I’m writing today about Brazilian writers and ‘theorists’ Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal.
These two were the banes of my life at Winchester University between 1989 and 1992. (I say university, but it was, back then in the Mesozoic, named King Alfred’s College. When it first applied to upgrade, during my time there - when bus shelters and garden sheds were transforming themselves into universities - the Department of Education sent back a reply to King Alfred’s that basically said ‘don’t take the piss’.)
Freire and Boal were, inevitably, nicknamed ‘the Brazil nuts’ by every year that passed through the course in Drama and TV. Now, they had both led hard lives in a hard country. Boal was even kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured by the military dictatorship of Emílio Médici, then exiled to Argentina.
It wasn’t them in themselves that got my goat, so much as the unhealthy symbiotic relationship between them and American and Western European academics, and those academics’ pathetic comparison of the Brazilian junta to their own governments. As always they were useful idiots. We thought such people would dissolve after the fall of the Soviet Union, for who would they thereafter be usefully idioting for? What charming innocence.
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