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People from outside of Brasília often dismiss Brazil's capital as socially divided, boring, corrupt, and emotionally cold. Apparently its founders created not a vibrant capital, but a cultural wasteland. However, as Sophia Beal argues, Brasília's contemporary artists are out to prove the skeptics wrong. These twenty-first-century artists are changing how people think about the city and animating its public spaces. They are recasting Brasília as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city. Various genres-prose, poetry, film, cultural journalism, music, photography, graffiti, street theater, and street dance-play a part. Brasília's initial 1960s art was state-sanctioned, carried out mainly by privileged, white men. In contrast, the capital's contemporary art is marked by its diversity, challenging norms about who has a voice within the Brasília art scene. This art demystifies the capital's inequities and imagines alternative ways of inhabiting the city.
Info autore
Sophia Beal is an Associate Professor of Portuguese in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the University of Minnesota, USA. Beal is the author of Brazil under Construction: Fiction and Public Works (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and co-editor (along with Bruce Robbins and Michael Rubenstein) of Infrastructuralism, a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies, published in 2015. The Portuguese translation of Brazil under Construction was published in 2017.
Since May 2015, she has been an International Collaborator of the Contemporary Brazilian Literature Research Group, a Brazilian federally-funded initiative. She earned her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tulane University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Relazione
"The Art of Brasília offers scholars and students in Brazilian Studies, Latin American Studies and Cultural Studies the dynamic scope of Sophia Beal's cultural reach, made accessible here to an English-speaking audience. ... her study presents Brasília as a vibrant, living, arts city, worthy of recognition." (Marguerite Itamar Harrison, Hispania, Vol. 103 (4), December, 2020)
