Re: Re: Re: <eyebeam><blast> localization carnival

[Carlos Basualdo <Cbasualdo@aol.com>]

In 1934 Jorge Luis Borges wrote a short text called "El escritor
argentino y la tradición" (The Argentine Writer and Tradition). The
argument is simple; there are no camels in the Coran, Borges wrote
quoting Gibbon. And also: "our tradition is the whole of western
culture, and I think that we have all the rights to that tradition, and
even more rights than any other inhabitant of a particular western
nation..." Well the argument goes on, but basically he says that the
margins could paradoxically be in a position of cultural privilege
because of the free and open access that the periphery may provide to
the main corpus of the tradition in question. His argument is strikingly
similar to that proposed by Deleuze/Guattari in "Kafka, Towards a Minor
Literature." Last summer I gave a lecture on the possible connections
between this text and Oswald de Andrade's "Anthropophagic Manifesto."
Both for me work as anti-essentialistic machines. Both short-circuit the
national instance, connecting the local with (some idea of) the
universal. I guess that's what I was referring to in my questions. 

And then there's always the Mercosur! I do not really think Brazil is so
different from other countries in the South. Sao Paulo looks like
Caracas, the people behave as Argentines from Rosario or Cordoba. Not to
speak of Curitiva, Porto Alegre, Florianópolis... Where does Brazil
ends... in Punta del Este? The North of Brazil is a whole different
story, of course, but it is also that way for Brazilians too, right?
Besides "O Globo" there seem to be more tensions that solutions in the
North and South divide that fractures the country... My whole point is
that the most interesting thing about de Andrade, Rocha, Oiticica and
the whole bunch was to leave the question of nationalism open. Open and
free floating. And I feel that there is a strong tendency today among
some Brazilians to close it down again. Oiticica said that Parangolés
were the "open root of Brazilian culture". If we want to extract
something of that thinking that is still relevant today maybe we should
not leave that word  aside... "Open".

Carlos
 




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