Abstract
The chapter traces, through a recomposition of ‘oblique lines’, two scenes in the Brazilian uprising where ‘Orphic socialities’ become discernible. The crowd is able to preserve something: itself or things that matter. In the first scene, by appealing to a kind of rhythmic hyperfaculty, someone is able to contain the movement of a crowd of tens of thousands, and their despair in re-living scenes of violence that transport them to the times of the military dictatorship. In the second scene, the crowd acts to protect a monument dedicated to the memory of Zumbi, a warrior of the Quilombo dos Palmares, decapitated in 1695.
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Notes
- 1.
The word ‘zombie’, related to the name of Zumbi, comes from Creole, and it refers to an individual who has lost her will and is devoid of her substance. Most dictionaries focus on the significance of “zombie” as the hybrid living-dead, and fail to capture the second significance of the word, where the accent is on resistance.
- 2.
The first records of the Quilombo dos Palmares place it in the current Brazilian state Alagoas, at the end of the sixteenth century.
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Soreanu, R. (2018). Oblique Lines. In: Working-through Collective Wounds. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58523-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58523-3_10
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