It is our pleasure to introduce Gerardo Mosquera who is known as one of the founders of the Havana Biennale and who has acted as one of the most influential curators at the eve of art’s globalization. He also was curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and presently acts as the artistic director of PhotoSpain from 2011 on. His presence in the literature on the extension of contemporary art in new parts of the world is very stimulating, the range of exhibitions he curated is equally impressive and almost unique. We are pleased to present a new text of his which starts with the strange fate of the German sculptor’s Fritz König Sphere which was damaged during the 09/11 attack. The author seems to use this as a metaphor that we have arrived in a new age where old post-colonial theories must be retaught and replaced by a concept which is more appropriate for the present situation. In that respect he proposes to speak “from here” that artists are entering the global stage: “The challenge is to be able to stay up-to-date in the face of the appearance of new cultural subjects, energies and information bursting forth from all sides.” We hope that this text will give rise to a lot of discussions.

The Global Sphere.
Art, Cultural Contexts and Internationalization

The Sphere

Ten years have passed since September 11, and we still perceive its effects. This tragedy was an unexpected and catastrophic outburst of globalization and the contradictory processes that it involves. Among other things, it is revealing that the only successful attack to the United States within its territory was planned in a small village in Asia, used planetary communications networks, and had the goal of creating a global media spectacle, while its agenda was ultra conservative Islam. Reflecting on this anniversary, I will begin this text on the cultural interactions between context and internationalization in art by some thoughts inspired by an artwork that was destroyed during the September 11 strike, but survived the aggression. The Sphere, a 15-foot, 45,000-pound steel and bronze sculpture by Fritz Koenig, used to be one more public art piece standing in front of a skyscraper. Only that it was placed at the World Trade Center plaza “as a monument to fostering peace through world trade¹.” It suffered considerable damage by the September 11 terrorist assail. On 11 March 2002, the ruined sculpture was re-installed at Battery Park, close to its original location at ground zero, to serve as a memorial, its initial meaning drastically transformed by the events. Today the sculpture is at the center of debates about if it should be kept in storage during the renovation works that are set to begin in Battery Park, and if it should be placed later at the National September 11 Memorial that will be erected at Ground Zero. Ten years after the catastrophe, the destiny of the artwork that survived it remains unclear. A sculpture in the shape of a sphere is, in a certain way, related to minimalism, concretism, and geometric abstraction. It is highly telling that the link of this particular sphere to September 11 contradicts the canonic interpretations of those artistic tendencies, which represent paradigms of certain mainstream directions in art today. Beyond their initial aim of creating art as “a new reality,” taking it away from representational functions (a utopian project that was never fully accomplished), they have been used to create an extremely introspective concentration of art on art itself. The excess of self-referentiality, repetition, and of the use of real time and of almost imperceptible gestures, have flattened much artistic production, jeopardizing its possibilities for creating meaning and thus, what is even worse, making them terribly boring. I am not saying that it is worthless for art to focus on itself; I am referring to a comfortable worthlessness and an arrogant self-isolation characteristic of certain contemporary inclinations in the art scene.
The sphere is the ultimate gute Form, a basic shape of perfection. It also expresses the idea of wholeness, referring to the world, or rather to the Renaissance’s newly acquired capacity of representing the entire planet by means of a globe, thus transcending medieval conceptions that depicted it as a flat surface full of uncertainties, abysses, and dragons. The very acceptance of the roundness of the Earth implied the possibility of global navigation –and domination– and the reduction of the world to a sphere closed in upon itself. Scientific knowledge helped reduce all kinds of enigmas, dangers, and complexities to a dragon-free icon of a world-in-the-hand that could be touched, held, and controlled (as represented in statues of Christopher Columbus) or even played with, as Charlie Chaplin does in The Great Dictator.
Traveling through Portugal –a country that pioneered global navigation in the 15th century—, one is struck by the large number of monuments that include globes made of rock or bronze or as a recurring decorative Renaissance and Baroque element. At times we see a great globe on a pedestal: the monument commemorates the very capacity to travel through, know, use, and dominate a world synthesized in a geometric figure. This shows us that the idea of globalization already appears symbolically in the European imaginary at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Dragons are back now in the twenty first century. The sphere has been violently destroyed, and a new icon has not replaced it. Its ruins were put back on the pedestal, as a symbol of the sphere’s own blatant pretension to sum up and grab the world. Is this postsphere an icon for postglobalization? In any case, the sculpture’s pristine, detached, self-contained character has been brutally violated. The much-mentioned gap between art and life has been overcome in a most unexpected way, by the formal and conceptual transformation of an artwork as a result of its invasion by harsh reality. This invasion was a real attack, which forced new content into the piece.

Cultural Appropriations

The Brazilian modernists created the metaphor of anthropophagy in order to legitimate their critical, selective, and metabolizing appropriation of European artistic tendencies. This notion has been used extensively to characterize the paradoxical anti-colonial resistance of Latin American culture through its inclination to copy (only the Japanese beat us in this), as well as to allude to its relation to the hegemonic West. The syncretic character of Latin American culture facilitates this operation, since the hegemonic cultural elements that are embraced are not completely alien, given Latin America’s problematic relationship with the West and its centers. This relationship is based on identity as well as difference due to the specifics of the region’s early colonial history, based on European settlement, the presence of important native populations that were subdued, massive slavery of Africans, creolization and mixture. On the other hand, the metaphor goes beyond Latin America to point out a procedure characteristic of subaltern and post-colonial art in general.
Poet Oswald de Andrade coined the term anthropophagy in 1928² not as a theoretical notion but as a provocative poetic manifesto. Its emphasis in the subaltern subject’s aggressiveness by means of appropriating dominant culture is extraordinary, as well as its bold negation of a conservative, lethargic idea of identity. Andrade even dared to affirm: “It only interests me what is not mine³”, reversing the fundamentalist politics of authenticity. Contrary to Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry”, which outlines how colonialism imposes the subordinate subjects an alien mask from which they negotiate their resistance amid ambivalence, anthropophagy supposes an attack: to voluntarily swallow the dominant culture in own benefit. We have to be aware that Latin American modernism built the notion already from a post-colonial situation. It also corresponded with the early international inclination in Brazilian culture, conditioned by the modernizing impulse launched by a cultivated and cosmopolitan bourgeoisie.
Starting from its poetic beginning, the metaphor of anthropophagy has been developed later by Latin American critics as a key notion for the Continent’s cultural dynamics. On the one hand, it describes a tendency of Latin American culture since the initial days of European colonization; on the other, it proposes a strategy for action. It has not only survived the pugnacious modernism of its origins: it has been impelled by poststructuralist and postmodern ideas about appropriation, resignifying and the validation of the copy, as we can see in the work of such influent scholars as Nelly Richard and Ticio Escobar. The concept was even the subject of the memorable 24th Sao Paulo Biennial, curated by Paulo Herkenhoff in 1998.
An emphasis in the resistance and affirmation of subaltern subjects is also present in the term “transculturation”, coined by Fernando Ortiz in 1948 to point out the bilateral exchange implicit in any acculturation⁴. Although the active role of the recipient of external elements –who selects, adapts and renews them— had been indicated time ago by anthropology, the new term proposed by Ortiz introduced an ideological element: it emphasized the energy of the subaltern cultures even under extreme conditions, as in the case of the African slaves in Brazil, Cuba and Haiti. The term established a cultural reaffirmation of the dominated at the level of the word itself, as well as a cultural strategy.

In reality, all cultures are hybrid both in anthropologic and –as Bhabha has pointed out— linguistic-Lacanian terms, due to the lack of unity of their signs⁵. All cultures always feed from each other, be it from situations of domination or subordination, and cultural appropriation is not a passive phenomenon. The receivers always remodel the elements they appropriate according to their own cultural patterns⁶, thus these appropriations are often not “correct.” They may be acquired, “without an understanding of their place and meaning within the other cultural system, and receive a meaning that is absolutely distinct in the context of the receiving culture⁷.” Receivers are usually interested in the productivity of the element seized toward their own ends, not the reproduction of its use in its original context. Such “incorrectness” is usually situated at the base of the cultural efficacy of appropriation, and frequently constitutes a process of originality, understood as a new creation of meaning.
If appropriation is at work in all cultural relationships, it becomes more critical under subaltern and post-colonial conditions. It has been said that peripheries, due to their location on the maps of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic power, have developed a “culture of resignification⁸” out of the repertoires imposed by the centers. It is a transgressive strategy from positions of dependence, since it questions the canons and the authority of central paradigms. According to Nelly Richard, the authoritarian and colonizing premises are in this way de-adjusted, re-elaborating meanings, “deforming the original (and therefore, questioning the dogma of its perfection), trafficking in reproductions and de-generating versions in the parodic trance of the copy⁹.” It is not only a question of dismantling totalizations in a postmodern spirit; it also carries an anti-Eurocentric deconstruction of the self-reference of dominant models¹⁰ and, more generally, of all cultural models.
Nevertheless, both anthropophagy and transculturation must be qualified to break with connotations that may prove too affirmative. In the case of “anthropophagy”, we need to make transparent the digestion battle that it implicitly carries: sometimes the consequences are addiction, constipation, or, even worse, diarrhea. As Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda has warned, anthropophagy can stereotype a problematic concept of a carnavalizing identity that always processes beneficially everything that “is not its own¹¹”. Although the notion refers to a “critical swallowing”, as critic Haroldo de Campos has put it, we must be alert before the difficulties of such a pre-postmodern program, since it does not take place in a neutral territory but subjected to a praxis that tacitly assumes the contradictions of dependency. It is necessary also to examine if the transformations that “cannibals” experience when incorporating the dominant culture do not subsume them into it. Also, appropriation, viewed from the other side, satisfies the desire of the dominant culture for a reformed, recognizable Other who possesses a difference in the likeness –which, in the case of Latin America, departs from its cultural kinship with Western metaculture, creating perhaps its perfect alterity—, facilitating the relation of domain without completely breaking the difference that allows to construct the hegemonic identity by its contrast with an “inferior” Other. Yet this quasi-Other acts at the same time as a mirror that fractures the dominant subject’s identity, rearticulating the subaltern presence in terms of their rejected otherness¹². If the tension of “who swallows whom¹³?” is more or less present in any intercultural relationship, it is also true that “frequently one plagiarizes what one is ready to invent”, as Ferguson has said¹⁴ emphasizing the appropriating subject’s agency through its volitional selectivity and its tactical catachrestic use of the appropriated element, as Gayatri Spivak has insisted. In this direction, it is important to underline that anthropophagy and transculturation articulate their discourses from their position in early neocolonial modernity and their indirect foundations on anthropology, diverging with similar notions in classic post-colonial theory, which departed from literary criticism and the colonial situation.
Anthropophagy, transculturation and, in general, appropriation and resignifying are related to another group of notions proposed to characterize cultural dynamics in Latin America. These notions have come to be stereotyped as epitomes for Latin American identity: mestizaje (miscegenation), syncretism and hybridization. Same as appropriation, the notions respond to relevant cultural processes taking place in such a complexly diverse milieu as Latin America –with its contrasts of all type, its cultural and racial variety and mixture, its multiple, coexisting temporalities, its wishy-washy modernities…- and have demonstrated to be very productive to analyze the region’s culture and its routes. Still, it is problematic to use them as emblems to tag Latin America or the post-colonial world, because, in fact, there is no culture that is not hybrid. This does not mean that such notions do not possess a particular utility to analyze the post-colonial situation, since hybridization processes were especially important for its formation in terms of culture, race and class under a vast span of differences, asymmetries, contrasts and situations of power.
Nevertheless, a problem with all notions based upon synthesis is that they tend to erase imbalances and conflicts. Even worse: they can be used to create the image of a fair and harmonious fusion, disguising not only differences, but also contradictions and flagrant inequalities under the myth of an integrated, omniparticipative nation, as one can see so clearly in the case of Mexico. Another difficulty is that the model of hybridization leads to thinking intercultural processes through a mathematical equation, by means of the division and sum of elements, the result of which is a tertium quid, the consequence of the mix. This type of models obscure cultural creation that is not necessarily the fruit of the blend, but rather an invention or a specific use of a foreign, unblended element. Ángel Rama has pointed out long time ago that transculturation “does not sufficiently attend to the criteria of selectivity and those of invention¹⁵,” and therefore it does not include the neological cultural transformations and creations in response to new, different milieus and historical situations in which cultures have to develop. This is what Yulian Bromlei calls ethnogenetic separation¹⁶, through which displaced cultures mutate in reaction to a conflicting new space.
Also, these paradigms based on appropriation and syncretism tend to assume all cultural components as being open to mixture, without considering those that do not dissolve, and the resistance to hybridization due to asymmetries that remain difficult to integrate. These do not always respond to conservative fundamentalisms neither are they the artificial consequence of authenticity politics trying to impose a return to some pure, essentialized origins. More important: Wilson Harris has indicated that in all assimilation of contraries always remains a “void” that impedes a full synthesis¹⁷, creating what Bhabha has called a “Third Space” where cultures can meet in their differences¹⁸.
On the other hand, co-optation menaces all cultural action based on syncretism, even though this last has been a path to resistance and affirmation of the subaltern. The difficulty is that the fusion usually happens towards the central or more powerful component, in an operation that simultaneously contests and re-inscribes its authority. Today, in the global and post-colonial era, the syncretistic processes are defined as a basic negotiation of difference and cultural power¹⁹. But those processes are turbulent: it is not possible to assume them comfortably as if they were a harmonious solution to post-colonial contradictions. There is no active syncretism in the linking of non-contradicting antagonisms; syncretism, at its best, is a strategy of participation, resignifying and pluralization against hegemony. Néstor García Canclini has pointed out that the concept of hybridization “is not synonymous of fusion without contradictions; it rather can help to show peculiar forms of conflict generated in recent intercultural dynamics that have taken place in Latin America amid the decadence of national projects of modernization²⁰.”
Another problem is that the subordinate appropriating subjects re-inscribe the Western sovereign subject’s model of Illustration and modernity, without discussing the fallacy of these centered subjects and, even more, to what extent the subordinate ones are themselves an effect of dominant power and its discourses. This does not deny their possibility of agency, which the appropriation paradigms place at the forefront in a very valuable epistemological and political turn. But this capacity cannot be over stated as an accommodating figure that resolves subalternity’s cultural problems by means of a simple reversion. It is necessary to make transparent the subordinate subjects’ constitution and actions, and to discuss appropriation in a more complexly ambivalent way.
Paradoxically, the appropriation paradigms, which are based on the incorporation of differences, underline the polar opposition between hegemonic and subordinate cultures. These days a dialogic relationship seems more plausible, in which the imposed language and culture are experienced as “own/alien,” as Mijail Bakhtin stated it in his discussion of literary polyglossia²¹. Hegemonic cultural elements are not only imposed but are also assumed²², reverting the schema of power through the apprehending of the instruments of domination, while ambivalently mutating the appropriating subject toward what it appropriates, together with its meanings and discourses.

From Here

There has neither been much progress in “South-South” and “South-East” (so to speak now that the “East” is beginning to leave the “South”) linkage, other than economic recessions. Globalization has certainly improved communications to an extraordinary extent, has dynamized and pluralized cultural circulation, and has provided a more pluralist consciousness. Yet it has done so by following the very channels delineated by the economy, thus reproducing in good measure the structures of power while keeping a deficit in “horizontal” interactions. To develop “horizontal” circuits and spaces becomes of major importance in order to “fill in”, at global level, the reticule of the “vertical”, “North-South” radial circulation schemes traced from power centers –which is inherent to the globalization of cultural exchange—, extending and democratizing them, while connecting the “zones of silence”. And even more important: “horizontal” networks subvert the control axes typical of the radial scheme by including a variety of new centers at a smaller scale. This whole process will contribute to pluralize and enrich culture, internationalizing it in the real sense, legitimizing it according to different criteria and to the criteria of difference fostered by the diversification of circuits, constructing new epistemes, and unfolding alternative actions. Only a multidirectional web of interactions will pluralize what we understand by “international art”, “international art language” and “international art scene”, or even what is called “contemporary²³”. These dynamics are as necessary as arduous, since streams usually flow towards where the money is, and the colonizing mentality is more inclined to settle down comfortably in the pyjamas and slippers of complaint rather than focussing their efforts on change.
Conditioned by the whole constellation of processes and situations sketched in the previous pages, readjustments in the equations for art, culture and internationalization are taking place today; these, in turn, contribute to those general cultural movements. The old Brazilian paradigm of anthropophagy and the cultural strategies of transculturation, appropriation and syncretism are increasingly being replaced by a new perspective that we could call the paradigm of “from here”. Rather than appropriating and critically re-functionalizing the imposed international culture, transforming it in their own behalf, artists worldwide are actively making that metaculture firsthand, unfettered, from their own imaginaries and perspectives, at a planetary scale. This epistemological transformation consists in changing from an operation of creative incorporation to another of direct international construction from a variety of subjects, experiences and cultures.
From Turkey to China, the work of many artists, more than naming, depicting, analyzing, expressing, or constructing contexts, is done from their contexts in “international terms.” Identities, like physical, cultural, and social environments, are performed rather than merely shown, thus contradicting expectations of exoticism. The notion of tigritude, coined by Wole Soyinka in the 1960s to oppose that of negritude, is now more pertinent than ever: “A tiger does not shout its tigritude: it pounces. A tiger in the jungle does not say: I am a tiger. Only on passing the tiger’s hunting ground and finding the skeleton of a gazelle do we feel the place abound with tigritude²⁴.” The metaphor emphasizes identity by action toward the outside, not identity by representation or internal assertion, as it has often been the case in postcolonial art.
Today, more and more identities and contexts concur in the artistic “international language” and in the discussion of current “global” themes. From, and not so much in, is a key word for contemporary cultural practice. All over the world, art is being produced more from particular contexts, cultures, and experiences than “inside” them, more from here that here. The context thus ceases to be a “closed” locus, related to a reductive concept, in order to project itself as a space from which international culture is built naturally. This culture is not articulated in the manner of a mosaic of explicit differences engaging in a dialogue within a framework that gathers and projects them. It works, largely, as a specific mode of recreating a set of codes and methodologies established hegemonically in the form of a global metaculture. This metaculture is not global in a true, all-encompassing sense, but as a planetary specialized field. As Charlotte Bydler has pointed out, “it is unlikely that there could be global art, in the sense of artworks that are recognized as such everywhere²⁵”.
Cultural globalization tends to configure an international code multilaterally, not a multifaceted structure of differentiated cells. That codification acts as an “English” that allows communication and that is forced, knocked about, reinvented by a diversity of new subjects that gain access to international networks undergoing outright expansion. In a near sense, Charles Esche has mentioned a combination of sameness and non-self-conscious singularity in art today²⁶. Many artists work, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari said regarding “minor literature”, “finding his own point of underdevelopment, his own patois, his own third world, his own desert²⁷”, within the “major” language.
Difference is increasingly constructed through specific plural modes of creating artistic texts within a set of international idioms and practices that is transformed in the process, and not by means of representing cultural or historical elements characteristic of particular contexts –it lays in action more than it does in representation. This inclination opens a different perspective that opposes the cliché of “universal” art in the centers, derivative expressions in the peripheries, and the multiple, “authentic” realm of “otherness” in traditional culture. Obviously, these porous times of migrations, communications, transcultural chemistries and rearticulations of power have strongly confronted the center-periphery polarity.
Artists are less and less interested in showing their passports. Moreover, if they were, their gallerists will probably prevent them from stating local references that might jeopardize their global potentials. As Kobena Mercer puts it, “diversity is more visible than ever before, but the unspoken rule is that you do not make an issue of it²⁸.” Identities begin to manifest themselves more by their features as an artistic practice than by their use of identifying elements taken from folklore, religion, the physical environment or history. This procedure entails a praxis of art itself, insofar as art, which establishes identifiable constants, constructing cultural typology in the very process of making art. Thus, there are specific art practices identifiable more by the manner in which they refer to ways of making their artistic texts than projecting their contexts.
Naturally, it is not a matter of a path without obstacles, and many challenges and contradictions remain. More important than the fact that artists coming from every corner of the world are now exhibiting globally is the qualitative reach brought by the new situation: how artists, critics and curators are contributing to transform the previous hegemonic, restrictive and conservative situation towards active plurality, instead of being digested by it. Pluralism can work as a prison without walls. Jorge Luis Borges once told the story about the best labyrinth: desert’s incommensurable openness, from where it is difficult to escape. Abstract or controlled pluralism, as we see in some biennials and other “global” shows, can weave a labyrinth of indetermination confining the possibilities toward real, active diversification.
Although art gains with the rise of artists from all over the world who circulate internationally and exercise influence, on the other hand it is simplified, since artists have to express themselves in a lingua franca that has been hegemonically constructed and established. In addition, all lingua franca, before being a language of all is a language of somebody, whose power has allowed them to impose it. A lingua franca makes possible intercontextual communication, but at the same time it indirectly consolidates established structures, while the authority of the histories, values, poetics, methodologies and codes that constituted the language are incorporated. Now then, the active, diversified construction and re-invention of contemporary art and its international language by a multitude of subjects supposes not only an appropriation of that language, but its transformation from divergences in the convergence. Hence, art language pluralizes within itself, although it has been broadly instituted by mainstream orientations. This is crucial, because to control language and representation also entails the power to control meaning²⁹. Of course, this dynamics takes place inside a porous strain between renovation and establishment, where the hegemonic structures show their weight.
Another difficulty is that the use and legitimation by artists worldwide of an international language set up by the Western mainstream implies a discrimination of other languages and poetics. Consequently, artistic manifestations that do not speak the prevalent codes are excluded beyond their contexts, marginalized in ghetto circuits and markets. This exclusion is even more radical if we think that the international language of art has confiscated for itself the condition of being contemporary and of acting as a vehicle for artistic contemporaneousness. This canon thus relegates art that does not fit into it, when better, to the sphere of tradition, and, when worse, does not consider it current, or just deems it as being definitively bad. It is true that there is a lot of redundant art that does not create meaning, as so much epigonal nationalist modernism, so many superficial derivative works and, in short, so much purely commercial art. Nonetheless, the problem remains of the possible exclusion or undervaluation of significant poetics simply for not responding to the codes legitimated at an international scale. In fact, with few exceptions, curators, critics and international institutions are not aware of this problem. The paradigms based on appropriation reproduced the situation of domain as they depended on an imposed culture: cannibals are only such if they have somebody to devour. The “from here” paradigm, although not indicating a rebellion or an emancipation and confirming the hegemonic authority, has simultaneously mutated the ping-pong of oppositions and appropriations and the alienation of the subaltern subject toward a new artistic-cultural biology where this subject is inside the central production from outside.
The art world has changed a lot indeed since 1986, when the 2nd Havana Biennial held the first truly international exhibition of contemporary art, gathering 690 artists from 57 countries³⁰ and pioneering the extraordinary internationalization of art that we witness today. Because of the silent mutation that has taken place, the multiculturalist discourses and practices of the 90s, which involved policies of correctness, quotas and neo-exoticism, are no longer current, to the extreme of connoting a simplistic programmatism. Until recently, a balanced national plurality was sought at the shows and events. Now the problem is the opposite: curators and institutions have to respond to contemporary global vastness. The challenge is to be able to stay up-to-date in the face of the appearance of new cultural subjects, energies and information bursting forth from all sides. It is no longer possible for a curator to work today just following the New York – London – Germany axis (as it used to happen not long ago), and to look down from there with a high brow. Now curators have to move around and to open their eyes, ears and minds. We have not done so enough yet, but the stream pushes –I hope so— in that positive direction.

Footnotes

¹ Elissa Gootman, “A Quiet and Understated Ceremony Punctuated by Two Moments of Silence”, in The New York Times (March 11, 2002), A-13.

² Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto Antropofago”, Revista de Antropofagia, Sao Paulo, year 1, n. 1, May 1928.

³ Ibidem.

fn4.Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y el Azúcar, Havana, 1940 (English edition by Alfred Knopf, New York, 1947).

⁵ Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences” (1988), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (editors), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, London and New York,1997, pp. 207-209.

⁶ R. H. Lowie, An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, New York, 1940.

⁷ Boris Bernstein, “Algunas consideraciones en relación con el problema ‘arte y etnos,’” Criterios, Havana, n. 5-12, January 1983 – December 1984, p. 267.

⁸ Nelly Richard, “Latinoamerica y la postmodernidad: la crisis de los originales y la revancha de la copia,” in La estratificación de los márgenes, Francisco Zegers Editor, Santiago, Chile, 1989, p. 55.

⁹ Ibidem.

¹⁰ Nelly Richard, “Latinoamérica y la postmodernidad”, Revista de Crítica Cultural, Santiago, Chile, n. 3, April 1991, p. 18.

¹¹ Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, “Feminism: Constructing Identity and the Cultural Condition”, in Noreen Tomassi, Mary Jane Jacob and Ivo Mesquita (editors): American Visions. Artistic and Cultural Identity in the Western Hemisphere, ACA Books, New York, 1994, p. 129.

¹² Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Men. The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, in October, New York, n. 28, 1984, p. 85.

¹³ Zita Nunes, “Os males do Brasil: Antropofagia e questao da raça”, Papeles Avulsos Series, n. 22, CIEC/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1990.

¹⁴ Quoted by Paul Mercier, Historia de la antropología, Ediciones Península, Barcelona, 1969, p. 170.

¹⁵ Ángel Rama, Transculturación narrativa y novela latinoamericana, Mexico City, 1982, p. 38.

¹⁶ Yulian Bromlei, Etnografía teórica, Nauta, Moscow, 1986.

¹⁷ Wilson Harris, Tradition, the Writer and Society, New Beacon, London and Port of Spain, 1973, pp. 60-63.

¹⁸ Homi K. Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences” (1988), in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (editors), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, pp. 208-209.

¹⁹ Jose Gatti, “Elements of Vogue”, Third Text, London, n. 16-17, Winter of 1991, pp. 65-81. For a thorough discussion of the idea of syncretism regarding Brazilian religions and culture see Sérgio Figueiredo Ferreti, Repensando o sincretismo, Editora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paolo, 1995.

²⁰ Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, Editorial Grijalbo, Mexico City, 2001, p. II.

²¹ Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 44-48. On all this issue see: Gerardo Mosquera, “Global Islands”, in Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash and Octavio Zaya (editors), Créolité and Creolization. Documenta 11_Platform 3, Hatje Cantz Publishers, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003, pp. 87-92.

²² Ticio Escobar, El mito del arte y el mito del pueblo, Museo del Barro, Asuncion, 1987, p. 76.

²³ Gerardo Mosquera, “Alien-Own / Own-Alien. Notes on Globalisation and Cultural Difference”, in Nikos Papastergiadis (editor), Complex Entanglements. Art, Globalisation and Cultural Difference, Rivers Oram Press, London, Sydney, Chicago, 2003, pp. 22-23.

²⁴ Quoted by Janheinz Jahn: Las literaturas neoafricanas, Madrid, Guadarrama, 1971, p. 310.

²⁵ Charlotte Bydler, The Global Art World Inc. On the Globalization of Contemporary Art, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala, 2004, p. 212. “…exhibition practices, texts, and even casual talk on the globalization of contemporary art have universalized particular art definitions, artistic practices, audiences, and Art History”, ibidem, p. 242.

²⁶ Charles Esche, “Making Sameness”, in Arjan van Helmond & Stani Michiels, Jakarta Megalopolis. Horizontal and Vertical Observations, Amsterdam, 2007, p. 27.

²⁷ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What is a Minor Literature?”, in Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West (editors): Out There. Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, New York, Cambridge (Massachusetts), London, 1990, p. 61.

²⁸ Kobena Mercer, “Intermezzo Worlds,” Art Journal, New York, vol. 57, n. 4, Winter 1998, p. 43.

²⁹ Jean Fisher and Gerardo Mosquera, “Introduction”, Over Here. International Perspectives on Art and Culture, New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press, New York, Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London, 2004, p. 5.

³⁰ Segunda Bienal de La Habana’86. Catálogo general, Wifredo Lam Center, Havana, 1986.