Coming up -- views on Rio+20 and the People's Forum

I'm thrilled to be in Rio de Janeiro this June, where I'll be gathering perspectives on the United Nations Conference on Sustainability and Development, or Rio+20, and the parallel People's Summit, which will bring together social movements and sectors of civil society engaged in environmental justice activism.  The focus of my stay is to document arts and cultural programming around the events, with the goal of further considering how Brazilian artists are engaging with environmental issues and presenting new perspectives on some of the overarching concepts at play, including  increasingly and urgently contested ideas of nature, conservation, development, sustainability, ecology, and environmental justice.  This research is part of an ongoing book project on the representation of nature and landscape in contemporary Brazilian poetry and visual arts.

I'll be regularly posting news, findings, and images here.  In the meantime, here are links for the multilingual websites for the two summits.  They are well worth exploring.

For the official UN Summit:
http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/index.html

And for the (from my perspective, more interesting) People's Summit:
http://cupuladospovos.org.br/en/

http://rio20.net/en/

Actualities and Potentialities of Barthe's Mythologies, II

This myth of the human "condition" relies on a very old mystification, which consists in always placing Nature at the bottom of History.  Any classical humanism postulates that if we scratch the surface of human history, the relativity of men's institutions, or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young black murdered by white men, what they think of the great family of men?), we soon reach the bedrock of universal human nature.  A progressive humanism , to the contrary must always consider inverting the terms of this old imposture, constantly scouring nature, its "laws" and its "limits," to discover History there and finally to posit Nature as itself historical.

Actualities and Potentialities from Barthe's Mythologies (New Translation by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers) I

The strike signifies that man is total, that all his functions are connected with one another, that the roles of man in the street, taxpayer, and soldier are much too fragile to oppose the contagion of facts, and that in society all are concerned by all.  By protesting that a strike is a disturbance to those it does not concern, the bourgeoisie testifies to a cohesion of social functions which it is the very goal of the strike to manifest: the paradox is that the petit bourgeois invokes the naturalness of his isolation at the very moment when the strike overwhelms him with the obviousness of his subordination.