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To what extent was the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL) able to serve as an instance of legitimization of the military dictatorship established in Brazil after the 1964 coup? This article aims to examine a specific aspect of the daily life of this institution during the military dictatorship: the investiture ceremonies. We believe that this approach allows us to analyze how politics could operate “apolitically” within the ABL. We argue that ceremonies may have become political events because it showed, first of all, the proximity and networks of sociability between the conservative intelligentsia and the regime. Secondly, we identified the transmission of values in some speeches that were, at that time, those of the conservative environment. The examination of the investiture ceremonies indicates that the ABL contributed to legitimize the regime which was established in Brazil in 1964. However, this legitimization did not take place through an open “collaboration”, but by the behavior of all its members, their proximity to the representatives of the regime and the diffusion and circulation of a conservative discourse.

Brazilian historiography emphasises student political practice as the main action of those students who were against the authoritarian and conservative regime. To explain the student movement through its political activity or subversion towards the established social patterns became commonplace when discussing the behaviour of much of 1960s youth. Even though such aspects are import, they take little account of other peculiarities of these students’ history. This article explores Anderson’s (2008) hypothesis on «imagined communities» – i.e. when people in a group establish synchronic identification through references given by daily communication – in this context. This highlights the emotional pandemic of the youth coalition of the 1960s, which spread to general political movements. From this perspective, the student movement is understood as an interaction among subjects of a similar age, mobilized by their identification with shared images, mainly on printed documents. This analysis reveals that in Brazil: 1) the students identified with the revolutionary youngsters in the magazines who would later become icons, such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara; 2) The reports and «hearsay» of youth action, recorded in the articles and stimulated and amplified by street demonstrations, schematic readings, impromptu rallies, graffiti and slogans, etc. We discuss synchronicity as an aspect of this period of history that was associated with the sensory stimuli involved in demonstrations, as well as the creation of stereotypes and representations of youth.

Repare bem (Maria de Medeiros, 2013) and Luz obscura (Susana de Sousa Dias) are illustrative examples of women documentary filmmaker's approach to post-dictatorship memory in Brazil and in Portugal. Their attempt to counterpose affective and personal memories with the official records of the state, through the use of mugshots and prison photos of members of a family nucleus taken by the oppressive apparatus of the respective regimes framed in a ‘family narrative’, is inextricable from a recovery of the memory of women’s efforts as both witnesses as and social and political agents. This article will build upon works combining a feminist approach with memory studies (Marianne Hirsch, Annette Kuhn) which provide an insight into the particularities of family photographs as a means to explore the intersection between the personal and the official, the intimate and the public, family and nation, memory and history. Both documentaries raise the stakes by questioning as well as collapsing the said binaries when they structure and order the historical source material within a ‘family frame’: mugshots and prison photos are inscribed in lieu of a speculative family album, thus performatively upsetting the ideological framework of authoritarian regimes as well as their historical legacies, currently the object of contestation and political manipulation.

This article analyzes the relationship between political and intellectual action of a specific group of folklorists associated with the Brazilian Folkloric Movement, and the development and implementation of cultural policy within the context of the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil. Therefore, this article is a comparative analysis of these policies based on documents from the military government as well as material created by folklorists, particularly material found in the Brazilian folklore magazine Revista Brasileira de Folclore.

Despite authoritarianism, the Brazilian military dictatorship has produced a speech in defense of democracy, according to the Doctrine of National Security (DSN). To legitimate it, the television-scheduling grid assumes a pedagogical role in the constitution of meanings desired by the regimen, mainly those of national integration and modernity. This text sees the television field as an integral part of the group who took up the political power of the country in 1964. However, just like the other forms of solidarity, the one stablished among the TV broadcasters’ owners (a public concession) and the Brazilian military dictatorship is not exempt of disruption. Therefore, the text points to the need to relativize existing readings, which build up a simplistic alliance between this field and the military dictatorship.

This essay offers an eco-critical reading of Ignacio de Loyola Brandão 's 1981 novel Não verás país nenhum. (Trans. And Still the Earth, 1985). I examine in detail the novel's unconventional and multi-layered conceptualizations of history while also focusing on aesthetic aspects of Brandão’s depiction of social, political, and environmental degradation. My analysis expands on the contextual timeframe of the Military Dictatorship years (1964-1985) with which the novel is conventionally associated. I propose instead to approach Brandão’s text through wider historical and spatial perspectives. I show how the novel articulates unconventional conceptualizations of history that challenge long-standing humanistic approaches. Though closely related to specific historical and political contexts in Brazil, this decades-old narrative anticipated many of the anxieties that became part of current global debates on the Anthropocene and its impact on humanistic precepts in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences.

Veja and dictatorship: military’s memory rebuilding the historyAbstract: The objective of this text is to investigate how the magazine Veja has addressed the issue of dictatorship in the period of affirmation of neoliberalism in Brazil. It is interesting to know which the main issues are and what approach the magazine has on the subject, focusing on the interpretation of what a dictatorship was, why it existed, and how the magazine deals with this past. At several times the magazine stands as interpreting the lived history, at the time of the dictatorship, judging, according to the magazine, their successes and pointing out some "excesses" of military action. In the field of memory, the magazine produces interpretations of that historic moment, without any concern about its stance regarding to the facts themselves, because Veja existed since 1968. One of the Veja’s characteristics to promote the loss of the sense of history is the production of journalist articles that promote gentle breaks with the past, it does not seek connections between what was said by the magazine itself in the past and what it says at present time, it is as if, indeed, its own past had not occurred. The privileged voice in the items analyzed is clearly the military voice, which has its speech reverberated and repeated countless times in the magazine, as well as its version of the "Revolution" as opposed to the idea of ​​Military Coup of 1964. The Left, generally, appears as the guilty for the repression as it would have disobeyed the order, and therefore it should be punished.Resumen El artículo tiene como objetivo investigar la revista Veja. Analiza la forma como la revista ha tratado de la dictadura en el período de consolidación de la democracia brasilera. Abarca más propiamente el período de consolidación del neoliberalismo. Busca saber cuales fueron las principales temáticas y con cual abordaje la revista trató la temática. Enfatiza la interpretación sobre lo que ha sido la Dictadura, porque ha existido, y como la sociedad debe relacionarse con ese pasado. Variadas veces la revista se ha atribuido el lugar de interpretar la historia vivida, en el momento de la dictadura, juzgando lo que para ella fueran sus aciertos y apuntando algunos (pocos) errores. Es decir, en el campo de la memoria, se producen interpretaciones sobre aquel momento histórico, sin cualquiera preocupación con la postura que ha tomado en el momento de dos hechos pasados, ya que Veja existió desde 1968. Una de las características de Veja para promover la pérdida de la noción histórica es la producción de textos periodísticos que promocionen suaves rupturas con el pasado, no busquen enlaces entre lo que ha sido dicho por la propia revista en el pasado y lo que dice en el presente. Es como si en realidad, su propio pasado no tuviera ocurrido. La voz privilegiada en los reportajes analizadas es la voz militar, que tiene su discurso reproducido y repetido innumerables veces en el la revista, así como su versión sobre la “Revolución”, en oposición a la idea de Golpe de 1964.