Ana Maria Mauad
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
Since its creation in 1982, the Laboratory of Oral History and Image (LABHOI), a division of the History Department of Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil, has been developing projects on the history of memory of different Brazilian communities, based on both oral and visual sources and the relationship between them.
The main purpose of LABHOI’s projects, despite its academic origin, is to engage communities in the production of their own history through visual and oral records. One of the results of this work is the organization of a digital database, accessible for a large public, that covers three fields of interest: Memory, Africa, and Slavery; Memory, Art, and Media; and Memory, City, and Communities.
LABHOI has become an important source for theoretical and methodological debates about the uses of visual representations of the past, and its members have published books and articles in this field. Recently LABHOI turned to the production of experimental videos based on the idea of the “videographic writing” of history, a modality of historical text that can perfectly mix sounds and images of recollections.
The video productions of LABHOI include the DVD box set Passados Presentes (Present Pasts) with four documentaries built upon our audiovisual archive Memórias da Escravidão (Memories of Slavery), launched in 2012. This audiovisual collection has been developed since 1994 and is composed of more than 300 hours of interviews with the descendants of slaves of the old plantation coffee areas of Rio de Janeiro.
Other projects developed during the last ten years include: Sons e Imagens da Rememoração: Narrativas e Registros das Identidades e Alteridades Afro-Brasileiras dos séculos XIX ao XXI (Sounds and Images of Recollections: Narratives and Records of Afro-Brazilian Identity and Otherness from the 19th to the 21st Centuries) (2010–2013), sponsored by the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq), in which an international network of researchers worked on issues concerning the memory of slavery. História e Memória da Prática Fotográfica no Brasil Contemporâneo (History and Memory of Photographic Practice in Contemporary Brazil), started in 2003, which is organizing a database of interviews with different professionals who have worked before, during, and after the Brazilian dictatorship in order to understand the political role played by photography in producing historical meaning about the present time and the organization of photojournalism as a field for public photography.
Since 2013 LABHOI officially included public history as one of its fields of debate and research with the approval of two new projects: História Pública, Memória a Escravidão Atlântica no Rio de Janeiro (Public History, Memory, and Atlantic Slavery in Rio de Janeiro), sponsored by the Carlos Chagas Foundation, Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ), which is developing a new approach to the study of the Atlantic diaspora in Rio de Janeiro, a city that has one of the major populations of Afro-descendants in Brazil; and Expanding the Global Feminisms Archive: Brazil and the “BRICS” Five, which is being compiled together with a team of scholars from the University of Michigan.