Mediations has circulated in various forms and formats since the early
1970s, and is now available free on the web. Both a web edition and a
print edition, downloadable in pdf form, can be accessed at
mediationsjournal.org. Featured authors in the current issue include
Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, Paulo Arantes, Iná Camargo Costa, Francisco
de Oliveira, Milton Ohata, and Roberto Schwarz. A full table of
contents follows.

http://www.mediationsjournal.org

In This Issue

Editors' Note


ARTICLES

Paulo Arantes: Panic Twice in the City
“São Paulo is a dead city. The populace is alarmed; faces register
panic and apprehension because everything is closed, without the
slightest movement. Besides a few scurrying pedestrians, only military
vehicles occupy the streets. Troops armed with rifles and machine guns
have orders to fire at anyone who remains on the street.” This city
emptied by fear isn’t the 21st -century megalopolis that hid behind the
barricades on the night of the 15th of May, 2006; but a
still-provincial city, recently industrialized, paralyzed by a general
strike in July 1917.

Roberto Schwarz: Worries of a Family Man
Roberto Schwarz’s 1966 reading reveals the social content of a famously
elusive text by Franz Kafka, and hints at its hidden affinities with
both the historical moment of Schwarz’s reading and with our own
present.

Roberto Schwarz: The Relevance of Brecht: High Points and Low
On one hand, the main thrust of Brecht’s dramaturgy seems almost beside
the point in an age of cynical reason. What critical edge can we
ascribe to the estrangement effect when Brechtian techniques are used
to sell kitchen sponges on TV? On the other hand, a contemporary
performance of Saint Joan of the Stockyards speaks clearly to our age,
not just to a bygone era of monopoly capital and liberal sincerity.
Have we been missing something in Brecht that explains the paradox?

Iná Camargo Costa: Reflections on Theater in a Time of Barbarism
A veteran of the São Paulo theater scene reflects on the practice and
theory of independent theater groups in a period of social
disintegration.

Francisco de Oliveira: The Lenin Moment
After tracing the path taken by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’
Party) to the Presidency of Brazil, Francisco de Oliveira describes how
the first years of the PT adminstration, which continued on the same
footing as the previous government, relate to a broader context
characterized by the consequences of the ascendancy of finance capital:
the impossibility of hegemony due to the increasing chasm between rich
and poor; the decomposition of class bases, including that of the
bourgeoisie due to the antagonism between financial and industrial
capital; emergent populism; and finally the incorporation of parties
and politics into the State, even as the economy and daily life are
increasingly privatized.

Luiz Felipe de Alencastro: Brazil in the South Atlantic: 1550-1850
The history of modern Brazil has always been interpreted on the basis
of one central question or another: cattle raising in the Valley of São
Francisco, the relations between masters and slaves, the structures of
dependency generated by merchant capital, bureaucratic privilege or the
stakes of the gold economy in the 18th Century. New research on the
slave trade, on the subjugation of the Indians, on internal and
international migrations, allows for the elaboration of an interpretive
axis of wider scope: the transformations of labor in the colonial and
national context through the middle of the 19th century. These
transformations inscribe themselves in a larger space that conditions
the history of Portuguese America and Brazil from 1550 to 1850: the
South Atlantic. This horizon imposes a new periodization. The rupture
with the colonial order occurred not with the arrival of the Portuguese
court in 1808 or with independence in 1822, but in 1850, with the
definitive end of the African slave trade.


BOOK REVIEWS

Milton Ohata: Our Lot
Milton Ohata reviews Roberto Schwarz’s Seqüências Brasileiras
[Brazilian Episodes]. After the important pamphlet Duas meninas [Two
Girls] (1997), Roberto Schwarz returns to the scene with Seqüências
Brasileiras, which brings together writings published from 1988-1998.
His essays, enemies of preestablished hierarchies, unashamed before
mythologies and fashions — always explosive, though discreet — tend to
risk untravelled roads, passing by the techniques and fashions common
among specialists.

Milton Ohata: Brazilian Civilization's Missing Link
Milton Ohata reviews Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s O trato dos viventes:
Formação do Brasil no Atlântico Sul [Mortal Traffic: The Formation of
Brazil in the South Atlantic]. O trato dos viventes begins from a
simple but consequential premise: that in the history of Portuguese
America, the whole is not the sum of its parts; that is, it cannot be
understood by merely combining the histories of its various regimes.
Rather, local history is to be interpreted in the light of its
effective connections, in reciprocal determination, with the history of
capitalism — in which the slave trade played an indispensible part.


Mediations Editorial Collective:

Nicholas Brown, chair
Eric Cazdyn
Maria Elisa Cevasco
Timothy Choy
Jamie Daniel
Imre Szeman
Neil Larsen
Silvia López
Modhumita Roy, book review editor
Emilio Sauri, editorial manager