Literature censored by the Brazilian dictatorship is the topic of study

Researcher produces a list of the fiction censored by the Brazilian dictatorship and analyzes specific cases.

By Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – During Brazil’s last military dictatorship, between 1970 and 1988, over 140 books underwent national censorship. Based on the study of the censorship action reports from the Department of Censorship and Public Diversions (DCDP), a researcher from the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) has produced a list of the censored fictional works for the first time. The study also identifies and analyzes the censorship mechanisms used in some cases.

The results of the study are collected in the book Repressão e resistência: Censura a livros na ditadura militar (Repression and Resistance: Censorship of Books during the Military Dictatorship) by Sandra Reimão, professor at the School of Arts and Humanities (EACH) and in the Post-Graduate Program in Communications Sciences (PPGCOM) in the School of Communications and Arts at USP.

The book, which received FAPESP funding under the Publications Research Support modality, will be released on December 7 at 18:30 at the Livraria Martins Fontes, on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo.

According to Reimão, the project began after reading Inimá Ferreira Simões’ book Roteiro da Intolerância: A censura cinematográfica no Brasil (The Route of Intolerance: The Censorship of Cinema in Brazil), which was released in 1999. Many of the censored films included in Simões’ book were adaptations of literary works.

 “I decided to research whether the books that inspired the censored films had also been banned. I was shocked to discover that there had been no systematic study of the books censored during the dictatorship. There were only partial lists with no clear specifications to identify the works. That was when I decided to do the research,” Reimão told Agência FAPESP.

Using the existing bibliography, the researcher worked with the file of DCPC reports and tracked the documentation on the works in the National Archives. The graphic illustrations, intended to dialogue with the text, are one of the highlights of the publication.

“Aside from systematically classifying the censored works and tracking an historical overview of the military government’s censorship activities involving art and culture—and especially books—I also tried to focus on particular cases of fiction censorship as a way of analyzing the means by which it was carried out,” said Reimão.

The researcher specifically analyzed the cases of Feliz Ano Novo by Rubem Fonseca, Zero by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, Dez histórias imorais by Aguinaldo Silva, Em câmara lenta by Renato Tapajós, the Mister Curitiba stories by Dalton Trevisan, and O cobrador by Rubem Fonseca.

According to Reimão, decree law 1077 of January 26, 1970 (also included in the book), which instituted censorship in Brazil, defined books that offended common morality and that could “destroy society’s moral base” as candidates for censorship.

The same decree declared that the works that threatened morality also put “into practice a subversive plan that places national security in danger.”

“For the censors, there was a direct correlation between the destruction of moral values and national security. One of the book’s conclusions is that when we talk about the 1970s, it’s impossible to separate the moral universe from the political universe,” said Reimão.