Pola Oloixarac vs. progressive feminism
And other highlights from the new Americas Quarterly culture section
I generally don’t write about my day job in this venue, but am making an exception to highlight the culture pieces in the new winter issue of Americas Quarterly (summer in the Southern Hemisphere).
One of the most exciting parts of my work as an editor at AQ is getting to commission, four times a year, short culture pieces on books, film and art in Latin America. This is a role with rare advantages. Unlike other magazines published in English, we have the ability to review books that have not been translated into English, art shows in Latin American countries that go uncovered in Anglophone media, and films that aren’t widely distributed in the Anglosphere.
Thanks to a network of contributors mostly either resident in or hailing from Latin America, and an editorial approach that generally seeks to understand the region on its own terms, we also don’t have the need, as many other U.S.-based publications do, to approach Latin America invariably through the language of American political and cultural discourse.
The pieces in this new issue are, I think, particularly worth sharing and briefly surveying here.
The barnburner, relatively speaking, in this collection is Andrea Moncada’s review of Bad hombre by Pola Oloixarac, a “work of fiction about real events” that, as Moncada describes, levels a critique against progressive feminism. As far as I’m aware, this is the first English-language review of the book, which was published last July in Spanish.
Oloixarac burst onto the scene in Argentina with her 2008 Las teorías salvajes, a satire of left-wing academia that got her hailed by Granta as one of its 2010 Best Young Spanish Novelists. Her novel Mona, which targets the international literary scene in a wicked sendup, was received with rave reviews in Anglophone media and won her a certain following in progressive literary Brooklyn.
But it’s not clear to me that Oloixarac’s anti-progressive stances, which she does not hide in her native Argentina, are universally known among her English-language admirers. Barriers of language and national politics may have up to this point allowed Brooklynites to consider only her literary output. I’m not sure if there are plans to translate Bad hombre, which would not be likely to be well received in these circles. It’s the kind of book that would be more likely to have its launch at Sovereign House than at a Brooklyn indie bookstore.
The title, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Donald Trump’s infamous 2016 comment, gestures at the gist of the book. Oloixarac is fascinated by the figure of the “bad hombre,” the lone macho figure who, she seems to argue, has become a target of elite women seeking to further their own interests at his expense. This theme she addresses through a series of accounts of persecutions of men in the elite worlds of academia and literature—based on real events, we understand, but not to be taken as gospel truth or as reportage, and presumably with names changed.
Oloixarac is a genius in the art of being an enfant terrible within the modern progressive worlds of academia and literature, but in this work she seems to make broader social claims, or at least the book is open to that interpretation. These are claims that the book’s form and perhaps her own inclinations do not do much to back up.
As Moncada writes: “It’s not difficult to find examples that suggest political correctness has gotten out of hand in the elite worlds of literature and academia. However, Bad hombre runs the risk of trivializing, or worse, delegitimizing the importance of what Oloixarac wants to prevent in the first place: women’s suffering.”
The nonfiction selection for this issue has Patricio Navia, a professor of liberal studies at NYU and contributor to AQ, reviewing a book on why Latin American presidencies frequently end prematurely: at least 20 have been cut short through resignations, impeachments and other politically unnatural means since the 1980s.
The book, by Christopher Martínez, who also wrote an article on the same subject recently for AQ, finds that the best predictor of whether Latin American presidencies can survive crises is the strength of a country’s party system. The stronger the party system, the more likely that a country can weather a political storm without bidding a premature farewell to its leader. But Navia asks an important question: Where do strong parties come from?
This is a subject that has attracted comparatively little attention in the political-science academic literature, even though its importance for political stability is understood to be paramount. How do you acquire a strong party system? In the meantime, Navia writes, “Martínez’s book reminds us that those countries that have an institutionalized party system should work hard to preserve it.”
For the art section, Cristóbal Sciutto writes from São Paulo on an exhibition of photographs at the Instituto Moreira Salles by Stefania Bril, inspired Polish-Brazilian observer of the cruelty and kindness of life in a pell-mell modern city then undergoing unimaginable transformation.
Born to a Jewish family that survived the Holocaust thanks to forged documents, Sciutto writes, Bril moved to Brazil after the war and worked in labs until deciding to dedicate her life to photography. Her great talent was for capturing scenes that juxtaposed the inhuman structures of modern São Paulo with people carving out tender ways to get by, in the cracks where one thing joins to another:
“Boy reading comics in a supermarket cart” shows an empty street in the wealthy Jardins neighborhood, closed off by the concrete walls of private residencies. A boy lies with his body extended from the sidewalk to the inside of a shopping cart tipped on its back, handle lodged where curb and asphalt meet. Loitering in an improvised chaise longue, his body cuts across the vertical strips of the composition (sidewalk, verge, street), a tender dissident making the city his own.
Sciutto also describes the faded promise of Bril’s faith in the photographic image as a means of “unveiling the city’s hidden actors” and spurring “structural social change.” Today, he writes, “the photographic image has become hegemonic, blinding instead of defogging perception.” But the appeal of Bril’s work remains.
Continuing her run as AQ’s film critic, Ena Alvarado turns her sights to Mariana Rondón’s Zafari, based on a sad true story about a zoo hippo in Caracas that ate a couple rubber balls and died in 2015. In Rondón’s hands, the hippo becomes the focal point of a tale set in an unspecified Latin American country of the breakdown of social barriers in times of societal collapse. As Alvarado writes, the characters’ “wolfish exploits remind us of the grounds on which our righteous ways of life stand—and just how fragile they are.”
On one hand, it’s a straightforward fable of the positive and negative effects of the breakdown of normal social function: think José Saramago’s Blindness. On the other, we’re clearly meant to think of this as a commentary on the fate of Venezuela in recent years, dragged into economic and social devastation which has spawned, in turn, the exodus of millions (in turn adding urgency to the issue of migration in the United States).
AQ’s music critic, the director of Americas Society’s excellent and eclectic music program, Sebastián Zubieta rounds out this section with a brisk profile of Brazilian songwriting titan Chico Buarque, daring the Swedish Academy to award him a Nobel Prize in Literature. (Buarque also writes novels.) Bringing typical erudition and brio to this whistle-stop tour of Buarque’s oeuvre, Zubieta pauses to highlight his famous and carefully calibrated protest song, “Calice.”
A pair of songs on the 1978 album Chico Buarque offer contrasting examples of his poetic-political jogo de cintura—a Brazilian football metaphor for brilliant solutions to a difficult situation, in this case the dangers of an artistic career in authoritarian environments. Early in the album, “Cálice” is a bleak protest song, starting with the title. “Cálice” means “chalice,” but the word also sounds exactly like cale-se, which means “Shut up!” so that every time the guest vocal ensemble shouts the word as a response to the singer, they are ordering him to stop, recreating the act of censorship.
The refrain paraphrases Matthew 26:29, with the singer, speaking in Christ’s voice, asking the Father to spare him the cup of bloody wine of his Passion. In the final lines, the singer wants to “get drunk into oblivion on diesel fumes,” a reference to a torture technique deployed by the government. He wishes to let out an “inhuman scream” that will nonetheless be a way of being heard, suggesting that life is perhaps not a foregone conclusion.
There are a couple other pieces in this issue that, while not technically within the bailiwick of the culture section, also deal with Latin American culture and history. One is our photo essay column on the Petronio Álvarez Festival in Cali, Colombia, now home to Latin America’s second-largest black population after Salvador. That is due in part to Afro-Colombian people fleeing armed conflict elsewhere in the country, writes Timothy Pratt, whose reporting accompanies vivid photos by Jesse Pratt López. The festival is a showcase of the ever-reinvented musical traditions of Colombia’s Pacific coast, which feature prominent marimba. Sebastián could say much more about this than I could. It's also a means of expression for Afro-Colombian pride, in a region historically dominated by brutal sugarcane plantations. In an especially striking image from the essay, a mural reads: “The sugar-growing valley needed Black blood … and now it needs peace and social justice.”
Last is our historical column, penned this time by AQ’s own Luiza Franco on a bridge between Brazil and Bolivia that was promised in a treaty in 1903 and never delivered—but which may finally be built now, thanks to China’s ravenous appetite for South American commodities.
The promise of the bridge, 121 years ago, came at the conclusion of a South American saga that fits the pattern of what I described, in an essay in American Affairs last year, as classical filibusterism: when settlers take it on their own authority to colonize a loosely held territory in the hopes of forcing their state to secure it for their possession. This was what Americans did successfully, a few decades earlier, in Texas and California; it was what they then tried unsuccessfully to do in Sonora and Nicaragua. And it is the model, in a looser sense, for the political economy of much of the U.S. and Brazil in the contemporary context: self-starting entrepreneurs breaking the rules in the hopes that they can force the state to change the rules after the fact.
“In the first years of the 20th century the northwestern Amazon region of Brazil, where the state of Acre is now, belonged to Bolivia,” Luiza writes. “But around 100,000 Brazilians lived in the area. Particularly rich in rubber trees, for years it attracted Brazilian rubber tappers eager to exploit its natural wealth.”
After Bolivia tried to set up a customs office and fighting broke out between rubber tappers and the Bolivian government, Brazilian diplomats secured the purchase of the territory from Bolivia in exchange for “land in the Paraguay River Basin, 2 million British pounds and the commitment to build a railway cutting across the Amazon to facilitate Bolivian access to the Atlantic Ocean.” Plus the bridge.
But the railway declined in usefulness after the end of the rubber boom and the bridge was never built. Now, it’s been revived as a means of allowing Brazilian commodities a faster land outlet to the Pacific. And, Luiza notes, Bolivians will finally get what was promised them in the 1903 treaty: “better access to the Atlantic Ocean through Brazilian territory.”