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

Notwithstanding the already established prominence of scholarship on rap music produced in the United States, Brazilian scholars rarely refer to American studies. Furthermore, a few comparative studies between Brazilian and American rap lyrics do exist. This study takes a step toward filling such a gap. While examining dominant scholarship on rap in Brazil, I demonstrate how Brazilian scholars render blackness invisible in their approaches to rap. Through a comparison between N.W.A.’s and Racionais MC’s’s lyrics, in which I highlight some of rap’s aesthetic and rhetoric devices that both groups share, I ultimately reclaim the place of blackness in Brazilian rap.

In this article, I contend that Ev(it)a, the protagonist of Lídia Jorge’s A costa dos murmúrios, embodies Homi Bhabha’s concept of “third space”. I argue that Ev(it)a represents the liminal space (and, therefore, hybrid, ambivalent) which lies at the intersection of the colonized and the colonizer’s discourses. As such, this character presents herself as a space that refuses both the fixity of the colonial discourse and the normativity of the phallocentric discourse, thus projecting herself as a renovating space, one that constructs new positions.

Differing from the closed narrative of the whodunit, género negro fiction favors the open textuality of the hardboiled, where content and themes critically codify social and historical contexts. Given this frame of reference, this essay analyzes three representative detective novels of the last fifty years as works of ambiguity and irony that criticize and reinterpret Mexico’s changing society: Rafael Bernal’s El complot mongol casts a cynical eye on the weaknesses of the so-called Mexican “miracle;” Paco Ignacio Taibo’s No habrá final feliz questions police-directed violence against a rebellious populace whose repression exhibits the nation’s “revolutionary” mythology; and Élmer Mendoza’s Balas de plata encodes the patent crisis of an emergent narco state characterized by unheard-of violence, dubious morality, and social paranoia. In a concluding note, Edgar Allan Poe’s and Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories are presented as whodunit counter-examples that anticipate the open narrative of género negro.

In this article, I examine the ways in which drag queens are represented in the literature of Latin American authors, such as Carlos Monsiváis, and Severo Sarduy. I contrast these literary representations to build on what I call an ecology of drag, a network that looks at how material objects activate different modes of perception around queerness, such as saturation and fragmentation. I situate these modes of sensing in the cabaret performance of a drag queen from Mexico City, namely Roberto Cabral. Their performances expose how the politics of sexuality and race propose a critique of history by deploying parody, and cabaret. In this transversal approach to literature, satire, and performance, I argue that drag culture combines affect and a critique of history to foster a sense of belonging in entertainment venues so as to give shape to sexual dissidence in contemporary urban Mexico. This form of sexually dissident culture can be better understood by the notion I refer to as broken record, an affective drive that connects queer memory with the sonic experiences of listening to Mexican romantic ballads. By alluding to popular songs, and literature, I associate drag performance with a repertoire of queer cultural practices that seek to foster a sense of belonging under the economies of queer nightlife. Broken records complicate the linearity of time condensed in a nostalgic nationalism, intermixing temporality, experience, and queer cultural production in the era of neoliberalism, as the practices of consumption turn sexual dissidence into a cultural capital with which queer collectives negotiate everyday life. This sense of brokenness of records metaphorically illustrates historical silences, erasures, violent acts, and misrepresentations sexual dissident cultures endure for social world-making. In this sense, drag performance is a queer cultural form that alters practices of consumption by generating belonging mediated by a sonic affectivity within global queer imaginaries, satirizing a national nostalgia for the masculinization of heroic figures, while ruffling conceptualizations of Mexican popular culture.

This article discusses Juan L Ortiz’s use of thinking and aesthetical Classical Chinese poetry elements in his work as his political answer towards the problem of inequality among human and non-human entities portrayed by euromodernity, especially in his book el Junco y la corriente(1957). By integrating the formal T’ang poetical forms in his poems, Ortiz creates an outdoor poetics which enacted the concept of cosmopolitics vindicating the nature of the interdependent and egalitarian relation among all sentient beings who conform to the vital community.

Estrada, Oswaldo. Troubled Memories. Iconic Mexican Women and the Traps of Representation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018. Print. 244 pp.

Sánchez-Prado, Ignacio M. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2018. 248 pp.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Print. 188 pp.

Fonseca, Alberto, Cuando llovió dinero en Macondo. Literatura y narcotráfico en Colombia y México. Buenos Aires; Culiacán: Editorial de la Universidad Nacional del Sur; Universidad Autónoma de Sinaloa, 2016. 198 pp.

Esch, Sophie. Modernity at Gunpoint: Firearms, Politics, and Culture in Mexico and Central America. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 296 pp.

Labrador Méndez, Germán. Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968-1986). Ediciones Akal, 2017. 680 pp.

Lee, Ana Paulina. Mandarin Brazil: Race, Representation, and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. Print. 229 pp.