Cosmopolitanisms

Paulo Lemos Horta, Bruce Robbins

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479830381
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse.

PART I

Justice

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 democratizatio...