doctoral dissertation isaias carvalho abstract

This dissertation-essay aims to reflect on literature, culture, and especially the Other. The Other of political and cultural representation in literary production, together with the Other of language – swear words, bad words, bad manners etc, or the “rude canon". Therefore, this is a two-fold study. In the literary texts that constitute the corpus of this work - Omeros, by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott (1998), and Viva o povo brasileiro, by Brazilian novelist João Ubaldo Ribeiro (1984) -, I scrutinize the so-called “low” language at the same level as the social, ethnic, sexual and cultural others: they are there and everywhere, but the hegemonic discourse in which I participate (and in which the implicit-explicit reader of this work also lives) makes them invisible and repressed in the dominant imaginary. This analysis of the linguistic and cultural Other becomes the leitmotif of "productive othering", a concept-attitude that has its first significant from the English language, and was initially modulated by Gayatri Spivak (1985). While the single signifying "othering" implies an inter-socio-cultural relationship which consists of discursive practices of exalting a positively valued identity of a self and the stigmatization and reduction of certain groups, under violence, the compound term "productive othering" functions as a counterpoint to this reifying attitude, since it proposes a new meaning for the repressed memory in relations of symbolic exchanges among cultures of various geographic and imagined territories nowadays, as is the case of the Extended Caribbean (WALLERSTEIN, 1974), which spans from the south coast of the United States up to the “Recôncavo Baiano” (Bahia, Brazil). The proximity of the concept of productive othering with other concepts in the field of cultural studies, such as miscigenation, is appropriate to examine the cultural mix, in its broader sense, and language, in its strict sense, in the works under review. Concepts of other thinkers outside this field are also borrowed, such as Roland Barthes, with his notion of "Text" (1998), Northrop Frye (1973), with his "ironic mode of fiction", and Linda Hutcheon, with "historiographic metafiction" (1988), among others. It is, therefore, a discussion that tackles issues of subalternity, gender, language, and the possibility of speech, as a way to unite the two angles of the dissertation: the political and the linguistic, in an attitude of productive othering.

Keywords: Derek Walcott. João Ubaldo Ribeiro. Productive othering. Post-Colonial Cultural Studies. Irony.

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Universidade Federal da Bahia

Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz