Popcretos, a subgenre of concrete poetry and art that emerged after the 1964 military coup, represent a heavily politicized turn within Brazilian concrete poetry. I analyze the relationship between the visual iconography and textual information on the labels of two of D & eacute;cio Pignatari's popcretos, "Cr$isto & eacute; a solu & ccedil;& atilde;o" and "Disenf & oacute;rmio." I contend that labels play a fundamental role in the political messaging of popcretos, even though scholars do not typically consider the labels as part of the poems. By using museum label theory to decode political messages criticizing Castelo Brancos' economic policies and focusingon the relationship between humor and politics in authoritarian Brazil, my new readings ofpopcretos demonstrate the importance of this subgenre of concrete poetry to the countrys' anti-authoritarian art ecosystem in the 1960s.
Although one of the most studied films in Brazilian cinema, little has been written on the issue of religiosity in City of God. In this article, I start from the reading of a transformative scene in which the traffickerZ & eacute; Pequeno has an encounter with an Umbanda practitioner who incorporates Exu, in dialogue with the representation of violence in the production. Z & eacute; Pequeno manages to briefly reign over the community of City of God in such a way that it opposes itself epistemologically to the Brazilian State. Within necropolitics, film often has the role of product and propagator of the logics of death, as it appropriates affects, a tendency that is rejected in this feature. I examined this film with the consideration that art can be a means to open a debate that is frequently underexposed-that of the demonization of Afro-Brazilian religions as part of institutionalized racism, along with the two-way violence it causes. Thus, I argue that the roles of Z & eacute; Pequeno and Exu along with the reappropriation of affects during the scenes of violence in City of God articulate a historical resistance to the violence against the Afro-Brazilian population and its religious practices.
Between 1959 and 1960, while hospitalized at Rio de Janeiro's Centro Psiqui & aacute;trico Nacional, Maura Lopes Can & ccedil;ado penned a diary that brought madness to the center of Brazilian literature: Hosp & iacute;cio & eacute; Deus: Di & aacute;rio 1 (1965). This essay situates Can & ccedil;ado within the surprisingly porous midcentury relationship between Brazilian psychiatric hospitals and the modern art world. The diary was written at the same hospital where psychiatrist Nise da Silveira's arts-based therapeutic project attracted avant-garde figures to accompany patients' creative processes, in parallel to the increased exhibition of patients' works in domestic and international museums. In this context, Can & ccedil;ado emerges as a uniquely liminal figure, hospitalized alongside Silveira's patients, but also embedded in an avant-garde network that deeply admired "primitive" and "mad" art. This in-between position is tense but strategic, as Can & ccedil;ado turns her gaze inwards towards hospital life, while also challenging the art world's "ecstatic eyes" from within.
This study maps the poetry of Fernanda Dias, one of the most important contemporary Portuguese writers, in the context of Macau's literature. It offers a diachronic view from the mid-1980s to the present day and a synchronic analysis of recurring themes in four of her five books of poetry, in parallel with some of the main theoretical concepts of the period. The cartography consists of three maps: a subjective map (Macau as a metaphor for the expansion of the self, in dialogue with the book Macau (2003) by Paulo Henriques Britto); a thematic map of recurring images in Dias's Horas de papel (1992), Rio de erhu (1999), ch & aacute; verde (2002), and O mapa esquivo (2016); and a theoretical map of the concepts "Border Gates," "Margins of destiny," "plural literatures," "Writing Macau," and "Recovering Macau," in dialogue with Dias's poetic translations.
This article focuses on the sambas of Carolina Maria de Jesus, her dressmaking, and her manuscripts, those recently republished in unedited form as well as others not yet published (studied archivally), highlighting aspects of her aesthetic that have not received significant scholarly attention. Building on a new focus on de Jesus as an artist in the past decade in Brazil, the article situates her vision at the border between documentary and poetics, a cultural space that she shares, the article argues, with samba do morro. Like other composers from marginalized backgrounds, she uses the lyricism of the samba (and other popular genres in her compositions) to create cultural space and visibility for herself, sometimes in ways that dovetail with samba concerns (for example when she explores the topic of malandragem), and sometimes in more unique ways, articulating a quotidian feminism, asserting a home of her own, and contributing to her broader material archiving of her experience of sub-citizenship.
This article addresses Clarice Lispectors' conception of the relationship between subjectivity and materiality in her second novel, O Lustre (1946), by examining the affective mechanism at work in the protagonist's development as a subject. Focusing on bodily tensions and their potential evident in scenes of the protagonists' visceral experiences and material entanglements, it highlights the author's writing strategy of prioritizing the physical realm and impersonal forces to expand the spectrum of how experience can be registered. The article emphasizes Lispectors' practice of a non-anthropocentric perspective, which posits a way of understanding the position of the human subject in the material world by attending to their interaction and coevolution. Considering the parallel between the matter-energy dynamics and the pre-individual dimension of the subjects' capacity and experience in the novel, this article argues that Lispector formulates a mode of subjectivity that is seamlessly connected with material objects and processes.
This article examines the strategies employed in Eliana Alves Cruzs' & Aacute;gua de barrela (2015) to convey issues of mobility and memory-making within the context of the African diaspora in Brazil in colonial times. To this end, it will inquire into the author's creative process, which chiefly resorted to family oral and visual memories and the study of schizophrenia-as one of her main sources was her schizophrenic great-aunt. As the writer recalls the trajectory of her family, she unveils the diverse standpoints perceptible in Afro-Brazilian history, challenging traditional historical archives by inserting elements that are simultaneously relevant for debate in contemporary Brazil. The article will point out these elements as it investigates Cruz's writing process, in order to highlight the intersection it creates between cultural memory, ethical remembering, the medical humanities, and women's writing demonstrated in this book.
