Global Periphery: Aesthetic and Cultural Margins in Brazilian Audiovisual Forms

Abstract

The closer we survey the contemporary scene, the more difficult it becomes to analyze questions related to violence, audiovisual languages, and social thought. How should we interpret images of violence today? Images of poverty and violence have never circulated more vastly, including those of “the excluded,” of “deviant” or “abhorrent” behavior. To decry violence and crimes has turned into yet another journalistic genre—which might be interesting if those images weren’t frequently decontextualized or pressed into the service of discourses of control and repression. Violence thus appears as “spontaneous” and unrelated to the economy or to social injustice, and treated in a spectacular fashion, as sensational event, TV soap, or reality show, which can be consumed with extreme delight.