Dr. Antonio La Pastina (Texas A&M University) will present a lecture “Remembering Brazil: Television Consumption, Autoethnography, and the Emotional Cost of an Authoritarian Regime.” Abstract:
"For the first 22 years of my life, I lived in Brazil. In this essay, I engage in a series of theoretical and methodological maneuvers to retrace the life of a young person—working class, the son of immigrants, queer, and privileged in his whiteness. While relying on autoethnography, I also draw upon my ethnographic instincts, which existed long before my formal academic training. I turn to notes, diaries, a personal archive, and a repertoire of memories and sensations, to understand how memory frames the experience of growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, during the US-sponsored military dictatorship. Yet, I have a larger goal as well. I want to answer the very questions I have asked dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times of my own informants and collaborators: questions about their media consumption, with a focus on television. In much of my ethnographic research, both in Brazil and elsewhere, my primary concern has been to understand the processes through which we engage with media, how that engagement becomes part of who we are, and how it shapes our responses to the world around us. Using poetic license, vignettes, and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic writing practices, I will convey the ways in which media, framed and shaped by U.S. imperialism, Brazilian authoritarianism, and a rising media network, shaped my worldview. Ultimately, I reflect on how decolonizing oneself (if that is the right term) becomes both an act of resistance and an act of affirmation: a means of remaining bound to a nation one loves, while acknowledging the profound cost of that relationship."
