In this essay from 1983, art historian Aracy Amaral responds to ongoing debates on the pertinence of regionalism as a framing paradox for Brazilian art. She calls attention to the excesses of internationalism in certain of Brazil’s larger cities that resulted in notable disjunction between artistic practice and the experiences of everyday Brazilians. Amaral also exposes the many invocations of Brazilian regionalism (in the Amazonian area, Minas Gerais, the Nordeste, among others) that, to varying degrees, diminished the international content assimilated in metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Moreover, the author qualifies how even in these outward-looking cities, there have been moments of increased self-referentiality, particularly as European immigration threatened the paradigmatic aspects of their original cultures. Amaral digresses briefly to explore the case of Cuba and its seemingly contradictory embracement of internationalism in the years following the revolution. The strategy, she writes, enabled a post-revolutionary intelligentsia to dispel the reductive myth of the island as folkloric paradise and playground of North American imperialism that emerged during the Batista years. Far from a negation of identity, it allowed Cuban artists to engage the mainstream on equal footing. Returning to Brazil, Amaral ends by outlining how regionalism can be useful as long as its aim is to alter social structures by focusing on the “here/now.” That is, it must actively address the loss of culture experienced by culturally dependent nations such as Brazil while keeping in check its own limits/limitations and points of reference.

The São-Paulo-based art historian Aracy Amaral (born 1930) originally presented “Indagações, extensão e limites do regionalismo” at a conference in Porto Alegre, Brasil [Encontro Nacional de Artistas Plásticos e Profissionais (ENAPP), organized by MAC-USP/Funarte/INAP/SEC/RS, November 7−11, 1983]. Her text reflects a long-standing conundrum of Latin American intellectuals, caught in between the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the developed Western nations and the struggles for emancipation in their region. Like many other thinkers of the time [See, for example: Marta Traba, “La resistencia,” document # 1126517; José Antonio Torres Martinó, “Reflexiones sobre el arte regional,” document # 822527; and Mel Casas, “Art on the Border,” document # 1125446], Amaral believes that the excessive adherence to the cosmopolitan models prevents artists from engaging with socio-political reality of their countries. Hence, similarly to her contemporary Brazilian critic Ferreira Gullar (born 1930), she seeks to stake out a balanced position that would permit artists to keep up with the international cultural development without sacrificing commitment to the problems of their homelands [See Gullar, “Caráter nacional da arte,” document # 807930]. Yet such a balance is, in fact, hard to achieve, as the case of Cuba demonstrates. Amaral’s idealized view on Cuban culture after the revolution was demystified, for example, by the literary critic Roberto Fernández Retamar in “Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura de nuestra América” of 1971 [document # 1056617].