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Partindo do incômodo causado pelas projeções exóticas do "Brasil" no imaginário internacional, discutem-se aqui alguns momentos em que, na literatura e na música, de tempos coloniais ao presente, a "África" revela-se como topos privilegiado, a resguardar poeticamente a pureza e a crueza de uma origem a um só tempo desejada e rechaçada. Analisando, ao fim, um trecho das memórias de Caetano Veloso, sugiro que um complexo mecanismo de sublimação simultaneamente nos protege e aproxima do momento mítico original em que a mão dos africanos teria tocado o primeiro tambor no Brasil, fazendo surgir, intacta, uma África mirífica, simbolicamente tão poderosa quanto esvaziada de qualquer história ou peso.
Este artigo considera as conexões entre blues e bossa nova, pouco reconhecidas na literatura sobre bossa nova, mas muito importantes para o desenvolvimento do estilo. Analisando as gravações do circuito samba-jazz em Copacabana nas décadas de 1950 e 1960, o artigo traz à luz uma prática de blues, tanto na estrutura de doze compassos como na utilização da escala blues como matéria de improviso, bastante comum naquela época. O artigo explica o papel de figuras-chave como Booker Pittman, Moacir Santos e Paulo Moura na transmissão da influência dos blues no Rio de Janeiro, e os efeitos dessa influência na bossa nova. O artigo termina com uma consideração sobre mudanças recentes no mercado cultural que têm possibilitado um entendimento mais profundo do fenômeno "bossa-blues."
Colonial Brazil's forests are a fascinating new topic in environmental history. Since W. Dean's With Broadax and Firebrand (1995), the field has been growing as more specific themes have been proposed and investigated. In Fruitless Trees (2000), a pioneering broad-scale incursion on the subject of the timber industry, S. W. Miller builds a theory that associates Portuguese forest policies with the development of the lumber sector. The 'monopolistic hindrance' thesis postulates that the conservation strategy represented by the 'madeiras-de-lei' ('timbers-under-the-law') institution – which aimed to safeguard Brazil's best trees for the construction and maintenance of the Royal Navy – was vague and poorly enforced but extremely rigid in its intent, resulting in negative consequences for the forest's use and economic development. This paper aims to debate this statement and contribute to the model's improvement. Our research on administrative documents from late 18th and early 19th centuries in Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina Island does not confirm the harshness of colonial government policies. Additionally, it also suggests that daily forest management was far more complex than the simple reading of Royal prescriptions would lead one to think. Drawing on E. P. Thompson's theoretical insights, we describe the 'madeiras-de-lei' institution as a practice that emerged as the dynamic result of socio-political relations established between forest bureaucracy – conceived as a group of individuals endowed with personal interests and well aware of the social and ecological peculiarities of the environment on which they acted – and private economic agents (sugar-mill owners, subsistence farmers, merchants, shipbuilders) for whom direct and continuous access to carbonized and/or non-carbonized timber was crucial.
In this article I address a long-standing issue in Machadian studies, that of the relationship between philosophy and literature in the fiction of Machado de Assis. I start by acknowledging my indebtedness to the studies that Abel Barros Baptista has recently dedicated to the Brazilian author. In his article, "A Reforma Hermenêutica: Acerca da legibilidade de Dom Casmurro," Baptista implies an anti-hermeneutical reading of Machado's novels and short stories in order to advocate for a "hermeneutical reform." With his contribution in mind, I proceed to question the theoretical and critical presuppositions of some of the most canonical readings that have been proposed to address the focus of this essay. I conclude by proposing a reading of the short story "O espelho: Esboço de uma nova teoria da alma humana," which exemplifies the principles that I sustain as being indispensable for addressing the issue of the relationship between philosophy and literature, that is, the philosophical relevance of literature as much as the literary relevance of philosophy.
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