Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

It is not enough to produce culture; modern society requires that the process should be recorded. People have always been concerned with the writing down of traditions, prior to Modernity, but reminding people of collective traditions became particularly important with the emergence of the nation-state. The political scientist Benedict Anderson suggests that ‘nation-ness’ is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time, hence the importance of deploying strategies to construct such an artefact.

This year the London Latin American Film Festival celebrates twenty-five years of Havana’s International TV and Film School, presenting the highlights from the past quarter century of one of the most influential of Cuban cultural institutions, alongside the best of this year's films, which reflect the changing priorities of Cuba's young filmmakers.

One only has to take a look at what is available under Green Shopping in the ‘Environment’ section of The Guardian - solar powered coasters, ecobuttons for PCs and clay pots to help street children in India - to realize that there is more to a ‘Green Economy’ than just a commitment to leave behind the compulsive behavior towards consumption bestowed upon us all by capitalism.

South America is home to a legend which, though little known by the wider public, has captivated sociologists, anthropologists, folklorists and journalists, as well as a number of websites concerned with promoting tourism in Uruguay, Paraguay and in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. 

Capoeira, an art form practiced in Brazil, is a form of martial arts that incorporates dance and music.  Characterised by rapid, complex movements, Capoeira originated when the Africans who had been brought to Brazil as slaves combined elements of both cultures to form an original fighting style.  

It is generally accepted by those who investigate the terrain where the Brazilian literature emerged, that the first pieces of writing were concerned with addressing the impressions and reactions spawned by the newness of the physical and human landscapes found in Terra Brasilis.

“Só me interessa o que não é meu.
Lei do Homem. Lei do Antropófago.”
(Oswald de Andrade, 1928,  The Anthropophagic Manifesto)
 

Rise of the Counter-culture

It would be near impossible to recreate the circumstances that resulted in tropicália. In 1967, Brazil's repressive military government had been in charge for three years and Brazilian music was in status quo. The authorities were happy that samba was the favourite music of the nation – they saw it as the perfect marketing tool – and didn't see the need for change. This was a climate in which João Gilberto's beautiful hybridisation of samba into bossa nova drew stinging criticisms from those who thought it was un-Brazilian.

At least ever since Edward Said wrote Orientalism (1978), it has come to be commonly accepted that texts can create knowledge and that, over time, this knowledge produces discourses. Culture works through consent and this author suggests that European culture produced the Orient, through the accounts of travellers and colonizers, and through literature, by penetrating people’s imaginations with a certain representation of the oriental.

‘Outsider Art’ is one of the terms used to refer to work made by self-taught artists in general, and inpatients (or clients, as preferred by some) in psychiatric institutions, in particular. The use of the term is polemic for it implies a distinction between ‘outsider’ and mainstream art.