XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Kinesthetic Knowledges: Corporeal Conjurings of Brazil Otherwise

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

This panel presents ethnographic explorations of imaginal sites of performance by focusing on how bodies in action–and in interaction–produce spatio-temporal sense of possibility. If the story of Brazil is often circumscribed by colonial histories and deferred promises of modernity, even as an anomaly to those meta-narratives, the session presents ethnographic portrayals of how alternative mythic-historical imagination emerges from, and is sustained by, embodied collective experiences in Brazilian cultural spaces. Drawing from performance studies, artistic research, and play theory, these papers offer perspectives on how communities access a sense of mytho-historical alterity. Key to the emergent imaginaries documented here is that agential possibility is located not in a space beyond or in a utopian no-place, but rather in the interstitial. It is precisely in the crossing of thresholds between real and unreal, history and myth, body and environment, material and spiritual that new in-between spaces of alterity are perceived and shared. These embodied senses of alterity manifest creative ontological responses to technocratic and epistemological oppression in Brazil. Drawing on studies situated in Acre, Bahia, Maranhão, and the urban periphery of Brasília and Rio de Janeiro, the ethnographic approaches presented here suggest kinesthetic experience generates an affective and aesthetic consciousness that gestures toward hidden pasts and the otherwise of knowledge. Taking up questions of gender, race, and class, the papers explore how the body and history must be apprehended in their manifold formations. In exploring these linkages between the corporeal and the political, the panel also considers experimental registers of the real and challenges to realism as a strategy and style of ethnographic representation.

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Da Floresta até o Mar: Mythic-historical spaces of Brazilian popular imagination in performances of the Santo Daime bailado - Ana Flecha, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Space-Time Travelers: Interstices of the Real, the Material, and the Imagined in the Valley of the Dawn - Kelly Hayes, Indiana University

• Site-based Movement Experiments in Embodied Listening: Moving Alongside Afro-Brazilian Spirit Entities - Jamie Davidson, University of California, Davis

• The Favela’s Magic Circle: Porous Geographies of the Unreal and Real - Alessandro Angelini, Johns Hopkins University

Chair

• Jamie Davidson, University of California, Davis

Session Organizer

• Alessandro Angelini, Johns Hopkins University