Dec 5, 2018
Fábio de Sá e Silva ─ A New Republic of Lawyers? Legal Careers, State Power, and Political Change in Contemporary Brazil
12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Joukowsky Forum
Event Archive 2018
Nov 28, 2018
Zachary Morgan - Neither Slave nor Citizen: State Control of Brazilian Free Blacks in the 19th Century
The study of Brazilian race and slavery in the nineteenth century is too often framed by the structure of abolitionist legislation; first that applied to the cessation of the Atlantic slave trade leading up to 1850, and then to the abolition of slavery itself before the passage of the Golden Law in 1888. Traditional and contemporary scholarship points to a lack of segregationist law as central to understanding Brazil’s post abolition racial hierarchy. Given the comparatively large size of Brazil’s free black population in the first decade of the nineteenth century (free Afro-Brazilians represented a plurality, a larger population than whites or enslaved Africans) my current research examines how state supported institutions such as orphanages, the police, and the military, alongside regional and national legislation, targeted and controlled the lives of free Afro-Brazilians before and after final abolition.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Nov 14, 2018
William Rohter - From General Rondon to Captain Bolsonaro: The Brazilian Military in Historical Perspective
12p.m. – 2p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street
Nov 13, 2018
Screening of "Grazing the Amazon" (Sob a pata do bói, 2018) with Paulo Barreto of IMAZON
6p.m. – 8p.m. Rhode Island Hall 108, Joukowsky Institute, 60 George Street
Nov 7, 2018
Nov 7, 2018
A Conversation with Brazilian Musical Legend Tom Zé
6:30p.m. – 8:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Nov 7, 2018
Hal Langfur ─ Pedagogies of Racial Violence in Colonial Brazil
12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Location Change: McKinney Conference Room
Nov 6, 2018
Bolsonaro, Brazil's Next President: A Teach-In
Please join the Brazil Initiative for a teach-in in the wake of Brazil's heavily contested presidential election and the struggles that lay ahead.
7p.m. – 9p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 24, 2018
Celso Thomas Castilho - The Black Press and Trans-Atlantic Literary Genres: An Intellectual History of Recife's 'Galeria dos homens ilustres de cor,' ca. 1876
This paper analyzes a rather rare type of newspaper in imperial Brazil—a self-described “Black” periodical—through the lens of intellectual history. I focus on the "Gallery" that appeared in O Homem, a newspaper in Recife, as a way to think about how such interventions that were about the politics of race and abolition also need to be considered as constitutive of a broader field of trans-Atlantic literary exchange; that the histories of Brazilian slavery and blackness indeed compel us to rethink the terms and forms through which the "illustrious men" genre evolved in the Atlantic world.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 23, 2018
Reighan Gillam – Animating Racism: Irony and Images of Dissent in Afro-Brazilian Media
Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines questions related to race, representation, and activism in Brazil. She earned her BA in Anthropology from the University of Virginia and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. She is currently completing her book Visualizing Black Lives: Afro-Brazilian Activist and Alternative Media, an ethnography of the ways in which Afro-Brazilians produce visual images and narratives that are more faithful to their everyday experiences and lives than those images found in mainstream Brazilian media. Her work has appeared in scholarly journals including Communication, Culture, and Critique, Feminist Media Studies, Black Camera, and Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.
12p.m. – 2p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 22, 2018
Pedro Mandagará - Native Brazilian Literatures and Ecocriticism
When Western cultures represent indigenous peoples, they usually use some clichés. A favorite one is that native peoples live “in harmony” with “Nature”. Cultural perception usually begs the question of what this harmony means or of what “Nature” is. In this lecture I will investigate what “Nature” and related concepts mean in the thought of four Native Brazilian authors: Graça Graúna, Kaká Werá, Ailton Krenak and Davi Kopenawa. All of them write and speak politically, defending positions we could call “ecological”. However, their “ecological” visions presuppose different versions of the relations between humans and the several natural worlds. This lecture presupposes a current debate on the role of “Nature” that goes on in the fields of ecocriticism (in authors such as Timothy Morton) and anthropology (Viveiros de Castro and Phillippe Descola, among others).
11a.m. – 12p.m. George Monteiro Conference Room, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies Department, 159 George Street.
Oct 17, 2018
Stanley Gacek - The Global Labor Movement and its Support for Brazilian Democracy and Worker Rights in 2018
Stanley Gacek, Senior Advisor for Global Strategies at the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), is a North American labor lawyer who has followed the labor movement and labor politics in Brazil for 37 years. He will provide a trade union and pro-worker perspective on the current state of Brazilian labor relations, reviewing the most recent labor law reform and assessing its drastic effects on Brazilian workers and their unions. He also will discuss how the Brazilian labor movement can respond to these challenges.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 16, 2018
Screening of "The Trial" (O Processo, 2018) with Director Maria Ramos
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for Best Feature Film at Visions du Reel and at DocumentaMadrid, THE TRIAL is a behind-the-scenes look at the impeachment trial of Brazil's first female President. The film – a tale of betrayal and corruption - witnesses the profound political crisis and the collapse of the democratic institutions.
7p.m. – 9:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 15, 2018
Ruben Oliven - Brazil Circles The Globe: Five Centuries Exchanging Commodities, Ideas, and Cultural Practices
Join guest speaker Ruben Oliven as he leads a discussion in the Sawyer Seminar Series on Brazil's history and impact in a global context.
4p.m. – 6p.m. McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 12–14, 2018
CineBrasil 2018
CineBrasil is an annual film festival that highlights some of the best works in recent Brazilian cinema. CineBrasil this year will include documentaries and feature length films of great artistic quality, some of which are virtually unknown outside of Brazil and touch on subjects such as political protest, queerness and family, labor relations and life in favelas. Tickets for each individual film are available on Eventbrite and the links are listed below as part of the schedule. If the films are sold out, there will still be some seats available in addition to seats freed up before the screenings. Eventbrite ticket holders and others: Please arrive at least ten minutes early to secure seating. Note that though many trailers do not have English subtitles, all of the films will be subtitled.
Granoff Center, Martinos Auditorium, 154 Angell Street
Oct 10, 2018
Yuko Miki - Where are the "Three Races"? Rethinking the Racial Narratives of Brazilian History
Brazil's national identity is imagined as a mixture of the "three races" of Indian, Black, and White. Indians, however, are relegated to a colonial past. In this talk, Yuko Miki questions the widespread idea, perpetuated by many scholars, of indigenous "disappearance" that paved the way for the birth of Latin America's largest black nation. By exploring the interconnected histories of black and indigenous Brazilians after independence, Miki argues that the exclusion and inequality of indigenous and African-descended people became embedded in the very construction of Brazil's remarkably "inclusive" nationhood. To understand the full scope of central themes in Latin American history - race and national identity, unequal citizenship, popular politics, and slavery and abolition - one must engage the histories of both the African diaspora and the indigenous Americas.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 3, 2018
Sep 12, 2018
Jean Segata - Working with Mosquitoes: An Ethnography of Public Policies for the Control of Epidemics in Brazil and Argentina
Jean Segata is a professor of Anthropology and Public Polices at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - UFRGS (Porto Alegre, Brazil). He teaches cyberculture, human-animal relations and environmental policies. He holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University for the Development of Alto Vale do Itajaí - UNIDAVI (Rio do Sul, Brazil), and a MSc and PhD degree in Social Anthropology at Federal University of Santa Catarina - UFSC (Florianópolis, Brasil). He researched new digital technologies through the ethnographic studies in a computer lab and on the Orkut focusing on subjectivity and local and global entanglements. He also had an ethnographic study about sharing medical technologies between humans and animals in pet stores and veterinary clinics focusing on the diagnostics and treatments for psychiatric dogs. Currently, he has been researching public policies based in modeling softwares and DNA viral analysis to control sanitary emergencies related to Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in Brazil and Argentina.
12p.m. – 2p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
May 3, 2018
Spring Film Series 2018 - Divinas Divas (Divine Divas, Leandra Leal, 2016)
“Divinas Divas offers a look into the lives of the pioneer generation of Brazil’s transvestite performers and drag artists of the 1960s. Using archival footage and performances, as well as recent interviews with the performers, Leal offers a view into their lives and how, by simply performing, they were challenging the conservatism of the time.” (IndieWire)
7:30p.m. – 9:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
May 2, 2018
Apr 25, 2018
Allan da Rosa – Ancestrality, Imaginaries and Black Daily Life in São Paulo
12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Joukowsky Forum
Apr 19, 2018
Spring Film Series 2018 - Favela Gay (Rodrigo Felha, 2014)
“Favela Gay tells the story of eleven individuals in their own words. Living in eight slums (favelas) in Rio de Janeiro, these members of the LGBTQ community – two transgender women, a crossdressing man, a travesti (in South America, a person who was designated male at birth who has a feminine, transfeminine or femme gender identity) prostitute, a famous carnival dancer, two community activists, and even a young man who used to be transgender, but transitioned back – have fought prejudice and seen some of the most unsavoury sides of the city.” (Sounds and Colours)
7p.m. – 9p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Apr 19, 2018
Daryle Williams - Redeeming Ham, Again: Slave Emancipation, Race, and Fine Arts in Brazil
Among Latin Americanists, Redemption of Ham (Modesto Brocos y Gómez, 1895) is an arrestingly familiar artistic representation of race mixture in Brazil. The appeal of Brocos’ allegorical treatment of the enigmatic Old Testament tale known as the "Curse of Ham" is conventionally framed around the troubled history of racial thought and anti-black racism in post-emancipation Brazil. Paradoxically, Redemption remains thinly contextualized in the canvas’ immediate historical context of gradual abolition and Brocos’ experiences with fomerly enslaved black people. This talk looks anew at Redemption and its author to explore the entwined destinies of slave emancipation, race, and fine arts in the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas.
4p.m. – 5:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Apr 11, 2018
Bruno Carvalho - Imaginable Futures: Clarice Lispector, Brasília, and the Anthropocene
Often identified as edenic in the colonial era, Brazil was hailed as the "land of the future" by Stefan Zweig in 1941, and seen as "condemned to the modern" by Mário Pedrosa in the 1950s. The talk will discuss Brasília in the context of Brazilian imaginaries of the future, focusing on Clarice Lispector's writings about the city, from the early 1960s. Her fiction, full of foreclosed futures and resistance toward redemptive possibilities, will be read in light of contemporary debates about the Anthropocene.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Apr 5, 2018
Spring 2018 Film Series - Abrindo o Armário (Opening the Closet, Dario Menezes and Luis Abramo, 2016)
The film dives into the process of liberation and conquests of the gay movement in Brazil. Through interviews, archival images and artistic performances, the film shows how homosexuals from different generations faced resistance, conquered spaces and fought for the right to construct a political, social and collective identity. (Globo Filmes)
7:30p.m. – 9:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.