Brazilliance!
Professor Dário Borim likes to think that he wears many hats. He has directed a play by Dias Gomes, interpreted Amazonian characters in video games, and served as official interpreter at international volleyball competitions. But his greatest passions are literature and music. It was not by chance that the first literature course he ever taught, in 1993 at the University of Minnesota, was on Brazilian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso and the literature of his time. He also intersects these artistic forms in his lectures and publications, academic and nonacademic alike, but their convergence shines its brightest brilliance in Borim's studio, where he produces, hosts and broadcasts Brazilliance, a weekly three-hour Internet-radio show on WUMD, the UMass Dartmouth station. For fourteen years now, Brazilliance has featured a variety of music from the Lusophone world, from Angola to Brazil, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Portugal, and beyond.
Brazilliance
has many facets, and its special editions bring into the WUMD studios a wide variety of guests. A journalist from Guinea-Bissau once talked about the importance of community radio in his country, a Portuguese-American anthropologist (and brass-band leader) discussed the fascinating music scene in multiethnic Lisbon, and a Cape-Verdean American narrated her path of self-discovery and exploration of the roots of her parents' culture through music. Since 2001, many of Borim's students have also come on air to share their favorite music and related stories, and the program has hosted local high school students who have joined Borim to learn about radio broadcasting and Lusophone music. Many musicians have performed live on Brazilliance over the years, including flute, guitar and mandolin players.
Some special editions of Brazilliance have focused on a particular topic, such as the celebration of Women's History Month in 2008, which highlighted music written by Brazilian female composers from early twentieth century to the present. The show has also provided a soundtrack and alternative medium to some of Borim's graduate courses at UMass Dartmouth. A mix of lecturing and music playback, the show Music, Facts and Fictions of Brazil: 1850-1930 was integrated in a seminar he taught in Spring 2007. The full six-hour-long recording is now available at some university libraries in the United States and the United Kingdom. Brazilliance runs every Thursday, 3:00-6:00PM, on 89.3 FM and online at WUMD.
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Catching Up with Gisany Monteiro
Gisany Monteiro graduated from UMass Dartmouth with a double major in Portuguese and Spanish in 2013. Two years later, she reflects on her experience, university career, and life since graduation:
"I am 31 years old. I was born in Cape Verde Islands and came to the United States when I was 15. I struggled to adapt to the new language and culture, but eventually became the first in my family to graduate from college. It wasn't an easy path. When I started at UMass Dartmouth, my son was two years old, and as a senior I was getting a divorce and struggling to pay my mortgage, but in the end I was able to pull it off, graduating with honors.
Being a Portuguese/Spanish major at UMass Dartmouth was amazing. I took so much, not only from my classes but also from my teachers, classmates and staff. I made a lot of friends, got plenty of support, and never felt like I didn't belong. I started to love reading; my passion for books developed at UMass Dartmouth. And many doors opened for me professionally. In 2013, I interned as a translator and interpreter from Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole with Schuyler Pisha, an immigration law specialist at Catholic Social Services in Fall River. This experience touched me deeply and made me realize how much I wanted to work for my community, to help and make a difference in the life of as many people as I could. Schuyler and I remain good friends, and I still work with him as a volunteer, as well as seek his advice and refer clients to him regularly.
My first full-time job after graduation was also as an interpreter, but after a year and a half I decided it was time to look for other employment in the area I've always wanted to build a career in, which is social service. After about two months and a few job offers, I've ended up working as a family support specialist for the United Way, doing case management. Life hasn't been easy, but it sure is a lot better now than at times in the past. I have my job, I live in one of the best neighborhoods in my city, my son goes to a great school, and I couldn't have asked for more."
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Focus on Angola: Remembrance and Reconstruction
In early October, two guest speakers hosted by the PhD program in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory shone a combined spotlight on Angola, in conjunction with Professor Anna M. Klobucka's graduate seminar on "Foundation and Reconstruction in Lusophone African Narrative."
Lara Pawson, former
BBC correspondent in Angola, discussed her recent book In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre (2014), which deals with the remembrance of the events of 27 May 1977, when a former government minister, Nito Alves, led a protest, or a revolt, against the MPLA government. Unknown numbers of people were killed in subsequent reprisals. Through her accounts of conversations with witnesses, perpetrators, victims of brutality, and bereaved survivors, Pawson's book illustrates the impact of the events of 1977 on the social and political culture of contemporary Angola and challenges what the author describes as a "crisis of historiography" that has to do with the way in which history has been defined by the stories of powerful male individuals and of organized politics. In her talk, she reflected in particular on the obstacles faced by a left-wing writer in confronting the failings of revolutionary movements, and the shortcomings of politically committed historians and journalists who have uncritically accepted the preferred narratives of only one organization or faction and dismissed the validity of alternative readings.
Phillip Rothwell, King John II Professor of Portuguese in the Facu
lt
y of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford, who introduced and led the discussion
after Pawson's talk, returned the following day for a lecture of his own, "The Confessional's Legacy in Postmodern Angola -- A Reading of Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano." Filled with pastiche and citation, Jaime Bunda e a Morte do Americano (2003) is one of celebrated Angolan author Pepetela's most postmodern novels. It is also one of the novels with which Pepetela claims to be least satisfied, finding it too contrived, although he also affirms it marked for him an attempt to regain the joy
of writing and freedom. Published a year after the end of Angola's civil war and touching on the global effects of President George W. Bush's war on terror, the novel offers an unusual take on forgiveness -- not as a means of postconflict national reconciliation but as a way to establish a pragmatic ethics for the future amidst the rampant corruption of the MPLA's monopoly on power.
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