Abstract
The turn of the twenty-first century in Latin America has seen the emergence of diverse artistic expressions as potent political and social instruments. This should not be surprising; as Sifra Goldman (1994: 245) observes, historically artistic production has often played this role. Culture seems to have been a political (and politicized) zone throughout the twentieth century despite the dramatic change in the context of artistic production in recent decades. Scholars have offered analyses of this change, pointing to the impact ofglobalization on culture and on artistic production, including the tendency toward both cultural homogenization, on the one hand, and increased distinction (fragmentation), on the other (Pieterse, 2004), the increased investment of the state in the construction of “national cultures” and the appropriation of indigenous arts and performances into national identity-building projects (García, 2005), and the emergence of “cultural capitalism,” in which nonmaterial objects (performances, media, cultural tourism, intellectual property etc.) are exploited as drivers of economic growth (Yúdice, 2003). These have combined to “give the cultural sphere greater protagonism than at any other moment in the history of modernity,” and the arts may be among the instruments best suited to responding to these “dramatic transformations in the economies, societies, politics, and cultures of Latin America” (Yúdice, 2003: 9–10). 1
The articles in this issue and the next one take seriously the new global context of artistic production and examine the efforts of local artistic and political actors to negotiate it. In these essays we observe individual artists and local artistic communities grappling with these global shifts. Neither elite nor folkloric, many of the subaltern artistic expressions examined here assert a reinvented cultural authenticity that simultaneously participates in and resists national rhetorics and global economies. This process results in vernacular artistic expressions that remain both locally grounded and politically relevant within a rapidly changing transnational (or even postnational) context. By “authenticity” here we mean local and artistic creative autonomy, the persistence of the expertise of the artist and artistic communities as authorities, the continuity of local meanings and referents, and the efficacy of the arts as a site of political critique and resistance.
In this first volume on the performative expressions of artistic culture, articles that examine a range of geographic areas and artistic forms, from Latino punks in the United States to indigenous festivals in Argentina and Guatemala, Afro-Latin performative forms in North and South America, and the Brazilian Theater of the Oppressed. Taken together, the articles in these two issues yield an optimistic assessment of the status of the arts in Latin America, making a case for the vitality and increased relevance of the arts as sites of resistance. They also provide evidence of the limits of this optimistic assessment: constraints on the authenticity, integrity, and efficacy of artists and artistic communities are well documented here.
The Global and the Local: New Hybridities
Globalization has not obliterated indigenous, African-descended, and grassroots artistic forms as was once feared. In fact, the articles brought together here seem to underscore Néstor García Canclini’s (2005) thesis that, through a process of hybridization, traditional (popular) cultures have experienced growth (rather than erasure) in the context of globalization and modern expansion. Salient in the politico-artistic landscape is the persistent relevance of the local, which remains a dynamic site for artistic production in much of Latin America. This is not to say that the local has simply “resisted” the global; rather, artists and artistic communities participate in global cultures and markets while simultaneously working to maintain control over artistic expression. Conversely, local artistic forms circulate globally, and in fact global markets depend on the inclusion of “traditional symbolic structures and goods . . . in order to reach even the popular layers least integrated into modernity” (García, 2005: 153).
Jan Pieterse (2004: 52) argues that these local cultures are as rhizomatic as capitalism itself and that culture and capitalism are braided together in the globalized world, resulting in a “global mélange.” In “The Theater of the Oppressed as a Rhizome: Acting for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Today,” Mariana Leal Ferreira and Dominique Devine apply Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome to describe the spread of Theater of the Oppressed around the world. They draw upon their experience of using the method in the classroom to create awareness of the struggles of indigenous peoples and call attention on stage to the recent adoption by the United Nations of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Social movements employing art and performance as a means of political expression and critique still draw on locally meaningful (“traditional”) cultural techniques, imagery, and materials, but they also adopt and appropriate artistic forms that circulate in the global market, retooling these as effective modes of artistic expression and political discourse and resistance. Patricia Zavella brings the conversation to Latinos in the United States in “Beyond the Screams: Latino Punkeros Contest Nativist Discourses,” examining the Latino punk scene as a space for fostering critical political discourses in immigrant communities. In particular, she focuses on the band Los Crudos, demonstrating how through lyrics and concerts they occupied a space of resistance against anti-immigrant sentiment, creating for themselves a cultural citizenship through which they claimed the right to perform and participate regardless of legal status while also creating opportunities for coalition building and solidarity across languages and ethnicities. Similarly, Tanya Saunders’s “Black Thoughts, Black Activism: Cuban Underground Hip-hop and Afro-Latino Countercultures of Modernity” argues that artistic actors intentionally appeal to an authentic, decommodified expression of hip-hop. She sees hip-hop in Cuba as a prime example of the appropriation, replication, and reconfiguration of globalized art to express local histories. Further, she argues that the artists in her study consciously choose hip-hop as the primary medium for their social critique. With state support, Cuban hip-hop has emerged as a powerful “utopian social movement” while simultaneously preserving enough independence from the state to critically engage state-sponsored race discourses.
Cultural Cannibalism
Imported forms drawn from the global marketplace are not so much consumed as cannibalized in local contexts. Motifs from Disney, Hollywood, and U.S. popular culture along with “folkloric” traditions and elements of ethnic and indigenous cultures that have found their way into the global marketplace are borrowed and appropriated. These are worked on in local artistic and political contexts, hammered into new forms that translate these imported elements into localized worldviews. Rather than leading to cultural homogenization, this work may all but strip global artistic forms of their original referents and imbue them with regionally and locally specific cultural and political meanings. In a sense, the creative expression at work in popular Latino/Latin American cultures reveals what the Brazilian writer, poet, and playwright Oswald de Andrade spoke of in his Manifesto antropofágico of 1928, a “metaphor of devouring” that is also articulated by Caetano Veloso in Verdade tropical (2002 [1997]: 247, our translation):
We Brazilians should not imitate but [rather] devour new information, from wherever it comes. . . . In the words of Harold de Campos [the challenge is] “to assimilate as a Brazilian species the foreign experience, reinventing it in our own terms [integrating] unmistakably local qualities through which the resulting product gains an autonomous character and confers, in theory, the possibility of functioning, with international defiance, as an export product.”
Global cultural elements thus become localized and “folklorized.” In “Manufacturing Identity: Masking in Postwar Highland Guatemala,” Rhonda Taube studies local costume parades celebrated alongside traditional religious festivals, in which dancers don costumes based on characters drawn from the North American mass media (including Disney, comic books, and Hollywood) and iconic figures from global culture (athletic heroes, political figures, etc.). Comparing Ladino (Hispanicized) and K’iche’ Maya practices, she observes that Ladinos’ costumes represent a relatively uncritical appropriation of U.S. imagery and commodification, while the K’iche’ reconstruct them with a uniquely indigenous message that celebrates cultural self-respect and dignity. In this way, the costumes disrupt narratives of consumption and allow for the indigenization of global symbols and symbols of globalization.
Cultural Citizenship: Arts and the Nation-State
The leftward turn in Latin American politics since 2000 includes increased state support for indigenous cultural expressions and an increase in state-based funding for the arts in some Latin American countries. Brazil’s Cultural Points program is a case in point. As George Yúdice (2003) argues, governments have come to see arts and culture as “expedients” for nation-building. Artistic communities seem to be negotiating the benefits and challenges of this shifting landscape. One even finds instances in which artistic citizenship is proposed as an alternative to state-based or traditional identity politics. The assertion of artistic citizenship alongside other alternative (insurgent) citizenships seems to be particularly pronounced in African-descended cultural performance communities (hip-hop, capoeira, samba).
State appropriation of local or traditional artistic expressions often undermines the rhetorical potency of art as political resistance and as an expression of specific ethnic or cultural identities. Yet, in these new cultural articulations, the specificity of the local creative process has not been de-territorialized; rather, a new dimension has been added, expanding its scope and relevance to the national cultural and political landscape. Representations of local politics and identity permeate the national and global political context, as these representations rewrite national histories by infusing them with key aspects of historically excluded populations. Katya Wesolowski examines state regulation and co-optation of capoeira in “Professionalizing Capoeira: The Politics of Play in Twenty-first-Century Brazil.” Anchoring part of her analysis in the discussion at the Third National Capoeira Congress in São Paulo in 2003, she explores the double-edged sword of state-sponsored professionalization. The formerly stigmatized art has been legitimized by its growing popularity and regulation. In this reconfiguration, once marginalized individuals can transform themselves into citizens, but at the same time a fundamental element of capoeira identity, malandragem (cunningness, lawbreaking, and subversion), is placed at risk.
Derek Pardue explores the current Brazilian administration’s reinvestment in “national culture” and popular citizenship through the Cultural Points program, launched by the Workers’ Party in 2003 under the guidance of Gilberto Gil. In his study of a particular hip-hop community, the Casa de Cultura Hip Hop, he assesses the inherent risks of the program. He identifies the artists’ ambivalence toward the Cultural Points program and the precarious position of hip-hop as a state-sponsored cultural practice given its “intensely critical” position vis-à-vis the state.
Many Latin American/Latino artistic communities today insist on the importance of authenticity in artistic production. Without retreating into an insulated and isolating nativism, they resist appropriation by contemporary nation-building projects. This resistance includes an insistence on their role in the creation of national identities, even as they must sometimes continue to perform within the hegemonic narrative that encapsulates, exoticizes, and commodifies traditional cultures in the construction of national identities that have currency in the global marketplace.
Beyond Expediency: Authenticity and the Persistence of the Aesthetic Dimension
Hip-hop, samba, fiestas, masking, and the other appropriations explored in the articles included here preserve and propagate meanings and referents beyond those assigned by global markets and nation-building projects. Yúdice (2003) argues that the expediency of culture as an instrument for economic capitalization, nation building, maintaining social stability, and even the promotion of political and social change has supplanted other meanings and significations, ultimately displacing the “transcendent” or aesthetic dimension. The essays here would seem to prove otherwise: that political efficacy and aesthetic expression are not mutually exclusive. Local artistic and forms, even as they are placed at the service of the global tourism industry or nation-building projects, may still have “transcendent” meanings. Cultural celebrations and performances maintain their aesthetic content and local referents, preserving significations beyond systems of production and commodification. Artistic communities are simultaneously versed in global cultures while preserving aesthetic elements in their artistic performances.
In “Performing Mulata-ness: The Politics of Authenticity and Sexuality among Carioca Samba Dancers,” Natasha Pravaz charts the female samba dancer’s quest for authenticity in a highly commodified, racialized, and gendered context. In particular, she focuses attention on the mulatas, whose dancing skills are often derided in juxtaposition to those of passistas, who are understood to possess more expertise, athleticism, and ability. She emphasizes the mulatas’ assertion of artistry, athleticism, and artistic pleasure in the face of their degraded race and gender status. This she terms a “strategic hybridity” through which the dancers embrace the qualities of mulata-ness while simultaneously claiming the cultural and artistic integrity of samba as an Afro-Brazilian tradition.
Karen Avenburg’s “Interpellation and Performance: The Construction of Identity through Musical Experience in the Virgen del Rosario Fiesta in Iruya, Argentina,” also indicates the persistence of the aesthetic and transcendent dimensions. Avenburg explores the role of musical performance in an annual religious festival in an indigenous village in northern Argentina. She identifies the real musical diversity of the fiesta (which includes regional musical forms, national folkloric music, Catholic hymns, and popular music) and demonstrates the ways in which these diverse musical styles work together in reinventing and reinscribing local, ethnic, regional, religious, and national identities. Through musical interpellation, the fiesta creates not only a sense of belonging to the Iruya ethnic community but also broader identifications. It is conceived as a traditional event with particularities that do not occur in other places, but it is simultaneously related to the national and international context in which indigenous identities were once stigmatized and are now being revalorized.
Conclusions
These articles analyze specific and highly local artistic expressions against the backdrop of globalization. They focus attention on the human beings, the artistic actors and agents, and the concrete working out of artistic practice in the new global context. Here we note the desire for authenticity, autonomy, artistic integrity, and cultural citizenship against the backdrop of these transnational phenomena.
Arjun Appadurai, discussing his theory of rupture (1996:15), explains that national articulations of identity and politics through art shift from representations of culture as “group identity based on difference” to “a process of naturalizing a subset of differences that have been mobilized to articulate group identity.” The full impact of this shift remains to be seen, but these new sites of intersection have the potential to help us rethink “the idea of Latin America” (Mignolo, 2005). The shift reflects Latin America’s need to assert itself as a “world of many worlds” (Mignolo, 2005:144)—to move away from the concept of “second-class” established during and through colonization and within what Mignolo calls the “Western European translation of this land.” In the articles presented in these issues we see narratives of “subaltern” cultures resisting this very European construct and marker of colonial difference.
Ongoing shifts in the global economy will continue to present challenges and opportunities for the arts and artists in Latin America. The decentering of the United States and Europe in the global economy, the rise of Asian and Southern markets, and the growth of the middle classes in the global South will have lasting effects on performative and artistic cultures in Latin America.