They don't wear black-tie: Intellectuals and workers in São Paulo, Brazil, 1958-1981
Date
2001-12-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Repository Usage Stats
views
downloads
Abstract
In 1979, film-maker Leon Hirszman (1937-1987) collaborated with playwright Gianfrancesco Guarnieri on a film adaption of Guarnieri's famous play about Brazilian working-class life, They Don't Wear Black-Tie. 1 The resulting film, released in 1981, reconfigured the politics and content of the 1958 play to fit the new era of the late 1970s when dramatic metalworkers' strikes placed São Paulo on the front lines in the fight against the Brazilian military dictatorship. Using biography and the dramatic and cinematic texts, this article traces the political and aesthetic challenges facing these two important cultural figures and their generation of radical intellectuals. In particular, the article will explain why an image of "workers" proved so central in the making of modern Brazilian theater and film since the late 1950s, while exploring the changing configuration of intellectual and povo (common people) between the late Populist Republic and the remaking of the Brazilian working class during the late 1970s. Throughout, it will ask: What is the cultural, political, and historical substance or significance of the presentation of workers in Black-Tie? Does it represent an expression of social reality? And if so, what reality, and whose vision? © 2001 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.
Type
Department
Description
Provenance
Subjects
Citation
Permalink
Collections
Scholars@Duke
John D. French
I am a professor of History at Duke University with secondary appointments in African and African-American as well as International Comparative Studies in Durham North Carolina. With a B.A. from Amherst College, I received my doctorate at Yale in 1985 under Brazilian historian Emília Viotti da Costa. Since 1979, I have been studying class, race, and politics in Brazil, Latin America, and beyond with 48 refereed articles as well as numerous chapters, briefing books, and reviews
My October 2020 UNC Press monograph entitled Lula and his Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil was awarded two prizes in 2021: the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Prize from the Brazil Section of the Latin American Studies Association and the Warren Dean Memorial Prize of the Conference on Latin American History. The book has been the subject of four round-tables with contributions from eighteen senior scholars across several disciplines: Labor: Studies in Working Class History (September 2021); American Historical Review (December 2021); Latin American Politics & Society (February 2022); and International Review of Social History (2022).
Reviewed widely, it has also been the subject of five podcasts and the Brazilian translations was published in September 2020 by Editora Expressāo Popular as Lula e a Politica de Astùcia: De Metalúrgico ao Presidente do Brasil (it is available for download as a PDF from https://fpabramo.org.br/2022/08/27/fpa-e-expressao-popular-coeditam-biografia-de-lula-escrita-por-john-d-french/). A detailed consideration of the methodological and theoretical lineage of the book can be found at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/charismas-birth-from-the-bottom-up-lula-abcs-metalworkers-strikes-and-the-social-history-of-brazilian-politics/E7E1D10F63BD31C81F190FD917D56267
My earlier books include The Brazilian Workers ABC (1992/1995 in Brazil), Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture (2004; 2002 in Brazil), and a coedited volume The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers (1997) as well as forthcoming co-authored article on the Brazilian Supreme Court 2012 decision ruling racial quotas in higher education admissions fully constitutional.
I have over the years served as Director of the Duke's Latin American Center and the Carolina-Duke Consortium, Treasurer of our national interdisciplinary organization LASA, and co-editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review for a five-year term that ended in June 2017. Over the past seven years, I have served as co-director of the Duke Brazil Initiative, the Global Brazil Humanities Lab of the Franklin Humanities Institute (2014-17), and as faculty co-director of Bass Connections Project (2015-19) on "The Cost of Opportunity: Social Mobility and Higher Education in Rio's Baixada Fluminense": https://sites.duke.edu/project_duke_baixada_project/ In the spring of 2020, I co-taught a course on "Black Lives Matter Brazil/USA" with Mellon visiting professor Dr. Silvio Almeida of Mackenzie Presbyterian University/FGV in Sao Paulo that led to an ongoing student project that produced an exhibit currently on display in the Classroom Building on Duke’s East campus as well as a remarkable website: http://blacklivesmatterbra-usa.com/
My past doctoral advisees have completed dissertations on Bolivia, Brazil (3), Chile, Jamaica & Trinidad and Tobago, Peru, Venezuela, early modern Spain, and southeastern pacific marine environmental history. My graduate teaching includes the "Modern Latin American History" colloquium, a two-semester sequence on "Afro-Brazilian History and Culture," and "The Latin American Wars of Independence." Over the years, I have directed numerous undergraduate theses in a variety of disciplines, eight of which won prizes. My undergraduate offerings include surveys of Brazilian and Modern Latin American history while my newest offering focuses on the political and military history of the Latin American Wars of Independence.
Unless otherwise indicated, scholarly articles published by Duke faculty members are made available here with a CC-BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial) license, as enabled by the Duke Open Access Policy. If you wish to use the materials in ways not already permitted under CC-BY-NC, please consult the copyright owner. Other materials are made available here through the author’s grant of a non-exclusive license to make their work openly accessible.