Marta Peixoto

Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature
New York University

"Urban Crisis and the Politics of Representation in Recent Brazilian Film"

Thursday, April 10, 2008
4:15 pm - C103 Hesburgh Center

Abstract

In the period of redemocratization after the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–1985), there has been, paradoxically, an increase in violent crime.  In Rio de Janeiro, this surge is linked to the illegal drug trade that takes place in poor communities, and to state repression of this trade, often itself overstepping the limits of legality. The homicide rate in Rio today is more than six times higher than New York City’s.  Focusing especially on News of a Personal War (João Moreira Salles and Katia Lundt, 1999), Elite Squad (José Padilha, 2007), and Babilônia 2000 (Eduardo Coutinho, 2001), this lecture asks how recent fiction and documentary films set in Rio represent this violence and what kind of intervention they can be seen to have in the conflicts they depict. What is the political efficacy of different strategies of realistic representation?  Are they productive, in the sense of helping to ease the conflicts or correct the situation that caused them, or counter-productive?  What impact (presumed) might they have on structures of power?

Biography

Marta Peixoto is associate professor of Brazilian literature at New York University. She has worked primarily on 20th-century Brazilian literature, having published one book on a major poet, João Cabral de Melo Neto (Poesia com coisas, Editora Perspectiva) and another on an internationally renowned novelist, Clarice Lispector (Passionate Fictions: Narrative, Gender, and Violence in Clarice Lispector, University of Minnesota Press). She has also published articles on women’s autobiographical writing and on Machado de Assis, among other topics and writers. Her current work centers on questions of urban crisis and artistic representation in literature and film, of which her article, “Rio’s Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film: Commonplaces of Urban Segregation” (PMLA, January 2007) is a part.