Years ago I was to write an article on Veloso and I could not finish it, partly because of what my work responsibilities were here and partly because of the emotions I have attached to that music (it was used to advertise Bahia as paradisiacal when I was there and miserable, and it agitates me). This was when that Tropicalizations book was new and Marcus Embry, a person whose work is worth knowing, wrote an astute review for Nepantla. He shows why the book, for all its diffuseness, is important in and to the transition to seeing US Latino and Latin American literature on a kind of continuum.
I/he say transculturation is now a buzzword. Embry associates this problematic with Moreiras’ 1999 discussion of hybridity; it’s an internalization of hegemony, a domestication of the conflict between identity and difference. It’s also that the hybrid ISN’T necessarily counterhegemonic, and it doesn’t cover all political action or, in Embry and Moreiras’ words, it doesn’t “exhaust the political.” Latinidad isn’t necessarily counterhegemonic, either, although the Saldívars said so in the early 1990s. What the boundaries of Latinidad are, and what the place of Latino literature in the 21st C, are the questions the book raises.
IMPORTANT FOR MY CECILIA PAPER: Embry: “Latinidad” can be interpreted as the broader category into which both the United States and Latin America are read (192). And the Caribbean is central in LOTS of Faulkner. So all of these texts are circulating in a broader world, broader container, not in a national language or tradition.
This journal also has an article by Sanjinés with ideas for his book on mestizaje upside down and I was thinking that for BRASA, I could start with the idea of “subalternity, a formless continuum,” which “is a state of becoming, permanently negotiating between sacred past knowledges and secular new situations” (58) … Ferreira da Silva, [I must continue here].
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 