Abstracts - "Media and Ideological Disputes"
Paula Martinez Almudevar, Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales - Universidad Nacional de San Martín
“The festivals of art and democracy.” Artistic-political connections in the radio's world of Buenos Aires during the Second World War
This work has the purpose of analyzing the circulation of artists –mainly from Buenos Aires radio stations– through various pro-Allied and anti-fascist festivals that took place between 1941 and 1945 in the city of Buenos Aires, investigating the transformations in their work experiences and the expansion of their political sociability.
Although the historiography that analyzed the political actions of different artists in that period has focused, above all, on the artists who were part of the cultural world of the left, some recently published research has made a contribution by evidencing how transformed the work experiences and political expressions of the artists who worked in mass culture – specifically in the stations of the city of Buenos Aires – with the arrival of European artists who, escaping the political conflicts in their countries, they found work on the city's radio stations. It was all of them who promoted artistic initiatives of solidarity with the “peoples attacked by Nazi-fascism” between 1939 and 1941. However, between 1941 and 1945, the participation of artists such as Libertad Lamarque, Fernando Ochoa, Carlos Taquini, and Berta Singerman were repeated. , in artistic festivals promoted and organized by the Communist Party. All of them were not only key in the organizational processes of the different unions of radio workers that began in 1939, they also had extensive artistic careers limited to mass culture entertainment and had toured the United States, various countries in Latin America and Europe.
In this sense, the communist newspaper La Hora and the entertainment magazines Antena and Radiolandia will be addressed with the intention of analyzing the participation of radio artists in festivals linked to anti-fascism, taking into account the place that these events occupied for the promotion of connections and circulations between artists from other countries. Likewise, it is proposed to investigate the configuration of a particular form of political expression of these subjects based on their experiences as workers, their exchanges and encounters with artists from other latitudes and their participation in festivals linked to anti-fascism. Finally, it is proposed to recover, from the own words of the subjects studied, the ways in which they described their positions regarding the European war conflict, the labor problems that it had raised both in the Buenos Aires radio stations and in those of other countries, and how that specific political and work experience translated into a particular way of understanding the course of local politics.
In other words, this work is interested in addressing the connections between the specificity of the artistic work experience in Buenos Aires radio stations during the context of the Second World War and the impact of this on the configuration of a broader political sociability among the and radio artists from different latitudes that respond to the dynamics of the work experience of these artists in mass culture.
Ana Mauad (Universidade Federal Fluminense)
Images at war: photography and politics in Brazil during the Second World War.
In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, Brazil was ruled by Getulio Vargas under the “Estado Novo” (New State), whose non-
alignment foreign policy put images at war. The ideological conflict between democracy and fascism was expressed in photographs that also
captured the social and cultural transformations, profiling divergent visions about what Brazil should be in the Western hemisphere scenario. This
presentation analyzes two sides of this image war: on the one hand was the ordered, white, male country depicted in the photographs from the
Ministry of Education and Health (MES), produced by German refugee photographers hired by the government to create the monumental
propaganda album called Obra Getuliana (Getulian Work); on the other side was the busy, mystic and cheerfully messy country photographed by
USpress photographers, such as Life magazine correspondents, and a few others hired by the US State Department, among whom was Genevieve
Naylor. Assigned by the Office of Inter-American Affairs, her mission was to picture Brazil as a good neighbor and to persuade the American
audience that Brazilians’ daily life looked more akin to the liberal “American way of life” than to fascism’s rigid discipline. What was at stake in the war of images was the country project that would be defined in the post-war period.
Helton Costa, Grupo de pesquisa em História da Casa do Expedicionário – GPHCEx
The good news about Brazil: foreign war correspondents with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force – FEB (1944-1945)
This work aims to present the profile of the English correspondent Francis Hallawell and the american journalists Frank Norall, Henry Bagley and Allan Fisher, who covered Brazil's participation in the Second World War, on the northern Italian front, between 1944 and 1945, as correspondents fixed. It is based on the hypothesis that both the british and the americans sent their best reporters, with knowledge of the brazilian language and culture, within a good neighborly policy, as a way of strengthening political-military relations between nations, as a means of rapprochement with the brazilian public and as a means of controlling information about South America's largest ally. For the investigation, primary and secondary sources were used, arranged in bibliographies and official documents, in addition to biographical data arranged on genealogy platforms.
Francis was a correspondent sent by the British Broadcasting Corporation – BBC, he was brazilian by birth, but had british citizenship by ancestry. He was affectionately nicknamed by soldiers and colleagues as Chico da BBC. Frank and Allan were accredited with the Coordination of Inter-American Affairs, had visited Brazil due to professional commitments and were called precisely because of the experience they had accumulated during their stay on national soil. In turn, Henry was from the Associated Press and since he was young he had been an outstanding student on the Journalism course he had attended. He had lived in Rio de Janeiro and served as editor-in-chief of the Associated Press in the late 1930s.
They all mastered the portuguese language, knew a lot about the culture of the regions of Brazil, and when Brazil declared war on Italy and Germany, they were remembered by the media bodies of which they were part, as important pieces within the political board that the entry of the largest country of South America represented. With the exception of Frank Norall, who when the Brazilian Expeditionary Force – FEB arrived on the italian front was already in that territory, covering the 34th North American Infantry Division, all the others were detached or relocated from the functions they performed, to provide on-site coverage. of the actions of the “pracinhas”.
As for the relationship with the Brazilian correspondents, everyone got along well, and especially Allan Fisher and Henry Bagley became very close to Joel Silveira and Rubem Braga.
The writing of this work also presents the development of the post-war period for the correspondents, until their death, therefore covering the complete trajectory of each of them. It is said that the americans remained journalists, while Francis Hallawell chose to abandon his career and become a commercial representative.