Patrícia Vieira

Wednesday, 22 May 2013, 6-7.30pm, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Brazilian writer and journalist Euclides da Cunha’s masterpiece Rebellion in the Backlands (Os Sertões, 1902) describes the campaigns of the Brazilian military against the village of Canudos, located in the country’s hinterland. The religious, messianic community of Canudos, led by self-proclaimed prophet Antônio Conselheiro between 1896 and 1897, was perceived as a threat to the Brazilian central government and was completely destroyed by the army after putting up a heroic fight. Thanks in part to Rebellion in the Backlands, Canudos remains a hallmark of utopian social experiments in Brazil to this day. Da Cunha portrays the community that came together in the village as the response of the downtrodden to centuries of neglect and racial discrimination. He puts Canudos in perspective, delving into its historical roots and presenting it, ultimately, as an example of resistance against exploitation. This link between messianism and political resistance is revisited in many movies from the 1960s Cinema Novo movement, which sought to denounce social inequalities in Brazil. In films such as The Guns (Os Fuzis, Ruy Guerra, 1964) or Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, Glauber Rocha, 1964) religion is portrayed ambiguously: it functions both as response of the people to the precariousness of their lives and as an alienating factor that prevents them from rebelling against those who cause their suffering.

Patrícia I. Vieira is Assistant Professor at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and at the Comparative Literature Program of Georgetown University and a Researcher in the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on Contemporary Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone African Literature and Film, Literature and Philosophy, Literary Theory and Postcolonialism. She is the author of Seeing Politics Otherwise: Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), Cinema no Estado Novo: A Encenação do Regime [Cinema in the Portuguese New State: The Staging of the Regime](Lisbon: Colibri, 2011) and co-editor of Existential Utopia: Reconsidering Utopian Thought and Practice (New York: Continuum, 2011). She has edited a volume of ClcWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (2009), co-edited a volume of the Journal of Contemporary Thought (2010), and published numerous articles in academic journals on literature and film. She is currently a Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities Research Fellow.

This event is part of Birkbeck Arts Week.