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Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2694571

1527-1900

Colin M. Snider,

Brazilian cultural history and politics

In the past few years, a new wave of scholarship on Brazil's military dictatorship has emerged. Moving beyond the political and economic narratives that dominated much of the English and Portuguese publications in the years immediately after the regime, this new research has proceeded to questions of social relations, cultural production, and transnational comparisons. Victoria Langland's Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil is among the best work yet to emerge from these new approaches to Brazil's ditadura. In examining student activism, memory production, gender, and Brazil in the transnational setting, Langland provides a groundbreaking and original work, one of the strongest books on Brazil's military dictatorship era yet.While 1968 is the fulcrum of Langland's analysis, her scope is much deeper and richer. After an introduction in which she uses Geraldo Vandré's popular 1968 protest song (from which she takes her title) to explore the “ethos of 1968” (p. 2), Langland steps back to examine student activism from the early 1800s to the 1950s. This approach obliterates the image of a timeless radical student, itself an image of the 1960s. Instead, Langland illustrates how students were historically active and politically flexible in national politics long before military rule. Langland's second chapter focuses on the period between the late 1950s and 1967, when the rise of the Lefts (Langland is justifiably deliberate in her pluralization) among students occurred in response to both national and transnational events. Consequently, politicians and others sought to limit student activism. The 1964 military coup and subsequent dictatorship further intensified these efforts to reduce what had been students' historically important role in national politics. Chapter 3 focuses solely on the events of 1968, simultaneously placing them alongside the international events of 1968 while also tracing the ways in which a “dialectics of repression” led to intensified struggles that would retrospectively gain greater meaning for students (p. 109). The final two chapters then look at how both the students and the military implicitly and explicitly memorialized 1968. Langland demonstrates that the military's efforts to prevent “another 1968” inadvertently acknowledged the importance of the year long before students vested it with iconic meaning (p. 173). Only in the 1970s, as the long-term effects of military repression became clear, did students begin to tie their own efforts to mobilize into the broader collective memory of student activism in the retrospectively monumental year of 1968.Speaking of Flowers is one of the most impressive contributions yet to our understanding of student movements and military rule in Brazil. Langland's emphasis on the heterogeneity of students themselves and of the Lefts (armed and unarmed) in military Brazil provides much-needed nuance to a group that scholarship all too often treats homogeneously. Her concern with students not just as agents but as subjects leads her to a genealogical approach that contextualizes the long history of Brazilian student politics, revealing how Brazilian students were privileged political and social actors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also addresses a major gap in scholarship on Brazil's dictatorship not only by exploring gender through women's presence in student politics but also by investigating questions of sexuality along with social mores, media portrayals of students, and the paternalistic attitudes of both student and military leaders. Perhaps of most interest to scholars of military regimes and memory struggles, Langland convincingly demonstrates how issues of collective memory are not limited to postdictatorship contexts; rather, memory was at the core of both the students' actions during military rule and, perhaps unintentionally, in the military's own post-1968 crackdown. Finally, in addition to a wide array of rich oral sources, her archival research is particularly impressive, given the difficulty of finding and working with many of the secret police files that appear throughout her work.With her focus on the União Nacional dos Estudantes and the clandestine Lefts, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo understandably dominate her narrative. However, student politics throughout the country could and did take a variety of forms, embracing local and regional as well as national issues. Thorough as Langland's work on student unions and mobilization is, there is still much room for future studies on alternate forms of student activism. Such studies could explore student politics and culture at the regional level or in terms of right-wing students, who themselves were politically active during the military regime but who fall outside the scope of Langland's subject matter.However, this is not to detract from an outstanding and innovative work on Brazil's dictatorship era. The contributions of Speaking of Flowers are not limited to Brazilian studies alone. Langland has provided a fascinating, enlightening, and pioneering book for those who work on the history of student activism, the global 1960s, military regimes, gender, or memory. Indeed, Langland's book is a useful tool not only for specialists but also in both undergraduate and graduate courses, and it merits the highest recommendation for scholars and students alike interested in what is an increasingly strong and diverse field of dictatorship studies in Latin America.