Manifesting Democracy?. Группа авторов
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a new political possibility that could open up to Brazilians; that is, they showed the potential of ‘a new democratic invention,’ one that could put an end to what she says is Brazil’s authoritarian foundations.
What Chaui’s chapter makes clear is that while the country was united in demonstrating, their expressions had distinct roots and took on different forms in different cities and different parts of the country. This is patent in André Reyes Novaes and Mariana Lamego’s chapter, which focuses exclusively, and very particularly, on the political activism of geography students at the public university where the authors both studied and now teach, namely the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). Using interviews conducted with the geography department’s student activists, the chapter maps out and explores the role of the students in Rio’s manifestações. While most of these young demonstrators were dismissed as vandals by the mainstream media and, in some instances, were arrested by police, Novaes and Lamego’s interviews foreground the meanings and especially the hopes and aspirations the 2013 protests held for the young activists. The chapter shows how these hopes and aspirations were linked to, and culminated in, a personal awareness of wider social and urban inequalities related to education and housing, and the individual narratives recounted by the authors reveal the profound and positive impact the June protests had on the lives of the working-class students. The chapter in this sense counters the dominant narrative that the 2013 protestors were, across the nation, from white and middle-class families by underscoring the role that working-class students from Rio’s peripheries had in the city’s June Days and in turn the significance that these particular manifestações held for them. Indeed, what is clear for the students interviewed by Novaes and Lamego is, that Rio’s demonstrations were more than a mere moment, they were an important social and political event that emerged from and were tied to the very fabric of their everyday lives, a fabric mired in hierarchies and inequities.
The personal narratives that underlie Novaes and Lamego’s chapter contradict dominant stories of the 2013 protests in Brazil, in particular those disseminated by the mainstream press and media. Such contradictions were disseminated at the time by social-media outlets. As with other international protest movements of the time, social media was an important catalyst for the Brazilian demonstrations, with Facebook, Twitter, and other citizen-journalism platforms driving the gathering momentum. Social-media outlets also became a key space for disseminating information and news about the manifestações. Key here was the online news collective Mídia NINJA (an acronym for Narrativas Independentes, Jornalismo e Ação; Independent Narratives, Journalism, and Action). Broadcasting live from the sites of protest and often incorporating protestors’ tweets, Mídia NINJA provided instant visibility of the protests and disseminated protestors’ own voices and political points of view, in ways that often questioned the credibility of the country’s biggest media organizations in their reporting of the manifestações. This live reporting made Mídia NINJA one of the main news outlets for the protests, challenging the dominance of Brazil’s mainstream media. Marianna Olinger’s chapter traces Mídia NINJA’s historical links to key alliances with other social-justice and activist movements and provides an overview of its role in the 2013 protests. Her chapter shows how it was part of a new virtual landscape that fostered a new collective imaginary that can engage thousands of people in the creation of a ‘new’ media and a new politics. Indeed, Mídia NINJA and other social-media outlets have given a new generation of Brazilians direct and quick access to ‘the political’ in its ontological dimension (Mouffe 2005), in the process short-circuiting the formal channels of politics with which politicians are more familiar.
The manifestações can thus be interpreted as evidence of social-media’s role in the very production of new kinds of participatory spatialities in late modernity. This is at the core of Pedro Erber’s chapter, which explores the large gatherings of youths from impoverished urban peripheries in the shopping malls of São Paulo and Rio, known as rolezinhos (little strolls), which took place at the time of the protests. Erber examines historical parallels of the rolezinhos, ranging from nineteenth-century Paris to colonial Korea, situating the rolezinho phenomenon in a transnational history of urban strolling. Whilst doing so Erber’s chapter draws attention to the ambiguous politicality between ostentatious consumerism and political practice. As Erber says, the rolezeiros, or young people from the urban peripheries who took to urban shopping malls, cannot simply be dismissed as enthralled by consumerism, they were reclaiming a contemporary spectatorship that is denied to them and were taking to spaces that are closed off to them.
In his chapter Erber interprets the rolezinhos as urban political happenings, seeing them as heirs of practices undertaken by artists in 1960s Brazil who carried out public performances in urban spaces. While artists were at the forefront of urban political performances in the 1960s, today such artistic happenings are undertaken by young people from the peripheries. The performative aspect of urban protests is explored by Barbara Szaniecki in her chapter, which discusses the strike by refuse workers in Rio de Janeiro that took place during carnival in 2014, examining it as ‘a site-specific art form.’ As the strike went on, refuse accumulated in the streets of Rio, turning the city into a morass of rubbish and a grotesque space. The strike visibly challenged the public image of Rio as a marvellous city and brought to light a different visual aesthetic, one in which the labour of refuse workers was brought into light. It is this visibility and its visualities that Szaniecki analyses, seeing them as an aesthetics of urban and political participation that for her is reminiscent of the environmental art of the 1960s performance artist Hélio Oiticica. The tropicalist artist privileged interaction with spatial and environmental concerns over pure aesthetics. Seeing the refuse workers’ strike as analogous to what Oiticica termed ‘ambient art,’ Szaniecki shows how popular manifestations participate in the creative, as well as political, field.
The dynamics of political participation is thoroughly engaged with by Renato Anelli and Ana Paula Koury, whose chapter discusses participatory urban planning and politics in São Paulo, especially as it relates to urban mobility. The authors outline the institutionalization of forms of participatory urban management initiated during the PT government of 2003–2006, when socially inclusive policies gave many the opportunity to play a role in formulating and implementing public policies. Key here was attempting to include social movements via participatory policies to improve urban circulation and the city’s public transport network for workers. Improving circulation around the city was, and is, of course, a key concern for the MPL. Yet for Anelli and Koury, the manifestações of 2013 represent a rupture from the past that highlights a tension between urban politics and administrative planning methods. The authors state that the protests revealed how the institutional channels for social movements to convey their demands were no longer suitable. Instead, movements like the MPL use public protests to assert their demands, bypassing the traditional form of political mediation. Their chapter thus illustrates the rejection of politics, stressed by Chaui and points to a shift in Brazil’s political landscape.
Alfredo Saad-Filho examines this shift in depth in his chapter, which offers a political-economy interpretation of the 2013 manifestações. He bases his interpretation on a review of two development strategies: import-substituting industrialization and neoliberalism, and the class structures associated with them. As Saad-Filho shows, examining these helps to locate the sources of social and political conflicts Brazil and the demands of distinct and rival social groups. Saad-Filho analyses these strategies in light of the forms of protest that have emerged in late capitalism and under neoliberalism, which 2013 is an example of, and explores the importance that social media have played in these. Saad-Filho’s chapter thus provides a political-economic framework for understanding 2013 seeing the manifestações as examples of new forms of protesting.
If Saad-Filho points to changes in Brazil’s political landscape, specifically in terms of new ways of enacting protests, the concluding chapter by historian Francisco Foot Hardman reflects on how in the country’s June Days and the demands made by protestors exposed the historical-cultural roots of persistent inequalities engendered, expanded, and consolidated since Brazil was officially granted its Independence in 1822. His chapter examines these historical inequalities from ‘five distinct but interconnected and mutually inter-referential themes