EdUSP highlights Professor David Jackson’s book Palavras em Rebeldia (2023), an anthology that highlights the multiple dimensions of the works of Patrícia Galvão

Yale’s Professor K. David Jackson is today one of the most important scholars studying the works of the Brazilian writer Patrícia Galvão (1910-62), also known as Pagu. In November 2023, EdUSP released his book Palavras em Rebeldia (2023), with texts from the many phases of Pagu’s journalism. In addition to Patrícia Galvão’s journalistic production, Jackson’s anthology also includes documents from her trail in 1936, therefore offering a perspective from her political travails. In an interview with the publisher Edusp, Jackson shares more about the journey that turned him into one of the most important scholars of the work of Patrícia Galvão. Palavras em Rebeldia (2023) reveals Pagu’s importance to Brazilian journalism and literature. It is worth noting that EdUSP will release four more books with the writer’s complete journalism. The first, Pagu e a Política, is now available as an ebook.

The interest of Professor Jackson in the works of Patrícia Galvão started unexpectedly around the 1970s, when he was doing research in Brazil at the Institute of Brazilian Studies at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and writing a thesis about Oswald Andrade. Through his studies of Oswald Andrade, he learned about Pagu’s novel Parque Industrial (1933) by following a footnote in a book on the history of Brazilian literature. Curious about the title, Jackson asked a colleague to make a copy for him of the only copy that existed in São Paulo’s Municipal Library. The title was then included for translation in a series of women’s novels at the University of Nebraska, and he and Dr. Elizabeth Jackson then translated it into English, finally publishing it in 1993. Early on, in 1978, a Brazilian journalist at the University of Texas, where David Jackson was a professor, published his article on Patrícia Galvão in Rio de Janeiro’s main newspaper, the Jornal do Brasil. Lastly, in the 1990s in Florianópolis, Ademir Demarchi, a postgraduate student at UFSC –who was at the time Professor David Jackson’s assistant– made copies in the archives of the Tribuna de Santos of hundreds of journalistic columns by Pagu.

This string of coincidences sparked Professor David Jackson’s interest in Pagu’s journalistic work. It was then that he started trying to find as much as he could about other columns through archival research in Brazil and through directing the typing of material and preparation of a manuscript on Pagu’s journalism both at the University of Texas and at Yale. At this stage and because of the colossal amount of material he was working with, Professor Jackson divided the work into four volumes: the first on Pagu and politics; the second on art and literature; the third on theater; and in a fourth volume, an anthology of world literature.

In Palavras em Rebeldia (2023), Professor David Jackson argues that Pagu became better known when Parque Industrial was republished in 1981. Interestingly, she was recently honored at the FLIP (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty) as author of the year. When asked to comment on what could have driven this delay in recognizing the importance of Pagu’s works, Jackson said that the lack of attention to Pagu is similar to the lack of attention to modernism at the time, a situation that would only improve with the greater development of Brazilian universities in the 1980s and 1990s. He added, however, that the lack of attention towards Pagu does not mean that she was not well known by the entire modernist group. Now Parque Industrial (1933) is well known and has been included in the list of important novels of modernism.

According to the critics, one of the interesting features of Palavras em Rebeldia (2023) is that it includes some of the police cases Pagu went through. When asked about this decision, Jackson argued that he received this material by coincidence, and that, once in his power, he thought it was important to show what she went through in the late 1930s at the hands of the Vargas regime and the National Security Court.

After commenting on the process of selecting the works that would go into Palavras em Rebeldia (2023) as well as on Patrícia Galvão’s practice of using many different pseudonyms in her writings, Jackson offered a reflection of what we can learn today from analyzing the life and works of Pagu: “I think it’s important to emphasize that Pagu was an intellectual, she was one of the great minds in Brazil during the period. Analyst, observer, critic, remaining independent. She believed strongly in education, in the value of reading for everyone and not just for intellectuals. She thought that by doing this people would rekindle their lives and understand things much more. […] She wanted to bring great literature to Brazil to form a global vision. I think Pagu was very Brazilian in this sense, because she wanted Brazilians to be very well-informed, to be readers, to be enlightened. And in her journalism she shows great sympathy for the people, for the proletariat, and also has great expectations and hopes. […] [Pagu] believed in herself by participating in everything as a militant, while commenting critically on literature, arts, and society…”