CHAMADA VAZANTES 2021 (v5n1)
Cariri refers to a “comarca” -a kind of big district-, territorial/ aesthetic/ cultural/ geopolitical ensemble which maps associate with four different Brazilian States: Ceará, Paraíba, Piauí, and Pernambuco. Cariri has been woven and crossed by different narratives that sometimes conceive of it as difference, sometimes dispute its legitimacy producing splits, hierarchies, forms of life, arts, distinctions, and ties. Continuous shifts in the meaning of this chronotrope show the complexity of the disputes over their sayability and their erasures. Invented and reinvented in the light of the idea of tradition, Cariri comes as a decentralized signifier that connotes countless transits, pilgrimages, religions, ethnicities, geological sites, underground water sources, and other material and immaterial heritage, composing affects, disputes, socio-cultural and artistic tensions with economic, philosophical, ethnic-racial, theological and political repercussions in the daily life of the diversity of populations that transit and live there.
Edson Soares Martins noted that Cariri communicated with the whole Northeast as well as with Brazil and the world, burst on the scene Luiz Gonzaga -a musician and instrumentalist-, Padre Cícero -a political-religious leadership-, and the poetics of Patativa do Assaré. It is a polyhedron of poetry, religion, and music usually called “popular culture” that operates as a symbolic shield when allegorizing the region, its territory, its population, and the sociocultural relations present there;- with emphasis on the natural beauty of Geopark of Araripe (Ceará) and Açude Boqueirao (Paraíba); sources pictorial production ancestral of rock of Serra da Capivara (Piauí) and Missão Velha, also in Ceará; among others. These narratives go back to the presence of scientific expeditions in Brazil during the 19th century, due to the naturalist travellers Francisco Freire Alemão German and George Gardner, or the curiosity of the members of the Folkloric Research Mission, coordinated by Mário de Andrade, sent to the North and Northeast by the Department of Culture of the Municipality of São Paulo, or the famous Cinematic Caravan of Thomas Farkas in the late 1960s.
In the contemporary Cariris cultures, far from pointing to a cohesive territory, the presence of different narrators highlights countless geographies and disputes of the meaning of the Cariri (s) from territories and paths. The dispute of material as well as symbolic composes several narratives marked by distinct aesthetic, political-intellectual projects, producing - from the Cariri (s) -, ideas, notions, and actualization of the popular composing spatial, temporal, and virtual imagery, from the Northeast and Northeast Brazil.
Instead of (re) inventing Cariri as a unit, the Dossier Cariri(s) Culture(s): arts and philosophies, transits, and diversity seeks to enhance its dispersion in different fragments and gestures, to show it as territory diversities combined by the profound challenges and strategies of cultural approaches that are expressed in the present. Thus, we seek contributions that explore this scope from different perspectives to stimulate the problematization and debate of the present themes, arising from research based on one or more of the following topics:
⦁ Cariri (s) poetic, artistic and literary representations
⦁ Contemporary contry (sertanejas)/popular cultures
⦁ Ethnic-racial dialogues and mediations in Cariri(s)
⦁ Cariri women: historical, political, social, economic roles and their struggles
⦁ Audiovisual, emerging technologies and memory building
⦁ Disputes and erasures of rural / urban boundaries
⦁ Traditional spaces (terreiros), popular artists (brincantes), rituals, festivals, dances
⦁ Alterity, transits and pilgrimages
⦁ Cultural biodiversity, “gourmet” territory
⦁ The waters in the lands of Cariri
⦁ Resistances, resilience, and exchanges in quilombolas and indigenous territories
⦁ Culture, counterculture and youth education
⦁ Philosophies and practices of the Bodies in the Cariri(s), performance, performativity, and gender
