Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture

E. King

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349691517, 9781137468314
• eBook ISBN: 9781137462190
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Orientalist discourses in Brazilian culture are an expression of anxieties about the re-structuring of time and space in the network age. The book examines engagements with Japanese postmodern culture in Brazil, which emerge in relation to the history of Japanese immigration and through a series of European and North American discursive mediations.

CHAPTER 1

Graphic Fictions of Japanese Immigration to Brazil: “Pop Cosmopolitan” Mobility and the Disjunctive Temporalities of Migration

The cultural celebrations of Japanese immigration to Brazil in 2008 were dominated by a discourse that connected this immigrant presence in the country to the increasingly global popularity of Japanese pop culture. A number of texts and exhibitions that set out to memorialize this immigrant history in Brazil both construct Japanese immigrant identity in terms of unchanging tradition and associate it with what Henry Jenkins describes as the “pop cosmopolitanism” of global anime and manga fan culture.¹ In the “Tokyogaqui” exhibition held in São Paulo and the special edition of the comic book magazine Front discussed in the Introduction, Japanese culture in Brazil is presented as being at once sedentary, deeply connected to the land, and both the symbol and agent of untethered global mobility. The focus of the present chapter is the way in which a strong tendency in the centenary celebrations attempted to inscribe the history of Japanese immigration into a version of Brazilian identity suitable to an era of pop cosmopolitanism. The texts that I will explore are explicitly concerned with the connection between Japanese immigration and changing conceptions of Brazilian national identity. The paradoxical attempt to at once reproduce and capture discursively the movement and flux associated with Japanese postmodern culture is, I argue, part of a wider discursive strategy to forge a flexible national identity suitable to an age of neoliberal multiculturalism. The hesitation between imposing continuity on identities and accommodating flexibility is a central characteristic of the discourse of virtual orientalism that I am tracing right through this book.

The debates in the social sciences surrounding the concept of mobility provide a useful framework for considering what is at stake in the apparently contradictory representation of Japanese immigration in Brazil during the centenary celebrations. Tim Cresswell argues that the focus on mobility by Mimi Sheller, John Urry, and Peter Adey responds to shifting conceptions of the social, which is “no longer seen as bound by ‘societies,’ but as caught up in a complex array of twenty-first century mobilities.”² The turn to mobility in the social sciences, which Sheller and Urry describe as a “new mobilities paradigm,” emphasizes the complex interconnections between places. The focus on mobilities draws on work from a wide range of disciplines, from studies of migration, transport, and technology as part of a theoretical project “aimed at going beyond the imagery of ‘terrains’ as spatially fixed geographical containers for social processes.”³ Cresswell makes a useful distinction between movement and mobility, arguing, “If movement is the dynamic equivalent of location, then mobility is the dynamic equivalent of place.”⁴ In other words, mobility is produced discursively, a “fragile entanglement of physical movement, representations and practices.”⁵ Virtual orientalism, the use of orientalist discourses in relation to digital culture, can be viewed as a way of intervening into the entanglement of mobilities of the current stage of globalization in Brazil. The conflation of Japanese immigration with pop cosmopolitanism sets in tension two patterns of mobility—the mobilities of migration, and the mobilities discursively associated with the communications technologies of the digital age. As Caren Kaplan points out, dominant European conceptions of modernity share a tendency to celebrate mobility, from the outward movement of imperialist expansion to the dream of unregulated flows of information and capital that functions as the sustaining fantasy of neoliberal philosophies. Kaplan claims that the discourses surrounding technologies emerge from this context: “That is, the rhetoric of explanation and definition connected to most information and communications technologies [ . . . ] emerge from this context and not the other way around.”⁶ Virtual orientalism is not restricted to representations of Japanese immigration. However, these representations provide a useful starting point for thinking about this discourse as a conceptual tool for exploring the fluxes and flows of late modernity.

In effect, the pop cosmopolitan tendency within the cultural texts that mark the centenary—the association of Japanese immigration in Brazil with high-tech Japanese pop culture—conflates the movement of migration (the social ruptures and upheavals it entails) into a postmodern identitarian mobility. The discursive incorporation of this highly mobile Japanese culture within a Brazilian national identity can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile the ubiquity of mobility of an era of digital networks, and the restructuring of the social that this entails, with an enduring sense of national identity.⁷ This precarious procedure would explain the strange paradox of the description of Japanese Brazilians as both perpetual immigrants (even those who were born in the country) as well as model Brazilian citizens. In his analysis of the 2008 centenary, Lesser points out, “Much of the language that government institutions produced for the event insisted that Brazilians of Japanese descent were permanent immigrants, that there was little difference in the high status of their great-grandparents born in Japan and their own Brazilian citizenship.”⁸ For much of the twentieth century, the potential mobility of Japanese immigrant populations (the suspicion of an enduring connection to their homeland in Japan) was considered to be a threat to the hoped-for stability of Brazilian national identity. These fears reached their height during the Estado Novo’s crackdown on immigrant identities. In the texts that I will discuss in this chapter, however, this perceived mobility is celebrated as a valuable contribution to modernity in Brazil.

Nowhere are this discursive strategy and its limitations more evident than in the comics and graphic fiction published to coincide with the centenary, many of which emulate the style of manga comics. The very concept of producing these narratives of immigration in the style of manga presupposes this connection between the culture of the Japanese diaspora and the globalization of Japanese pop culture. Two texts are particularly illuminating in their attempts to incorporate this fantasized transnational mobility into a construction of multicultural Brazilian identity. The first is O vento do Oriente: Uma viagem através da immigração japonesa no Brasil [Eastern Winds: A Journey through Japanese Immigration in Brazil], which was published by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística in 2008. Scripted by André Uesato and Renata Corrêa and with art design from Lícius Bossolan and Martha Werneck, the book is divided into two sections. The first reads from left to right and includes a brief history of Japanese immigration to Brazil followed by an origami manual. The second reads from right to left and recounts, in a highly dynamic manga style, the story of the Paulista “nerd” Bruno who attends a manga and anime convention at the Universidade de São Paulo. At the convention, he meets his classmate Tatá, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants whose metal fan, a family heirloom that she is using as part of her cosplay outfit, turns out to be a time traveling device. The pair is sent on a journey of discovery through the history of Japanese immigration to Brazil, spanning from the arrival of the first workers aboard the immigrant ship the Kasato Maru to a futuristic vision of Brazil.

The second text is O catador de batatas e o filho da costureira [The Potato Picker and the Seamstress’s Son], created by scriptwriter Ricardo Giassetti and graphic artist Bruno D’Angelo and published by manga specialist Editora JBC (Japan Brazil Communication) in 2008.⁹ The book is also divided into two sections, one that reads from left to right and the other that reads from right to left. The two sections of the book recount narratives that fuse at their denouement. The first tells the story of Isidoro, the mestiço son of a freed slave who is determined to transcend his poverty and escape from his home on a fazenda (farm) in Ribeirão Preto. The second tells the story of Ikemoto, one of the first Japanese immigrants to arrive in Brazil on the Kasato Maru, who, for reasons that only become clear in the final pages and unlike the majority of his fellow passengers, is determined to leave his past behind and make a new life in Brazil. The subtitle of the book makes its discursive agenda clear: Um neto de escravos, um imigrante japonês; Duas histórias com um mesmo final: O futuro do Brasil [A son of slaves and a Japanese immigrant; Two stories with the same ending: The future of Brazil].¹⁰ In a manner similar to O vento do Oriente, Giassetti and D’Angelo’s book is concerned with the role of Japanese immigration in Brazilian identity and, like the former, it also sets out to incorporate the disjunctive movement of migration into a precarious construction of national mobility for the information age. Analyzing these two texts together will reveal the ambiguities of this precarious discursive construction of mobility. I focus on the way this tension between the movements of migration and constructions of national mobility, staged in these texts, evoke disjunctures between national temporalities and the multiple, conflictive temporalities of migration. My analysis of O vento do Oriente centers on the way the comic uses the “fold” aesthetics of manga to stage a network of disjunctive temporalities. The discussion of O catador de batatas, meanwhile, explores the way the comic uses both the metaphor of the migrant ship and the “plastic line” to disrupt national temporalities reinforced by orientalist discourse.

In his chapter on pop cosmopolitanism, Jenkins explores the growing popularity in the United States of the products of the Japanese culture industries and wonders whether this phenomenon opens up parochial cultural perspectives or “may simply amount to a reformation of orientalism.”¹¹ O vento do Oriente draws this orientalist tendency within pop cosmopolitanism to the foreground and there is nothing “simple” about it. On one level, the narrative is replete with orientalist tropes associating Japanese culture with tradition and nature, the ancient past of São Paulo’s hyper-modern present. The conceit of finding an ancient family heirloom that has magical powers makes these connections explicit. When Bruno and his companion Tatá first find themselves inexplicably relocated in time and space from the São Paulo present to the state interior in 1945 the first thing that the Paulista urbanite comments on is the natural world he discovers there. The first panel that follows their spatio-temporal dislocation shows a detail of Bruno’s hand running through the long grass as he says, “Nossa! Capim de verdade!” [“Wow! Real grass!”].¹² This would all suggest that the Japanese presence in Brazil is being presented as the premodern past that gives form and shape to Brazilian modernity, just as so many other internal Others of the nation-state have done in the past, from Antônio Conselheiro and his followers in the positivist discourse both used and problematized in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões to the favela inhabitants of contemporary Rio de Janeiro. At a thematic level, these associations of Japan with the premodern would also seem to evoke the temporality of orientalism as reinforcing a narrative of progressive ascent from barbarism to civilization. And yet, the complex temporalities evoked in the comic never fall into line with the temporality of nineteenth-century orientalist discourses. I argue that the temporal complexities in the text are best viewed as the result of a tension the narrative sets up between two types of mobility as well as between the flux and fixity of racial categories in Brazil.

First, the comic sets up a connection between the character Bruno’s pop cosmopolitanism and a form of neoliberal, transnational mobility. In its thematization of spatio-temporal dislocation, the comic literalizes the imaginary mobility of pop cosmopolitanism. Bruno, the Paulista nerd, is presented as a highly mobile consumer. He is knowledgeable about cultural practices from around the globe and knows more about the Japanese tea ceremony than does his friend Tatá, the descendent of Japanese immigrants. His cosplay outfit is an imitation of a Japanese kimono and his samurai sword was made in China. When they come under attack from members of the ultra-nationalist movement Shindo Renmei and the two Paulistas are forced to defend themselves, Bruno points out that his sword is a fake, “Mas não tem lâmina, é só fantasia! Comprei na 25” [“But it doesn’t have a blade, it’s just fancy dress! I bought it on 25 March Street”].¹³ A footnote informs those readers who are not familiar with downtown São Paulo that Rua 25 de Março is “famosa por suas diversas lojas de fantasias e de artigos baratos” [“famous for its fancy dress and discount stores”]. Bruno’s mobility through time and space is connected to his consumer mobility which, as Rachel Bowlby points out, is a kind of pseudo-mobility, “the parody of mobility as perpetual, happy, directionless to and fro.”¹⁴ His movement through time and space, made possible by the magic heirloom, evokes a futile ersatz mobility up and down the vast arcades where Paulista “nerds” go to buy their comic books. Just as his sword is really a fantasia (a word which means both “fantasy” and “fancy dress”) so too is his mobility.

However, Bruno’s unexpected encounter at the manga and anime convention brings him into contact with another form of mobility; when the magic fan sends him back in time, Bruno is forced to confront the more fractured and violent mobility of migration. The intended didactic message behind the comic is clearly intended to show Bruno—and Brazilian pop cosmopolitans like him—the realities of suffering behind their orientalist fantasias. In two separate temporal leaps in the narrative, the companions encounter a couple mourning for their relatives killed in Nagasaki by the atomic bomb and one of the first immigrant workers to arrive on board the first Japanese immigration ship the Kasato Maru, who has been dreaming of returning to his homeland for ten years. Both episodes confront Bruno with the violence of migration. In the first, they are attacked by a Shindo Renmei group attempting to assassinate those who admit Japan’s defeat in the war. The juxtaposition between the mourning couple and the physical violence draws attention to the fact that they are both expressions of a sense of loss. The violence is presented as an extreme expression of a diasporic longing for a lost homeland. The fascist movement in Japan during the 1930s often presented itself—and has since been thus interpreted—as an attempt to “overcome” the social fractures produced by modernity through the construction of a sense of identitarian wholeness and continuity. Similarly, Shindo Renmei attempts to suture the dislocations of migration through its defense of a fascist conception of national purity expressed in a refusal to believe in the possibility of defeat.¹⁵ During their stay with the immigrant in 1918, they meet a former slave who tells the pair that the arrival of Japanese immigrants to Brazil was connected to the end of slavery and that both the first immigrants and the former slaves became the victims of a different kind of slavery, “a escravidão da miséria” [“the slavery of poverty”].¹⁶ The smooth, frictionless mobility of Bruno’s media-driven pop cosmopolitanism comes up against the ruptured and jarring movement of migration.

The relationship between these two forms of mobility is a recurring motif in the comic. The mourning couple they encounter on the road to Marília in 1945 runs a mobile cinema that screens films for Japanese immigrants in the interior of São Paulo. Bruno, who is as well informed as ever about the history of Japanese immigration, points out, “É um tipo de cinema itinerante que os descendentes de Japoneses faziam pelo interior de São Paulo!!!” [“It’s a type of itinerant cinema run by the descendants of Japanese immigrants in the int...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Virtual Orientalism in Brazilian Culture
• 1  Graphic Fictions of Japanese Immigration to Brazil: “Pop Cosmopolitan” Mobility and the Disjunctive Temporalities of Migration
• 2  Otaku Culture and the Virtuality of Immaterial Labor in Maurício de Sousa’s Turma da Mônica Jovem
• 3  Ekphrastic Anxiety in Virtual Brazil: Photographing Japan in the Fiction of Alberto Renault
• 4  Paranoid Orientalism in Bernardo Carvalho’s O sol se põe em São Paulo
• 5  Paulo Leminski’s Haiku and the Disavowed Orientalism of the Poesia Concreta Project
• 6  Moving Images of Japanese Immigration: The Photography of Haruo Ohara
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index