Theme is fundamental to understanding the political and social moment in Brazil
The testimonial and decolonial turn of historical knowledge, a work recently published by Editora da Unicamp and written by Márcio Seligmann-Silva, addresses remembering, forgetting, testimony and decolonial theory. The author revisits several historical facts in order to highlight the importance of combating colonial thinking that is still present in our society.
Seligmann-Silva has a degree in history from the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC), a master's degree from the University of São Paulo (USP), a doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin and a postdoctoral degree from the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin and Yale University. He is currently a professor of literary theory at Unicamp and a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
We invited the author to talk about his book.
Editora da Unicamp: How does your training as a historian help you in the research you carry out in the field of literary studies?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: As a history student, I have always directed my studies towards the fields of aesthetics, art history and literature. My scientific initiation, back in 1985, the end of the dictatorship, dealt with the work of Antonio Callado as an inscription of the dictatorial period. I was greatly influenced by Professor Nicolau Sevcenko, who thought about modern history through reading literary and imagery works. Reading historians from the Annales School and theorists such as [György] Lukács, [Theodor] Adorno and Walter Benjamin also made me realize that disciplines, as they are divided in academia to this day, must be problematized and broken down. This academic structure is a legacy of the Enlightenment model associated with XNUMXth century Positivism, not to mention that it was part of a colonial project. On the other hand, I also learned, especially from Benjamin, that authentic critical humanist thought must always be steeped in history. Before anything else, we must start from our time-now, the Jetztzeit, which defines our spiritual, political and intellectual demands. There is no objectivity that is not anchored in the now-time and our place. My department is called “Literary Theory”, at UFRJ; the corresponding department is called, due to a Germanophile influence, “Science of Literature”. These models, which are at the origin of these departments, preached an idea of “theory” and “science” as the finished fruits of Enlightenment colonialism. The “theory” proposes a false spiritualization of the approach to literary production. It confines literature (a concept, in fact, only invented in the 18th century) in the ivory tower. Literature, in this way, is also restricted to the model emanating from Europe, with the other countries being secondary branches of this central vein, which would have its brilliant source, original and unreachable in Antiquity. It is worth remembering that, during the Modern era, modern writers themselves carried out a struggle for the recognition that the modern production of literature would be of equal value as the ancient one (the so-called “Quarrel between the ancients and the moderns”). Now we belatedly realize that the countries and regions that were considered appendages of Europe must also fight for their intellectual, aesthetic and political independence. In this struggle, called postcolonial thought, the location of thought is fundamental. Now-time and place are recognized as part of all knowledge. Eurocentric thought thought itself universal, but in fact it “universalized” to erase differences, in the same way that Humanism in Modernity has always been and is inhumane towards those crushed by the economic-symbolic system. Anyway, the theme of my book, The testimonial and decolonial turn of historical knowledge, can only be understood in light of this emphatic emphasis of historical thought.
Editora da Unicamp: In the introduction to the book, you state that attempts to face the dilemmas presented in the work are always partial. How important is it to propose a discussion that is not impartial?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: Precisely thinking about this new and consistent model of objectivity that I speak of here, we can no longer accept the idea of “neutral”, “universalizable” knowledge, which, ultimately, wants to be unique, monolingual. Jacques Derrida drew our attention to what he called the “colonial drive” of languages. He noticed that languages tend to dominate each other. Modernity can be seen as a long period of time that promoted the triumph of half a dozen languages from metropolitan countries and the death of thousands of other languages. This territory called Brazil also lost around a thousand languages in this process. Each language brings with it unique worldviews that disappear with its extinction. So, accepting that all knowledge is produced within this (mis)encounter of languages, cultures, classes, genders, ethnicities, etc. it is fundamental. We have to leave behind the so-called positivist objectivism. The positivist is always on the side of power and the powerful. He wants to assert a universalism that is actually a machine for erasing and annihilating differences. Authentic knowledge requires taking a stand in the face of the enormous challenges we face, both economic, political and cultural. When you want to destroy education, universities, freedom, democracy, the environment, massacre women, eliminate LGBTQIA+, black people and the poor, then more than ever we have to take sides. In short, preaching “neutral knowledge” only fits within a denialist discourse.
Unicamp Editor: What is the role of “politics of forgetfulness” in Brazil today, marked by denialist policies in history and science?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: Precisely, Brazil is a country particularly marked by this history of annihilation of marginalized groups and bodies and their memories, their epistemologies and their dreams. The policies of oblivion are part of necropolitics. I treat, in the book, how every genocide wants us to forget their crimes. You want to normalize them or hide them, or you want both at the same time, which also leads us to insanity. The more violent a country, that is, its elites, the more these policies of forgetfulness emerge. Our cities and roads that commemorate, in street names and monuments, dictators, bandeirantes, corrupt and bloodthirsty generals only give a face to this gigantic device of forgetfulness that is mobilized in all modern societies, but here in a more radical way. If it were not for this machine for producing oblivion and glamorizing the catastrophe, it would not have been possible to elect a complete representative of this (neo)colonial violence, as occurred in Brazil in 2018. The degree of denialism is also directly linked to the despotic tendency of those in power. . Ultimately, figures like [Adolf] Hitler create “Ministries of truth” to impose their lies. The despot, in his desire for absolute power, wants to abolish all truth that does not correspond to his interests. He sees facticity as a challenge to his desired omnipotence and attacks it with all the weapons at his disposal. In Brazil, our task is to rewrite history against the grain (remembering another of Benjamin's mottos), that is, we have to raise the platform for millions of bodies and mouths and conquer a political space to receive and hear these stories that have been silenced under the weight of elite discourse. This is what the testimonial turn of knowledge means: other bodies and epistemologies, other experiences and emotions enter and recompose the political-cultural field, challenging the colonial monolingualism of the elites, fracturing the so-called Western episteme. This is also what the social movements of women, black people, LGBTQIA+, solidarity workers and participants in worker and peasant struggles, among many other new agents of mnemonic and historical inscription, are trying to do. These struggles have always existed on a greater or lesser scale, but now, with the new fascist wave, it has become clearer than ever that this critical and plural rewriting of history, full of testimony, is fundamental, because a society drowned in denialism, in the thought single and monolingual language is condemned to produce and reproduce genocide. As the poet [Heinrich] Heine said, where books are burned, people are soon burned.
Editora da Unicamp: What is meant by “memory practices” and how can your book help in deconstructing the colonial logic that tends to reproduce violence and inequalities today?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: Fortunately, this decolonial wave has only grown in recent years. Events such as the murder of George Floyd, which took place in Indiana [USA] in 2020, and the resulting international wave of protests and the tearing down of colonialist monuments are indicators of this process that I describe here. In my book, I seek to think critically about our habits of treating cultural phenomena that still largely tend to reaffirm colonial thinking and logic. Areas such as the so-called “fine letters”, as well as the “fine arts”, are permeated to the core with Eurocentric colonial thought. The aesthetics that govern academic analyzes are an essential fruit of the colonial device. Hence I speak of an aesthetic-colonial device, since through the arts and literature both the idea of a “people” (and their “enemies”) and a “nation” are forged, just as it is constructed, in the stories literary and art, the illusion of linearities, descendants and ascendencies. The very habit of thinking about literary and art histories from a purely national point of view shows a persistence that seems harmful to me. As Benedict Anderson drew our attention in his essay on nations as “imagined communities”, to produce a nation, first of all, it is necessary to produce a lot of forgetting. Then, a distant and heroic past is created to be worshiped and serve as a pedestal for the elites of the present. Authors such as WEB Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Lélia Gonzalez, Grada Kilomba, Abdias Nascimento, among many other essential thinkers, teach us to think beyond the idea of linear nation building. Paul Gilroy helped create and disseminate the powerful metaphor of a “black Atlantic”. Thinking about the stories of diasporas, violence, but also struggles, utopias, victories and defeats of groups not necessarily thought of as a “people” linked to a nation, is a powerful gesture that allows us to open our stories, our self-images, to beyond the confinement of the nation. And it is from these stories and these new, empowered self-images that our political struggles, as well as our research, are structured.
Unicamp Editor: How do you observe this “testimonial turn in historical knowledge” and how can this new sensitivity act in the construction of new narratives?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: The testimonial turn of historical knowledge is precisely the result of this process in which the struggle for the emancipation of other voices and perspectives is bearing fruit, perhaps late, but with enormous potential. Testimony explodes the colonial frames of memory. He promotes new epistemologies, no longer focused on monolingualism, but rather on coexistence with differences. As the populations trampled on by the capitalist machine are also those who are victims of racism and, more specifically, environmental racism, with the emancipation of their bodies and narratives, we begin to rethink our habits of environmental destruction and our dusty conception of progress. From the indiscriminate practice of destruction and reduction of Gaia and bodies to commodities, for an ethics of care for Gaia and inter-human relationships and with non-humans. We see how traditional political parties are also being shaken by these agents and their speeches. The various academic disciplines are also being permeated by economic, ethnic and religious groups that were previously barred from entering academia. I have noticed how these students who entered thanks to the achievement of quotas are quickly changing the so-called human sciences. I believe that this change can bring, and in fact is already bringing, new fruits in politics and in our lives in general. Finally, I also remember that the testimonial turn of historical knowledge has shaken our ways of archiving the past. The production of video testimonies, performances, a revaluation of orality, accompanied by a critique of the unilateral valorization of written documents, are also part of this turn. Museums around the world are beginning to be rethought. New debates and legal disputes arise because groups demand the return of cultural objects that had been stolen, within the logic of spoliation and appropriation carried out by the colonial machine.
Editora da Unicamp: In the era of “posts” and “blogs”, replaced almost instantly by new publications, can we speak of the end of “tradition”, at least in the way it was constructed and valued in the recent past? And how to think about the future in the face of apparent “forgetfulness” in the modern era?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: There is a complicity between the mind-boggling flow of new media and denialism. But it does not need to be, necessarily, this way. A website it must be occupied, as the new public space that it is. The modern democratic field was established based on the Enlightenment doctrines of the 18th century based on a notion of public space that should (in theory) be organized democratically. The same must happen with the virtual space of the website. In it we have the impression that everything can be stored, but also that everything can sink. I discuss this in my book dealing with the history of memory and the metaphor of mnemonic inscription. On the other hand, the tradition, as it was thought until the mid-19th century, had already been shaken, according to Benjamin, by the invention of analogue photography. This medium created a way of inscribing/producing the real independently of the material bases of this inscription. The paradox is that, by turning the “document” into something immaterial and potentially reproducible ad infinitum, we lost the notion of uniqueness and the materiality that supported the notion of tradition. The digital turn only deepened what was already happening with photography. But even so, we continue to build our new archives and anarchies, as testimony precisely anarchizes with the archontic archives (those under the responsibility of the Archons), the archives of and for power, without which States and bureaucracies do not exist. If the current government continues to decree a hundred years of oblivion regarding the files of its destruction, the testimonial counter-memories allow and will allow the inscription of this history of violence, despite all the ephemerality of digital files. On the other hand, it is important to highlight that the virtual space, especially from social networks, has a tendency to favor simple and direct slogans (which are easily assimilated, memorized and reproduced), which have been manipulated with great competence by the right. . There is a structure in website which has facilitated thinking based on jargon, but this also has to be attacked by the progressive camp.
Unicamp Editor: Your book talks about “testimonies”. How can we talk about them in a society alien to the construction of memories?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: I don't think our society is oblivious to the construction of memories. In fact, there is a war of memories in every society. In Brazilian society, that is, in a country with one of the worst distributions of wealth in the world, marked by centuries of enslavement and the repression of its wounds, in this largely neocolonial country, with an elite that has always been hand in hand with international elites , we have the impression that memory has no place, other than the official one, propagandized by those in power. But the testimonies with his other memories, with his critical counter-archiving work, are there. Society needs to open up to them, as there are no testimonies without ears to listen to them, without other people to receive and convey them. In English, we say “to bear witness”, something like “bear the testimony”. We need to receive and bear these testimonies if we want to finally leave the colonial era.
Unicamp Editor: You mention two rivers that made up the landscape of the mythical geography of ancient Greece: Lethe, the river of oblivion, and Mnemosyne, the river of remembrance. Can it be said that memory and forgetting go together? How does this happen?
Márcio Seligmann-Silva: Without a doubt, there is no simple opposition, forgetting x remembering. For example, as I remember with Saint Augustine, we remember that we have forgotten something. The forgotten lives in our memory! On the other hand, as I said above, to build grand narratives associated with the idea of a single and linear progress, “zillions” of other narratives are erased that cannot be reduced to this Euro and technocentric narrative. A memory of the elites is built at the cost of forgetting/erasing/repressing others. Hence, testimony emerges as a set of mnemonic “traces” that allow us to establish writings against oblivion. The concept of trauma, which I also study extensively in my book and other articles, has brought an enormous complexity to this memory-forgetting pair. After all, for [Sigmund] Freud, traumatized people suffer from “too much memory”. For Freud, there are also scenes that are repressed and constitute group traumas that can remain for a long time, as in the traumatic memory-forgetfulness of individuals, in a state of latency and after decades of being reactivated. Now, the term “latency” comes from Lethe, just like the “delete” key on our computers: deleting means throwing it into the river Lethe. And we know that often what we delete on one occasion we end up recovering for other texts. Ultimately, it is not possible to make a simple dichotomy between these two rivers that cross us, as much as we cross them throughout our lives.
