XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Não Foi Acidente, Foi Crime: Submerged Perspectives from Mariana and Brumadinho Socioenvironmental Calamities

• In Event: (Un)Sustainable Development and its Representations

Abstract

This presentation will analyze how contemporary Brazilian cultural productions are responding to the representational challenges of narrating socioenvironmental calamities. I will examine the documentary The Safest Place (2021) by Aline Lata and Helena Wolfelson, and the poem-book O Gosto Amargo dos Metais (2022) by Prisca Agostini to address the advantages and challenges in describing and narrating the unprecedented disasters of Mariana and Brumadinho tail mining failures. The imaginative realm approximates readers to environmental devastation through creative and empathetic accounts anchored in reality. I contend that, though language (understood here broadly) imposes its limitations to convey these catastrophes’ dimensions, it is only through cultural expression we can comprehend multiple layers of loss, trauma, and, conversely, the resilience that are part of narratives about anthropogenic socio-environmental disasters. Mary Louise Pratt’s (2022) theorization on world-making and interspecies contact zone, along with Gomez-Barris’s (2017) definition of submerged perspectives within the extractive zone, will illuminate my analysis to foreground how non-fictional and fictional narratives portray historically disenfranchised communities as active participants in re-creating their stories amidst unprecedented environmental calamities. Ultimately, my corpus offers aesthesic gestures and socio-political propositions to account for stories that allow the contradictory motion of approximating readers to events of a magnitude that no language can translate.

Author

• Andressa Maia, Brown University