Democratizing memory and the question of Black difference in Brazil (ca. 1980–1988): The transformation of the Serra da Barriga (Alagoas), from haunted “Black territory” to national memorial in the transition between dictatorship and democracy

By voiding the previous social pact, including the predominant conception of racial integration, the Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) created the conditions for a radical understanding of Black difference, which found its leading motif in the memory of the Quilombo of Palmares, a historical community of rebel slaves. A new Black movement understood its cultural and historical experience as containing a utopian legacy, an alternative for a Brazil marked by racism and inequality. To overcome its problems of legitimation, the regime set into motion a process of gradual democratization. The need to symbolically and culturally accomplish this transition created an institutional breach for the memory politics of the Black movement. In this context, the inclusion of the Serra da Barriga, a site of the war against Palmares, into national cultural heritage became the testing grounds for novel politics of culture that changed both the understanding of Brazilian nationhood and Black difference, as represented in the memory of Palmares.

The Political Implications of Urban Displacement: Notes from Two Fieldwork Research Projects in Casablanca

Resettlement programs have always been in the political agenda of public institutions and administrators of Casablanca since its growth during the French Protectorate. Today real estate and private multinational capital sneak into local and national powers, pushing public authorities to clear land for new urban development through demolition and resettlement of local residents. The dwellers of areas such as the old town centre (medina) and the slums (karyan) increasingly react to displacement by challenging this urban agenda frontally with their bodies and words, but often also deploying what James Scott calls “weapons of the weak”, i.e. implicit acts of resistance and symbolic dissent. Reversing Asef Bayat’s statement, we consider residents of these stigmatized neighbourhoods “revolutionaries without a revolution”, partisans of an intimate cause of their own, that aims at having a home and surviving in a hostile city. Our reflections are the product of two separate fieldwork researches: one with the inhabitants of informal neighbourhoods, another with residents and former residents of the old medina. The two cases show how resettlement affects the sense of belonging and of cohesion of low-income classes by uprooting the founding element of the everyday life: the house. The uncertainty about the possibility to keep their own home deeply conditions the implicit social pact with the monarchy apparatus, and may represent one of the conditions that are undermining the allegiance to the monarchy itself.

CROSS-BORDER IDENTITY AS A DAILY RESISTANCE TACTIC OF COSMOPOLITANISM IN A TIME OF GLOBAL HEALTH EMERGENCY: GORIZIA-NOVA GORICA GO BORDERLESS

Ulrich Beck represented cosmopolitan society as overcoming the nation-states as the container of the respective civil societies. In order to understand these profound changes, sociology itself appears inadequate, populated as it is by definitions that Beck considers as zombie concepts: “the conceptual apparatus of the sociology of modernity appears in crisis because it is inadequate to describe the situation of societies in which the borders of the nation-states that contained them have dissolved in an extremely rapid period. Rather than a definitive departure from that sociology, Beck’s invitation to the international community of sociologists is to recalibrate their concepts in a cosmopolitan perspective» (Porcelli 2005: 8). The social contract, which was at the base of the construction of what Anderson defined the imagined communities, sanctioned the renunciation by the populations of part of their prerogatives of freedom favouring the security guaranteed by the sovereign power. The present global health emergency seems to have proposed the same social pact: more security and less freedom, especially people segregated within the resurging nation-states by new borders and walls. The remaining residue of globalisation is its economic-financial globalism. Ethnographic analysis along border areas reveals a consolidated cross-border identity experienced in people’s everyday lives as a tactic of resistance against the erection of new self-containment barriers. This contribution aims to analyse the salient aspects of this phenomenon in the city of Gorizia, which for decades has constituted an integrated metropolitan area of the Italian and Slovenian zones, defining a specific cross-border identity shared by both Italian and Slovenian citizens. This identity has not given way in front of the walls that have been restored in recent months in order to contain the contagion and therefore could represent what de Certeau defined as a tactic of resistance that in the present case bears witness to the invention of an increasingly cosmopolitan daily life. In this respect, the main points of the project book submitted for the candidacy of Gorizia-Nova Gorica as European Capital of Culture 2025 will be examined. The title of the bid book itself specifies the cosmopolitan identity of the area under analysis: “Go borderless”.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC THOUGHT OF HÉLIO PELLEGRINO (1924-1988): INITIAL REFLECTIONS

"This theoretical study is part of a doctoral thesis and aims to investigate how the psychoanalytic thinking of Hélio Pellegrino - the Brazilian psychoanalyst, poet and writer - is structured and its ethical and political implications in the formation of psychoanalysis. We note the importance of thematic research, since there is no scientific publication that has as its object of study a systematic analysis of the author's psychoanalytic production. Furthermore, investigations of this kind contribute to the establishment of a reference bibliography on psychoanalysis in Brazil. That said, this research was developed and completed through a study of a large part of his psychoanalytic production, which is under the custody of the personal archives of the Museum of Brazilian Literature, at the Casa Rui Barbosa Foundation (FCRB). In this work, we outline some elements of the analysis found in his work, whose focus is on reflecting on the epistemological, conceptual and practical foundations of psychoanalytic theory. It has, as a constant concern, the analysis of the problems that structure Brazilian society, observed through his own reading of the Oedipus complex, the constitution of subjectivity and the social pact, in general, and in Brazil, in particular. As such, he discusses the explicit commitment of psychoanalysis in transforming the serious social problems faced by Brazil, which are related to the serious structural problems of international capitalism, and which are also reflected in the problems of the development of psychoanalytic institutions around the world."

Justicia asertiva y empatía institucional

El presente propone un camino diferente a la noción de justicia que agrega el concepto de asertividad en la praxis de la justicia institucional con el objetivo de que en la decisión judicial se produzcan el entendimiento y reconocimiento entre la institucionalidad judicial y los usuarios o coasociados del pacto social de Colombia, ausente o tenue hasta ahora. Para ello, se recurrió a la empatía como herramienta de sensibilización entre la decisión judicial y la demanda de justicia, sin dejar de lado los puntos de encuentro que anteceden la determinación deóntica de la justicia. Abstract This paper proposes a different path to the notion of justice, adding the concept o assertiveness in the praxis of institutional justice with the objective that in judicial decision understanding and recognition between the judicial institution and the users or co-associated with the social pact of Colombia –absent or tenuous until now– produces itself. To do this, empathy was used as a tool to raise awareness between the judicial decision and the demand for justice, without neglecting the meeting points that preceded the deontic determination of justice.

John Locke—Theorist of Limiting and Supervising Political Power by Citizens

This paper aims to analyze John Locke’s ideas on the limited political mandate of the institutions of power, and the need for their supervision and sanctioning by citizens when they violate their duties. It emphasizes the topicality of these ideas, pointing out that they represent two fundamental principles in the functioning of the rule of law, defining the current democracies. Locke justified them starting from the hypothesis that society was founded by people through a deliberate pact, so that the common good could be promoted more effectively, and the legitimacy of political power is conditioned by the observance of this task. Therefore, if political power violates the social pact, it can be overthrown by citizens even by force. The author then raises the question if the use of force to change a political regime can still be justified today. Her answer is that this is an objective mechanism, which appears implacably in all unjust societies, and the only way to defuse it is for states to permanently respect the rights and freedoms of all citizens.