The sulicide and the sulicide of Northeastern literature

from Franklin Távora to sertãopunk

Abstract

This work aligns the contemporary literary movement of “sertãopunk” — which explores narratives related to cyberpunk set in Brazil’s Northeastern region — with the political-literary project of “Northern Literature” by Franklin Távora, a pioneering author in Northeastern regionalism. It is argued that both appropriated foreign literary forms to represent the Brazilian Northeast from an emancipatory perspective, challenging the exoticizing discourses about the region, which have prevailed since Távora’s 19th-century. Overcoming the stigmas imposed by literary critics on Northeastern literature, which has historically been considered subordinate in both its forms and themes, Távora and the authors associated with sertãopunk have succeeded in subverting hegemonic discourses about the region. One of sertãopunk’s proponents refers to this demand for self-determination as the “sulicide of Northeastern literature,” in reference to the eponymous track by Baco Exu do Blues and Diomedes Chinaski, in which they question the invisibility of Northeastern rappers compared to their counterparts in the South-Southeast axis. Just as Távora flips the logic that disqualified the literary production of the Brazilian North as “provincial” by simultaneously claiming proximity to a national substrate that the critics at the heart of the empire lacked and establishing a creative dialogue with emerging foreign trends, sertãopunk authors challenge the notion that the Northeast region is backward compared to the rest of Brazil. They devise stories that not only project Northeastern characters into a highly technological future but also grant them a historically denied protagonism.