Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

1 The Wily Homosexual (First—and Necessarily Hasty—Notes)

1 The Wily Homosexual (First—and Necessarily Hasty—Notes) Silviano Santiago It is a commonplace that when Brazilian intellectuals travel to metropolitan sites, they are asked, How has Brazilian cultural production contributed to this or that critical theory, or how might Brazilian cultural production contribute to it? The question implicitly underscores not only the peripheral character of Brazilian culture (and thus of the intellectual who represents it) but also the subaltern condition of the Brazilian experience—even the ignorance of the historic specificity of Brazilian culture in the West. “Peripheral,” “subaltern,” and “particular” correspond semantically to the referent of the cosmopolitan question on the value of Brazilian culture, and these terms are respectively opposed to “metropolitan,” “superior ,” and “universal,” features associated with the place of utterance. I have a vigorous response for the curious metropolitan, and a polite one as well. In accepting the metropolitan’s dialogue I am not seeking a clumsy inversion of the hierarchy of values implicit in the metropolitan question; I am, rather, looking for a strategy to supplement such a question. My participation in the dialogue would attempt, then, to raise the inquirer’s awareness with respect to his or her utterance —an utterance charged with politically hegemonic values. I answer my interlocutor that I prefer to redirect the question to texts produced in the metropolis . I submit to him or her any and every text and author representative of the West 13 and charge him or her with the task that has been assigned to me. I am indirectly reminding him or her that there is a moment of mediation in dialogue, and that that moment should be allowed to speak, for it is that moment that legitimates the values that inform the question initially asked of me. Here is a contemporary example of the redirection of questions I am addressing . Within the corpus of Susan Sontag’s essays, how has Brazil contributed to the theories that she has expounded with such originality? I extract two answers and I sense a contribution. In Against Interpretation, Sontag credits Brazil, through Carmen Miranda, for contributing to her theory on camp; more recently, in the pages of the New Yorker, she proposes that the nineteenth-century Brazilian author Machado de Assis might have contributed, with his fiction, to the theory of the Western novel. Who will next be named in her texts? Much more than those produced at great pains by Brazilianists, Sontag’s texts end up defining the meaning of Brazilian culture in a cosmopolitan setting such as the United States.1 The academic research of the specialist in Brazilian culture, even that which is written in English, the universal idiom, becomes increasingly less significant in our globalized times, for it tends to resituate the peripheral, subaltern , and particular in a sort of cultural ghetto—from which it had ironically attempted to remove it. The many contemporary nationalist regionalisms—fragmented manifestations of political resistance in neoliberal times—are best summed up now by that other regionalism that in the metropolises goes by the name of “Little Brazil.” Here are other classic and modern examples of the attempt to redirect the metropolitan question, this time the European question. The notion of cannibalism applied to Brazil, presented with unusual clairvoyance by a thinker of the magnitude of Montaigne in his similarly titled essay, has dominated the general meaning of Brazilian culture from the Renaissance to modern times. Clarice Lispector, promoted with great sympathy in France by Hélène Cixous (Vive l’orange), gave universal preeminence to Brazilian women’s literature and artistic production. On the rebound, Carmen Miranda, Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and, of course, anthropophagy are overvalued internally in Brazil. The vicious circle that constitutes the specificity of national culture is complete. As Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant contend in “On the Wiliness of Imperialist Reason,” “cultural imperialism lays the foundation for the power to universalize particularities tied to a single historic tradition, causing them to no longer be known as such.” According to these authors, universal conceits thus established are “true commonplaces in the Aristotelian sense of notions or theses with SILVIANO SANTIAGO 14 which one argues, but over which one does not argue.”2 Astuteness versus astuteness and a half. Truth versus truth and a half. The customary metropolitan question with which I began has been more insidiously construed in recent years—from the vantage point of theories about globalization...