“They Look Like They’re Trying to Pull Up Nails with Their Heels”: Ricardo Güiraldes’s Response to Cultural Appropriation in Don Segundo Sombra

Cultural appropriation has often been linked to American treatment of indigenous cultures. In Playing Indian, for example, Philip J. Deloria investigates how images of Indianness, however inauthentic, stereotypical, or completely ethnocentric, work to help white Americans come to terms with their history of conquest and possession. While the term cultural appropriation has been linked to the conflict between dominant and indigenous cultures as Deloria suggests, it is used far less frequently with respect to American and Latin American cultural identities. Yet, the preponderance of movies and literary works in which Americans follow the same rubric – use Latin American culture to define American cultural identity – evoke the same sense of loss on the part of Latin Americans, in this case, Argentines. For over a century, for example, the gaucho has been examined, evaluated, and reevaluated by Argentines within gauchesque literature to make sense of modernization, notions of civilization versus barbarism, and what creates argentinidad, or what it means to be Argentine. Ricardo Güiraldes sought to respond to the cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of the gaucho, specifically that gaucho culture could be taken up by anyone and used for any purpose, no matter how benign; and that gauchos were a part of the past, eschewing modernization in forms such as industrial ranching and technology when, in fact, they embraced it. In Don Segundo Sombra, Güiraldes addresses these issues. Rather than permit cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism to remain unremarked upon, Güiraldes demonstrates that gaucho culture has remarkable qualities that cannot be imitated by novices, both foreign and native. He then examines gaucho culture, particularly the link between frontier life and economic displacement, in order to champion the gaucho and argentinidad as the models for Argentines to follow.

«Fuera de lugar»: Roberto Schwarz y la centralidad de la experiencia periférica

This article analyses Roberto Schwarz’s contributions to understanding the significance of Brazilian culture in relation to the way in which it is embedded in the dynamics of global capitalism. At first, it analyses to what extent his approach to Latin American culture can be understood as a dialectical alternative to postcolonial and subaltern studies. Then, based on his analysis of the intertwining of artistic form and social reality, it focuses on how Schwarz reveals the significance of Machado de Assis’ late narrative, which goes far beyond the strictly local. Finally, it offers some insights into his understanding of the evolution of the peripheral ‘maladjustment’ in the recent evolution of global capitalism on the basis of Paulo Lins’ novel Cidade de Deus.

The Latin American Comics Archive (LACA): an online platform housing digitized Spanish-language comics as a tool to enhance literacy, research, and teaching through scholar/ student collaboration

The Latin American Comics Archive (LACA)1 is an ongoing project combining capabilities for Spanish language and culture teaching, research in the Humanities, and digital technologies as a tool for expanding the access and analysis of Latin American comics for both scholars and students. Thanks to a Digital Humanities Mellon Seed Grant, LACA started out with a small representative sample of Latin American comics that were digitized and encoded in CBML over the 2016-2017 academic year. In the Fall of 2017, a pilot course allowed students and researchers to access and explore these source materials as pedagogical tools for learning and researching about Spanish language and Latin American culture. The use of digital tagging and annotation tools on the archive enabled for the analysis of the visual and verbal language of comics, as well as cultural and linguistic items or themes, and a variety of formal categories. Students and researchers were able to collaborate in the definition of key terms to be annotated and used for the research of topics in the digitized comics, with the object of ultimately creating or collaborating in critical editions of comics for use by others, and the expansion of the archive, which will eventually be open to general scholarly use by students and researchers. Integrated applications could also allow for the production of short critical interventions in comic format.

Invenciones de Caliban: cultura, humanismo y posoccidentalismo en Roberto Fernández Retamar

The goal of this research is to analyze the different critical dimensions of the writing of Roberto Fernández Retamar. We are guided by the hypothesis that in the anti-colonial texts of the Cuban poet, one intuits a heterogeneous and non-essentialist reading of the Latin-American culture, which is embedded with the elaboration of a metaphoric concept of Caliban, able to disorganize the cultural dichotomies of the colonial modernity. In the first part, we verified how the particularity of “Caliban” consists in his capacity of resisting any cultural derivation and unilateral writing, being related with what Jacques Derrida defines as différence. Secondly, we reflect on the humanism developed by Fernández Retamar with the well-known trope: the anticolonial humanism conceived from a relationship of aggressiveness between the “own” and the “other”. Finally, we analyzed the impact of the notion “posoccidentalismo” suggested by the Cuban in his criticism of the Latin-American post colonialism. We agree with Caliban; a symbol is not an authority of the absolute. On the contrary, it is a tool that wants to undo scriptural and epistemic modes offered by the western culture, and that takes form, within the work of Fernández Retamar, in an anticolonial and post western humanism, which is still budding.