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week11blecture-magicalrealismandlatinamericanboom.pptx
Week 11b Lecture:
Magical Realism & the Latin American “Boom”
Questions:
What is Magical Realism and how do we distinguish it from Surrealism?
What is intellectual violence?
Magical Realism
Magic blended with reality
Surrealism: magic & irrationality dominate
Latin American “Boom”
1940s: Literature and art from Latin America
Borges, Lispector, Marquez, Paz, Kahlo
Magical Realism:
An Introductory Primer
Change of Scenery: Making Mountains [2013]
Giclée technique
gisleur
Blurring boundaries
Magical Realism:
Rob Gonsalves [Canada]
Little Flower and Intellectual Violence
Problem of naming: “…there she stood, the smallest woman in the world. For a second, in the drone of the jungle heat, it was as if the Frenchman had unexpectedly arrived at the end of the line. Certainly, it was only because he was sane that he managed to keep his head and not lose control. Sensing a sudden need to restore order, and to give a name to what exists, he called her Little Flower. And, in order to be able to classify her among the identifiable realities, he immediately began to gather data about her.” [89]
Little Flower and Intellectual Violence
Discovery of Little Flower
Naming as control
Genesis 2:19: “God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto the man to see what he would name them.”
Marcel Pretre [prêtre: father/minister
Condemnation of ethnography
Little Flower and Intellectual Violence
Being looked at/devoured: “The photograph of Little Flower was published in the color supplement of the Sunday newspapers, where she was reproduced life size. She appeared wrapped in a shawl, with her belly in an advanced stage. Her nose was flat, her eyes deep-set, and her feet splayed. She looked just like a dog.
That same Sunday, in an apartment, a woman, glancing at the picture of Little Flower in the open newspaper, did not care to look a second time, ‘because it distressed me.’
In another apartment, a woman felt such a perverse tenderness for the daintiness of the African woman that…Little Flower should never be left alone with the tenderness of that woman…
Little Flower and Intellectual Violence
In another house, in the consecration of spring, a young girl about to be married burst out compassionately, ‘Mother, look at her picture, poor little thing! Just look at her sad expression!’
‘Yes,’ replied the girl’s mother—hard, defeated, and proud—‘but that is the sadness of an animal, not of a human.’” [90-91]
Little Flower and Resistance?
The undevoured gesture—the smile: “…in the humidity of the jungle…love is not to be devoured, love is to find boots pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who is not black, love is to smile out of love at a ring that shines. Little Flower blinked with love and smiled, warm, small, pregnant, and warm.
The explorer tried to smile back at her, without knowing exactly to which charm his smile was replying, and then became disturbed as only a full-grown man becomes disturbed.” [94-95]
The Smile: Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa [Leonardo da Vinci, 1506]
Sigmund Freud: the “Mona Lisa smile”
Sfumato: color blending
“Cannibal Manifesto”:
Brazilian Modernism
Brazilian cultural identity:
1825: Brazilian independence
Oswald de Andrade: “Cannibal Manifesto” of 1928 [“Tupi or not Tupi”]
A “new” Brazilian style: metaphorical cannibalism
Tarsila’s Abaporu [1928] & Rodin’s Thinker [1904]
Henry Ford Hospital [1932]
Impossible maternity
Distrust of science
Magical Realism:
Frida Kahlo
My Wet Nurse and I [1937]
Pre-Colombian funerary mask
Adult head
Inspiration
Magical Realism:
Frida Kahlo
The Two Fridas [1939]
Victorian/Tehuantepec dresses
Divorce & Diego Rivera picture
Magical Realism:
Frida Kahlo
