Del Fuego Research Articles

The Brazilian Elites in the novels of Michel Laub, Andréa Del Fuego and Clara Drummond: a revenge against bolsonarism

Este artigo estuda a reação de alguns escritores brasileiros ao processo de deterioração política desencadeado pelo bolsonarismo. Partindo da ideia de que houve uma cismogênese na política brasileira em decorrência dos comportamentos antiestruturais dos apoiados do ex-presidente Jair Bolsonaro, busca-se aqui evidenciar o modo pelo qual os escritores Michel Laub, Andréa Del Fuego e Clara Drummond se posicionaram contra a perseguição bolsonarista à classe artística, criando obras em que as elites brasileiras, identificadas socialmente com o viés político neoliberal e conservador do ex-presidente, são representadas de forma caricatural. No final, o artigo conclui que esses escritores produziram personagens caricaturais a fim de fazer prevalecer sua posição política antibolsonarista, sustentada especialmente pela crítica às elites e determinada pelo contexto da rivalidade política disseminada nos anos do governo Bolsonaro.

Coeval minimum south American and maximum Antarctic last glacial maximum dust deposition: A causal link?

Records of wind-blown mineral dust provide an excellent proxy of past atmospheric circulation, a key parameter to understanding Earth's climate changes. Dust deposition at distal sites depends on atmospheric conditions both in sink areas, along transport pathways, and close to dust sources. To disentangle the contributions of changes in these conditions to distal dust deposition, it is necessary to retrieve complementary information from geological dust archives at different distances from sources. In the Southern Hemisphere, paleo-dust recorded at proximal loess remains under-studied compared to dust recorded at medium- and long-range archives. Here, we expand previous sampling of southern South America's Pampean loess. New age models based on luminescence dating of potassium feldspar imply minimum dust mass accumulation rates during the early part of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) across all three sampled sites, in opposition to coeval maximum dust deposition in the East Antarctic Plateau (EAP). In turn, provenance analysis based on neodymium and strontium isotopes suggests that <5-μm loess mostly derived from the Puna-Altiplano Plateau (PAP). In EAP, unmixing of neodymium, strontium and lead isotopic signals confirms that LGM dust mostly derived from southern South America (contrasting with Holocene EAP dust records that suggest a combined dust contribution from southern South America and Australia), either from southern central-western Argentina or from a combination of Patagonia/Tierra del Fuego and southern Puna in the PAP. Our results favor this second scenario, in which the coincidence of minimum dust deposition in the Pampas and maximum deposition in the EAP during the LGM is in part associated with reduced close-to-source wet scavenging of fine-grained dust due to more local arid conditions and less frequent rainfall, allowing more vigorous long-range transport of southern Puna dust.

Lead Isotopic Constraints on the Provenance of Antarctic Dust and Atmospheric Circulation Patterns Prior to the Mid-Brunhes Event (~430 kyr ago).

A lead (Pb) isotopic record, covering the two oldest glacial–interglacial cycles (~572 to 801 kyr ago) characterized by lukewarm interglacials in the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica Dome C ice core, provides evidence for dust provenance in central East Antarctic ice prior to the Mid-Brunhes Event (MBE), ~430 kyr ago. Combined with published post-MBE data, distinct isotopic compositions, coupled with isotope mixing model results, suggest Patagonia/Tierra del Fuego (TdF) as the most important sources of dust during both pre-MBE and post-MBE cold and intermediate glacial periods. During interglacials, central-western Argentina emerges as a major contributor, resulting from reduced dust supply from Patagonia/TdF after the MBE, contrasting to the persistent dominance of dust from Patagonia/TdF before the MBE. The data also show a small fraction of volcanic Pb transferred from extra-Antarctic volcanoes during post-MBE interglacials, as opposed to abundant transfer prior to the MBE. These differences are most likely attributed to the enhanced wet removal efficiency with the hydrological cycle intensified over the Southern Ocean, associated with a poleward shift of the southern westerly winds (SWW) during warmer post-MBE interglacials, and vice versa during cooler pre-MBE ones. Our results highlight sensitive responses of the SWW and the associated atmospheric conditions to stepwise Antarctic warming.

Decolonising Mourning: World-Making with the Selk’nam People of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego

ABSTRACT This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalised writing into an academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous centred, feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalising of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning.