Daniel Silva | Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina - UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) (original) (raw)
Papers by Daniel Silva
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture, 2024
This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine the creative ways wher... more This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine the creative ways whereby young research interlocutors rewrite the socio-historical and material subtexts that underlie inequities in Brazil. In conversation with what the youths speak of their communicative and artistic practices, the chapter analyses how they mobilise various semiotic resources as they do culture, become agents of literacy practices and regauge registers. Based on interviews and participant observation of a poetry gathering and a youth collective oriented to literacy socialization, this paper showcases how peripheral youths reclaim their voice and respond to structural violence, systemic racism and stigmatisation through repurposing literacy practices, language regimes and embodied sensibilities.
Entangled Englishes, ed. by Jerry Won Lee and Sofia Rüdiger, 2025
This chapter is an attempt at thinking of how semiotic resources normally dominated by elite grou... more This chapter is an attempt at thinking of how semiotic resources normally
dominated by elite groups might be appropriated by minorities and repurposed beyond usual frameworks of domination. I draw from fieldwork with activists in Rio de Janeiro favelas; my case study unpacks how Brazilian Black feminists recast English and literacies as decolonial resources. In Brazil’s colonial past, literacy was denied to enslaved populations; today,
English is usually associated with elite segments and practices. The circuit of Black feminists that I bring into conversation is not repurposing affordable resources on the symbolic market. They thus evoke a sense of unease (instantiated in affects such as anger, defiance, and discomfort) in recasting trajectories of socialization into domains that are not normally imagined to include them. Instead of inclusion into social spheres where legitimized semiotic resources circulate, they often talk about intrusion into these arenas. Additionally, these intellectuals do not frame their semiotic work of intrusion as individual projects. Intrusion is part of a collective struggle–the imagination of semiotic domains that favor redistribution and break with the devaluation of Black lives.
Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness, 2019
This chapter draws from our fieldwork in situations of multilingual diversity that are contradict... more This chapter draws from our fieldwork in situations of multilingual diversity that are contradictorily positioned in official, power-laden discourses as monolingual and linguistically uniform. Empirically, we have been examining scenarios like the Brazilian and Uruguayan teaching of ‘mother tongues’ (as the teaching of Portuguese and Spanish is commonly referred to in these countries), and en- gaging with teachers, students, and policymakers, as well as reading historical and contemporary documents, to investigate how monolingualism has been in- vented in these contexts. Here, we will engage with Fabian Severo, a Uruguayan writer and teacher of Spanish born in Artigas, one of the seven Departments in the northern Uruguayan border with Brazil. Canonical sociolinguistic schol- arship has characterized the translingual practices spoken in this region of in- tense physical and symbolic crossing and blending as ‘a dialect that is the result of local Spanish-Portuguese contact’ (Canale, 2015, p. 19), technically coined by Elizaincín and Behares (1981) as Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay (DPU). Like other people from this region, Severo, however, prefers the term ‘Portuñol’ for communicative practices in his hometown, a translingual recombination of Portuguese and Spanish he has deployed in writing poems (Severo, 2010, 2013) and a novel (Severo, 2015). Based on an interview with Severo vis-à-vis our reading of the literature about linguistic diversity in the region, we propose a twofold argument with regard to the ordinariness of translinguistic practices.
![Research paper thumbnail of [Open Access] Sociolinguistics of hope: Language between the no-more and the not-yet](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/120370105/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Language in Society, 2024
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2024
Numa abordagem etnográfica da linguagem, abordamos a “semiótica abaixo do radar” empregada por Ja... more Numa abordagem etnográfica da linguagem, abordamos a “semiótica abaixo do radar” empregada por Jair Bolsonaro e seus estrategistas durante sua incumbência como presidente (2019-2022). Crystal Abidin (2021) sugere que a semiótica abaixo do radar é típica da cultura de celebridades digitais, que adaptam affordances de plataformas para “torcer” mensagens, de forma que estas sejam registradas de modo específico por públicos escolhidos e passem despercebidas pelo público em geral. Analisamos como
Bolsonaro se apropriou dessa estratégia, utilizando enunciados “cômicos” sobre jornalistas mulheres, imediatamente lidos como “apitos de cachorro” por públicos refratados – isto é, como comandos para ataques de manadas em mídias digitais. Empiricamente, construímos dois estudos de caso, centrados respectivamente na violência política de gênero contra Patricia Campos Mello e Gabriela Prioli, algumas das muitas jornalistas e comentaristas políticas transformadas em “inimigas”. O artigo
aponta para a importância de visões não racionalistas para o estudo da linguagem indireta, bem como convida a um retorno às bases etnográficas da sociolinguística, de forma a lidar com as desestabilizações promovidas pela interseção entre extrema direita e digitalização.
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2024
Bakhtin (1986) pioneered the understanding that speech is always shaped by ritual, formal, and in... more Bakhtin (1986) pioneered the understanding that speech is always shaped by ritual, formal, and interpersonal conditions, encapsulated in the notion of "speech genres." Since then, it has been a truism to say that there is no talk in a social vacuum, but rather situated talk, constrained by the conditions but also enabled by the affordances of speech genres. Xochtil Marsilli-Vargas's Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires innovates a scholarly tradition on the generic working of language by proposing that not only speech, but also listening, is shaped, constrained, and afforded by specific genres.
Drawing on over 6 years of fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Marsilli-Vargas offers an intricate theory of listening genres while also giving contextual and ethnographic detail of psychoanalytic listening and as a genre. Argentina (and Buenos Aires, in particular) has the highest number of psychologists per capita in the world. Not only do porteños (the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) often resort to psychoanalysis, but they have also spread the cultura psi (i.e., "psychoanalytic culture") beyond the dyadic encounter between analyst and analysand. In Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis has morphed into different formats of treatment and shaped everyday conversations, digital interactions, graphic works of art, and mass media tropes. In her theoretical discussion and sophisticated analyses, Marsilli-Vargas details the specificities of psychoanalytic listening as a genre and discusses the communicability or social circulation of tropes, dispositions, affects, and ideologies influenced by psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires' everyday listening culture. Marsilli-Vargas theorizes that a listening genre is a framework of relevance "that surfaces at the moment of reception and orients the apprehension of sound" (38). When doctors listen to a patient's heart through a stethoscope, they are performing a different listening from someone who lays their head on another person's chest and hears heartbeats. Both people are listening to heartbeats, but the types of training involved, the relevance attributed to sound, and the habituated ways of engaging in both semiotic practices differ. These differences, Marsilli-Vargas argues, are mainly due to the fact that we are dealing with different genres of listening-communicative practices of ordering and directing attention that are deeply regimented and social. She attributes at least four characteristics to psychoanalytic listening as a genre. First, it is cumulative, valorizing the situational qualities of listening and its effects over time. Beyond the context of the listening event, signifiers resonate with the listener, producing performative effects. Second, listening to the Other is a process that involves cultivation. Such pedagogical process requires both nurturing corporeal sensibilities for listening and learning modes of attention, discourse formulas (e.g., "When you say X, I listen to Y"), and other ritualized embodied dispositions. Third, as a result of the cultivation of psychoanalytic listening, the speech of the subject is seen as being traversed by the speech of the Other. In psychoanalytic experience, the subject is seen as "divided and spoken through (…) the Other inside the analysand" (71). Fourth, psychoanalytic listening favors practices of interpretation that go beyond denotational meaning. This generic form of listening favors the prosody that resonates with the subject over the conventional meaning attached to sounds. In Genres of Listening, Marsilli-Vargas discusses this particular genre and other generic forms of listening through ethnographic vignettes, situated examples, and empirical materials from the ethnographic and musicological record. She also gives special attention to how "psychoanalytic listening as a genre has left the clinical setting to circulate throughout many different arenas, becoming a social way of listening and a mode of organizing social interactions" (7). An example of this social spread is the Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytical Therapy (MPFSPT). Unique to Argentina, the MFSPT is a heterodox method of psychoanalysis whereby a group of analysts perform collective treatment to groups of patients that can reach up to 80 people. In these collective health practices, analysands and analysts alternate in interpreting symptoms and further reiterating the
Atlantic Studies, 2023
This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered durin... more This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered during fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. For Raphael Calazans, a young Black composer, the culture of survival emerges from solidarity: in the absence of housing policy for freed slaves, people created their own neighborhoods and improvised everyday solutions. The culture of survival is a practical means of grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. It is enacted through different communicative practices, including the papo reto (straight talk) activist register. I draw from conversations with local intellectuals to examine these language flows as a rhizomatic ensemble of tropes emerging from confrontations between life and death, as in police raids. In responding to current iterations of racial terror, the culture of survival displays dynamic resources – including solidarity, self-formation, humor, defiance and strategies for handling liminality – that favela residents deploy in their everyday life.
Calidoscópio, 2023
A editoria e os tradutores agradecem ao editor de Current Anthropology, Laurence Ralph (Princeton... more A editoria e os tradutores agradecem ao editor de Current Anthropology, Laurence Ralph (Princeton University), bem como à University of Chicago Press por nos permitir publicar gratuitamente a versão em português deste artigo.
Pragmatics & Society, 2023
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2023
Based on our fieldwork with Rio de Janeiro favela activists and social movements, this paper look... more Based on our fieldwork with Rio de Janeiro favela activists and social movements, this paper looks into how Black female activists, during the COVID-19 pandemic, engaged with multimodal resources and practical sociolinguistic imaginations that yielded forms of agency within an unequal social matrix. While engaging with a critique of the liberal model of agency as the triumph of individual autonomy, this paper ethnographically looks to modes of agency that unfold at the online- offline nexus as a capacity to act that emerges from pain and suffering, within limits of the language that wounds, and in the context of surviving capitalist inequities. This modality of agency becomes visible in the mourning movement for Marielle Franco, a Black favela councilwoman brutally murdered in 2018. Ethnographically, we discuss the Afrodiasporic agency of mourners as ‘watering Marielle’s seeds’, that is, as expanding Marielle’s sociolinguistic imaginations of language diversity, access to semiotic resources, and Black Atlantic cooperation.
Linguagem em (dis)curso, 2022
Resumo: A partir de pesquisas de orientação etnográfica, como as de Stephen Levinson e Elinor Och... more Resumo: A partir de pesquisas de orientação etnográfica, como as de Stephen Levinson e Elinor Ochs, e social, como as de Jacob Mey e Joana Plaza Pinto, o artigo assume uma postura particular sobre a pragmática linguística. Nomeada originalmente por Peirce e firmada como perspectivaem vez de disciplina-, a pragmática abriga pesquisadores/as de diversas tradições. Pessoas com trabalho pragmaticamente orientado ao estudo linguístico podem estar filiadas a áreas como a sociolinguística, a antropologia linguística, a linguística aplicada, a etnometodologia etc., mas sugiro uma semelhança de família: a pragmática vista como ciência sociali.e., tanto área etnograficamente orientada ao papel, às ideologias e à agência dos usuários da linguagem, quanto ciência "na sociedade", engajada. O artigo revisita etnografias linguísticas na Oceania e África, bem como trabalhos de orientação semântica. Conclui-se, com Rajagopalan, que uma diversidade de problemas de pesquisa dessa perspectiva são refinamentos da ação situada dos sujeitos.
Gender and Language, 2023
Political actors' embedding of the here-and-now of enunciation into constructions of gender, sexu... more Political actors' embedding of the here-and-now of enunciation into constructions of gender, sexuality and race is a deictic practice that can be uncoupled from its context and projected into political fields. This article unpacks alternative invocations of the deictic field by Jair Bolsonaro's new right in Brazil and by Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman who was assassinated in 2018, the same year Bolsonaro was elected president. While Bolsonaro has vilified progressive tropes, such as gender equality, sex positive education and Marielle's legacy, Marielle and later her mourning movement have mapped her here-and-now onto mottos such as 'Marielle lives' , which defy chronologic time. Marielle's central figure has thus been 'present' across the political spectrum-for progressives as a figure of immanence, and for white supremacists as a symbol of the Black gendered body whose life is not mournable but whose phantasmatic presence is a continuing threat.
Sociolinguistic Studies, 2022
This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro's handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his ... more This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro's handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his 'different kind of branding.' Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro's branding tactics were predicated not on portraying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on producing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in necropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the 'brand-new' Brazil projected in Bolsonaro's presidency (2019-2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the 'shadow board' that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro's 'chaotic' branding project harnessed features of currently existing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of 'alternative facts', entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism.
Discourse, Context & Media, 2022
This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by... more This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and 'artivism' as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.
Applies Linguistics Review, 2022
This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to i... more This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to investigate the emergence of "hybrids" (Latour 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press) of body, language, and politics, while simultaneously looking to the contextual objectification of communicative resources. The interaction took place during the 2013 Circulando, an annual event promoted by the NGO Raízes em Movimento in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro. As both Brazil and South Africa were on the route of mega sporting events and the neoliberal transformation of the city into business, activists from both peripheries produced comparable views of their struggle against forced removals ahead of the FIFA World Cup. In this ethnographic case, translanguaging as hybrid embodied practice occurs alongside other semiotic moves, such as circumscribing specific pragmatic functions. The empirical and epistemic findings may be of relevance for translanguaging research. Specifically, activists' engagement with "non-modern" modes of hybridization (e.g., their contextual mingling of language resources, technologies and the body) and "modern" forms of objectification, such as the circumscription of specific "genres of listening" (Marsilli-Vargas 2022. Genres of listening: An ethnography of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press) suggest that it is not fruitful seeing as separate in our data the dynamics of hybridization and objectification, or the dynamics of transglossia and uniformization.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s, 2022
This chapter examines how subjects in Brazilian favelas build on indexicality, or particular mode... more This chapter examines how subjects in Brazilian favelas build on indexicality, or particular modes of linking signs to their social worlds, to articulate alternative temporalities that are conducive to hope. This particular practice of languaging is a means of grappling with conditions of hopelessness predicated in regimes of violence and economic dispossession. We focus on Marielle Franco, a Black queer councilwoman from the favela who was elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. An advocate for the socially and economically marginalized, Marielle was assassinated after just over a year in office, on 14 March 2018. Her political languaging is representative of a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. We explore Marielle’s production of hope via language, or what we refer to as the languaging of hope, and find that she contested an enduring indexical order in Brazil to challenge the temporal regiment of the political establishment premised on the exclusion of non-elites. We refer to the ensuing temporal imaginary produced by Marielle’s communicative praxis as transgressive temporality.
Anais do V Colóquio Internacional Letramento e Cultura Escrita, 2014
O funk carioca é uma poderosa forma de comunicação e de identidade das juventudes de periferias e... more O funk carioca é uma poderosa forma de comunicação e de identidade das juventudes de periferias e favelas. Em O Atlântico Negro, Gilroy destaca que essas performances seriam uma espécie de contra-discurso da diáspora africana, que funciona como uma prática de compensação à exclusão do letramento e política formais a que foram submetidos os descendentes de escravos no ocidente. Assumimos aqui que o funk carioca é um tipo de letramento: é no interior dessa prática musical que são produzidos e disseminados inúmeros textos orais e escritos através dos quais jovens de periferias e favelas se tornam autores textuais. Por meio da análise de um processo de produção textual coletivo que resultou na aprovação da Lei 5.544/09, que reconhece o funk como cultura do estado do Rio de Janeiro, destacaremos como esse texto é um efeito do que chamamos de “Letramento de Ruptura”. Trata-se de formas de usar socialmente a leitura e a escrita que, a um só tempo, repetem e desafiam enunciados estigmatizantes. Ao longo de sua história, essa prática musical foi representada pela mídia corporativa e por setores da sociedade como música de bandido, que incitaria à violência, corromperia menores etc. O funk era tratado como um “caso de polícia” e ponto final. Porém, a lei é um ato de fala que instaura uma outra representação para o funk carioca, rompendo e instaurando possibilidades para outras temporalidades e representações.
Signs and Society, 2022
This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formatio... more This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil's favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants' ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the "crossfire," that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the "world of crime" in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the "convoluted" language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a "direct" and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world's most unequal countries.
This paper argues that (in)securitisation-"making 'enemy' and 'fear' the integrative, energetic p... more This paper argues that (in)securitisation-"making 'enemy' and 'fear' the integrative, energetic principle of politics" (Huysmans 2014:3)-now calls for much fuller attention than it has hitherto received in sociolinguistics, and that it should figure alongside 'standardisation' and 'marketisation' as a major mode of governance shaping and shaped in language ideology and communicative practice. After a sketch of the two conceptions of governance that have dominated in sociolinguistics over the last 50 years, the paper draws on Foucault and Mbembe's 'necropower' to introduce (in)securitisation and its historical and contemporary role in the formation of nation-states and the management of large populations. It then outlines some of (in)securitisation's prototypical features (states of exception; enemies & inferiorised 'races'; walls and fortifications; intensified alertness; silencing), turning after that to (in)securitisation's entanglement with standard language in two empirical studies. In one, people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro experience ongoing violence from drug traffickers and police, but have developed digital media practices and a discursive register to resist this (counter-securitisation); in the other, Greek-Cypriot secondary school teachers and students navigate postwar reconciliation through precarious engagement with Turkish, the language of the former enemy (de-securitisation). There are substantial differences between these two sites, indicating the need for close, sustained ethnography, as well as the difficulties facing any attempt to predict the sociolinguistic effects of (in)securitisation. Even so, (in)securitisation is still vital to an understanding of how people in these places orient to standard language, and beyond this, with the pandemic, increased geopolitical instability and the Climate Emergency, it is hard to doubt (in)securitisation's growing relevance to a plurality of sociolinguistic processes and practices.
Debates do NER, 2019
Esta é uma tradução do influente artigo de Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: an... more Esta é uma tradução do influente artigo de Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: an Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry, Chicago, v. 35, n. 4, p. 836-862", realizada por Daniel N. Silva e revisada por Bruno Reinhardt. A autora avança o debate de que o secularismo "não é simplesmente (...) a separação doutrinal entre igreja e Estado, mas (...) a rearticulação da religião de uma maneira que é comensurável com sensibilidades e formas de governo modernas." Empiricamente, a autora a analisa a polêmica em torno dos cartuns dinamarqueses que em 2005 fizeram chacota da imagem de Maomé - e que foram republicados em vários jornais no mundo secular. A autora mostra que a dicotomia liberdade de expressão x blasfêmia é insuficiente para explicar esse episódio de injúria e dor moral. Ao demonstrar o próprio caráter religioso do secularismo, a autora identifica também que, no contexto multicultural europeu, religiões majoritárias tendem a ser protegidas legalmente, enquanto religiões e práticas minoritárias tendem a ser submetidas a sanções e exclusões não aplicáveis às maiorias. Os conceitos mobilizados pela autora incluem o de ideologia semiótica, um desdobramento do influente conceito de ideologia linguística proposto por Michael Silverstein em sua releitura de linguistas como Whorf e Jakobson.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and Youth Culture, 2024
This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine the creative ways wher... more This chapter draws from fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro peripheries to examine the creative ways whereby young research interlocutors rewrite the socio-historical and material subtexts that underlie inequities in Brazil. In conversation with what the youths speak of their communicative and artistic practices, the chapter analyses how they mobilise various semiotic resources as they do culture, become agents of literacy practices and regauge registers. Based on interviews and participant observation of a poetry gathering and a youth collective oriented to literacy socialization, this paper showcases how peripheral youths reclaim their voice and respond to structural violence, systemic racism and stigmatisation through repurposing literacy practices, language regimes and embodied sensibilities.
Entangled Englishes, ed. by Jerry Won Lee and Sofia Rüdiger, 2025
This chapter is an attempt at thinking of how semiotic resources normally dominated by elite grou... more This chapter is an attempt at thinking of how semiotic resources normally
dominated by elite groups might be appropriated by minorities and repurposed beyond usual frameworks of domination. I draw from fieldwork with activists in Rio de Janeiro favelas; my case study unpacks how Brazilian Black feminists recast English and literacies as decolonial resources. In Brazil’s colonial past, literacy was denied to enslaved populations; today,
English is usually associated with elite segments and practices. The circuit of Black feminists that I bring into conversation is not repurposing affordable resources on the symbolic market. They thus evoke a sense of unease (instantiated in affects such as anger, defiance, and discomfort) in recasting trajectories of socialization into domains that are not normally imagined to include them. Instead of inclusion into social spheres where legitimized semiotic resources circulate, they often talk about intrusion into these arenas. Additionally, these intellectuals do not frame their semiotic work of intrusion as individual projects. Intrusion is part of a collective struggle–the imagination of semiotic domains that favor redistribution and break with the devaluation of Black lives.
Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness, 2019
This chapter draws from our fieldwork in situations of multilingual diversity that are contradict... more This chapter draws from our fieldwork in situations of multilingual diversity that are contradictorily positioned in official, power-laden discourses as monolingual and linguistically uniform. Empirically, we have been examining scenarios like the Brazilian and Uruguayan teaching of ‘mother tongues’ (as the teaching of Portuguese and Spanish is commonly referred to in these countries), and en- gaging with teachers, students, and policymakers, as well as reading historical and contemporary documents, to investigate how monolingualism has been in- vented in these contexts. Here, we will engage with Fabian Severo, a Uruguayan writer and teacher of Spanish born in Artigas, one of the seven Departments in the northern Uruguayan border with Brazil. Canonical sociolinguistic schol- arship has characterized the translingual practices spoken in this region of in- tense physical and symbolic crossing and blending as ‘a dialect that is the result of local Spanish-Portuguese contact’ (Canale, 2015, p. 19), technically coined by Elizaincín and Behares (1981) as Dialectos Portugueses del Uruguay (DPU). Like other people from this region, Severo, however, prefers the term ‘Portuñol’ for communicative practices in his hometown, a translingual recombination of Portuguese and Spanish he has deployed in writing poems (Severo, 2010, 2013) and a novel (Severo, 2015). Based on an interview with Severo vis-à-vis our reading of the literature about linguistic diversity in the region, we propose a twofold argument with regard to the ordinariness of translinguistic practices.
Language in Society, 2024
Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2024
Numa abordagem etnográfica da linguagem, abordamos a “semiótica abaixo do radar” empregada por Ja... more Numa abordagem etnográfica da linguagem, abordamos a “semiótica abaixo do radar” empregada por Jair Bolsonaro e seus estrategistas durante sua incumbência como presidente (2019-2022). Crystal Abidin (2021) sugere que a semiótica abaixo do radar é típica da cultura de celebridades digitais, que adaptam affordances de plataformas para “torcer” mensagens, de forma que estas sejam registradas de modo específico por públicos escolhidos e passem despercebidas pelo público em geral. Analisamos como
Bolsonaro se apropriou dessa estratégia, utilizando enunciados “cômicos” sobre jornalistas mulheres, imediatamente lidos como “apitos de cachorro” por públicos refratados – isto é, como comandos para ataques de manadas em mídias digitais. Empiricamente, construímos dois estudos de caso, centrados respectivamente na violência política de gênero contra Patricia Campos Mello e Gabriela Prioli, algumas das muitas jornalistas e comentaristas políticas transformadas em “inimigas”. O artigo
aponta para a importância de visões não racionalistas para o estudo da linguagem indireta, bem como convida a um retorno às bases etnográficas da sociolinguística, de forma a lidar com as desestabilizações promovidas pela interseção entre extrema direita e digitalização.
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2024
Bakhtin (1986) pioneered the understanding that speech is always shaped by ritual, formal, and in... more Bakhtin (1986) pioneered the understanding that speech is always shaped by ritual, formal, and interpersonal conditions, encapsulated in the notion of "speech genres." Since then, it has been a truism to say that there is no talk in a social vacuum, but rather situated talk, constrained by the conditions but also enabled by the affordances of speech genres. Xochtil Marsilli-Vargas's Genres of Listening: An Ethnography of Psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires innovates a scholarly tradition on the generic working of language by proposing that not only speech, but also listening, is shaped, constrained, and afforded by specific genres.
Drawing on over 6 years of fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Marsilli-Vargas offers an intricate theory of listening genres while also giving contextual and ethnographic detail of psychoanalytic listening and as a genre. Argentina (and Buenos Aires, in particular) has the highest number of psychologists per capita in the world. Not only do porteños (the inhabitants of Buenos Aires) often resort to psychoanalysis, but they have also spread the cultura psi (i.e., "psychoanalytic culture") beyond the dyadic encounter between analyst and analysand. In Buenos Aires, psychoanalysis has morphed into different formats of treatment and shaped everyday conversations, digital interactions, graphic works of art, and mass media tropes. In her theoretical discussion and sophisticated analyses, Marsilli-Vargas details the specificities of psychoanalytic listening as a genre and discusses the communicability or social circulation of tropes, dispositions, affects, and ideologies influenced by psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires' everyday listening culture. Marsilli-Vargas theorizes that a listening genre is a framework of relevance "that surfaces at the moment of reception and orients the apprehension of sound" (38). When doctors listen to a patient's heart through a stethoscope, they are performing a different listening from someone who lays their head on another person's chest and hears heartbeats. Both people are listening to heartbeats, but the types of training involved, the relevance attributed to sound, and the habituated ways of engaging in both semiotic practices differ. These differences, Marsilli-Vargas argues, are mainly due to the fact that we are dealing with different genres of listening-communicative practices of ordering and directing attention that are deeply regimented and social. She attributes at least four characteristics to psychoanalytic listening as a genre. First, it is cumulative, valorizing the situational qualities of listening and its effects over time. Beyond the context of the listening event, signifiers resonate with the listener, producing performative effects. Second, listening to the Other is a process that involves cultivation. Such pedagogical process requires both nurturing corporeal sensibilities for listening and learning modes of attention, discourse formulas (e.g., "When you say X, I listen to Y"), and other ritualized embodied dispositions. Third, as a result of the cultivation of psychoanalytic listening, the speech of the subject is seen as being traversed by the speech of the Other. In psychoanalytic experience, the subject is seen as "divided and spoken through (…) the Other inside the analysand" (71). Fourth, psychoanalytic listening favors practices of interpretation that go beyond denotational meaning. This generic form of listening favors the prosody that resonates with the subject over the conventional meaning attached to sounds. In Genres of Listening, Marsilli-Vargas discusses this particular genre and other generic forms of listening through ethnographic vignettes, situated examples, and empirical materials from the ethnographic and musicological record. She also gives special attention to how "psychoanalytic listening as a genre has left the clinical setting to circulate throughout many different arenas, becoming a social way of listening and a mode of organizing social interactions" (7). An example of this social spread is the Multi-Family Structured Psychoanalytical Therapy (MPFSPT). Unique to Argentina, the MFSPT is a heterodox method of psychoanalysis whereby a group of analysts perform collective treatment to groups of patients that can reach up to 80 people. In these collective health practices, analysands and analysts alternate in interpreting symptoms and further reiterating the
Atlantic Studies, 2023
This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered durin... more This study delineates the “culture of survival,” a trope that my research group encountered during fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro favelas. For Raphael Calazans, a young Black composer, the culture of survival emerges from solidarity: in the absence of housing policy for freed slaves, people created their own neighborhoods and improvised everyday solutions. The culture of survival is a practical means of grappling with the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade. It is enacted through different communicative practices, including the papo reto (straight talk) activist register. I draw from conversations with local intellectuals to examine these language flows as a rhizomatic ensemble of tropes emerging from confrontations between life and death, as in police raids. In responding to current iterations of racial terror, the culture of survival displays dynamic resources – including solidarity, self-formation, humor, defiance and strategies for handling liminality – that favela residents deploy in their everyday life.
Calidoscópio, 2023
A editoria e os tradutores agradecem ao editor de Current Anthropology, Laurence Ralph (Princeton... more A editoria e os tradutores agradecem ao editor de Current Anthropology, Laurence Ralph (Princeton University), bem como à University of Chicago Press por nos permitir publicar gratuitamente a versão em português deste artigo.
Pragmatics & Society, 2023
Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2023
Based on our fieldwork with Rio de Janeiro favela activists and social movements, this paper look... more Based on our fieldwork with Rio de Janeiro favela activists and social movements, this paper looks into how Black female activists, during the COVID-19 pandemic, engaged with multimodal resources and practical sociolinguistic imaginations that yielded forms of agency within an unequal social matrix. While engaging with a critique of the liberal model of agency as the triumph of individual autonomy, this paper ethnographically looks to modes of agency that unfold at the online- offline nexus as a capacity to act that emerges from pain and suffering, within limits of the language that wounds, and in the context of surviving capitalist inequities. This modality of agency becomes visible in the mourning movement for Marielle Franco, a Black favela councilwoman brutally murdered in 2018. Ethnographically, we discuss the Afrodiasporic agency of mourners as ‘watering Marielle’s seeds’, that is, as expanding Marielle’s sociolinguistic imaginations of language diversity, access to semiotic resources, and Black Atlantic cooperation.
Linguagem em (dis)curso, 2022
Resumo: A partir de pesquisas de orientação etnográfica, como as de Stephen Levinson e Elinor Och... more Resumo: A partir de pesquisas de orientação etnográfica, como as de Stephen Levinson e Elinor Ochs, e social, como as de Jacob Mey e Joana Plaza Pinto, o artigo assume uma postura particular sobre a pragmática linguística. Nomeada originalmente por Peirce e firmada como perspectivaem vez de disciplina-, a pragmática abriga pesquisadores/as de diversas tradições. Pessoas com trabalho pragmaticamente orientado ao estudo linguístico podem estar filiadas a áreas como a sociolinguística, a antropologia linguística, a linguística aplicada, a etnometodologia etc., mas sugiro uma semelhança de família: a pragmática vista como ciência sociali.e., tanto área etnograficamente orientada ao papel, às ideologias e à agência dos usuários da linguagem, quanto ciência "na sociedade", engajada. O artigo revisita etnografias linguísticas na Oceania e África, bem como trabalhos de orientação semântica. Conclui-se, com Rajagopalan, que uma diversidade de problemas de pesquisa dessa perspectiva são refinamentos da ação situada dos sujeitos.
Gender and Language, 2023
Political actors' embedding of the here-and-now of enunciation into constructions of gender, sexu... more Political actors' embedding of the here-and-now of enunciation into constructions of gender, sexuality and race is a deictic practice that can be uncoupled from its context and projected into political fields. This article unpacks alternative invocations of the deictic field by Jair Bolsonaro's new right in Brazil and by Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman who was assassinated in 2018, the same year Bolsonaro was elected president. While Bolsonaro has vilified progressive tropes, such as gender equality, sex positive education and Marielle's legacy, Marielle and later her mourning movement have mapped her here-and-now onto mottos such as 'Marielle lives' , which defy chronologic time. Marielle's central figure has thus been 'present' across the political spectrum-for progressives as a figure of immanence, and for white supremacists as a symbol of the Black gendered body whose life is not mournable but whose phantasmatic presence is a continuing threat.
Sociolinguistic Studies, 2022
This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro's handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his ... more This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro's handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his 'different kind of branding.' Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro's branding tactics were predicated not on portraying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on producing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in necropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the 'brand-new' Brazil projected in Bolsonaro's presidency (2019-2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the 'shadow board' that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro's 'chaotic' branding project harnessed features of currently existing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of 'alternative facts', entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism.
Discourse, Context & Media, 2022
This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by... more This article draws from our ethnography in the Complexo do Alemão favelas (neighborhoods built by residents) in Rio de Janeiro to discuss how Black activists bring affordances of digitalization and enregistered practices into broader arenas of political participation. We unpack our own positionality and experience with the armed surveillance and securitization of normative regimes that challenge (and often cooperate with) the state in governing peripheral and, to a lesser extent, central areas in Brazilian cities. Favela residents are disproportionately affected by these violent forms of securitization. We look to their ordinary digital and enregistered languaging and 'artivism' as a means of surviving necropolitics that are proper to the African diaspora. In dialogue with the sociolinguistics of globalization and the sociology of violence, the study provides ethnographic evidence of situated cooperation and creative use of language and technologies. We believe this may offer promising paths for further objectives, including antiracist education and comparative studies of grassroots activism.
Applies Linguistics Review, 2022
This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to i... more This article draws on a transidiomatic interaction between South Africa and Brazil activists to investigate the emergence of "hybrids" (Latour 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press) of body, language, and politics, while simultaneously looking to the contextual objectification of communicative resources. The interaction took place during the 2013 Circulando, an annual event promoted by the NGO Raízes em Movimento in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro. As both Brazil and South Africa were on the route of mega sporting events and the neoliberal transformation of the city into business, activists from both peripheries produced comparable views of their struggle against forced removals ahead of the FIFA World Cup. In this ethnographic case, translanguaging as hybrid embodied practice occurs alongside other semiotic moves, such as circumscribing specific pragmatic functions. The empirical and epistemic findings may be of relevance for translanguaging research. Specifically, activists' engagement with "non-modern" modes of hybridization (e.g., their contextual mingling of language resources, technologies and the body) and "modern" forms of objectification, such as the circumscription of specific "genres of listening" (Marsilli-Vargas 2022. Genres of listening: An ethnography of psychoanalysis in Buenos Aires. Durham: Duke University Press) suggest that it is not fruitful seeing as separate in our data the dynamics of hybridization and objectification, or the dynamics of transglossia and uniformization.
The Routledge Handbook of Language and the Global South/s, 2022
This chapter examines how subjects in Brazilian favelas build on indexicality, or particular mode... more This chapter examines how subjects in Brazilian favelas build on indexicality, or particular modes of linking signs to their social worlds, to articulate alternative temporalities that are conducive to hope. This particular practice of languaging is a means of grappling with conditions of hopelessness predicated in regimes of violence and economic dispossession. We focus on Marielle Franco, a Black queer councilwoman from the favela who was elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro in 2016. An advocate for the socially and economically marginalized, Marielle was assassinated after just over a year in office, on 14 March 2018. Her political languaging is representative of a disruption of the teleological time of progress, inverting taken-for-granted relations of causality. We explore Marielle’s production of hope via language, or what we refer to as the languaging of hope, and find that she contested an enduring indexical order in Brazil to challenge the temporal regiment of the political establishment premised on the exclusion of non-elites. We refer to the ensuing temporal imaginary produced by Marielle’s communicative praxis as transgressive temporality.
Anais do V Colóquio Internacional Letramento e Cultura Escrita, 2014
O funk carioca é uma poderosa forma de comunicação e de identidade das juventudes de periferias e... more O funk carioca é uma poderosa forma de comunicação e de identidade das juventudes de periferias e favelas. Em O Atlântico Negro, Gilroy destaca que essas performances seriam uma espécie de contra-discurso da diáspora africana, que funciona como uma prática de compensação à exclusão do letramento e política formais a que foram submetidos os descendentes de escravos no ocidente. Assumimos aqui que o funk carioca é um tipo de letramento: é no interior dessa prática musical que são produzidos e disseminados inúmeros textos orais e escritos através dos quais jovens de periferias e favelas se tornam autores textuais. Por meio da análise de um processo de produção textual coletivo que resultou na aprovação da Lei 5.544/09, que reconhece o funk como cultura do estado do Rio de Janeiro, destacaremos como esse texto é um efeito do que chamamos de “Letramento de Ruptura”. Trata-se de formas de usar socialmente a leitura e a escrita que, a um só tempo, repetem e desafiam enunciados estigmatizantes. Ao longo de sua história, essa prática musical foi representada pela mídia corporativa e por setores da sociedade como música de bandido, que incitaria à violência, corromperia menores etc. O funk era tratado como um “caso de polícia” e ponto final. Porém, a lei é um ato de fala que instaura uma outra representação para o funk carioca, rompendo e instaurando possibilidades para outras temporalidades e representações.
Signs and Society, 2022
This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formatio... more This essay studies papo reto (straight talk) activist register as an enregistered social formation that indexes practices, relations, and personae belonging in Brazil's favelas (low-income neighborhoods). Drawing from fieldwork in the Complexo do Alemão favelas in Rio de Janeiro, I discuss three case studies that showcase prototypical pragmatic features of papo reto (suspension of face concerns; directness; and indexically valued tropism). In juxtaposing findings from the sociology of violence in Brazil with my informants' ethnopragmatics, I conclude that papo reto activist register is a crucial language game for surviving the "crossfire," that is, the violent dispute between the normative regimes of the state and the "world of crime" in favelas. Further, in its rewording of the "convoluted" language of bureaucracy and other upscale registers to a "direct" and more participatory speech level, papo reto activist register is a fundamental weapon for the political participation of Blacks and other minorities in one of the world's most unequal countries.
This paper argues that (in)securitisation-"making 'enemy' and 'fear' the integrative, energetic p... more This paper argues that (in)securitisation-"making 'enemy' and 'fear' the integrative, energetic principle of politics" (Huysmans 2014:3)-now calls for much fuller attention than it has hitherto received in sociolinguistics, and that it should figure alongside 'standardisation' and 'marketisation' as a major mode of governance shaping and shaped in language ideology and communicative practice. After a sketch of the two conceptions of governance that have dominated in sociolinguistics over the last 50 years, the paper draws on Foucault and Mbembe's 'necropower' to introduce (in)securitisation and its historical and contemporary role in the formation of nation-states and the management of large populations. It then outlines some of (in)securitisation's prototypical features (states of exception; enemies & inferiorised 'races'; walls and fortifications; intensified alertness; silencing), turning after that to (in)securitisation's entanglement with standard language in two empirical studies. In one, people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro experience ongoing violence from drug traffickers and police, but have developed digital media practices and a discursive register to resist this (counter-securitisation); in the other, Greek-Cypriot secondary school teachers and students navigate postwar reconciliation through precarious engagement with Turkish, the language of the former enemy (de-securitisation). There are substantial differences between these two sites, indicating the need for close, sustained ethnography, as well as the difficulties facing any attempt to predict the sociolinguistic effects of (in)securitisation. Even so, (in)securitisation is still vital to an understanding of how people in these places orient to standard language, and beyond this, with the pandemic, increased geopolitical instability and the Climate Emergency, it is hard to doubt (in)securitisation's growing relevance to a plurality of sociolinguistic processes and practices.
Debates do NER, 2019
Esta é uma tradução do influente artigo de Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: an... more Esta é uma tradução do influente artigo de Saba Mahmood, "Religious Reason and Secular Affect: an Incommensurable Divide? Critical Inquiry, Chicago, v. 35, n. 4, p. 836-862", realizada por Daniel N. Silva e revisada por Bruno Reinhardt. A autora avança o debate de que o secularismo "não é simplesmente (...) a separação doutrinal entre igreja e Estado, mas (...) a rearticulação da religião de uma maneira que é comensurável com sensibilidades e formas de governo modernas." Empiricamente, a autora a analisa a polêmica em torno dos cartuns dinamarqueses que em 2005 fizeram chacota da imagem de Maomé - e que foram republicados em vários jornais no mundo secular. A autora mostra que a dicotomia liberdade de expressão x blasfêmia é insuficiente para explicar esse episódio de injúria e dor moral. Ao demonstrar o próprio caráter religioso do secularismo, a autora identifica também que, no contexto multicultural europeu, religiões majoritárias tendem a ser protegidas legalmente, enquanto religiões e práticas minoritárias tendem a ser submetidas a sanções e exclusões não aplicáveis às maiorias. Os conceitos mobilizados pela autora incluem o de ideologia semiótica, um desdobramento do influente conceito de ideologia linguística proposto por Michael Silverstein em sua releitura de linguistas como Whorf e Jakobson.
Objetivo: Este curso objetiva oferecer uma visão panorâmica da Pragmática Linguística. Serão disc... more Objetivo: Este curso objetiva oferecer uma visão panorâmica da Pragmática Linguística. Serão discutidos alguns dos problemas centrais do campo, bem como a visão de pragmática como perspectiva nos estudos da linguagem (e além), oferecida por Jef Verschueren. Como tal, autores e autoras interessados/as em linguagem para além da pragmática serão trazidos para discussão, sobretudo no que diz respeito à ampliação e transbordamento de bordas e fronteiras que esses/essas autores/as podem oferecer ao campo. Avaliação: o conceito final será composto por (70%) um artigo final, ao final do curso, e pequenas atividades orais e escritas (30%) ao longo do semestre.
This paper explores two competing models of adaptation of discourses in society. The first model ... more This paper explores two competing models of adaptation of discourses in society. The first model is contradictorily a non-adaptable framework or matrix that scales the social circulation of text and talk as expandable, i.e. scalable, yet seemingly un-modifiable in its expansion. Following Anna Tsing's (2012) work on scales, we term this form of adaptation " self-containment. " The other model, which we call contamination, is not grounded on scalability to the extent that it is not valid everywhere in the same way. Instead, this form of circulation is nonscalable as it is embedded in the singularity and indeterminacy of encounters. A nonscalable project is unable to travel without being contaminated by the engagement or clash with others. To investigate the circulation of these models of discourse adaptation in contemporary Brazil, we tackle some of the narratives forging the 2016 Olympic sporting event and the 2014 World Cup. We do so by tracing " communicable maps " (Briggs 2007) and weaving a " trail of associations " (Latour 2005). The established connections produce a provisional panorama in which the friction of scalable and nonscalable narratives produces collaborative trans-contextual plots which are the outcome of relations of mutuality.
O principal objetivo desta disciplina é situar o campo aplicado de investigação sobre a linguagem... more O principal objetivo desta disciplina é situar o campo aplicado de investigação sobre a linguagem como área transdisciplinar, contextual, mestiça e crítica de conhecimento. Para tanto, abordaremos textos diversos no campo, produzidos no Brasil e no exterior, sobre epistemologia da linguística aplicada, assim como textos que abordem problemas centrais da LA a partir de casos empíricos. Será dada especial ênfase ao papel das ideologias linguísticas na produção de conhecimento sobre linguagem e sociedade. O foco do curso será, além de teórico, empírico e etnográfico, o que significa que buscaremos embasar as discussões dos textos e entre nós em evidências e interpretações situadas sobre essas evidências.