Exiles and Nomads: Perlongher in Brazil

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the effect of exile on the work of the Argentine poet and anthropologist Néstor Perlongher. The writer fled Argentina for Brazil in the early 1980s after suffering police harassment and violence. In Argentina, his poems had criticized conservative notions of the nation, and proposed alternative desiring communities, or Temporary Autonomous Zones to use the term coined by Hakim Bey. In contrast, his poetry in Brazil details the appearance of marginal sexualities in public spaces, in particular during Carnaval. At the same time, exile appears as political defeat for efforts to find a forum for gay rights, in particular with the collapse of the Argentine Homosexual Liberation Front. In the 1980s Perlongher's poetry fluctuates between celebrating the exile's border-crossing and increased misgivings about the use of such movements by global capital, and the ability that the state possesses to set in motion and utilize mass movements. These misgivings give way to the at times conflictive presence of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology in Perlongher's work, as an alternative to his early journeys across borders.