Brazil Inside Out: Tensions between Cultural Singularity and Conceptual Translatability
Description
Engaging with Brazilian Studies within the broader field of Comparative Literature means inhabiting a space of unresolved and perhaps unresolvable tension. On the one hand lies the enduring demand for translatability—an expectation shaped by the institutional histories of both Area Studies and Comparative Literature in the United States. Scholars working on Brazil are often expected to frame their research in ways that make it accessible to audiences attuned to comparative paradigms, global theories, or cross-regional dialogues—whether within Latin American studies, Global South frameworks, or other transnational discursive fields.This expectation frequently privileges models of equivalence, analogy, or generalization, inviting conceptual translations that risk flattening the historical density and epistemic thickness of Brazilian contexts.
On the other hand, Brazilian intellectual traditions have long foregrounded the singularity of their critical vocabularies, advancing concepts such as formação, malandragem, cordialidade, and antropofagia not merely as descriptive categories but as deliberate acts of conceptual self-assertion. These terms emerge from historically situated debates that oscillate between strategic opacity and claims to exceptionality, posing persistent challenges to any project of comparative interpretation. Yet this insistence on conceptual untranslatability also risks lapsing into a form of methodological nationalism, where the specificity of the Brazilian case becomes insulated from external dialogue, resistant to critique, or vulnerable to self-exoticization.
How do we negotiate the pressures of conceptual legibility without reducing Brazil’s intellectual and cultural productions to their most easily translatable features or most internationally palatable forms? Conversely, how might we resist the comfort of epistemic insularity without surrendering to the homogenizing pull of global theoretical frameworks? What does it mean to write about Brazil today—whether from within its borders or elsewhere—without reproducing either the violence of forced translation or the self-enclosure of exceptionalist narratives? What does Brazil have to say, for example, about the afterlife of slavery, environmental collapses, democracy challenges and other current global issues?
We welcome contributions that engage these dilemmas across literary, historiographical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary registers. Papers may reflect on moments of productive mistranslation, strategic opacity, or conceptual friction—whether in literary criticism, intellectual history, or broader cultural analysis. Rather than seeking resolution, this panel foregrounds the methodological frictions and epistemic negotiations that continue to animate the field of Brazilian Studies within Comparative Literature today.
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Speaker Bio
Raquel Parrine is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Haverford University. Her work explores sexual dissident imaginaries in Latin America, with particular focus on their intersection with race and ethnicity in literature and visual arts. She has a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan and a B.A. and M.A. in Spanish and Portuguese and Literary Theory from the Universidade de São Paulo.
Speaker Bio
Alfredo Melo is Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of Campinas (Brazil)
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Speaker Bio
Dr. Nicole Sparling Barco is a Professor of World Literature at Central Michigan University, where she teaches courses on the topics of World Literature, Literature of the Americas, African-American Literature, Women and Gender Studies, Genre Studies, and Writing. Dr. Barco specializes in comparative studies of North, Central, and South American cultural production, more specifically in the literature written in English, Spanish, and Portuguese from these regions.