Setting history in motion: social movements and popular art in urban Brazil, 1970s–1990s

Journal article

This article examines the video essay in this issue, “Visualizing Resilience from the Periphery: Social Movements, Visual Archives, and the Megacity,” and the video essay as a form of historical argumentation. First, the article traces how the video essay reconstructs a visual lexicon that fostered resilience among social movements from the urban peripheries of South America’s most populous city, São Paulo, during Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship (1964–85) and the democratic transition that followed. Popular artists illustrated movement paraphernalia with hand-drawn images of diverse subjects, including urban landscapes, public life, neighborhood organizing, and open protest. The video essay assembles these dispersed illustrations as well as soundscapes and clips from films into distinct phases of a metanarrative connecting the rise of the megacity to collective social action. It subsequently disassembles those focal points to underscore the open-ended and iterative nature of visual argumentation. The article then underscores how the video essay as a form of peer-reviewable argumentation allows historians to creatively engage with a large corpus of visual imagery. It concludes by discussing issues inherent to the form, such as the difference between written and visual argumentation, citation practices, integration of text, translation of foreign languages, and the preservation of digital scholarship, among others.

Authors: McDonald, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: American Historical Review
• Volume: 129
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 1703-1731
• Publication date: 2024-12-05
• DOI: 10.1093/ahr/rhae469
• EISSN: 1937-5239
• ISSN: 0002-8762
• Language: English
• Keywords: urban history; social movements; Latin America; digital humanities; popular art