7º Anniversary of the Protests of June of 2013

              Last 20th of June one of the biggest protests in Brazil history completed seven years. The reason why this protest is studied until now and others are not, it was its character totally spontaneous, unexpected and non-partisan. And this movement called by some as "June Revolution," must be always remembered. The Brazilian people realized that they deserve a better governance, a better return for so many taxes they pay. Besides, we want respect for our basic human rights and justice when they are violated. We want a fair and inclusive electoral and political systems. We want honesty, efficiency and accountability from our politicians and public service. In short, we want a governmental system that make the most of our human and material resources. And so Brazil can reach its true potential and let to be known as 'the eternal Country of the Future' and becomes really what its potential can make for its citizens. This post is a summary of the report published at   https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/documents-by-section/departments/anthropology/Revolutions.pdf

             The June Revolution that shook Brazil in 2013 took everybody by surprise. It started in São paulo as a small gathering protesting a looming rise in the cost of public transport, and in two weeks it spread across 400 cities and towns, bringing millions of people into the streets and forcing President Dilma Roussef to start a process of constitutional reform. For many political observers this "movement of movements" was a new form of working-class articulation of diverse social forces. Fighting for a freedom that encompassed both social and labor demands, slaves infused the labor movement with civic consciouness. But boundaries between freedom and slavery continue to be fluid in Brazil. As in past forms of slavery, the civil liberties of the Brazilian poor are heavily restricted. As a result, economic and civic struggles to struggle for recognition go hand and hand. The June revolution started when the Free Fare Movement led a demonstration against the rise in public transport fare. This small protest quickly escalated and this led to a second phase of the struggle, which reached its apex between June 17 and 20. By now the demands had widened and included health, education and opposition to PEC 37, which would restrict the attorney general's power to carry out independent investigations, de facto eliminating an importanr anticorruption tool. On June 20, one million people marched on Avenida Vargas in Rio. As in other contemporary mobilizations, the Brazilian movement relied heavily on social media to organize gatherings, flash mobs and direct actions across the city. When President Roussef reversed the transport fare increase and proposed a constituent assembly devoted to political reform, more stringent punishments for corruption and investments in transport, health and education, the movement was furiously repressed. As a result of the violence unleashed by the police, the protest entered into a third phase. demands became more dispersed across a wide range of issues including gay rights, legalization of drugs, abortion, lower inflation, public spending and privatization, traffic tolls, etc. For Saad Filho, the movement was now fragmented and captured by a strong anti-left middle class. Another view holds that this was a moment of convergence between the "old" and "new" left. But how did a brooding political discontent become a full-fledged urban revolution? Perhaps more than any other Brazilian cities, the "wondeful city" is an explosive mix of extreme wealth and deprivation, of drug gangs and finance barons, favelas and luxurious real estate, of ancient aristocracies and brutal police, infrastructural decay and stunning natural beauty. The protest was ignited by what was perceived as an unjust planning of major sport events, the World Cup and the Olympic Games, to be held in Rio between 2012 and 2016. Discontent started to rise when the newly formed Olympic Committee announced its plans of investments in the city. Transport and housing improvements focused mainly on Barra da Tijuca, a high-income area, while bus and low-cost train were to be scaled down. So, was "the movement of the movement" led by the middle class or by the precariat? The answer is not straightforward because the political and economic threshold between the precariat and the middle class is fuzzy. For instance, their main common enemies are inflation and corruption. At the beginning of 2013, the 10% increase in prices hit the working class hard. The middle class was hit even more violently by the raise in services. By the time of the demonstrations, a vociferous anti-inflation movement had emerged. Anticorruption movements are also typically cross-sectional. In May, the trials against the PT politicians involved in the vote-buying scandal (Mensalão) had just ended. André Singer's analysis of the June demonstrators socioeconomic profile confirms the porosity between the middle class and the precariat in Brazil. The majority of the demonstrators were young, especially in Rio, where 41% were under the age of 25 and 80% were under the age of 39. Moreover, participants overall had high levels of education. In most cities, no less than 43% of demonstrators had a university degree. Research suggest that 30% of the demonstrators defined themselves as being from the center and adding those who classified themselves as center-left and center-right, the center constituted 70% of the demonstrators. The changes in the electoral system and expansion of public services linked to oil venues announced by Roussef after the protest communicated clearly that the government took seriously the demands of the protesters and felt accountable towards them. In spite of the damaging effect of the events in June 2013, Roussef was re-elected a year later. A investigation in the kickback schemes of Petrobras is triggering a new wave of protests against the president. 35 Petrobras top managers have resigned. In March 2015, half a million Brazilians took the street in anticorruption demonstrations. Because the scandal involved the entire political system, their anticorruption slogans are directed against the political system. How can the events of June 2013 be reassessed in the light of these contemporary developments? The recent proliferation of free-market slogans does show the isolation of the left. Besides, economy does matter. In time of economic prosperity, horizontal forces may turn popular anger into a progressive movement, as it happened in 2013. But in the times of economic downturn, cross-sectionalism may take right-wing turns.

180th Birthday of Thomas Hardy - Part II

                  This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291908399_Thomas_hardy_and_realism. The second was published https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgarticle=1117&context=eng_theses. The third was published at file:///C:/Users/Luciano/Downloads/2-5-22-396.pdf

               One distinguished 19th century novelist was bold enough to observe that "realism", though much championed by the most celebrated fiction writers of the century, was "an unfortunate, and an ambiguous word". It had been, he continued, "taken up by literary society like a view-halloo". Plotting Thomas Hardy's realism is to see with unusual clarity the availability of the term for alternative meanings at the end of the Victorian period. He makes its potential visible as he proposes across his life alternatives versions for where the "real" for the literary writer, might lie. The subject of Hardy and realism is not straightforward. And we have Hardy's own warning about this: he was the distinguished novelist. In the period that saw the establishment of the novel as the dominant literary form in British culture, the Victorians gave powerful consideration to the idea of fiction as representing the real. They were theorists about and practitioners of imaginative prose that described itself, in one way or another, as representing the textures and experiences of lived life. Realism is, at least at the headline level, the imaginative counter of romance. Unlike realism, romance does not have its feet on the ground. Realism claims itself as a language of the earth. Realism lives with history and politics; romance with myth and fantasy. Realism, as a literary practice is habitually a discourse of the agnostic because it concerns itself with things empirically knowable; romance readily makes way for the theological, because it admits into its textures the nonoempirical, the extraordinary, the possibilities of what might be beyond the globe.

               The industrial revolution and the agricultural revolution in the 18th century affected communities drastically. Hardy saw a direct relationship between historical processes and individual lives: both, like natural processes, were evolutionary; human character evolved as history evolved. The roles of education, morality and social mobility were also impacted during this time. Characters such as Tess and Jude were limited by their social position. They represent many characters in Hardy's novels struggling to survive in their ever-evolving world. Thomas Hardy wrote his novels in a time of great change and perhaps with great prupose. The literary critic Stanley Hyman writes, "hardy saw himself as time's surrogate not only in illuminating the past but in stimulating his readers to move into the future. His plots imitate the inoxorable movement of time, and his characters reveal varying degrees of ability to adapt to it. His novels not only express his view of the past and the present but attempt to restructure the responses of his readers in such a way as to accomodate them to the only future he believed possible. Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge demonstrates a successful moral evolution as he transcends egotism and return to natural morality. His daughter Elizabeth, is another example of successful evolution to natural morality. In Tess of the d'Urbevilles, Tess demonstrated both success and failure. Tess is at once the most natural and most human of Hardy's creations. Alec d'Urberville is a character who best represents the genteel, landed aristocracy who really places no value on morality. The great beauty of this and all literature I believe, is its timelessness. Although written in the 19th century, Hardy's Darwinian message is timeless. If one were to question whether Hardy was a successful character in light of this study, he would be successful. He not only evolved in his belief system, but used the novel to examine the new world and present his observation to society. He grew up in an age of change and was one of the first writers to discuss the ache of modernism.

              Thomas Hardy was glad about the improvement of science, he enjoyed the advance done in global co-operation and comprehension. Truth should be told, he was a genuine organizer and a humanist. This response against the traditional prudery and fake assembled force in the succeeding decades till finally it formed into an revolt and achieved the end of Vistorianism. Following Hardy's novels is a confounding knowledge. In his novels he has fictionalized the key existential clashes of man with the enigmatic universe and the social order. The contentions and strains that definitely go to the truth of human presence are the central of his inventive work. He is an explainer of man's suffering and infinite distance. Like Shakespeare, Hardy demonstrates a consciousness of the unfeeling mindlessness of the states of human life. Most of Hardy's great characters are archetypal. They are engaged into a dual struggle against the forces of the universe and the irrational elements in social traditions. His characters transcend time and place. They are essentially true to life. For him Modernism, in the turn of the 20th century, failed in the cultivation of the fundamental human virtues of concern and kindness for others. Two world wars bears witness to this truth. His greatness consists in bringing to light the wealth of a life of the common people. But Hardy wrote about them more effectively than any English novelist. Hardy's works have some influence upon and affinities with writers such as John Fowles, William Faulkner, Ibsen, Zola and Dreiser. All these writers base the details of their narratives on ordinary life. Their works present the helpless subordination of the individual to peripheral forces. Like Hardy, they too are sympathetic to the individual whose identity and individuality are recognized. When we speak of morality in hardy, we do not mean that hardy wrote his novels to convey any moral lesson. Meanings are not single, but multiple. They are historical and social constructs. Any approach to life that does not respect pluralism in all walks of life is against the very nature of man.

180th Birthday of Thomas Hardy

            Last Tuesday, the British writer Thomas Hardy would complete180 years-old, so this post is a tribute to him. He is one of the main realist writers and tried to expose the injustices and evil of the final of Victorian Era.   This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy. The second was published at  ngagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1868&context=etdarchive. The third was published at https://writersinspire.org/content/character-environment-thomas-hardys-fiction. The fourth was published at https://mantex.co.uk/thomas-hardy-greatest-works/

               Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot. He was critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining of rural people in Britain. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels such as The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).  Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex in Southwest England. Because Hardy's family lacked the means for an university education, his formal education ended at the age of sixteen, when he became apprenticed to a local architect. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London in 1862. In 1870, while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of St.Juliot in Cornwall, Hardy met and fell in love with Emma Gifford, whom he married in Kensington in 1874. Hardy was horrified by the destruction caused by First World War. He wrote to John Galsworthy that "the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world." Hardy became ill with pleurisy in 1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to his wife, the cause of death was cited as "cardiac syncope". 

                    Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) contains complex and detailed interrogations of many Victorians values and of the capitalist culture of his time. This novel is a condemnation of the social, ethical, moral, religious, and political values held by the majority of Hardy's elite contemporaries in England. Studying the history of the literary and critical reception of Tess of the d'Urbevilles reveals the breadth and depth of Hardy's cultural criticisms. In 1998 John Paul Riquelme published a detailed study of the past one hundred years of literary analysis and critical history of this novel. "Tess has been a significant stimulus to thinking about moral values". Riquelme gathers a vast amount of Marxist, materialist and feminist literary analysis of Tess from the 1950s to the 1990s. Peter Widdowson's "Hardy and Critical Theory" published in the 1999 also explores in detail the evolution of critical approaches to the analysis of Thomas' literature over the past century. "a intellectual closely familiar with the literary debates of the second half of the 19th century. We may deduce feature of Hardy's involvement in these: one which casts him as ineluctably transitional between Victorian and Modern. It is apparent that Hardy is actually participating in the pan-European debate about Realism, and that he was opposed to a "photographic" naturalism, favoring instead a kind of "analytic" writing which brings into vie other realities obscured precisely by the naturalized version." Within Tess Hardy criticizes Victorian England's moral standards for continuing to validate and legiyimize this specific type of abuse and all other forms of domination and gender inequality. He has his heroine defy the prevailing societal views about the value of women and female purity.  Hardy is careful to show us how Alec destroy his humanity in the process of victimizing Tess. As a member of the possessing class, Alec suffers from what Karl Marx calls "human self-alienation". Alec feels satisfied in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power. It prevents him from seeing the hypocrisy of his assertions. Only by simultaneously exploring all of Hardy's value judgments and social commentary within Tess can a reader understand the range of criticisms that Hardy raises about the late Victorian society in which he lived. The professor at the Yeshiva University in N.Y. Linda Shires wrote, "Tess of the d'Urbervilles is not only the richest novel that Hardy ever wrote, it is also the culmination of a long series of Victorian texts which identify and enact the alienated condition of modernity." The richness of the text is revealed by the fact that Hardy included complex critiques of a broad range of ideological conventions within Tess without the novel losing its passionate recounting of Tess's life. The time has come to shift from the tendency of micro focus to a holistic macro focus, so that we can recognize the trenchant social commentary in Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

                  The specific sense of place detailed in Hardy's fiction is very important as it provide a realistic, countrified backdrop against which his many characters live out their lives and struggle against their circumstances. Hardy's intense study and accurate portrayal of 19th century rural society in Dorset, presents a microcosm of human life through which Hardy intended to comment on the universal condition of human existence. Hardy classified his novels into three groups; the biggest section named 'Novels of Character and Environment' includes the Hardy's major novels such as: Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far From the Madding Crowd. This classification clearly show us the importance he placed upon the interaction between human life and immediate surroundings, and the role of environment in determining the lives of the characters that inhabit it.

                   Thomas Hardy is one of the few writers who made a significant contribution to English literature in the form of the novel, poetry, and short story. He creates unforgettable characters and orchestrates stories which pull at your heart strings. Jude the Obscure  is Hardy's last major statement before he gave up writing novels. Hero Jude is intellectually ambitious but held back by his work as stonemason and his dalliance with earthy Arabella. When he meets his spiritual soulmate Sue, everything seems set fair for success, except that she is capricious and sexually repressed. Jude struggles to do the right thing. This novel reveals the deep-seated social and sexual tensions in Hardy, himself a self-made man from a humble background.