Against the Current: Electricity and Cultural Production in Brazil’s Anthropocene

FAIN: FEL-288383-23

Victoria Troianowski Saramago
University of Chicago (Chicago, IL 60637-5418)

Research and writing leading to a book on the cultural legacy of electrification in Brazil from the 1930s to the present.

“Against the Current: Electricity and Cultural Production in Brazil’s Anthropocene” investigates the multiple ways in which Brazilian artistic practices have shaped perceptions of the production and consumption of electrical energy and, inversely, how electricity has enabled, affected, and occasionally destroyed cultural objects. It argues that, far from merely praising electrification as a gateway to modernity, artists across the decades have addressed this process in a highly skeptical and ironic fashion, thus providing a powerful critique of the developmentalist paradigm that persisted across generations in twentieth-century Brazilian politics. Ranging from the 1930s to the present, this book analyzes a wide array of works of literature, film, visual arts, theater, and music that provide a comprehensive understanding of how cultural production has addressed the deep changes associated with the Anthropocene.