Silviano Santiago. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture.
Case, Thomas E.
Ana Lucia Gazzola, ed. Tom Burns et al., trs. Durham, North
Carolina. Duke University Press. 2001. 187 pages. $54.95 ($18.95 paper).
ISBN 0-8223-2752-X (2749-X paper)
BRAZIL is a huge country, almost the size of the United States with
a population of over 260 million (half of that of the entire South
American continent), and its territory borders all the South American
countries except Ecuador and Chile. Brazilians speak Portuguese, a
language that ranks fifth worldwide in number of native speakers.
Nevertheless, Brazil's culture is little known, and its literature
is viewed from a European perspective, both by its authors and its
readers.
Silviano Santiago (see WLT 66:1, p. 78) tackles the enigmatic
situation of his country in this volume of translations of eleven of his
seminal essays on Brazilian culture written over the past thirty years.
Santiago brings to his interpretations a vast background in European and
North American universities, and he has written extensively as a
novelist, poet, translator, and critic in deconstruction theory and
comparative literature. The collection is competently edited by Ana
Lucia Gazzola, who provided all eleven translations with either Tom
Burns or Gareth Williams. Gazzola also wrote the brief introduction in
collaboration with Wander Melo Miranda. The essays are annotated, and
quotes and titles from languages other than English are translated. The
volume also includes an index of authors and subjects.
The first two essays set the tone and substance for the entire
collection: Europeans brought cultural systems (Christianity,
Renaissance, Enlightenment) to Brazil and the rest of Latin America,
destroying autochthonous values. This colonialism reduced the Indian and
African cultures to inferior status, or simply disregarded them, and
produced a European ethnocentric consciousness within the dominant
class, which, in essence, made its culture a copy. As a result, its
cultural forms are incomplete, and the "space in-between" (a
phrase coined by Santiago) characterizes Brazil's hybridism.
Succeeding essays elaborate on this theme, one focusing on Eca de
Queiro's O primo Basilio, others on Machado de Assis's Dom
Casmurro and Guimaraes Rosa's Grande Sertao, pointing out, among
other things, their inherent Brazilian traits. One essay covers the
conflictive and sometimes ambivalent use of tradition and utopian vision
in Brazilian modernist writers, concentrating on Oswald de Andrade and
Murilo Mendes, who looked back to the country's indigenous and
African cultures. Others deal with the repression and censorship during
the military regime of the 1970s; literature in the age of mass culture
in which books in Brazil are reduced to a luxury for a small percentage
of the population ("literature is functionally untimely in the era
of the cinema and arts of technical reproducibility"); and the
function of the postmodern narrator in the stories of Edilberto
Coutinho. The final essay grapples with the low estimation of Brazilian
culture among Brazilian writers themselves, envisaged a century ago in
the Eurocentrism of Joaquim Nabuco, and the current struggle for
cultural identity in a world threatened by globalization and the
electronic media.
All in all, The Space In-Between presents a selection of
provocative English translations concerning art and literature in Latin
America's largest country.
Thomas E. Case
San Diego State University
