The provocative undertones of "The Eternal" mirror a fresh epoch in cultural trends.
Breaking Away from the Mirror: South American Cultural Independence in a Global Context
It's been a while since I've pondered South American cultural production within a world context, sans the shadow of traditional centers of power. The launch of the series based on The Eternaut serves as a springboard for this discussion once more. Instead of staring into mirrors, we need to position ourselves in an exchange where we start thinking in terms of parity. Not just in terms of inheritances, intellectual colonization, and unilateral influences, but true equality.
Delving into the Epics: "The Eternaut"The concept of "responding to the empire" has been prevalent since the latter half of the 20th century, and it successfully established itself as resistance through imitation and subversion of the colonial discourse. Works like The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which tells the story of the invisible madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre and thus subverts the discourse of the barbaric, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara's counterwriting of Martín Fierro in The Adventures of China Iron are prime examples.
The case of The Eternaut is also a testament to mimesis: written under the influence of science fiction genre greats, H.G. Oesterheld breaks away from the stereotypes of the north and creates a comic book with all the topics of the time (the nuclear danger, the Cold War, the fear of mind control, and private life) set in Buenos Aires. He pens a gauchesque apocalypse in the 20th century where, against the prevailing individualism of the time, he resorts to the epic of the group and the common man.
The Shift in PerspectiveToday, the series starring Ricardo Darín and directed by Bruno Stagnaro is among the three most watched on Netflix worldwide. This points to a significant shift in the management of the artistic from mimesis as the only field. No longer is imitation enough, we must write and create forward.
In his seminal book The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha declared that the colonial subject could destabilize the centrality of the empire through a subtle, slightly altered imitation of both history and language. Yet, there's a clear and confirmed risk that mimesis did nothing but reaffirm the centrality of the empire. Bhabha's "almost the same, but not quite" implies a discomfort: if the colonized subject can imitate and subvert artifice, the latter's fragility is exposed. However, it remains a mirror that reflects "the real," destabilizing the very thing it seeks to challenge.
Gayatri Spivak, in Can the Subaltern Speak?, raises the true conflict that mimesis generates: imitation alone cannot empower subaltern subjects, as dominant discourse systematically denies them true representation. As fans of comic books and post-apocalyptic stories watched and enjoyed The Walking Dead, based on the wonderful comic by Kirkman and Moore (2003), readers of The Eternaut could also find parallels with a work written in Argentina in 1957 and still considered one of the most influential comic books in its genre. Yet, negative comments about the series soon appeared on social media, as if it were an imitation of great apocalyptic series and not its genesis.
This presents the most critical point of the argument: as long as we define our art only in terms imposed by cultural dominance, our own production will be betrayed because many times, they simply won't fit into the categories created for other worlds. The problem isn't the absence of artistic production in the periphery but the predominance of expectations that ignore our traditions and the influence of certain genres (which are wonderful) but that, in their imposition, distort other possible genres that we have had within our reach for a long time.
Stepping into the FutureThe appearance of the The Eternaut series should, if nothing else, be the space for the construction of critical and artistic frameworks that are internally coherent and independent of the external as the only parameter. It's time to write and create forward, forming decentralized cultural networks that are separate from the North-South binary where the North dictates the filtering. Subversion is no longer enough; writing in response is no longer enough. If a text remains silent, it doesn't necessarily mean it is bad, but rather that it has been filtered by conditions of production and validation that do not always apply.
But to achieve autonomy, dialogue, and mature exchange, we need an intellectuality up to the task. One that knows how to give battle from a systematic perspective, from creation and criticism, from the generation of its own intellectual categories to the dissemination and study of our productions. Only from there can we generate an adult dialogue, no longer subaltern but alternative, other, diverse. There lies the richness, in our diversity, in our productions that have always anticipated genres and created categories that are later imposed on us as novelty.
Homi Bhabha explains it best: "It is the in-between space that carries the meaning of the culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we can avoid the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of ourselves."
- López's reinvention of "The Eternaut", set in Buenos Aires and addressing contemporary issues, can be seen as a prime example of South American intellectuality and subversion within the global context, moving beyond mimesis and asserting cultural independence.
- The education-and-self-development sector should focus on fostering this intellectual dynamism, encouraging the creation of decentralized networks that promote the exchange of ideas beyond traditional North-South binaries, thereby empowering subaltern subjects.
- In the realm of entertainment, the success of "The Eternaut" series on Netflix is indicative of a shift away from imitation and towards original creation, laying the groundwork for a truly equal exchange of artistic expressions across global platforms.
- As we move forward, it is essential to embrace our unique lifestyle and traditions, drawing on our rich South American cultural heritage to generate a diverse, alternative discourse, embodied in our art, literature, and entertainment, ultimately establishing ourselves as the "others of ourselves" in the global context.
