Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Impertinence of Belonging

2008; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08905760802402543

1743-0666

Pedro Meir Monteiro,

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size I thank Claire Williams for the translation of a first version of this article, and Steve Lawrence for helping me revise its final English version. Notes I thank Claire Williams for the translation of a first version of this article, and Steve Lawrence for helping me revise its final English version. 2I think here of Jacques Lacan's considerations on “anguish” as being the result of a “lack” that is not a simple one. In Freudian terms, the individual always experiences the moment when both the familiar and the strange (Unheimlich) meet. In Lacan's re-reading of Freud, anguish only exists when the familiar lack (i.e., all the signs of belonging that I'm capable of missing) is invaded by the strange, bringing into light the paradox of a familiar (and familial) “lack” that is “lacking.” These theoretical intricacies lead to the notion that the individual's desire wouldn't be possible had it not been for the very absence of the desired object. In our case, such an object can be either the subject itself (“the” Latin American) or the theoretical construct that is “Latin America.” See CitationLacan's “L'Angoisse.” 3Those familiar with the field of Spanish and Portuguese know that the significant influx of Spanish American students to the graduate programs in the United States is due mainly to the lack of possibilities for continuing as graduate students in their home countries. This is not the case in Brazil, where a relatively strong system of graduate schools and public scholarships allows for many graduate students to dedicate themselves solely to their education, before they enter the job market. For a discussion of the Brazilian academic system, focusing on the University of São Paulo, see CitationSchwartzman. When entering the bay of New York in 1893, Nicaraguan poet Rubén CitationDarío referred to “el corazón del monstruo.” See Darío's “Edgar Allan Poe.” 5Mário de Andrade's fabulous character was drawn from the German ethnographer Koch-Grünberg's account on the myths and tales of the Taulipang and Arekuná Amazonian Indians, in which one can find the god Macunaíma and its opponent Piaimã. See Andrade's Macunaíma. 6The influence of Rabelais on Mário de CitationAndrade's Macunaíma is often discussed in regard to Bakhtin's studies of popular culture during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See, for instance, Gilda de Mello e CitationSouza's O tupi e o alaúde. 7See CitationAntelo's A Ilha de Marapatá. 8See Diniz's “O conceito de América Latina: uma perspectiva francesa.” There is controversy over the first time the term (“Latin America”) was used. CitationDiniz affirms that the concept was probably first used by Charles Calvo, in his 1862 Recueil Complet des Traités…However, Jorge Schwartz, in his “Down With Tordesilhas!” states that “the term ‘Latin America’ emerges for the first time in 1836, in an article by Michel Chevalier, and was vigorously taken up by the Colombian writer and diplomat José María Torres Caicedo,” author of the 1865 treatise Unión Latinoamericana. According to Schwartz, the idea that the term was “coined and spread by the ideologues of Napoleon III as a justification for the invasion of Mexico” is just an error (279). For a comprehensive debate on the imperial rationale presiding over the conception of a “Hispanic America,” see CitationDíaz-Quiñones's “Hispanismo y guerra.” 9Being a Brazilian faculty member in a Spanish and Portuguese department opens another front where a new “Other” may be found. I refer here to Portuguese literature and all of the lusophone postcolonial literatures of Africa and Asia. I discussed this issue in my essay “The Other Roots.” For a panorama of the contemporary debates on literary and cultural criticism in and on Latin America, in a book that significantly contains no article by a Brazilian critic (even though CitationRaúl Antelo addresses “Brazilian” issues in his contribution to the volume), see CitationSánchez Prado's América Latina: giro óptico. 10Modern Language Association's 2007 report on “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in United States Institutions of Higher Education” shows that, between 2002 and 2006, the increase of enrollments in Portuguese in postsecondary institutions in the United States is significantly more modest than the increase in enrollments in languages such as Arabic and Chinese. 11The expression (“nossos irmãos latino-americanos”) is easily found in the official rhetoric of Brazilian diplomacy. See, for example, the speech of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Celso CitationAmorim at the “Reunião de Chanceleres da América do Sul e dos Países Árabes” in May 2005. 12Of course, it is not the case here of naming or blaming people. But any scholar working in a Department of Spanish and Portuguese knows that a newcomer who will occupy a position in Portuguese is expected to know Spanish at least for bureaucratic matters. Most faculty meetings are held in Spanish, students (majors and graduate) often know Spanish better than Portuguese, and the ratio between Spanish and Portuguese faculty obviously responds to the differences in enrollments. The MLA report mentioned above shows 10,267 students enrolled in Portuguese in 2006, at 2,851 United States postsecondary institutions, while in the same year 822,985 students enrolled in Spanish. 13In his essay “Down With Tordesilhas!” Schwartz traces the interest of Brazilian intellectuals in the Hispanic American literary tradition back to José Veríssimo, Mário de Andrade, Brito Broca, Manuel Bandeira, and, more recently, Antonio Candido and Haroldo de Campos. More recent attempts at “crossing” the Tordesilhas line, departing from the Brazilian side, can be found in Patricia CitationArtundo's Mário de Andrade e a Argentina and Viviana CitationGelado's Poéticas da transgressão. 14The welcome speech addressed by José Veríssimo to Rubén Darío, on the occasion of the latter's visit to the Academia Brasileira de Letras in 1912, read: “Children from the same continent, almost of the same land, hailing from the same peoples, in short from the same race, or at least from the same cultural background. We, Latin Americans, share great common interests and live, slightly more than others do, but indifferent to each other, ignoring one another almost totally.” Quoted in Schwartz, 277. 15In the introduction to his Tropical Truth, Caetano CitationVeloso suggests that when one tries to understand this “absolutely Other” that is Brazil, “the parallel with the United States” is inevitable: “If all the countries in the world today must measure themselves against ‘America,’ position themselves in relation to the American Empire, and if the other countries in America have to do so in an even more direct way—comparing their respective histories to that of their stronger and more fortunate brother—Brazil's case is even more acute, since the mirror image is more evident and the alienation more radical. Brazil is America's other giant, the other melting pot of races and cultures, the other promised land to European and Asian immigrants, the Other. The double, the shadow, the negative image of the great adventure of the New World. The sobriquet ‘sleeping giant,’ which was applied to the United States by Admiral Yamamoto, will be taken by any Brazilian as a reference to Brazil, and confused with the seemingly ominous words of the national anthem, ‘forever lying in a splendid cradle.’” (4) 16“Différance is the name we might give to the ‘active’ moving discord of different forces, and of differences of forces, that Nietzsche sets up against the entire system of metaphysical grammar, wherever this system governs culture, philosophy, and science.” (Derrida, 70) What CitationDerrida calls “metaphysical grammar” is exactly what would guarantee that “Brazil” can be thought of as a word whose meaning is self-evident, as if knowing Brazil were a possibility given by Brazi l itself. What I am proposing in this article is exactly the opposite, since my assumption is that knowing Brazil is only possible when we realize that the sign “Brazil” does not exist outside of that system of forces. In other words, there is no metaphysical grammar in which the meaning of Brazil is stable and conclusive. I need to flee from the sign “Brazil” in order to understand not only that a country is a discursive construct, but that this discursive construct is the proof that “Brazil” does not exist outside of language, outside of that world of forces, of differences and différances. On the same issue, see CitationRocha's “Nenhum Brasil existe.” 17“As decolonization proved an absolute necessity by the 1960s, African and Caribbean postcolonial writers as well as European and Latin American dissenting intellectuals came to use the counter-hegemonic idea of Caliban in order to destabilize colonial sets of ideas and call for the deprivileging of Prospero-qua-colonizer.” (CitationZabus, 9) 18In O espelho de Próspero, CitationMorse proposes: “For two centuries a North American mirror has been held aggressively to the South, with unsettling consequences. The time has perhaps come to turn the reflecting surface around. At a moment when Anglo America may be experiencing failure of nerve, it seems timely to set before it the historical experience of Ibero America, not now as a case study in frustrated development but as the living-out of a civilizational option.” (I use here Simon CitationRomero's translation in his obituary of Morse in the New York Times.) On Morse's enchantment by Ibero America, see my article on Buarque de Holanda's Raízes do Brasil (CitationMonteiro, “En busca de América”). See also CitationMonteiro CitationLobato's América, Buarque de CitationHolanda's Raízes do Brasil, and Gilberto CitationFreyre's The Masters and the Slaves. 19Both Antelo and Schwartz have engaged in a consistent campaign of de-provincialization of Brazilian literature. Interestingly enough, the dialogue between the Brazilian literary critic Antonio Candido and the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama has gained special visibility after Antelo edited Antonio Candido y los estudios latinoamericanos in the Críticas series from the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana at the University of Pittsburgh. This is a clear example of an in-between space, where a bilingual (Spanish and Portuguese) publication is made possible thanks to a North American university. 20I paraphrase here Brazilian anthropologist Roberto CitationDaMatta, who titled one of his books O que faz o Brasil, Brasil? (What makes Brazil, Brazil?). CitationDaMatta (himself an expatriate who taught for decades at the University of Notre Dame) is a sharp observer of the cultural differences between the North American and Brazilian ways of life, having academia as his constant reference. See his Tocquevilleanas. 21According to the Indian-American critic, the analysis of cultural differences “changes the position of enunciation and the relations of address within it; not only what is said but from where it is said; not simply the logic of articulation but the topos of enunciation. The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the ‘other’ that resists totalization—the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. The identity of cultural difference cannot, therefore, exist autonomously in relation to an object or a practice ‘in-itself,’ for the identification of the subject of cultural discourse is dialogical or transferential in the style of psychoanalysis. It is constituted through the locus of the Other which suggests both that the object of identification is ambivalent, and, more significantly, that the agency of identification is never pure or holistic but always constituted in a process of substitution, displacement, or projection.” (CitationBhabha, 312–313)