Culture, sustainability, and religious spaces are the themes of "Estudos Avançados" #103
The digital and printed versions of issue #103 of IEA's journal Estudos Avançados are available to be downloaded and purchased. It includes three dossiers: "Culture and Society," "Hybrids of Knowledge II," and "Religious Spaces II." The articles can also be accessed on the SciELO platform (Portuguese only).
According to the editor, Sérgio Adorno, "Culture and Society" contains texts that "revisit relevant themes of our contemporaneity." From different methodological perspectives applied to various thematic and conceptual territories, the dossier "seeks to approach the possible or perhaps even lost meanings of the present times."
Of the nine articles, seven address themes raised by the works of writers Carolina Maria de Jesus, Franz Kafka, Artur Azevedo, João Guimarães Rosa, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Hermann Block. The other two discuss political aspects involved in the language of Brazilian psychoanalysts and the political-cultural performance of the Brazilian-American Cultural Institute (BACI,) which operated in Washington from 1964 to 2007.
In "(Ob)scene and Spectacle in Carolina Maria de Jesus: Reflections from her Unpublished Manuscripts," Valéria Rosito, from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ,) reflects on the conflicts that de Jesus has faced from her professionalization as a writer with the publication of the best seller Quarto de Despejo.
According to Rosito, there is a "clash between a polished vision of the person of the favela (or favelada) as a first-person witness and a "reporter" as opposed to the prismatic desire of the author for creative writing disjointed from the references that were immediate."
Kafka is the subject of two articles. In "Belonging/Not-Belonging in Franz Kafka: An Example to Remember," Celeste Ribeiro-de-Sousa, from USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH), points out the decisive psychic, social, and historical circumstances that have led the author to include his particular feelings of "belonging/not-belonging" in his writings. Although there are many ways to explore the author's writings, the idea of "belonging/not-belonging" is presented as a key to understanding not only the man and the writer but also the texts he has written, according to Ribeiro-de-Sousa.
As part of a study on re-readings of the myth of Odysseus, the article "The Sirens that Keep Silent (or Not)," by Adelia Bezerra de Menezes, from the Institute of Language Studies at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), addresses the short story "The Silence of the Sirens," by Kafka, based on Walter Benjamin's ideas about the impossibility of traditional narrative due to the degradation of experience. For the researcher, Kafka astonishingly anticipates what is currently in force in Brazil in a century: "The era of post-truth, of fake news, of the overwhelming demoralization of politics, of lies as a strategy."
"From Father to Son: Transmission, Permanence, and Change in João Guimarães Rosa's 'The Third Bank of the River'," by Belinda Mandelbaum, from USP's Institute of Psychology, discusses the "transmission chains" present in Guimarães Rosa's narratives. The argument uses a framework of bond psychoanalysis, which considers the family as a privileged space for the transmission of messages between generations. In the article, the processes of permanence and change in the narratives' chain of transmission, that include the literary work and the readers, are approximated to the disorders of transmission between the father, the son, the story, and the readers in the short story "The Third Bank of the River."
The two articles that do not refer to literary works maintain the concern of the dossier in relating cultural aspects to the characteristics and challenges of Brazilian society. In "The Language of the Other and Ours: Politics, Translation, and Psychoanalysis," Paulo Sérgio de Souza Jr., also from UNICAMP's Institute of Language Studies, discusses the inadequacy and elitism of the language used by Brazilian psychoanalysts, based on translations that are poorly produced and / or originated from a language other than the original of renowned authors of the European psychoanalytic thought.
Dária Jaremtchuk, from USP's School of Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (EACH), is the author of "The Brazilian-American Cultural Institute as a Political-Cultural Tool." According to her, following the history of the BACI, created in 1964, allows you to learn about aspects of Brazilian cultural diplomacy in the United States during the Cold War. The hypothesis that she adopts is that the spaces of art and culture have functioned as important environments of social articulation in diplomatic and commercial activities, with the BACI being a very revealing case of this process. "However, this reality changes in the contemporary globalized world, as artistic and cultural spaces seem to have ceased to be vital for the practice of cultural diplomacy, as the closing of the institute reveals."
The other two sets of texts in the issue complement the dossiers started in issue #102 of the journal. "Hybrids of Knowledge II" brings analyzes of new topics within the scope of issues addressed by IEA's Environment and Society Research Group," including energy governance, environmental impact assessment, nature and impact of participatory research in the production of knowledge, and hybrid nature of the concept of cultural heritage. "Religious Spaces II," on the other hand, adds articles on the formation of museum collections and institutional collecting, the contributions of artists such as Cândido Portinari, Mino Cerezo Barredo, and Claudio Pastro to the formation of collections in the state of São Paulo, and the architectural legacies and their transformations over time.
The list below contains the names of the authors who have contributed with each one of the addressed themes:
Culture and Society
Valéria Rosito
João Roberto Faria
Paulo Sérgio de Souza Jr.
Celeste Ribeiro-de-Sousa
Belinda Mandelbaum
Adelia Bezerra de Meneses
Juliana P. Perez, Daniel R. Bonomo, and Danilo C. Serpa
Andrio J. R. dos Santos
Dária Jaremtchuk
Hybrids of Knowledge II
Andrea Lampis, João Marcos Mott Pavanelli, Ana Lía del Valle Guerrero, and Célio Bermann
Evandro Mateus Moretto, Simone Athayde, Carolina Rodrigues da Costa Doria, Amarilis Lucia Casteli Figueiredo Gallardo, Neiva Cristina de Araujo, Carla Grigoletto Duarte, Evandro Albiach Branco, Sergio Mantovani Paiva Pulice, and Daniel Rondineli Roquetti
Marina Ribeiro Corrêa, Luciana Yokoyama Xavier, Leandra R. Gonçalves, Mariana Martins de Andrade, Mayara de Oliveira, Nicole Malinconico, Camilo M. Botero, Celene Milanés, Ofelia Pérez Montero, Omar Defeo, and Alexander Turra
Leandro L Giatti, Jutta Gutberlet, Renata Ferraz de Toledo, and Francisco Nilson Paiva dos Santos
Sílvia Helena Zanirato, Tatiana Gomes Rotondaro, Maria Letícia Mazzucchi Ferreira, and Cyril Isnarto
Religious Spaces II
Christian Mascarenhas
Andréa Franzoni Tostes
Márcio Luiz Fernandes
Hilda Souto e Márcio Luiz Fernandes
Ubiratan J. A. Silva