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

Director Rafael Baledón deploys horror film conventions combined with Mexican melodrama to critique monstrosity and humanize the ‘monster.’ Professor Frankenstein’s hubris constructs an unnatural creature from formerly living body parts, but the real outcast is Jaime Rojas, a vengeful criminal unable to leave behind acts of cruelty. Rojas’s vision is anchored in the past, challenging law and order, frozen in a world that has moved on with accelerated modernity requiring transformation. Frankenstein’s creation, Shelley’s prototype of the outcast, in mid-century Mexico is a figure of empathy attempting to overcome his origins. A potential victim of science and society, Orlak performs human acts, casting aside the control of others. The fire that takes his life parallels the self-sacrifice of Shelley’s character, only the motivation has changed. 

Although Japanese Brazilians have constituted a key immigrant group since their arrival in 1908, the community has been relatively underrepresented in Brazilian literature. Given the linguistic and often physical isolation of Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, their literary portraits have differed from representations of prominent European immigrant groups, which have historically been more fully realized. Japanese characters initially appeared as caricatures of urban types in works by Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade in the 1920s and 1930s. Narratives by Japanese Brazilians, specifically Ryoki Inoue’s Saga (2006) and Oscar Nakasato’s Nihonjin (2011), correct for the oversights of earlier depictions by focusing on familial tales of migration and labor that foreground life on rural coffee fazendas. This article analyzes these nuanced portraits in contrast to the one-dimensional modernist accounts to underscore the critical place of diasporic voices in a reimagined Brazilian literary canon.  

This article argues that Gabriel Mascaro’s Boi neon (2015) challenges the longstanding division between human and nonhuman animals in the sertão, a landscape that has been a fixture of Brazilian cinema. Boi neon blurs that dichotomy by presenting a group of characters that form a gender-destabilizing, nontraditional nomadic family who mainly works for vaquejadas, a Brazilian rodeo held in an arid region undergoing accelerating industrialization. The film collapses the Western cultural hierarchy between humans and animals in a key scene where Galega, a female truck driver, wears a horse’s head mask during an erotic dance. According to the anthropologist David Le Breton, the face is the body region where the human condition acquires meaning and incarnates a person’s identity. For Le Breton, modifying a face is the equivalent of changing existence. By analyzing Galega’s performance in dialogue with Le Breton’s theory, this article explores how Boi neon disrupts the ontological division between human and nonhuman animals in the landscape of the sertão, which historically became a stereotyped idea of impoverished, savage land that has only existed to be tamed or destroyed in the name of progress. Additionally, the article claims that Mascaro’s film encourages viewers to recognize their own animality, challenging the speciesist view of humans as rational beings distinct from their animal nature.

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (2016) by Veeraporn Nitiprapha, Thailand’s first female who receives Southeast Asian Writers Award (S.E.A. Write Award) twice, is a novel on the overseas Chinese in Thailand that can also be classified as a work in the Magical Realism tradition. Inspired by the author’s own biographical elements along with her interpretation of masterpieces of Latin American literature, the author fictionalizes a tragedy based on Chinese “outsiders” in Thai society through the saga of the Tang family from a ghostly perspective, based on local beliefs that bring up the subject of memory derived from Pedro Páramo (1955) by Juan Rulfo and One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. This article uses Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat as a case study that exemplifies the influences of Latin American literature in Thai contemporary literature. The Thai novel is, therefore, studied through the dialogue and interaction with its Mexican and Colombian models: a fictionalization of the “forgotten” history of the ethnic “outsiders,” a creation of ghost characters, as well as a labyrinthic and “haunting” narrative. The analysis employs psychological and socio-historical dimensions to discover both parallelism and disparity in contemporary history and ancestral faiths between these two antipodes.   

Este artículo analiza cómo la novela La cena, de César Aira, emplea la figura del zombi para explorar las crisis económicas, sociales y políticas generadas por el capitalismo neoliberal. A través de una lectura basada en el concepto de “realismo capitalista”, el texto sostiene que los zombis representan la pérdida de autonomía y subjetividad del individuo en un sistema que deshumaniza y descarta cuerpos como bienes superfluos. La novela sitúa la precariedad económica y la alienación emocional del protagonista como un reflejo de estas dinámicas, yuxtaponiendo el espectáculo mediático con el deterioro físico y mental de los sujetos. En última instancia, el artículo plantea que los zombis no solo encarnan la ruptura de la cohesión social, sino también la crisis del significado y la representación, desafiando las narrativas tradicionales de comunidad y humanidad. 

This essay examines the Latin American Baroque and neo-Baroque as critical frameworks for engaging with Michel Foucault's concept of the history of the present. Divided into two main sections, it first questions the Eurocentric mold of Foucault's modern critical ethos and then explores how the Baroque ethos—marked by excess, simulacra, and heterogeneity—offers a "contaminated" perspective for rethinking the ontology of the present. Through the works of Sarduy, Echeverría, and others, the text highlights the Baroque’s potential to interrogate and reframe foundational assumptions about critique and modernity.

This essay explores one possible interpretation on how Latin American intellectuals and activists use the concept of utopia.  The first part of the essay provides a sketch of how European and US scholars, particularly those following Ernst Bloch, have articulated utopia.  The section ends with a pessimistic reading of utopia due to the institutional power of settler colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy.  In the second section of the essay, the author begins by using some of the work of Jose Boaventura de Sousa Santos to explore Quijano’s coloniality of power.  In the process the author demonstrates how much of European thought around utopia assumes knowledge as an un-positioned, un-located, neutral, and universalistic position.  So utopia, as articulated by European thinkers, becomes part of the violent history and epistemology that invented America and can be said to be tainted with this original sin.  In response, Latin American scholars and activists turn to concepts that emerge from struggles of resistance against Eurocentric thought and practices, like sumac kaway, pachamama, or the Zapatista struggles to restore utopia as part of the struggle for el buen vivir.  This approach helps disentangle ourselves from the projects of modernity and permits a collective mode of thinking that is produced and thought from difference, towards liberation.  So Latin American activists and scholars, like others from the Global South, are endeavoring to reevaluate utopia by going beyond European thought and restoring value to the struggles of communities whose heritage have been erased, especially native communities that have resisted coloniality.

La poesía de la diáspora de la llamada “literatura hispanomagrebí” está marcada, en especial, por la hibridez. Este artículo se centrará en analizar la articulación de la identidad en la obra poética de dos integrantes de este conjunto: Khédija Gadhoum y Farah Jerari. El cotejo revela que, por un lado, la estadounidense-tunecina basa su proyecto poético en la temática de la migración y en la deconstrucción de la memoria, mientras que el de Jerari propone un viaje para deconstruir su identidad. Tras resaltar los puntos comunes de las obras de dos autoras tan diferentes, se valorará con la posibilidad de vincularlas con el macrocontexto de la poesía de la diáspora.

Building on the relation between translation, bilingualism, language learning, and the actual practices of translators, this article examines the nexus between Indigenous poetry and translation, and its potential to expose readers to urgent aspects of social justice. It makes the case for the unleashing of bilingual readers’ full critical, analytical, and creative potential through a more student-centered and aesthetic approach to literary criticism that is guided by translation praxis. In addition to engaging in a theoretical dialogue with various decolonial, translation, and Indigenous and Native American theories and methods, it presents the blueprint for a collective translation exercise, supplemented by extension an analysis of valuable testimonies from some of the students who participated in the exercise and found in translation a place for reflection on what it means to translate other ways of being and to inhabit other cognitive spaces. At its core, this article represents an attempt to transform the classroom into a more open space for critical engagement where students embody the figure of the translator and, in doing so, experience the role of cultural translation in social justice actions.

The aim of this article is to analyze some artistic experiences developed in Brazil, since the arrival of Japanese immigrants in 1908. The focus is the impact of the so-called transcreations, which is a concept invented by the Brazilian poet and semioticist Haroldo de Campos. More than a literal replication of Japanese Aesthetics, Campos’s proposal of transcreation became a powerful tool to recreate Japanese Art through the lens of some Brazilian singularities. A few bridges among Campos and other artists, such as Sergei Eisenstein, are also developed to explore multiple possibilities to deal with performing arts, by combining aesthetical and political attitude. Some Nipo-Brazilian choreographers are mentioned to illustrate the discussions, such as Alice K., Angela Nagai and Thiago Abel.   

Rosa Sevilla de Alvero (1879-1954), dramaturga, poeta, autora de artículos en la prensa filipina en español, fue también docente y, como tal, muy consciente de sus obligaciones como educadora de los futuros ciudadanos de una patria todavía en conformación en el contexto de la reconfiguración colonial de las primeras décadas del siglo XX, en las Filipinas bajo tutela estadounidense. El drama lírico en tres Actos la Prisionera de amor, presentado en 1922 y ambientado en las Filipinas de la década 1910, da fe de ello. Prisionera de amor no es (sólo) un drama sentimental, sino la defensa feminista de la agencia de las mujeres mediante la idea de la maternidad patriótica. Mediante el análisis de las femineidades propuestas por Prisionera de amor, analizamos cómo emergen figuras alegóricas que definen la personalidad filipina, su idiosincrasia y sus valores. También observamos los arquetipos masculinos desde la perspectiva del ethos de la virilidad definido para mostrar sur la interconexión y complementariedad entre estas femineidades y masculinidades apuntan hacia una filipinidad compatible con la modernidad propuesta por Estados Unidos. 

The Mirandese language is a Romance language and form of Astur-Leonese that is spoken in a border region of rural northeastern Portugal. Mirandese owes its existence to the southward expansion of the medieval kingdoms of Asturias and Leon into territory later incorporated into the Portuguese kingdom. For most of its history Mirandese has been an essentially oral language, though in recent decades this has changed, and in 1999 an Orthographic Convention for the Mirandese Language was published. That same year, the Portuguese parliament recognized the existence of Mirandese and the linguistic rights of the Mirandese community. Despite these advances, spoken Mirandese is in decline, and it currently has an estimated 3,500 active speakers. This decline is due to factors including language stigmatization, particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century, improved transportation links between the northeast and the rest of Portugal, and rural-to-urban migration. Mirandese may go extinct as a spoken language by the mid-twenty-first century. On September 8, 2023, Cristina Martins (Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities, University of Coimbra) gave a keynote address, “Mirandese, quo vadis?” at the 44th Annual Conference of the Association for Contemporary Iberian Studies, at the University of Porto. Professor Martins provided an overview of the history, present, and possible futures of Mirandese. She also described her linguistic research on and personal relationship with the language. I invited her to participate in this interview, conducted by email, to introduce Mirandese to a primarily North American academic audience, and to expand on the themes of her address.