Continuing Review’s tradition of covering writing and arts from Brazil, we are pleased to present this special issue of the journal, no. 102, “Digital Brazil: Voices of Resistance,” guest-edited by translator, scholar, and author Elizabeth Lowe. The issue compiles a variety of texts produced and circulated via social media, blogs, and other platforms of the digital age, as well as through traditional print media. The contents explore themes particularly relevant to the current moment, one that reflects the political, economic, environmental, and social challenges in Brazil today, especially against the global backdrop of the Black Lives Matter movement, the threat of authoritarianism, and the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic.
The issue’s cover and inside images, by photographer Vincent Catala, express this particular historical moment through his sober visual documentation of the effects of the pandemic at its terrifying height in São Paulo. Serving as a metaphor for the devastation and despair of this daunting period, they also suggest resilience as well as the promise of change.
Highlights of the contents selected by Prof. Lowe, as discussed in her cogent introduction, include J.P. Cuenca’s review of his own publication history as a product of the digital age; additional blog entries by Noemi Jaffe and Djamila Ribeiro; and critical essays, respectively, by Cristina Ferreira Pinto-Bailey on “Black Brazilian Feminisms,” by Paulo Dutra on “Resistance and Dissidence,” and by Leila Lehnen on “Decolonizing Fictions” in Afrofuturism. The contents showcase fiction, non-fiction, and poetry by authors working in digital as well as in traditional media, employing various aesthetics, and ruminating on, often exposing with clarion calls rooted in personal experience, issues of identity, censorship, and racial inequality. Among these representative “voices of resistance” are the above-mentioned Cuenca and Dutra, Cristiane Sobral, Conceição Evaristo, Fabricio Corsaletti, Juliana Sankofa, and Fábio Kabral. In respective memorial pieces, Nélida Piñon and Paula Parisot reflect on the great late writer Rubem Fonseca.
Review 102 also includes special Features—a pairing of poems and art by Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão and the late painter Will Barnet; an interview, by Jerry Carlson, of Cuban writer Senel Paz; and a selection of poems by Peruvian poet Mariela Dreyfus from her latest collection, Musical Notebook. The issue concludes with reviews of new titles—Raquel Chang-Rodríguez and Carlos Riobó’s Talking Books with Mario Vargas Llosa, The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, and others by modern and contemporary writers from across the hemisphere, including Oliverio Girondo, María Negroni, Reina María Rodríguez, Guillermo Cotto-Thorner, and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara.
My thanks to our guest editor, Elizabeth Lowe, for her vision, her dynamic selection of texts, and her brilliant contextualization of the contents; and to all the writers, scholars, translators, and reviewers, as well as our cover-artist, all of whose work is so daringly represented in this issue. Special appreciation to Marcos Antônio Alves de Gouvêa for assistance with correspondence in Portuguese. My continuing gratitude to Review’s editorial staff and advisory board; to The City College of New York, particularly to Erec Koch, Dean of the Division of Humanities and Arts, for all his generous support these past few years; and to Routledge/Taylor and Francis, for its ongoing commitment to Review.
We hope our readers enjoy this significant and thought-provoking issue of Review, which aims to highlight the vital intellectual and creative work by a host of underserved writers and artists working in the latest media with the goal of promoting justice and healing, providing much needed inspiration, and heralding a new era beyond these troubled times.