Paulo Eduardo Arantes
Traduzione di Giovanni Zanotti
The World’s Brazilian Fracture: A Look from the Brazilian Laboratory of Globalization
Abstract: This 2001 essay discusses the concept of the “brazilianization” of the world, proposed in the 1990s by American, French, and German social scientists to designate the increasingly dual character of urban structures and labor markets in their respective societies. Referring back to traditional debates within Brazilian critical theory on dualism and dependency, it claims, on one side, that the “dualization” between a center and a periphery must be understood as a necessary effect of their contradictory unity. On the other side, it shows how the displacement of this “fracture” into the “center” itself ironically realizes the old hopes of global convergence in a reversed sense, as a “peripheralization of the center” announcing what the author would later call “the new world time”.
Keywords: Brazilian Critical Theory; Brazilianization; Social Fracture; Labor Market Flexibility; New World Time.