University of São Paulo’s Revista do IEB Addresses The Erasure Of Peoples

The most recent Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (RIEB), launched in December 2022, number 83, brings sociopolitical and legal analyzes of Colonial Brazil from the perspective of the production of the Portuguese researcher and professor António Manuel Hespanha (1945-2019). The magazine also seeks to rethink the artistic and cultural productions of the country, which, in the centenary of the Modern Art Week, boasted an art produced by the upper middle class, considered as an erudite nucleus, exemplified in the emergence of samba.

The magazine, in the Editorial , highlights the issue’s critical theme. “We interrogated materials from ancient times to remember our roots of inequality and violence”, observe the authors Dulcilia Helena Schroeder Buitoni, Luiz Armando Bagolin and Walter Garcia. There were “five centuries of absence of people, with some gaps opened by science and art”, they explain when dealing with the paths of the texts, which demonstrate the erasure of the Brazilian population since the beginning of colonization.

Then, opening the Dossier section, are the articles related to the productions of Manuel Hespanha, Making and undoing history: the historiographical contribution of António Manuel Hespanha , written by Monica Duarte Dantas and Samuel Barbosa. They pay homage to this researcher responsible for translating documents, who published books, chapters and critical articles on the institutional, political and legal history in relation to power in the spaces of Portuguese colonization. However, far beyond a tribute to science, it is a text of personal respect for the person of Manuel Hespanha. Highlight:

“Averse to formalities, curious, experimental, tireless, accessible to anyone who sought him out, always oozing humour, António Manuel Hespanha was, in addition to being a remarkable teacher and researcher, also a unique human figure who is missed.”

Seven more texts make up the Dossier , covering the history of Portugal during the Old Regime (15th to 18th centuries) and Brazil at the time. A rereading of “colonial Brazil” based on the work of António Manuel Hespanha and The uses of law in Portuguese overseas America: between the pragmatism of the rustics and the refined argumentation of the scholars highlight the inequality and erasure of the Brazilian people caused by colonization portuguese.

The magazine continues with the Articles section , which brings cultural issues to the debate. The first, entitled Between the square and the square: artists and intellectuals in the formation of two samba “cradles” , explains how urbanization projects prevented the birth of popular samba in Largo da Banana, in São Paulo, and in Praça do Onze, in São Paulo. in Rio de Janeiro, to be appropriated by white intellectuals, and how this spills over into the collections of the Museu da Imagem e do Som (MIS) in both states.

The second text is Veríssimo, critic of symbolism (1899-1901) , which analyzes José Veríssimo’s criticisms of the black poet Cruz e Sousa in order to directly or indirectly evaluate his contributions to the Symbolist literary school.

Watú is not dead! inaugurates the most illustrative part of the magazine, in the Creation section . It features photographs from the exhibition that took place at the IEB during the year 2022. Eleven contemporary artists addressed the erasure of black productions, LGBTQIA+ people, women, indigenous and peripheral populations, deforestation and other current issues. Highlight:

“The proposals, as diverse as the origins of their proponents, expressed, through the respective poetics of each artist, their visions and anxieties about Brazil today, showing, in this sense, in a forceful way, how Brazil is permanently in check because of violence (which is historical), social injustice, the destruction of nature, the curtailment of wealth for the majority of the people and, mainly, the manipulation of collective memory.”