Creative Insurgencies in Postdictatorial(ising) Brazil: Memory Conflicts, Artistic Practices, and Political Activism
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2023
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This thesis investigates the historical conditions for and creative practices around memory activism in post-dictatorial Brazil during and following the National Truth Commission (2012). Drawing on interviews with activists engaged in the struggle for memory, truth, and justice, the thesis examines the ways that collective memory regarding the dictatorship period (1964–1985) is disputed by non-State actors through creative modes of representation and performance, including street demonstrations, escrachos (public “naming and shaming”), critical toponymy, and urban installation. The thesis argues that young activists were impacted by State-sponsored initiatives, particularly those implemented from 2007 onwards, while seeking to extend its institutional limits to include popular participation. Working at the intersections of aesthetic experimentation and political expression, the activist collectives considered in this thesis also constructed critical dialogues between past and present, both by reworking critical art practices developed in the 1970s and by drawing attention to the legacies of the dictatorship period, including the continuing lack of accountability for many perpetrators of human rights violations. Drawing on frameworks from collective memory studies, studies in cultural trauma, and emerging scholarship on memory activism, the thesis demonstrates both the importance of State-led initiatives for reckoning with past State violence and its legacies in the present, and of participatory and public social actions to supplement and extend these State-led initiatives.
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