KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Aug. 10, 2022 \u2013 On summer break in Brazil, David Faflik has mixed work and play \u2013 depending on how you might define each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Faflik, an English professor at the 溏心vlog免费B站, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in spring 2020 to conduct research and teach in Brazil. But COVID-19 was just taking hold around the world, so travel to Brazil was out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThey postponed it multiple times \u2013 at least two, maybe three,\u201d says Faflik. \u201cIt didn\u2019t really look like it was going to happen at one point. They kept reopening the window and finally they said if you received the award in this timeframe, your deadline is March 2023 to use it \u2026 or lose it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, in May, Faflik, a specialist in 19th<\/sup> century American literature and culture and author of five books, traveled to Belo Horizonte, a city of about 2.7 million in the province of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, to teach at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and conduct research on two very different book projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Faflik received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair award \u2013 one of the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright Scholar Program \u2013 he planned to use it to research the connection between Benjamin Franklin and Brazil. The story is a chapter in his upcoming book, \u201cReception Histories,\u201d a historical study of the role gift giving and cultural exchange has at times played in the circulation of American literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the two years since winning the award, Faflik was able to do most of the research online through the national archives in Rio de Janeiro, and write much of the book. And he became focused on a new project \u2013 a scholarly look at Brazilian soccer \u2013 or futebol \u2013 and the idea of play in a time of a pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m a lifelong soccer fan,\u201d says Faflik. \u201cI\u2019ve followed the Brazilian game as best I could over the years. Down here it\u2019s o jogo bonito<\/em>, the beautiful game. If you\u2019re a football fan, it\u2019s hard not to know and care about Brazilian football.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Minas Gerais is home to Faflik\u2019s favorite team and the center of the book \u2013 Clube Atl\u00e9tico Mineiro, which he describes as a scrappy, passionate and perennial runner-up that plays in the country\u2019s elite league. The book, \u201cPlus Minas: Profiles in Brazil\u2019s Beautiful Game,\u201d mixes history, memoir and reporting as it explores ideas of play for play\u2019s sake, the joys of soccer, and issues of race and ethnicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019ve long been interested in the idea of writing this book as someone who teaches literature for a living,\u201d says Faflik, who hopes to finish the manuscript before returning to 溏心vlog免费B站 for the fall semester. \u201cA lot of people assume that my work is really a form of play. So, I was thinking of the meaning of play during the pandemic. I\u2019m applying that idea to football and thinking about the emotional sides of the sport through the lens of this particular team, and with Brazil being known as the most passionate footballing nation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Faflik has researched Brazilian soccer and Atl\u00e9tico Mineiro from afar the last two years. But the Fulbright trip to Belo Horizonte has allowed him to do his primary research on the team\u2019s home soil, while also interviewing club executives, players and fans and witnessing the daily passion for the sport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe only way I could make the contacts I needed was to be here. It\u2019s a strange place. It\u2019s the sixth largest city in Brazil. But there\u2019s still a small-town feel. The joke here is that everybody knows somebody who knows somebody,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve used a lot of connections that I’ve made just being here. I\u2019ve had access to the club and I\u2019ve found lots of fans who are enthusiastic about my enthusiasm. I’ve gotten much closer to things than I ever thought possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n For \u201cReception Histories,\u201d Faflik was able to do about three-quarters of the research for the Franklin chapter before coming to Brazil. But what he\u2019s found in public archives in Belo Horizonte has been invaluable. The chapter traces the path of Franklin\u2019s \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s Almanack\u201d to Brazil, where it became a school primer for elementary students in the nation\u2019s government-run schools in the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m a literary scholar, but I think through things historically,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in the way literature moves through the world, quite literally \u2013 the way it circulates, how it came to be, who the different parties are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1800s, Minas Gerais had one of the largest populations of free Blacks of any province in Brazil. After the country\u2019s independence from Portugal in 1822, the \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s Almanack\u201d texts \u2013 donated by upper-class patrons \u2013 was used in the mandatory free public schools to instill a \u201cbourgeois ideology\u201d in the mostly impoverished students, who were largely Black and many former enslaved people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s Almanack,\u201d published between 1732 and 1758 in the U.S., was still popular around the world. It was translated into dozens of languages, because of Franklin\u2019s worldwide fame. In the years after the American Revolution, Faflik says, Franklin was one of the most recognizable Americans in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFranklin is sort of the consummate entrepreneur and he perfects and then corners the market on almanacs. \u2018Poor Richards Almanack\u2019 goes through hundreds of editions in about a 27-year span,\u201d he says. \u201cAt one point, if Americans own books, they own a Bible and \u2018Poor Richard\u2019s Almanack.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In local archives in Brazil, Faflik was able to examine original copies of \u201cPoor Richard\u2019s\u201d and other Franklin reprints, along with administrative records of the public school system in Minas Gerais in the 19th<\/sup> century. He even found a letter written by a student to a man who had donated some of the texts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was records that only exist here,\u201d he says. \u201cIt gave me a very granular sense of what was happening in Minas Gerais classrooms. That\u2019s what I needed to trace the flow of Franklin\u2019s books, what texts were being taught, but more importantly how those texts reached the classrooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStudents who were attending public schools at that time were impoverished and couldn’t afford their own school materials. They couldn’t afford shoes, let alone books,\u201d he adds. \u201cMost of these books were being donated by wealthy, and not by coincidence white well-wishers within the state who were drawn to Franklin’s texts because of the kind of moral and sort of proto-capitalist worldview that was inscribed into them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cReception Histories,\u201d which also explores the circulation of works by Roger Williams, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, is one of Faflik\u2019s most ambitious projects, he says. It looks at literature over a longer historical time period than the mid-1800s, and it goes beyond understanding American culture to ideas of the practice of literary study and the reception of literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen you talk about gifting and literature, it\u2019s kind of a very material way of reminding oneself that, at least for me, literature is about love,\u201d he says. \u201cIf you devote your life to this, you love to read and you want to share that love.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 Aug. 10, 2022 \u2013 On summer break in Brazil, David Faflik has mixed work and play \u2013 depending on how you might define each. Faflik, an English professor at the 溏心vlog免费B站, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in spring 2020 to conduct research and teach in Brazil. 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