Volume 4, Issue 2

Quanto vale ou é por quilo? tells the story of two groups of characters: one that profits from the continued misery of much of the Brazilian population, and another that tries to expose and punish those in the private and political sectors who are responsible for such exploitation. By exploring parallels between a time marked by African slavery in Brazil and the presumably more illuminated present, the film attempts to lay bare a systemic social and economic disparity that continues to be intertwined with race. This article hypothesizes that the narrative locates the solution for some of the nation’s woes in the realm of social identity. More specifically, it argues that the film proposes that the country’s pernicious inequities are grounded in the perpetuation of nefarious and persistent attributes in understandings of Brazilianness among much of the population. If Brazil is to improve, the film advises, then prevailing definitions of the national group must be modified. Drawing on research in social psychology, and work in the area of cognitive approaches to literature and culture, this article seeks to decipher what sort of intervention on identity the film is making, and which of its elements might lead to influencing viewers’ social identities.

Most everyone in the U.S. knows the stories told about illegal immigration, whether or not they subscribe to those stories. Right-wing narratives explain how ‘illegals’ or ‘aliens’ invade our country to ‘steal our jobs’ and ‘smuggle drugs’. Liberal narratives justify the illegal entrance of ‘desperately poor people’ who come here to feed their families. Patrick Hogan, in Understanding Nationalism , reveals the national and psychological purposes of such stories and explains how they are formed. This essay addresses the relationship between these national narratives and migrants’ actual experiences. As long-time volunteer of a humanitarian aid organization on the U.S./Mexico border, the author has heard stories about and witnessed the violence and death caused both by the desert and law enforcement. The more familiar narratives frame and consequently limit debate about the nation’s border enforcement policies, which force people to the most isolated desert areas where these atrocities occur. Through personal anecdotes about motivations for crossing and experiences in the desert, migrants offer critical stories that challenge standard emplotments, providing a new perspective on an apparently familiar problem.

The text proposes a structural narrative reading of José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s falangist discourse and shows how its thinking is based on spatial and dynamic imagination and a particularly strong sacrificial nationalist motif. It further suggests that the symbolic dimension in its nationalism constitutes a driving emotional force to be found in all nationalisms. Falangism was a religious version of fascism, famous for becoming the official ideology of Francoist Spain; but it shared with all militant national political forms of thinking the emotionally compelling mystique : the feeling of a spiritual essence and force emanating from a beloved land and conveying existential identity and value to its subjects, thus justifying and calling for committed violent and sacrificial acts that override ordinary systems of lawful behavior.

‘World literature’ has several distinct meanings. Most important for the present study, it may refer to the products of increased interaction across literary traditions in a globalized political economy. The resulting ‘global literature’ involves extensive convergence in narrative practices. The result is a diminishing of cultural diversity in storytelling. Globalization may also lead to certain sorts of divergence. This may seem to partially counterbalance the convergence. However, in an unequal, global economy, divergence is most often guided by hegemonic cultural practices, even if this occurs negatively. Specifically, such divergence commonly operates through identity-based repudiation of global standardization with a consequent simplification and distortion of putatively indigenous traditions. Thus, in unequal global conditions, both convergence and divergence have the effect of reducing the diversity of narrative cultures. In consequence, the globalization of literature may have deleterious effects on the aesthetics - and indeed the ethics and politics - of narrative. The essay ends with some possibilities for reversing this trend.