The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle

Introduction

1¿Qué somnoliento conformismo hace que se siga recitando Carlos Monsiváis-Juan Villoro-Pedro Lemebel-Martín Caparrós-Cristian Alarcón como si se intentara formar un canon con una muestra gratis? [What tiring conformity has made it so that we keep reciting Carlos Monsiváis-Juan Villoro-Pedro Lemebel-Martín Caparrós-Cristian Alarcón as though we were trying to form a canon with a free sample?] —María Moreno, “La crónica raabiosa” (n.p.) In [the oceanic] space, composed of the sedimented traces of uncharted histories, a hegemonic temporality intersects with other times, with the times of others [. . .] We are brought into the presence of a contingent, temporal relation and into the multiplicity of the present, which is irreducible to its representation. —Iain Chambers, “Maritime Criticism and Theoretical Shipwrecks” (682) In November 1983, João Ubaldo Ribeiro published a crônica in Rio de Janeiro’s newspaper O Globo titled “No pasarán!” The text humorously details past and potential invasions of the island of Itaparica, located in Bahia, some one thousand miles from Rio. It jokingly describes Portuguese resistance to Dutch incursions on the island during the seventeenth century, as well as the short presence of Spanish soldiers there under the sixteenth-century reign of Felipe II. (This presence, Ubaldo writes, occurred while Portugal was under Spanish rule, so it did not actually count as an occupation.) He also discusses the English who, thankfully, were only in the area with “Um navio pirata ou outro [a pirate ship here or there]” as they focused their mission of bringing “Civilização e a Cultura Introduction  *  2 THE EVERYDAY ATLANTIC ao Terceiro Mundo [Civilization and Culture to the Third World]” elsewhere .1 Finally, he pokes fun at the French tourism that has recently taken over and turned the territory into a globalized “tropiques éxotiques” full of bars and restaurants with French names Ubaldo claims he does not know how to spell since he does not have a French dictionary handy (59; his emphasis). The crônica ends by discussing the United States, with whom “não temos praticamente nenhuma experiência [we have had virtually no experience]” but who are the topic of popular debate due to “[os] incidentes em Granada [the incidents in Grenada]” (60). He concludes that Itaparica is a tough place to conquer mainly because the people there take things with a sense of humor, and therefore only an atomic bomb could defeat it: “A sorte é que ninguém aqui é japonês. [It is fortunate that no one here is Japanese]” (61). A fun text in tone and style, Ubaldo’s crônica is representative of the typical characteristics associated with the newspaper chronicle in the twentieth century.2 The chronicle, a print precursor to the blog, is a daily or weekly literary genre that straddles fiction and nonfiction and is common to Spanish-, Portuguese-, and Catalan-language newspapers.3 It avoids the rigid rules of “objective” and researched journalistic standards that have applied to Western reportage since the North American press established those standards in the nineteenth century, at the same time as it takes advantage of its formal flexibility to comment, at times obliquely, on contemporary social issues.4 The chronicle described above is particularly illustrative because it also exemplifies the inherently transatlantic construction of subjectivity that, I demonstrate in this book, is present in the chronicle and the blog throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this case, Ubaldo requires the reader to think beyond the limits of Brazilian society alone, using a broad historical and geographical scope to comment on power at a time when a military dictatorship, albeit waning, still ruled the country. He does so by simultaneously referencing contemporary and historical events that are both local and transatlantic. Together, these references address the reader on a number of different levels that inscribe national identity in broader concerns with power and subjectivity, deterritorializing the Brazilian nation-state in the process. The chronicle’s brief reference to “the incidents in Grenada,” for instance, appears just three weeks after the U.S. invasion of the island and presumes a reader who is up to date on current events. The Introduction 3 title of Ubaldo’s crônica, “No pasarán!”, on the other hand, presumes a transnational knowledge of Atlantic history, invoking the motto that supported the last stand by Madrid’s Republicans as they...