrenagem maior que gerar ia o estado real de vida das pesso as
na fave la, tal como o aspecto político do narcotráfico ( 141).
Por outro
lado, Pele grin i também responsabiliza o romance por criar um t ipo de
diver são para seu púb lico leitor, identific ado pela crít ica como parte da
classe média, que também se divertir ia, supomos, com filmes, novelas e
jogos eletrônicos violentos: “o texto acaba tocando no exótico, no
pitoresco e no folclórico que, ‘para o leitor de classe média têm o atrativo
de qualquer outro pitoresco’” (143).
Contudo, o principal diferenc ial entre as obras aqui abordadas est á
no tratamento que Cidade de De us dispensa aos seus personagens. O livro,
como mencionado, é divid ido em três partes, intituladas com nomes de
personagens. Já esta d ivisão sugere que a narrativa sobre um lugar, como o
título do livro ind ica, se dar á através de seus moradores. Com efeito, são
muito mais comuns as de scrições dos bec os, vielas, ruas e prédios através
das ações e movimentações dos personagens do que por uma pausa na aç ão
propriamente dita para que a descr ição pur a ocorra. Esse entroncamento de
lugare s e pessoas, por sua vez, dá preponderância à aç ão de fato. O livro
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traz a ação do personagem fave lado ao primeiro plano. E qualquer que seja
a cur iosid ade do leitor em relaç ão ao lugar , ela somente poderá ser saciada
pela le itura d as extensas
movimentações e atitude s de Inferninho e seus
contemporâneos, Pardalzinho e sua gangue , Zé Miúdo e todos envolvidos
na guerra.
É
dessa
m aneira,
predominantemente
atravé s
das
ações
do s
personagens, que a favela vai se desenhando. Assim, momentos como o que
segue são exemplares:
Inferninho largou o taco de sinuc a, foi até o bue iro onde
havia entocado seu revólver, de u um confe re na arma, ganhou
as r uas na esc uridão da noite sem lua. Entrou numa vie la,
passou em frente ao jardim-de-infânc ia, atravessou o Rala
Coco, entrou na rua da E scola Augusto Magne, esticou- se pela
rua do braço direito do rio; a cada esquina diminuía os passo s
para não ser surpreendido. Nada de políc ia. Ia provide nciar a
morte do alcagüete para servir de exemplo, porque senão todo mundo
poderia passar a alcagüetar. Essa t alvez fosse a liç ão mais
importante que aprendera nas rodas de bandido quando
menino no morro do São Carlos. Inferninho é do ódio e seus
passos são d a rua do c lube. Foi só atrave ssar o L azer, cortar
pela vie la da igreja, dobrar à dire ita, pe gar a r ua do Meio e
chegar ao Bonfim. (52, grifos meus)
Esse trecho é ilustrativo de um padr ão do romance não só pelo
entrelaçamento dos movimentos de Inferninho à descrição do espaço, mas
pelo uso do disc urso indireto livre (“Nada de polícia. Ia providenciar a
morte do alcaguete para servir de exemplo, porque senão todo mundo
poderia passar a alc aguetar ”) que traz à t ona também os pensamentos do
personagem. Lembremos que é o bandido fave lado, o sub alterno, aqui,
quem age e pensa.
Alguns
o utros
fragmentos,
mais
c urtos,
ocupam
a
narr ativa,
constituindo uma descr ição que só pode ocorrer porque o movimento das
personagens permite. Em “r umaram lá par a baixo, já que Lar anjinha tinha
126
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
visto Inferninho entrar na casa do Carlin hos Pretinho pela manhã. Antes
de atravessarem a praça do bloco c arnavale sco Os Garimpeiros da Cidade de
Deus (...)” (50), descobrimos que os personagens estavam “lá em cima” e
que C arlinhos Pretinho morava “em baixo” e, ainda, que no caminho estava
a praça do bloco carnavalesco, provavelmente, “no meio”. Lugar, como
sugere sua geogr afia, de mediação, já que é lá que Laran jinha, Acerola e
Aluísio encontram Passistinha, velho malandro da favela respeitado por
todos, que intervém a favor dos três junto a Inferninho. De fato, a querela
foi resolvid a poucas linhas depois.
Ao contrário do que m uito da crít ica argumentou ver no livro 9, o
narrador parece negar-se a tirar a foto, a fazer o retrato da Cidade de Deus e
entregá-lo ao le itor. O que interessa são as pessoas, os personagens, suas
ações e vozes. Inferninho, personagem que dá nome à primeira parte do
livro, numa digressão, nos conta que
o pai, aque le merda, vivia embriagado nas lade iras do morro
do São Carlos; a m ãe era puta da zona, e o irmão, viado. (...)
Lembrou-se também daque la safadeza do incêndio, quando
aquele s homens chegar am com saco de e stopa ensopado de
querosene botando fogo nos barracos, dando tiro para todos
os lados sem quê nem pra quê. (...) Um dia após o incêndio,
Inferninho foi le vado p ara a c asa da pat roa de sua tia. T ia
Carmen trabalhava no mesmo emprego havia anos. Inferninho
ficou morando com a irmã da mãe até o pai construir outro
barraco no morro. Ficava entre o tanque e a pia o tempo todo
e foi d ali que viu, pela porta entreaberta, o homem do
televisor d izer que o incêndio fora ac iden tal. Sentiu vontade
de matar toda aquela gente branca, que tinha telefone, carro,
geladeir a, comia boa comida, não morava e m barraco sem água
e sem privada. Além disso, nenhum dos homens daque la casa
tinha cara de viado como o Ari. Pensou em le var t udo da
brancalhad a, até o televisor mentiroso e o liquidificador
colorido. (23)
9
Para uma crítica que vê em Cidade de Deus um “quadro na parede”, ver Pelegrini.
127
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
É importante notar como Lins, ao resolve r inserir a digressão sobre
a vid a, amar gur ada, de Inferninho, se recusa a justific ar sua esco lha por ser
bandido. Quando Inferninho soma ao se u ódio pelos ricos, derivado das
carências de que é vítim a, o fato de que “nenhum dos homens daque la c asa
tinha cara de viado como o Ari”, a possível compaixão do le itor se esmaec e
frente ao preconceito e entendemos, afinal, que nem tudo pode se r
justificado quando se trata de seres humanos (e personagens do livro).
Os trechos mencionados constituem uma espécie de padrão d a
narrativa, ded icada, desse modo, principalmente às ações, pensamentos e
sentimentos dos personagens. Quando é esta a ênfase do livro, não se pode
deixar de notar a diferença entre Cidade de Deus e Os Sertões. Enquanto o
últ imo não pôde delegar ao se u personagem, o sertanejo, o privilé gio da
ação e do pensamento, o primeiro faz disso seu mec anismo operacional. Os
fave lados de Lins são seres que agem e pensam, e é assim que a narrat iva se
constitui estr uturalmente. O romance, portanto, delega agênc ia a homens e
mulheres até então invisíveis, extrapolando até mesmo os limites da própria
obra literár ia. Cidade de Deus, nesse sentido , parece incit ar a atuação num a
esfera que é re al: não somente seus perso nagens passam a fazer parte do
imaginár io de um determinado lugar que a literatur a constrói, como o
romance abre as portas para outros esc ritos desde e sobre as favelas
brasileir as. Cidade de De us, ao trazer ao plano literário seres cuja ex istência
era algo d a ordem do unic amente socialmente compreensível, gera um
espaço de le gitimaç ão da obra literária sobre os fave lados, escr ita por
fave lados.
Os Sertões, por outro lado, apesar da retórica da denúncia escolh ida
pelo seu e scritor, não consegue conceber os sertanejos além de um grupo a
ser cientificamente conhecido e classific ado. O resultado torna-se algo
mais facilmente abarcado pelo conhecimento já existente (em diversas
áreas), e, portanto, pelo Establishment, visto que ele n ão demanda n ada alé m
da simpatia pela causa moderna da introdução de seres considerado s “pré
modernos” aos valores associados com o poder. O que talve z não fosse
pouco, mas que est á longe de constituir um a postura de respeito em relação
ao Outro. A configuraç ão da ordem social não se altera, a confrontação
128
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
com o Outro de fato não existe, e Os Sertões determina seu lugar
fundamental no pensamento “oficial” e hegemônico sobre o Brasil. E é este
pensamento que pode ser reconfigurado a p artir de Cidade de De us.
129
P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
Obras Citadas
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São Paulo: Edusp, 2008. Print.
Carvalho, José Murilo de. “Nação imaginária: memória, mitos e heróis.
Adauto Novaes (ed.), A crise do Estado-nação . Rio de J aneiro: C ivilização
Brasileir a, 2003. 395- 418. Pr int.
Chatterjee, Partha. “A Brief H istory of Subaltern Studies”. Nimnabarger
Itihas (1998). Rpt. in
Empire and Nat ion: Selected Essays.
York: Columbia Un iver sity Press, 2010.
New
289-301. Pr int.
Cunha, Euclide s. Os Sertões. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2008. Print.
Fraser, Robert. Lifting the sentence: a poetics of postcolonial fiction. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000. Pr int.
Gonzalez-Echeverría, Roberto. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Lat in Americ an
Narrative.
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.
Print.
Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de. Raízes do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das
Letras. Print
Johnson, Adriana. “Everydayness and S ubalternity.” South Atlantic Quarterly
106. 1 (2007): 21- 38. S aqD uke. Web. 23 Aug 2011.
---. Sentencing Canudos. Pittsbur gh: University of Pittsbur gh Press, 2010.
Print.
Lima, Luiz Costa. Terra Ignota. Rio de Jane iro: Civilizaç ão Brasile ira, 1997.
Print.
Lins, Paulo. Cidade de Deus. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002. Pr int.
Pelegr ini,
T ânia.
“A s
voze s
da
violência
na
cultur a
brasile ir a
contemporânea”. Crítica Marxista, 21 (2005): 132- 153. Web. 16 Fev
2012.
Rama, Ange l. The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham: Duke
Univer sity Press, 1996. Print.
Santiago, Silviano. “Fechado para balanço (sessenta anos de modernismo)”.
Nas malh as da letra. Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002. Print.
Schwarz, Roberto. “Nac ional por subtraç ão.” Que horas s ão? S ão Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1987. Print.
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---. “Uma aventur a artística incomum.” Folha de São Paulo 7 Sep. 1997.
Antivalor. Web. 23 Aug 2011.
Sevcenko, Nico lau. Literatura como missão: t ensões culturais e criaç ão cultural na
Primeira Repúblic a. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1999. Pr in t.
Smith, Anthony. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: B lac kwe ll, 1999.
Print.
Valente, Luiz Fernando. “Brazilian Lit erature and C itizenship: from
Euclides d a Cunha do Marcos Dias.” Luso-Braz ilian Review 38. 2 (2001):
11- 27. The University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division. Web. 9
Jan. 2012.
Ventura,
Roberto.
Os
Sertões
(Coleção
Folha
E xplic a).
S ão
Paulo:
Publifolh a, 2002. Print.
Williams, Garreth. The other side of the popul ar: neol iberalis m and subalternity in
Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Print
Zilly, Berthold. “A encenação da história em Os Sertões”. Flávio Aguiar,
Ligia Ch iapinni (eds.). Civiliz ação e excl usão: visões de Brasil em Érico
Veríssimo, Eucl ides da Cunh a, Claude Lévi-Strauss e Darcy Ribeiro. S ão
Paulo: Boitempo e Fapesp, 2001. 176 – 196. Print.
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P: PORTUGUESE CULTURAL STUDIES 4 Fall 2012 ISSN: 1874-6969
DIEGO SANTOS VIEIRA DE JESUS
P onti f i c al C athol i c U ni ve rsi ty of Ri o de Jane i ro
NOT THE BOY NEXT DOOR: AN ESSAY ON EXCLUSION
AND BRAZILIAN FOREIGN POLICY
Brazil’s international profile is sust ained by its soft power expressed in
terms of the capacity to persuade, negotiate and mediate. As ex-foreign minister
Celso Amorim ind icates, “[ i]n the present-day world, milit ary power will be less
and le ss usable in a way that these other abilities – the c apacity to ne gotiate based
on sound economic policies, based on a society that is more just than it used to be
and will be more just tomorrow than it is today” (“The Soft-Power Power”). In the
last two decades, Brazilian leaders consolidated relat ions with global powers such
as the U.S. and the E uropean Union through careful negotiation in order to avo id
hostility and deve lop a sense of limited divergence (Lima and Hirst). At the same
time, those leader s aimed at reduc ing powe r asymmetries in North-South relations
with the coordination of positions with developing countries and non-traditional
partners (Vigevani and Cepaluni 1309- 1326). Brazilian authorities look forward to
reshaping international in stitut ions with emphasis on equal representation (Hurrell
and Narlikar 415-433). In regional politic s, Brazil’s prominent position in South
America was constructed through negotiation aiming at the development of strong
political ties with Argentinean authorities and, in the 2000s, better relations with
leftist le aders such as Vene zue la’ s Hugo Chávez and Bolivia’s E vo Morales. In
multilateral
inst itut ions,
Brazilian
negotiators
used
dip lomatic
tools
that
consolidated the le git imacy of their claims for the reformulation of dec isionmakin g structure s (Lima and Hirst 25-33).
Brazilian foreign policy’s literature indic ates that the deve lopment of a
“benign power” profile is not recent. Gelson Fonseca Jr. (356- 359) indic ates that
Brazil’s preference for negotiation and mediation created some advantage s
internationally , because a necessary condition for modernization was a peaceful
international environment. Thus consensus was not a value in itself, but an
understandin g of multip le interests, necessary for the legit imacy of Brazil’ s claims
for international projection. According to Amado Cervo (204-205), cordiality was
based on the perception of national gre atness, wh ich would make fee lings of
hostility superfluous for Brazilian leader s. Zairo Cheib ub (122- 124) indicate s that,
through negotiation and international arbit ration, Brazil could de fine its territorial
borders and eliminate disputes about them, trying not to be charged of imperial
expansionism. A lex andra S ilva (97-102) argues that pac ifism and rule of law
created
continuity
and
coherence
in
the
country’s
foreign
policy,
wh ich
strengthened Brazilian supremacy in South America and nat ional unity through the
consolidat ion of its sovere ignty. In the academic debates on Brazilian foreign
policy, it is possible to detect the consensus on Brazil’s “benign” international
insertion, coherent with its long- standing interests of autonomy and deve lopment,
but less attention is given on the perpetuation of subtle forms of exclusion
through this soft-power identity, as we ll as its m ain impacts on the maintenance of
hierarchies that mar ginalize d ifference in the international le vel, though not alway s
in an explicit way.
I argue that Brazilian leader s and dip lomats maintain a “benign wonder”
based on negotiation and mediation abilit ies, but this perspective is not innocent
or humble, not only in the sense of satisfac tion of Brazilian long- standing interests
of autonomy and deve lopment. This artic le sustain s that, in the archetype of “softpower power”, logocentric structures and dichotomous way s of thinking in
relations with deve loping countrie s and global powers remain act ive in Brazilian
foreign policy, though there is space for m ediat ion with difference. The apparatus
of exclusion in relations between Brazil and other countries creates obstacles for
the recognition of the we alth of diffe rence, the development of common
experiences towards the destabilization of hierarchies and the shar ing of value s
that transcend norms of coexistence. The effect of the maintenance of those
divisions is the diffic ulty to look for common gains and to construct stronger
bases for an effective management of collective problems. Difference represented
by underdeveloped and other developing countries is sometimes understood as
“anomaly ” or “bac kwardness” in relat ion to democratic or liberal models o f
development achieved by Brazil. There is a p attern of “exclusion through
inclusion”, which means that Brazil de ve lops an apparently inclusive perspective
of difference in order to preserve and manage hierarch ies. Deve loped and more
powerful countries are not explicitly labeled as traditional “imperialists” or
“dominators”, b ut the emphasis on their ambition and ability to use force and
institut ions in their benefit updates o ld colonial discour ses not necessarily in order
to destabilize hierarchie s, but to question Brazil’s inferior positions. Depreciative
visions of difference are upd ated, and hierarchies are not overcome as modern
regulatory ambitions. These hierarchies are constantly rearticulated and reinvented.
Exclusion can be art iculated in complex ways. There is the possibility of
mediation with difference, but the mediatio n can provide a path for exceptionalism
when certain ways of living are conceived as non-acceptable. The supposed
freedom of difference can be conditioned to some kind of authority, for example
(Walker). The postcolonial perspective adopted in this artic le gives emphasis to
the fact that difference can be man age d not only with spatial strategies of
segmentation, but also temporal mechanisms of exclusion with the application of
notions of development and modernizat ion, which consolidate difference as
“backwardness”, “barbarianism” or “dysfunction” (Blaney and Inayatullah 21-45).
Difference confers positive content to the “advance” of the “civilization” of the
Self. From this perspective , the crystallization of spatial boundar ies between insid e
and outside occ urs concomitantly with t he permanence of different “stage s of
development” in a linear interpretation of time. Difference is located in the
inferior stage s compared to the “advance d civilizations” (Blaney and Inayatullah
93- 125, 161-185). Base d on the work of S akaran Krishna, I will deve lop the ide a
that
dominant
discourses
that
equate
modernization
with
“civilization”,
development and progress can become instruments of power in the hands of oncecolonized states in the deve loping world (Krishna 4), such as Br azil. Those
dominant discour ses are more explic it in Brazil’ s relations with underde veloped
and developin g countries. In order to have a stronger dialogue with the literature
of postcolonial st udie s, I will apply E dward S aid’s crit ique of notions of
civilizational superiority and exc lusive c laims to rationality or objectivity. Insp ired
by Homi Bhabha, I will ar gue that politic s – including international politic s and
foreign policy – is performative. At the e nd of this artic le, I will emphasize the
negotiations between identity and difference, as we ll as the ambiguous and split
selves that emerge from those negotiatio ns. The mentioned ambiguity can be a
source of creat ive politic al engagements in Brazil’ s relations with other countries.
It can ind icate a hybrid space where negotiation between the authority and its
supposed supplicants can occur and change , according to Krishna (78-79, 96).
In the next sections, I will exam ine how hierarchies persist in Brazil’s
relations
with
underdeve loped/deve loping
countrie s
and
global
powers,
respectively . The examined d isco urses will be main ly the speeches, dec larat ions
and interviews of government officials – specially the president and/or the foreign
minister – during Brazil’s two previous administrat ions, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luiz Inácio L ula da S ilva (2003-2010), as we ll as
authorities of other countries in response to Brazil’ s decisions 1.
Brazil’s relations with underdevelop ed and developing countries
Many Brazilian authorities be lie ve that the Southern Cone and Latin
America are becoming what Amorim c alle d a “secur ity community, in which war
becomes inconceivable ” ( “The Soft-Powe r Power”). In Mercosul’ s 10th Social
Summit of December 2010, the then Brazilian president Lula urged the members
of the economic bloc to move forward in the integration process towards the
I do not argue that the process of hierarchization has always been defined in the same way in different moments of
Brazilian foreign policy history. Second, I understand that the words “developed” and “developing” used in this article
carry strategies of exclusion and marginalization and denounce the existence of a “linear” perspective of time. But it is
important to highlight that I do not assume them in an uncritical manner. In this analysis, I will question them as natural
concepts and will explicit the hierarchies inscribed in them. Third, I also recognize that an orthodox realist account
would see the image of a “benign country” as a cover for power. However, the theoretical perspective adopted in this
article focus on how discourse defines hierarchies between identity and difference and has practical effects in those
relations, while a realist perspective would not develop those issues in detail. Fourth, when I refer to “Brazil”, it is
important to notice that I do not see it as an unproblematic homogeneous unit of analysis. I will focus on discourses of
exclusion created by Brazil’s main foreign policy decision-makers and institutions, but I will not obliterate differences
among domestic actors. Those differences will be discussed whenever they affect Brazil’s international profile.
1
construction of a "Mercosul identity", a term coined by the president himself. In
his vie w, the le aders of the region had ove rcome the disputes in terms of who was
closer to U.S . interests and had important achievements, r angin g from the
agreement on the national benches in Parliament – and the bloc's direct election of
representatives to this partic ular inst itution – to the privile ged economic and
political sit uation after the 2008 financ ial crisis. A lthough Lula had indicated a
higher le vel of convergence in the polit ical relationship among the members – "we
are not here to talk about nucle ar bombs, nor war" –, there are several
impediments to integrat ion. They range fr om the lack of an effic ient mechanism
for disp ute settlement to the diffic ulty of developin g the ide a of integrat ion in the
collective imagin ation of its members’ societies (Olive ira).
Divisions between identity and difference indic ate the permanence of
dichotomous ways of thinking about the regional relations in the Southern Cone.
Within Mercosul, it is possib le to observe the persistence of a traditional pattern
of trade among the members: Brazil continues to import commodities and export
manufact ured goods to other members. Moreover, the bloc had a lim ited role in
stimulat ing the competitiveness of regio nal exports, particularly man ufact ured
goods to markets in the de veloped wor ld, and fighting endogenous reasons for the
lac k of competitiveness of ind ustrial imp orts (Vaz). At the intra-regional leve l,
different views about the integrat ion process – that prevent the coordination of
positions – and individual strategic interests remain, which take precedence over
the alliance between leaders and soc ieties. Many of these differences arise from the
conception that Paraguay and Uruguay are relegated to a marginal or submissive
position in the distribut ion of gains within the bloc by Brazil and Ar gentina, wh ich
account for most of the benefits of economic activity spurred by integr ation.
According to the Uruguayan advisor of the Chamber of Commerce Dolores
Benavente, “Mercosul is like a fam ily: Brazil is the father; Argentina, the mother;
Uruguay and Paraguay, the kids” (Gerchmann, my translation). The logic –
recognized even by weaker countries’ authorities – is that the different – seen as
"less skille d" and "less deve loped" like “children” – are place d in subordinat e
positions to the stronger and economically more vibrant members, labe led as
"ad vanced" and "more appropriate" to the parameters of international economy.
By naturalizing such categorizat ion, the marginalization of the economically
weakest members is perpetuated, e ven though the interaction with the strongest is
not interrupted.
Since 2006, Ur uguay’ s and Paraguay’s leaders have made it clear that time
was r unning out to meet their demands regarding the elim ination of asymmetries in
the bloc and thus ensure their stay in Mercosul. Paraguayan authorities said that
their country would le ave the bloc if Brazil and Argentin a did not interrupt their
protectionist practices. In 2006, Ur uguayan authorities argued that Mercosul
should have flexib le rules on trade with countries outside the integrat ion process.
They stated that, in case of Br azil’ s non-ac ceptance of a free trade agreement with
the U.S., Uruguay could change its status in Mercosul to the one of associated
country. Brazilian leader s have not categor ically rejected the initiative of Uruguay
to seek bilateral agreements, provided that it did not compromise compliance with
the Common External Tariff (CET), which is a central axis of the bloc. Ur uguayan
leaders alleged that the failures of Mercosul prevented further progress regardin g
the expansion of acce ss to other markets and that their country was damaged by
"signific ant costs" such as de industr ializat ion of less competitive sectors and job
losses.
The creation of the Mercosul Structural Convergence Fund in the second
half of the 2000s aimed at reducin g ec onomic asymmetries among Mercosul
members, seeking to meet the demands of Uruguay and Par aguay. With the
creation of Mercosul Parliament in 2006, Lula urged congressmen to think of
generous polic ies for smaller countries and saw that the most powerful countrie s
of Mercosul should collaborate in the deve lopment of the weakest. Still, even with
this apparent increased concern with the reduction of asymmetries, hierarchies
between stronger and weaker members are perpetuated, and as such they reproduce
the understanding of we aker co untries as "supporting actors" in relation to the
other members. In the search for a more balanced partic ipation of Paraguay and
Uruguay, Brazil’s and Argentina’s decisio n-makers would have to confront the
issue of inst itutional representativeness b eyond the terms in which it h as been
treated so as to provide the authentic expression of multilateralism in Mercosul
(Bouzas, “Mercosul, dez anos depois: processo de aprendizado ou déjà-vu?”).
The maintenance of Brazil’ s privile ged position in Mercosul is also possib le
through the disseminat ion of values and principles that inhibit the expression of
difference that represents a threat to its in terests. For ex ample, the 1998 Ushuaia
Protocol stipulated that democratic inst itutions were a prerequisite for the
development of the bloc and changes of the democratic order were barriers to
participation in the integration process (Almeida, Mercosul em sua prime ira década
(1991-2001): uma aval iação polít ica a part ir do Bras il). Venezue la – a country in
process of accession that should incorporate the democratic commitments at that
time – was conceive d by many Brazilian p olitic ians and c ivil society gro ups as an
"atypical, " "dy sfunctional" or "problematic " model of state that would need to be
"tamed" under “real” democratic value s. Brazilian le gislators critic ized H ugo
Chávez’ s dec ision not to renew the lease of network transmission of Radio Carac as
Televisión (RCTV), hinderin g the freedom of the press and woundin g democratic
principles. Cháve z responded by labe ling Brazilian congressmen as “parrots who
repeat U.S. orders”. Br azilian Congress r at ified Venezue la’ s acce ssion to the bloc
in 2009, but many Brazilian senators co mplained about Chávez and Venezue la.
During t alks with U.S . officials ( who suggested “intelligence shar ing” with the
Brazilians in order to monitor the Venezuelans), Amorim declared that Brazil d id
not see Chávez as a threat (Viana). Howe ve r, in a confidential tele gram reve aled by
WikiLe aks, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim labels Venezue la as a “ne w threat to
regional st ability” and says that “Brazilian people consider plausible a militar y
incursion by Chávez in a ne ighboring country because of his unpredictable
character”. This was one of the main reasons for the creation of a South American
Defense Council in order to “insert Vene zuela and other countries of the region in
a common organization that Brazil can control” (“Celso Amorim diz que Cháve z
‘late mais que morde’”,Veja, my translation ).
In spite of the fact that trade liberalizat io n has proceeded re lative ly quic kly
in Mercosul, str uctural imbalances bet ween Brazil and Ar gentina were not
elim inated. With risin g budget defic its and weak attraction of foreign inve stment,
the “Brazil-dependence” proved negat ive for Argentina (A lmeida, Mercosul em sua
primeira década (1991-2001): uma aval iaç ão política a part ir do Brasil, “Problemas
conjunturais e estrut urais d a integr ação na América do Sul: a trajetória do
Mercosul desde suas origens até 2006”). The negative image of Brazil in Argentina
was strengthened after 1999, when the de valuation of the Brazilian re al and the
introduction of a floating exchange r ate h ave generated not only the reaction of
Argentina’s private sector, but also a polit ical-commercial cr isis of Mercosul’ s
external credibility. At first, with the permanence of the problems linked to the
Argentina’s lac k of competitiveness, Argen tinean politic ian s saw Br azil as a threat.
Some said that there was a Br azilian plan to deliberately harm Argentina and
doubted Brazil’ s good intentions. In references to Brazil, Ar gentinean Economy
minister Domingo Cavallo said that “coun tries that devaluate their currencies to
become more competitive are doing the same thing as stealing from their
neighbors” (Maia, my translation). Argent inean authorities saw such a policy as
harmful to their country, which updated constant criticisms that Brazil tried to
solve its internal problems at the expense of its ne ighbors. The lack of capac ity of
Mercosul to deal with the crisis became even more obvious, especially regard in g
problems such as the lack of an appropriate institut ional fr amework for solvin g
internal disp utes, the gap created by diffe rent perceptions of members about the
bloc and the weak macroeconomic policy coordination (Souto-Maior 7- 10).
Although in 2002 President Lula h ad made promises to rebuild Brazil’ s special
relationship with Argentina, Argentinean authorities began to make use of trade
defense mechanisms considered "abusive" by their Brazilian counterparts, such as
unilateral safeguards and antidumpin g measures (Alme ida, “Problemas conjunturais
e estruturais da integraç ão na América do Sul: a trajetória do Mercosul desde suas
origens até 2006”). If Brazil was conceived by Argentine politic ians and
businessmen as "unfair and self-interested", Argentin a was seen as "weak" by the
Brazilian side. Amorim’s dec larat ion in 2004 p uts Brazil in a privileged position
and marginalizes Ar gentina as “less dynamic”:
In the beginning of negotiat ions in Mercosul, wh at did Ar gentinean
businessmen and public sector want? They saw in Brazil a dynamism
that Argentina didn’t have, e specially in the industrial sector. They
wanted to inc lude Argentina into this dynamism, to positively
contaminate Argentine industry, but, for various reasons, they
followe d a d ifferent track. It is necessary to get back to this
dynamism. (…) This won’t be done with automatic safeguards,
trigger s that have problems (…) Br azil is the bigger country and it
will keep having a greater importance in all of this (Amorim,
“Entrevist a ao Jornal Valor Econômico”, my translation).
In
relation
to
African
countries,
the
separation
of
modernity
and
backwardness; civilization and barbar ianism was consolidated. The concept of
“civilization”, in the contemporary world, reaffirms the ideas of socioeconomic
progress, viable governments, human rights, the strengthening of democratic
value s and the repud iat ion of terrorism. It lives on as a modern regulatory
ambition, when it disciplines sub jectivity and determines identity in particular
spatiotemporal contexts. The “civilizin g” notions are conceived as an ideal of
social organ ization and ad apted to the particularit ies of each place and time, givin g
effect to hierarchies that marginalize difference and ensure the integrity of the
dominant identity. In Lula’ s dec lar ations about Afric an countries, many of those
hierarchies persisted and reflected the conception of Africa as a “bac kward ”
continent. In his visit to Namibia in 2003, Lula said that the country’s capital,
Windhoek, was “so c lean, that it doesn’t even look like Afr ica” (BBC Brasil, my
translat ion). In his conception – shared by different sectors of Brazilian
government and society –, Africa’s im ages are connected to poverty and dirtiness,
which reifies a contrast between African states and the “rich ” and “c lean” nonAfrican countrie s. Another example was Lula’s dec lar ation about South Afric a’ s
hosting of the 2010 Wor ld Cup. Lula said that “it was necessary that the World
Cup occurred here [in South Africa] for the world to see that Africans were as
civilized as those who critic ized them before the event” (Aze vedo, my translation).
Although Lula’s intentions to pay a compliment to South Africa and to the Afric an
countries, his dec lar ation reified the centrality of the concept of civilization and
the hierarchies it estab lished, accordin g to which Afric an countries were perceived
as backward, primit ive or not as civilized as non-African states.
Many would say that dec larat ions like those could demonstrate simply the
existence of an exclusionary vision on Lula’s or h is government members’ part. I
recognize that statements like those alone could not demonstrate the existence of
an unequivocal exclud ing profile in Brazilian foreign policy. However, those
individ ual declarations take a different dimension when, in re lat ions between
Brazil and Afr ican countries, we c an identify mechanisms that reve al cultur al and
political postures of hier archization eve n in official doc uments and reports
produced by Itamaraty, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. In its foreign policy
balance from 2003 to 2010 for the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries –
composed mostly by African countries –, Brazilian Foreign Min istry indic ates that:
For Brazil, the natur al benefits of sh ared lan guage and common
cult ural-historical heritage, as we ll as the fact that the country has
recognized expertise in strate gic sectors for economic and social
development of Afric an Portugue se-speaking co untries and East
Timor, such as the case of tropical agr iculture and the fight against
HIV-AIDS,
make
these
countries
singular
partners
for
the
consolidat ion, either in bilateral or communitarian bases, of the
South-South cooperation paradigm. Alm ost half of the reso urces
destined by Brazil to technical cooperation are destined for Afric an
Portugue se-speakin g countries and East T imor (“Balanço de Polít ica
Externa 2003/ 2010”, my translat ion).
In the official discourse, Br azil is portrayed as the owner of something that
its partners do not have: expertise in strategic sectors for socioeconomic
development. It inserts Brazil in a privile ged socioeconomic and cultural position
in relat ion to its partners, creates the logic of superiority of its policie s, an d
reinforces the dependence of other countries on Brazilian support in the area of
technical cooperation. The discourse consolidates exclusionary practices in which
the “more civilize d” and “de veloped” actor helps its “le ss civilized” and
“backward ”
partners.
Though
this
cooperation
avoids
impositions
and
conditionalities on aid, those “comparative advantages” that the Foreign Ministry
tries to highlight allow the facilitation of the action of Brazilian institut ions an d
companies in those countries.
In other occasions, Brazilian authorities tr y to posit Brazil as a “mode l” to
inspire
“less
civilize d”,
“le ss
democratic”
or
“less
deve loped”
countries,
conceiving their solutions for specific problems as “nat ural” or “the best way ” to
solve impasses. In February 2011, when the Egyptian Parliament was dissolved
after President Hosni Mubarak’s resignat ion, the Brazilian ambassador for Egypt
Cesário Melantonio Neto said that “this is the natural way to democracy in Egypt.
We can even compare with Brazil’s history. In our transition to democracy, after
the military regime, we needed a new Parliament and formed a National
Constitutional A ssembly to elaborate a new Constitution for the country, based on
democratic values” (“Embaix ador do Brasil no Egito apoia dissolução do
Parlamento”, my translation). This model image of Brazil – and also its leader s – is
also accepted by those who have more common historical roots with Brazilians,
such as the Portuguese-speakin g countries in Afric a. When Guinea-Bissau’ s
president Malam Bac ai S anhá won national elections in 2009, he said that he wo uld
like to be “the Lula of Guinea-B issau. We share a very similar culture, we speak
the same language, we share the same hist ory. (…) I would like to sit and talk to
president Lula. I’d like to share some points of vie w on deve lopment (…). There
are a lot of good things in Brazil” (“Presidente diz que quer 'ser o Lula da G uinéBissau' .”). A lthough Brazilian authorities might manipulate and emphasize the
common aspects of identity with African countries for political and economic
convenience, they put Brazil, again, in a privilege d position that reifies hierarchie s.
Similar p atterns are visible in Brazil’s re lat ions with Iran, partic ular ly when
Brazil tried to mediate between Iran and Western powers – specially the U.S. –
regardin g the controversial Iranian nuclear program in May 2010. Brazilian
authorities brokered, along with their Turkish counterparts, an agreement in which
Iran agreed to exchange low-enriched uranium for 19, 75% enriched fue l for the
Tehran Research Reactor. During the talks, Brazilian negotiators tried to show that
Brazil shared with Iran the identity of a de veloping country that wanted to
preserve its autonomy and the inalien able rights to de velop peace ful n ucle ar
activitie s. However, in the eyes of most of the international community, Iran seeks
to develop its nuc lear program for the possible product ion of nuclear weapons.
While Ir an looks distant from the Western model of society, Brazilian leaders
reinforced that Brazilian foreign policy was based on “un iversal value s” such as
the defense of human rights, the criticism to the proliferat ion of weapons of mass
destruction and the condemnation of terrorism. The reiteration of this im age and
its embedded value s perpetuated – even unconsciously – the idea that countries
and societ ies that were not totally adapted or conformed to this standard were
"dysfunctional" and "anomalo us" in relation to "civilized" actors. Through the
adoption of a diplomatic vocabulary an d the enhancement of communication
channels, Brazilian authoritie s trie d to broker the fue l swap, but the U.S. an d
European leaders cr itic ized the Tehran Declar ation for not eliminatin g the
continued production of 19, 75% enriched uranium inside Iran ian territory.
Brazilian authorities tried to increase their relevance in wor ld affairs by
disc iplining Iran in modern structures of authority through mediation and trying to
build trust. However, the U.S. and European leaders considered that Iran wanted
to break international unity regardin g its nuclear intentions. They rejected links
between the Tehran Declaration and san ctions against Iran. Though Brazilian
negotiators and the global powers’ leade rs opted for different methods, it is
possible to identify in both initiat ive s atte mpts to “disc ipline” and “domestic ate”
difference, as well as its assimilat ion into structures of authority where the threat
it symbolized could be elim inated in the name of stability and we ll-bein g of the
international community.
The multiple attempts to “civilize rogue states” show the permanence of a
modern regulat ive ambition that locates difference spat iotemporally in order to
preserve peace. As Amorim puts:
We think that when we are in the Security Counc il, whether
permanent or not, we have to contribute to peace and secur ity in the
world and not just deal with our o wn inte rests. I have fo llowed this
subject for a long time, and it was a problem that I alway s thought
had no solution until I heard about the swap agreement. (…) And I
thought maybe a co untry like Br azil, which has this c apacity for
dialogue with several countries, could somehow help. And so I
disc ussed this sub ject with the Iranians. President Ahmadine jad c ame
here. And I made trips to Iran, and I really found that it was in
principle possible to pursue that role (“The Soft-Power Power”).
Amorim’s declaration shows that Brazil sees itself as different from the
“problem” that Iran brings and, instead, it conceives itse lf as part of the
“solution” in light of its ability to negotiate. Brazil was as a "student" of global
powers in the "pedagogy of the competition" (Blaney and Inayat ullah) when it
adopted democratic and liberal orientation s deve loped by such powers, which was
fundamental
in
winning
support
from
those
states
and
key
international
institut ions. A s it became more adept and embedded in the “teacher’s” intellectual
world, this relationship changed: Brazilian decision-makers tried to prove that they
can not only “teach” Iran on how to act, but also thought that global powers co uld
learn a lot from Brazilian lessons of dealing, in a more open and trustful way, with
countries traditionally labele d as “rogue states”.
Brazil’s relations with global powers
Although Brazil sh ares the We stern identit y with global powers, other types
of hierarchies operated simultaneously in their relations. I recognize there is a lot
of space for mediation with difference an d sharing of values between Brazil and
the U.S. or the E uropean Union, but many logocentric str uctures remain active.
Brazilian dec ision-makers wanted to ensure that regime type and economic
orthodoxy, for example, were not used as tools of subtle control by leaders o f
dominant states. Domination c an be imple mented in more subtle way s, spec ially by
the preservation of asymmetries in international instit utions, which Brazilian
authorities cr iticize very intensely . Amorim said that:
Until recently all global decisions were made by a handful of
traditional powers. The permanent members of the Security Counc il
— Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S., who are incidentally
the five nucle ar powers recognized as such by the Nuclear NonProlifer ation Treaty — had (and still have) the privile ge of dealing the
cards on matters of international peace and secur ity. The G-8 was in
charge of important decisions affectin g the global economy. In
que stions related to international trade, the ‘Quad’ — the U.S., the
European Union, Japan and Can ada — dominated the scene (Amorim,
“Let’s Hear From the New Kids on the Bloc”).
Amorim recognized that developing countries had more participation in
world politic s, but asymmetries were preserved:
On April 15, Brasilia was host to two consecutive meetings at the
highest politic al leve l: the second BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and
China) summit and the fourth IBSA Dialogue Forum (India, Brazil
and South Africa). S uch group s, differ ent as they are, show a
willingness and a commitment from emerging powers to redefine
world
governance.
Many
commentators singled
out
these
twin
meetings as more relevant than recent G-7 or G-8 gatherings.(…)
Paradox ically, issue s related to international peace and sec urity —
some might say the “hard core” of glo bal politics — remain the
exclusive territory of a small group of countries (“Let’s He ar From
the New Kids on the Bloc”).
When talking about the Tehran Declarat ion, Amorim (“Let’s Hear From the
New Kid s on the Bloc”) saw that emergin g powers such as Brazil could “dist urb
the status quo” when dealing with subjects “that would be typically handled by the
P5+1 (the five permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany)”, but he
also recognize d that “the tradit ional cente rs of power will not share gladly their
privilege d status”. Brazilian dec ision-makers recognized the obsolescence of old
types of domination by global powers, suc h as open conquest or co lonization, but
indic ated the existence of more subtle for ms of crystallization of hier archies that
revived old myths of submission of weake r or less de ve loped countries. Most of
those myths were revived by the growing unilateralism of global powers, which
contrast to what Amorim (“The Soft-Power Power”) called Brazil’ s “unique
characteristic wh ich is very useful in international ne gotiations: to be able to put
itself in someone else's shoes, wh ich is essential if you are looking for a solution”.
The supposed arrogance of global powers dealing with some international issues
were constantly condemned by Brazilian leaders and officers. A s Amorim puts,
“[t]here are things we [Brazilians] are able to say (…) that we wo uld not be able if
I just go to the world podium and say, ‘ Here I am; I'm a great guy. I'm a se lfrighteous guy. And yo u have to do what I say’ . (…) They [global powers] m ay
think they have the moral authority, but t hey won't be heard” (“The Soft-Power
Power”).
The maintenance of hierarchies between “us” and “them”, identity and
difference is more explic it in Brazil’ s relations with the U.S. . According to Andrew
Hurrell, both countries have a consensual position over substantive values that
coexist with a deep disagreement over the procedural values. This means that they
agree on the importance of democracy and liberal values, but they disagree on
which values from the liberal basket should be given priority. Partic ularly after
September 11th 2001, those Western liberal value s were emphasized in Brazilian
foreign policy, but that was not a synonym for full-scope adherence to policie s
adopted by the U.S. For ex ample, wh ile the U.S. authoritie s defended a more
interventionist perspective on the defen se of democracy and the design of
institut ions in similar mode ls to its o wn so ciety, Brazilians adopted a m inimal and
less interventionist definit ion of the term that encompassed free e lections and
institut ions and the rule of law. I agree with Hurrell about the consensus on
substantive value s, but I think the real clashes of interest, along with deep and
persistent diver gences between Brazil an d the U.S. in the way they vie w the
international context have deeper motivations. The common frustration in
relations between those countries and the absence of close engagement has to do,
in my opinion, with the reiteration of h ierarchies in the bilateral relations that
updates o ld d iscour ses of domin ation and imperialism, even in a context of close
commercial and polit ical relations betwee n both states. The U.S. represented a
threat to Brazilian interests of preserving leadership in So uth America and among
developin g countries.
Brazil’s initiative toward a le ading role in South America is visible in the
creation of the Union of South American Nations in 2008 and the strengthening of
the 1978 Amazon Pact. Nevertheless, fears that Brazil co uld assemble So uth
America into a single bloc in order to destabilize U.S. presence in the Americas
grew strong after Brazilian reluct ance to follow the American initiative to
revitalize its inter-American le adership. Br azilian authorities have also shown their
resistance to U.S. interventionist initiative s in Latin America, which wo uld open
precedents that threaten sovereignty. Brazilian leaders showed their condemnation,
through bilateral and multilateral channe ls, to the U.S. supported coup d’état
against H ugo Chávez (Santiso). They also criticized U.S. support for Colombia’s
war against drug traffic king and guerrilla forces – that could be used as a pretext
for U.S. presence in the Amazon region – and showed strong reservat ions
regardin g U.S. concern with intelligence and police control in the Triple Border
between the cities of Puerto Iguazu, Ciudad del Este and Foz do Iguaç u,
supposedly a sanctuary for Islamic terrorism (Hirst).
In economic affairs, Brazilian authoritie s defended that the FTAA (Free
Trade Area of the Americas) str ucture should lie upon the existing blocs in order
to consolidate existing sub-regional in itiat ives and their bargaining power towards
the U.S. and Nafta. In 1997, Brazil assume d a more affirmative stance based on the
indivisib le nature of the negotiat ing pac kage, the coexistence between FTAA and
the existing agreements and non-exclusion of any sector in negotiations related to
access to market s or the eliminat ion of barriers. In the beginning of last decade ,
the Brazilian government’s perception was that the U.S. administration wanted to
consolidate the implementation of liberal r eforms and force the unilateral opening
of Latin American economies, creating commercial advantages with the reduction
of barriers to its exports. Furthermore, the U.S. Congress was not willing to make
concessions, such as the elim ination of agric ult ure subsidie s and the revision of
antidumpin g le gislation (Bouzas, “El ‘nuevo regionalismo’ y el Áre a de Libre
Comercio de las Améric as: un enfoque menos indulgente”; Cortes). Brazilian
authorities started to develop the image of the U.S. as a threat connected to
intentions of creatin g a hemispheric inst itutional and legal architecture for its
hegemonic interests. Brazil feared the dismantling of its industrie s and national
service s because of the high le vel of competitiveness of American companies and
the possible negat ive impacts on its trade balance.
Before the interruption of FTAA negotiations in 2005, Lula’ s government
indic ated that, even if the FTAA were created, Brazil would not become an
unconditional ally of the U.S. . S imilar positions were defended by Brazil in
multilateral forums where it was an act ive player regardin g the definit ion of rules.
In multilater al trade negotiations, Brazilian negotiators criticized the subsidizat ion
of agr iculture and exce ssive U.S . deman ds regardin g new issue s such as the
enforcement of intellectual property rights. One of the major issues durin g the
WTO Doha Development Round – wh ich started in 2001 – was the debate on
pharmaceutical licensing and public health programs, especially concerning the use
of non-licensed pharmaceut icals in Brazilian anti-HIV/AIDS programs (Hir st).
The Brazilian go vernment and NGOs consider the U.S. position as a threat not
only to the industry of generic pharmaceuticals, but also to health care programs
for Brazilian society. Divergences that expose persistent hierarchies and the
diffic ulty in dealing with the U.S. were also visib le in Brazil’ s multilateral posit ion
towards nuc lear non-proliferation and n uclear disarmament issues. In spite of
constant U.S. pressures, the Brazilian government refused to sign the IAEA
Additional Protocol, partially because the reinforced safeguards sy stem could
create obstacles for the safety of national ultracentrifuge technology. Nevertheless,
Brazilian authorities also saw that reinforced safeguards were not sustainable
without parallel deve lopments by the nuclear-we apon states re garding n ucle ar
disarmament (Rublee 54). Brazil st ill saw n ucle ar-weapon state s such as the U.S. as
threats because they did not live up to the commitments of NPT’s Article VI to
elim inate nucle ar ar senals. Lula declared t hat “[t]he existence of weapons of mass
destruction is what makes the wor ld more dangerous, not agreements with Iran ”
(Lula, “N ucle ar We apons Make the World More Dangerous, Not Agreements with
Iran”).
Brazil’s relations with the European Unio n were also characterized by the
preservation of hier archies, though in a more subtle way. The E uropean Union
developed a strate gy of engagement with Latin American countries based on the
promotion of economic development and global projection of European values and
interests. The change in those relations was connected to the liberalization of
European economies, the attempt to highlight the European Union in the new
global economic politic s and the competition with the U.S. for new m arkets. The
model of cooperation developed by the European Union is based on partnership,
inspired by notions of equality and cooperation that transcend power inequalit ies
and supposedly challen ge the notion of hierarchies. Inter-regionalism might
encompass politic al and instit utional reforms, as we ll as soc ial inclusion and the
overcoming of power imbalances betwe en Europe and Latin America. The
European Union tries to show that it is more concerned with a type of cooperation
in which the North assumes responsib ilities for the South’s deve lopment and
encourages transformations re lated to so cial responsib ility and partic ipation of
civil society (Gruge l). It was a way to minimize dominat ion and submission
stereotypes created
by colonialism.
However,
new hierarchie s emerge
and
rearticulate o ld myths of dominat ion of European powers and dependency of
Southern countries in contemporary times. In this context, Brazilian authoritie s
see, behind the benevolent image of European strategy of partnership, the
persistence of hierarchies that translate into protectionist barriers by the European
Union against the access of Brazilian and Latin American export to its mar kets.
Those
barriers
consolid ate
exclusion
and
represent
a
threat
to
Brazilian
development, relegating the country to an inferior position in light of its necessity
to export agricultur al products for economic growth. Brazilian politic ians and
businessmen understood the maintenance of strict rule s that damage free trade as a
threat to the development of the Brazilian economy and to the preservation of the
country’s identity as an emerging country.
Final considerat ions
Although there is space for mediation and interaction with difference in
Brazil’s relations with other countries, mechanisms of exc lusion persist and cre ate
obstacles to the de velopment of common experiences towards the destab ilization
of hierarchies and the sharing of value s that transcend coexistence. Difference
represented by underdeveloped and other developin g countries was conceived as
“backwardness” in relation to liberal an d democratic models of de velopment
achieved by Brazil. Global powers were seen as “ambitio us” through the revival
and adaptation of old colonial disco urses. Negative visions of difference persist
and are constantly updated, reinvented and rearticulated. It would be very
simplistic to say that this ar gumentatio n constructs the idea that, if Brazil
recognizes that it has a more dynamic economy than his South American neighbors
or his Afric an partners, it would be e viden ce of Brazil’ s prepotency. It would also
be limited to affirm that, if in the commercial and economic trade disputes with
stronger powers (the U.S., European Unio n, etc.) Brazil moves towards protecting
its national interest, it would be considered instantaneously a subtle indic ation of a
dichotomist suspic ious and resentful posture. What is being defended here is that
Brazilian
foreign
policy
might
reflect
deeply
internalized
notions
of
the
depreciation of difference, wh ich create obstacles to better political solutions for
many problems in the relations with other countries.
I do not suggest in this artic le that the appreciation for dialogue and
negotiation would re quire Brazilian authorities to deliberately ignore the existence
of rich and poor countries, weak and strong states or even the anarchic
characteristic of the international system. Instead, Brazilian leaders and society
should consider those categories, but not take them for granted or as immutable
elements of the international context. The destabilizat ion of the pre-given
polarization between "advanced " and "bac kward" countries, societ ies that are "fit
for development" and "unfit for deve lopment", opens the possibility for a crit ical
reflection of Brazil’ s act ions and the ways it internalized liberal proposals. It may
also highlight way s to redefine policie s aimed at reducing ine quality with a denser
and more precise knowle dge of suffering of other societie s, the recognit ion of
common aspects between these experiences and the intensific ation of dialogue in
new terms in order to overcome oppression. When it is possible to identify
elements of exclusion similar to other societies in its own political, socioeconomic
and cultural experience – the "Other within" –, Brazilians may re inforce dialo gue
with other societies and have more comprehension of their own society. This
dialogue would be implemented through the analysis of domestic and foreign
mechanisms that reproduce oppression an d marginalization of peripheral societ ies
in the international sy stem and the development of better responses to such
problems. Such efforts – wh ich would be taken not only in relat ions with
developin g, but also de veloped countries – can be carried out through different
ways. One first step could be the increased interaction of Itamaraty with other
ministrie s to develop programs with foreign counterparts, aimed at strengthening
technical cooperation in t acklin g problems related to issues such as he alth care ,
educat ion and public safety, for example . Brazilian authorities can le arn from
mistakes
and
successe s
of
its
partners
in
implementing
these
program s
domestically. Parad iplomacy and the invo lvement of subnational actors such as
municipalities and federal state’s go vernments may be important, given that many
of these policie s are put in practice at leve ls below the national leve l.
I do not assume the immutability of the international system as an arena of
conflict in wh ich foreign polic ies are determined with the consideration of
relations between se veral se lf- interested st ates. So it is possib le, according to the
main ar gument de veloped in this artic le, to develop multip le ways to recognize
practices of exclusion and share experienc es of sufferin g and oppression in order
to replace them with new proposals that critically re invent international relat ions
as intercultural relations of sharing and un derstanding.
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