ABSTRACT
This chapter focusses on the idea of 'a fragmentation and scattering of a once-unified people'. Culture, therefore, becomes the imputation of a unified, often trans-historical, field of behavior whose origins spring from Western scientific discourse. As with Carol Zemel's piece on representing the shtetl, Helio Oiticica's serious play with European high modernist art highlights the interpenetrations of various worlds within 'Modern art'. Fanon's suspicion of totalizing systems extends to overarching socialism, and tends strongly to the models of Che Guevara and subsequent 'Third World' variations that were intended to insure plurivocalism, however tragic their outcome. Trinh reveals both the assumption of who controls the universalizing concept of 'human nature' and who remains its ultimate example with auxiliary information imported from 'the natives'. Henry J. Drewal's discussion about Bantu and Yoruba arts in Brazilian culture reaches deeply into the reaches of interpenetration.
