03/30/2026
Next Monday at CLACS: The First Installment of the Spring Graduate Research Colloquium, featuring Marina Bedran (Johns Hopkins University)
📅 Date: Monday, April 6, 2026
⏱️ Time: 6:00 p.m.
📍 Location: Espacio de Culturas (53 Washington Square South)
📄 Registration: Please use the link found in our bio.
Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Brazil saw an escalation of developmentalism, with several attempts to develop Amazonia and bring economic investment into the region. During this period, many prominent intellectuals, artists, and writers embraced modernizing principles centered on urban and industrial imaginaries, often in ways that reproduced the government’s rhetoric of political and economic progress and development. This talk examines, through select case studies, the work of Brazilian and Brazil-based artists who turned to Amazonia at the height of developmentalism, crafting experimental aesthetics in response to the multifarious and often unfamiliar universe they encountered. It discussed developmentalism’s grounding in monoculture as both a material practice and a worldview: an ideology of progress, linearity, and teleology that devalues the universe of human and nonhuman multiplicities not always immediately apprehensible. In turn, it shows how formal experimentation articulated new ways of thinking about the nonhuman, Indigeneity, and development, helping shape public perceptions of Amazonia in the decades that followed.
