Editorial Note

This issue marks the 60th anniversary of the Luso-Brazilian Review, the journal in Afro-Luso-Brazilian studies in the United States with the longest, uninterrupted publication record. We are extremely grateful for the many authors who have submitted their excellent work to the journal, for the colleagues who have donated their time to provide insightful peer-review evaluations for the journal, for the many members of the editorial and advisory boards over the years, and for the many assistants who have worked on the journal over the course of these 120 issues. To mark this anniversary issue, we are honored to be able to draw on the expertise of our dear colleague, longstanding former editor, and active member of the editorial board Mary Lou Daniel, and for her willingness to write a commemorative piece to reflect upon the history of the journal.

This issue opens with an article by Frans Weiser, “Trilogies of State Failure: Ethical Ambiguity and the ‘Adaptation’ of Elite da tropa and Tropa de elite.” In this study, Weiser explores both texts from the point of view of their realism, ethical ambiguity, and narrative praxis. It focuses on a re-evaluation of the Tropa de elite phenomenon by analyzing the role Luiz Eduardo Soares’s co-authored book Elite da tropa (2006) played in the creation and the reception of the film. Perhaps the most significant contribution of Weiser’s article is the consideration of the film independently from the book, both having been developed concurrently, and the film in fact conceived first. This article argues that rather than material adaptations, the film and the book should be understood as thematic transpositions.

The second article by Matthew P. Johnson is a timely reflection on the urgency of environmental preservation. In “Sacrificing Guaíra Falls: Geopolitics and the Environmental Impact of South America’s Biggest Dam, 1962–1982,” Johnson discusses the context of the Itaipu dam that submerged the Guaíra Falls following an agreement signed in 1973 between the intransigent military dictatorships of Brazil and Paraguay, seduced by the massive amounts of energy and the flooding of the problematic boundaries disputed in the War of the Triple Alliance. They argued that it was a necessary sacrifice for economic growth and progress despite the ensuing ecological disaster from the flooding of the Itaipu’s reservoir. Johnson revisits the construction of the dam and a discussion of the geopolitical origins of the dam and possible alternatives that could have been pursued such as the one designed by the Brazilian engineer Otávio Marcondes Ferraz. As detailed in this study, Ferraz’s proposition would have spared the Guaíra Falls. Johnson argues that Itaipu was a political choice to bury a border conflict that could undermine the military regime’s legitimacy and that the rhetoric of necessary environmental sacrifice was and is unfounded and dangerous given that it encourages complacency towards environmental destruction.

In “Escaping Patriarchal Institutionalization: Oppression, Femininity, and Transgression in Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem,” Amartya Karmaka revisits the depiction of the main protagonist Joana within a patriarchal world that limits female autonomy. Karmakar works through the following questions: How does patriarchal ideology shape the feminine subject in the novel? How does Lispector’s protagonist break free from this social space? How does Lispector craft a feminist narrative that defies the patriarchal social order? And how does Lispector revise the traditionalist perspective of the masculinist novel and alter it to delineate a narrative that engages with the Bildungsroman process of the making of a female artist? The author shows how femininity through the perspective of the protagonist and within her social context is a patriarchal definition of womanhood and demonstrates how patriarchal ideology functions in the formation of subjective identity and the function of power guised in the form of norms and conventions.

Next, in “Saudades in Brazil. Léopold Senghor and the Poetics of a Luso-Afro-Atlantic World,” Mauricio Acuña discusses the poetics and politics of Léopold Sédar Senghor whose work has mostly been engaged within the scope of Anglophone and Francophone languages and cultures. This article takes as its corpus a poem published in the poetic collection Nocturnes and speeches delivered in Brazil and Portugal to analyze the relation between Senghor’s poetics and politics as it zigzags between his poetry and travel discourses and records. Acuña analyzes from this perspective Senghor’s involvement in the Négritude movement and his political ideas in relation to the writings of Gilberto Freyre and concepts such as racial democracy and Lusotropicalism, racial exceptionalism, and Afro-Atlantic cosmopolitanism. This study provides a new angle through which to understand Senghor’s philosophical investment in geopolitical regions beyond the North Atlantic area such as south-to-south connections between Afro-Atlantic regions.

The issue closes with an article by Eugenio Lucotti, “A técnica e o golpe: A ‘narração ensaística’ em José Cardoso Pires e Curzio Malaparte,” that provides a comparative reading of two texts from a methodological point of view, José Cardoso Pires’s Censorship as a Technique and Curzio Malaparte’s The Technique of Revolution. The focus in this essay is on the technical efficiency of revolution and censorship that enables the authors to express ideas against the status quo through subversive strategies as a means to understand history. If Curzio Malaparte’s intentions appear mostly educational, Cardoso Pires’s text is articulated as a denunciation and an invitation to take future action. In particular, Lucotti discusses Cardoso Pires’s hybrid form of writing that merges essay and narrative form.

As we celebrate the 60th-year anniversary of the Luso-Brazilian Review and fitting with the mission of the journal from the very beginning to be a forum for graduate students and early-career researchers to publish their work alongside more seasoned scholars, we have recently launched an “article incubator” for graduate students working in history and social sciences. The information with the pertinent deadlines can be found on the website and social media platforms of the Luso-Brazilian Review. I am grateful to our LBR editorial team and journal assistants who contribute in so many ways to the quality of the journal, and to reviewers who generously donate their time to keep the peer-review system functioning. We look forward to receiving articles from scholars at all stages of their careers working in the areas of the journal. Here’s to the next 60 years of the Luso-Brazilian Review!