For Whom the Bell Tolls: national identity and violence in contemporary Brazil

The talk will present a panorama of the Brazilian contemporary scenario of violence not as the byproduct of sheer ignorance alone, but as something that can be understood as deeply rooted in the coloniality of the Brazilian historical imagination. From Bolsonaro and his clan to Emperor D. Pedro I, the structural complexity of factors on display in the myth of ‘brasileiro’ (Brazilian) identity reveal a number of stereotyped characteristics created and reinforced throughout Brazilian history and still influential today.

The interrelation between necropolitics and the brasileiro myth can give us some ideas on how and why democracy has been such a huge challenge in contemporary Brazil. Usually ‘brasileiro’ stands for an absolute identity, completely free of tensions (social, economic, racial, gender, etc.) and, therefore, the only "Brazilian democracy" that matter is the one that endorses the violent imaginary of absolute unity and no tensions. Can a democracy thus understood, without difference or tolerance, still be called a democracy?

Dr. Andre de Lemos Freixo is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Manchester (UK), researching on ethics and public history. He is a Lecturer in the Department of History of the Federal University of Ouro Preto (DEHIS / UFOP). He co-ordinates the Group of Studies on Ethics and Politics (GHEP) in the Centre for Studies in the History of Historiography and Modernity (NEHM), and is Director of Publications of the Brazilian Society for Theory of History and Historiography.