The Miami Consortium’s Foreign Languages across the Curriculum Lecture Series presents: "Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil"

A talk by Dr. Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine 

In the late nineteenth century, the fledgling Brazilian republic staged several campaigns against the Canudos settlement in northeastern Brazil. The settlement’s residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression and opposed the new republic. Due to their resistance toward the new government, they suffered a death toll ranging from fifteen to thirty thousand.

In this talk, Professor Johnson will discuss her recent book, Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil, which offers an original perspective on the official discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of “other” voices through the re-envisioning of history and seeks to tell the unofficial story of Canudos.