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

La visibilidad editorial que las autoras y los autores negros ha recibido recientemente resulta una buena ocasión para ahondar en el pasado cultural de ascendencia africana en una Península Ibérica desmemoriada. Para un conocimiento inclusivo, el canon literario y el marco exclusivamente filológico se muestran insuficientes y requieren de otras disciplinas, tanto científicas como humanísticas, a fin de trascender un imaginario nacional euroblanco que solo deja espacio a las vidas negras para habitar las últimas décadas del presente. Sin embargo, las contribuciones desde áreas de estudio como la arqueología, la genómica y la antropología ponen en evidencia la presencia negra y africana en cada uno de los estadios de la Prehistoria, Protohistoria e Historia de la Península. Este artículo aborda brevemente el pasado y el legado cultural de AfroEspaña desde una mirada diacrónica, siguiendo los procesos de poblamiento, su ascendencia y la articulación de la cultura en diferentes periodos hasta nuestros días.

This essay closely examines the role played by the Crimean War in Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’s 1900 novel Dom Casmurro. In portraying the narrator of the novel, Bento Santiago, nicknamed “Casmurro,” and his boyhood friend, Manduca, as quarreling over their preference in the 1854-56 conflict between Russia and an Anglo-French-Ottoman coalition, Machado delineates certain character traits in the two friends, differentiating the sympathetic Manduca, doomed or die young, and the dour, longer-lasting Casmurro. But Machado also comments on the global reach of the Crimean War (in which Brazil was neutral) and of the global canvas on which a Brazilian novelist of this era inevitably drew. Though the world was not as well-connected as it is today, these reverberations allow us to speak of a developing semi-global environment in the mid-nineteenth century. Given Machado’s own racial background, and the persistence of slavery and colonialism worldwide, examining the Crimean War reference in the novel can speak both to the narrative strategies within Dom Casmurro and to the novel’s wider sociopolitical applicability.

Este artigo analisa a representação das águas e do sujeito coletivo em Água, uma novela rural do escritor moçambicano João Paulo Borges Coelho. Observamos primeiramente a trama de linguagem do romance, seus procedimentos de enunciação e de representação. Inferimos que a água é o elemento-chave, a personagem principal em torno do qual gravitam os demais personagens que enformam a comunidade. Em seguida examinamos a novela à luz do paradigma epistemológico da colonialidade. Concluímos que em suas temporalidades cruzadas remanesce a subalternidade do sujeito, em particular do feminino, oprimido por hierarquias redivivas; e também que em sua existência acossada por urgências este sujeito delineia-se na obra como condenado da terra, sem futuro à vista, sem perspectivas de emancipação. Analisamos ainda o romance como discurso que engendra resistência estética ao dar visibilidade ao anônimo e ao arquitetar dissensos que reclamam uma nova partilha do sensível. Esta investigação bibliográfica fundamenta-se em estudos literários e sociológicos, estéticos e filosóficos, pós-coloniais e decoloniais.

In his 2006 novel La Gruta del Toscano, Mexican author Ignacio Padilla demonstrates the tendency among the Crack writers to “embrace and contest” their uneven access to world literature as writers from a peripheral culture. This under studied novel refuses to engage in privileging Latin American literature to establish truths about the non-West in Asia. The uneven power dynamic of East and West is embodied by Sherpa Pasang Nuru’s oral tales about lost Western explorers searching for the bottom of a cave they believe to be Dante’s Inferno. Nuru controls the narrative about the terrain and its literary connections. Padilla’s gesture of reaching out and appropriating source texts from the European literary canon and from Alpinist narrative embraces the power of their human drama, but also contests their Eurocentrism and imperialistic worldview. Rather than speaking for someone else in the Himalayan contact zone, Padilla’s inscrutable protagonist Nuru demonstrates sympathy for the situation of the local Sherpa population. As a “strategic Occidentalist,” to use the theory of Ignacio Sánchez Prado about the Crack authors, Padilla approaches Mexican narrative from a variety of foreign inspirations, and like in Borges’ view, his work demonstrates that there are no geographic limits to the scope of Latin American literary invention.

This historiographical essay explores the relationship between postmodern criticism and postcolonial studies within the context of the challenges of historiography today. Starting with a reconstruction of the role of the historical discipline and historiography in the modern colonial expansion, we situate the postmodern crisis as one that centrally crosses historiographical discourses and has produced a series of bifurcations and isolations concerning postcolonial debates in the rest of the social sciences and humanities. We analyze the bifurcation produced between the field of postmodern criticism and postcolonial studies, on the one hand, and the estrangement between historiographical production and postcolonial criticism, on the other. The present article aims to offer new hypotheses that will explain the divergence between historiographical production and postcolonial studies.

El artículo examina tres textos del escritor peruano Nikkei Augusto Higa Oshiro con el objetivo de destacar como un esquema narrativo común en ellos refleja la evolución de su cuestionamiento identitario. El cuento “Corazón sencillo”publicado en 1987 sigue al protagonista Berto, serrano ingenuo e infatigable trabajador, despreciado por sus vecinos y parientes urbanos, que asciende al cielo al final de su vida, en un obvio simbolismo cristiano. Las novelas La iluminación de Katzuo Nakamatsu y Gaijin se publican en 2008 y 2014, después de la decepcionante estancia que Higa hizo en Japón a partir de 1990 hasta 1992. Las novelas reescriben la leyenda de Buda y adaptan esta figura religiosa con Katzuo Nakamatsu y Sentei Nakandakari, dos  protagonistas nikkei marginalizados respectivamente en lucha contra una crisis de identidad y la hostilidad del entorno. La reescritura de la leyenda búdica reactualiza el esquema narrativo de “Corazón sencillo” con un tono más pesimista, aunque se perciben matices entre las novelas: si Gaijin invierte la imagen de la ascensión celestial con un Nakandakari condenado a la tierra enemiga, La iluminación integra algo de la salvación cristiana en la imagen del satori que Nakamatsu alcanza finalmente. Así las referencias religiosas constituyen indicios que leer con prudencia para apreciar la actitud de Higa frente a su propia interrogación identitaria.

Since the onset of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (~1980-2000), Peruvian writers have worked to narrate often unspeakable violences, contributing to a still-developing “Conflict Canon.” Yet while the Conflict overwhelmingly impacted Indigenous individuals from the nation’s rural Andean highlands and jungle lowlands, Peru’s most critically acclaimed and bestselling narrations of Conflict predominantly belong to white men of means from Lima. These depictions of the civil war written for/from the capital frequently reproduce tired geo-racial imaginaries, taking their cue from Mario Vargas Llosa’s polemic analysis of the 1983 murder of eight Peruvian journalists at the highland community of Uchuraccay (Ayacucho). Ayacucho, the Peruvian department most intensely victimized by Conflict violences, frequently appears in these narrations as a racialized wasteland. While scholars have produced significant analyses of the non-literary cultural production of Ayacuchan victims of the Conflict, the present essay considers the short fiction of Ayacuchans Erika Cuadros and Livio Huaripaucar, whose stories appear together in Siete cuentos sin fin, published by Editorial Amartí (Ayacucho). Considering the narratives themselves together with Editorial Amartí’s promotional materials, Facebook posts, and media appearances, I suggest that the collection contests dominant geo-racial imaginaries, (re)presenting post-Conflict Ayacucho and its experience of civil war against the discourses of “bestseller” authors like Vargas Llosa. Crucially, I propose that Cuadros, Huaripaucar, and Editorial Amartí develop important “counterpublics” (Warner 2005) and, in doing so, achieve an antihegemonic symbiosis of content and form.

Barraza, Vania and Carl Fischer (editors). Chilean Cinema in the Twenty-First-Century World. Wayne State University Press, 2020. 372 pp.

Ramírez Rojas, Marco & Pilar Osorio Lora. Growing Up in Latin America. Child and Youth Agency in Contemporary Popular Culture. Lanham, Roman & Littlefield, 2022. 271 pp.

Martin-Jones, David. Cinema Against Doublethink. Ethical Encounters with the Lost Past of World History. Remapping World Cinema Series. Routledge, 2019. 242 pp.

Corral, Wilfrido H. Discípulos y maestros 2.0. Novela hispanoamericana hoy. Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2019. 610 pp.