TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World

In this essay, I contend that globalization is less an international process and more a colonial project. I argue that definitions of “globalization” articulated primarily through economic metrics insufficiently account for the violences concomitant with such a project. In response to this insufficiency, I draw on three concepts by three decolonial authors—transmodernity (Enrique Dussel), global coloniality (Aníbal Quijano), and dialogical cosmopolitanism (Eduardo Mendieta)—in order to develop my own definition of globalization. I then offer a preliminary sketch of what I call “affective alternatives,” which could convey ways of life different from the hegemonic social forms that globalization promotes and imposes. At the very least, affective alternatives present a parallax: seen and felt from the perspective of the alternative, globalization is not taken as neutral, normal, irreversible, or desired; rather, it is “distorted” into globalization/coloniality, a project to be resisted. I conclude with reflections on connecting and deepening coalitions of resistance.

O presente artigo investiga a exposição de Paulo Climachauska Ronda noturna realizada em 2015. Momentos centrais das narrativas sobre a modernidade e a arte brasileiras são colocados em xeque nesse conjunto de trabalhos por meio do contraste da racionalidade construtiva com a violência das metrópoles brasileiras. Ronda Noturna elabora, assim, nexos sociais, políticos, culturais e econômicos da realidade e da arte promovendo uma leitura complexa das relações de poder transnacionais.

La historia de la mística Catarina de San Juan y la exótica China Poblana representa el encuentro transpacífico entre Acapulco, Sevilla y Manila y la fascinación con el Lejano Oriente que se remonta al siglo XVII. Catarina, una princesa de la India, fue secuestrada y vendida a Acapulco por el mercado de esclavos en Manila, y, posteriormente fusiona con la figura de la China Poblana mediante una “coincidencia lingüística.” (Locklin 65). En la novela La rosa de la China (2011), el autor Jaime Panqueva retoma la leyenda de la China Poblana. Sin embargo, en la obra se encuentran tramas que no existen en la leyenda original, las cuales tratan del pujante comercio triangular que denota el sistema de Manila entre China, Japón y Filipinas durante los siglos XVI y XVII. El presente trabajo indaga la historia “contrabandeada” en la novela de Jaime Panqueva y se arguye que el objetivo del autor es atraer a los lectores con el aura exótica de la China Poblana con el fin de presentarles la historia del sistema de Manila. Este contrabando se lleva a cabo por medio de Rolando Edmundo, uno de los protagonistas, cuya historia consiste en la hibridación de distintas identidades miméticas que representan los tres lugares que forman parte del sistema de Manila.

Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky’s final photography exhibition casts aside typical visualizations of her adopted country to foreground the marginal voices that react to global forces. Yampolsky’s photographic narrative engages directly with ideas promoted in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s key work on cultural imperialism: How to Read Donald Duck. This analysis of her photographic text will show how Yampolsky’s visual representations of the subaltern provides further and distinct evidence of Dorfman and Mattelart’s assertions regarding the introduction of foreign symbols into a Latin American context. Additionally, her work demonstrates how the popular classes appropriate these symbols, adding to them mexicanidad and additional meaning created by the subaltern.

In Abderrahman El Fathi’s Danzadelaire, there is a hybrid, non-binary poetics that questions originality and the idea that human subjects are subservient tools for exploitative neoliberal economics. As the central thesis, I argue that El Fathi pens a cyborg poetics in his Danzadelaire anthology by questioning a racist, paternalist, and Africanist vision of oikos, a home space that is no longer defined as the glorified Al-Andalus. Instead, the investigation argues that Al-Andalus is a destructive idealized home space because it conceals the colonial difference between Spain and Morocco. The close examination of El Fathi’s poetics entails a discussion of the meaning of tools and prosthetics and how human colonial subjects relate to them. At issue is whether the colonial subjects are in control of these tools or whether they become a prosthetics of empire, leading to theoretical and literary analyses of the similarities between cyborgs and colonized subjectivities as well as matters of agency in the context of the hegemonic capitalism that so often dominates the global South. The investigation of global South issues as relating to coloniality opens up fresh avenues for discussing space, oikos, hybrid identities, and movement across borders. Using Marxist theory from Donna Haraway, literary analysis of Arab poetics from Jaroslav Stetkevych, and postcolonial postulations from Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon, the study analyzes poetry in a light that combines issues of race, coloniality, technology, cyborgs, and feminist gender theory.

In this article, I will argue that ghosts are used, in two very different contexts and cases, as ways to represent and discuss anxieties about the advances of science and the uses of technology, at the same time that they express a cautious fascination with these unstoppable advances. This concern with the ability of ghosts to move and adapt to technological change is not only about what happens in the films but is also related to what happens outside the films, that is, the viral expansion of ghosts stories and filmic narratives as ways to talk about social and political issues. I will work primarily with two short stories by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, “The Specter” and “The Puritan”, that I will place in dialog with two Japanese movies, The Ring by Hideo Nakata and Pulse by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, tracing their possible connections and interpolations.

Álvarez, Ignacio, Luis Martín-Cabrera y Greg Dawes, eds. Homenaje a Jaime Concha. Releyendo a contraluz. Raleigh, NC: Editorial A Contracorriente, 2018. Impreso. 196 pp.

Arias, Arturo. Recovering Lost Footprints. Volume One: Contemporary Maya Narratives. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Print. 249 pp.

Camps, Martín, ed. Dialogues of the Delta: Approaches to the City of Stockton. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. Print. 235 pp.

Sampedro Vizcaya, Benita & Losada Montero, José, eds. Rerouting Galician Studies. Multidisciplinary Interventions. Geneva: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. eBook. 338 pp.

Tognato, Carlo, ed. Cultural Agents Reloaded: the Legacy of Antanas Mockus. Trans. Lisa Crossman. Cambridge, MA: Department of Romance Language and Literatures, Harvard University/Harvard University Press, 2017. Print. 646 pp.

Tortorici, Zeb. Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Print. 327 pp.