Diogenes articles from September 2000

Diogenes archives from September 2000

Making one out of many: the Brazilian experience.(the nation's identity)
September 22, 2000... Brazil, land of miscegenation (metisse). An indisputable fact and an unending process. But how should we understand its genesis and how should we, while respecting the requirements of a historiography worth the name, interpret it in terms of...

The fusion of races as locus of memory.
September 22, 2000... For a long while the dilemma between `not being' and `being other' has haunted the history of Brazil. The country's mixed-race condition lay at the heart of the dilemma which reached its apogee in the second half of the nineteenth and the...

The Minas Gerais: a high point of miscegenation.
September 22, 2000... From the earliest days of its history, Brazil has been a favoured `laboratory' for ethnic, cultural and religious hybridization. The absence or scarcity of white women and the temptations of sexual exoticism drove the Portuguese discoverers,...

Japanese immigration in Brazil.
September 22, 2000... Television, newspapers and magazines often discuss the presence in Japan of dekasseguis (1) from Brazil. This migratory movement, which started in 1985, has started to show signs of decline. The recession in Japan has been accompanied by the...

From orality to writing: the reality of a conversion through the work of the Jesuit Father Jose de Anchieta (1534-1597).
September 22, 2000... We are in 1563, somewhere on a Brazilian beach about 100 kilometres north of what is now Sao Paulo. A young man in a cowled robe alone on the beach is writing a poem on the sand with the point of his stick. The hostage of a savage tribe for...

Literature and racial integration.
September 22, 2000... The historical formation of Brazil is distinguished from the majority of ex-colonial nations by one factor that is especially characteristic: an intense process of ethnic and cultural mixing. The Portuguese colonisers, who, unlike the English...

Introducing Castro Alves.(poet Antonio de Castro Alves)
September 22, 2000... Antonio de Castro Alves was born on 1 March 1847 on the Fazenda das Cabaceiras (Cabaceiras Farm) in the state of Bahia, and died in July 1871 in Salvador, the state capital. For this short twenty-four year span of his life he represented, as no...

Brazil and the Cape Verde Islands: some aspects of Cultural Influence.
September 22, 2000... Pedro Alvares Cabral's ships left Portugal on 9 March 1500 en route for the territory that he first named Terra de Vera Cruz and that later came to be known as Brazil. On the 22 March they called at the island of Sao Nicolau [Caminha, 1500],...

An Overview of Brazilian Art.
September 22, 2000... I find it hard to understand what can be meant by `mestico (mixed-race) art'. No one disputes that the Brazilian people are of mixed race, but even if this is the case, the idea that their artistic creations should also be `mestico' seems...

Brazilian identities and musical performances.
September 22, 2000... ... our faults do not allow our qualities to show themselves to best effect. That is why, at the moment, Brazilians are a people of intermittent qualities and permanent faults. Mario de Andrade, Essai sur la musique bresilienne,...

Caetano Veloso or the taste for hybrid language.(Brazilian popular music)
September 22, 2000... Like many sociocultural phenomena in Brazil popular music, as everyone knows, is the result of a meeting of influences. It could almost be said that it is born a cross-breed, given the half-European, half-African origins of its best-known first...

Reflections on Brazilian Amazonia and International Policies.
September 22, 2000... Nowadays, that part of Amazonia which is situated on Brazilian territory is more and more the focus of attention for communication methods and the international agenda. This enormous expanse of land covered by tropical forest of unequalled...