Editors\' Introduction: \'The Brazilian Contemporary\' Special Issue

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The Brazilian Contemporary Fabio Akcelrud Durão & Suman Gupta Published online: 19 May 2015.

Click for updates To cite this article: Fabio Akcelrud Durão & Suman Gupta (2015) The Brazilian Contemporary, Wasafiri, 30:2, 1-3, DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2015.1011382 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2015.1011382

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EDITORIAL

The Brazilian Contemporary I In planning this Special Issue on contemporary Brazilian cultural texts, the editors felt that it won’t do to simply present selected authors and artists and their works. No selection could be representative, or even symptomatic, of the Brazilian contemporary and we did not wish to give the impression that it could. Saying that is a truism which could apply to any similar project addressed to any context. However, saying that with regard to the Brazilian context is to acknowledge a particularly raw nerve therein. The idea of ‘the contemporary’ and, correspondingly, the construction of a distinctively ‘Brazilian’ national sphere have been and continue to be under constant pressure — in a way, the slippages between these two terms is the stuff that makes sense of both. And, making sense of both has been and is a conjoint and ongoing process. This Special Issue, then, couldn’t simply represent or symptomatise contemporary Brazil in any simplistic way; it had to convey a sense of the past and current discussion that asks, often in agonised tones, ‘What is distinctively Brazilian?’ and, relatedly, ‘What is contemporary?’ The essays, interviews, stories and poems that appear below are all devoted to asking these questions or performing their troubled circumambulations around them. To engage with the cultural domain of the present is to be cognisant of the past; to be cognisant of the past entails taking account of cultural domains which were engaging similarly with their present — the continuum of the present. The past in Brazil, the history of Brazil, never quite offers a national tradition that has been tangibly formed and is firmly in view; there isn’t even a nation-defining tradition or formation to imagine and then flesh out and be nostalgic or celebratory about. The colonial and postcolonial history of Brazil seems not wholly in possession of itself as a distinctive nation, not quite ever reaching towards such imminent possession nor somehow straying away from possession which was almost in hand. The political and economic state of Brazil, grounded in social realities, seem to counter the imminent or just missed possibility of satisfactorily assumed nationhood. Colonial formative experience, the persistence of slavery, the interference of outside interests, longing for extrinsic confirmation, the potential for revolution and the actuality of dictatorship, exploitative social arrangements and uneven economic development, divergent identity-based claims … these interfere constantly with the flowering of nationhood and its expression in a coherent cultural discourse. This social and political history is reflected in the passage of, for instance, literary history: neo-classicism and romanticism seem to last too long; realism clarifies the difficulty of articulating a prospective nationhood; modernism has a longue dure´e of uncertain pre-modernism; modernism looks outwards to express the inward aspiration and castigates itself for doing so; the avant-garde acknowledges a Brazilian canon by subverting it first; the avant-garde both announces its end and dissolves the possibility of a choate Brazilian contemporary … and the contemporary is still searching for itself and its connection to the past in Brazil. We, the editors, do not make the above statements on our own account — as editors. These are some of the arguments and observations made in the essays in the issue by Roberto Schwarz, Leandro Pasini, Marcos Siscar and Fabio Akcelrud Dura˜o; and underpin the interviews with Se´rgio de Carvalho and

Wasafiri Vol. 30, No. 2, June 2015, pp. 1–3 ISSN 0269-0055 print/ISSN 1747-1508 online # 2015 Wasafiri http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690055.2015.1011382

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Marcelo Mirisola. Caetano Galindo’s essay has a complementary interest in relation to those; it contemplates how literary translation feeds into the intellectual process described above. Suman Gupta’s contribution also has a complementary place in considering the view from outside Brazil, through the tourist appraisal that constructs Brazil irrespective of its complex self-reckonings. In different ways the stories and poems play at the interstices of the process of such self-reckonings of the Brazilian contemporary — constituting, reflecting on and performing it. The idea that surfaces through these reckonings with the present that is now past and the presence of the past in the present is that, perhaps, such a journey of agonising over a well-articulated Brazilian contemporary is itself distinctively Brazilian and distinctively contemporary. The national coherence of Brazil at any point of time – and especially this point of time – lies in its search for and interrogations of such coherence. Perhaps a distinctive sense of Brazilianness is, so to speak, thrown forth through the very slippages and uncertainties and provisional tenor of the arguments outlined above. And yet, the very posing of that thought is also attended by instant and inbuilt scepticism. It seems contradictory to base a construction of nationhood, let alone celebrate its purchase on the contemporary, on comprehensive doubts about and questionings of such constructions. It seems somehow invidious to say this is itself a distinctively Brazilian contemporary; the best that is possible is to say that a coherent Brazilian contemporary is coming into being, is potential. That immediately invites the rejoinder that this potential may never be realised or might have been lost already. If a note of anticipation and numerous notes of wistfulness and bitterness are struck in the texts brought together here, they can be put down to that juncture; the meeting point of a potential that is still coming into being and which will perhaps never be realised and may well be lost already. Of course, that doubt and sense of loss are themselves still part of the constructive process of self-reckonings. One of the consequences of approaching this Special Issue thus is that it seems disingenuous to have the following texts fixed in a grid of genres and specialisms. Of course, it is the case that the poems are recognisably poems and the essays are essays — and some of the voices are of academics and others of performers and poets and so on. However, such distinctions are apt to be over-determined, and especially when thinking about the texts below. To us, all of these texts seem to be layered over by a similarly pale cast of thought; a related awareness of context and expression seems to blur and criss-cross scholarly and discursive and poetic and fictional texts. That is hardly surprising, since we have chosen them for, and, in the case of the essays, encouraged them towards engagement with ‘the Brazilian contemporary’. That itself makes for some common ground. Beyond that, though, it is arguably also the case that, in Brazil, poets, novelists, professors, actors, directors and translators are not as far apart as they are apt to be in, for instance, the UK. The professional precincts are more porous; the imagination and rationales of poet, novelist, translator, professor and so on often extend from the same interactive space, are often found in some combination in the same persons. This is evident in several of the texts that follow.

II We open our issue with an essay by Roberto Schwarz, the most sophisticated critic writing in and on Brazil today. ‘A Book’s Seven Lives’ interprets a keystone of Brazilian literary criticism, Antonio Candido’s Formac¸a˜o da Literatura Brasileira (1959), showing that this thick volume is still significant – perhaps more so now than before – for the understanding of Brazilian literature in the social context it emerges from and the idea of nationhood that sustains it. The making of a national literature was not accompanied by the making of a just society; art may very well be complete within a totality that never really came of age. Leandro Pasini’s article converges with Schwarz’s position when it argues that ideas and theories produced in Europe and the United States are transposed onto Brazilian cultural productions without mediation. By analysing the important critical contributions of Haroldo de Campos, Se´rgio Miceli and Silviano Santiago, Pasini insists that, disconnected from a reflection of the country’s self-making, these authors’ achievements are inseparable from crippling flaws. Marcos Siscar’s paper gives this debate a different turn as he investigates, from a sympathetic point of view, Haroldo de Campos’s defence of poetic diversity. Against the grain of the two previous papers, Siscar’s does not posit a primary Brazilian specificity but implies that the issues involved here have a wider than national scope and validity. Siscar demonstrates that Campos’s proposal of a post-avant-garde is itself an avant-gardist strategy. Also on literary matters, Caetano Galindo’s contribution gives us an inside view of the inequalities embedded in the practice of translation in Brazil and anglophone contexts. His observations are grounded in comparative translation studies and argue that, from the weaker side of the spectrum of world literature, translations should aspire to transparency and universality rather than an opaque laying bare of their translational devices and strategies. Turning to visual culture, Fabio Akcelrud Dura˜o’s piece investigates the case of Bispo do Rosa´rio, a psychotic who spent decades in an institution and became famous as an artist without ever having

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contact with the world of art. Dura˜o’s argument is that, if simply considered artworks, Rosa´rio’s creations fail, but if viewed as objects in their own right, they dislocate and appropriate the concept of art. Suman Gupta’s paper is on a distinctive form of graffiti writing or pixac¸a˜o, which is strongly associated with Brazilian urban spaces. Gupta takes a tourist’s view of this phenomenon and explores attempts at co-opting pixac¸a˜o as an art form and as a national or urban brand. This issue also presents two interviews with Se´rgio de Carvalho and Marcelo Mirisola. The former is the director of the well-known Companhia do Lata˜o, one of the most successful of the many experimental theatre groups that emerged in Sa˜o Paulo and other large cities in the last twenty years. Carvalho tells of his experiences in non-institutional drama and the connection thereof with academic work (he is a professor at the prestigious University of Sa˜o Paulo). In his interview, short story writer, novelist and playwright Mirisola explains why he is critical of the Brazilian literary establishment, which he regards as inherently damaging and perpetuating mediocrity. More importantly than the above, in this Special Issue we have the privilege of presenting works of poetry and short fiction, which appear here for the first time in English translation — by Ferreira Gullar, Marcos Siscar, Paulo Henriques Britto, Nuno Ramos, Joa˜o Gilberto Noll, Paloma Vidal, Leila Guenther, Elvira Vigna, Ana Paula Maia, Josely Vianna Batista and Marı´lia Garcia. The variety of topics and themes, styles and technique, concerns and motivations in these provide a representative view of how contemporary Brazilian literature exists by questioning its Brazilianness and place in conceptualisations of the contemporary. Fabio Akcelrud Dura˜o and Suman Gupta