Brazil

Kicking, Stripping, and Re-Dressing a Saint in Black: Visions of Public Space in Brazil’s Recent Holy War

This article deals with a particular case of blasphemy that happened in 1995 when a Protestant televangelist insulted one of the most reverend religious symbols of Brazil — Nossa Senhora Aparecid. This was shown on TV as the televangelist’s protest against the presence of Catholicism in the public sphere of Brazil. The author uses this case in order to consider the cult of saints as a symbolic site where issues of nation, history, ideology, public space, and so on, come together.

The Modernity of ‘New Societies’: Trajectories of Post-Enlightenment non-European Modernities

Focusing on South Africa and Brazil, this contribution reflects on the modernity of those societies that emerged from colonial encounters, thus are shaped by European post-Enlightenment thought, but gain auto-interpretative and institutional shape in the response to the specificities of the respective colonial and post-colonial situation.