Living Quixote: Performative Activism in Contemporary Brazil and the Americas by Rogelio Miñana

Author:Rogelio Miñana [Miñana, Rogelio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826522689
Google: Q9FWyQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 49660243
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2020-01-15T10:44:10+00:00

FIGURE 5.1. Handwritten signs in public protest in Porto Alegre, Brazil (June 18, 2013). Photograph by Isaias Ramos

Enhanced by the savvy use of social media, the success of the Brazilian Autumn rested on the discursive strategies by which people (the human “social network”) rescripted the mainstream version of the contemporary Brazilian story articulated by politicians and business conglomerates such as Johnnie Walker or FIAT. In only a matter of days, the #BRevolução would awake its own alternative version of the Brazilian giant, one who not only walks, but now also talks, and rather loudly. Conquering the streets of the entire nation, this vociferous titan, in contrast to Johnnie Walker’s silent colossus, channeled myriad individualized messages publicly performed (written, chanted, enacted, posted, and shared) by ordinary citizens.

Through the tens of thousands of handwritten signs and placards in hundreds of marches across the country, another story (the stories of many Others) began to emerge. Together, signs and the physical act of protest wove a narrative that proved deeply political and utterly performative. With the message quite literally embodied in the marching demonstrators who wrote and chanted their demands, signs acted as linguistic, bodily extensions of people’s outrage and hope.10 Intertwined in a symbiotic relationship, the stories told through signs and banners cannot be separated from the person or people who wrote, waived, and chanted them. In this consequential synthesis of discourse and action, of performative transformation and social change, I identify the same brand of activism that I later examine as the main feature of Quixote-inspired Brazilian organizations.

In lieu of the silent giant digitally created by an advertising agency for a multinational liquor company, the titanic Brazilian body that for a few days towered over government and economic elites consisted of millions of anonymous citizens engaged hands-on in the mass rescripting of the national narrative. While Quixote-inspired activism leans on a literary giant to guide their subversive act of rewriting, the Brazilian Autumn instead appropriated the two videos that had arguably best captured the nation’s newfound role as a world titan in the collective imaginary: Johnnie Walker’s awakening “gigante” and FIAT’s “Vem pra rua.” By repurposing these two commercials, ordinary people drew from decades-long oppositional tactics that take full advantage of the ubiquity of advertising in conjunction with the potential of the Internet for mass mobilization.11

In recent years, wide access to digital remixing technology via inexpensive or free editing software and applications rendered the popular Johnnie Walker and FIAT advertisements, albeit unintentionally, into ideal targets for the subversive imagination of a network of anonymous citizens. As Henrique Mazetti pointed out already in 2008, artistic and activist collectives in Brazil have incorporated into their arsenal “sabotagens midiáticas e guerrilha semiótica, em paródias ou adulterações da publicidade comercial” (media sabotage and semiotics guerrilla warfare, via parodies or edited versions of commercials; 108). With experience accumulated over at least a decade, by 2013 activists were well versed in sabotagens of commercials disseminated through social media. During the protests, and according to Brandviewer (a company that

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