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A CÂMERA AGORA ESTÁ COM OUTRX: REPRESENTAÇÃO LGBTQ+ NO CINEMA BRASILEIRO DO SÉCULO 21
([Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2021-04) Kassis, Abe; Namorato, Luciana
Aesthetics, Politics and Event: Borges’s “El fin,” the Argentine Tradition and Death
(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2014) Dove, Patrick
This essay takes up the relationship between literary aesthetics and the critique of nationalism in Jorge Luis Borges. I begin with a critical overview of Josefina Ludmer’s genealogy of the gaucho genre and then turn to Borges’s “Elfin,” which by my reading, poses a number of challenges, not only to the ideology of cultural nationalism, but also to Ludmer’s attempts to distinguish between the popular and its aestheticization.
Critique of Critique
(Política común: A Journal of Thought, 2013) Dove, Patrick
John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11 seeks to reposition the field of Latin American Studies inresponse to what he views as a new historical conjuncture associated with the aftermath of September 11,2001. Whereas in the US and Europe the impact of 9/11 is perceived mainly through the refocusing of foreignpolicy and national security in the “war on terror,” in Latin America post-9/11 is shaped by the politicalascendancy of Left-populist regimes in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere. Throughpopular social and economic programs as well as a “Bolivarian” discourse of regional unity againstimperialism, these governments have rejected the dominant neoliberal economic model while presentingthemselves as a bulwark against U.S. influence in the region. Often referred to collectively as the marearosada, these populist regimes are viewed by many as proof that the Washington Consensus has come to anend. If that is the case, it remains an open question whether 9/11 and its aftermath facilitates a reaffirmationof national sovereignty in Latin America, as Beverley believes, or whether it exposes even more drastically thecrisis of sovereignty, as others would no doubt argue.
Cultural Margins in Borges: Mimesis, Autobiography and Catastrophe
(Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 1998) Dove, Patrick
The history of commentary on the work of Jorge Luis Borges is marked by a persistent resistance, which manifests itself in the difficulty or impossibility of identifying and documenting a Borgesian system (a poetics, a grammar, a rhetoric, and also a philosophy), and likewise in the problem of delimiting a field and an application with respect to Borges' text, of assessing its standing with cultural, national and socio-political concerns. With respect to these difficulties, there are two prevailing tendencies in reading Borges: 1) the tendency to critique, devalue or even dismiss him, on the grounds of a self-evident Eurocentrism, in light of his conservative political statements or on the basis of a supposed lack of political relevance (identified in the author's refusal to provide a political context in or for his stories, and his insistence on the textuality of any and all context), and finally his silence with regard to issues of Argentine or Latin American specificity or communality (and here the devaluation consists in a deprivation: Borges is not Argentine enough); 2) from the other pole, a prevailing tendency to celebrate Borges as a writer of the universal who is - again - essentially indifferent to a particular question of origin and community (whence, it seems, his "universal" applicability and appeal). This latter assessment continues to allocate Borges' text to broadly defined categories (mystical, fantastic, escapist) while refusing, or finding itself unable, to address the specificity of Borges' subject matter, which may indeed appear to be universal in scope, but which also never ceases to return upon and re-articulate the question of a particular. In either of these common readings, Borges' text could be said to be essentially reducible to an ideal notion of translation, or a movement between the particular and the universal: as either absolutely impossible or absolutely possible, and in both cases entirely devoid of any remainder or play of difference.
Eco, Latin America, and the West
(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2005) Dove, Patrick
The journal Eco: Revista De La Cultura De Occidente published its ﬁrst volume in May 1960, with the ﬁnancial support of the Instituto Cultural Colombo-Alemán in Bogotá, Colombia. The journal continued to publish its volumes on a monthly basis until 1984, weathering ﬁve changes in editorial leadership and periodic ﬁnancial difﬁculties. In the early years, its editorial staff and contributors were drawn primarily from a small local group of European expatriate intellectuals. Its editors, in announcing their intention to provide a voice of and for la cultura de occidente, advocated a fundamental connection between Latin America and the Western tradition. At the same time, the journal proposed what at ﬁrst glance must have struck many Latin American readers as little more than a curiosity: it promised to introduce its Latin American audience to a Germanic face that had historically been overshadowed in these latitudes by its French, English, and Spanish brethren.
Elizabeth Hampsten, translation of Carlos Liscano, Truck of Fools [El furgón de los locos]
(A Contracorriente, 2007) Dove, Patrick
Liscano is a professional writer who, in addition to his work as a journalist, has published novels, short stories, poems and a dramatic monologue. His testimonio is thus somewhat atypical in that it is written by the author alone, and reflects an erudite—albeit also politically Left—perspective.
Erin Graff Zivin, The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary
(Shofar, 2008) Dove, Patrick
Erin Graff Zivin's The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary explores representations of Jewish presence in the region in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American literature. The book does not present itself as a study of Jewish experience and identity, but is instead an investigation of how literary representations of "Jewishness" bear witness to conflicts that accompany the historical transformation of Latin American societies during the previous two centuries. The key distinction between representations authored by Jewish writers on the one hand, and literary portraits of "Jewishness" by authors who do not necessarily meet any definition of Jewishness (and who in some cases apparently had very limited first-hand experience of "real Jews"), establishes a productive tension. Graff Zivin acknowledges that cultural representations of "Jewishness" have frequently coincided with—at times helping to conceal—real experiences of violence and discrimination against Jewish communities. At the same time, she insists on the distinction between "Jewish" and "Jewishness" in order to underscore the crucial role played by representation (and thus fabrication, distortion, and figuration) in the unfolding of "real experience." "Jewishness" describes a rhetorical function of naming "differences" that have not been fully assimilated into dominant national and regional narratives of belonging in Latin America. Graff Zivin argues that these literary representations have the potential to secure prevailing hegemonic configurations (by providing negative examples of what the nation must overcome or repress) or to destabilize these operations (by preserving or reintroducing the thought of a remainder that has yet to be assimilated into dialectics of self and other, familiar and stranger, and so on).
Expressive meaning
(Springer/J.B. Metzler, 2018) Amaral, Patrícia
The term expressivity or expressive meaning has a long tradition in linguistics. Roman Jakobson, building on an earlier proposal by Bühler (1934), coined the term expressive or emotive for one of the functions of language. He describes it as “focused on the ADDRESSER [speaker], aims a direct expression of the speaker’s attitude toward what he is speaking about” (Jakobson 1960: 354) and gives interjections as the prime example of this function. The separation between emotive language and referential (or descriptive) language is clear in his characterization of interjections: “they are not components but equivalents of sentences” (Jakobson 1960: 354). Although there is significant overlap between this definition and later ones, later proposals, starting with D. Alan Cruse (1986), focus on diagnostics that underlie the distinction between expressive meaning and descriptive or truth-conditional meaning, the latter being meaning that can be explicitly denied and objectively verified in the actual world (cf. Lyons 1977).
Hegemony in Latin America
(Blackwell, 2016) Dove, Patrick
The conceptual development of “hegemony” has a major impact on Latin Americanist political thought beginning in the 1960s. The concept is deployed in a wide range of contexts including: the role of intellectuals in society; transition from dictatorship to democracy; the triumph of the “Washington consensus”; and the return of populism in its neoliberal and anti-neoliberal forms. Hegemony theory is seen as enabling social theory to account for the complexity of social organization in modern societies and to understand the tenuous unity of the social without losing sight of heterogeneity and contingency.
Herman Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South
(Latin American Literary Review, 2009) Dove, Patrick
Hermann Herlinghaus 's Violence without Guilt offers an original and illuminating approach to contemporary Latin American cultural production in the context of global capital and its impact on local lived experience. The book focuses primarily on narcocorrido ballads by groups such as Los tigres del norte and cinematic, sociological and literary treatments of drug-related violence in 1990s Colombia. The analyses are framed by a theoretical engagement with the notion of "bare life" and its connection to sovereignty and violence, a theme first introduced by Walter Benjamin and more recently taken up in different ways by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. While much of Herlinghaus's critical focus is informed by Benjamin and Agamben, Violence Without Guilt also introduces a new dimension to the debate: whereas Derrida and Agamben explore the juridical ambiguities of sovereignty, Herlinghaus is interested in how socially-produced affects (fear, anxiety and guilt) illuminate what is at stake with "bare life" in a situation characterized by the crisis of traditional figures of sovereignty. He seeks to show how affect provides a vehicle for projects of exclusion and domination while also testifying to the resilience of those who resist social annihilation and struggle to affirm existence in the absence of any overarching goal or direction that would justify it.
In the Wake of Tragedy: Citation, Gesture and Theatricality in Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona furiosa
(Hispanic Issues Online, 2013) Dove, Patrick
In recent decades there has been a surge of interest in memory and history in Southern Cone cultural production. This interest can be understood in the context of two transitions taking place in the 1980s and 1990s: from political violence and repressive military dictatorship during the 1970s to representative democracy on the one hand; and from state to market, or from the modern state form in its various manifestations (liberal, populist, national security) to the neoliberal state of privatization and financial speculation on the other hand. The rise of memory politics in the decades following dictatorship is propelled by conflicts left unresolved by these transitions. To the extent that Francis Fukuyama’s characterization of the market as the overarching telos that guides all of modern history has been accepted as the obligatory point of departure for post-dictatorship political reason, then a fully accomplished transition—one in which the market has been inscribed as the sine qua non for any participation in the political—would mean the disappearance of any traces of historicity from the social landscape of postdictatorship Southern Cone societies. Memory politics aims to forestall the erasures that accompany this reinscription by looking to the past for material that would revitalize our sense of history today. Its strategies are myriad and include both the goal of salvaging old libidinal investments and that of shattering the post-historical mirror of the present.
José Eduardo González, Appropriating Theory: Angel Rama’s Critical Work
(Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018) Dove, Patrick
Ángel Rama (1926-83) is known in North American academic circles for research on Spanish American modernismo, conceptualizations of narrative transculturation, and literacy and power. His work has also been criticized for overemphasizing the role of intellectuals in societal transformation and for minimizing the violence of subaltern assimilation. Many readers have concluded that Rama’s writings have become outdated in the time of neoliberal-administered globalization, when intellectuals and literature have ceded their erstwhile hegemonic positions.
LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE HERITAGE SPEAKERS
([Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2021-05) Duro, Eduardo; Namorato, Luciana
Brazilians make up 1% of immigrants in the United States and this number continues to increase. Historically, Brazilians immigrated to the US in search of economic opportunities, for example, during periods of hyperinflation that followed the two-decade military rule in Brazil (Batalova 1). Today, one of the biggest challenges Brazilian descendant heritage speakers (HLS) face is maintaining their heritage language (HL) in monolingual environments. A HL can be defined as a language other than the dominant language that is spoken in the home, often without institutional, community, or formal support systems. A heritage language can also be defined as a language with which individuals have a personal connection (Fishman, Reversing Language Shift 362). Heritage languages are of utmost importance as “Language defines how one views the world, how they form their thoughts, with whom they identify, and what worlds are open to them. It is a precious, invaluable resource that is sought after by many people in a number of schools and institutions, an enviable asset” (Vallance 3). Hence, without one’s heritage language, they face disadvantages as well as miss part of their identity. In this study, I focus on Brazilian Portuguese (BPT), which is the national language of Brazil, the seventh most spoken language in the world and second most common romance language (Boyce). Those who successfully maintain their HL usually had access to a number of resources that facilitated the maintenance of their language skills. In the modern-day globalized world, speaking a second language or being bilingual creates new opportunities and allows one to preserve their connection to their heritage culture. There are several techniques and methods that have been shown to work in improving and maintaining fluency in a HL. This paper presents a collection of resources on this topic and compares and contrasts them to a small-scale study where BPT HLS are asked questions about their language habits and their language fluency. Of a total of eight participants, three were contacted for additional study and completed a borrowed-word assessment activity; they also answered questions based on my preliminary conclusions. The findings of the study offer insights into HL maintenance and the importance of factors, such as cultural identity and language perception. Using the study, I identify aspects like cultural competence, socialization, family support, formal instruction, language perception and language material consumption, and examine how they influence HL maintenance. Furthermore, I identify the impact that these aspects have on HL maintenance and offer suggestions on how to maintain a HL and how to overcome potential challenges in HL maintenance.
Literary Futures: Crime Fiction, Global Capitalism and the History of the Present in Ricardo Pigila
(A Contracorriente, 2012) Dove, Patrick
This chapter narrates Ricardo Piglia’s intellectual and literary formation in the less than serene Argentine sixties and seventies. Arriving back in his home country from Paris where he had studied with Roland Barthes, Piglia seemed set to carry on the long tradition of transferring cosmopolitan knowledge to the Porteño capital. But then, the “Nixon Shock” happened, and the political and cultural ground on which Piglia and his peers stood underwent a seismic shift. In an analysis of his recurring detective, Emilio Renzi, and the recent Nocturno blanco, this chapter examines how Piglia responded literarily by pulling from popular mediums, such as the noir novel, and pitting high political idealism against the lived reality of Argentine life.
Literature and the Secret of the World
(CR: The New Centennial Review, 2014) Dove, Patrick
This paper began to take shape in the context of a conference called “Literature and the Secret of the World.” The conference organizer proposed a dual point of departure for reading the title: first, Jacques Derrida’s assertion that literature is “the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world” (Derrida 1992, 47); second, the assertion in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 that in the serial murder of women in Santa Teresa lies hidden “the secret of the world”(Bolaño2008,348). My discussion of Bolaño’s novel pursues the relation between literature, world, and secret, to which I add important considerations by Martin Heidegger and Carlo Galli concerning what gives with this thing called “world.”
Literature and “Interregnum”: Globalization, War and the Crisis of Sovereignty in Latin America
(SUNY Press, 2016) Dove, Patrick
Literature and “Interregnum” looks at late 20th- and early 21st-century literary responses to neoliberal-administered globalization and its impact on the conceptual vocabularies of political and aesthetic modernity in Latin America’s Southern Cone and Mexico. The book endeavors to establish dialogues between literature and a range of theoretical perspectives, including Continental philosophy (Aristotle, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, Agamben, Schürmann, Thayer), political thought (Hobbes, Marx, Benjamin, Schmitt, Gramsci, Jameson, Laclau, Rancière, Virno, Galli), psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan), and sociology of globalization (Harvey, Sassen). Through juxtaposition of the methods and sensibilities proper to these traditions of inquiry I explore two related hypotheses.
Mass Media Technics and Post-Politics in César Aira's La villa
(Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2009-01) Dove, Patrick
In recent years Latin Americanist cultural criticism has paid increasing attention to mass media as it affects both inner life (perception, imagination and thought), social relations (ways of representing community, projecting national belonging and envisioning alternative political possibilities) as well as the production, dissemination and archiving of knowledge. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler characterizes the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the age of media differentiation. Differentiation marks a shift from a time dominated by a single media (print) to an era in which the written word must compete with visual and sound media—which in many respects prove more adept than print at capturing the speed and noise of modernity. For Latin America, meanwhile, the work of Néstor García Canclini, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Garlos Monsiváis, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo and others has contributed in important ways to broadening our understanding of how the proliferation of visual and auditory media (photography, film, television and radio in particular) has displaced or reshaped old notions about sociality that had evolved in societies dominated by print media.
Memory between politics and ethics: Del Barco's letter
(Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2008) Dove, Patrick
This paper looks at an ongoing debate in Argentina concerning how experiences of political conflict during the 1960s and 70s are remembered today. I am particularly interested in a controversy concerning experiences of militancy and armed struggle that began with the publication of an interview with Héctor Jouvé, a former guerrilla participant, published in the Córdoba monthly journal La intemperie. Jouvé recounts his experiences as a young political activist in the 1960s, beginning with his decision to join the Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo (EGP), a small group—modeled after Che Guevara’s Sierra Maestra guerrilla force—that was to operate in the northern Argentine province of Salta. In the wake of this two-part interview with Jouvé, the journal published a letter by the Córdoba philosopher Oscar del Barco denouncing the political use of violence and asserting an ethical injunction of non-violence—“No matarás” (Thou Shalt Not Kill)—as the first principle of all social life. Del Barco’s letter also delivers a “confession” in which the author discloses his own support for armed struggle during the 1960s and 70s. He asserts that, by virtue of his intellectual and moral decisions, he shares responsibility for the errors and transgressions committed by armed Leftist militant groups. Moreover, he calls on others who formerly voiced intellectual and moral support for political violence to acknowledge their errors and seeking forgiveness. Del Barco’s missive has prompted responses from a significant number of Argentine intellectuals of his generation, many of whom have expressed reservations about the nature of the critique. The polemic rapidly extended beyond the confines of the Córdoba journal La intemperie, making its mark in cultural venues such as Conjetural, El interpretador, El ojo mocho, Página 12 and Pensamiento de los Confines.
Politics, Rhetoric and the Future of Testimonio. A Review of Kimberly Nance's "Can Literature Promote Justice?: Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio"
(A Contracorriente, 2007) Dove, Patrick
Kimberly Nance’s Can Literature Promote Justice? examines the cultural phenomenon of testimonio in the context of its academic reception from the 1970’s through the present. Her book seeks to revitalize critical debate on the genre—which many in the field perceive as having run its course—by offering an alternative to prevailing interpretive tendencies. In Nance’s view, the mourning of solidarity perpetuates an interpretive fantasy—albeit nostalgically or melancholically rather than affirmatively—and thereby blocks critical awareness of the truly emancipatory potential of the genre.
Reflections on the Origin: Transculturation and tragedy in pedro páramo
(Angelaki: Theoretical Journal of the Humanities, 2001) Dove, Patrick
Although his oeuvre consists by and large of only two published works, a collection of short stories (El llano en llamas, 1953) and a novella (Pedro Páramo, 1955), the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo has been generally recognized as one of the major figures in Latin American letters. In a famous assessment, Carlos Fuentes describes Rulfo’s work as “not only the highest expression achieved so far in the Mexican novel...[but where] we also find a thread that leads us into the new Latin American novel, and to its relation with the so-called international crisis of the novel” (La nueva novela hispanoamericana, 17). Rulfo’s considerable influence upon Latin American cultural production during the Boom period and beyond is only in part a reflection of a set of formal innovations constituting one of the most distinctive breaks with the naturalist tradition in Latin America, and which moreover is widely seen to have prepared the way for the proliferation of the “new novel” and a stylized “magical realism.” At the same time, and as Fuentes’ remarks only begin to indicate, the mark left by Rulfo’s work upon Latin Americanist reflection also announces the collapse of the aesthetic ideology through which the value of literature has traditionally been upheld by the Western philosophical tradition. At the precise moment and through the very succession whereby Latin American literature lays claim to the unique and authentic expression of a singular, Latin American truth—and thus by extension to a place in the global cultural market that is no longer relegated to producing bad copies of European works—this very literary act exposes a crisis situation in which the possibility of literature, or of its redemptive capacity, is radically unsettled.

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