In the 2024-25 academic year, Professor Karl Erik Schøllhammer has been nominated to the Rio Branco Chair. Professor Schøllhammer is professor at the Pontifície Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in the Department of Language and Literature. The following is an edited version of his presentation during the launch ceremony.
Thanks to the honourable Rio Branco Chair, I bring a project to King’s this year that is part of a much larger and ambitious interdisciplinary approach to civic self-recognition of urban, social, and cultural issues in Rocinha, an important neighbourhood in the valley of Gávea in Rio de Janeiro. Under the institutional umbrella of UNIR – The Centre of Research and Knowledge Articulation Rocinha PUC-Rio, a collaboration that embraces 15 departments from my home university and 9 social organisations from Rocinha, my project wears the title: 'Citizenship and spatial identity in challenged urban communities - memory, imagination, and cultural work in contemporary Brazil'.
The research objective is to investigate the cultural work of literary and, in a broad sense, artistic production in and about the community. It proposes to study how literary, artistic, and cultural products and events become part of the historical constitution of a territorial and political identity. Through the application of a geo-referential information system (GIS) in the research of literary and artistic representations and expressions, the project has the ambition to convert aesthetic and literary analyses into an interactive tool in a collaboration between academia and socially challenged populations.
But what is the importance of literary and aesthetic expressions and representations of space and territory in challenged urban communities?
Through the interpretation of spatial representations in literature, the goal is to reach an understanding of how “place” occurs in the interaction of a moving body and a geographical and urban landscape. Literary representations can be significant expressions of the meaning production, the making sense of historical recognition, and the stability of space. They can talk about belonging, territorial identification, movement, freedom, and bodily expansion, but also about violence, and restricted mobility, all notions that gather a political dimension when focused upon in the context of urban marginality.
In the book O espaço do cidadão, written by the Bahian geographer Milton Santos in 1987, we read: "It is impossible to imagine a concrete citizenship without a territorial component. We have already seen that the value of the individual depends on the place in which he or she is located and that, therefore, the equality of citizens presupposes, for all, similar accessibility to goods and services, without which life will not be lived with that minimum of dignity that is required. (…) In a territory where the localization of essential services is left to the mercy of the law of the market, everything contributes to increasing social inequalities. This is the current Brazilian case". (Santos, 1987:195-96)
On the eve of the new constituent assembly, Santos warned of the spatial and territorial challenges to citizenship in Brazil. In his view, the two essential components of the civic model are culture and territory, which in a way are synonymous. Space is imposed to the extent that the population experiences, through space, the fact of scarcity. "The citizen is the individual in a place. The Republic will only be truly democratic when it regards all citizens as equal, regardless of where they are." (Santos, 1987: 203)
My project is in a certain way an homage to the legacy of Milton Santos and at the same time a deep mapping of the possibilities to work with literature and artistic and cultural representation in the context of knowledge sharing in challenged communities across the disciplinary boundaries of social and political sciences, urban anthropology, and the humanities.