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
Webcast Archive
Nov 7, 2018
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 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 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
May 2, 2018
The State of Democracy in Brazil
6 p.m. – 8 p.m. Location Change: Joukowsky Forum
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
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.
Mar 19, 2018
Kleber Amancio - Conformities and Silences: The Representation of Blacks in the Brazilian Visual Arts (1637-1930)
This talk intends to be a narrative about the Black presence in the Brazilian visual arts. My purpose is to identify “if”, “when” and “how” these subjects appear in art works. To achieve this target it is necessary to investigate this presence/absence without losing sight of the respective historical context. From Franz Post to Di Cavalcanti, passing through other artists like Jean Baptiste Debret, Antonio Rafael Pinto Bandeira, Henrique Bernardelli, Tarsila do Amaral, etc., the moments of silence and representations are both revealing to historians. Dissimilar works like Alegoria da lei do ventre livre (1878) by Miguel Navarro y Cañizares, Redenção de Cam (1895) by Modesto Brocos and Retrato de Preto (1906) by Arthur Timotheo da Costa show us that these pieces, more than reproducing discussions that take place in society, are rather a type of thought that through material means gains concreteness; creates patterns of behavior, postulates interpretations and effectively acts upon reality.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Feb 22, 2018
Sonia Roncador - White Trash à brasileira: Immigration and the “Problem of Acclimatization” in Nineteenth-Century Rio
Drawing from mid nineteenth-century newspaper crônicas and medical pamphlets on European immigrants’ uncertain acclimatization in miasmatic (toxic) Rio’s inner city, my talk challenges these immigrants’ “unconditional whiteness,” and ultimately proposes to revise the paradigm of whitening framing discourses of immigration in Brazil.
4p.m. – 5:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Feb 7, 2018
Ana Lucia Araujo - Memory of Slavery and The Problem of Reparations in Brazil
Over the last two decades, like other former slave societies, Brazil witnessed the rise of several initiatives memorializing slavery in the public space. Although the construction of monuments and memorials, and the organization of commemorative activities associated with the slave past can be considered as a form of symbolic reparations for slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, since the emergence of the abolitionist movement some social actors have emphasized the need of material and financial reparations to former slaves and their descendants. By making connections with the international context, this talk will explore the dialogues between memory of slavery and the demands of financial and material reparations of slavery in Brazil.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Dec 7, 2017
Okezi Otovo - Black Maternity as Political Risk: Abolition, Reproduction, and Republicanism Compounded
Brazil’s process of abolition holds unique lessons for historians of slavery and emancipation because the nation experienced its long stumble towards abolition, the fall of monarchy, the rise of liberal republicanism, and the dominance of a plantation coffee economy concurrently. These significant turn-of-the twentieth-century shifts meant Brazilians debated, battled, and negotiated the end of slavery in a specific national context of state building with particular international implications. In this chapter, I argue that black motherhood as experience and cultural imaginary provided a vital thread from the hierarchies of a slave society to post-abolition, post-imperial race relations. Through their reproductive and productive labor, black women held a particular type of social power, which was simultaneously feared, acknowledged, and undermined. My goal is to theorize the immediate consequences of the parallel processes of abolition and republicanism through the discourses of social medicine and the experiences of Afro-Bahian mothers. Yet both the medical and political communities in Bahia recognized that black maternity could be as much a disruptive as a cohesive thread. In a symbolic and an actual way, black reproductive bodies had the capacity to produce both continuity and change. My invocation with the research is to read the fervor over reproduction, not as exclusively a form of exclusionary politics, but also as recognition of the absolute centrality of Afro-Bahian maternity to a transitioning state and society.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street
Nov 9, 2017
George Avelino - Electoral Concentration in Brazil, 1994-2014
The seminar will present the index of measuring candidates' electoral concentration, suggested by Avelino, Biderman e Silva (2011), which could be used in any type of electoral system. The analysis will cover all candidates to a seat in Brazilian Federal Chamber of Representatives for elections between 1994 and 2014. Results showed in a systematic way that successful candidates are less concentrated than unsuccessful ones; a finding that contradicts approaches that assume the predominance of the personal votes in Brazilian proportional elections.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Nov 7, 2017
Resistance to Black Genocide in the Americas
A four-person panel discussing resistance to Black genocide and the resilience of the Movement for Black Lives across the Americas including Douglas Belchior of Uneafro-Brasil and the Brazilian Black Movement, Kleaver Cruz, creator of The Black Joy Project, Zaire Dinzey-Flores, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University; and Mary Miller Flowers of Open Society Foundations in Washington, D.C.. Keisha-Khan Perry of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University will moderate.
6:30p.m. – 8:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Nov 6, 2017
Douglas Belchior - Uneafro-Brasil: Education and the Struggle for Equality and Social Justice
Douglas Belchior will speak about Uneafro-Brasil, an educational organization of which he is the founder, to examine the potential for radical education to fuel social change and advance the cause of racial justice.
6p.m. – 8p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street
Nov 2, 2017
Falina Enriquez - The Mark of a Business: Musical Professionalization in Recife, Pernambuco
This paper focuses on how a specific set of musicians in Recife, Pernambuco present themselves as professionals in order to enhance their social status and better weather the vicissitudes of the music industry and more specifically, the state sponsored music scene. What kinds of semiotic, practical, and legal strategies do these musicians employ to construe themselves as professionals and develop what one of my interlocutors described as “a marca de uma empresa” (the mark of a business)? I use this ethnographic case study to argue that branding is an increasingly integral element of musical professionalization, which is shaping how musicians position themselves within the social order and in relation to the state government. I investigate this example as a means of evaluating how individuals are currently negotiating economic instability and other socioeconomic shifts that scholars have commonly attributed to neoliberal policies and ideologies.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 26, 2017
Miqueias Mugge - Militias and the Politics of War in 19th Century Brazil
In this talk, Professor Mugge scrutinizes the social origins and political articulations of Brazil’s 19th century war elite, and focuses on the practices and alliances of forty National Guard officers who commanded 30,000 militiamen in the meridional province of Rio Grande do Sul from 1845 to 1873. These militias were pivotal to the Brazilian war machine and provided the majority of troops for the war against Paraguay, which represented a milestone in the country’s military and infrastructural development and also the beginning of the decline of the Monarchy. Close attention to workings of these peripheral Senhores da Guerra (War Lords) helps us to understand how the modern Brazilian State was formed in and through contexts of emergency and war, and to illuminate the ways in which local worlds have been militarized.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Oct 12, 2017
Amilcar Pereira - "For an Authentic Racial Democracy!": The Brazilian Black Movement's Struggles in Schools and Curricula
This talk will highlight one of the most important aspects of the Brazilian black movement since the late nineteenth century: the struggle not only for access to educational institutions but also for curricula substantively inclusive of Africa and its Diaspora. In 1978, the Movimento Negro Unificado—MNU (Unified Black Movement) drafted its Carta de Princípios (Charter of Principles), which called for the reassessment of the role of blacks in Brazil’s history. Since 2001, when the adoption of quotas for Brazilians of African descent in universities became a frequent topic of the discussion in the media and within different sectors of society, debates about racial issues in Brazil have become very lively. President Lula’s signing Law 10,639 in January 2003 was a seminal event. It made the teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian histories and cultures mandatory throughout the Brazilian educational system, including both public and private schools. This significant development was primarily the result of efforts of the black movement, which had exposed the existence of racial discrimination and struggled for better conditions for African descendants in Brazil during the twentieth century.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street
Sep 26, 2017
Country at a Crossroads: A Roundtable on Brazilian Politics
Three Brazilian scholars -Vera Paiva, Claúdio Beato and Abner Sótenos- will comment on the current political situation in Brazil and offer their perspectives for the country's future. Professor James N. Green will moderate.
7:30p.m. – 9:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Apr 19, 2017
Anna Mester – Brazil's (Re)Encounter with "Africa"
12 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. Joukowsky Forum
Apr 19, 2017
Anna Mester - Brazil’s (Re)Encounter with “Africa”
This presentation will explore “Africa” as a cultural and historical construct and the museum as a space which discerns, creates, and writes historical discourse of and about “Africa” in the present. I will study two exhibitions A nova mão afro-brasileira and África ancestral e contemporânea: as artes do Benin to understand how the museum serves as a space of discursive and historical contention for the (re)writing of Black histories across the South Atlantic.
12p.m. – 1:30p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.
Apr 13, 2017
Joel Wolfe - O Grande Brasil: A Spatial History of the Making of a Nation
Professor Wolfe's Thomas E. Skidmore memorial lecture reinterprets modern Brazilian history by using geography as its starting point. Almost every key event, practice, and social arrangement in Brazil was fundamentally shaped by the nation's massive size.
7p.m. – 9p.m. Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.