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1. Insular Outreach, Moveable Outlook: Transamerican Currents in Brazilian Lyric
- University Press of Florida
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1 InsularOutreach,MoveableOutlook Transamerican Currents in Brazilian Lyric Can one be at once more oneself and more a national being through poetic appeals to the selves and signs of potent Others and their locations in the same hemisphere? Do poets feel that they expand the reach of their craft by using nonprint vehicles, by composing in different languages, or by redefining spaces in relation to alternate territories? Is the substantiation of mass media and electronic technology as cornerstones of contemporary existence worldwide antithetical to lyric or a source of revitalization? Can poems open fresh perspectives on the experience of cybernetic environments ? Is the perception of place, with the changes it undergoes, a topic for all genres of present-day literature? Such are some of the questions that motivate the present study of threads of poetry in Brazil in the context of the Americas, that is, in relation to the United States, Spanish America, and the hemisphere as a whole. Both historical and ongoing connections in lyric between Brazil and the USA, two countries of continental proportions, enfold not only national languages and letters per se but tourism, film, music, and other aspects of popular culture as well. Latin American matters in song and verse involve shared mythologies and histories, contrasting and converging styles, and present-day activism. This nuanced nexus—of Brazilian resources, recourses, and discourses in the Americas in the circumscribed domain of contemporary poetry—forms its own part of the encompassing array of processes and situations that comprise globalization. If an overriding concern of intellectual inquiry and critique in the 1980s was to assess the nature and limits of epochal phenomena subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism, from the 1990s into the early twenty-first century the imperatives of analysis of human endeavor, and the priorities Brazil, Lyric, and the Americas 2 that continue to drive critical agendas, have been shaped by the subjects of globalization, understood in the most basic sense to mean widespread transnationalization and intensification of the integration of different parts of the planet. When this topic came to the fore of public discussion, the predominant perspectives were those of economics and geopolitics. Considerable attention has now been paid as well to institutional implications and the ramifications for communities. Cultural dimensions of globalization have been the focus of incisive integral studies in social anthropology and of collections of essays by humanists and theoreticians of discourse. Culture in such approaches most commonly operates according to a “conventional social scientific sense” summarized as “the beliefs, values, and lifestyles of ordinary people in their everyday existence” (Berger, 2). Given the central role of mass media in the planetary spread of ideas and products, investigations of expressive culture most often refer to electronic means of communication and the impacts of technology, from film, radio, and television to the ever-expanding Internet. The late 1990s are generally considered to be the years when the Internet truly took hold not only in North America but in such nations as Brazil as well. Even before the definitive assertion of the World Wide Web, Arjun Appadurai distinguished himself both for having shifted emphasis from the accustomed configuration of culture in nation-states to a series of dimensions of cultural flows termed “-scapes” (ethno-, media-, techno-, finance-, and ideo-) and for having relativized fears of rampant Westernization and cultural homogenization. In the account of Fredric Jameson, globalization presupposes essentially a confluence of economic and cultural factors in a “communicational concept” (55) based on technologies and their implantations. Interrelations of local and globalized behaviors also concern analysts of cultural globalization in a fundamental way, especially with respect to counterpractices (protest, resistant discourse, alternative modes of expression) and issues of identity. There is limited published research directly related to globalization that ponders culture understood conventionally as (elite) aesthetic production (“high culture,” if you will), including painting, sculpture, concert music, drama, fiction, and, of course, poetry. While on an understandably lesser scale compared to varied social-science domains, turn-of-the-millennium literary scholarship indeed began to consider imaginative writing under transnational rubrics, to seek means by which a discipline attuned above all to national formations could respond to the challenges of the age of globalization.1 To make a transition from a worldwide focus to area stud- [44.212.50.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:08 GMT) Insular Outreach, Moveable Outlook 3 ies, there is a useful allied theory of regional, continental, or hemispheric subglobalization (Berger, 14–15). In this approach, focus can be...