May 19, 2008
Lúcio Flávio Pinto
Excellent article in this past Sunday's Los Angeles Times on this journalist from Pará and his struggle to report on corruption and environmental destruction in this near-feudal Amazonian Brazil state.
Posted by johnn at 05:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 02, 2007
US Pilots and Brazilian controllers indicted
In the case I blogged about last week, both US pilots and four controllers were indicted for their roles in last September's fatal Gol crash. i read about it here, but I'm sure it was briefly noted in all the major outlets. The indictment was filed in the town nearest the crash, but I don't know if the trial will be there as well. Hmm.
Posted by johnn at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 30, 2007
A rare non-anti-Chavez op-ed
Today's L.A. Times has an amazing rarity: an op-ed piece that doesn't lament Hugo Chavez's non-renewal of Venezuelan tv station RCTV as a blow to "freedom of the press." Under the (print) headline "Chavez didn't start this media war," journalist Bart Jones reminds us of the role this station played in the 2002 coup attempt.
Posted by johnn at 08:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 09, 2007
American pilots blamed for Gol crash
According to this BBC report, the Federal Police have recommended criminal prosecution of the two American pilots involved in the mid-air collision that killed 154 people last September. The article cites their being unaware that their transponder was malfunctioning as the source of their culpability (and not, apparently, flying at an altitude different from that of their original flight plan). Certainly in a US civil proceeding, this would be worth some small percent of contributory negligence, but they are facing serious criminal charges in Brazil.
Anyone who has followed the myriad revelations over the last eight months of utter confusion; repeated, sometimes near-fatal errors; poor morale; and ridiculous pay and work conditions of Brazilian air traffic controllers (who work under the Air Force) must wonder whether the pilots can get a fair trial as the Brazilian government reels from controller scandal. On the scale of blame, it would seem that the controllers who erroneously cleared the American pilots to fly at the incorrect 37,000 ft altitude plus the several others who subsequently failed to notice the mistake plus the poorly implemented radar and radio system that prevented contact with the pilots until it was too late, bear the brunt of it. Barring radio contact with some tower which noticed the transponder was not transponding, I don't know how they would have known that or how they could be blamed for the deaths because of this. I think that in the civil lawsuits already filed in American courts evidence of the past year's massive incompetence in Brazilian air traffic control will result in minor contributory guilt at most, but I confess to little confidence that a nationalistic Brazilian criminal jury will think the same way.
Posted by johnn at 01:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 05, 2007
The Dancer Upstairs
In finally got around to seeing this 2002 film, John Malkovich's directorial debut. As luck would have it, two days later anthropologist Orin Starn came to Pomona College for a talk about the history of the Shining Path and Peru's subsequent attempts to deal (or not, as Starn says) with the aftermath of the bloody 1980s. I guess I admired the acting and the cinematography and so forth along with everybody else, but three issues made this a hard film for me to enjoy.
The first is that Malkovich (and, I guess, Nicholas Shakespeare, the writer on whose novel and screenplay this film was based) has done the typical Hollywood thing and reduced an enormously complex social revolution to a kind of Latin American NYPD Blue episode, with the honest cop and the corrupt Army trying to take over the case and the romance and family drama that spills over into the crime scene, in this case the last safe house of Guzman qua Gonzalo cum "Ezequiel." Blech. I mean, I know reduction has to take place, but this was ridiculous.
Second, maybe Malkovich doesn't speak good enough Spanish to have done it differently, but I hate the somewhat outdated conventional way of depicting speakers of foreign language by having them speak accented English. This makes them sound foreign in their own country and less than fully articulate. Film it in Spanish and subtitle it. For the audience that would watch this film, subtitles would be just fine.
Finally, and most importantly, he labels the setting "Latin America" and thinly disguises Peru's Sendero Luminoso guerilla war, all the while including so many specific details about Lima, the Peruvian Andes, Sendero and Guzman that the attempt at generification was laughable. If you're go that close to historical fiction, just go all the way. In his talk, Starn reminded me of even more specific details of the Sendero war that were faithfully but disguisedly represented in the film.
Posted by johnn at 10:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 17, 2006
Brazilian Racial Quotas "Debate" is out of Control
More on academic incivility in the debates over race and affirmative action in Brazil. A Brazilian colleague and I are trying to organize a panel for the next Latin American Studies Association meeting called "Para Além da “Raça”: Negritude, Branquitude e Anti-Racismo no Brasil." One scholar we approached for possible participation told us that he/she thought the idea was excellent but he/she didn't want to subject himself to the public treatment awaiting anyone questioning the increasingly rigid party line on the race concept in Brazil and the far-reaching legislative package currently under debate and scheduled for a vote later this year in the Brazilian Congress (the Estatuto de Igualdade Racial, more on this soon).
Here at the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR), where I am currently visiting professor, Prof. Kabelenge Munanga came up from São Paulo to talk about racial quotas. A table of four discussants was arranged, and the event was advertised as a "debate". Prof. Munanga gave a fair but brief summary of some of the major arguments against quotas, but he is strongly in favor and arranged his presentation for maximum rhetorical advantage, naturally. Disappointing was the fact that no one esle at the table questioned quotas in the least. I asked the moderator afterwards if he had been unable to find anyone to speak against (or even to advise caution with respect to) the proposed quotas. Answer: "Ninguém que quisesse se expor" (No one who was willing to expose themselves" in that setting.) Funny, since the latest poll show about 35% opposition to racial quotas (and a lot more when the imported concept is fully explained), and Universities are disproportionately filled with whiter and wealthier indivuduals less likely to support them (the whole point of the quotas, no?).
While I wish that scholars with more nuanced analyses or thoughtful opposition to some forms of affirmative action in Brazil would be more outspoken, I certainly understand, given the current climate.
Posted by johnn at 01:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2006
Brazilian "Race" and the Latin American Studies meeting
Well, I see it's been over two months since my last posts on this blog. I returned from the late March Latin American Studies Association Congress in San Juan writing a report in my head to post here, but like so much of what I want/need to write about my first and still, unfortunately, major research area, I've been blocked. The field of of racial studies in Brazil has just become so damn unpleasant. Specifically, anyone who suggests publicly, here or in Brazil, that race is not the major, overriding, irreducible category of Brazilian social experience gets chastized. I use the term "political correctness" with great reluctance, owing to its hijacking by US conservatives since the early 1990s, but that is exactly what this is.
I gave an intentionally strong and polemical paper, as an antidote to the mind-numbing acquiescence to the raciological orthodoxy that prevails at these meetings. Michael Mitchell, one of the deans of Brazilianist raciology, sits there shooting daggers of stares at me the whole time, and a young guy, apparently one of his graduate students, patronizingly suggests that I need to read the "literature," by which I presume he means the unempirical, circular, intellectual pyramid scheme that is Brazilianist "race relations" research today. Then, my commitment to social justice is challenged by a woman who identifies herself as an attorney, professes ignorance of the literature, and misinterprets my argument about the ethnographic data on race and color by 180 degrees. (It turns out that describing Brazilian society as "prejudiced" "discriminatory," "unequal" and "pigmentocratic" about two dozen times and arguing that accurate and honest data will help the struggle for social justice isn't enough to innoculate oneself against this particularly hurtful canard.) Then, my argument is labeled "neo-Freyrean" by my panel chair, who has just given a paper about race and space in Rio Grande do Sul using the most slippery, vague, and deceptive term in the race theory arsenal: "racialization."
This, of course, is what anthropologists Peter Fry, Yvonne Maggie, and their allies have had to put up with Brazil for over a decade. It was the most infuriating experience I've personally had of it, though, and it reminded me of why I've been trying to move myself out of this increasingly dismal subfield for a few years.
Ah well. The conference was fun. Record high attendance due to its location in San Juan (one colleague joked that it was all she could do not to write the words "Puerto Rican junket" into the text of her talk), record low attendance, it seemed, at panels, although I can't be sure because I didn't make it to many myself. Hey, I was there with a four-month-old baby!! He needed to see the beach!
Cuban scholars weren't allowed to attend, by the way, and I think the Association will vote to move the 2007 meeting from Boston to Montreal. That's how I voted, anyway.
Posted by johnn at 09:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 09, 2006
Speaking of goons and clowns...
... i.e., the FBI and so forth, I received an email from the Latin American Studies Association lamenting the fact that Cuban scholars will once again be barred from attending our congress, to be held this time in San Juan, PR, next week. The US, laudably, even made an exception to allow the Cuban baseball team to play in the World Baseball Classic. But I guess historians and anthropologists are less likely to defect and play catcher for NYU or Princeton.
I dutifully called the CA Congressional delegation to complain, but it's not likely to have done much good.
I vote for LASA never again to meet in the US until all our colleagues can attend.
Posted by johnn at 08:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wrong about Lula
I seem to have been wrong about the effect of the PT (Workers Party) corruption scandal on Lula's reelection prospects.
According to O Globo, he's carrying a solid lead in the polls.
Posted by johnn at 08:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 06, 2006
Rear Projection: Tales of the Brazilian Butt
A great quote from today's L.A. Times story in the health section about glute exercises:
But be warned: A toned gluteous medius, though it provides nice side shaping, doesn't provide the rear projection favored by fashion-conscious Brazilians and other posterior purists.Assessing the meaning of "Brazil" in contemporary American popular culture, I guess we have a distinctive distribution of wealth, a distinctive distribution of bikini fabric, a distinctive distribution of depilation wax, and a distinctive distribution of butt muscle.
Posted by johnn at 04:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2006
The Brazilian Race Stats Game
A story in the Los Angeles Times yesterday reports on a new "black-owned" TV channel in Brazil that attempts to address the paucity of black faces on television there. This is a topic where the same misleading and outdated factoids ("Brazil's population is 50% black," "Xuxa is the standard of beauty," "few black faces on TV," ...) are traded around academic and journalistic writing alike, all building up to an elliptical and coy conclusion that Brazilians are deluded about racism in their country. (Pictured above is Netinho de Paula, founder of the channel.)
Here's the letter to the editor that I submitted yesterday. I don't now if they'll publish it (it's a little long):
Henry Chu's article (January 12) about Brazil's new black television channel leads with a misleading claim that has unfortunately become a cliché in writing about Brazil. The idea that blacks “make up nearly half the population” in Brazil is a statistical bait-and-switch that counts as “black” those who claim some African ancestry or use any nonwhite racial term to identify themselves. Since many of these people are in fact light-skinned, they are then not counted as “black” faces on television. Dark faces are no doubt under-represented on Brazilian television, but it's impossible to say by how much. Furthermore, "black” media make sense in the US because there are distinct African-American cultural forms to be represented and a fairly clear “black” audience. In Brazil, by contrast, there are no dialects or cultural traditions that can be identified as distinctively black and only a very small percentage of the population that identifies itself that way.Dark-skinned Brazilians are disproportionately poor, and whatever cultural commonalities they seem to share they also share with other poor Brazilians. One important reason that such recent initiatives as the “TV da Gente” black television channel are criticized is that they focus on race in isolation from the broad and subtle forms of prejudice that keep Brazil such an unequal society. Facile comparisons with US racial issues make meaningful solutions for Brazil harder to achieve.
Xuxa's show is long gone from TV Globo, and I don't think that Blonde No. 2 Angelica's show is on anymore either. This is not, of course, to say that Brazil doesn't have a color prejudice problem or that it's not reflected on TV. It's just that thinking on these issues never goes anywhere because most scholars who work in this area are mired in an unproductive and misleading comparative framework, perpetuated by a kind of exasperated taken-for-granted tone and the "50% black" and "most African-descended people after Nigeria" canards.
The Ethnic Multicutlural Media Academy had this to say about the case:
After 300 years of slavery, and non-white faces being a rare thing in media and politics, TV da Gente, Brazil’s first black television channel, aims to bridge racial divide.
Excuse me, "bridge a divide"? With a channel called "Our TV"?
Even though LA Times reporter Henry Chu can't understand why, he does report that there has been a vociferous Brazilian reaction against the network that sees the move as "racist."
Posted by johnn at 09:31 AM | Comments (0)
December 19, 2005
Mais um em Bolivia!
Evo Morales somehow got his 51%, and another threat to the Bushies joyfully appears on the southern horizon. Bechtel shouldn't have tried to steal their rainwater.
Posted by johnn at 09:05 PM | Comments (0)
December 12, 2005
Simpsons in Italy
I sincerely hope that, in case the Rio de Janeiro tourism agency, Riotur, is still flaunting its ignorance and unhipness in pursuing its defamation case against Fox for the meticulously researched (and then, of course, shamelessly stereotyped) Simpsons in Brazil episode (#284, March 31, 2002, "Blame it on Lisa"), they also see at least tonight's great Simpsons in Italy episode (#364, "Italian Bob") so they can see what good company they're in to be featured by this program. I personally like the Brazil episode more with each screening, and I show it to every Brazil-focused class I teach. Ha ha. (Don't tell Fulbright...)
Posted by johnn at 01:08 AM | Comments (1)