Thursday, March 5, 2015
12:00pm – 1:30pm
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
This talk deals with the relationship of Brazilian and Latin American artists with the French Communist cultural press and the international communist movement during the early Cold War. The French Communist press played an important role in disseminating the work of Latin American artists, especially those who lived in Paris. Some of them rose to prominence within communist networks, such as the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado. Experience in Europe influenced the work of these authors, especially Amado, to whom this talk devotes most attention. He was the Brazilian artist who benefitted the most from the internationalization of his work while exiled in Paris, paving the way also for the dissemination of works by foreign friends in Brazil and Brazilians abroad. This talk also examines the various dilemmas of communist artists at the height of Stalinism.