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Professor
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Line of Research
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Andrea Ciacchi
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See and describe. Journeys and stories of artists who traveled around in Latin America (1850-1930)
Description: The aim of the project is to verify the work and production of visual artists (painters and/or photographers; European and Latin American) who have produced between the second half of the 19th century and the three first decades of the 20th century in Latin America not only their primary work (paintings, drawings, photos) but also descriptive, narrative and/or analytical texts (letters, journals, stories, reports, essays, books, conferences, and so on) during their short or long trips, or even in case they were moving to foreign countries in Latin America, so that they could absorb the scenarios, elements and aspects of the several dimensions of the otherness in the region (ethnic, racial and social). After the first data collection, the objective of the project is to select texts to be commented on and analyzed through scientific papers. The activities of the project are directly connected to the scope of the Graduate Programs in which I work (Latin American Studies and Comparative Literature) and Master’s Degree students will be incorporated to it.
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Antonio Rediver Guizzo
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Imaginaries of Violence in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Description: The relation between society and violence has been the center of representation in the several literary works of our time. Currently, we have been watching the overexposure of images of aggression, murder, torture, mutilation, wars, etc. (subjective violence) perpetrated by easily identified agents; as well as the representation of the non visible faces of violence: symbolic and systemic. The project, which is in the field of Latin American Comparative Literature, has the main goal of investigating the aesthetic configurations of violence in Contemporary Latin American Literature and the relations they have with the social, cultural and historical contexts in which they are produced and/or which they represent. This goal unfolds the investigation of the following axis: a) representation of subjective violence; b) representations of the symbolic violence which permeate the discourses that authorize and reproduce the asymmetries and relations of social dominance; c) representations of the systemic violence which is present in the asymmetric functioning of the economic, political and legal systems that promote and/or perpetuate social inequalities; d) the representation of the imaginaries of sacrificial violence and its dystopian transubstantiations, representations in which “evil” is personified and society is put in a permanent state of emergency and assumes the role of combating it in order to maintain social cohesion; e) the aesthetics of violence which emerge from the textual surface, in other words, how violence is transformed into lexical options, grammatical structures and compositional choices in the plot; f) the symbolic imaginary of violence, or the set of images and their relations which constitute similar imaginary settings in the representation of violence; g) the spectacular representation of violence as an aesthetic resource which exceeds the material and historical conditions of its time and assumes different compositional proposals, such as: the relation between the affective dimension of the represented characters and the handling of violent acts; the allegorization of violence in narratives which perform mythic, utopian and dystopian universes of representation; narratives that explore the overexposure of violence as an aesthetic resource of composition; the naturalization, alienation, rejection and/or comicization of the manifestations of violence.
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Débora Cota
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Clay imaginaries: for a discussion about community, identity and Latin Americanism today
Description: This research project has contemporary Latin American cultural productions (literature, visual arts) as its object of study, and from these productions it aims at discussing issues related to the national, cultural identity and community, considering the current debates about Latin Americanism. It is focused on a) the critical reading of literary works and visual arts, b) and the theoretical discussion about Latin Americanism in the current culture, through the considerations made in the scope of literary, cultural and academic criticism, as well as through the dialogue with the epistemologies of philosophy and anthropology c) It also aims at constituting a research about the theoretical perspectives about the category called “community”. d) In order to define which productions will be analyzed, it stipulates productions made from clay or those which constitute their imaginaries from this element. It is a project based on comparatism which aims at approaching literatures from different nationalities in the countryside of Latin America, as well as areas of knowledge, especially literature and the plastic arts and anthropology.
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Dinaldo Sepúlveda Almendra Filho
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Figurations of justice: political imagination and moral forms in modern cinema (1945-1989)
Description: The objective of this research project is to elaborate a phenomenology of the political imagination and the moral forms in modern cinema of fiction and documentaries between 1945 e 1989, from the end of the 2nd World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its object of study is the figures of justice and the aesthetic dialogues between modern cinematographic imagination and the political and moral thinking about justice (marxism, liberalism, crimes against humanity and so on). The goal is to develop, through a comparative study of the figures of justice in modern cinema, a historiography and theory of political cinema in this period of time, investigating from a broad historical perspective how political thinking assumes expressive forms in modern fiction and documentary films. The focus being on the circulation of style figures, mannerisms and innovations of language among works, no matter which category they are in. The idea of figuration serves as a guide for restituting to the political its sensitive dimension, moving from the political to an aesthetics of politics and its imaginative languages. Due to the broad historical frame of reference, the project is structured as a research program, operated by comparative subdivisions of the figures of justice constituted by periods, countries, movements, genres, films, directors or even events (for example, the figures of justice in modern Latin American cinema from a comparative perspective between countries or other worldwide filmography works). Updated sub projects may be created in accordance with the results of the current investigation. The study program of the figures of justice will consider the means by which modern cinema imagines and styles the political thinking and the moral forms, creating figurations of the senses and sensitivities of justice, without neglecting the imaginaries for equality, liberty, democracy, fraternity and peace.
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Emerson Pereti
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About the meanings of absence: artistic narratives, dictatorial reminiscence and the counter-reformation of neoliberalism
Description: By drawing upon a theoretical-critical framework about memory, forgetfulness, absence and representation, this research aims at analyzing a set of works that has been produced in the Southern Cone in the last decade which are aesthetically and politically marked by the different meanings of the dictatorial absence. This involves the selection of the artistic material, the analysis of its aesthetic and narrative expedients and the formulation of particular approaches as possible answers to the contemporary concerns about the theme. This work is justified by our responsibility to the historical past and the ethical dimension which involves the concept of justice. Walter Benjamin developed the idea of the dialectic image as a jump into the past which is only possible during the moment when the “now” is legible and this jump is deeply characterized by an instant of danger. Recognizing this danger would be, in this study, to see in these narratives the representation of the past which has been destroyed by dictatorship, especially in a moment when this past is being threatened. We hope to collaborate with other contemporary studies which, by paying attention to the ruins of the past, have the goal of finding alternative directions towards the traces of destruction, inequality and injustice of dictatorships, especially during a moment in which neoliberalism, its direct heir, is intensified and has been flirting with authoritarianism and gathering economic, religious and ideological fundamentalism.
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Felipe dos Santos Matias
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Dialogues between literature and history in Latin American poetics
Description: This project studies the interlocutions between literature and history from a comparative perspective in poetic productions of the 20th and 21st centuries by different Latin American authors. The research is done by means of the theoretical discussion and critical analysis of literary works, in a dialogue with historiographic texts, with the aim of detecting, through this interdisciplinary relation, the confluences and divergences of the methods of representation and the process of reshaping and building meanings which are used in different Latin American poetic productions. As theoretical and critical fundamentals, the research will use the contributions of Fernando Aínsa, Seymour Menton, Magdalena Perkowska, Hayden White, Luiz Costa Lima, Linda Hutcheon, Walter Mignolo, Georges Duby, Jacques Le Goff, Walter Benjamin, Paul Ricoeur, among others. P.s.: This research project (code PIA1259-2017) received financial resources from an Undergraduate Research Grant (IC - UNILA), pursuant to PUBLIC NOTICE PRPPG 66 (PIBIC 2018/2019), in order to execute the Work Plan PIA1375-2018.
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Fernando Mesquita de Faria
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The current Latin American scenario beyond the great geographic axis
Description: The project questions and problematizes the origins and current forms of the Latin American scenario. In order to do so, we analyze and study some particular works within the theatrical context and their interdisciplinary relations with areas such as Literature, Anthropology, Cinema and Music. With a focus on theatrical and ritualistic manifestations that are produced out of the great cultural capitals, we aim at mapping Latin American artists and authors whose poetics suggests Amerindian and African influence, observing the confluence and divergence of meanings, the intercultural dialogue and the space-time intersection of these poetics. With the research, we intend to make theatrical experiments based on the knowledge acquired from the fieldwork and from the theoretical basis obtained, with the goal of building new forms of critical thinking in the Latin American time and space.
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Leonardo dos Passos Miranda Name
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Geopolitics of the Landscape
Description: The decolonial approaches put Latin America, which is a set of conflictive representations in itself, in the center both politically and analytically; and generally, these approaches are against the epistemic racism which is a structural component of modernity/coloniality and its instrumental rationality which is allegedly said to be objective and neutral. However, even if the idea of “race” is clearly sustained by visual data, there are few papers which are attentive to the role of the modern-colonial ocularcentrism and, more specifically, of the landscape, which is the most visual of geography in the institution and legitimation of the colonialities. Moreover, the spacial dimension has little centrality in the decolonial texts, insofar as there are few debates about the discourse and practice which geo-historically give way to the ways of producing, conceiving and representing the different places and landscapes. Considering this contradictory reality, this research project aims at starting a debate about the landscapes in the context of the different interpretations of the notion of geopolitics, especially the concept of geopolitics of knowledge which is driven by the decolonial literature, in order to finally outline an agenda with three axis of investigation: landscape as image; landscape as rule; and landscape as the production of space for well living.
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Marcelo Marinho
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Literature and Geopoetics: imaginary cartographies of Latin America
Description: The Mexican poet and essayist, Octavio Paz (1914-1998), says that “perception is conception”, in a famous verse of his metapoem called “Blanco”, a name that leads the reader to different perspectives as far as the ultimate goals of literature are concerned: target, free space to be filled, goal, purpose in itself, “hole or mediation between two things”, “space in which writings are left without being filled”, “printed form with gaps to be filled in”, according to the Diccionario de la Real Academia de España. Based on these ideas, the present project aims at searching for temporary answers to the following question in the context of the imaginary construction of Latin America: how does this literature made out of spacial signs that are ever changing, random and multidimensional settle onto the white static, bi-dimensional and linear paper? In order to examine the in between places of culture in which we can find temporary elements of answers, the object of this project is the artistic production of different authors and creators who work with the imaginary representation of the Latin American space.
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Mariana Cortez
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Living Latin American books in the Three-Border Region: reading and writing proposals in public school libraries
Description: This research project has the goal of being a research-action that promotes reading and writing with the aim of improving the conditions of rural public school students into the literary culture. In order to reach this general goal, we will investigate, in an interdisciplinary way, if the actions of the project in the first years of elementary school in public schools of the three-border region (Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay) do transform the teaching practice of teachers as far as the promotion of reading and writing and the insertion of the libraries into their teaching-learning practice are concerned. This project aims at reflecting more deeply both upon the structure of school libraries and the teaching practice applied into this process, asking questions about the teaching-learning practice and about how, with few resources, it is possible to intervene in library spaces in the selected public schools. Considering the problematics approached in this research, the actions and reflections must be guided by an interdisciplinary perspective, since its object requires different observations, from the field of Language, Library Science or, especially, the field of Education, due to the fact that we will be working with teaching-learning practice and methods in the development of students and teachers. Intervening in the community implies an approach which changes the positivist view of the social science. It also requires an understanding that it is not possible to just indicate technical procedures for a complex reality such as education is. According to Silva (2009), “in order to interfere or transform an education reality, it is essential to make a list of what one has, reflect upon it and look for strategies aiming at improving the pedagogical action” (p.18). This will be the method applied onto our investigation. The research project is intended to be consolidated into a research group that is constituted by professors of the hosting institution, researchers from universities or teacher development programs in all three cities-regions that are part of the project, graduate and undergraduate students.
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Regina Coeli Machado e Silva
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Profanare: the aesthetics of evil and horror in Rubem Fonseca
Description: Through the problematization of the relation between literature and society and by considering that contemporary Brazilian narratives have been repeatedly using the theme of faltering borders that mark the human identity, this project is a consequence of the project called “Between the Sacredness and the Precariousness of life: evil and human nature in contemporary literary narratives” and it has the following objectives: a) provide broader considerations for an anthropology of the literary narratives, understanding them as expressions which unveil shared social plots and cognitive problems that are not immediately noticeable in culture; b) explore the sacredness of life beyond religion, as a comprehensive idea-value that, from the outside, makes themes related to the aesthetics of evil and horror intelligible; and c) study the forms of updating evil in the narrative of Rubem Fonseca, through borderline experiences, with its tension regarding the meaning of human life, in stories which involve crimes, disease, physical and mental limitations, violent acts in personal and familial relations. The methodology applied is based onto the analysis of secondary sources, the ethnographies about the multiple effects of biotechnology in today’s society, the bibliographic sources of anthropological theories of art, both western and contemporary, and the analysis of the literary production of Rubem Fonseca. We hope to obtain specific contributions for an anthropology of art and, correlatively, of literature, explore this theoretical and methodological option as one of the means by which we can comprehend contemporary Brazilian cultural issues.
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Rosangela de Jesus Silva
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Circulations, connections and visualities between Latin America and Europe: contributions of Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro (1846-1905) to the 19th century illustrated press
Description: Since their first contact in the 16th century, when the stories of both America and Europe came across, the marks of conflicts, resistance, transit, appropriation and transformation have always permeated the relations between the continents. Linguistic elements, eating habits, beliefs and images have established indisputable links between the “Old Continent” and the “New World”, especially as far as the Iberian Peninsula is concerned. There are several studies about these different types of transit (people, images, texts and objects) and this project aims at modestly venturing out, and offering an initial contribution, through the analysis of the transit of Rafael Bordallo Pinheiro (1846-1905) in the illustrated press as a cultural mediator who has a relation with other mediators with whom he learns and teaches. We begin from an ongoing research project that is focused onto the flows and connections between Latin American journals (Argentinean, Brazilian and Paraguayan) in order to analyze an artist who transited, provided meetings and made images and ideas circulate through both continents. The research is carried out from the conceptual perspective of “Cultural Transfer”, which is focused on analyzing the relations between Latin America and Europe from a non-hierarchical perspective, but rather as “multilateral interchanges” (COMPAGNON, 2005), a two way street.
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