coldhearted scientist وداد

On Facebook, one of my Friends had been invited to an event far from him and declined with regret, as a result of which I saw what the event was and Liked it. I really did like it, too, and I wish I could go for research reasons.

Immediately the author of the event Friended me on Facebook, and he turns out to be a professor at Brown who does very interesting things. Our mutual Friends were telling him about things to read that would help shape his project, and these things turn out to apply to me as well. And there is this history professor whose work I always liked, but do not follow systematically since he is out of field, and now JSTOR has revealed to me that all of his recent writings apply directly to what I am doing.

This is an argument for the chance encounter; had I not opened Facebook at the right moment I would have missed all of this. (I am on Facebook under the name of my ex-cat; my header image is a photograph of the Cibeles carrying a Republican flag, my picture is a famous picture of a CNT militant; there are no pictures of me and nobody knows my name, so I am a spy.)

I hope this long quotation does not violate JSTOR’s terms of service. The Mystery of Samba: Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil by Hermano Vianna. Review by: Jeffrey D. Needell. Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 561-563.

…[T]he author argues that Freyre’s pioneering Casa grande e senzala (1933) derived directly from, and embraced, a gestalt common among younger, nationalist intellectuals before and during the 1920s, incorporating Afro-Brazilian culture, modernism, the common people and miscegenation, in a fashion congenial to the nationalist and populist political trends associated with the Revolution of 1930 (pp. 12-13, 41, 53-60). Archival correspondence and a close reading of Freyre’s publications contradict nearly every point. They indicate that he changed intellectual direction in the 1910s, in the 1920s, and, dramatically, after 1930. In his mid-1920s essays and in works of 1933 and 1936, while he celebrated Afro-Brazilian influence and the adaptive qualities he associated with miscegenation, he was clearly aristocratic, racist, authoritarian, culturally and politically reactionary and a champion of provincial tradition and authenticity. Finally, Casagrande was written in reaction against the events of 1930 and Vargas’ triumph, which he opposed.

The author also sometimes neglects subtleties of culture and class. For example, in arguing against the accepted idea that the elites repressed and despised popular culture in the early twentieth century (pp. 23-31, 81ff.), he assumes an all-or-nothing logic perilous in cultural history. He cites the occasional act of elite patronage and the ephemeral fashion for rustic exoticism after 1910 to state that elite taste was not as Europhile as assumed. However, his very sources, quoted or not, make it (unsurprisingly) clear that such individual or brief musical excursions derived much of their charm and excitement precisely because of the dominant prejudices favouring European high culture. The author mistakes occasional cultural ‘slumming’ for emergent elite celebration.

The author’s contribution is to turn our attention to a transitional era of compelling contradictions….

That sentence in red is key for my project, and every day I wish I had not spent so many years struggling in the vise of Reeducation instead of doing this work.

Good news today, though, is that the colleague in my other department who did not make tenure, got a job. She gets a 20% raise over what she is making now. She also got a research fellowship abroad which starts next spring. Her new institution is happy about it and is fine with her taking time off for it.

She said our institution does not support research. I realized I hardly know how it is to be non-visiting faculty at an institution that does. Yet one has Facebook.

Axé.