Abstracts

New Approaches to Latin American Popular Culture

23 - 25 April 2009

Keynote Speaker:
Alberto Moreiras (University of Aberdeen)
Populism and the Popular:  An Antibiopolitical Critique 

My paper is an engagement with populist theory and the notion of the people.  The very notion of "the popular" must be contested today as a 19th century conceit thoroughly dependent upon outdated theories of the nation.  I will be drawing on a number of seminars taught by the later Michel Foucault at the College de France in the late 1970s that have recently been published, as well as on Ernesto Laclau's _Populist Reason_.  My contention is that a biopolitical element already implicit at the birth of the notion of the popular has today taken over to such an extent that we must focus on it rather than on its populist screen.  We stand in need of new notions of political life that can offer an alternative to identitarian configurations of the political at the national or intranational level. 

 

Other Speakers:

Abilio Estévez (Cuban writer)

Tres tristes tigres, La Estrella y el bolero

 

Entre otras muchas cosas, Tres tristes tigres, de Guillermo Cabrera Infante se propuso describir y descubrir, como nadie lo había hecho hasta entonces, el ambiente de la noche habanera de los años cincuenta, con su lenguaje inconfundible (ese “habanero” tan peculiar), e incorporó algo que hasta entonces había sido considerado de uso únicamente vulgar: el bolero, la canción de cantina, arrabalera, de “victrola”, con sus historias insolentes, de amores y desamores desmedidos, de fidelidades desfachatadas e infidelidades tan colosales como imperdonables. El mundo cursi del bolero nocturno, de bar, entró así por primera vez en la literatura llamada seria. Como ha dejado dicho el ensayista mexicano Carlos Monsiváis: “En Tres tristes tigres, Cabrera Infante hace ese infaltable capítulo de la educación sentimental de América Latina: la canción romántica”. Intento, pues, definir el bolero, explorar qué significa ese género, cómo se puede saber que una canción es un bolero, género tan esquivo e importante en América Latina, desde finales del siglo XIX hasta la actualidad. Y me propongo revelar de qué modo lo empleó Cabrera Infante en su gran novela, al descubrirnos no sólo la noche habanera, sino a un personaje inolvidable y muy unido a ella, La Estrella, aquella mujer que cantaba boleros.

 

Alberto Fuguet (Writer and filmmaker)
Latin American Liminality: Fear (and sorrow) and loathing (and good times) in non-places

¿Hay vida post McOndo? A más de 12 años de la aparición de la “moral McOndo” la oposición ciudad-campo ya no es tan absoluta. De qué tipo de ciudades hablamos? De qué barrios? Buena parte de la literatura y el cine latinoamericano están situando sus narraciones en no-lugares. Desde aeropuertos a edificios intercambiables, de malls a Starbucks, supermercados y tiendas de cómics. La cultura pop no sólo es la cultura imperante sino que la identidad del narrador, del autor, de los personajes o de la ciudad en que están ambientados contiene cada vez menos elementos “autóctonos”. ¿O sí?  Hablaré de distintos cuentos y libros de autores como Martin Rejtman, Andrés Caicedo, Edmundo Paz-Soldán (¿su última novela es americana o latinoamericana?) además de películas como Rudo y Cursi y Amores perros. Además exhibiré mi nuevo cortometraje DOS HORAS, ambientado en un aeropuerto.  Una confesión de un alienado pop, directo desde el frente de la batalla cultural.

 

Stephen Hart (University College London)
Santería, Black Magic and the Black Market in Cuba

Santería, or Regla de Ocha, as it is also known, has played a complex role in Cuba since the advent of the Revolution (1 January 1959). Frowned upon by the Spanish during the Colonial period ‘santería’ came to be valued in the 1960s given the Revolution’s emphasis on discovering Cuba’s African roots. Whereas the lion’s share of research on ‘santería’ in contemporary Cuba has focussed on the visually striking nature of the rituals which are central to ‘santería’ cosmology, this study will interrogate the economic structures which underline its function within society. Drawing on some basic concepts derived from game theory as enunciated by Von Neumann and Morgenstein, this paper will interpret ‘santería’ as principally an n-person non-zero sum game in which the religious agent (or member of the sect and believer) negotiates with the religious leader (the ‘babalawo’ or ‘santera’) over the sale of ‘supernatural goods’. This project draws specifically on G. Levy and R.  Razin’s theory of religious organizations which analyses the dynamics of religious organisation and religious beliefs after individuals experience personal shocks to their well-being. The theoretical framework provided by the Levin-Razin theory is nuanced in this paper by the field research carried out by M. Holbraad on Ifá cults in Havana which, increasingly during the 1990s -- and against a backdrop of grinding poverty created by the fall of the Socialist Block and exacerbated by the U.S. Blockade -- promoted themselves as characterised by extraordinary material wealth, luxury, and unplanned spending, as encapsulated by the colloquial expression as used on Havana’s streets: ‘especulación’ (Holbraad, p. 644). While ‘especuladores’ in Havana are typically imagined as non-whites ‘involved in some kind of shady economic activity - be it hustling, pimping of dealing on the black market’ (Holbraad, p. 650), this term has also come to be used of the ‘babalawo’ who is able to choose enormous sums for the initiation ceremony, with it not being uncommon for $6,000 to change hands (Holbraad, p. 659). One of the key questions of this project will be the extent to which the ‘speculation’ underlying the activities of the ‘babalawo’ and the ‘santera’ is an example of what Levin and Razin refer to as the ‘supply side of religion’ and the implicit suggestion that this points to not only an entrepreneurial presence but also the ‘political power of religious leaders’ (pp. 28-29). Indeed, it is difficult not to interpret the entrepreneurial/speculative nature of the activities of especially the ‘babalawo’ as an example of private enterprise within a Communist society, which has important political implications for Cuba´s future.


Lorraine Leu (University of Bristol)
Brazilian Cinema, Mass Media and Criminal Subjectivities

Given the crisis of the state in administering zones of conflict in Brazil’s cities, the mass media have become an important arena for discussion about crime. Media representations play an important role in how crime is understood and discursively articulated in the public sphere. Like other forms of the mass media, film often engages in the stylisation of criminal acts to make them more consumable and communicable.  However, unlike some sections of the media, contemporary films openly represent the underlying causes of crime and the perspective of criminals.  They explore the relationship between the criminal subject, power, agency and representation in provocative ways.  This paper will examine how the relationship between mass media cultures and subaltern representation is explored in two recent films featuring Afro-descendent criminal subjects. The documentary Ônibus 174 and the biopic Madame Satã enact struggles by Afro-Brazilians to constitute themselves as social subjects by both conforming to and going against the grain of mass cultural role models. Taking one definition of citizenship as the freedom to create representations of oneself, I will consider the extent to which the narratives of socio-cultural identity created by these individuals are inflected by hegemonic representations of Afro-descendents in public and media discourse. These films also highlight the distorted concept of citizenship that has emerged in Brazil in which media celebrity is equated with subjecthood.  Fame, or notoriety, becomes the only way for non-consensual popular subjectivities to be recognised by civil society and acquire another marker of citizenship  – the right to the city.

 

Chandra Morrison (University of Cambridge)
Colouring Pollution: ‘Cleaning’ the City and ‘Recycling’ Social Values in São Paulo Street Art

Creating within the interface of social values and urban space, multiple paulista street artists visually articulate an explicit concern for both the physical and social environments of São Paulo.  In particular, this treatment of the meio-ambiente is expressed through an engagement with trash and pollution – classifications which can be conceptualised not only as material but also as social categories, potentially projected onto people, places, actions, and aesthetics.  Street artists especially play with the notion of pollution – environmental, social, and visual – through implementing strategies of recycling and cleaning as mechanisms integrated into the construction of their artistic productions.

This paper examines the work of four paulista street artists and art collectives, exploring their artistic treatment of pollution and tactical utilisation of recycling and cleaning within their interventions into São Paulo’s urban fabric:  1) Projeto Imargem, their ‘agentes marginais’, and artistic-environmental efforts at Represa Billings in the Zona Sul; 2) Alexandre Orion and his reverse graffiti project Ossário; 3) Coletivo 6emeia’s painted modifications to the drainage system of the neighbourhood Barra Funda; and 4) Mudano’s provocative written phrases, inserted into various contexts and moments of the city.

Working within the realm of aesthetics and the visible, these artists intervene into the visual content of São Paulo through the application of colour and the construction of contrast.  Playing on graffiti’s (at times) socially negative connotation as ‘visual pollution’ and its ability to chamar atenção (through colour, imagery, contrast, and illegality), the act of painting and the insertion of street art within urban space not only alter the aesthetic and physical environment, but also call public attention to specific socio-environmental issues, as ‘colouring’ pollution accentuates both a state of neglect and the neglect of the State.  Highlighting latent potentiality through the implementation of recycling and cleaning, these artistic interventions within São Paulo’s urban structures provoke a re-evaluation and repositioning of society’s relation to the natural and constructed environment in which it thrives.

 

Andrea Noble (University of Durham)
Tears and Revolution

In December 1914, at the height of the revolution, Mexico City was temporarily occupied by the troops of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, an occasion that provided a series of opportunities to be photographed at symbolic sites at the heart of the nation, including: seated on the presidential throne; in that bastion of bourgeois sociability, Sanborns restaurant; banqueting with interim president Eulalio Gutiérrez; and, in Villa's case, weeping at the tomb of the assassinated hero, Francisco I. Madero. Drawing Adolfo Gilly's class-based analysis of the revolution, Gareth Williams has established December 1914 as a crucial interregnum in the revolutionary struggle, a pivotal moment at which the peasantry was briefly able to capture the social life of the whole nation. Subsequently, as the essentially conservative post-revolutionary regimes installed themselves in power, it was photo opportunities such as those made at the height of revolution's 'social curve', projecting an image of the struggle as a moment of rupture to the established order, that continued to circulate, for they were consonant with and lent legitimacy to the hegemonic project of revolutionary nationalism.

As Mexico prepares to celebrate the centenary of the revolution and images of its popular heroes start to circulate with renewed vigour, this paper homes in on the photograph taken on 8 December 1914, capturing Pancho Villa -- large white handkerchief partly obscuring his face -- weeping melodramatically at the tomb of Madero. Placing an emphasis on Villa's status as a hypermasculine embodiment of the popular hero, this paper explores the testimonial value of tears within the context of a reconfigured understanding of the 'social curve' of December 1914.

 

Francisco Ortega (Universidad Nacional, Colombia)

The birth of the pueblo and its political legacies

"I will examine the emergence of the ""People"" --as protagonist, political force and discursive figure-- at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th in order to identify an often ignored genealogy of contemporary understandings of the ""Popular."" In that sense, I seek to dialogue with those new meanings the people and the popular have acquired in contemporary thinking, particularly in a moment in which classical paradigms of nation and sovereignty are challenged, both politically (neo-liberalism) and theoretically (the idea of the multitude, post-hegemony, etc.).

I am particularly concerned with three issues. To begin with, how a certain politics of the past has obfuscated the vibrant struggles and ambivalences of the late colonial and early Republican period; that is, I am concerned with how the past (the people) has been taken out of History (the popular) in order to produce a social order. Secondly (and by contrast), I am interested in how subaltern groups understand and remember their role during such foundation moment of the nation. Finally, I am motivated by the ways in which we still live under the influence of the political language and imagination of the early Republican days. Much has changed, however, and many now speak of a need to move beyond them. I wish to challenge such conventional wisdom. My guess is that a more careful investigation of our own political culture will yield interesting answers to outstanding and pressing questions. For instance, are we to move beyond the language of citizenship precisely at the moment when local and social movements invoke the need to effectively extend citizenship from the political to the social?  What political legacy --if any-- is there still waiting to be claimed for a more inclusive, just and fair society? What unfulfilled promises still hold us to that political pact?"

 

Joanna Page (University of Cambridge)

Intellectuals, revolution and popular culture: a new reading of 'El eternauta'

 The scale of the tragedy suffered by the Oesterheld family during Argentina’s last dictatorship – Oesterheld, four daughters and their husbands were all killed or disappeared without trace – has severely circumscribed critical approaches to Argentina’s most well-loved comic series, El eternauta. Oesterheld’s narratives of extraterrestrial invasion and domination have been exclusively read as straightforward allegories of political oppression (imperialist or authoritarian) and popular revolution: a barely veiled call to arms, with the last sections of the series completed when Oesterheld had already gone underground as a militant. This paper takes a different approach, reading the two major publication runs (1957-1959 and 1976-1977) as interventions in specific debates in each period over the role of the intellectual in relation to politics and the pueblo. The text that emerges under this lens is full of doubts and uncertainties, haunted by the spectre of civil war, and less a manifesto for socialist revolt than a very personal exercise in self-critique. Aside from suggesting new readings of the text itself, this revisionist approach also raises questions concerning the relative and historically contingent nature of the ‘resistance’ that popular culture might present to hegemonic culture, the strongly appropriative strategies adopted by elite culture towards popular culture in Latin America, and the extent to which texts like El eternauta stage a genuine encounter with the intellectual’s social and cultural other.

 

 

Edmundo Paz-Soldán (Cornell University)
Mexican Pulp Fiction: Of Drug Lords and Writers [In Spanish]

New Mexican narrative is highly interested in popular genres such as detective novels. I will try to address why the "noir" genre is interesting to many Mexican writers today --Martín Solares, Elmer Mendoza, Yuri Herrera among others--, focusing on a "culture of violence" in the Northern states, brought about by the emergence of drug-trafficking and the attempts of the State to curtail it. I will also analyze what is distinctive about this gente as it is practiced by contemporary Mexican writers, with an interest in showing how new stereotypes are being created for old staples of Latin American fiction (the "strong man" of many political novels is here, in a seemingly apolytical context, the drug lord who has control over certain territory), and how literature itself is being represented (in Herrera's Trabajos del Reino, the writer is a "corrido" composer for the drug lord, and in Mendoza's Balas de Plata, the main detective reads Piglia).

 

Lúcia Sá (University of Manchester)
Girl-singers in the streets of hell: Tata Amaral’s Antonia

This paper will compare Tata Amaral’s film Antonia with previous cinematic depictions of Brazilian favelas, such as Cidade de Deus and Favela Rising. It will argue that by inverting many of the  gender assumptions of the previous films, Amaral’s female-centred work ultimately produces a new spatial definition of periferia.

 

Erica Segre (University of Cambridge)
"El convertible no convertible": Reconsidering Refuse and Disjecta Aesthetics in Contemporary Cuban Art

In 1993 the Cuban government granted artists the right to receive payment in convertible currency for works they sold abroad. New galleries, still state-run, but with no obvious (discredited) state affiliation to disturb the appearance of a fully intellectually ‘privatized’ and autonomous cultural sector, promoted and sold art objects – especially avant-garde or primitivist to foreign buyers for dollars with the state retaining 30 per cent of the sale price and the remainder going directly to the artist – an unprecedented material development. This liberalization that allowed Cuban artists to establish direct relations with international galleries, collectors and institutions for sale of their art works, residencies, tours and exhibitions marked the eclipse of a certain form of hegemonic state sponsorship and regulation embodied in the Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales that had previously been the sole promoter and distributor of visual art in Cuba and abroad. While the contestatory, risk-taking renewal witnessed in the arts from the late 1990s had a formative precedent that pre-dated the introduction of commercial agents namely in the situationist provocations, collective infractions of revolutionary kitsch and deconstructive curatorial placements of the 1980s, its capacity to generate income and to offer a profitable and fashionable cultural export is a recent, novel and complex phenomenon. According to some well-versed commentators it is undergoing the kind of belated self-scrutiny prompted by the instability of the markets, its own questionable ontology as a corpus and its unimpeded consecration as a vehicle of debate.

In 2008, the prestigious Galeria Habana hosted an exhibition of upcoming artists, seemingly intent on promoting a new generation concept, called with obvious irony Cubanos convertibles. This year’s Habana Bienal perhaps marks a natural development in the establishment of the Peso Cubano Convertible as the obligatory metaphor of a debased cultural nationalism and the compromised/compromising openings to the global market that have ensued, by opting for the theme (a little disingenuously) exploring resistance to globalization. This paper will discuss the work of internationally celebrated, influential Cuban artists whose work seeks to critique globalization while dismantling the complicitous ‘impurities’ and incongruities of their own production seen through the distorting mirror of frustrated consumerism at home and the voracity of the free market paragons abroad. The poetics of recycling have an affirmative Third-World trajectory in Cuba where very few things can afford to be disposable and material reconfigurations have provided a sardonic artistic language (of revolutionary memorabilia, unhomely domestic objects, regenerating rubbish, unsightly folklore) with a broad, popular appeal. The transformative interventions of artists on material salvage and detritus serve to allude to the impoverishment of manufacturing practices and export industries, the precariousness of supplies and the perennial spectre of personal and national naufragios but have also played with notions of viciously recursive ideologies. Abel Barroso’s post-industrial installation projects characterize the double-edged strategy espoused by engaged art. Café Internet Tercer Mundo (2000), first staged during the Bienal, offered a deliberately primitive take on video art and electronic technology done with hand-crafted wood and monochrome wood-cut engravings, later supplemented by a gallery of poignant simulacra including implausibly functional wooden faux-replicas of image-making paraphernalia (televisions, laptops, fax machines, mobile phones, printers and other status gadgets). The conceptual satire was extended with Se acabo la Guerra fria a gozar con la globalizacion (2006), a wry look at state-driven promotion of foreign investment in Cuba and the aggressive capitalism of first World expansionism using artisanal maquetes and scaffolding. The paper will discuss an interestingly impersonal reflexive trend in contemporary art that, fibred by notions of social responsibility, participatory spectatorship and dissent, has explored the notion of  ‘recycling’ as broadly inclusive of material disjecta with attendant ideas of ingestion and reconversion. A trend that has also followed a more polemical vein seeking, for instance, to tackle a proclivity to resist expulsion of the obsolete that has resulted in the recycling of dogma, or that has interrogated the final taboo of chauvinism – the expertise in replicating and reconditioning aesthetic models culled or cannibalized with ingenious opportunism and defensive irony. The question arises in artistic and cultural terms, when is a convertible not convertible?

 

Claire Taylor (University of Liverpool)
Approaches to Latin American Cyberculture

This paper sketches out some potential theoretical and methodological approaches to Latin American cyberculture, and locates them at the crossroads of two theoretical strands: contemporary debates in Latin American cultural studies; and theorisations of cyberculture. Regarding the first of these strands, the paper dialogues with debates taking place within Latin American cultural studies on new forms of cultural expression (see Paz-Soldán and Castillo 2001), and the problematization of area studies (see Beasley-Murray 2003). The paper draws together these two debates, arguing that Latin American cyberculture be approached via Moreiras’s notion of ‘critical regionalism,’ which involves thinking through ‘the contradictory totality of global integration and fragmentation’ (Moreiras 2001).

Regarding the second theoretical strand, given that research on cyberculture to date has been predominantly Anglophone, this paper sketches out ways to develop insights into a specifically Latin American cybercultural practice. Making use of concepts such as off- and online interaction, cybercommunities, and cyberimperialism, the paper also integrates concepts in contemporary Latin American communications theory, such as Martín-Barbero’s notions of ‘mediation’ as the resistant ways in which Latin Americans appropriate media content (1987), and García Canclini’s concept of hybrid cultures (1990), to explore the strategies by which Latin American online practitioners create and sustain resistant forms of expression. In so doing, the paper proposes the notion of the ‘@rchive’ as an enabling concept through which to view Latin American cybercultural practice, and to explore to what extent Latin American cultural production online participates in cyberculture on its own terms. 

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