Artes

Este trabalho traz reflexões sobre o uso do computador como recurso no processo ensino-aprendizagem por professores do ensino fundamental de uma escola pública da cidade de São Paulo. Constituindo-se como pesquisa participante, buscou abrir espaço no cotidiano escolar para a vivência e troca de experiência entre professores e alunos quanto ao emprego da utilização do computador na busca de sua contribuição para construir o conhecimento. Assim, procurou desvendar não apenas as contribuições desse imprescindível instrumento como facilitador no processo ensino-aprendizagem, as dificuldades e superações dos usuários, como também as diferentes alternativas de trabalho pedagógico que esse recurso possa efetivamente apresentar no cotidiano escolar. O estudo aponta para a quebra de paradigmas no processo de ação e reflexão da ação por parte dos professores, tendo como pressupostos tanto a necessidade do engajamento efetivo do docente na adoção do computador enquanto recurso, quanto a necessidade de um profissional facilitador do processo, que auxilie nas reais necessidades do professor. Além disso, este estudo buscou incentivar a reflexão do professor a respeito do uso do computador sob uma ótica mais pedagógica do que tecnológica.

Funk in Brazil, a form of the popular culture from the favelas , or hillside slums, and other low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, is as multi-dimensional and ambiguous as the social reality from which it comes and is often misunderstood by outside observers and vilified in the media. Incorporating counter-cultural aspects of the international Black movement and world hip-hop and fusing them together with the culture of the favelas, funk has evolved into a rich musical form characterized by irony, complex masking and subversive messages and practices. To examine these practices in funk, I combine literary and cultural theory with social science hypotheses on the nature of the “social bandit” and the power of Rio's drug gangs, as well as an ethnographic perspective mostly focusing on the community of the favela of Rocinha. After providing background on the climate of violence in Rio de Janeiro and discussing the social and economic organization of the community of Rocinha in general terms, I explore the nature of the baile funk, or funk dance, in favelas as a platform for the staging of the power of the drug traffickers. I also attempt to map out the ideological contours of the rule of criminal factions in the partially alternative social formation of the favelas, paying special attention to lyrics of a style of underground funk music know as proibidão, one of the principal practices through which the legitimacy of these drug traffickers is produced and lived. Finally, I examine the utopian character of funk as a form of entertainment as an example of the tendencies of ‘black Atlantic’ cultures of the African Diaspora. I also explore its similarities with Brazilian Modernismo, compare it to contemporary Carnival and situate it in the context of other styles of popular music in Brazil.

This paper aims to further interrogate the already precarious position of Brazil's favelas, or informal squatter communities. Due to Rio de Janeiro's role as the host of the 2016 Olympics and 2014 FIFA World Cup, the city government has been forced to rethink their attitudes towards favelas. This thesis claims that arts-based projects in the favelas exist in and through states of uncertainty, which is elucidated by the fact that the communities themselves exist in states of uncertainty due to police occupations and government sponsored upgrading programs that aim to make the favelas more palatable to the communities' international and local critics. While favelas are normally considered dystopias, I claim that they are critical utopias that both critique existing realities and offer alternatives and possibilities through which diverse people can comfortably co-exist. My discussion focuses on public projects that incorporate participation, community building, and placemaking in an attempt to legitimize auto-construction and defend against displacement. Throughout my discussion, I stress that the affective possibilities of socially engaged projects in the favelas emerge from processes of self-representation, and the issue of who is operating or initiating these projects falls second to the matter of who is speaking.

'Favela Effects: Brazilian Art at the Intersection of Community Development and Global Markets' investigates the representation of informal housing settlements, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro, as a crucial facet of contemporary art. I investigate a complement of site-specific and socially-oriented practices based in the favelas in order to consider the shifting value of 'marginality' in the contemporary art world. I trace the global networks of donor agencies, arts biennials, NGOs, curators and art practices through which favela communities are incorporated into the cultural market. I also examine the manner in which artists and community activists re-route these networks to bolster local struggles for rights and resources.

This work focuses on the intersection of youth, their music and their agency, all of which interact to shape identities and create social change in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Music as media activism serves as backdrop, narrative, response, and counterpoint rhythm to the interlocking systemic violence(s) affecting favela youth. Identity issues around race, poverty and violence are the central focus as Brazil's homicide rates are some of the highest in the world with much of it concentrated in Rio and perpetrated by the state against youth of color. In 1993 rampant violence reached a climax as poor black and brown youth were being murdered daily in Rio's streets. The city's image of paradise on earth, and Brazil's self-narrative of racial democracy were suffering. Musical genres of funk and hip-hop proliferated in Rio's favelas facilitating life stories told by youth of color. Lyrics of racism, chronic poverty and violence surfaced in resistance to imposed constructions of blackness, space, and worth. In dialogue and resistance, youth design alternative worldviews and identities while performing grassroots participatory citizenship. In these ways young people disrupt structural violence and re-work local and global identities.

This project analyzes three examples of testimonial literature written by favela residents in Brazil to demonstrate the extent to which these accounts contest or confirm the popular news media's violent representation of favelas and their inhabitants. The literary works Quatrocentos contra um: Uma história do Comando Vermelho (1991) by William da Silva Lima and Capão pecado (2000) by Ferréz and the documentary Notícias de uma guerra particular (1999) present an insider's perspective of the violence that takes place in the favela and thus can reveal the factors that contribute to it.

Through these explanations, readers and viewers become aware of the generally unheard side of the story of the repressed and ignored poor class. Lima's voice in Quatrocentos contra um serves to explain the way that crime was organized as a means of survival to combat the repression and abuse of the government, and in Capão pecado Ferréz demonstrates the difficulty that favela residents who are not involved in drug trafficking have in avoiding the violence that surrounds them because they do not have equal opportunity for education and employment. He suggests a non-violent rebellion through artistic means to build a positive image of favela inhabitants, both inside and outside of the poor community. The documentary Notícias de uma guerra particular directed by João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund presents information that places much of the blame for violence on the lack of social structure that would integrate the poor, and more importantly allows for honest, hardworking favela residents to share their experience of trying to make a living and avoid illegal activity while suffering from the stereotype that all who live in poor communities are involved in violent activity. Together these works constitute an attempt for the violence of the favelas to be explained through the voice of favela residents themselves.

Funk carioca, a genre of urban music originating from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, has had a long history of being misunderstood. Stigmatized by associations of violence and criminal activity, funk carioca has faced many obstacles in obtaining positive circulation beyond the margins, and for some more affluent members of society, this genre of music is also linked to a sense of cultural embarrassment. In more recent years, however, funk carioca artists performing at venues in the Zona Sul, the wealthiest section of Rio de Janeiro, have helped bolster an image of the genre of music and its culture that appeals to residents of the area. This thesis explores the impact of funk carioca artists as cultural mediators, members of the periphery who are adept at adapting to a variety of different social environments and codes, and the ways in which their performances are consumed by an audience comprised primarily of upper and middle class members of the society of Rio de Janeiro. Funk carioca, despite its criminalized past, is in high demand in the Zona Sul, and it is through the cultural mediation skills that funk carioca artists possess that a more relatable image of the genre of music and the favela are promoted, resulting in important improvements in center-periphery relations and significant steps toward more meaningful discourse regarding the social inclusion of the favelas.

O Ateneu by Raul Pompéia, O mulato and Casa de pensão by Aluísio Azevedo, Bom-Crioulo by Adolfo Caminha and O urso: romance de costumes paulistas by Antônio de Oliveira are examples of coming-of-age Brazilian novels. Bisexuals, homosexuals, mulatos, malandros in the early stage of their careers, fragile and neurotic adolescents – these are the outsider inhabitants of the 19th Century coming of age novel. The comparison of these five works allows us to see common elements in the trajectories of the main characters, youngsters characterized by a singular personality or by a mysterious and dramatic past and caught in the act of transitioning from a rural environment to an urban one (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, São Luís do Maranhão). This passage from a safe but small and limiting milieu to a diverse multifaceted city informs the adolescent's freedom of choice. The collapse of illusions (echoing the Lost Illusion of Balzac) is achieved through a gradual familiarization with intrigues and prejudices and through the revelation of hidden truths from the past. The authors of these novels, published episodically in local newspapers of Rio and São Paulo, were asking their contemporary readers to see Brazilian society from the point of view of a marginalized and troubled outsider. This study is divided into three chapters: the first reviews the critical debate on the Bildungsroman genre in European, North American and Brazilian criticism. The second analyses through a structuralist perspective the elements of continuity and difference between the European Bildungsromane and the Brazilian narratives of coming-of-age. In particular, I focus on the complex relationship between the main protagonist and the father figure. The third chapter proposes to interpret the concept of "formation" as ethical reflection in the Brazilian coming-of-age novels.

This dissertation examines the role of new visual reproduction technologies in forging public cultures of sensationalized violence in two rapidly modernizing nations on the periphery of industrial capitalism. I trace parallel developments in the production and reception of silent crime and adventure film in Brazil's First Republic and in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Mexico, at a moment when industrialization and urbanization were reshaping daily experience without eliminating profound social inequalities. Re-evaluating critical frameworks premised on cinema's relationship to the experience of modernity in the industrialized U.S. and Western Europe, I argue that these early twentieth-century cultures of popular sensationalism signal the degree to which public life in Mexico and Brazil has been conditioned by violence and social exclusion linked to legacies of neo-colonial power. In the first half of the dissertation, I examine cinematic re-enactments of real-life crimes filmed in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Mexico City between 1908 and 1919. Combining an emphasis on location shooting with melodramatic tropes inherited from popular literature and theater, these true-crime films grapple with representational problems at the heart of the cinematic medium: its potential for both documentation and dramatization and its indeterminate relationship to topical events. Incorporating analysis of locally produced crime serials, I focus on the dynamics of unequal cultural exchange between Mexico and Brazil and industrialized nations, particularly France and the United States, which acted as exporters of cultural products. Addressing the economic polarization of metropolitan centers and rural areas, the latter half of the dissertation analyzes fiction features produced outside the two countries' principal cities in the 1920s, where economic development lagged behind that of urban centers. These productions drew on the conventions of imported serial films and westerns (particularly location shooting and dynamic action sequences) to display local landscapes even as they asserted mastery over cinematic technology's viscerally thrilling effects. In constructing violence and risk as markers of local modernity, early Mexican and Brazilian crime and adventure films rendered spectacularly visible the social tensions of national modernization projects.

After World War I, with a growing middle class exerting a decisive force, Brazil's early modernists deliberately began to move away from the conservative art academies steeped in European tradition and to search for cultural self-definition in terms of their Indian and African roots. Included in this search was the desire to incorporate the uniqueness of their native land and their country's reaction to cultural influences from the United States and Europe. It was this desire which eventually led to the Semana de Arte Moderna--a visual arts exhibition and series of dance spectacles, literary readings, and concerts hosted and attended by painters, poets, novelists, critics, and musicians, held in Sao Paulo between February 13-17 of 1922. Thus, the central purpose of this investigation is not only to give a factual accounting of the Semana de Arte Moderna but to examine the definition of Brazilian Modernism in the context of its paradoxical relationship with Europe.