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.

The idea that vision is superior to the other senses would explain the commonly held assumption that humans learn better through images, and that ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’. When a new technology that reproduced what the eyes see started to be developed in the nineteenth century, its impact was felt in distinct areas such as art, the social sciences and psychology.

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. 

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)
 

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was initiated in 1992 by a small number of scholars mostly from literature and cultural studies backgrounds, prompted by the dismantling of authoritarian regimes in Latin America and subsequent processes of redemocratization.

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.

On January 1st 2011, Dilma Rousseff took Office as the first female president of Brazil, officialising the end of a remarkable, for some, and certainly memorable, government by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The genealogies of both cinema and ethnography display some curious overlaps with both disciplines often involved in a race against time as though aspects of the human race could be lost forever, thus the need to register with images and words fragments of a world about to expire.

The beginning of the twentieth century is a moment of rupture with regard to notions of space and time, evidenced by the great transformations brought about by greater mobility, photography and the new paths opened by psychoanalysis. In the realm of the visual arts there is a growing interest in the marginal art produced in mental institutions.