EMERGING POWERS - DISSIDENCES, TEMPORALITY, AND

PLURAL DISCOURSES: A POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

Cláudia Santamarina
PhD student in Psychosociology of Communities and Social Ecology at the Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Works on references of Postcolonial Studies analyzing
social counter-hegemonic practices. Email: claufcost@gmail.com

Eliana Nunes Ribeiro

PhD student in Psychosociology of Communities and Social Ecology at the Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Works on Postcolonial and Cultural Studies, focused on
cultural memory, invention of everyday life, and narrative and participative methodologies.
E-mail: lianrib@gmail.com

Heliana Castro Alves

PhD student in Psychosociology of Communities and Social Ecology at the Federal
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Works on Postcolonial and Cultural Studies
focused on cultural memory, Traditional Communities and arts; Professor at the
Universidade Federal do Triângulo Mineiro - Brasil. Email: helianasolar@gmail.com

Luciana de Oliveira Leal Halbritter

PhD student in Psychosociology of Communities and Social Ecology at the Universidade
Federal do Rio de Janeiro - Brasil. Works on references of Networks Theory, Social Justice
Theories and Cultural Studies. E-mail: lucianaleal.halbritter@gmail.com

Maria Inácia D’Ávila Neto

PhD in Social Psychology from the Université Paris - France. Coordinates the EICOS Image
Laboratory of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Visiting Professor at the EHESS
(School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences) within the technical and scientific
cooperation framework. Visiting professor at Université Lille 3, integrating the postgraduate
course of MITRA (Mobilités, Identites, Conflits), approved in the framework of Erasmus
Mundus / European Union. Email: inadavila@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
Starting from the concept of nation as an imagined community and a system of cultural
representation, this article rests upon a postcolonial perspective to develop reflections on
emerging powers of contemporaneity. Indeed, from the postcolonialism's critique, we can
perceive that dissident discourses find their own courses - through performative narratives -
diverging from the dominant discourse and giving visibility to their own realities rather
obscured by the idea of nation. In this context, the pedagogical narrative of the nation - based
on a linear, historicist, homogeneous, and empty temporality - equalizes histories by
engendering a dominant, official discourse and relegates the disjunctive events to the margins,
where these discontinuous narratives - performatives - are silenced by the ideological
strategies that attribute to the nation an essentialist identity. Thereafter, it is possible to reflect
on the in-between occupied by these dissident discourses and the way they develop into
emerging powers capable of rescuing the quotidian plurality - hidden historically, culturally
and politically by a dominant homogeneous discourse - back into the concept and living
experience of the nation. Based on Homi Bhabha's concept of temporality, this article
addresses the emerging powers that manifest themselves by means of: the performances of the
body, which destabilize the nation's homogeneity; the performative memory, which includes
the Negro question in the body of the Brazilian Constitution; the social dissidence and
emancipation of Gypsy ethnic groups, which points to a permanent breakage of the fiction of
a homogeneous nation; and, finally, the virtual social networks, which reinvent the public
space for the constitution of the public sphere. This article thereby reveals the way these
multiple dissident processes exhibited by social movements and relations have been
questioning the legitimacy of the monocultural, geo-delimited, and marginalizing nation's
organization and its exclusionary temporal linearity.

Keywords: Nation, temporality, dissident powers, postcolonialism.

INTRODUCTION:
In the contemporary, globalized world, the coloniality - a matrix of power that institutes itself
by means of territorial, racial, cultural and epistemic hierarchies (RESTREPO & ROJAS,
2012) - generates economic, cultural, and power relations that are differentiated between the
nations as well as domestically, because of the relations of domination that took place during
the colonial period. The idea of a national State is in the base of the normative system of the
constituted States under the Rules of law, which find in the concept of “nation” the legitimacy
for the normative and administrative decisions imposed on the public and private spheres of
the society.
Nation can be conceptualized as the community of people who share a national identity, with
common interests, and subject to the same sovereign power, which is legitimately exerted by
the State, detainer of the three powers: legislative, executive and judiciary. This concept,
constructed since the end of the feudal system (Fraser, 2008), has never corresponded to an
effective homogeneity of identity and culture and, furthermore, no longer holds the same
function - in the global capitalist world-system - as it used to hold when the concept of nation
linked to modernity was widespread. The idea of nation State, however, has always been tied
to the modern world in the imperialist context of the colonial geopolitical conjuncture. In such
a way, the “time” of the nation is directly related to the problematizations that arise today
when we approach the globalization in the period that comes subsequently to the colonial
stage.
The postcolonial theory, by electing the colonial period as the problematizing axis, inscribes a
new temporal relation, frustrating any simplistic - and fixed in relation to history - reference,
opening space to a critique toward the very concept of nation as a homogeneous identity
community.
In fact, the term postcolonialism per se does already problematize the question of “time” by
simply placing the "post", a conceptual prefix quite bothersome to many critics of this theory.
On the other hand, the very dynamics of the colonial relations, since the imperial discoveries,
leads to a degradation of the other who supports the idea of nation's homogeneity. For Santos
(2010), the "imperial discoveries" were marked by the production of inferiority by using
strategies such as

“war, slavery, genocide, racism, disqualification, transformation of

the other in object or natural resource, and a vast succession of
mechanisms of economic imposition (taxation, colonialism,
 neocolonialism, and, finally, neoliberal globalization), political
imposition (crusades, empire, colonial state, dictatorship, and, finally,
democracy), and cultural imposition (epistemicide, missionarism,
assimilationism, and, finally, cultural industries and mass culture)”
(p. 182).1

In this context, the concept of nation should be rethought in the light of the postcolonial
studies, which problematize the colonialism - such as the critique of Eurocentrism developed
by Edward Said (2003) and Franz Fanon (1967) and the constitution of postcolonial
theoretical assumptions driven by Homi Bhabha (1994) and Gayatri Spivak (1988) - and
conceptualize the coloniality of power in Latin America, such as Anibal Quijano (2000) and
Maria Lugones (2008). Together, these authors, in different spheres and localities, carry
through important contemporary critiques that have been contributing for decolonial
movements.
The nation as symbolic community (HALL, 2011) does not configure itself in an independent
entity, above the individuals connected by a common life in society that makes them
participate of one same nation, and more than a political institution it is “a system of cultural
representation. The individuals are not only legal citizens of a nation; they participate of the
idea of the nation, the same as represented in its national culture.” (2011, p. 49).
As Bhabha explains (1998), however, the nation as form of living the location of culture is a
community imagined through a discursive creation that seeks to consolidate a historical
certainty and establish a steady nature, grounded on the dominant discourse.
Homi Bhabha's concept of temporality, which he uses to discuss the contemporary
postcolonial context and its “time lag”, is central to the concept of location of culture and,
consequently, to the concept of nation, and has had repercussions in terms of both cultural
production and political projection. This centrality becomes clear when the author affirms that
the location of culture occurs around the temporality, as directly opposed to the fixed
historicity that occurs in the bulge of modernity, refuting the idea of national space as
“fullness” of time.
Bhabha (1994) thinks of the modern nation from two temporalities, the pedagogical and the
performative. The pedagogical narrative of the nation, based on a linear, historicist,
homogenous, and empty temporality, standardizes histories, generating a dominant official
discourse, and relegates the disjunctive events to the margins where the discontinuous
narratives - performative - are silenced by ideological strategies that attribute to the nation an
essentialist identity. The performative narrative, as Bhabha states, introduces the temporality
of the in-between and questions the teleological traditions of past and present and the
polarization between archaic and modern. It is the time of the meanwhile _ that is not a mere
present continuous, but the present as succession without synchrony, where the people live
their plural and autonomic lives within the homogeneous and empty time of the pedagogical.
The nationality, which binds the subject to a nation, fits in the pedagogical temporality,
insofar it is a strategic cultural construction aimed at identification, as a form of social and
textual affiliation, through social and literary narratives that nourish the symbology and
affectivity of a cultural identity of people and nation: "The narrative and psychological force

1
Free translation of the authors. In the original: “a guerra, a escravatura, o genocídio, o racismo, a
desqualificação, a transformação do outro em objeto ou recurso natural e uma vasta sucessão de mecanismos de
imposição econômica (tributação, colonialismo, neocolonialismo, e, por último, globalização neoliberal), de
imposição política (cruzadas, império, estado colonial, ditadura e, por último, democracia) e de imposição
cultural (epistemicídio, missionação, assimilacionismo e, por último, indústrias culturais e cultura de massas).”.
that nationality brings forward cultural production and political projection is the effect of the
ambivalence of 'nation' as a narrative strategy." (Bhabha, 1994, p. 140)
In addition, the main purpose of this strategy is the cultural and identity homogenization,
discursively constructed through the common language and by the concealment of
particularities and peculiarities of other cultural practices and realities that are not
encompassed in that imagined national community (Bhabha, 1994).
The narrative of the nation, however, stumble in the fissures that the linear discursive
historical process does not cover, leaving marginalized the differences not accepted in the
homogeneity that is needed to materialize a uniform culture, creator of a national identity that
passes itself off as unitary and not multiple. In this sense, the plural, performative discourses,
according to Bhabha, are marginalized because they do not meet the uniformizing pretension
of the historical discourse, politically constructed to constitute the idea of nation and its
equivalent identities.
The fissure is also present in the nation's temporality, as far as the imagined homogeneity is a
narrated history based on an idea of cause and effect, in a linear mode, which does not echo
the voices of discourses and narratives that conflict in the nation's space. The very idea of the
nation's space depends on the cultural homogeneity built through a past, linear time, since by
incorporating these discordant discourses it would be fracturing its own space, exposing the
inexistence of a present cultural unity, as simulated in the narrative of the past. Thus, the
fictional unity of the nation State does not resist the criticism of the postcolonialism and
weakens in the presence of the processes of globalization and identity fragmentation.
From the postcolonialism critique, we can clearly see that the dissident discourses and
narratives find paths tangential to the dominant discourse - through performative narratives -
bringing to light their realities obscured in the idea of nation. Thus, it is possible to think of
the in-between occupied by these dissident discourses, and how they constitute themselves as
emerging powers, rescuing back into the concept and living experience of the nation the
quotidian plurality that constitutes them, previously hidden historically, culturally and
politically by a dominant homogeneous discourse.
In this article, starting from Homi Bhabha's concept of temporality, we approach the emerging
powers that manifest in four ways: the performances of the body, which destabilize the
nation's homogeneity; the performative memory, which includes the Quilombola question in
the body of Brazilian Constitution; the dissidence and social emancipation of the Gypsy
ethnic groups, which points to a permanent fissure in the fiction of national homogeneity; and
the virtual social networks, which reinvent the public space of constitution of the public
sphere.

THE BODY'S COUNTER-NARRATIVE: PERFORMANCE AS DESTABILIZER OF

NATION-HOMOGENIZER NARRATIVES

The construction of the nation-homogenizer narrative requires, concomitantly, a pedagogical

construction of the body, and the installation of a classificatory system through which
categories can be evidenced that bind the State to its members and the member amongst
themselves. However, the performance, as an episteme, allows the corporeality to enters the
scene of plural dissidences, times, and discourses that fracture the essentialist univocality of
the national discourses. The concept of performance keeps in itself certain untranslatability,
being a term of meanings often contradictory. The debate around this concept can be
systematized into two main approaches: the linguistic, associated to the term performativity
and the dramaturgical, identified with the word performance.
The linguistic approach of performativity developed from J. L Austin's work (1998). The
author proposes the performative as an act of speech that is not submitted to the regimen of
truth verification. Such speech acts are "enunciation" that carry out an action, being delivered
in the first person singular, simple present tense, affirmative, and active voice, such as, "I now
pronounce you husband and wife," in which the authority of who delivers it is implicit, as
well as the context and the circumstance.
Within the discursive approach, Bhabha (1994) considers the performative as integrating, in a
disruptive way, the nation as narration, emerging from the margins of the homogenizing
historicist discourse, establishing the enunciative present, marked by repetition and pulse. For
Bhabha, the performative introduces the temporality of the in-between, a space of border
between discourses that destabilizes the meaning of people as homogeneous.
The dramatic model _or dramaturgic_ is represented, mainly, by Richard Schechner, of the
Department of Performance of New York University. Schechner (2006) considers the
performance a symbolic form of artistic-cultural expression, starting at the ritual ceremonies
and passing through theatre spectacles, cinema, and dance.
In the scope of this section, we shall take the dramaturgic approach from Taylor's (2003)
definition, referring a wide range of corporeal behaviours and practices performed in rituals,
arts, or daily life, for which applies some training or rehearsal2, which may even question the
body contours themselves. For this purpose, it will be considered as a term that connotes,
simultaneously, "a process, a praxis, an episteme, a mode of transmission and
accomplishment, and a means of intervening in the world" (Taylor, 2003, p. 15), by means of
incorporated action. Therefore, the time of the performance is constructed based on the
reiteration in the present of past events, such as artistic actions and events, and socio-political
and cultural acts, such as sports, rituals, political protests, military parades, and funerals.
The difficulty about thinking of a (in)corporated practice in a system where the word - written
or spoken - assumes an epistemic and explanatory power, becoming guarantor of its own
existence, brings the complexity of ways by which the body can be constructed, elaborating
its ambivalent role in the maintenance and resistance against the colonizing power.
Considering the body as a key concept in the decolonial thinking requires an epistemological
displacement that transforms it from an object of study to a place of enunciation. Such
movement enables the contact with an explanatory and epistemic potential that can keep alive
organizational practices and structures by linking groups in other temporalities differing from
the linear, historicist time of the nation State. Each group, however, delineates a unique
knowledge on the body with respect to its constituent elements, its performances, its
correspondences, as the conceptions of body are tributary of the conception of person.
Le Breton (2006) congregates the different representations of the corporeality into two major
areas: in the first - to give flesh to men - the corporeality occurs by a complex net of
correlations between the human condition and the Cosmo3, without a distinction between man
and body; the flesh is seen as an organic portion of a sociocentric and sacred world, a
communication system involving exchanges with others, including the deities. In the second -
to give body to men - the separation between man and body exists.
Modern Western paradigm, born in the transition of century XVI to century XVII and
represented by the biomedical knowledge and anatomo-physiology, advocates a new
individualistic sensibility, based on three major divisions: with the Cosmo _ the flesh in no

2
Taylor agrees with Schechner's (2006) definition that characterizes performances as restored behaviors,
experienced two times.
3
Cosmo - order, organization. Word used in the context of the first Greek philosophers to designate the order
that exists in the phisis (collection of existing natural things)
longer explained by the macrocosm; with the fellow creature _ the body becomes border of
the individual; and with yourself _ men possess the body. The isolation of the body within the
Western societies testifies a social fabric in which men is separated from the Cosmo, from the
others, and from themselves. This ideal of separativity constitutes and is constituted of
hierarchic relations of space that establish, according to Santos (2010), the far, the below (in
the hierarchic sense) and the exterior, related with the East, the Savage and the Nature,
respectively.
Particularly from century XVIII, the focus in the body started to change the ways of
understanding the identity, with the increasingly frequent use of the body as a resource to
attest the differentiated nature between individuals. From this Eurocentric perspective of the
objectification of the body as nature, the enunciation of race and genre is produced, both
concepts demarcating inferiority in relation to the subject/rational/masculine/European.
Century XIX was the period when the modern colonial capitalist system systemized a new
ontological organization of the world, by means of a dichotomistic and hierarchic categorical
logic. Gay (1988) points out the eagerness with which the European bourgeoisie sought to
define itself, their status in society, their hierarchies, and their moral characteristics; in short, a
visual and performative identity. The disciplinary discourse of the Biology gives support to
build essentialized and hierarchical identities. Integrating this process, being inherent in it, the
ontological marginalization of non-Western peoples and sexual dimorphism takes shape.
Thus, the physical and material aspects of the body more and more assumed the role of
witnesses of the nature of the "I" that this body sheltered. This totalizing narrative converts
into subaltern epistemological forces such as religion, emotion and body, associating the act
of knowing to Europe, inaugurating an anthropocentric, phallogocentric, universalist and
essentialist paradigm. The millennial knowledge, the cosmologies of the peoples that did not
integrate the European capitalist centre was reduced to superstition, popular knowledge,
folklore.4
On the other hand, the performance, as corporeal practice, works within a system of codes and
conventions that, however, are neither universal nor transparent and their meanings change
according to the moment and context. The characteristic of reiteration established in the
performance - the information stored in the body, by means of various methods that are
mnemonic and transmitted alive, in the here/now, for an actual audience; the condition of
contemporaneity and co-spatiality between who creates and who receives, whose behaviours
would go beyond the mimetic repetition, including the possibility of critical change and
creativity in the repetition - permits the individual agentivity, keeping it at the same time that
transforms it. (Taylor, 2003)
Taylor emphasizes performance as a transmission system, working with the concepts of
archive and repertoire as systems of knowledge transmission in distinct ways, either
simultaneously or conflictingly. An archive would hold supposedly lasting materials such as
texts, buildings, bones, which inaugurates an archival memory that works remotely, beyond
time and space, separating the source of knowledge from the knower in time and/or space,
immunizing against the alterity. The repertoire, in turn, requires contemporaneity and co-
spatiality between those who create and those who receive; it consists of the corporeal
memory that circulates through performances, gestures, verbal narration, movement, dances,

4
Phallogocentrism - neologism coined by Jacques Derrida to refer to the centralization of logos in the symbolic
power of phallus, indicating a binary system of imposition of the masculine. See DERRIDA, Jacques. El
Cartero de la Verdad. In __________ La Tarjeta Postal de Sócrates a Freud y más allá. Edicion Eletrónica
Escuela de Filosofia Universidad ARCIS. Available at www.philosophia.cl. Accessed in June 3rd, 2015.
singing; it requires the presence and permits the individual agentivity, keeping it at the same
time that transforms it.
Thus, historically marginalized social groups such as the Gypsies and Quilombolas constitute
a disjunctive temporality through their performances, establishing their scripts as an everyday
subversive tactics. Taking the dance as an example, we can see in both the Jongo5 circles of
the Quilombola and the dances in couples of the Gypsies6, a corporeal performance that, by
reiterating and updating the immemorial archives of both cultures renew their ethnicity. When
transposing the temporal barrier, from the intergenerational transmission, the performative
practices expressed in dance format presentify the memory of the group in the suits, gestures,
and rhythms. The disjunctive time of the party is installed and, thus, the in-between space is
created, where other forms of social existence an organization are manifested and invented.
In the acts of performance, the body is either the means and the message that transmits
information and participates in the circulation of images, negotiating a disjunctive time,
transforming the apparent stability of the archive - identified with the pedagogical, in a script
- something that, “They are ultimately flexible and open to change. Social actors may be
assigned roles deemed static and inflexible by some. Nonetheless, the irreconcilable friction
between the social actors and the roles allow for degrees of critical detachment and cultural
agentivity." (Taylor, 2003, p. 29). In the ethnic groups as Gypsies or Quilombolas, it is
possible to see in a clearer and exuberant way performances that recontextualize, resignify,
parody, and defy the constituted archives, disorganizing the ideological strategies and the
dominant epistemology, which attribute to the nation a homogeneous and essentialist identity.

RACE, ETHNICITY, AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL DISSIDENCE – THE GYPSY

RESISTANCE AS AN EXAMPLE
The important contemporary conflicts between dominating political forces, wanting their
values to become universal, and populations which are categorized as ethnic-racial minorities,
who react to subordination and to social iniquities to defend their culturally peculiar ways of
living, have been going on for centuries. In the Middle Ages, various popular manifestations
against the abuses and the moral corruption of the clergy, against monotheism, the religious
and sexual prohibitions, along with the opposition to catholic hegemony, lead to people being
classified as pure and impure as to their blood, based on the religious divergences of the
“infidels” or “heretics”, which culminated, for example, in “pedagogic” classification
procedures, such as the “mark of infamy” – which represented the regulation and distinctive
clothing for minorities, among which were the Jews, Muslims and prostitutes – to identify,
label, segregate and isolate deviating individuals or dissidents, while this was also aimed at
containing the adherence of the new generations to ways of life which were deemed
undesirable to the political hegemony (Richards, 1993).

5
Jongo, Afro-Brazilian dance created from the mnemonic memory of the diasporic gestures, was sung and
danced in the colonial period to organize escapes and rebellions inside the farms, resisting, in such a way, to the
slavery exploitation. Nowadays, it is present in the great majority of the quilombos, as a performing mark of
ethnicity.
6 The itinerant Gypsy people of inland of Rio de Janeiro state, for example, adapted the Brazilian popular dance
called Forró to another corporeal register that reiterates their habits of avoidance of physical contact between
men and women in public, which applies even to the married couples. The evolution of the dancing pairs in the
"Gypsy forró" prevents as much as practically possible any corporeal contact and the eye-to-eye contact, which
allows that single and married individuals mix themselves through the dancing performance without any
constraints. The Forró as originally danced by non-Gypsy, on the contrary, values a great deal of corporeal
between man and woman, especially of the trunk and lower members.
While no people “which does not have names, languages or cultures in which some form of
distinction between the Self and the Other, us and then, is not established (…)” (Castells,
2000, p. 22) is known, and while it is known that all peoples need to be acknowledged by
others as to their particularities, the identity rigidity with which dissident peoples have been
marked seems to have better served the hegemonic interests of segregation than the very
peoples in defence of their self-determination. All the identity is mobile, “formed and
transformed continuously in relation to the forms by which we are represented or called for in
the cultural systems which surround us. […] The fully unified, complete, safe and coherent
identity is a fantasy.” (Hall, 2005, p. 13)7 The act of self-proclaiming, thus characterizing, a
personal or group identity does not have the same meaning held by belonging to a race or
ethnicity, named by others, such as what has been happening to Gypsies since the colonial
expansion.
In the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, the word “gypsy”, which has its roots in the Greek
medieval atsinganos or atsinkano, translatable as untouchable, was created to designate
mobile peoples, pilgrims who would travel the world, just as those who would self-identify as
kalé – a Sanskrit word which means dark-skin nomad people. This inclusion of “Gypsies” in
European history by association with this concept of “untouchable”, which has assembled in
this designation several ethnic groups with similar cultural practices8, has been met by an
unprecedented Christian fundamentalism, with an intense distinction between the holy and the
profane, turning nation-States that were still being built into a stage of terror and persecution.
The year of 1498 witnessed a “(…) radical political turn from a conception of plural co-
existence into an exclusive social system which was based on ethnic-religious purity (blood
purity)” (Stallaert, 2012, p. 274).9 The castes engineered by “ethnic Christianity”, and by
other forms of racism, started justifying all sorts of repression, exclusion or extermination
practices directed against Iberians, Celts, Italics, Visigoths, Jews, Arabs and Gypsies, who
went from non-Christian to heretics and of impure blood (Stallaert, 1998). Historian David
Mayall (2009) highlights that it is not mere coincidence that this “discovery” of the “Gypsy”
has been produced exactly in the political moment in which the wide European colonization
project, powered by the English and the Dutch, decided to distinguish the existence of peoples
of common Aryan origin, affirmed as the model of civilization and superiority, from the
“foreign” peoples of Indo-European origin (Mayall, 2009, pp. 122-130).
In Portugal of the year 1500, Gypsies were included in the list of barbarian peoples described
in the Manueline Ordinances10, just as the new Christians and the indigenous, and later the
blacks and the mulattos. As politically defining stratified markers were being established
based on antiquity, ideological belonging, and physical and personality traits, for those who
7
Free translation of the authors. In the original, “formada e transformada continuamente em relação às formas
pelas quais somos representados ou interpelados nos sitemas culturais que nos rodeiam. [...] A identidade
plenamente unificada, completa, segura e coerente é uma fantasia”.
8
The ethnic Kalé groups were grouped under the designation of the “race” of Gypsies; these groups being
contemporaneously self-proclaimed as Calon, the Rom, in constant movement throughout the Central European
and Balkan regions, from where they have migrated to the Americas and to Eastern Europe, beginning in the 19th
century, and the Sinti, who have traveled around Italy, France and Germany (ADOLFO, 1999).
9
Free translation of the authors. In the original, “(...) giro político radical desde una concepción plural de
convivencia hacia un sistema social excluyente basado en la pureza étnico-religiosa (la pureza de sangre)”.
10
The Manueline Ordinances are the legal rulings which were prevalent in Portuguese legislation from 1512 to
1605. They were established by King Manuel I of Portugal to adapt the administration of the Kingdom to the
tremendous growth of the Portuguese Empire during the time of the “discoveries.” This was the first legislative
body which was issued in Portugal, stating the national unity and consolidating the role of the king in justice.
These were published after the Alfonsine Ordinances, still handwritten, and were enforced up until the
publication of the Philippine Ordinances, during the Iberian Union.
held different worldviews and social practices and traditions, so were established limits of co-
existence and grounds for exclusion, among which was being banned (Carneiro, 2005).
Under the influence of caste-based classism, the Catholic Church of the 18th century,
represented by Father Rafael Bluteau11, justified the social position of Gypsies as pariahs and
marginal individuals from a religious standpoint, designating them as nomad non-Christian
persons, coming from Egyptian nations, and forced to wander around the world, without
permanent housing or home, due to being a people that denied shelter to Christ as a child,
when he was still in the company of the “Holy Virgin” (Silva, 1789, p 34-35).
The obvious influence of ethnic Christianity in producing discriminating narratives has
revealed, in this point, another strategy to regulate the social practices described as wrong: the
invention of religious myths. This pedagogic way of reaffirming cultural identities by means
of orally transmitted myths and legends has succeeded in including Gypsies, and several other
diasporic peoples, in a linear, continuous temporal dimension, denominating them
"traditional peoples" – in the sense of rigidity of practices. However, the resistance by nomad
Gypsies to the homogenous assimilation of heteronomous myths has made them support their
place of performance, meaning their place as subjects of their own particular society, not
aligned with historic horizontal temporality, thus being relegated to the margins of the
nation’s writings (Bhabha, 1994).
The initial government regulations of the 15th century, which recommended that pilgrim
Gypsies should be well treated and welcome by countries where they would arrive in, quickly
changed and turned into an increasing position of intolerance towards impure and heretic
Gypsies. The intensification of the “ethnic cleansing” highlighted by caste-based classism,
and the evidence that there were no “Oriental lands”, or “Egyptian”, where the Calon would
return to, have made their moral and political dissidence, persevered through their itinerant
ways, become absolutely undesirable.
Historic documents show the way by which the Calon Gypsies, already classified as
dissidents and without a homeland, were forced into nomadism by the succession of forced
migrations between territories, due to the fact that these did not correspond to their needs for
settlement, subsistence, and social co-existence: permanent house and work, suppression of
the Caló language and divinatory practices (Borrow, 1841). However, successive governs did
not manage to establish successful practices in suppressing forms of colonial (de) regulation,
experienced by ethnic groups which considered the State as foreigner and an invader (Santos,
2010), such as the nomad Gypsies.
The forms of control targeting the construction of worldwide capitalism, which made the
Calon nomad Gypsies stay on the margins of that social system, has also allowed an
understanding of a permanent slide in another kind of temporality – disjunctive from where
only fragments or pieces of cultural signification were incorporated into the Nation’s
narratives (Bhabha, 1994).
The nomad Gypsy communities, even racialized, at first by the theological discourses of the
Old Regime, and, subsequently, by the scientific “evidence” of Modernity, have not
integrated into the roles and places of this new structure for the production of wealth, and,
consequently, of labour control. Positioned against the servitude destined for the “Indians”
and to the “slavery” imposed to the “blacks”, the “Gypsies” were unviable, and they took
advantage of their “non-existence” to strengthen their performance in the context of mobility,
flows and evolution phenomena.
The Gypsy nomadism, at first manifested as a response to the intolerance of governments

11
Author of the first Portuguese dictionary, in 1702.
towards diverse ways of life, and a resistance to salaried work, kept turning into a resource for
group and cultural survival, reflecting their migrating formation, just as Clifford pointed out
(1994):

Diaspora discourse articulates, or bend together, both roots and routes

to construct what Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987),
forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain
identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside,
with difference (Clifford, 1994, p. 308)

The Gypsy nomad communities, in this sense, have always shown the softening of the bonds
between culture and place/physical limit, and have highlighted - since the colonization project
of the 15th century the permanent discontinuities of ideas about time and space that constitute
a continuative temporality, constructed by the colonizer discourse. Experiencing a space
without places and a time without duration – disjunctive temporality - peoples without priests,
without guardians of a common memory or traditions, without history texts to transmit beliefs
and laws, and without a linguistic pattern, they still persist.
The nomad Gypsies did not get to places coming from a geographically located origin, and
they do not include themselves in national integration practices. Clifford (1994) tells us:

Peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective

histories or displacement and violent loss cannot be “cured” by
merging into a new national community. This is especially true when
they are the victims of ongoing, structural prejudice. Positive
articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the normative territory
and temporality (myth/history) of the nation-State (Clifford, 1994, p.
307).

The Calon nomads come to be counter-hegemonic forces, authors of their own temporality and
proclamation. To belong and to live in “Gypsy” contexts involves understanding in principle the
heteronomous condition of what designates them “Gypsies” and the existing alliance of those
who identify as Calon. In order to speak about “Gypsies”, from a decolonial perspective, it is
necessary to consider all knowledge as a dynamic social construction, and not as a
consequence of arbitrary determinisms based in an origin.

PERFORMING POST-COLONIAL MEMORY: THE QUILOMBOLA12 MOVEMENT

AS AN EXAMPLE OF A CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVE
The relationship between post-colonial studies and memory studies is still a field that is not
very explored, even if the conceptual evidence drives them to conflict with each other during
their different – although not entirely distant – epistemic practices (Rothberg, 2013). To speak
in terms of temporality in the post-colonialism perspective means, therefore, to problematize
and to reflect about the question of history and memory based on a new theoretical place –
even if the latter, memory, appears as a conceptual icon only between the lines of this theory.
Bringing the notion of “temporal incision”, Bhabha brings new ways for analysis: it is in the
interstitial space, or in this “in-between” – which occurs between modern and contemporary –
that is possible to observe the re-inscription of the historic subject. The concept of disjunctive

12
The Quilombola movement is formed by descendants of black slaves who struggle for the legal ownership of
the territories occupied by their ancestors.
temporality and “time lag” makes, therefore, possible the discussion of post-colonial memory:
it is a dislocated memory, fluid and living in an open sea, between the margins of two times,
in a third space, thus breaking with the simplistic, nationalist and historicist narrative of
modernity. The very notion of colonial power of Quijano (2000) indirectly faces us with the
question of this time lag, foreseeing the common presence of the colonial structures of power
throughout the various political systems over time. It is in this place that we can speak of a
collective memory at the centre of post-colonial theory. In this sense, considering that
memory is related to the social group, as Halbwachs (1994) states, we should report to the
location of culture from Bhabha’s notion of temporality, in order to understand the nuances of
post-colonial memory and how it enters, in a subversive way, the national narrative.
As soon as slavery was banned, new struggles became part of the black movement, which was
tirelessly trying to occupy the public space. However, there was no social visibility for its
struggles, considering the homogeneity perspective that was tied to the nation-State project,
which, on its turn, was projecting in the mirror of the new cultural imperialism, towards a
world geopolitical reshaping. The tendencies to silence and to forget what had happened,
which were observed after the abolition, throughout the world, were, before anything else,
results of the political delegitimization of the peoples who did not have access to symbolic
resources, or even to a territory, to materialize their social demands. Once civil rights headed
towards universalization, and once post-war international policies in support of human rights
started arising, new enunciation conditions started, however, appearing. The memory of
slavery was presented wide open in the international stage in the 20th and 21st centuries based
on a temporal incision: its histories gain new voices among the descendants of slaves who
proclaim the consequences of slavery’s past “time” in the present “time”. The resistance has
always happened and has never ceased to exist since the times of slavery, but only in
contemporary times did it become truthfully legitimized from a social point of view, taking a
public space in the contemporary global narrative.
In comprehending the double and divided time in the context of a culture of social protest,
and observing a cultural autonomy of past generations, the Nation signifies the people as a
“historic presence”, a priori, and, therefore, as a pedagogic object [immovable and
atemporal], as much as it builds it in the performance of the narrative, meaning in its
“enunciative present” of contemporaneity. If the pedagogic object grounds its narrative
authority in a fixed “tradition” of the people, then the performative, in a more subversive way,
introduces the temporality of the inter-place. The people, in its double inscription – as a
pedagogic object and as a performative object – requires a new temporality, which is refused
in the discourse of historicism: the finitude of the nation – and, consequently, its narrative –
avoids the alliance between a full present and the visibility of the past (Bhabha, 1994).
From this notion of disjunctive temporality – or of temporal incision – in the dialogic
relations between people and nation, the Quilombola movement and its struggles in the
postcolonial context is problematized for the composition of the constitutional text of 1988. It
is known that, during the process of political and democratic reopening of the country, the
social movements came out from the realm of obscurity, silence and forgetting what had
happened, and enjoyed some political projection to make a new national “narrative”: the
Brazilian constitution.
Since 1986, the black movement was already getting organized and the rural black
communities produced a popular amendment with a particular focus on the rural and land
issue, to be directly sent to the Constituent Assembly. Based on popular pressure and on the
support of members of parliament of popular origin – and not without many adjustments –, it
was this way born the article 68, which offers the right to legally hold the lands and to the
preservation of the African-Brazilian culture. It is interesting to highlight that initially it was
born out of the discussions about the cultural heritage based on articles 215 and 216, to later
be changed, rejected in the chapter of culture, and, finally, incorporated into the transitory
atypical disposition.
That “transitory atypical” deserves to be signalled as an “in-between” – it brings the mark of
an impermanent temporality, since the article is not thought for future application, in case its
past object – the social demand of which it is part – ceases to exist. Between past and future,
here is the enunciation of the present – the “transitory”, therefore, seems to suspend in the
time a part of the national narrative: the memory of slavery.
The popular movement and the achievement that this constitutional article represents is a fact
that should be reflected on: if we consider the constitution as a new national narrative, it is
necessary to observe that it takes place in an important historical split of political re-opening.
At this moment, the constitution, as a narrative, can be seen in its discursive liminality that
allows space for ideological ambivalence – the space of social protests –, an historical breach
which is used by the people to include, in a subtle way, their vindications, and, therefore, their
dislocated memories.
In fact, as Homi Bhabha (1994) states, minority discourses appear due to modernity’s
disjunctive temporality: the peoples that live in the ambiguous, hybrid, invisible and temporal
frontiers of history take advantage of the discursive liminality of the modern narrative to
achieve a symbolic power of manoeuvre and strategic negotiations in the national space.
Thus, in the configuration of the State, the complex time of modernity is characterized by its
duplicity and incision in the process of national representation, which frustrates any
expectation of homogeneity associated with the imagined community of the nation (Bhabha,
1994, p. 234, Anderson, 2005). The nation as a double narrative is perceived here in its
disjunctive temporality, divided between political rationality (and the fragments of cultural
significance) and the certainties of a nationalist pedagogy (Bhabha, 1994, p. 232). Before
anything else, the black movement manages to include one of the most important vindications
of the land and rural issue based on a subtle subversive tactic in which the memory becomes
the means and the end, at the same time. On the inscription of dissident memory in the
constitutional narrative, it is observed that this is doubly contained in the formulation of the
very content of the amendment.
When speaking about the holding of the lands, it is pointed to the term “quilombo-remaining
communities” – and it should be said that the term “remaining” brings, in its significance, a
historic and temporal relationship with the slavery past. The memory of slavery, therefore, is
inscribed directly in the constitutional text problematizing the permanence of colonial power
in the contemporary time. However, that memory is included in disguise: considering the
paragraphs 215 and 216, the article firstly enters the field of culture – even though the main
vindication was about the holding of the lands – and subtly installs its hybrid temporality in
the articulation of differences and cultural identifications in the national narrative. However,
the term “quilombo-remaining” – in which the memory tacitly inscribes itself – brings a false
essentialized and fixed idea of time, something distant and apparently harmless, when, in fact,
it reflected a contemporary question and a serious vindication in the dense process of land
struggles.
Therefore, if the Nation understood, at this time, the people as a “pedagogic” object and fixed
in time – a distant and vague idea from the rare quilombos of colonial time –, the people
subversively uses this crystallized image of the past to effect its narrative performance,
inscribing its memory in contemporaneity. Here, the “dislocated” memory becomes a
strategic tool: while giving the idea of a distant and fossilized notion of the historic past, the
issue is used for not seeming to represent a threat to the ruralists who imagined that there
were only a few quilombo“-remaining” communities (Silva, 2009. The strategic tactic is
successful, based on its ambivalence and on a subtle temporal ambiguity inscribed in the
discursive liminality of modernity.
Coincidently, Bhabha (1994, p. 144) alludes to the metaphoric image of Quilombola
communities to indicate that the black textuality, in its “transgressing and invasive structure”,
is developed through “rhetorical strategies of hybridism, deformation, masking and
inversion”, in an analogous way in relation to the way of life of Quilombola communities who
lived on the frontiers. From these temporal splits, consequently, “the forces of social authority
and subversion or subalternity may emerge in displaced, even decentred “strategies of
signification” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 145).

In 1994, the Brazilian Association of Anthropology perceives the present breach in the
constitutional narrative conquered by the black movement, and completes the work of re-
semanticization of the term “quilombola”, showing the contemporaneity of their demands and
thus instrumentalizing the access to the rights of urban and rural black communities
throughout the country.
The lapse in the structure of modernity opens a small discourse breach in history, from its
own ideological ambivalences. It is through this postcolonial breach that the entire sea of
memories invades the compartments, which were before closed, of the nation-State: the
narrative of modernity is transformed by the performative process of the memory of the
postcolonial subject, who was before kept outside of the national history. The slave memory
has dislocated itself in space, but it has perpetuated itself in time – it was knitted between
generations and becomes re-signified from the disjunctive temporality of modernity. In this
long process, after many years of being forgotten or kept in silence, new historic conditions of
enunciation arise. This reconstructive character of memory considering the specific context of
the peoples directly submitted by the colonial power is what constitutes the motor of the so-
called “performative memory” of traditional communities in the postcolonial era. The
memory gains here a new social function and new practices of remembering in the
postcolonial context: it is the memory as a cultural performance of the subordinated subject in
the context of contemporaneity. It is performative because it introduces, subversively and
tactically, the temporality of the inter-place.
PUBLIC SPHERE, PLURAL DISCOURSES, VIRTUAL SOCIAL NETWORKS AND
EMERGING POWERS
The temporality addressed by Bhabha is a conceptual way that enables the re-interpretation of
the public sphere, so that it incorporates the place where the emerging powers (with their
discourses and dissident narratives) manifest themselves, in a dynamic of horizontal exchange
which directly interferes in the creation of public opinion, which ceases to be unique and
becomes plural.
The concept of public sphere of Habermas – according to Fraser’s critical perspective, which
exposes the insufficiency of the homogeneous concept of nation as a place where the public
sphere exists – should be reconsidered with a postcolonial approach. For Habermas, the
nation is the public space where all the debates on the matters of justice take place, being the
reference mark of the public space in the creation of a public opinion. Therefore, the public
sphere conforms to the nation. However, this relationship of equivalence established between
the nation and the public space is no longer effective in a global context.
The public space in which it is possible to debate and create solutions for the claims of justice,
resulting from social inequalities (which, in Habermas, are generally called social problems),
is today globalized and postcolonial, and the social problems of his theory are a consequence
of a globalization process which generates the global system (which is not only economic, but
also cultural, political and epistemic), extrapolating the limits marked by the nation’s
frontiers. As Grosfoguel says (2010, p 475):
“...it is impossible to transform a system which operates in a global
scale giving priority to the control/administration of the nation-State
(Wallerstein, 1992b). No type of ‘rational’ control by the nation-State
will, alone, be able to change the location of a certain country in the
international division of labour. The planning and ‘rational’ control of
the nation-State contribute to the developmental illusion of the
elimination of inequalities of the capitalist world-system at the level of
the nation-State. [...] a global problem cannot have a national solution.
This is not a matter of denying the importance of political interventions
at the nation-State level. What is important is not to isolate the nation-
State and to understand the limits of political interventions, at this level,
for the long-term transformation of a system, which operates on a
global scale. While it goes on being an important institution of historic
capitalism, the nation-State is a limited place for radical social and
political transformations.”13
For Habermas (1997), social actors – private individuals who are integrated in virtual social
networks, of higher or lower density, depending on how strong or weak are the factors that
bond them – circulate through direct or indirect communication channels, which allow them
the discourse exchange about the social problems that affect them in their private spheres.
This assimilation deprived of social problems is channelled to the partial public spheres (for
example, churches, schools, and political parties), where these are debated, generating
discourses which are formed by the common language (1997, p. 93):
“Any encounter that is not limited to mutual observation contacts, but
is fed by the communicational freedom that ones give to others, moves
in a public space formed by language. […] the public spheres are not
yet too connected to concrete spaces of a present audience. The more
they detach themselves from their physical presence, also integrating,
for example, the virtual presence of readers located in distant places, of
listeners or spectators, which is possible through the virtual media, the
clearer becomes the abstraction that follows the passage of a spatial
13
Free translation of the authors. In the original: “... é impossível transformar um sistema que opere à escala
global privilegiando o controle/administração do Estado-nação (Wallerstein, 1992b). Nenhum tipo de controle
‘racional’ do Estado-nação poderá, por si, alterar a localização de um determinado país na divisão internacional
do trabalho. O planejamento e o controle ‘racional’ do Estado-nação contribuem para a ilusão
desenvolvimentista da eliminação das desigualdades do sistema-mundo capitalista ao nível do Estado-nação. [...]
um problema global não pode ter uma solução nacional. Não se trata de negar a importância das intervenções
políticas ao nível do Estado-nação. O importante será não reificar o Estado-nação e compreender os limites das
intervenções políticas, a este nível, para a transformação a longo prazo de um sistema que opera à escala
mundial. Embora continue a ser uma importante instituição do capitalismo histórico, o Estado-nação é um
espaço limitado para transformações políticas e sociais radicais.”
 structure of simple interactions to the generalization of the public
sphere.” (Habermas, 1997, p. 93)14
The public sphere would, as a result, be “a suitable network for content communication,
stances which have been taken, and opinions; here, the communication flows are filtered and
synthesized, to the point of being condensed into public opinions focusing on specific
subjects” (Habermas, 1997, p. 92). Out of this would come out the public opinion:
“The processes of opinion formation, when it comes to practical
matters, always follow the change of preferences and the focus of
participants – but they can be dissociated from the translation of such
dispositions into actions. […] the communication structures of the
public sphere alleviate the public from the task of making decisions;
the delayed decisions are still reserved to institutions that produce
resolutions. In the public sphere, the manifestations are chosen
according to the subjects and to the ‘pros and cons’ positions; the
information and arguments take the form of focused opinions. […] A
public opinion is not representative in a statistical sense. It does not
constitute a collection of individual opinions researched one-by-one or
privately manifested.” (Habermas, 1997, pp. 93-94)15
The function of the political public sphere would, however, be to capture and organize as
issues the problems of society as a whole, based on the communicational contexts of
potentially affected people, and the public opinion that would be formed in that instance
would influence the political system, with which is the political power, legitimized and
empowered with potential to come to decisions with a mandatory nature. Institutionalized
processes would thus be necessary for the translation of the social power and the influence of
the public opinion into the political power.
As Fraser (2008) explains, the theory of Habermas implicitly entails that the participants in
public discussions should be citizens of a bordered political community, equivalent to the
territorial national State, where the discussion takes place in a national language,
understandable and transparent to all, being essential that there is a coincidence between the
subjective structure (private individuals in interpersonal interaction networks) of the public
sphere and the national imagined community, from the imaginary created by a common
literature, of individuals belonging to a national community (correspondence between the
national identity of the individual and the political community that the individual belongs to).
The public sphere of Habermas consequently depends on the pedagogic temporality described

14
Free translation of the authors. In the original: “Qualquer encontro que não se limita a contatos de observação
mútua, mas que se alimenta da liberdade comunicativa que uns concedem aos outros, movimenta-se num espaço
público, constituído através da linguagem. [...] as esferas públicas ainda estão muito ligadas aos espaços
concretos de um público presente. Quanto mais elas se desligam de sua presença física, integrando também, por
exemplo, a presença virtual de leitores situados em lugares distantes, de ouvintes ou espectadores, o que é
possível através da mídia, tanto mais clara se torna a abstração que acompanha a passagem da estrutura espacial
das interações simples para a generalização da esfera pública.”
15
Free translation of the authors. In the original: “os processos de formação da opinião, uma vez que se trata de
questões práticas, sempre acompanham a mudança de preferências e de enfoques dos participantes – mas podem
ser dissociados da tradução dessas disposições em ações. [...] as estruturas comunicacionais da esfera pública
aliviam o público da tarefa de tomar decisões; as decisões proteladas continuam reservadas a instituições que
tomam resoluções. Na esfera pública, as manifestações são escolhidas de acordo com temas e tomadas de
posição pró ou contra; as informações e argumentos são elaborados na forma de opiniões focalizadas. [...] Uma
opinião pública não é representativa no sentido estatístico. Ela não constitui um agregado de opiniões individuais
pesquisadas uma a uma ou manifestadas privadamente.”
by Bhabha, since it is solely supported by the present affirmation of the historical unity of a
people.
These premises of the Habermasian public sphere are not supported, however, by a globalized
world-system, where the plurality of discourse is hidden but is not submitted to the
homogenization process. There are, therefore, two temporalities: the official, which supports
the notion of public opinion as a unity, a national generality, while being fictional, and a
temporality of the plural discourses that are made subordinate, of minorities and cultural
difference, which are made invisible by a supposed consensus, with the consequent
subordination of the demands that result from this.
That, however, does not keep away the validity of the theory of Habermas in which explains
the dynamics of the public sphere formation. Its circumscription to the nation and to the idea
of homogeneity between nationals is what finds no support. It is true that the normative force
of the public power is grounded on the pedagogic temporality of the past, which generates a
(supposed) consensus that goes beyond the minorities and the cultural difference discourses,
which remain active in the performing temporality of the present. However, the fragmentation
of national identity, the transnational questions and the debilitation of the national State have
generated the weakening of that imposed consensus, which has caused both mass media and
alternative flows of communication to begin manifesting themselves in an effective way,
searching for a new public space.
As Bhabha highlights (1994, p. 154):

“The language of national collectivity and cohesiveness is now at stake.

Neither cultural homogeneity, nor the nation's horizontal space can be
authoritatively represented within the familiar territory of the public
sphere: social causality cannot be adequately understood as a
deterministic or overdetermined effect of a 'statist' centre; nor can the
rationality of political choice be divided between the polar realms of
the private and the public. The narrative of national cohesion can no
longer be signified, in Anderson's words, as a 'sociological solidity'
fixed in a 'succession of plurals' - hospitals, prisons, remote villages -
where the social space is clearly bounded by such repeated objects that
represent a naturalistic, national horizon.”.
Habermas does not ignore the existence of other public spheres which are not solely the
official one, the latter producing the dominant discourse, but he indicates that these peripheral
public spheres, based on a non-institutionalized public communication, lead to opinion
formation processes which are “more or less spontaneous” (1997, p. 90) and autonomous,
which would need a structured social anchorage so that it could become integrated into the
institutionalized public sphere by the legitimizing political processes of state activity as a
deciding field. Therefore, if one is recognizing the existence of antagonisms in social life and
dissident processes in public opinions formation (and not opinion, as in singular), what is
missing here is the emergence of these processes in a public space which acknowledges them
as such.
A public space in which these antagonisms today manifest themselves without the imposed
mediation of mass media or of other structured institutions to filter these discussions is the
space of virtual social media and networks, such as Facebook, and of some collaborative
platforms, in which it is possible to observe a plural discourse, a plurality of narratives in
which private individuals, in their private spheres, freely manifest themselves, in direct and
horizontal social interaction.
The proposal of social media and networks as a public space which is part of the public
sphere aims precisely to keep away that idea of peripheral public spheres, considering that,
due to the dynamics of horizontal exchanges which are typical of virtual social networks, one
cannot talk about a central discourse and a peripheral one, or about an official discourse and a
hidden one. In the network, there are no marginalized discourses, but different plural
discourses, which move along spaces of dominion and resistance, of homogeneity and
heterogeneity. It is a place where the pedagogic aspect of the official discourse and the
performing aspect of the counter-hegemonic meet and become intertwined, going beyond the
territorial limits imposed by a homogenizing idea of nation.
Enne (2004) mentions that networks can be conceptualized under three different approaches:
cultural, relative to the exchange of information and symbolic goods; economic, as a system
of trade in materials and merchandise; and social, as an integration system between people,
through interaction practices. The public sphere, in order to be constituted, requires the
existence of the public space, where the exchanges between individuals in interaction
processes take place, in which the meta-political debate is developed in conditions of
participation equality between all the interested parties. The virtual social networks, as a
system of information and symbolic goods exchange, and as a system of integration and
interaction practices, are a virtual public space due to the absence of physical co-presence, but
just as real as any other public space in which ideas pertaining to relevant political and social
issues for a society are discussed.
In this space, diversified narratives are presented and become spread, generating a public
debate that is not mediated by institutionalized or organizational ways, such as what takes
place in the public sphere idealized by Habermas. To this author (1997), there are three types
of public sphere: the episodic (as in bars, casual meetings in public transportation,
restaurants), the organized presence (political party meetings and church meetings), and the
abstract (the media), all seeming to combine as one single public sphere in the virtual domain.
It is, therefore, possible to state that the temporality of virtual social networks is of a
performing nature, not being limited to a discourse linearity or historical unicity. In social
media, multiple narratives are confronted, while they are being spread, affecting the uniform
narratives of the national public sphere.
The reality of communication mediated by the computer, and specifically through social
media, raises some questions: would this be a horizontal public sphere, in which the functions
of organizers, speakers and listeners of the public discourse are combined in an individual
participation by private individuals? Could it be said that virtual social networks take a total
public sphere function, integrating the three types into a single public space? Could those
virtual social networks serve as the space for dissident expressions of plural discourses?
The virtual social networks made viable by the Internet, can constitute a field of discourse
with no intermediaries, in which the private individual publishes the questions and problems
of the private sphere, bringing them under a public light, without the need for a media
structure to make his communication flow possible. On the other hand, by its horizontal
structure, it allows the manifestation of performing temporality, with simultaneous plural
narratives and discourses, exposing what is occulted in the official narrative.
Thus, there is a practical way in the real world that allows the individual subject to participate
directly in the public sphere. In order to give it a normative efficiency, it is missing the
restructuring of the political system so that it may come to incorporate the plural public
opinions generated by that way into the administrative and normative powers of the State,
which exclusively hold the sovereign power.
CONCLUSION
The nation, as a system of cultural representation, reiterates the discourse of the Eurocentric
historical truth. However, the legitimacy of its monocultural and geo-delimited, marginalizing
organization, and its exclusionary temporal linearity, have been questioned by the multiple
dissident processes shown by social movements and relations, as we have been pointing
throughout this article.
Concerning corporeality, the study of performances would show tensions, which would not be
recognizable in written texts and documents. The examination of contemporary practices of
populations who are generally rejected as retrograde gives visibility to histories, memories,
and struggles, turning into destabilizing counter-narratives and installing disjunctive
temporalities.
As to the phenomenon of postcolonial memory and the cultural production of this memory, a
new dissident agency is observed, which serves as instrument to the new social struggles,
breaking up the temporal frontiers of the linear history of the modern nation-State. The split
time of modernity is brought to the surface in the fabric of a new “post-colonial memorial
performance”, which, in projecting a future, re-inscribes contemporary demands in past
histories.
Similarly, when dealing with ethnic dissidences, such as those of Gypsies or Quilombolas,
any related discourse or knowledge that is produced must recognize that their identities are
constituted in that liminal space between different histories, lived in different temporalities,
by different social groups, in a dispute for heterogeneous social organizations and ways of
life. Tthe cultural resistance must be understood as a reflection of the regulatory tension
inherent to the racializations and ethnicizations, as well as a dissident power whose counter-
narratives can change the dominant representations and reveal other possible worlds.
Regarding the social networks of virtual interaction as place of direct expression of dissident
discourses, their dynamics allow a horizontal exchange between the participants, as well as
reflecting the performative, the present time – in which dissidences and their narratives
manifest themselves simultaneously – enabling thus the expression of the social power in a
communicational process where multiple public opinions are formed. Therefore, the emerging
powers oppose the identity rigidity of the nation as location of culture in a space of present
temporality that allows the individual to manifest himself as such, as well as to take part
actively in forming public opinions that will influence the political power.
The recognition of the existence of emerging dissident powers exposes the current discursive
paradox between the pedagogization of a national homogenous identity and the projection of
egalitarian and pluricultural social ideals. In this context, the emerging powers find in the
“time lag” of the virtual social networks, of the ethnic, corporeal performances, and of the
social political-identity organizations a channel for revealing the dissidences rather hidden by
the dominant discourse, thus paving the way for the discursive plurality otherwise ignored by
the pedagogic way of thinking the nation.

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