Lecture by MarÃlia Librandi Rocha: Ideas out of Place or Inside a Body?
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Speaker(s): MarÃlia Librandi Rocha
In his widely-discussed essay "Idéias for do lugar," ("Misplaced Ideas"), Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz describes how liberal Enlightenment ideals, imported into slaveholding societies like that of 19th-century Brazil, faced circumstances incongruous to those of the bourgeois European societies that birthed them. In her talk, Professor Librandi Rocha will address Schwarz's claims, bringing her own expertise in Brazilian literature to bear on a reevaluation of "ideas out of place."
Talk summary: I intend to discuss
how Schwarz's concept of "ideas out of
place" is related to an idea of history and fiction
operating as "imitatio," in a world divided into
center and periphery, model and copy. How could we re-potentialize
his concept through an idea of mimesis as production of differences
in an asymmetrical world where the center is constantly dislocated
and the peripheries are inside and not outside? Diverse
authors will help us rethink the terms of Schwarz's
concept, starting with the rebel tradition of modernists who
suggested that in Brazil and Latin America, Afro and Amerindian
ideas are located in our bodies, proposing to abandon the idea of a
proper place/body in order to defend multiple (dis)locations. In
this polemic theme, I ask participants to collaborate with their
"cultural synchronization and
disjuncture".
Response by Sidney Chalhoub (Universidade Estadual de Campinas–UNICAMP)