By Stijn De Cauwer
I first read about the work of the Observatório de Favelas in the great book Radical Cities by Justin McGuirk (Verso, 2014). This organization in the vast and sprawling favela Complexo da Maré in Rio De Janeiro was founded by the social geographer Jailson de Souza e Silva. Besides being a place for research about life in the favelas, the organization also houses the Escola Popular de Comunicação Crítica (ESPOCC). It has always been the dream of Jailson to start an alternative university in the favelas, in which educational programs would be combined with critical reflection about life there. Out of a personal interest in alternative education projects and curious to see how “critical theory” is put to use in a specific context, I decided to visit this place during my current stay in Rio.
Various recent developments, however, have made visiting Complexo da Maré—a series of connected favelas that blended together over time—not so inviting. Maré is not one of those favelas that the city of Rio has attempted to turn into some kind of a tourist attraction. Recently, the violence in Maré has flared up once again. Two rivalling drug gangs fight to control the favela, with its inhabitants in the crossfire, and, making matters worse, the army has attempted to control the favela, which has added to the violence. During carnival, the fighting became so widespread that the highways near Maré, including the highway to the airport, were closed. It was precisely the violence of the army, causing casualties wherever they operate, that Marielle Franco denounced. Marielle was born in Complexo da Maré and made it to the Rio city council, where she continued her struggle for the people in the favelas. Last week, she was shot in downtown Rio. Her assassination strongly affected and shocked the people of Brazil. At the university where she was supposed to speak this week, a protest event was held. Murals with the slogan “Marielle presente” can be seen all over city. Even David Byrne dedicated the last song of his show in Rio to her. If I was not accompanied by a local friend who is familiar with the area, I would probably not have taken a bus to Maré.
Several photos of Marielle are hanging on the wall as we enter the Observatório. We are guided by Piê, who explains that the past week was very hectic for them with the murder of Marielle and the many protests that were organized in the wake of her death. Piê is a former student of the Escola Popular de Comunicação Crítica. Because of the fact that university education is relatively expensive in Brazil and the Temer government has implemented heavy cutbacks in academic funding and grants, university education is mostly out of reach for the inhabitants of Maré. The Observatório offers free courses that are part of two programs: one program teaching the students audiovisual skills and photography for the purposes of citizens’ journalism and another program in digital culture. The one-year programs lead to a degree that is acknowledged by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Some of the students have been able to adopt their skills in various cultural projects throughout the city. Because the classes take place in the Observatório, the students are also involved in the debates and research going on there concerning the conditions of the favelas, as well as the activism against the continuous violence experienced by the inhabitants and the so called “pacification” of the favelas. After several years of successfully running the program, Piê also acknowledges that recent political and economic developments have affected the funding of the organization, making it difficult to continue the educational programs at this time.
The day before this visit, I presented a paper at a large academic conference in Rio De Janeiro, partly organized by the Academia Brasileira De Filosofia. Probably as an overreaction to safety concerns in Rio, the conference was held inside the old military academy near the beach of Leme. The general absurdity and stuffy pompousness of this kind of academic conference, with posh receptions in the presence of the consuls of various countries and a dress code, was made all the more bizarre by the location. Entering the conference was only possible after showing one’s badge at an army checkpoint. Our PowerPoint presentations were even installed by uniformed soldiers. The usual dreary presentations were disrupted by the occasional blaring of an army trumpet. The contrast with the idealistic attempts of the people of the Observatório to offer academic education and critical theory to the inhabitants of Rio could not be bigger.
For more information:
http://of.org.br/en/http://of.org.br/en
http://of.org.br/areas-de-atuacao/educacao/espocc-2/ (in Portugese)
The Lonely Hearts Hotel is the most recent novel by Canadian author, Heather O’Neil. It is the story of Pierrot and Rose; orphans, who both, in differing circumstances, nearly die at birth but miraculously survive against the odds. O’Neil’s novel begins against the backdrop of Pierrot’s and Rose’s childhoods, spent together at a Montreal orphanage in the early part of the twentieth-century. Both the nuns and the other children at the orphanage recognize that Pierrot and Rose are special; through music, dance, and play they manage to cultivate pockets of joy out of their dismal realities. While the nuns do their best to stifle Pierrot’s and Rose’s flourishing (as well as their connection), the other children delight in the magic that is brought into their otherwise fragile and violent existences. From here, the novel follows the two protagonists as life takes them in differing yet equally dark directions. Despite their separation, both hold onto their childhood promise to one another of a shared future. Nineteen-thirties Montreal becomes the stage for make-believe, unlikely friendships, poverty, theft, theater-troops, addiction, sex, and mafia-life. Written with unparalleled imagery in the form of metaphor and simile, O’Neil’s prose come alive in the imagination like an illustrated fable stretching out before the reader, spontaneously coming into being as each page is turned. When a nun is described as reminding Pierrot of “a glass of milk” and “clean sheets blowing in the wind at the exact moment when the water evaporated from them and they became dry and light and easy again,” the reader is not tripped up by this strange mix of subject/object but instead sees the sunlight on those sheets, the rolling hills in the distance, and almost smells the fresh country air.
Like a Chef is a work with a double focus. It is, in the very first place, an autobiography, or at least in part, but it is also a vibrant presentation of gastronomy, more particularly the various types of the “new cuisine”, an approach to cooking and food presentation in French cuisine. In contrast to classic cuisine, an older form of haute cuisine, new cuisine is characterized by lighter, more delicate dishes, an increased emphasis on presentation, and the desire to make cooking as innovative and surprising as, for instance, art. Both perspectives come neatly together in the person of Benoît Peeters who, as a young author (he published his first novel at age 20), had to try to make a living. His love for food as well as his lust for innovation encouraged him to try his luck as a cook, and the book reports his many gastronomic adventures in the first years of his adult life, from the discovery –a nearly religious epiphany– of the new cuisine in the restaurant of the Troisgros brothers to his personal contacts with some great chefs such as Willy Slawinksi from the Apicius restaurant in Ghent and Ferrian Adrià from El Bulli.
In the book 50 Key Terms in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by Joost de Bloois, Stijn De Cauwer and Anneleen Masschelein, 50 important terms are explained by 35 scholars. In short texts, the history and context of each term is explained, as well as the debates that the term has triggered. Each text is followed by a short bibliography for further reading. There are terms that help us to understand contemporary political challenges: precarity, immaterial labor, biopolitics, common(s), anthropocene, surveillance, debt, cultural memory, agonism, multitude, spectacle, post-truth and political theology. Some terms help us to understand new media developments: algorithm, open access, digital cultural heritage, convergence, archive and network. Other terms help us to come to terms with the diversity of human life: intersectionality, heteronormativity, posthumanism, postfeminism, postcolonialism and crip theory. Some terms are deceptively simple but they have a complex history and their use has become the object of critical research in the Humanities: love, war, life, justice, immunity, noise, image, participation, crisis, creativity, performance, rhythm, curating and that mysterious notion people like to use so easily, culture. Certain terms may be considered to be somewhat outdated in the public opinion but they have continued to be relevant in the Humanities: utopia, class and ideology. Finally, there are terms which have become much-debated theoretical terms: accelerationism, plasticity, affect, individuation, speculation, medicalization and the sensible.
The film opens with an uncomfortable scene, thrusting the viewer head on to the heart of the matter. This initial anxiety rings like white noise throughout the film, increasing and decreasing in pitch, but penetratingly constant. Its only pitch-equal is the closing scene that, while quite a different image, echoes the initial degree of discomfort with which the viewer has been coping for the last 115 minutes.
The book has indeed an exceptionally long blurb section, which starts at the front cover, continues on the back cover, appears to cheer up the interior cover pages and quite a lot of the front matter. In short: no less than nine pages of praise of a “superb”, breathtaking”, and “brilliant” book, which only made me yawn.
James I. Porter’s “Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura” (Critical Inquiry, vol. 44-1, 2017, pp., 80-113) is one of the best essays I’ve read in recent months. It is a rereading of Erich Auerbach’s seminal study “Figura” of 1938 as well as a vital contribution to the cultural analysis of reading and storytelling, not in the empirical, but in the philosophical sense of the word.
For contemporary readers, however, Auerbach (1892-1957) is not the author of “Figura” but of Mimesis, written in exile between 1942 and 1945. Mimesis, which has never been out of print, is a study of the progressive emergence of “realism” in Western literature, that is of a way of interpreting that emphasizes the literal, not the symbolic meaning of the text, even if the literal meaning is open to debate, and that highlights how stories are rooted in concrete historical and material contexts. Auerbach scholarship generally focuses either on “Figura” or on Mimesis, but rarely brings together both studies, as if the author’s attention had simply shifted from classic philology and symbolic reading to comparative literature and realism. Yet in “Disfigurations”, this is exactly what James I. Porter does: rereading Mimesis in light of “Figura”, not in order to find a dialectic synthesis of the two apparently conflicting poles, but in order to disclose the profound continuity in Auerbach’s thinking as well as the crucial importance of “realism” in the genesis and meaning of Mimesis itself, which was written in exile in Turkey (a then militantly nonreligious state). Auerbach’s great book, Porter argues, should be read not just as a defense of Western realism, but as a reaction against the symbolic –be it figural or, worse, allegorical– that was defended by Nazi philosophy, philology, theology, etc., to delete not only Jewish history and Jewish tradition but the typical way in which the Jewish tradition read its own stories, namely as realist stories deeply rooted in precise historical conditions yet utterly ambivalent and ambiguous –and therefore inevitably open to endless interpretation and reinterpretation and permanently inviting us to question our own relationship to the specific environment in which we are living here and now (including our fundamental incapacity to produce final and fixed meanings).
Cultural Studies Leuven 