Heriberto Yépez

A SKETCH ON GLOBALIZATION & ETHNOPOETICS

Ethnopoetics as: theory-praxis related to crossing the conventional borders
between the theory-praxis of our culture and the theory-
praxis of other cultures.

Ethnopoetics as: putting into question the way in which our culture became
"our culture", and putting into question how other cultures
became "other cultures".

Ethnopoetics as: thinking about the risks of building an International
(paranational) Poetics, when such enterprise could become a
tool to make global homogenization easier.

Ethnopoetics as: keeping away from the danger of conceiving the "Past" as
another opportunity to extend our extreme consumerism
even to where-when we couldn't. Ethnopoetics cannot
become the intellectual branch of the Retro spirit.

Ethnopoetics as: the challenge to acquire a glocal point of view without
falling in LiteraTourism.

Ethnopoetics as: the thinking of the language practices of the "Third
World", the "Primitive" and the "Marginal-Alternative".

Ethnopoetics as: the thinking of our categories as something we inherited
and so, something we always need to put into quotation
marks (denaturalize language).

Ethnopoetics as: an on-going revision of the past through the point of the
present (J. Rothenberg).

Ethnopoetics as: the serious development of an imaginary contemporary
ficto-ethnopoetics (A. Schwerner, S. Sarduy, M. Bellatin).

Ethnopoetics as: the self-consciousness of ethnopoetics; a constant
destruction of the theory-praxis of ethnopoetics in the past.

Ethnopoetics as: escaping the temptation of looking outside "Western"
literature or the "Mainstream" simply because "our" own
practices have become exhausted, boring or less attractive.

Ethnopoetics as: preventing that "our/their" practices are not misused by
the "West" simply because the "West" is exhausted, bored
or in market-driven-decay.

Ethnopoetics as: criticism against the use of other-poetic-practices as a
resource to revitalize a dominant (but tired) tradition. As if
poetics from other cultures could be use in the same pattern
as oil or any "natural" or "cultural" resource from other
cultures used for its own good.

Ethnopoetics as: helping to make traditions maintain a real diversity, with
or with out the building of common ground (axis).

Ethnopoetics as: the belief that traditions around the world must be
different, polar, or even incompatible.

Ethnopoetics as: politics referring to the conservation of "nature" or "city"
that made/makes possible the existence of specific poetics
practices in certain communities.

Ethnopoetics as: politics referring to the conservation of the languages that
make possible the existence of specific poetic practices in
certain communities.

Ethnopoetics as: the impossibility of dividing general poetics from specific
politics.

Ethnopoetics as: a reflection on the concept of hybridization, cross-
breeding, etc. in the areas related to languages and
language in general (in general?)

Ethnopoetics as: anthropology + philosophy + Cultural Studies + Literature
+ Another

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the poetic practices of "minorities" by
"mayorities".

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the poetics practices of "majorities" by
"minorities".

Ethnopoetics as: Counter-conquest (Lezama Lima).

Ethnopoetics as: Anti-translation (Nathaniel Tarn).

Ethnopoetics as: The End of "Orientalism" (Edward Said).

Ethnopoetics as: a radical critique of any attempt to "understand"
(dominate?) the discourse and works of other cultures
without building an effective dialogue in which the "others"
can directly reply to interpretations.

Ethnopoetics as: a study and experimentation of individual or communal
language-combinations such as Frenglish, Portunhol,
Spanglish, etc or the presence of various languages in a
poetic space.

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the combination of several cultures that
"share" "one" language, or use traditionally separated
strata from that "one" language, resulting in a cross-
cultural (ethnopoetic) work "without" having to go
"outside" "one" "culture" (i.e, the work of José Kozer as
using the different Spanish languages around Spain, the
U.S. and Latin America, or the use of different
levels/vocabularies/social classes of English by Bruce
Andrews in the U.S.).

Ethnopoetics as: an exercise of using other (cultures-)languages (away from
Mother Tongue) as an alternative to becoming "Translated"
or "Translating".

Ethnopoetics as: the study of the shifts in cultural paradigms on the poetic
subject since the explorations of contemporary ethnopoetics
(from the poet as "shaman" to "rockstar" to "D.J.").

Ethnopoetics as: a strategy to leave behind "ethnopoetics" as a curious
branch (60's related) of literature and make it inseparable
of poetics, until the term is useless for being so obvious and
fancy.

Ethnopoetics as: the analysis of the international/global/intercultural field
open by technology.

Ethnopoetics as: a radical exploration of the Internet as an experiment on
ethnopoetics.

Ethnopoetics as: an experiment away from paragraph & line. If
ethnopoetics has deepened the exploration of orality, the
pictoric, other-forms-of-writing, non-page-formats, etc, as
available resources for our own purposes, it's necessary to
see all those explorations as a first stage to finally leave
paragraph and line behind.

Ethnopoetics as: "ethno" as the permanent prefix of every poetics.
"Ethnopoetics" not just applying to the poetics of the
"Other".

Ethnopoetics as: the radical search beyond the end of translation.