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Dr. Claire Williams (St. Peter’s College, University of Oxford)

Event programme (pdf)



Brazil Week, a weekful of Brazil-related cultural and academic events, took place in Oxford and London between 26 and 31 October 2009. The organising team were Nicole Algranti (Taboca Produções, Rio de Janeiro), Claire Williams (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford) and Juliano Zappia (Jungle Drums Magazine, London). Sponsorship and support were gratefully received from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Vale S.A., TAM Airlines and the Brazilian Embassy in London in order to bring participants from Brazil to the UK.

There was collaboration across the University and across different Faculties, Institutes and Departments. At St. Peter’s College especially, both staff and students embraced the idea of Brazil Week with great enthusiasm. Chef Colin Purvis created special Brazilian menus for the Dining Hall and the JCR and MCR student bodies organised a Jazz Jam session and a Capoeira performance, as well as serving caipirinha cocktails in the bar.

Information about Brazil Week was one of the top News items on the University of Oxford’s homepage and in the Oxford University Gazette, in the Brazilian Briefing posted by the Brazilian Embassy in London, in Jungle Drums magazine and it also appeared in Brazilian newspapers.

Events

The week started on Monday 26th October with a Postgraduate Seminar where students from four different departments of the University presented their doctoral research. The participants were: Liana Anderson and Kelly McManus (Oxford University Centre for the Environment), Felipe Correa (Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages), Frances Hansford (Department of International Development), Chris de Sá (Latin American Centre). There was considerable lively discussion after each of the talks and, most important of all, the researchers found that there was a lot of common ground in their interests and research.

On Wednesday 28th October, as part of the Ethnographic Film Series organised by Prof. Marcus Banks (Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology), Nicole Algranti, in full Ashaninka dress, introduced two films about tribes living on the Peru/Brazil border in the Amazon: Noke Haweti and Ari Hokanta Haka. Nicole not only directs films about the indigenous peoples living in this area, but runs cinematography courses to enable the tribes to make their own films. One of the films shown was made by the Katukina tribe, about their way of life and in particular their use of kampo, a special medicine obtained from a breed of tree frog. After the films, the audience asked Nicole about the experience of filmmaking in the Amazon and about tribal life and customs.



Nicole presented another film to a different audience in the Taylorian Institute that afternoon. This was the UK premiere of De Corpo Inteiro, a documentary about the celebrated Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), who was also Nicole’s great-aunt [see http://www.tabocafilmes.com.br/]. The film recreates, with actors, some of the interviews conducted by Lispector with the great cultural figures of her day and published in popular magazines. The showing was followed by a round table discussion involving short presentations by Teresa Montero Ferreira, a researcher and biographer of Lispector, Claire Williams, Lecturer in Brazilian Literature at Oxford, who has published widely on Lispector’s work, and Nicole Algranti herself. This led into a series of questions from the audience about the film, Lispector’s reception in Brazil and abroad, and how the interviews and other journalism could be related to her literary work. The round table discussion and questions can soon be heard as a podcast via the Faculty of Modern Languages webpages.



The focus of Brazil Week moved to contemporary issues on Thursday 29th October, firstly with a Lecture on tourism and the selling and consumption of poverty in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The speaker was the sociologist Bianca Freire Medeiros (Fundação Getúlio Vargas), currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Mobility Research, University of Lancaster, whose research took her to South Africa and India as well as the enormous Rio favela of Rocinha. The superbly illustrated lecture took place at St. Catherine’s College.

That evening large numbers of Brazilians from Oxford and the surrounding area converged on the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building for TRÊS, a concert by three of Brazil’s most innovative musicians: Adriana Calcanhotto, Moreno Veloso and Domenico Lancellotti. Tickets sold out a week before the concert took place! The repertoire included some songs the trio wrote by themselves, some they wrote together, and some by composers or poets they admire from around the world such as 12th century troubadour Arnaut Daniel, Mayakovsky and Madonna. The music wove together their three very different voices with various combinations of guitars, cellos, mpcs, drums and apples...

The band travelled to London to reprise their performance at the O2 Academy in Islington, on Friday 30th October, in front of an audience of 800 people.

Conclusion

The aims of Brazil Week were:

  • to raise awareness about the richness and diversity of Brazilian culture,
  • to organise events that would be beneficial to students working on Brazil-related research and projects,
  • to celebrate the fact that there are so many academics and students at the University of Oxford who are working in and on Brazil, and to bring them together,
  • to facilitate interaction between the University and the public – including the approximately 4000 Brazilians living in Oxford.

These aims were achieved successfully because there were interested audiences at every event, from varying departments across the University and from the general public, including visitors who travelled to Oxford from Germany especially to attend.