Poetry and citizenship: notes on slam poetry in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro from 2016-2020

The dispute towards the meanings of citizenship and poetry is one of the main concerns of the slam poetry produced in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro between 2016 and 2020. This text analyzes works by Carol Dall Farra, Lucas Afonso, Luiza Romão, Luz Ribeiro, Mel Duarte, Roberta Estrela D’Alva, Tom Grito and Valentine and the context of their performance. It tries to foreground the mutually constitutive relationship between poetry and citizenship in the slam produced in these cities during this period. This relationship is grounded both at the level of the word, in the topics brought to discussion by the poets, and at the level of performance, in the enactment and collective pratice of slam poetry by the members of its community, its organizers, poets and audience members.

Cytaty i plagiaty. Tekst piosenki i wypowiedzi slamerskie w świetle prawa autorskiego

The most important function of copyright is the protection of products of creativity, property rights and personal creator. In this broad sense, the laws protecting the author are understood and accepted by practice all over the world. The main focus of this article is to analyse the lyrics of Polish songs whose authors entered the judicial path to investigate one’s rights, and to compare them with spoken word texts, which, due to frequent references to the works of other authors, could be considered illegal. The research material consists of open court judgments, song lyrics and recordings of slam poetry texts collected by the author.

Revolução através da palavra: reflexões acerca do uso da literatura e da oralidade como expressão social e atuação política no Slam das Minas - RJ

A resistência e a luta política dão-se de diversas formas, e uma delas é a através da arte. O presente artigo é resultado de uma pesquisa em desenvolvimento que busca entender os sentidos e os efeitos políticos da participação feminina no slam poetry brasileiro e de como essa forma de manifestação artística se relaciona com o território da cidade. Através de uma abordagem etnográfica, o artigo pretende demonstrar como mulheres e pessoas trans estão atuando politicamente através da poesia falada e de como a união de seus corpos vem incidindo no espaço público nos eventos do Slam das Minas na cidade do Rio de Janeiro.

Adaptation against Myth: Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott and the Violence of Austerity

This article explores, from the standpoint of socio-political myth-criticism, the processes of revision and adaptation carried out in Gary Owen’s 2015 play Iphigenia in Splott. The play, a dramatic monologue composed in the rhythms of slam poetry, rewrites the classical Greek myth of Iphigenia in order to denounce the profound injustice of the sacrifices demanded by austerity policies in Europe—and more specifically, in Britain—in the recession following the financial crash of 2008. Reassessing contemporary social, economic and political issues that have resulted in the marginalisation and dehumanisation of the British working class, this study probes the dramatic and mythical artefacts in Owen’s harrowing monologue by looking back to Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the classical play which inspires the title of Owen’s piece and which serves as the mythical and literary background for the story of Effie. The aim is to demonstrate how Owen’s innovative adaptation of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, slurred out in verse, resentful and agonising, speaks out a desperate plea against myth, that is, against a dominant social ethos that legitimises its own violence against the most vulnerable—those who, as in the classical myth, suffer the losses that keep our boats afloat.

Desiertos de amor (2018) by Raúl Zurita: between poetry, image and voice

After a brief contextualization of the author's biography, I present the volume Desierto de amor (2018) by Raúl Zurita, realized with González y Los Asistentes (music) and Massimo Giacon (comic), as a significant example of a hybrid literary product that mixes poems, music and comics. The transmedial and trimodal work uses different media that merge each other. The poem, a migrant text halfway between slam poetry and poetry in music, alternates and superimposes itself on music and poetry comix. Reflecting on the potentialities of transmediality and intersemiotic translation, I analyze how transcoding into other languages ​​brings added value to the poetic text because it creates an intertextual dialogue that produces a new reception mechanism. The visual and auditory reading takes place in a different space and time, with new expressive modalities and ways of reaching the addressee.

Beat Performance Poetry

The essay investigates the influence of Beat performance poetry on the contemporary slam poetry movement, which includes many participants who openly acknowledge Beat antecedents for the social justice content of their poetry. The essay focuses on the Beat performance poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman, and discusses at length the ways in which the author teaches Beat literature as well as performance poetry.

Slam Poetry: entre os impasses da crítica e da criação

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir, à luz da crítica literária, a prática de leitura de poesia hoje. O recorte proposto em nossa discussão toma como foco de análise a leitura de poesia e sua abordagem crítica e analítica no contexto acadêmico das universidades brasileiras. Para tanto, traçamos um percurso metodológico que compreende os seguintes passos: 1) apresentar os impasses enfrentados pela crítica literária universitária, com especial atenção à poesia; 2) debater algumas das hipóteses mais recentes no que diz respeito à crítica de poesia; 3) pensar a crítica de poesia como prática situada. Neste último ponto, nossa ênfase recai na produção poética da periferia, sobretudo o slam poetry conduzido por mulheres, a partir da qual defendemos a hipótese de que ler poesia hoje demanda a inserção do (olhar) crítico no contexto social e cultural dos poetas, o que demanda uma expansão do ato de ler poesia para apreender questões que intercruzam o estético, o político e o ético.

CORPOREAL ACTIVISM IN ELIZABETH ACEVEDO’S THE POET X: TOWARDS A SELF-APPROPRIATION OF US AFRO-LATINAS’ BODIES

Scholars have typically studied Chicanas/Latinas in the US and African American women separately. However, this paper explores both the cultural appropriation of Afro-Latinas’ bodies in the US and the strategies they employed to reclaim their bodies and agencies through Elizabeth Acevedo’s novel, The Poet X. The protagonist’s body is simultaneously and paradoxically hyper-sexualized by racist discourses, and called to chastity by the patriarchal Catholic doctrine presiding over her Dominican community. Nevertheless, I argue that the protagonist makes her body a site of activism as she re-appropriates the agency over her body by moving from a self-imposed invisibility and silence in order to try to avoid the hyper-sexualization of her incipient curves, to a non-objectified visible position through her sexual desire, self-representative embodied narrative, and performance of her slam poetry.

“Our skin is a monument”: corpo, raça, mulher em alguma poesia africana em português

My article focuses on how poetic word works as an instrument of emancipation in issues related to gender and race in the Portuguese-speaking African space and diaspora. Starting from the 1950s and from the notebook / manifesto Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesaorganized by Mário Pinto de Andrade and Francisco José Tenreiro, and considering the idea that knowledge and its artistic manifestations create genealogies of concepts, I intend to present a brief overview to illustrate the moments of rupture and cleavage that have existed in the evolution of such themes. In this context, particular attention will also be paid to the most recent experiences of new textualities created in Portugal by Afro-descendant and anti-racist subjectivities, such as Djidiu: A Herança do Ouvido, an idea of collective textual production contaminated by practices such as rap or slam poetry.