Idelber Avelar

The untimely present : postdictatorial Latin American fiction and the task of mourning

The Untimely Present examines the fiction produced in the aftermath of the recent Latin American dictatorships, particularly those in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Idelber Avelar argues that through their legacy of social trauma and obliteration of history, these military regimes gave rise to unique and revealing practices of mourning that pervade the literature of this region. The theory of postdictatorial writing developed here is informed by a rereading of the links between mourning and mimesis in Plato, Nietzsche’s notion of the untimely, Benjamin’s theory of allegory, and psychoanalytic / deconstructive conceptions of mourning. Avelar starts by offering new readings of works produced before the dictatorship era, in what is often considered the boom of Latin American fiction. Distancing himself from previous celebratory interpretations, he understands the boom as a manifestation of mourning for literature’s declining aura. Against this background, Avelar offers a reassessment of testimonial forms, social scientific theories of authoritarianism, current transformations undergone by the university, and an analysis of a number of novels by some of today’s foremost Latin American writers—such as Ricardo Piglia, Silviano Santiago, Diamela Eltit, Joao Gilberto Noll, and Tununa Mercado. Avelar shows how the ‘untimely’ quality of these narratives is related to the position of literature itself, a mode of expression threatened with obsolescence. This book will appeal to scholars and students of Latin American literature and politics, cultural studies, and comparative literature, as well as to all those interested in the role of literature in postmodernity.

Heavy Metal Music in Postdictatorial Brazil: Sepultura and the Coding of Nationality in Sound

Preamble: ‘you censor what we breathe/prejudice with no belief’ (Sepultura, 1993) Heavy metal is a postdictatorial genre in Brazil, one whose musical and cultural significance is best grasped by mapping the various meanings acquired by metal music amongst urban youth during the decline of the military regime in the mid-1980s. As in most countries, speed, thrash and death metal evolved in Brazil primarily as working-class urban youth genres. Unlike their Anglo-American and continental sisters, however, Brazils pioneer metal bands began to craft their art under a heritage of intense censorship and repression, courtesy of a two-decade-long dictatorship (1964-85). Brazilian metal not only had to face the usual aesthetic and moral reprimands flung against it in the North, but also a political accusation that as a form of protest it was not socially aware enough. Never mind, of course, that bands or fans themselves rarely phrased their own agenda in such crude terms as ‘protest’ or ‘resistance.’ Once a certain orthodoxy defined that such a function was the only one to be attributed to popular music—and the only meaning a phenomenon like heavy metal could have in Brazil—the debate was already framed in a no-win situation for the genre. In order to establish itself heavy metal had to implode the terms of that debate and show how inadequate they were to account for the genres sound, writing and iconography. The band I will follow here, Sepultura, has been for 18 years (1985-2003) largely responsible for the genres victory in that national cultural battle, one that they could only win by rephrasing it as an international debate.

Contemporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture: On Amerindian Perspectivism and the Critique of Anthropocentrism

En las recientes formulaciones sobre las relaciones entre naturaleza y cultura, han sido cruciales las nociones de “biopolítica” de Foucault y “tanatopolítica” de Agamben. A estos conceptos fundamentales se les pueden agregar las interrogantes de Fabián Ludueña y Dipesh Chakrabarty, quienes subrayan la necesidad de entender la historia humana en términos de su conexión integral con el planeta y lo animal. A su vez, desde la disciplina de la antropología el brasileño Eduardo Viveiros de Castro ha defendido una “internalización de la naturaleza” como una nueva inmanencia, rechazando la idea de que los seres humanos simplemente habitamos espacios naturales, exteriores. En todas estas posturas, se concluye que la naturaleza y la cultura son realidades consubstanciales. El presente trabajo argumenta que América Latina representa un espacio importante en el estudio de esta nueva imbricación. En particular, los debates y conflictos actuales que se suscitan sobre la Amazonia, y que involucran tanto cuestiones medioambientales como los derechos de las comunidades indígenas, ejemplifican las dificultades que tal imbricación acarrea. Mediante la exposición de esta historia, espero demostrar cómo el momento contemporáneo se caracteriza por una urgencia por repensar la intersección entre la historia cultural y la historia natural.

Cenas dizíveis e indizíveis Raça e sexualidade em Gilberto Freyre

Penso que o casal negro/ branca é mais que uma bomba [. . .] Por quê? Porque a sexualidade é antes que nada uma questão de fantasmas e o fantasma que une o negro com a branca é um dos mais explosivos que há (Laferrièrre 124; trad. minha). This article addresses the intersection of race and sexuality in Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-grande e senzala and Sobrados e mucambos. After an introduction that outlines how sexuality pervades the entire body politic in these works, I proceed to show the fluid and porous nature of the border between homo- and heterosexuality in Freyre. I then go on to discuss Freyre’s asymmetric representation of interracial sexual relations. Whereas the contact between white landowners and black or mestiza women is extensively described as the very model of national unity, the image of the black man with a white woman has a far more ambiguous and problematic status in the text. I study Freyre’s references to that image as instances of the balance of antagonisms recently identified by Freyrean scholarship as the major rhetorical device of his text. I conclude by suggesting that this unspeakable scene offers an entryway into the unconscious of Freyre’s trilogy on patriarchal Brazil.

The June 2013 Uprisings and the Waning of Lulismo in Brazil Of Antagonism, Contradiction, and Oxymoron

This article takes issue with the common assumption that Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment proceedings should be blamed on the revolts of June 2013. Rather than taking the ousting of the former President as the point of arrival of a causal chain, I privilege the June uprisings as the truly unique event in contemporary Brazilian politics. After analyzing the singularity and the multiplicity of the June revolts, I go on to argue that they laid bare and accelerated a profound crisis of Lulismo, emblematized in the collapse of its three major rhetorical strategies: antagonism (the constant search for an antagonist in the body politic), contradiction (the successive alternation between compromise and radicalism), and oxymoron (the simultaneous maintenance of antagonisms and contradictions). Looked at from the point of view of the epochal events of June, Rousseff’s impeachment appears as a minor adjustment of the oligarchic pact, a charade that is fairly standard in Brazilian history. On the other hand, June remains open as a source of emancipatory impulses, as an event whose legacy is still in dispute.

Revisões da masculinidade sob ditadura: Gabeira, Caio e Noll

This article addresses the coding of masculinity in texts by Fernando Gabeira, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Joao Gilberto Noll at the turn of the 1970s/1980s. In Brasil the Abertura period coincided with the consolidation of the gay movement, divorce laws, the beginning of the massive incorporation of middle-class women to the wage labor force, increasing visibility of transvestites, and overall the marked decadence of the ideal man promoted by the military regime. This essay discusses the ways in which Gabeira, Caio, and Noll remembered, anticipated, allegorized, cut through, and/or ignored that context, and thus situated themselves in different ways vis-a-vis the revision of masculinity that took place at the turn of that decade. Gabeira wrote a hyperbole that became self-fulfilling, Caio reached the pinnacle of career marked by a methodic erasure of the border between homo- and heteroaffectivity, and Noll inaugurated a three-decade-long reflection on the dissolution of masculinity through the representation of one of its constitutive scenes, the disappearance of the father.

La construcción del canon y la cuestión del valor literario

Este ensayo plantea la premisa de que en todo estudio literario esta presente, de una u otra forma, la pregunta por el valor. Desde aqui, centrandose en la critica y algunas problematicas respecto a esta, se desarrolla una breve panoramica sobre el tema del juicio y del «valor literario», partiendo por algunos preceptos del New Criticism, pasando, entre otros, por algunas reflexiones de Wayne Booth, hasta llegar, acercandose y poniendo en tension su concepto de canon, a Harold Bloom

Entre o violoncelo e o cavaquinho: música e sujeito popular em Machado de Assis

O artigo discute a tensao entre a cultura erudita, a emergente cultura popular e a incipiente cultura de massas atraves de uma analise do estatuto da musica na obra de Machado de Assis. Dedicando atencao especial a um conjunto de cronicas sobre o tema e aos contos “Um homem celebre” e “O machete”, o artigo propoe que a obra de Machado foi a primeira reflexao literaria sobre a musica como cifra privilegiada da nacionalidade.

An Anatomy of Marginality: Figures of the Eternal Return and the Apocalypse in Chilean Post-Dictatorial Fiction

The article analyzes two novels by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit from the standpoint of the post-dictatorial imperative to mourn the dead and reactivate collective memory. After framing Eltits fiction in the context of the avant-garde resurgence of plastic and performance arts in the second half of Pinochets regime, I move on to discuss Lumpérica (1983) and Los vigilantes (1994) as two different manifestations of the temporality of mourning. The article addresses how Lumpéricas portrayal of an oneiric, orgiastic communion in marginality (shared by the protagonist and a mass of beggars at a Santiago square) composed an allegory in the strict Benjaminian sense; it further notes how such allegory, as an antidictatorial, oppositional gesture, could only find a home in a temporality modeled after the eternal return. I then show how Los vigilantes, a post-dictatorial novel centered on the task of mourning, abandons the circular logic of the eternal return in favor of an eschatological, finalist matrix of an apocalyptic type. Eltits shift—which I present as a move from an affirmation of impossibility to the impossibility of affirmation—is not presented merely as a personal matter of choice, but as an expression of a predicament proper to post-dictatorial fiction.

A literatura afro-americana sob a ótica da tradução

The article makes use of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of minor literature - i.e. that which is produced by a minority within a major language - to shed light on the displacements imposed by Afro-American writers upon the symbolic tradition they inherit through the English language. By means of an analysis of a short story by Katherine Porter and a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, emphasis is placed on the recurrent process of demetaphorization one finds in African-American texts. Such Processes are shown to entail a theory of translation that highlights difference and contests the authority of the original. O artigo utiliza, a partir de Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari, o conceito de literatura menor – literatura produzida por uma minoria no interior de uma lingua majoritaria - para analisar os deslocamentos operados pelos escritores negros americanos na tradicao simbolica herdada por eles atraves da lingua inglesa. Por meio de uma leitura de um conto de Katherine Porter e um poema de Paul Laurence Dunbar, enfatiza-se os recorrentes processos de desmetaforizacao encontrados nos textos afro-americanos. Num momento seguinte, mostra-se que tais processos implicam uma teoria da traducao que privilegia a diferenca e contesta a autoridade do original.