Critical Theory: Made in Brazil

volume 384 | "A Bruccoli Clark Layman book." | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018044186 | ISBN 9780787696597 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Brazilian literature-21st century-Bio-bibliography. | Authors, Brazilian-21st century-Biography-Dictionaries. | Brazilian literature-21st century-Dictionaries Classification: LCC PQ9506 .T94 2019 | DDC 869.09/98103 [B] -dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044186 Gale,

Crossroads of Freedom

This book is at the crossroads of vari ous paths in recent historiography. 1 Walter Fraga followed the trails of experience and self-reflection blazed by slaves, freed people, and masters, to understand conflicts and alliances in the Bahian Recôncavo (the bay on which Salvador is located, and its immediate agricultural hinterland) from the end of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In so doing, he abolished the radical dissociation between "slavery" and "freedom" which had led many scholars to see the end of bondage in 1888 as either the terminus of one historical road (and research agenda) or the beginning of another; for it became clear that strategies, customs, and identities were worked out before emancipation shaped subsequent tensions between subalterns and their superiors. Indeed, the focus on actual lives, lived and pondered, as a way to discover broader social logics, brought Professor Fraga to the path of microhistory, an approach that seeks "God" (evidence of larger pro cesses of change and continuity) in the intricacy of "detail. " 2 This option, in turn, took him to people's names-that is, to the method of nominative rec ord linkage-as a strategy for tracking persons over time in order to trace individual and collective biographies. Crossroads of Freedom: Slaves and Freed People in Bahia, Brazil, 1870-1910 is the point of encounter of these diverse but converging paths. To say this, however, only weakly defines the book's qualities. The crossroads in this case are exceptionally charged with power-so much so that it is difficult to do justice to Fraga's method in a brief compass. How does one explain, for instance, the magic of chapter 2, in which the author employs detailed police documents and an exceptionally rich trial rec ord to reconstruct the assassination, by slaves, of a priest-administrator on a sugar plantation of the Carmelite Order in 1882? Fraga analyzes and contextualizes the case so skillfully that it illuminates slave owners' theater of dominion and

Tempo, 2014

The study of the Brazilian response to Machiavelli' s books and ideas reveals that The Prince was published for the first time only in the 1930s in the Portuguese-speaking countries. Nevertheless, since the 16 th century in Europe, and despite the fact that it had been listed in 1559 in the Index of prohibited books, the work was being published and circulated in several ways. Far from taking advantage of the possibility of doing justice, almost four centuries later, to the founder of the modern political science, the translation of 1933, published by the Calvino Filho publishing house, in Rio de Janeiro, is introduced by a preface written by Mauricio Medeiros. Although politically engaged in the fight for freedom and against the authoritarianism of Getúlio Vargas, his preface, if analyzed from a paratextual perspective, seems meant to reaffirm, in the 20 th century, the traditional interpretation of the Machiavellian work done by the (not strictly libertarian) Portuguese inquisitors at linguistic and lexicographic levels.

Brasiliana, 2016

The article discusses the so-called Marginal Literature in São Paulo’s outskirts – produced by authors who do not “fit” in the symbolic hierarchies’ canon –, within a broad overview of Brazilian literary tradition that has once tried to represent social inequalities and marginalization. Firstly, it will be briefly situated a debate according to which the “dialectic of malandroism”, as proposed by Antonio Candido, has been shifted in a varied panel of artistic forms and practices towards a “dialectic of marginality”, as suggested by João Cezar de Castro Rocha, based on the exposition of social conflict instead of its disguise. Secondly, an analytical architecture of an aesthetics of marginality will be proposed by identifying to what extent past literary experiences have influenced marginal literature movement. Finally, a framework will be provided to understand some strategies authors have been using to reverse prejudices related to their cultural expressions, which implies an attempt to create an alternate form of narrative based on the place of enunciation and the right to speak by themselves.

The sociologist and anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), author of The Masters and the Slaves (1933), and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982), author of Roots of Brazil (1936), are considered two of the main interpreters of Brazilian society, having both produced works that continue to impact the understanding of Brazil. According to some, these were the works that "invented Brazil". In this essay, I seek to analyze these authors' experiences while abroad and the impact this had on the production process of their best-known works. In the case of Gilberto Freyre, I highlight his academic training in the United States, and in the case of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, his free training in Germany. As this work shows, different academic and cultural experiences abroad led to different interpretations of Brazil. Based on the analysis of their biographies and best-known works, I highlight how some of the main interpretations of Brazilian society were made possible by the particular "intellectual diaspora" in which they participated, and identify some of the key influences permeating their work.

Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 1996

Hispania, 2006

Truth' and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific 'truth' and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.

The first class: transits of Brazilian literature abroad [electronic resource] /organization Pedro Meira Monteiro ; translation John Norman. – São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2014; pp. 190-197. English version of: A primeira aula: trânsitos da literatura brasileira no estrangeiro Available in Portuguese and Spanish Text (PDF) ISBN 978-85-7979-055-3

Resumo Este artigo pretende apresentar uma análise panorâmica da escrita de mulheres negras dos E.U.A. e do Brasil, examinando como estes escritos estabelecem uma relação dialógica entre si no espaço diaspórico das Américas. A partir das considerações acerca da diáspora feitas por Brent Edwards (2003), argumentarei que as escritoras contemporâneas Afro-Brasileiras e Afro-Estadunidenses re-escrevem o corpo da mulher negra segundo representações literárias multi-facetadas nas interseções dos discursos de raça, gênero, e sexualidade. Lidos lado a lado, seus projetos literários contribuem para a reelaboração de idéias universalizantes sobre o " eu " e as complexidades da subjetividade em relação ao sujeito feminino negro, ao mesmo tempo em que retêm suas especifi cidades históricas e culturais. Através de um olhar comparativo e trasnacional, este artigo debruça-se sobre algumas das obras literárias de escritoras como Conceição Evaristo, Miriam Alves, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Cristiane Sobral, e Elisa Lucinda (Brasil); e também, Abstract This essay aims at delineating a panoramic analysis of contemporary black women's writings in the U.S. and Brazil in order to examine how these writings establish a dialogic relationship with each other across the diasporic space in the Americas. Taking on Brent Edwards conceptualizations of diaspora (2003), I will argue that contemporary Afro-Brazilian and U.S. Afro-American women writers rewrite the black female body into literary representations of multi-layered racial, gender and sexual discourses. Read against and with each other, their writings contribute to re-elaborate universalizing notions of selfhood and the complexities of subjectivity, while retaining a sense of cultural and historical specifi city. Within a comparative and transnational approach, this essay will discuss some of the writings by Conceição Evaristo, Miriam Alves, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Cristiane Sobral, and Elisa Lucinda (Brazil); as well as some of the works by Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Danzy Senna (U.S.), among others.

This paper interrogates the claims of the German theorists Max Bense and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (1948-) that they perceived in Brazilian art and literature a tropical temporality, defined by a constructed existence outside linear ("European") history. As he wrote in his Brasilianische Intelligenz: Eine cartesianische Reflexion(1965), Max Bense, a Stuttgart-based philosopher of aesthetics and technology, found in Brazil's modernist capital, said to have been built ex nihilo in the late 1950s, an unprecedented fusion of design and politics that upended historical models of aesthetic valuation. As Bense applied his informational aesthetics to his study of Concrete poetry, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, in hisAfter 1945: Latency as Origin of the Present (2013), uses a post-hermeneutical method to denude João Cabral de Melo Neto's poetry of historical and semantic depth. Ultimately this paper argues that in their autobiographical accounts of travels to Brazil both authors betray a tendency to equate Brazil with an "otherness," thereby displacing onto Brazilian culture another indication that, from the European perspective, its dream of itself persists.

Canadian journal of Latin American and Caribbean studies, 2018

New Directions in Uneven and Combined Development

In June 2014, the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) co-hosted a conference on ‘Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development’. A key question raised during the conference, and subsequently continued online (Parry and Rosenberg 2014), was this: what would it mean to read a literary text ‘under the sign of uneven and combined development’? The discussion ended without a singular answer, and WReC’s own eventual position owed as much, if not more, to World-Systems Analysis, as to UCD: ‘We propose,’ they later wrote, ‘...to define ‘world literature’ as the literature of the world-system – of the modern capitalist world-system, that is’ (WReC 2015, 8). Yet arguably – and as noted in the edited volume which followed the conference – there had already long existed a more direct route for thinking about literature and UCD in the works of the celebrated Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz (Christie and Degirmencioglu 2019, 12). Schwarz, it is true, does not reference Trotsky’s idea by name. Consider, however, some of the key themes of his work. He identifies national ‘peculiarities’ (1992, 20) in Brazilian culture which (like Trotsky’s ‘peculiarities of Russia’s development’) are ultimately explained internationally by ‘our dependent-independent position in the concert of nations’ (Schwarz 1992, 53). He points to ‘historical imperatives’ arising from this uneven development which operated (like Trotsky’s ‘whip of external necessity’) to ensure ‘the inevitability of cultural imitation’ in Brazilian national life (1992, 7). He analyses how, via this imitation, ideas that were ‘[g]rafted from Europe on to a colonial social being... began to follow different rules... [leading to] a widespread sense of indigenous pastiche’ (or, as Trotsky put it, ‘combined development’). Schwarz therefore also rejects that ‘vulgar Marxism’ which (in Brazil, as in Trotsky’s Russia) propounds a unilinear, stadial view of history (Gledson, in Schwarz 1992, xi). Instead he explores how the multilinear and interactive

Hispanic Research Journal-iberian and Latin American Studies, 2018

on their extensive research, that 'in the imaginary of Brazilian society, there prevails the idea that "politics is not a woman's place"' (258).