Eva Dale 0:00 From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University. From departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials, mathematics and languages, among many others, the college always has something great happening. Join us to find out what's new now. David Staley 0:32 My guest today over Zoom is Isis Barra Costa, Assistant Professor in Contemporary Brazilian culture and Literary Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She has many areas of research interest, including interdisciplinary approaches to Brazilian literature and culture, cyber literature and artivism in the Americas, performance studies, Latin American cinema, Afro Latino children's books and graphic novels, and Afro Brazilian performance, visual arts, literature, and music and orature, which we're going to be learning about today. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Barra Costa. Isis Barra Costa 0:34 Thank you, thank you for the invitation. It's great to be here. David Staley 1:11 Well, and I will confess I have not encountered the terms po music or orature before, and I think I'd like to start there. Tell us, first of all, what Poe music is. Well, they are sort of the same. Orature is more used in English, and there is a lot published on it. We are dealing with oral literature now. So the idea that literature is not only what is printed or what is written, that there are other forms of textualities, and this are the ones that I am particularly interested in. So the term in English is orature. In Portuguese, it becomes orality or literature together. And Poe musica is a term that was coined to talk about Brazilian music with the idea that if you want to find Negritude or the strongest Black expressions, you are going to find that in music. My research is on sacred and secular performances, songs, dances, writings of the African diaspora, with a focus in Brazil. So when I talk about orature or Poe music, I'm talking about literature, but just a different literature. Give us an example of, say, Brazilian orature, the sort of thing that you might study. Isis Barra Costa 2:58 Okay, let's see MPB, which is popular music, the stuff you hear on the radio, Titano velozo, donjo Bean, Gilberto Gill, many contemporary musicians. That's one aspect. Then you have sacred songs, songs that are played in Afro Brazilian cosmologists, religions different forms of Candomble on banda. These are religions that come out of Nigeria, Benin, Congo, Angola, and how they transform themselves in the new world. And this songs at times are in Nago, which is almost like a dialect of Yoruba. At times it's going to be kikongo. This sacred songs, they are going to be both reinterpreted in secular music, in popular music that you hear, for instance, in carnival. No at times you are going to have sacred song themselves being played in the context of Carnival, for instance, just with a different purpose, and it becomes a public performance. No, many of the texts of oral literature are going to be historical references, and that's what interests me the most. So the internal wars in the old Congo and Angola kingdoms. How this remain in perform? It's not remain because they keep on transforming themselves. No, there is not, but how this is still celebrated and reinvented in Brazil, and how this tells a history in a way that official history does not. And this is what I'm looking for. This is the essence of my. Work, which started precisely with the question of how would religious men and women, the priestesses, babalaos, Ganges, from different parts of the African continent, how would they and how do they explain what happened historically, no, the new world and how this changed. For instance, sacred orature, which also appears in the form of divination. No, and divination is a corpus of literature, similar you can say it's an oral Bible. Now it has 256 audios. It works with permutations, like each refrain, each piece, each story, is going to have a song, a performance, and advice and a reference to a historical moment. So over time, they had to change to include, for instance, still in the African continent, the Muslims, or when it came to the Brazil, like how different groups are going to meet in the new world. So one story would exist in one region of the Old Kingdom of Oyo. But when they come to the new world, they meet and it's going to have a transformation. So my question was basically about Once this happened, how did they started making sense of life and talking about it and singing about it and dancing about it? What was space from then on? What was Stein from then on? And this is like when I look for your work, and it actually just arrived today because I asked it from the library, the history and future book. David Staley 6:55 Oh, you honor me. Isis Barra Costa 6:59 Using historical thinking to imagine the future. So this, it's a similar journey, in the sense that I'm trying to see other representations of the past that still today are not recognized by Well, historiography is one thing, literature is another. It's still it ran parallel to it, but it wasn't in a cocoon. It was always reinterpreting and incorporating what was happening in the mainstream. So this art can dialog with history and literature as we know it, but not the other way around. No, because we are not trained to see that as art or as history, so we cannot even recognize it. David Staley 7:50 So it sounds like we're moving into the subject of your nearly completed manuscript, imagining the past and remembering the future Afro Brazilian philosophies. Is that the subject of this manuscript? Isis Barra Costa 8:03 Yes, yes. David Staley 8:05 Tell us more about some of your findings and I suppose your final thesis. Isis Barra Costa 8:08 So this has been the work of my life. I've been studying this from my PhD on, even though I have been publishing articles like I have never put together this vision, this view that I have been working with, which, right now, it's very relevant. It's more relevant than ever, and in different contexts, one of them is Black Brazilian artists who are saying no to the European forms of art, but then what do they say yes to? And this is a slow learning it's going to take years to learn this histories to sort of like, rewire yourself. It involves a rewiring, like, you have to get out of the university. And this is something that I started learning with angui watiango, a writer from Kenya, and then Kamau Brathwaite, who was my advisor. He was historian and poet from Barbados, and he talks about, among others, deeducation. David Staley 9:31 Deeducation?education? Isis Barra Costa 9:33 Deeducation. David Staley 9:34 What does this mean? Isis Barra Costa 9:37 Well, basically, that African, and this is a generalization, of course, but African arts are imminent. So when the Europeans face that they were not able to recognize art or architecture because it didn't have the. Artifacts of civilization that they were once used, and because this culture is imminent, because it's carried from within, it was able to make this fantastic journey and recreate itself. No So so this is something that continues into today. It's not a question of changing the canon, for instance, of inserting new forms of literature. It's not just publishing something that was written or produced by a Black artist. It's more than that. No it's recognizing other languages that exist, that are pretty much alive and that are more and more being valued by this new generation, this new generation of what I call artivists and members of a Wi Fi diaspora. David Staley 11:11 Tell us more about that concept, artivism. So what does that refer? What does that mean? Isis Barra Costa 11:16 Yeah, so art and activism, and this is towards the end of my manuscript that I'm looking at art that emerged at the second decade of the 21st century. And it's interesting. It's almost a parallel to the past century, in the 20s, 1920s a similar movement existed in Brazil, with the French negra Brasilia, the Brazilian black from and these movements were thwarted by dictatorships, no And the group now in 2020 is on one end, like following the RE democratization of Brazil, which is presently on hold, but still no and the black movement. So they are going back to demands that exist, that have existed since at least the 1920s and searching for validation. And previously, these groups worked a lot with poetry in their publications and so on. And nowadays, it's mostly visual images, the power of the image. And this is also a generation that grew up with the Internet. So what that signifies in terms of them organizing themselves for artistic interventions, but also getting out of the bubble, because the issue with Brazil speaking Portuguese puts Brazilians in a sort of an island, no in which the communication with the Hispanic Latin America or with North America, and the importance of the African continent and the Americas being limited because of language, but the image is powerful. The image allows their art to travel and connect all through the diaspora. So what this young generation is achieving is amazing. It's amazing and it makes sense. No, normally, it's normal that in moments of political ritual says that there is this blossoming of something new and powerful. David Staley 13:45 Do you think of yourself as an artivist? Hmm, good question. I guess I am. But I do it in a different setting? No, I do it in in my classroom. I do it in conferences. I do it with my academic writing. So it's on a different stage. No, but yes, if I have to step on a on a stage and participate in, for instance, Abu two performance, I have done that already, and I would be willing to do it again and again. Eva Dale 14:25 Did you know that 23 programs in the Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences, are nationally ranked as top 25 programs, with more than ten of them in the top ten? That's why we say the College of Arts and Sciences is the intellectual and academic core of the Ohio State University. Learn more about the college at artsandsciences.osu.edu. David Staley 14:50 Your approach sounds very interdisciplinary. Is that fair? Do you think of yourself as sort of an interdisciplinary thinker? Isis Barra Costa 14:58 Yes, yes. So my studies were in comparative literature. I came to the US to study English literature, actually American literature, that was my interest. And then I saw how provincial that was. In those days, there were no professors from India or the Caribbean or the African continent. So I said, Okay, since I have a scholarship not ready to go to Brazil, I can study Comparative Literature here. Let's go no and and with that. So even though I have studies mostly in literature and cinema, to a certain extent, my research dialogs a lot with mostly performance studies, but also with history, anthropology, ethnography. So if I am invited to a conference or to be a speaker or a member of the committee, chances are it's going to be performance studies and anthropology, those are the groups that are most interested in what I do, I guess, even more than people in literature. David Staley 16:08 So how did, how did you end up in a Spanish and Portuguese department then, as opposed to, I don't anthropology or music or something like that? Isis Barra Costa 16:17 Yeah, I could have, but that's something about the structure of American universities. Because in comparative literature, I had colleagues from all over the world and in very different researches, but the only American, North American colleague I had, he stayed in Queens, New York, teaching Comparative Literature. Other than that, each of us went sort of back to the country where we were born. So the Russian was going to be teaching Russian literature. The French was going to be teaching French literature, because with a comparativist approach, which was also something that people are looking for at the beginning of this century, but, but, yeah, I do not have proper training in anthropology or history, and thank goodness, like it gives me more freedom. No, like what you're trying to do in your research, we see people like saja Hartman talking about the critical fabulation. No, this is something that we can do. It's in our teaching, in our writing, in our research. So there is a freedom in literature that that history and anthropologists seem suffocating. I hope it's getting more flexible. I do not know. I would imagine so no. David Staley 17:50 This hits a little too close to home for me, I think. So before we started recording, before we went on the air, I had asked you, what are some of the most surprising results that you've encountered in your research? And you said something really interesting. So I'm quoting from you, you said, "Perhaps the realization that often what we look for is right under our noses, but that in order to see what we look for, we need to step down, or step away from our certainties and presumptions," which I thought was really very interesting. Tell us what did you mean by that? Isis Barra Costa 18:21 So this has to do with my experience. I came to the US to study American literature, and I found myself more and more studying Brazil, and specifically studying Afro Brazil. I had to leave Brazil to start seeing that and this comment I made, I think it's something that has been going through my mind a lot with the younger generation, and the certainties this culture of canceling that we have the inabilities to to reimagine things in a completely different way, to accept impossibilities. No. So the culture that I'm studying today was not seen as a culture by my parents, if anything, it was seen as something connected to to the poor people, to the Black people, to rural people, not something that they would pay for their daughter to study abroad, no. David Staley 19:32 Your parents were presumably, what urban professionals, or something like that. Isis Barra Costa 19:36 Yes, my father was a geologist, so a scientist. David Staley 19:41 And you said you had to leave Brazil in order to see this. That's really a profound observation. Isis Barra Costa 19:47 Yeah, that's very common, I think, and that has a lot to do with the culture of the Americas, know, and how intertwined they are. So one of the things a Brazilian. Covers, and I see this with my students when they come to the US is that they are no longer white, and we grew up thinking of ourselves as white. No, we become Latino, a person of color. So regardless of what we want to do like we are going to be confronted with a transformation. And in New York, I was embraced mostly by people from the Caribbean. No they had like an image and African Americans, they have an image of Brazil, which is interesting. It's this sort of beautiful place of the Americas where, and this has been changing, but where racism, for instance, would have been dealt in a different manner. And of course, it has been now, and there is a long tradition of historical studies comparing mainly Brazil and the US, but Brazil has its issues, but the enthusiasm with which African Americans and Caribbean people imagine Brazil, I gradually gravitated towards that in trying to understand it and to learn more about this spectacular space that they were referring to that I didn't know, no and at the same time, European Americans did not have the same level of interest, so this was not something I expected. David Staley 21:44 So I'm interested to learn more about what's next for your research. And you have a number of things on your plate, it looks like. So the first is, well, tell us about the project that's called Afro Brazilian arts and activism, a lecture series on Afro Brazilian arts and activism. Tell us more about this project. Isis Barra Costa 22:03 Sure. This actually happened in the spring of 21 I was on a medical family medical leave. I was supposed to teach a course spring 21 called Black Brazilian art and activism from the 18th to the 21st century. So my colleague, Lucia koshigun, she started teaching it. The course was via zoom, so I was in Brazil, and she was here. It's now our 10th year of the graduate program of Portuguese speaking cultures here at this department. And Lucia was one of the creators of this program. So we started this course, and I said, Okay, I'm going to invite some of the artists that I'm working with, some of the scholars. I know that what started like in a in a small sense, like within three months, a semester, three months. No, we had 16 lecture events, 24 guests and a specialized interpreter, an interpreter who specializes in Afro Brazilian culture. You cannot have any interpreter for that. And we were interviewing and talking like in your program with Black Brazilian artists, activists, historians, photographers, anthropologists, and some of them based in the US. And it was also that moment we were living. It was a combination of the isolation that we were living in the social rights movement, the wanting to talk about it, the sense of urgency, no, and it was also a result of being in this field for so long and having forged friendships that that are wonderful, because Center for Latin American Studies helped us with some funds, but it was limited, like this is Something that would have required a lot of money and a lot of time. So, so the next step is to have this published in a bilingual anthology. And it would be great for courses, or, like any course that wants to bring African Diaspora Studies, I think would benefit from something like this. And this also talks to because of the place of the American, North American universities in the world, in the diaspora, that is a focus, almost an exclusive. It's focused on African American history and a disconnect to the other Afro diasporic realities. Publications like this are important to rethink, even well, issues in the US like to like in the same manner that I had to step out of Brazil. People have to step out of the US, in their minds, at least. To start reimagining it, no, and to not be stuck on their certainties, which lately are so deep, no. David Staley 25:10 Very certain. I know you are also interested in establishing partnerships at Ohio State to develop the Midwestern Afro Digital Museum, and I want to hear more about this. Isis Barra Costa 25:23 Yeah, this is a project that is very important to me, and so far I haven't been able to devote enough attention. So this is the digital Museum, and it's a project that was elaborated by an Italian anthropologist who lives in Bahia. David Staley 25:44 In Brazil. Isis Barra Costa 25:45 In Brazil, and he started creating nowadays, it's in the US as well. It has to be within a university. It's a platform that you're going to gather archives of all sorts and put people in contact, no scholars, and also to allow for for tools like crowd sharing and crowdsourcing, no so I've been working with the afro digital Museum in Rio, and our obvious partner here in Columbus is the Afro American and African Studies community Extension Center. We have been working with Adeleke, like the previous director was Linda Myers. So how to involve the community here? And that is the first step to give visibility to our local afro, diasporic historical memory. And by that I mean interviews, performances, movements, family memorabilia, photographs, correspondence, testimonies, one of the things when I arrived here, I expected to find quilts here. I expected, like Cincinnati, that this would and I don't see them. No like at times I see photos of them, but and it was back talking to Linda Myers, that I realized that mostly families keep them, and we don't want it as an object in a museum, but we want to register of it contextualized, know the image and the story behind it, and to have it in a digital platform and translated so as this history, and especially Here in Ohio, Columbus, it's well, it's not very visible the afro diasporic culture here, but it is here, no, and, yeah. So this is a sort of a simple project that, well as most projects, it requires a little bit of time and a little bit of money. So one semester off, we want to go beyond triple A s history would be a great partner. And the English department, they have some initiatives in that sense as well. So I will get there. David Staley 28:16 Isis Barra Costa, thank you. Isis Barra Costa 28:20 Thank you. Eva Dale 28:21 Voices from the Arts and Sciences is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University, College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services Studio. Sound engineering by Paul Kotheimer. Produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Eva Dale. Transcribed by https://otter.ai