1

The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor

SILVIANO SANTIAGO

Translated by Magdalena Edwards and Paulo Lemos Horta

I.

As Manoel de Oliveira’s 1997 film Voyage to the Beginning of the World unfolds, the camera’s focus gets confused with the car’s rearview mirror.1 The camera, or the rearview mirror, determines the point of view that will guide the viewer’s perception of the voyage from Lisbon to a distant town embedded in the mountains of northern Portugal. For the characters in transit, distance from the past and the future holds the same dramatic weight. The arrival at their destination will take even longer due to the rhetorical effect—and the experience that awaits the characters in the future is an unknown that will unfurl without warning, as opposed to what happens in David Lynch’s films where the camera’s gaze follows the road taken and a climate of suspense dominates. Here, as the car gains ground, the camera shows us the signage that has already been obeyed, the asphalt path already traveled, and the landscape unveiled. The viewer enters into a time machine. By filling up the heart of the past twice consecutively, the present becomes a throughway to the future.

Four people travel along the modern Portuguese highway, not counting the fifth, the unknown figure of the driver. Two by two. The old film director, Manoel, and the starlet in love with him. And two more actors—one is Portuguese and the other French, the son of a Portuguese father who at the age of fourteen crossed the poor mountains of northern Portugal, fleeing by foot to Spain and from there emigrating to France. He abandoned his native village to earn a living and start a family. The famous French actor Afonso, who arrives in Lisbon to star in a big film production, plans a voyage to the beginning of the world. He wants to meet his rural relatives who still live in northern Portugal. The group is transnational in its ease with national languages. Everyone is of Portuguese origin and, with the exception of the actor Afonso who speaks only French, bilingual.

Two films unfold and are contrasted in Voyage to the Beginning of the World. The first is in the hands of Manoel, the film director. The French Portuguese actor Afonso, who is the son of another Manoel, drives the second. In the first, the director, played by Marcello Mastroianni, commandeers the voyage’s original impetus, namely, the curiosity and anxiety of the exile, from the French actor. The old director steals the desire to walk his family’s past from the son of the alien (meteco or métèque). Unlike the actor, who eagerly anticipates his first meeting with the Portuguese family he lost due to his father’s emigration in the 1930s, the director only intends to revisit the aristocratic past of the Portuguese nation, which includes his ancestors’ achievements, and more recently, his own. In a predictable and tiring monologue, he seeks the attention of his three fellow travelers so he can recall his own memories. His courtly youth, Portugal’s history, and the nation-state become muddled in memory’s landscape. In an attempt to free his memory from the anguish of saudade, he makes the driver take a detour three times, thus imposing his particular past’s images on that route’s place and putting them ahead of the images of the second film.

The car first stops in front of the renowned aristocratic Jesuit school where the director began his early studies. The camera abandons the position dictated by the rearview mirror in order to capture the car and the characters in profile, as if to say that it is now narrating a story at the margins of the voyage’s trajectory. The car stops a second time. While the director weaves additional reminiscences, the group wanders through the abandoned gardens of a former luxury hotel. Still catering to the director, the car stops for a third and final time, now in front of a house with a statue of Pedro Macau, a paternal image for the director. Pedro Macau represents the Portuguese who, having enriched themselves in the colonies, returned wealthy to their country of origin and brought to its shores “the white man’s burden,” to use a classic expression from Rudyard Kipling. Notice the log Pedro carries on his back, immobilizing him; read the metaphor of Pedro’s adventures: the Portuguese present moment is torment, and the future arrives gnawed by remorse. A country of sailors, the Portuguese ended up exiling themselves in their own land, in maturity or in old age.

The film director’s story is no different from so many others depicted in modern national literatures since the beginning of the twentieth century. Marcel Proust’s branding iron both laid bare and universally marked the individual literary memory of the past century. All the great artists and intellectuals of Western modernity, including the Marxists, went through the madeleine experience. There is a shared past—in most cases cosmopolitan, aristocratic, stately—that can be drawn from each one of the subsequent autobiographies of various authors. In the preface of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil (Roots of Brazil), Antonio Candido was sensitive to the disappearance of the individual from the socio-literary texts of the decade in question. The memory’s text transforms what seemed to be different and multiple into one and the same. He observes: “[O]ur particular witness accounts become a register for the experience of the many, all of whom, belonging to what dominates a generation, deem themselves different from one another in the beginning and become, little by little, so similar they end up disappearing as individuals.”

The passengers’ attention, and the spectators’, is diverted three times from the second film’s images and dialogue, which hold more interest than the first. The French actor, as much as he tries to counterattack the usurper, only manages to confiscate the narrative thread from him late in the film. The film director does not have the right to impose the memories that fill the void of the aristocracy’s saudade on the other two Portuguese travelers and on the son of the meteco (alien), now a rastaqüera or rastaquouère (good-for-nothing). The Portuguese language in Brazil appropriated the words meteco and rastaqüera, which have pejorative meanings in modern France, which we use here to characterize the French actor, the son of Portuguese emigrants.2 Consider this passage from Mocidade no Rio e Primeira viagem à Europa (Youth in Rio and First Voyage to Europe) (1956), the memoirs of the author, lawyer, and diplomat Gilberto Amado (1887–1969): “I began, naturally, to be delighted by the masterworks of French cuisine. I raised my already reasonable aptitude for opining knowingly, and not approximately like a rastaqüera or meteco, on these matters of sauces and condiments.” In French lands, the diplomat, a member of the Brazilian elite, did not want to be confused with the immigrants, from whom he also distances himself back home.

When the actor overtakes the film’s narrative thread—an opportunity the up-to-that-point costar seizes in order to take the spotlight from the director and to command, as the star, the continuity of the narrative until the end—his action does not operate as a mere cut within the film. The seizure signals more: it has to do with a true epistemological cut. The words and the images of memory, in Manoel the film director’s hands, follow the experience of one day in the life of the French actor, son of another Manoel, the Portuguese émigré we have already discussed. The first name of the director and of any and all Portuguese émigrés is the same—Manoel. What differentiates and distances the two is the family name and the place each occupies in Portuguese society. On this day, which is to be experienced by the four fellow travelers, the Portuguese past of all those other Manoeís (plural of Manoel in Portuguese) will be unveiled, in every way different from the past of the Manoeís who were being represented by the film director’s autobiographical and elitist speech. The actor says to his fellow traveler:

“I liked listening to him, but what he said does not pertain to me.”

The actor’s interest in the voyage is another, his anxiety is another, and his memories are other—dictated by the life experience of that other Manoel, his father. He was a “very willful” boy, the son of poor farmers from northern Portugal. Without documentation or money, he climbed the mountains of Felpera with only the clothes on his back. He made it to Spain during the Civil War. He was imprisoned. In jail, he learned the rudiments of mechanics. He went cold and hungry and often did not have a roof over his head. He crossed the Pyrenees, who knows how, made it to France, and settled in Toulouse, where he became an employee at an auto shop and later the owner. He married a French woman, had two children with her, and bedded many other women. In that other Manoel’s past, his son wants to discover the misery of life in the countryside as much as the taste of adventure in distant lands. From his father, the son inherited nostalgia, translated by the guitar he carried and the fado he sang. In the father’s future, in a most unexpected way, a son appeared who—through who knows how much effort and tenacity—belongs to the elite of French cinema.

Achievements are not the only things in the life of Manoéis good-for-nothings (rastaqüeras). The cosmopolitanism of the poor Portuguese man brought losses for the son that only the voyage at hand—the opposite of the emigrant father’s voyage by foot—can reveal and recompense. The main loss is that of the maternal language. In the win-or-lose of cosmopolitan life, the actor ended up without control over the indispensable tool for communicating directly with his forefathers. Having a father who abandoned his original nationality, the son ended up suffering the violent process of becoming a citizen of France. In the film director’s speech, during the first film within the film, Portuguese is a language as exotic for the French actor as the autobiographical material it carries. The other two travelers take on the role of interpreters. The Portuguese spoken in the car has nothing to do with him, the son of the meteco (alien) in France.

In the second film, when everyone sits around the table in the dining room of the house where Afonso’s father was born, the actor realizes that he has lost his relatives less in memory than in the linguistic hiatus that isolates them in the present. The lack of a shared language brings about a lack of communication and creates distrust in the home, dominated by the black color of the clothing. The actor feels exiled in his father’s land for a different reason than the one raised by the film director’s narrative. As he gets closer to those who are distant, the inverse voyage undertaken by the son distances him, in another way, from the relatives who should be close. The inverse transforms the anxious and happy reunion scene among relatives into an afflicted game dominated by misalignment and distrust. In the process of hybridization, typical in the lives of metecos who don’t reset their family values to a blank slate, the actor commits an irreparable omission: the failure of continuity with the mother tongue, having forgotten it.

We can bring some originality to the debate in vogue today by introducing the idea of the stable and anachronistic Portuguese village into the discussion about the unstable and postmodern global village constituted in transit by the economic circuits of the globalized world. Voyage to the Beginning of the World dramatizes two types of poverty that are minimized in analyses about the processes of the transnational economy.

The first type of poverty dramatized in the second film predates the Industrial Revolution and presents man in his condition as a worker of the land and herder of animals, a romantic and autochthonous representation. Faced with the powerful machines that till, plant, harvest, and satisfy the needs of the transnational economy of grains, faced with the extremely modern processes of breeding and raising domestic birds and animals, faced with the mysteries of cloning animals, the emblematic figure of the Portuguese peasant is anachronistic—an individual lost in time and space in the twentieth century, without ties to the present and, for this reason, destitute of any idea of the future. He can’t even relate to modern electronic gadgets like television, which are within reach thanks to the perverse tricks of consumer society.

The days that follow are confused with the return voyage to the “beginning of the world.” The image of the actor’s aunt is as mineral in quality as the stony landscape where survival unfolds for those who remain to till the land and raise the livestock. Her husband has the snout of an animal, which the director character points out crudely by making faces to imitate him. Both are timely through the revanchist metaphors they carry: the aunt, a stone in the middle of economic globalization’s road; the uncle, a wolf on the lookout for failures in the computerized sheepfolds so he can pounce.

In the case of Brazil, the two revanchist metaphors find their political redemption in the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement—MST).3 They fight for agrarian reform on the legislative level and for the ownership of unproductive lands on the judicial level. They fight for the permanence of peasants in a motorized and technocratic world that excludes them, reducing them to the condition of global society’s pariahs. These days, due to police persecution that is compounded by interminable judicial processes, many activists survive as the accused.

The other type of poverty dramatized by the second film occurred after the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the democratization of transportation methods, the horizons of the farmer disinherited from the land and animal rearing were broadened. He was beckoned by the possibility of easy migration to the big urban centers, which had become devoid of cheap workers. The poor are anachronistic in another way now, in contrast to the grandiloquent postmodern spectacle that summoned them to its lands for manual labor and housed them in the metropolises’ miserable neighborhoods. This new ruse of transnational capital with the peripheral countries anchors the peasant in foreign lands, where his descendants will lose the weight and strength of their original traditions little by little. A few, like the actor in the film, arrive at the condition of a recognized agent, a French national, but many experience a future they do not participate in except through manual labor, which has been disqualified and rejected by the citizens of the country in question.

A new and thus far unknown form of social inequality has been created, which cannot be understood in the legal landscape of a single nation-state, nor through the official ties between national governments, since the economic reason that brings the new poor to the postmodern metropolis is transnational and, in the majority of cases, is also clandestine. The flow of its new inhabitants is determined in large part by the need to recruit the world’s disadvantaged, who are willing to perform the so-called domestic and cleaning services and to transgress the national laws established by immigration services. They are predetermined by necessity and by postmodern profit. Kwame Anthony Appiah highlights this in the preface to Saskia Sassen’s book: “[T]he highly qualified employees of the management sectors, like finance, see their salaries grow scandalously while the remuneration given to those who clean the offices or make photocopies stagnate or sink at once.”

Between the two poverties—the one prior to and the one following the Industrial Revolution—there exists a revealing and intriguing silence in Manoel de Oliveria’s film. In the universe of Voyage to the Beginning of the World there are neither factories nor workers. There is, if anything, the national entertainment industry, represented by the director and the actor, which today is totally globalized. In truth this is the industry that is being questioned by the film’s multicultural strategy. For the miserable and willful farmer, just as for the unemployed workers in the urban world, social inequality in the motherland suggests a leap into the very rich and transnational world, a leap that appears somewhat enigmatic but which is concrete in reality. That leap is propelled by the lack of options for economic and social betterment in their own villages and often in the small urban centers of their own countries, as is the case of the Governador Valadares region in Minas Gerais. The world’s unemployed unite in Paris, London, Rome, New York, and São Paulo.

Long gone is the time described in Graciliano Ramos’s Vidas secas, a time dominated by the pau-de-arara transportation trucks. Long gone is the time of the retirantes (refugees, literally people who retire from the land) from the latifúndio’s monoculture and the Northeastern drought. Today Brazil’s retirantes, many of them natives of Brazilian states that are relatively rich, follow the flow of transnational capital like a sunflower. Still young and strong, they want to enter the postindustrial world’s metropolises. To obtain a passport, they form long lines at the doors of the consulates. Without getting a visa, they travel to bordering countries like Mexico or Canada in relation to the United States of America, or Portugal and Spain in relation to the European Union, and there they come together with fellow travelers of all nationalities. The peasant today leaps over the Industrial Revolution and lands on his feet, midswim, by train, ship, or airplane, directly in the postmodern metropolis, often without the necessary intermediacy of a consular visa. Rejected by the powerful national states, avoided by the traditional bourgeoisie, incited by the unionized working class, and coveted by the transnational entrepreneurs, the migrant farmer is today the “very brave” clandestine passenger in the postmodern ship of crazies.

Fortunately, Voyage to the Beginning of the World is a film with a happy ending.

The French Portuguese actor requests an interpreter again, in order to speak with his relatives. The old aunt, his father’s sister, played admirably by Isabel de Castro, does not recognize her nephew in the French words he employs. She looks into his eyes while speaking to the interpreter:

“For whom should I speak? He does not understand what I say.”

As she continues to question the situation, she is harsh, intolerant, and agitated:

“Why doesn’t he speak our language?”

Because of the actor’s successive requests for recognition as her nephew, translated into Portuguese by the interpreter(s), she repeats the same question to the point of exhaustion: “Why doesn’t he speak our language?” The actor realizes too late that in the economy of family love, the work of linguistic interpreters has no value. Their goodwill does not compensate for the loss of the mother tongue.

Scrutinizing the enigma of rustic ignorance that confronts the good manners and savoir faire of metropolitans, the actor arrives at the possibility of a common language that transcends words—the language of affection. The aunt enters into a wordless dialogue established by her nephew’s gestures. She begins to recognize him through his gaze and likeness. The son looks like his father; they have the same eyes. Immediately the language of affection employs the vocabulary of skin-to-skin contact. The actor takes off his jacket, gets close to his aunt, rolls up his sleeves, and asks her, through the interpreter, to embrace him. Arms and hands cross, tightening family bonds. The actor says to her:

“Language is not what matters, what matters is blood.”

The blood dictionary holds the etymology of the language of affection’s elements. The aunt finally recognizes him as her brother’s son. They embrace. The nephew asks her to go to the cemetery, to visit his grandparents’ tomb. The language of affection becomes complete at the moment when the aunt seals the meeting by giving the nephew a piece of peasant bread. Nevertheless, the aunt’s bitter conclusion remains:

“Look, Afonso, if your father did not teach you our language, he was a bad father.”

We cannot ask the poor and cosmopolitan Manoéis to abdicate their conquests in the global village, far from the native village, but each nation-state in the First World can provide them, in spite of the absence of responsibility on social and economic levels, the possibility of not losing touch with the social values that sustain them in the cultural isolation they must endure in the postmodern metropolis.

II.

If we are all in favor of multiculturalism, we have to define at least two of its modes—one already quite old, and the other more than contemporary.

There is an old multiculturalism—of which Brazil and the remaining nations of the New World are an example—the illustrious reference of which in each postcolonial nation is Western civilization as defined by the conquistadors and as built by the original colonizers and the groups that followed them. Despite preaching peaceful coexistence among various ethnic and social groups that enter into contact in each national melting pot, theory and practice are the responsibility of white men of European origin, tolerant or not, Catholic or Protestant, speakers of one of the various languages of the Old World. The multicultural action is the work of white men so that everyone, without exception, will be Europeanized in a disciplined way like them.

Nowadays, the old multiculturalism has been forsaken by the leaders of the recently formed African and Asian nations and valued by the nations of the Old World, such as Germany, France, and England, where violent pockets of intolerance, not to mention racism, still exist in broad daylight. The boomerang that multiculturalism threw to the New World in the nineteenth century, in order for it to remain an appendage of Europe in the postcolonial period, in recent years flew over the targets of Africa and Asia and returned to where it was first launched. The spell turns against the sorcerer in his own house. Outside its place of origin, today the old multiculturalism works to resolve conflictual and apocalyptic situations that crop up in the nations belonging to the first version of the European Union.

Among the most credible theorists of the old multiculturalism is the North American William G. Summer who, in 1906, coined and defined the term ethnocentrism. In his book Folkways, published in 1906, Summer defines ethnocentrism as “the technical term that designates the vision of things according to our own group being at the center of things, such that all other groups are mediated and evaluated in reference to the first.” And he continues: “Each group thinks that its own customs (folkways, in the original) are the only good ones, and if it observes that other groups have other customs, these provoke disdain.”

Among the theorists of multiculturalism is also the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre, author of Casa-grande & senzala; the scholars from the Social Science Research Council in the United States, who since the 1930s have defended cultural diversity; and the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Faced with the scandal triggered by the draft of “second class citizens” (blacks, to be precise) by the U.S. government during World War II, she coined the famous phrase that grew to include citizens without distinction: “we are all third generation.” The fundamental principles of that multiculturalism rest on a key concept, acculturation. Robert Redfield, Ralph Linton, and Melville Herskovits defined acculturation in 1936: “[A]cculturation is the set of phenomena that results in continuous and direct contact between groups of individuals of different cultures and that brings on transformations in the initial cultural models (patterns, in the original) of one or both groups.” The old concept of multiculturalism rests on that concept and on the work that, anachronistically and with the help of Jacques Derrida, we will call deconstructing ethnocentrism. In Brazil, as we know, the multiculturalist landscape was strengthened by the ideology of cordiality.

The examples of cordial multiculturalism in Latin American literature are old and numerous. Let us cite a few from Brazilian literature. Let us begin with Iracema (1865) by José de Alencar, then move on to O cortiço (1888) by Aluísio Azevedo, and end with Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958) by Jorge Amado. The impersonal and sexual voice of the nation-state that, in retrospect, had been formed in the melting pot’s interior speaks through that multiculturalism. Now, under the empire of the governmental and entrepreneurial elites and the country’s laws, various and different ethnic groups, various and different national cultures, intersect in a patriarchal and fraternal manner (the terms are dear to Gilberto Freyre). They mix in order to constitute another, different national culture that is sovereign and whose dominant characteristics, in the Brazilian case include the extermination of the native population, the escravocrata (slave-ocrat) model of colonization, and the silencing of women and sexual minorities.

Immigrants who did not fit the principles defined by the nation-state that generously welcomed them would be decisively excluded from the agenda of planned immigration, or would not be accepted in national territory. One of the most illustrative historical debates regarding the rejection of immigrants who might not submit to the national organization dictated by the establishment of the Second Brazilian Reign is the case of Chinese emigration at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1881, a little before the abolition of black slavery in our country, Salvador de Mendonça defined his ideological position, which ended up being countersigned by the Brazilian government: “To use [the Chinese population] during half a century, without permanent conditions, without allowing settlement in our land, with the periodic renewal of staffing and contracts, seems the best step that we can make towards vanquishing the present challenges and preparing auspiciously for the nation’s future.” The wolf’s reason is clear: to count on Chinese agricultural labor, without, meanwhile, welcoming them definitively into the national territory. Fortunately, the positivists reacted to this intolerant reasoning, subordinating the political exercise to the moral. They declared that it amounted to replacing a slave arm with a quasi-slave arm. The Chinese did not emigrate to Brazil for two complementary reasons.

The words dictated by the nation-state’s intolerance when faced with the difference presented by the foreign are not absent from many of the recent declarations of U.S. politicians. During a discussion in the U.S. Senate regarding the advantages and disadvantages of a shared American market, a prominent senator uttered this pearl that accentuates the impossibility of the balanced welding of the continent’s nations: “If the other [countries of the American continent] are too slow, we will go ahead without them.” We know what the unbridled and selfish advance of a single nation-state can lead to. After the events of September 11, 2001, in which ethnic and religious differences were aggravated by the biases of mutual fundamentalism, the possibilities of multiculturalism, as it had been practiced since the great discoveries of the sixteenth century and theoretically determined in the first half of the twentieth century, were thrown in the trash can of the new millennium. At the same time, groups of emigrants (or those who are already immigrants) in the United States suffer from the restrictions and annoyances that all the newspapers and televisions report.

The multiculturalism that reorganizes the disparate elements that are found in any particular colonial or postcolonial region, or that supports immigration planned by the nation-state according to a system of quotas, has invariably referred to the rhetoric of strengthening “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s well-known expression. For Anderson, the nation is imagined as a limited and sovereign community. Let us cite the definitions that he gives us of the three italicized terms. First: “the nation is imagined as limited, because even the largest of them, which encompasses perhaps a billion human beings, possesses finite borders, even though elastic, beyond which are found other nations. No nation considers itself coextensive with humanity.” Second: “It is imagined as sovereign, because the concept emerged at a time when the Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the hierarchical dynastic reign that is divinely put in place. (…) The pledge and symbol of that liberty is the sovereign State.” Third: “the nation is imagined as a community because, without taking into account the inequality and exploitation that currently prevail in all of them, the nation is always conceived of as deep and horizontal fellowship.”

Through persuasion of a patriotic ilk, the multiculturalists of the imagined community have freed the dominant elite of the social, political, and cultural demands that overflow from the narrow circle of economic citizenship. If you want to wash your dirty laundry, you will have to do it at home. The ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic differences, roots of internal conflicts or possible future conflicts, were discarded in favor of a united national whole, patriarchal and brotherly, republican and disciplined, apparently cohesive, and sometimes democratic. The shards and remnants of the construction material that helped to elevate the building of nationality are thrown in the trash of subversion, which should be combated at whatever cost by the police and military. According to the rules of this multiculturalism, the construction of the state had as a priority its aggrandizement through the destruction of the marginalized population’s individual memory and the favoring of collective memory’s artificiality.

In these times of the transnational market economy, would it be fair to preach the theoretical principles developed within multicultural research and practice as they were defined in the past?

The structure of the old multiculturalism—whether attested within the new economic order by the most diverse national hegemonic governments or not—is at odds with today’s need for a new theorization that would base itself on an understanding of the dual process set in relentless motion by the global economy—that of the “denationalizing of the urban space” and of the “denationalizing of politics,” to use Saskia Sassen’s expressions from Globalization and Its Discontents. She goes on, characterizing the social agents seduced by the process: “And many of the unprivileged workers in the global cities are women, immigrants, and people of color, whose political sense of individuality and whose identities are not necessarily immersed in the ‘nation’ or the ‘national community.’ ”

The constitutive principles of the imagined community are being harnessed by the multiracial fountain and by the transnational economy from which it drinks and from which the marginal, and also hegemonic, nation-states still drink. First, the nation-state becomes coextensive with humanity. As an example, we can cite the polemical essay by Vaclav Havel, “Kosovo and the End of the Nation-State,” in which he sounds the alarm that the bombing of Yugoslavia by NATO forces puts human rights above the rights of the state (which was responsible, let us remember, for the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo). Havel favors the desire to put into play a law greater than that which safeguards the sovereignty of each nation-state. Visibly inspired by a Christian ethic, he writes: “[H]uman rights have their deepest roots in a place that is outside the world we see […]. While the state is a human creation, human beings are God’s creation.” Second, the sovereignty of the nation-state is questioned in connection to the law and social models. Third, the “deep and horizontal fellowship” is left shipwrecked in the very rhetorical figures that constituted it.

A new form of multiculturalism seeks to first take into account the influx of poor migrants in the postmodern megalopolises, mostly former farmers who make up the majority of legal and illegal migrants, and second to take in poor ethnic and social groups marginalized by the marked process of multiculturalism in service of the nation-state.

Today transnational political movements, notably NGOs working together with the civil society of each nation-state, support the political struggle of migrants in postmodern megalopolises and those marginalized in nation-states. Consider the case of the black women’s movement in Brazil and the role of the website criola, whose stated objective is the mobilization of young black women to confront racism, sexism, and homophobia.4 The transnational form of NGOs can be adapted to the economic margins thanks to Brazil’s abandonment of classic modes of communication—the postal service, telegrams, and fax—in favor of the increasingly less expensive, faster, and more global Internet. A civil society in the periphery is paradoxically inconceivable without the technological advances of information science.

The nation loses a utopian condition that has barely been imagined, it is worth reiterating, by its intellectual, political, and business elite. It begins to demand a cosmopolitan reconfiguration of its new dwellers as much as its old marginalized inhabitants. Contemporary economists and politicians pragmatically reconfigure national culture in order to make it conform to the determinations of the flow of transnational capital that drives the diverse market economies into conflict on the world stage. With regard to marginalized groups in countries on the periphery of the global market, the national culture would be, or rather should be, newly configured in a way that would lead to the unprecedented manifestation of a cosmopolitan attitude among economically disadvantaged cultural actors.

The indigenous Brazilian population is one of the ethnic groups with the greatest difficulty in articulating itself locally, nationally, and internationally. The demographic weight of the indigenous population in Brazil does not compare with the presence of similar groups in the national population of Bolivia (57 percent) or of Peru (40 percent). A relatively diverse and diffuse population base proves an obstacle to stable and less volatile forms of representation, the Social-Environmental Institute explains.5 Indigenous organizations, legitimated by the 1988 Federal Constitution, nonetheless represent the use of mechanisms that make it possible to deal with the institutional world of national and international society.

A notable example of that cosmopolitan turn, now by Afro-Brazilians, is the official webpage of Martinho da Vila, composer and singer, son of farmers.6 Compared by many to the hero of black Brazilian resistance, Zumbi dos Palmares, the artist also makes sure he includes a list and biographies of several other black leaders on his website. The list includes: Manoel Congo, Amílcar Cabral, Samora Moisés Machel, João Cândido, Winnie Mandela, Martin Luther King, Agostinho Neto, and Malcolm X. The recent cultural closeness between Brazil and African nations has little or nothing to do with the official policy of the Brazilian government, which since the presidency of Jânio Quadros has tended to bring postcolonial Africa to industrialized Brazil and to take industrialized Brazil to postcolonial Africa, in order to strengthen the export system for consumer goods.

The Afro-Brazilian cultural movement was set off by another singer from the blue-collar heartland, Clara Nunes, who described herself as a “Minas Gerais warrior daughter of Ogum with Yansã.” Carmen Miranda ceased being the model of the sambista; instead of a “tutti-frutti hat,” a cowbell. In 1979–80, the former textile factory worker in Belo Horizonte appeared on Brazilian television dressed in the style of a black woman from Angola. She sang the song “Morena de Angola,” by Chico Buarque (included in the album Brasil mestiço, 1980): “Morena de Angola who has the cowbell tied to her leg / Does she shake the cowbell or does the cowbell shake her up?”

Within the same landscape created by Clara Nunes, while also pushing its boundaries, Martinho da Vila organized international gatherings of black art from 1984 until 1990, which he baptized as Kizomba, an African word meaning an encounter of identities, a celebration of confraternity. Martinho explains:

I decided to do the Kizombas because I felt that the Brazilian people were very curious and had little information about mother Africa. In addition to not having much information about black culture in the diaspora. To give you an idea, Angola, so influential in the formation of Brazilian culture, only came to Brazil for the first time when we organized the Primeiro Canto Livre, in January of 1983. It goes without saying that, until the first Kizomba, Brazil was practically disconnected from the anti-apartheid protests. 30 countries had already participated, including Angola, Mozambique, Nigeria, Congo, French Guinea, the United States, and South Africa.

The redefinition of Afro-Brazilian culture as cosmopolitan and poor has polarized Brazil as much as Africa, and former French colonizers as much as the United States. The basic principle is challenging the inefficiency and injustice caused by the intellectual and political elite’s discourse of national citizenship for centuries. As for the marginalized, the radical critique of the national state’s disorder no longer appears in terms of the official policy of the government nor in terms of the economic agenda taken on by the Central Bank in accordance with the coercive influence of international financial mechanisms, as the current critique is being reconstituted in a period of globalization. The radical critique appears in terms of the dialogue between similar cultures that were equally unaware of each other until today. Although their subversive mode is soft, their political stock may be strong and little influenced by the festivities generated by the governmental machine.

In Latin America, where cosmopolitanism was always the possession and the afterthought of the rich and idle, of diplomats and intellectuals, intercultural relations of an international variety flourished principally in the realm either of embassies or the institutions of higher learning. There are sad cases. There are extraordinary cases, like that of the Brazilian modernists of the 1920s. Now is not the moment to trace their history. Invitations extended to foreign professors and scholars to help educate new generations also became common currency during the late creation of the university in Brazil. An example of this is the extraordinary story of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes trópicos, in particular Chapter XI, “São Paulo.” There, the French anthropologist defines the national interlocutors he and his wife entertained:

Our friends were not truly people, they were more functions whose intrinsic importance, less so than their availability, seems to have determined the list. In this way, there was the Catholic, the liberal, the legitimist, the communist; or, on other planes, the foodie, the bibliophile, the lover of purebred dogs (or horses), of classical painting, of modern painting; also the local erudite, the surrealist poet, the musicologist, the painter.

Since the 1960s, the establishment of agencies for the advancement of research (CAPES and CNPq) has made it possible for young researchers and instructors in higher education to enrich their knowledge at foreign universities and for foreign professors and researchers to continue visiting Brazil. More recently, major Brazilian states have created their respective Foundations for Research Support (Fundações de Amparo à Pesquisa, or FAPEs).

Over the last few years, many of our illustrious foreign visitors have traveled to other parts of the land and established new connections. They leave the asphalt, climb to the favelas and interact with cultural groups located there. Conversely, many of the young artists living in underprivileged communities have traveled to foreign countries and presented their work on international stages.

A wonderful example of this kind of partnership is found in the theater group Nós do Morro (Us from the Hill), which emerged in the favela known as Vidigal in 1986.7 Today the group’s cultural and artistic activities transcend the limits of the favela and of the theater language of their origin. The group’s participants hold a place of distinction both in the world of theater and in national cinema. The detailed history composed by the group’s members highlights their participation in Outros olhares, outras vozes (Other Views, Other Voices), a short film project from 1988 that included young people from five countries and their respective organizations. The members of “Nós do Morro” also took part in the Shakespeare Forum and thus attended classes with Cicely Berry from the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production of Cidade de Deus (City of God) directed by Fernando Meirelles, which recruited more than 110 nonprofessional actors from the poor communities of Rio de Janeiro as cast members, included acting workshops coordinated by Guti Fraga, the director of the theater group “Nós do Morro,” which produced performances praised by critics and the audience at the Cannes Festival in 2002.

As an exception to the rule, anthropologists and missionaries have long worked with indigenous people. But these new partnerships are unprecedented. A few decades ago this kind of contact between professionals from a hegemonic culture and young representatives from the cultures of the poor from a country like Brazil would have been unthinkable.

NOTES

This chapter was first published as “O Cosmopolitanismo do Pobre” in Margens/Márgenes—Revista de Cultura, Belo Horizonte/Buenos Aires/Mar del Plata/Salvador, n. 2 (December 2002): 4–13.

  1  Voyage to the Beginning of the World, Manoel de Oliveira’s 1997 film starring Marcello Mastroianni in his final production before his death in 1996, is a quasi-reconstructed documentary/biography based on the real-life experience of the actor Yves Afonso, who filmed a French Portuguese coproduction in Portugal in 1987. Voyage, whose main character is a filmmaker named Manoel played by Mastroianni, won the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997.

  2  Meteco (métèque) and rastaquera (rastaquouère) are two common Gallicisms used in the speech of bourgeois literary Brazilians. These words have an evident pejorative meaning and refer to, respectively, the condition of the foreign, poor immigrant in European society and the undisguisable presumption of being on the level with cosmopolitan values.

  3  More information can be found on the Internet at www.mst.org.br (the site is in Portuguese and six other foreign languages, and serves as a good example of what, concretely, we are characterizing as the cosmopolitanism of the poor). There you can read that, since 2001, the MST’s fight has been marked by its internationalist character.

  4  Lúcia Xavier, Jurema Werneck, Luciane O. Rocha, Maria Aparecida de Assis Patroclo, Sonia Beatriz dos Santos, “Criola,” accessed December 22, 2016, www.criola.org.br.

  5  Fany Pantaleoni Ricardo, Bruno Bevilaqua Aguiar, Tatiane Klein, and Isabel Hariri, “Povos Indígenas no Brasil,” accessed December 22, 2016, www.socioambiental.org.

  6  Martinho da Vila, “Movimentos Negros,” accessed December 22, 2016, www.martinhodavila.com.br.

  7  Luciana Bezerra, “Nós do Morro Comemora 30 Anos de Atividades com ocupação no Teatro Serrador,” November 1, 2016, www.nosdomorro.com.br.