The Divide Isn’t Only Digital: Sidney Rocha and the “Darker Side” of Connectivity

• In Event: Region(alism) as a Discourse of Modernity

Abstract

This paper examines two early pieces by contemporary Brazilian author Sidney Rocha, the micro-contos “matriuska” and “googlemap” (matriuska, 2009). These texts function as exemplars of Rocha’s critical exploration of region and self in the global digital age, in which the technological “belatedness” of a region signifies for its exclusion from the hyper-connected global. For Rocha, the regional subject is the subject par excellence, given that the boundaries of place and self, however permeable they might seem, can never be fully surmounted. Rocha’s construction of region inverts commonly-held notions of modern reality: rather than region as a backdrop of local tradition against which a modernizing narration develops, a virtually-connected global becomes the mythical background against which a decidedly local and material existence persists. Rather than a ghost appearing in the machine, the machine is the ghost whose presence haunts the boundaries of existence, but whose promise of liberation is never delivered.

Author

• Ami Schiess