Introduction

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 37 no. 1 (2021), 1–4© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Introduction Márcio Seligmann-Silva Let us exploit our full critical and creative capacity to make colourful parachutes. Ailton Krenak, 2019 This dossier features seven contributions that compose a current portrait of Brazil from the viewpoint of the difficult construction of its democracy in the twenty-first century. The works cover different areas such as law, psychoanalysis, literary and image studies, human rights and the pressing indigenous issue. The proposal to present this multidisciplinary outline is founded on the idea that such transdisciplinarity alone is up to the task of minimally representing the complexity of twenty-first-century Brazil. The contemporary challenges, given that these lines are written in complete isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic, extend beyond the frameworks of subject areas of knowledge and require interdisciplinary transcendence and dialogue. This dossier trusts in the critical and creative capacity of academic production and its strength in the face of new challenges that present themselves as seemingly insurmountable. Starting out with the contribution from the historian Janaína Teles, we have a detailed view of a key moment in the struggle for the right to memory, justice and truth in relation to the past of Brazil’s military dictatorship of 1964–85. The article stresses the role played by the relatives of dead and missing politicians in the attempt to set up a National Truth Commission, ultimately created in 2011 but with severe limitations, considering the country’s needs. This chapter in the history of our democracy explains why Brazil still lags behind its Latin American neighbours when it comes to building spaces for expressing and hearing the testimonies of the dictatorship’s victims, to constructing authentic justice aimed at investigating crimes against humanity, to creating spaces of memory and landmarks that guarantee the establishment of ethics and politics based on human rights. The ‘logic of reconciliation’ that guided the transition to democracy after 1985 enabled the constitution of a veritable legal and memory blockade, extending the state of exception beyond 1964–85. This obstruction of the work of justice and memory is largely responsible for the election in 2018 of a government that denies the crimes perpetrated by the dictatorship regime. Such denialism also underpins modern-day torture, as we see in the article in this dossier written by the psychoanalyst Paulo Endo. The contribution from Eduardo Bittar, of the Law School of the University of São Paulo, focuses precisely on the current debility of Brazilian democracy. He stresses the precariousness of our political practice stemming from Márcio Seligmann-Silva 2 unconditional privileges granted to the economic sector, as a consequence of which ‘instrumental reason is placed above anything else’. Such instrumental reasoning, which is perfectly consistent with neoliberalism, has been linked to a neoconservative agenda based on a series of ‘retro-topias’, as Bittar calls them, aiming at ‘the preservation of family, of religious values, of order and of progress’. This movement culminates today in the militarization of politics, the persecution of political opponents, the criminalization of politics, the moralization of public debate and an attempt to reduce the state’s role in the economy to a bare minimum, aiming at unprecedented privatization. Bittar concludes with a series of suggestions that, if followed, should assist in redirecting Brazilian politics towards the construction of an authentic democracy. Paulo Endo analyses the meaning for our current political context of the election of a president who openly defends the torture now taking place in prisons, an issue that is not given the attention it deserves on the political agenda. If I stated above that the failure to address the crimes against humanity committed during the civil-military dictatorship of 1964–85 means a continuation of the state of exception in the field of memory and justice, Endo’s article reveals that such a state persists also in Brazilian prisons, but now aimed mainly at the poor, marginalized and black population. The author also stresses the importance of the ‘domestic enemy’ ideology that underlies Brazilian politics nowadays and ‘justifies’ the use of force by the state. As it was during the dictatorship period, so it...