A Review of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil by Victoria Langland
Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça
Institute of Social Sciences, Rio de Janeiro State University
carloseduardorebellodemendonca@gmail.com
Abstract
An historical account of the founding and subsequent political role of the Brazilian National Students’ Organisation (UNE) prompts a discussion concerning how an organisation intended as an authoritarian corporatist authority for management of university students’ interests came to play an important role in the Brazilian version of the Global 1968, therefore suggesting an analysis of the causes of post-1960s middle-class radicalism and identity politics.
Keywords
Brazil – university politics – military dictatorship, 1964–85 – 1968 student activism – middle-class radicalism
Victoria Langland, (2013) Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
The bourgeoisie, while utilizing the support of the petty bourgeoisie, distrusts the latter, for it very correctly fears its tendency to break down the barriers set up for it from above.
—— Trotsky[1]
‘Speaking of flowers’: We enter the work threading upon an all-too familiar trope of history-writing in a postmodern setting – the divide between the historical fact and its remembrance, the manner in which the subject of memoryremembers a particular past event (whose paramount relevancy is assumed) in order to ascertain its meaning, said meaning being then consigned to public consciousness; in the metaphor used by Jan Stern in a book about Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, this remembrance of the event acts as a ‘nervous knot’ interrupting day-to-day workings and surfacing as ascream of the social body.[2] Remembrance therefore is produced by the event’s concrete happening; nevertheless, remembrance is at the same time a distorting mirror, which transmits and at the same time transforms the consciousness of the event into something that does not necessarily exist ‘by itself’.
The book starts by telling us how, already well past mid-1968 in Brazil, a protest song by the singer and songwriter Geraldo Vandré became enormously popular as the unofficial hymn of the ongoing mass-manifestations against the military dictatorship – ‘our Marseillaise, born amid the struggle, sung, spontaneously and emotionally, by an ever greater number’, according to the belated comment of satirist Millôr Fernandes.[3]
Something, then, which poses the issue of the relationship between the Marseillaise in itself (one of the many patriotic songs from the French Revolution) and theMarseillaise as aparticular set of memoriesabout the French Revolution, not onlyof it. Just as theMarseillaise had to face competition, was banned, accepted grudgingly – until it eventually became the hallmark of a patriotic and conservative bourgeois consensus – and was eventually superseded byThe Internationale as a revolutionary song –, in the same way, Vandré’s song eventually (and in untimely fashion) became the quintessentialmemory of the Brazilian 1968 mass protest, standing, however, in a problematic relationship with the 1968 events taken in themselves. Just as Eric Hobsbawm titled his work on the historiography of the French Revolution ‘Echoes of the Marseillaise’,[4] so could Professor Langland have titled hers ‘Echoes of Speaking of Flowers’.
Professor Langland’s task, however, was far more difficult than Hobsbawm’s, who wrote a work on the eve of the Great Revolution’s bicentennial and in the shadow of its world-accepted relevance. Professor Langland had to write, at the same time – writing in English and for an anglophone public – a history of the Brazilian students’ movement and its role in the opposition to the 1964 coup and the ensuing military dictatorship, as well as a history of thememories that developed out of and around the same movement.
Any of these single tasks would be difficult to tackle in the space of a single book; as it is, she had to achieve both. If Professor Langland were writing in Portuguese and for a Brazilian audience, she could have been much more direct in dealing with what is her book’s most interesting subject, the interplay between actual happenings, their remembrance, telling and writing; as it is, she has to deal, Ranke-like, with the eigentlich gewesen – the ‘making’, as her title goes– before she proceeds to the ‘remembering’ – the latter being far more original and intriguing than the former, and sometimes crowded out by details of the bare facts.
As Professor Langland begins in her Introduction, Speaking of Flowers is as important, in both music and lyrics, for what it tells about the protests in 1968 Brazil as for what it choosesnot to tell. It rejects militarism and the military, who ‘live without reason’, but at the same time conveys an alternative vision of ‘conqueringmasculinity’ (p. 4) of its putative singers – with ‘flowers on the ground and history in [our] hands’– that turns one back towards the gender-charged nature of much of contemporary protesting: the challenging of traditional conceptions of appropriate gender behaviour by the increasing participation of female students in political organisation, acts of violence– and premarital sex – as if general militancy still ‘rested on masculinist and heteronormative assumptions’ (p. 4), something underscored by the ‘steady marching rhythm’ of the song itself (p. 2).
This is something that is more implied than stated in Langland’s text: that Vandré’s song, as much as it intends tocelebrate the ongoing event, at the same time standsin contradiction to it: by speaking in its lyrics of the revolutionary scenery as ‘schools, streets, fields and building-sites’ (a progression ending in the all-too-familiar peasant–worker pair) it depicts an image of the mass upsurge according to the at-the-time all too familiar line of a 1950s Soviet poster: the standard militant as a male representative of a particular class collective. However, as Langland elaborates in the following first chapter, one of the hallmarks of the development of the Brazilian students’ movement that attained self-sustaining momentum during the 1960s was precisely the transition from the ‘student’ as simply the junior member and younger replacement of the (ruling and/or middle) class, towards the student as a subject unto herself – the transition from conventional class politics to identity politics, with all the consequent changes in political discourse.
As Langland explains at the start of Chapter 1, even if university-level education had existed in Brazil since the early 1800s, following the flight of the Portuguese Court from the Napoleonic army and the temporary (1808–21) transfer of its seat to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil failed to develop a proper university as an institution; what was created instead were professional programmes – cátedras – attached to lifelong, tenured professors,catedráticos, teaching a particular discipline. What developed in Brazil from the early-nineteenth to the early twentieth century– in sharp contrast to Spanish-speaking Latin America– was not the university ascorporate institution, but as a network of isolated faculties, with the students in the role of individual pupils to a prominent figure teaching a particular profession. In this mechanism of co-optation, agency remained firmly in the hands of the senior party, with the juniors as dependent subordinates. Hence the fact that students were not supposed, well into the Vargas era, even when politically active – as many undoubtedly were – to represent views and stances other than those representative of the ruling class as a whole: ‘student politics’, as distinguished from a sample of the ruling class’ politics, did not exist. Hence the fact that the pioneering early-twentieth-century students’ organisationCasa do Estudante do Brasil, founded in 1929 by feminist poet (and high-society lady) Ana Amélia Carneiro de Mendonça, functioned merely as a charitable and cultural venue concerned with cheap lodgings and meals, amateur theatrics, and other similar activities. Casa do Estudante, however, attained membership of the international, Brussels-based organisation, the CIE (Confédération Internationale des Étudiants), and as such was acknowledged asthe national organisation of Brazilian students as a whole, something that enabled it to act as parent organisation to the later, Vargas-era corporate organisation the UNE (União Nacional dos Estudantes).
The creation of UNE followed the late-1937 coup that created Vargas’s personal dictatorship, which abolished electoral politics, thus rendering ‘corporatist and other forms of political pressure ever more critical’ (p. 36). As Vargas’s interest from 1937 on was in creating something approaching what might be called, in Dahl’s terminology, an Inclusive Hegemony, i.e., a network of corporatist organisations providing the dictatorship with a grassroots support-base, he felt it necessary to institute, in December 1938, a national political students’ organisation superseding all previously existing organisations, and thereby enjoying a legal monopoly in the representation of students’ interests. Since Vargas wanted to wrestle the students’ body away from the influence of the fascistoid Integralist Movement, his granting of the monopoly of representation to the UNE dovetailed with the interest of the organised Left in forming a grassroots base of support for popular-front, antifascist politics – as much as Vargas also opposed fascism for the sake of his Bonapartist, populist political project. In this way the UNE quickly became the commonly-acknowledged representative body of Brazilian university students.
As Langland writes, this acknowledgement came at a price: as much as the UNE granted students a separate political identity from their mentors, that identity was, according to Langland, a purely ‘gendered culture of male camaraderie and homosocial [i.e., male-centred] political networks’ (p. 39). As the UNE quickly came to outshine Casa do Estudante and Ms Mendonça’s leadership, women students lost their sole space for discussion of their needs, as they were excluded from the new organisation’s agenda. However, it could be remarked that, as Casa do Estudante was mostly a charitable venue, Ms Mendonça’s position within it was mainly that of someone exerting a role somewhere between a chaperone and a duenna, thus partaking of the entirely subordinate role assigned to students, irrespective of their gender. As much as the Vargas-era UNE leadership worked within a framework of ‘intra-elite male networks of […] friends and family’ (p. 42) – as was wont to happen in the context of a personal dictatorship where political participation was closely managed and under the dictator’s thumb – the UNE quickly developed into something different during the post-dictatorship period.
One of the issues with Langland’s book is that although she – like most American Brazil scholars – has complete mastery over the sources and archival evidence, that is,history itself, she dialogues little with Brazilianhistoriography in terms of its particular concerns: when Vargas, in 1942, turned the confiscated stately Rio mansion that housed a German club into the UNE headquarters – at the same time rewarding the organisation for backing Vargas’s diplomatic turn against the Axis and offering it formal recognition as the representative of the entire body of university students nation-wide – he fostered with his endowment a gentlemanly, thoroughly homosocial ethos that imbued much of the UNE’s activities. However, Vargas’s acknowledgment of the UNE also did much to make the organisation thoroughlypolitical.
In late 1948, when the leadership of the American USNSA wrote to the UNE urging it to break its ties with the successor organisation to the CIE, the IUS (which was Prague-based, and therefore deemed unreliable in the context of the burgeoning Cold War), the Americans presented the Brazilians with the argument that the IUS was a partisan organisation, ‘more concerned with political considerations than with constructive student activities, such as travel and exchange’ (p. 51). As Langland puts it, this all had to do with the fact that the UNE leadership was from the start far more politicised than the Americans were willing to concede, ‘that it never considered student interests to be limited to travel and exchange’ (p. 51); that the Union, therefore, was acting as part of what Brazilian Marxist historian Nelson Werneck Sodré called ‘The Brazilian Revolution’,[5] i.e., a belatedly bourgeois-democratic revolutionary process, one of whose traits was the emergence of a politically active middle class acting politically in its own right, instead of entering the political game in a capacity ancillary to the elite power-brokers – mostly thorough the state apparatuses (Sodré, a member of an older generation, came to play a part in contemporary political struggles solely in his capacity as a senior military officer). What the UNE offered to the younger, politically active members of Brazil’s contemporary emerging middle-class was an opportunity for independent political agency, thus facilitating the switch from a game of pure class politics into identity politics – something that would eventually include gender issues – in a far more inclusive manner than could have been expected from leaving the management of a national student organisation to a female philanthropist.
It is undeniable that Werneck Sodré’s notion of ‘Brazilian Revolution’ was altogether questionable, smacking of a stage-ist conception of Marxism that set an agenda for backward capitalist societies in which a largely mythical bourgeois revolution mandatorily precedes a socialist revolution set in the unforeseeable future. That notwithstanding, the emergence of the UNE did much to trigger a process of middle-class political radicalisation that would reach its zenith during the 1960s; such a process having to do with the fact that the emergence of a national student organisation like the UNE as an independent, open-ended organisation, not tied to a particular concrete purpose – be it a functionary of the national state-bureaucratic apparatus, or a private charitable pursuit – turned the organisation into a loose cannon.
One cannot assign a function to a student organisation in the same way one might a trade union: the UNE’s functions were so general and ill-defined that, even if its original aim was to allow students to participate in intra-elite political networks, the organisation eventually developed a moral authority of its own that allowed it to become a hotbed of partisan activity, something that prompted its critics to dispute the ‘students’ authority to participate politically at all’ (p. 59). Already during the 1950s, the UNE had become a vector of that Brazilian conservatives’ nemesis, political radicalism with no strings attached, a notion that could be conveyed by the choicest word of abuse hurled by the 1960s military dictatorship at the students’ movement and other opponents: baderna, for ‘mayhem’,stasis – a Brazilian idiom rolling together the notion of uncompromising political radicalism with gender and race politics, as ‘baderna’ was originally the family name of a nineteenth-century Italian female dancer reviled both for her ‘dissolute’ ways and for incorporating African refrains into music-hall performances.[6]
I agree with Professor Langland that the UNE all-too-often played the respectability card by struggling to appear – in memory if not in actual fact – as respectable by conforming to the accepted norms of social behaviour, excluding all that did not conform to an aura of gentlemanly camaraderie and feats of arms. However, from its very inception the organisation favoured political voluntarism on the part of the younger members of the petite bourgeoisie – and with, it the re-emergence of all kinds of political activism, even those that the UNE itself wanted to downplay, such as gender politics. By fostering voluntarism, the UNE potentiated a subjective activist mood that favoured repressed groups, the assertion of whose interests – even when based on actual issues and plights – otherwise proved difficult in the context of the elitism and corporatism of existing institutions. The UNE, at least, exhibited the hallmark of a new kind of subjective socio-political mood in 1960s Brazil, when, in the words of a female historian (taken from Freirean pedagogy), ‘the entire country was creating its consciousness [se conscientizava]’ (p. 72).
At this point we are already well into the second chapter of the work, which deals with the period leading up to the 1964 military coup and its immediate aftermath up to late 1967. The chapter begins by describing one of the innumerable minor scuffles of the time, namely the 1961 confrontation between a reactionary dean and the student body of the University of Pernambuco over granting a venue for Che Guevara’s mother Celia to perform a speaking engagement (together with peasant leader Francisco Julião) which had to be delivered by candlelight (the dean ordered power lines to the conference room to be cut) and the ensuing students’ strike, that was repressed by force by the military. The ruckus attracted not only the attention of Brazilian media, but also of Time magazine, whose writer fulminated against a ‘Marxist Typhoid Mary, spreading violence wherever she goes’. In Professor Langland’s apt summing-up, the powers that be in both Brazil and the US found this ‘combination of peasants, university students and Communists potentially catastrophic’ (p. 63, emphasis mine). The fact that state-owned Brazilian universities suffered at the time from a glut of middle-class candidates with passing grades as against the limited positions available, who had to wait in line as ‘surplus [excedentes]’, that curricula were mostly outdated, devised as they were by a small number of lifetime chair-holding professors – all these factors, combined, made much for ‘spearheading a large rush of student political involvement’ (p. 73), such involvement having to do mostly with university issues, but then also with the surrounding radicalised political environment.
At this particular point, Professor Langland’s American perspective is very helpful, as she quotes the remarks of one American USNSA representative – who attended a 1961 UNE congress as part of an attempt, again, at wooing the Brazilian organisation away from the IUS – about ‘the fashionable dress of the [women] delegates […] and the drab attire of most women at the NSA Congress’ (p. 78). One could say that the quote hits the nail on the head in capturing one of the chief traits of radical politics in 1960s Brazil: the festive, partying, even sexually-charged atmosphere – something conveyed by a contemporary idiom hurled at middle-class activists:esquerda festiva, ‘festive Left’ – something that might be anglicised as Tom Wolfe’s ‘radical chic’, were it not that Wolfe’s expression deals with radicalism as agrand bourgeois fad, as the ultimate means of high-class snobbery, whilefestiva speaks of radicalisation as a means for, above all, middle-class self-expression and political agency in disregard of the existing hierarchies.
As culture scholar Roberto Schwarz noted in one of his essays on the period, it was this educated middle-class radicalisation that made 1960s Brazil seemingly so progressive on the cultural and political levels; in an ironic aside, Schwarz describes the mood of the time by saying that ‘’twas a time when even some congressmen made speeches that were actually intriguing’.[7] That notwithstanding, behind this progressive façade, what eventually prevailed was the unnerving reactionary mediocrity of ruling-class discourse and of its middle-class adherents. Hence the fact that the grand opening of the 1 April 1964 coup – ‘the smouldering aftermath of the Day of Lies’, as Langland aptly puts it (p. 87) – would be marked by the torching of the UNE Rio building by a crowd of coup supporters. That Langland chose to make the ‘lynching’ of the UNE building the focal point for her subsequent account of the early dictatorship points to what would become a defining trait of the period up until today: the struggles around thememories of present and past events.
Instead of simply banning the UNE outright, the new regime instituted in its place a shadowy Students’ National Directorate (DNE) whose functions remained indistinct and which was rejected outright even by the USNSA (p. 94). For as long as university students were recognised as political actors in their own right, they might stage a discursive backlash, and the view that was to ultimately prevail among the dictatorship’s top brass was expressed at the time by financial czar Roberto Campos: that to allow students any kind of political activity was to defer ‘to the pretension of setting directions without previous experience’ (p. 96). By 1967, the dictatorship had already instituted new rulings that simply precluded the existence of students’ organisations on the national and state level, with remaining organisations being supposed to deal only with specific student concerns. Hence the fact that the student movement assumed a clandestine quality – quite apart from its individual members’ participation in the clandestine Left organisations that began to form at the time. Hence also the fact that, when mass action burst forth in early 1968, it would from the very start assume a performance-like quality, that of an ‘acting out’, in the Lacanian sense, i.e. a demand forrecognition.
Chapter 3 of Langland’s work deals with the 1968 chain of events as she describes how, in late March 1968 (i.e., at the beginning of the working school-year after the Southern summer vacation), during a banal police-brutality episode, the student Edson Luis was shot dead outside the downtown Rio Calabouço student restaurant. She then proceeds to stress the fact that the killing spurred an immediate – and, in hindsight, seemingly disproportional – response in a surge of massive street demonstrations, beginning with the public wake, funeral procession and a seventh-day mass. The conclusion drawn by Langland underlines that what was at stake from the start was the massive quality of the demonstrations as an end in itself, as the actual fact of their multitudinous quality broke down the façade erected by the dictatorship of a – to use a contemporary expression – supportive ‘silent majority’ among the students’ body politic. The fact that Edson’s death was haphazard, an ‘unfortunate incident’, also helped to bring home the discursive truth – repeated as the motto, ‘podia ser seu filho [It could have been your son!]’ – that the killed student could have been, in fact,anyone. The manifestations were planned and organised ‘for the record’, as acts of memory and as a claim for independent political agency. Notwithstanding the fact underlined by Langland that these memories tended to conform to a sexist, male-only discursive pattern, the truth was that the 1968 mass demonstrations’ ambience allowed considerable space for political agency irrespective of gender. Of course, much of what passed for progressive at the time had a faked, staged quality. However, the fact remains that, in the ensuing memory-wars surrounding the actual happenings of that year, ‘1968’ quickly became 666: to Brazilian reactionaries, a signifier for anything ‘destined to destroy society and subvert customs’ (p. 141), from mass mobilisation to venereal disease and illegitimate birth– in the words of one of the most unnerving military mediocrities of the time (p. 177).
It is therefore only natural that, even after the late-1968 military backlash that established an overtly military dictatorship and inaugurated Brazil’s bleierne Zeit, when the organised students’ movement was repressed out of existence – even then underground Left activists looked back to 1968 as thefons et origo for the legitimacy of their politics.
If I have chosen here Hölderlin’s original German for what became commonly known in Brazil as the Years of Lead, os anos de chumbo, what I mean by this is to stress the fact that 1968 was less a concrete programme than a mood– in fact, it stood for the notion of unconditional, independent political agency – something like Hölderlin’s uncompromising political romanticism. For the military and their ruling-class allies, who intended a society without room for any kind of ‘unauthorised’ action, anytime, anywhere, anyhow– no matter how trite the action actually was – ‘1968’ came to stand as the supreme abomination.
In Chapter 4 of her work, which deals with the realities of the Years of Lead (1968–78), Langland describes an episode taken from archival evidence from the repressive organs’ own files: during late 1973, a group of high-school teenage students paraded briefly through downtown Rio indulging in a parody of a political march, under a banner asking ‘for a love song’ and to the tune of a mildly obscene ditty (pp. 192, 193) – an antic that threw the reporting officer for the police into abject panic, classifying the incident as preparation for fully-fledged guerrilla activity…. Actually (and given the fact that I myself remember having participated in similar activities at the same time) one can be fairly certain that the students in question risked imprisonment and torture – even death, provided the report reached the ‘right’ quarters. Given the vicious fear of the officer, Langland wonders if this strange incident was not a façade for something ‘bigger’ – i.e., some kind of actual political manifestation, as she ponders whether the ‘long song’ banner was or wasn’t a mock-erudite reference to an antifascist 1940s poem by Drummond de Andrade (p. 201). Speaking out of my personal – and avowedly anecdotic – experience, I beg to differ: it was probably nothing other than teenagers, out of bravado, mimicking some forbidden grown-up thing; something that renders the episode even more creepy and scary, when one considers that these boys and girls unwittingly jeopardised their lives by so doing.
But then Langland begins Chapter 5 – with discussion concerning the memory ties between ‘1968’ and a rebuilt, post-dictatorship students’ movement – by speaking of Honestino Guimarães, whose 1973 arrest and ‘disappearance’ was mostly due to his previous UNE activism and to the fact that he was one of the clandestine vice-presidents to the then-illegal organisation. The UNE memory of mass mobilisation remained central to the late dictatorship and post-dictatorship period, even when the students’ movement had to rebuild itself almost from scratch: hence the fact that most of this final chapter tells of the 1980 confrontation that opposed the waning military dictatorship, as against the fledgling students’ movement over the fate of the old UNE HQ Rio building, which was torn down by the federal government and turned into a parking lot – but even then only after a long, protracted process of court measures and counter-measures, that even included a gunpoint confrontation between the police and a federal judge, something that preserved UNE memory for the younger generations.
In the Epilogue that closes the work, Professor Langland takes us only as far as 2011 – that is, to the close of Lula’s second term – in order to inform us, by way of a conclusion, that ‘1968 lives on in Brazilian national memory’ and that subsequent political and cultural events are ‘read through the lens of this earlier period’ (p. 248). This, however, in the near-decade between the completion of the work and today, has acquired an entirely new layer of meaning – as Langland herself expected. If her concluding 2011 remark meant that memory of 1968 mass-mobilisations and student radicalism is the bottom line over which a common acceptance of mass politics and a democratic consensus was built during the post-dictatorship years, one cannot but accept her conclusion, but also to add that the centrality of the ‘1968’ signifier is proved not only by its acceptance but also by its refusal, as the rightist backlash that developed during Dilma Roussef’s administration, and eventually led to her deposal through a parliamentary coup, has taken every available opportunity to contest and vilify those same 1968 memories – something expressed by the sexist and misogynist smears directed against Dilma. Nevertheless, episodes such as the 2013 wave of street manifestations and the 2015 São Paulo public high-schools occupations prove that memories of 1968 with a positive slant are also still very much with us.
Now, to something by way of a final conclusion: as far as can be gathered by the reviewer, Langland’s work is conceived as history, not sociology or political science – hence the fact that theoretical remarks are kept to a minimum. That notwithstanding, the work tells a lot to the theoretically-minded scholar. As the author herself admits, the Brazilian 1960s history of mass mobilisation is part of a history of the global 1960s – something that was admitted even at the time, when the Brazilian student movement’s activity took note of the ongoing French May and similar contemporary developments, while the military dictatorship and its supporters feared foreign contagion. This global wave of contestation, as much as it developed in the context of a global Cold War ambience and nourished itself on a previously existing Left political culture, at the same time broke with it, in that it conformed, not to the ‘class vs. class’ framework that prevailed until the late 1950s, but contrariwise fed itself mostly on a middle-class radicalism that inaugurated the era of identity politics.
This turn from class and towards identity politics is something that became one of the chief themes of the Marxist historiography of the period, viz. Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes.[8] That developed into the post-Marxist notion of, say, a Žižek, according to whose nostrum radical politics has to move away from objective sociology towards emancipatory subjectivity, from the concrete working class towards the proletariat as the (symbolic) embodiment of ‘social negativity’.[9]
To a Marxist who wants to maintain coherence with his theoretical notions, such ‘negativity’ is in itself a slippery commodity, large-scale social change being of necessity based on the objective interests of class – which, in the case of the global capitalist economy, means the working class. The working class, however, no matter how blurred in terms of its limits, is never an absolute majority. Therefore, no revolutionary change is possible without a political basis of support in the petite bourgeoisie – or the middle class, the class that ‘doesn’t exist’ in Lacanian terms, as its identity is defined by what it is not, by its being ‘in the middle’. The political agency of the middle class resides, objectively, in its possibility of choosing sides – a decision, to a certain extent, taken subjectively.In this sense, the Brazilian ‘1968’ – and a whole host of similar 1968s – is still very much with us, in memory and in actual fact. And it is in drawing our attention to this that resides the chief merit of Professor Langland’s work.
References
Hobsbawm, Eric 1990, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution, London: Verso.
Hobsbawm, Eric 2000, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith Publisher, Inc.
Langland, Victoria 2013, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ridenti, Marcelo 1993, O fantasma da revolução brasileira, São Paulo: UNESP.
Schwarz, Roberto 1978, O pai de família e outros ensaios, Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra.
Sodré, Nelson Werneck 1973, Introdução à revolução brasileira, São Paulo: Ciências Humanas.
Teles, Maria Amélia de Almeida 1993, Breve história do feminismo no Brasil, São Paulo: Brasiliense.
Trotsky, Leon 1977, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder.
Žižek, Slavoj 2002, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917, London: Verso.
[1] Trotsky 1977.
[2]Apud Langland 2013, p. 212.
[3] Quoted in Ridenti 1993.
[4] Hobsbawm 1990.
[5] Sodré 1973.
[6] Teles 1993.
[7] Schwarz 1978.
[8] Hobsbawm 2000.
[9] Žižek 2002.
