RCAAP Repository

Starting from a set of divorce proceedings opened by Western African women, known as pretas (or negras) minas, in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century, I intend, in this article, to discuss how the associations between color, social condition, ethnic identity and certain stereotypes and behaviors, such as notions of honor and honesty, were essential – sometimes even decisive – for the development of such actions. In this process, we will observe as judges, priests, lawyers, prosecutors and also slaves and freedmen observing – and sharing – certain codes and signs of identification of the African populations that lived in the city of Rio.

The article intends to explore the centrality of the recognition of the figure of the victim for understanding the legacies of colonial violence and the imagination of alternative narratives and futures. In this perspective, we seek in our text to understand, based on the contributions of Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the importance of the process of recognition of victims, especially the colonial ones, in the production of a social theory engaged in overcoming policies of forgetfulness and valorization of experiences, knowledge and practices of historically silenced collectivities and subjects. Focusing on the criticisms that surround the Eurocentric and hegemonic version of Modernity (DUSSEL, 1993), the material and subjective heritages of the colonial arrangements (QUIJANO, 2005) and the possibilities of a transgressive sociology and its consequent Southern Epistemology (SOUSA SANTOS, 2010), the recognition of the victim’s figure and his experiences emerges in contemporary social theory as significant processes for the validation of silenced memories and the imagination of unthinking futures.

In the light of the debate on compulsory voting in the National Constituent Convention of Uruguay of 1916-1917, this text reconstructs the ascendancy of a republican ideology in Uruguayan politics, in counterpoint with different liberal positions. Without major semantic or discursive forcings, the text analyzes the existing connections between the positions for and against compulsory voting and the republican and liberal political legacies that have been encouraging much of the conventional debates on the citizen matter and its recent reactivation. The article also allows us to glimpse the attraction that the policy of ideas exerted in the foundational debates of Uruguayan democracy, as well as the normative and political relevance of the deliberative exchanges held in that constitutional body.

Este trabajo pretende hacer dialogar algunas imágenes de la serie Cicatriz, de Rosângela Rennó, con la escrita de/sobre la cárcel en diferentes momentos de la historia de la literatura brasileña, a la luz del concepto de colonización en su sentido lato, en relación con los conceptos de biopolítica (Foucault) y necropolítica (Mbembe). Representando momentos dictatoriales diversos, se analizan, bajo el enfoque de la imagen de la cicatriz/tatuaje asociada a la de la escrita, escenas de Memórias do Cárcere, de Graciliano Ramos (1954), Cartas da prisão (1977), O canto na fogueira (1977) y Batismo de Sangue (2006), de Frei Betto, además de la trilogía de Luiz Alberto Mendes: Memórias de um sobrevivente (2001), Às cegas (2005) y Confissões de um homem livre (2015).

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In this article, we review a series of studies on social representations of national history carried out among young people in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Portugal, and East Timor. In each one of these countries, data were collected to examine the social representations of national history and the emotions associated with the most important events, among which the colonization process and the wars of liberation stood out. The results point to ambiguities, ambivalences, and contradictions in the social representations of history that “binds” Portuguese-speaking countries. In general, one observes a “mismatch” of memories about the colonial past. This mismatch of memories about the “common past” is particularly evident when we compare the historical memories of the young Angolans and of the Portuguese youth: while the Portuguese participants highlight the discoveries, the Angolan participants highlight the slavery, the slave trade, and the massacres. Borrowing the expression of Mia Couto (2009), globally the results mirror Luso(A)fonias and demonstrate how challenging is the active listening and engagement with of Other.

The Spanish travelers who visited Japan between 1868 and 1936 rejected the static and stereotyped image of the country, in which they saw reflected the similar caricature that the Europeans had made of nineteenth-century Spain. They also discussed — before 1898 — whether Japan could be a threat or an opportunity for the Philippines. But, above all, they made an effort to offer a dynamic vision of the country, pointing out possible reasons for its vertiginous socio-economic transformation. In any case, they did not believe that the Japanese modernization model could be transferred to Spain: although they admired its amazing achievements, they also identified important problems and limitations.

This article analyzes the controversies that arose between representatives of the Catholic Church and municipal councilors of Santa Maria, in the interior of Rio Grande do Sul, for the decision to demolish or not a church. On one side were the local priest and the bishop engaged in the preservation of the Catholic building; on the other, city councilors seeking the endorsement of the provincial government and the Church itself to demolish the temple, arguing that their “miserable appearance” was shameful for the modern city they wanted to build. To reflect on this disagreement, which occurred between 1884 and 1888, we must first analyze what led the matrix to arrive at its ruinous aspect. For this, we will use the correspondence exchanged between the City Council of Santa Maria and the provincial government. In a second point of this article, it will be necessary to explain the meanings of that church and the ideas that were behind the attempt to overthrow it. We believe that the expectation of the arrival of the railway to the city caused the councilmen to take controversial positions, generating tension with the representatives of the Catholic Church and the provincial government. As a general context, we have the relations between religion, politics and modernity in the second half of the nineteenth century, revealing conflicts between Church and State at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Republic.

The aim of this article is to discuss the importance of the field of Archeology of Repression and Resistance, in Brazilian and Latin American contexts, contextualizing the emergence of the field based on its historical context and contemporary discussions in the field of Heritage Studies and Archeology of the Present. The paper emphasizes interpretive changes in all three fields, relating to new social actors and innovative views about heritage. This applies to the study and heritage use of sites relating to traumatic remembrance (POLLAK, 1989; JELIN, 2001), pleading for truth and justice.

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In 1953, in the middle of the Cold War, Time-Life’s US-based Life magazine launched a Spanish-language version aimed at getting closer to the Latin American public, spreading the American way, Americanism and promote anti communism in the subcontinent. The period was notable by a series of organizations and treaties with the propose of regulating inter-American relations, under the hegemony of the United States. It is also characterized by the implementation of state agencies and programs designed to promote a cultural policy intended to achieve global hegemony, a strategy called “psychological warfare”. Life en Español magazine, directed by Henry Luce, integrated the wide network of collaborators who helped to realize this politicalcultural project of the United States. In this sense, from the theoretical perspective of Soft Power by Joseph Nye, the article discusses the relation of the publication in the Spanish language with the North American strategic objectives in the cultural field.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the relationship between two modes of acquiring and professing the culture that compete in the Argentine intellectual universe during the first decades of the twentieth century, namely the private sphere of cultural production and the official university, linked to the State. The objective is to understand how the wide network of literary journals that characterizes Buenos Aires of this context developed in relation of tension with the professionalization of the University that was accentuated from the Reformation of Cordoba in 1918. In the end, this article aims to shed light on the possibility of approaching the intellectual field from the inspiration of Carl Schorske in Vienna Fin du Siècle: considering that intellectual and cultural phenomena do not succeed or confront themselves only as consistent unities (diachronic) but rather, that they are related, in a synchronic way, to the other cultural and political manifestations of their time.

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The present work intends to discuss, through the analysis of sources, how military discourse, at two different times, kept among its characteristics an articulation between the notions of excesses, exception and order. In defense of a vague but active conception of order, they engaged in repressive processes that organized portions of the State for the systematic use of violence. These processes appear in their discourse sometimes as excesses committed at the end of the system, sometimes as legitimate exceptions to the legal framework, since the defense of order sometimes requires the use of legally unforeseen resources, particularly when the situation is analogous to a war. The speeches that allow us to perceive this articulation were sought in the discussions around of the State Armed Forces in the 1987-8 constituent and, thereafter, in the statements given to the National Truth Commission (CNV). Transition and transitional justice appear here challenged by the narratives that justify, at one time and another, the continued use of violence.

This paper analyzes the movie The Nun and The Torturer (1983), directed by Ozualdo R. Candeias, which approaches the abuses imposed on a religious woman during the hardest years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, at the same time exploring the sexual encounters between other imprisoned side characters. Since the movie was censored by the Public Diversion Censorship Division (DCDP) in the final years of the dictatorship, its censoring process is also unraveled in this article, which exposes the connections and mismatches between moral and political censorships in the period of transition to democracy.

This article intends to analyze transnationally black carnival performances of the cordões and canboulay bands in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, in the Post-Abolition period. The aim is to understand the collective strategies of black subjects to build autonomy spaces and claim and occupy public spaces in contexts of hegemony of racialized and racist views. This comparative perspective allows us to reflect on Post-Abolition as an historical Atlantic problem, approaching the Caribbean and the South Atlantic. To do so, we will use primary sources of archives in Rio de Janeiro and London, especially police and government documents, at the National Archives, and at the National Archives of Brazil, and newspapers, magazines and memorialists, archived in the British Library and the Biblioteca Nacional do Brasil. We conclude that the creators of the cordões and canboulay bands produced dissident black performances and communicated to broad and varied audiences identities that combined Afro-American practices and expressions of resistance to attacks by public forces, while reinforcing their humanity against stereotypes about being black in the post-abolition of the Americas, whether in colonial context or in an independent republic.

This article intends to investigate and to problematize about the different levels of proximity and similarity of the intellectual and political paths of two Latin American thinkers: Mário Pedrosa in Brazil and José Carlos Mariátegui in Peru. They are probably part of the same generation of Latin American militants and intellectuals who sought to interpret reality critically, translated into common trajectories of research methodologies and practices, theoretical reflection, and political activities, overcoming the narrow limits of economic and cultural development in their countries. In this sense, reference is made to this investigation not only in the historiographical debates, but in the dialogue the most significant correspondences and works of Mariátegui and Pedrosa. After a brief biographical and comparative exposition of the two authors and their political activities, it is intended to expose the points of contact of their reflections and activities in the fields of economics and political thought and their common contributions in the field of cultural criticism.

After declaring itself a cooperative republic, Guyana underwent two remarkable processes: internally, it nationalized the production of bauxite and sugar, strengthening the power of the State over the population; externally, sought to play a leading role in the non-aligned countries and in the Third World, with the support of Cuba and China. In a context of economic crisis and territorial dispute with Venezuela, on the one hand, and several socialist movements in the Caribbean and Central America, on the other, the country got a high-level partnership from Brazil, guaranteeing commercial release and at the same time political support. Analyzing the documentation that the foreign ministers produced for the analysis of presidential generals, I try to analyze how Guyana has moved on the international scene, in view of Brazilian diplomacy and its capacity to absorb this complicated country in its zone of influence. I emphasize that this is an unpublished documentary series, a precious resource for research on Guyana in Brazil.

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