The Making of Modern Brazil

FAIN: FS-267176-19

San Diego State University Foundation (San Diego, CA 92182-1931)
Erika Robb Larkins (Project Director: February 2019 to present)
Kathryn Margaret Sanchez (Co Project Director: September 2019 to present)

A three-week seminar for higher education faculty on race and place in contemporary Brazilian history and culture.

This seminar will introduce scholars to the social, racial and cultural diversity of Brazil. We will discuss the aftermath of colonization and slavery in the Americas, the emergence of racial ideologies and contrasting images of urban and rural spaces. Through an exploration of scholarly sources like films, music, ethnographic texts, fiction and historical images and documents, we will examine topics such as modernity, racial politics, and urban spaces, along with social and cultural marginality, gender, class, and ethnicity. Participants will learn to include Brazil in their own courses and research by producing a module/syllabus or draft research project reflecting the themes and issues discussed. Beyond expanding and deepening the scholars' knowledge and understanding of Brazil, the seminar will enable colleagues to develop new insights for interdisciplinary teaching extending beyond Latin America, as many themes are applicable to developing areas of the world and the United States.

Associated Products

George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art Database
Author: Heather Shirey
Abstract: The Urban Art Mapping Research Project operates a George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database, which documents examples of street art from around the world that have emerged since Floyd’s killing as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality. Through the seminar, the participant was able to incorporate more material from Brazil into the database, most notably work by the São Paulo collective Nós Artivistas. She also connected with these artists personally—the seminar provided an excellent framework for understanding their work.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://georgefloydstreetart.omeka.net/
Primary URL Description: The Urban Art Mapping Research Project operates a George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database, which documents examples of street art from around the world that have emerged since Floyd’s killing as part of an ongoing movement demanding social justice and equality.
Access Model: open access

Mapping Covid-19 Street Art (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Mapping Covid-19 Street Art
Author: Heather Shirley
Abstract: MAPPING COVID-19 STREET ART: Artists and writers producing work in the streets – including tags, graffiti, murals, stickers, and other installations on walls, pavement, and signs – are in a unique position to respond quickly and effectively in a moment of crisis. Street art’s ephemeral nature serves to reveal very immediate and sometimes fleeting responses, often in a manner that can be raw and direct. At the same time, in the context of a crisis, street art also has the potential to transform urban space and foster a sustained political dialogue, reaching a wide audience, particularly when museums and galleries are shuttered. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising to see an explosion of street art around the world created in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic, even as our movement in public spaces is limited due to public health concerns. Through the seminar, the author was able to incorporate more material from Brazil into the database, most notably work by the São Paulo collective Nós Artivistas. The author also connected with these artists personally—the seminar really gave the participant a good framework for understanding their work.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://covid19streetart.omeka.net/
Primary URL Description: MAPPING COVID-19 STREET ART: Artists and writers producing work in the streets – including tags, graffiti, murals, stickers, and other installations on walls, pavement, and signs – are in a unique position to respond quickly and effectively in a moment of crisis. Street art’s ephemeral nature serves to reveal very immediate and sometimes fleeting responses, often in a manner that can be raw and direct. At the same time, in the context of a crisis, street art also has the potential to transform urban space and foster a sustained political dialogue, reaching a wide audience, particularly when museums and galleries are shuttered. For all of these reasons, it is not surprising to see an explosion of street art around the world created in response to the Covid-19 global pandemic, even as our movement in public spaces is limited due to public health concerns.
Access Model: Open access

Black Women, Media Imagery, and Representation in the Global South (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Black Women, Media Imagery, and Representation in the Global South
Author: De Anna Reese
Abstract: This module is an exploration of the social and cultural history of Brazil with a focus on Black women and gendered forms of anti-blackness within popular culture. Under stereotypical depictions as maids, wet nurses, exotic mulattas, or prostitutes, Black Brazilian women are subject to controlling images that racialize, hypersexualize, and objectify their features and bodies alongside a nationalist discourse of Brazil as a colorblind utopia. By examining the place of Black women vis-à-vis Brazilian hierarchy and social practice, the module will address how Black women negotiate, challenge, and resist these misrepresentations through artistic, community, and political expression. (Syllabus is available under supplementary materials)
Year: 2020
Audience: Undergraduate

Abstracted Resistance: Third-Worldism in Rubem Valentim's Afro-Brazilian Symbolism, 1963-1966 (Article)
Title: Abstracted Resistance: Third-Worldism in Rubem Valentim's Afro-Brazilian Symbolism, 1963-1966
Author: Abigail Lapin Dardashti
Abstract: This essay examines the research, drawings, and paintings of the Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim produced during his trip to Western Europe and Senegal from 1963–66. Valentim’s work has recently become a paradigm of Brazilian geometric abstraction. Scholars have largely interpreted the symbolism in his paintings as deriving exclusively from Brazilian African-derived religions and as divorced from contemporaneous politics. Building on this literature, I explore the political dimensions and multifaceted articulations of abstraction in Valentim’s five notebooks from his trip to Europe, which have only come to light in the past few years and are the foundation of his painting practice. I argue that his study of African and Polynesian objects from the British Museum as well as his abstract notebook drawings highlight his private support of Third-Worldism, which promoted solidarity amongst countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in favor of national liberation and against global capitalism. Valentim’s time abroad coincided with the Brazilian military coup in April 1964, whose regime combatted progressive politics like Third-Worldism. While his notebook drawings contained politicized words opposing the dictatorship, the resulting paintings are devoid of them, which qualified them for regime-sponsored exhibitions like the Brazilian display at the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar and veiled the artist’s private resistance embedded in his geometry. The true intentions of his abstract visual language, revealed in the notebooks, were unintelligible to the regime, making his work a contested landscape of political conversation.
Year: 2021
Primary URL Description: Article is accepted and forthcoming.
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Art Journal
Publisher: Art Journal

“Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil” (Article)
Title: “Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil”
Author: Chris Schmidt
Abstract: “Tapestried Landscape: The Queer Influence of Roberto Burle Marx on Elizabeth Bishop’s Brazil” This essay examines queer affinities in the Brazilian landscapes of Elizabeth Bishop and the landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx. It considers how these two artists, working across national borders and artistic mediums, realized their similar perspectives on mediated nature and the relationship to aesthetic representation, queer identity, and ecology. In this essay, I suggest that Burle Marx’s aesthetic influence, and his personal entanglement with Bishop and her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, illuminate two major Bishop poems: “Brazil, January 1, 1502” from her 1965 volume Questions of Travel, and “Crusoe in England” from Geography III (1976). In the presciently ecocritical “Brazil,” Bishop complicates the commonplace view that tropical landscape is a wild and untouched first nature by highlighting the landscape forms the Portuguese projected onto it. The poem’s alternation between nature and its visual representation in painting and tapestry links the poem to Burle Marx’s distinct practices of landscape design and fine art painting, and his philosophy of landscape as a form of “artificial nature.” In the essay’s second section, I establish Macedo Soares and Burle Marx’s fractious collaboration on the design of Flamengo Park, which informs Bishop’s ambivalent descriptions of tropical landscape in her later poems. Finally, I draw a connection between Bishop’s obliquely autobiographical “Crusoe” and her image of Burle Marx as botanist–explorer in the Darwin tradition. The queer dimension of Bishop’s poem echoes Burle Marx’s collecting expeditions, especially those he undertook with the architect Rino Levi. Alongside Bishop’s lifetime of reading scientific adventure accounts, Burle Marx’s real-world plant expeditions offer the poet a model of queer botanizing.
Year: 2020
Primary URL Description: Article is accepted and forthcoming.
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Modernism/Modernity
Publisher: Modernism/modernity

“Geographies IV-VII.” (Article)
Title: “Geographies IV-VII.”
Author: Chris Schmidt
Abstract: "Geographies IV-VII" is a sequence of poetic erasures that highlights and questions Elizabeth Bishop's use of place names in her poetry. The sequence is meant to provide a picture of Bishop as a student of Brazilian place and language. In the process, the sequence suggests how naming and renaming may abet the colonial and capitalist territorializing of land into property. In an iterative sequence of four page-spreads, I compile all the place names that Bishop used in her Collected Poetry, then reproduce exactly their coordinates, as if on a map, on the recto and verso sides of codex page-spreads. I place all the places names from the Northern hemisphere onto one page–spread, and all the names from the Southern hemisphere (which are exclusively in Brazil) on another spread. In the two subsequent spreads, I perform some selective translation to understand which Brazilian place names Bishop translated from Portuguese into English—and why. In the final page-spread, I isolate Brazilian place names that either retain or replace known indigenous place names. In my research process note, I ask why Bishop translates some Brazilian place names into English and not others; and raise questions about how name-giving encodes power, and in some cases resists it.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://https://www.du.edu/denverquarterly/current/index.html
Primary URL Description: This article was published in the last issue of Denver Quarterly, but the website has not yet been updated.
Access Model: Open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Denver Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 20 pp. 82-91
Publisher: Denver Quarterly

Introduction to Black Diaspora (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Introduction to Black Diaspora
Author: Jaira Harrington
Abstract: This course introduces undergraduates to Africans in the Diaspora. Through the seminar, I was able to integrate Brazil through film, art, and culture.
Year: 2021
Audience: Undergraduate

“Authoritarianism and Brazilian Cinema: A Discussion.” (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Authoritarianism and Brazilian Cinema: A Discussion.”
Author: Gonzalo Aguiar Malosetti
Abstract: A roundtable discussion on Brazilian cinema during the military dictatorship in comparison to the present day.
Date Range: November 19, 2020
Location: virtually: Florida Atlantic University, November 19 5-6pm

“A Place Where Death Is Too Real: Racial Subaltern Subjects and Right-Wing Killing Fantasies in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau” (Book Section)
Title: “A Place Where Death Is Too Real: Racial Subaltern Subjects and Right-Wing Killing Fantasies in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s and Juliano Dornelles’s Bacurau”
Author: Gonzalo Aguiar Malosetti
Abstract: This book chapter explores racial violence present in the recent Brazilian film BACURAU (Dirs. Kleber Mendonça filho and Juliano Dornelles) through the political, right-wing, dictatorship of Brazil and its legacy.
Year: 2021
Publisher: Iberoamericana-Vervuert
Book Title: Violencia, memoria, y resistencia en el cine, la literatura y el performance latinoamericanos de los siglos XX y XXI

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