Comunicação

My dissertation examines the representation of Afro-Brazilians within the contemporary culture production of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, specifically in three novels, rap music, and the hip-hop community. The novels form a diverse corpus of works. Two were published during the 1990s by middle-class canonical writers, Subúrbio (1994) by Fernando Bonassi and Cidade de Deus (1997) by Paulo Lins. Bonassi offers a homogenous vision of the margins while Lins presents them as diverse. Yet, both draw on a materialist approach that leads the protagonists toward an apocalyptic conclusion. The third novel was published by a resident of a favela in the outskirts of São Paulo, Graduado em Marginalidade (2004) by Sacolinha. This novel presents a complex and at times contradicting view of favela life. Graduado offers the possibility for social advancement as the novel seeks to redefine race within Brazil. Rap music and the hip-hop community present a critical view of Brazilian culture and history. Through lyrics, musical form, and activism hip-hoppers look to contest, question, and alter established ideas of race in Brazil. Much like Sacolinha’s novel, hip-hoppers redefine race in order to rewrite their future and in the process break from the cycle of violence and drugs that threatens the well-being of Brazil’s most marginalized. Utilizing materialist and postcolonial theories this study explores how these cultural forms contribute toward understanding representations of race within Brazilian urban culture.

Esta tese analisa relações entre imprensa, humor e vida social em São Paulo entre os anos 1839 e 1876. O estudo tem como eixo central o processo inicial de formação da imprensa de humor paulista, identifica como se constituíram os primeiros periódicos humorísticos,e busca problematizar a emergência de estilos e narrativas de humor em meio a processo geral de constituição e afirmação do periodismo paulista. No cruzamento entre o fazer-se dessa imprensa e a vida social, procura surpreender e refletir sobre o diálogo ativo entre a construção de campos temáticos nos periódicos e as transformações da vida urbana naquela conjuntura. Analisando as publicações e a constituição de narrativas e estratégias de linguagem produzidas por cronistas, jornalistas e por caricaturistas como Angelo Agostini, Eduardo Langlois e Nicolau Hauscar de Vergara, evidenciou-se caminhos que, do interior do jornalismo político e domingueiro, abriam-se a experimentação dos gêneros de humor. Com a publicação do Diabo Coxo e o Cabrião, as folhas domingueiras sinalizam para uma percepção social mais intensa do viver urbano, explorando o momento de transição e transformação de vila tropeira para metrópole do café e os impactos de novas tecnologias simbolizadas principalmente pela inauguração da Estrada de Ferro São Paulo Railway. Já as publicações de o Coaracy e o Polichinelo, apresentam-se uma narrativa mais ágil, bem agosto dos novos ritmos que a cidade vivencia. Ironizam-se as primeiras obras de benfeitorias urbanas. Mostra-se também uma cidade mais a vontade com as novidades do mundo moderno. Valorizam-se os debates e combates políticos do momento.

This study analyzed the structure and performance of the main regional telecommunications sectors of the Philippines and Brazil under different ownership structures. Poor performance was the common thread between these two companies and was analyzed in the context of three variables: ownership, market structure and regulation at the primary level, and contextual variables such as culture, and political and economic structure at the secondary level. The study found that institutional idiosyncrasies at the state and the firm level in Brazil and the Philippines largely explained the performance of the telecommunications companies in both countries. Specifically, the historically poor performance and low investment of the Philippine Long Distance phone company in the Philippines can be attributed, for the most part, to profit-maximizing measures that meant the exclusion of non-profitable areas such as the local telephone network; corrupt practices that siphoned and shifted profits elsewhere; and a weak regulatory and political environment that was unable to enforce compliance with positive incentives. The performance and investment patterns of the Sao Paulo state company, Telesp, can be attributed for the most part, to the political and economic policies at the national and state level and the political/regulatory structure of the Telebras system. Mismanagement and corruption at the ministerial and firm level, while exacerbating the poor performance, played a less crucial role in the firm's overall performance than it did in the case of the Philippine Long Distance Company.

This dissertation examines musical events in the public auditory spaces of São Paulo, Brazil. Drawing upon seventeen months of ethnographic and archival research conducted in the city of São Paulo during 2009-2013, I interrogate the public musical event as a specific mode of musical practice constitutive of the city’s contemporary urban condition. I develop the concept of listening heuristics—instruments of public policy that, in the broadest sense, facilitate an encounter between audiences and some sonic activity—as an analytic with which to understand these events as a nexus of social processes that unfold in the realms of cultural finance, the musical labor market, urban leisure, and urban spatial management. I use listening heuristics to explain how musical practices have become essential components of social and political projects of late capitalism in large urban agglomerations like São Paulo. Embedded within highly contentious debates about cultural policy, urbanism, citizenship, and economics, such events both characterize the social processes of music making in São Paulo and highlight the particularly fraught negotiations of aesthetics and power in the city’s aural public sphere. The dissertation addresses the role of musical events in Brazil’s recent, uneven economic growth through an examination of the alternately divergent and complementary logics of social inclusion and economic accumulation that are implicated in many cultural initiatives, contributing to an emerging area of musical scholarship that deals with neoliberal policy reforms and musical production. Furthermore, I position the ways in which musical actors experience the spatial and symbolic aspects of urbanity as a central research question, providing ethnographic accounts of economically segregated urban spaces in early twenty-first-century Brazil and employing the concept of urban imaginaries, which understands the physical and symbolic aspects of urban social life as mutually constitutive, as a way of interrogating the ways in which sonic practices participate in the construction of the city’s contemporary modernity.

This study analyzed the professional values of Brazilian journalists and their perceptions of foreign influences in their work. A sample of 402 journalists working for 12 leading news organizations of São Paulo, Brazil, participated in this study through a self-administered survey conducted in May of 1998. The questionnaire included questions on job satisfaction, media roles, and ethics. It partially replicated similar surveys conducted in the United States and in France. The study was complemented by personal interviews with editors and reporters. Professional values held by Brazilian journalists were compared to professional values of American and French journalists. Brazilians perceived themselves as highly influenced by the American journalistic style. They were less satisfied with their jobs than Americans and French journalists and were more willing to accept questionable journalistic practices.

Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theories of language, hegemony and counter-hegemony; critical race theories; Erving Goffman’s frame analysis; and from extensive communication scholarship, this qualitative study examines resistance to state violence in Brazil through the use of media and language. It employs frame analysis and grounded theory to analyze public content produced by two grassroots groups from Sao Paulo. The study shows how two groups create media and develop alternative grammars to resist criminalization, dehumanization, and erasure, in order to challenge dominant notions of race, space, justice, violence, and citizenship. Constructing a form of radical media located within broader networks of activism, these groups challenge traditional understandings police brutality in the country. In reframing police killings from necessary tools of social order into genocidal attacks on communities of black and poor periféricos, activists and families place racial meanings and identity at the center of the problem, expose structural inequalities, connect broader social justice issues, and put forth an understanding of state violence as a historical and foundational issue of Brazil as a nation. Furthermore, they expose the far-reaching consequences of state-sponsored violence through a frame of disruption: the broken normalcy of life, mental illness, financial problems, family separation, and community fragmentation resulting from massacres and other cases of police killings. The texts examined in this thesis also suggest that the family members, primarily mothers, are not seeking to restore the relative normalcy that existed in their lives before violence struck them. Having gone through the experiences of violence, neglect, and impunity they conceive their work as one of changing the existing framework of social relations; altering society’s views on state violence, its contexts, mechanisms, and consequences; and contributing to create a deeper understanding of justice. Their media present a robust body of counter-knowledge and public memory of violence that preclude the cases to vanishing from the public realm and offer much needed alternative narratives that explain state violence from the ground; alternative narratives that overtime may help close the immense knowledge gap that exists among different segments of Brazilian society.