Lecture by Marília Librandi Rocha: Ideas out of Place or Inside a Body?

Speaker(s): Marília Librandi Rocha

In his widely-discussed essay "Idéias for do lugar," ("Misplaced Ideas"), Brazilian literary critic Roberto Schwarz describes how liberal Enlightenment ideals, imported into slaveholding societies like that of 19th-century Brazil, faced circumstances incongruous to those of the bourgeois European societies that birthed them. In her talk, Professor Librandi Rocha will address Schwarz's claims, bringing her own expertise in Brazilian literature to bear on a reevaluation of "ideas out of place."

Talk summary: I intend to discuss how Schwarz's concept of "ideas out of place" is related to an idea of history and fiction operating as "imitatio," in a world divided into center and periphery, model and copy. How could we re-potentialize his concept through an idea of mimesis as production of differences in an asymmetrical world where the center is constantly dislocated and the peripheries are inside and not outside? Diverse authors will help us rethink the terms of Schwarz's concept, starting with the rebel tradition of modernists who suggested that in Brazil and Latin America, Afro and Amerindian ideas are located in our bodies, proposing to abandon the idea of a proper place/body in order to defend multiple (dis)locations. In this polemic theme, I ask participants to collaborate with their "cultural synchronization and disjuncture".

Response by Sidney Chalhoub (Universidade Estadual de Campinas–UNICAMP)