Casey Tilley
Casey Tilley, a fourth-year doctoral degree candidate in Asian studies and comparative literature, received a LASARS for their research titled “Grassroots Ecopoetics in Brazil: Contemporary Cordel on the Life and Death of the Amazon.” The Billerica, Massachusetts, native will investigate archives of environmental discourse for the conservation of the Amazon rainforest from the Library of Congress collections of Brazilian Cordel.
Tilley's research focus is on ecopoetics, including poetic treatments of climate change, development (counter)discourses, and regional grassroots and experimental literatures in mainland China, Taiwan and Brazil. Tilley is working on the project with the support of their faculty sponsor, Sarah Townsend, associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese.
Cordels, which are pamphlets like chapbooks or zines, are emblematic of Northeast Brazil’s national heritage aesthetic and are important sites of public discourse, according to Tilley.
“In Brazil, whether the Amazon should be conserved as wilderness, opened for extractive industries, or sovereignty returned to Indigenous peoples, isn’t an either-or question but a delicate political one,” Tilley said. “This project hopes to understand the way these ideas are framed and debated, rhetorically and artistically, at [the] local level.”
Tilley’s research sheds light on the extensive history of mutual entanglement between Brazil’s inhabitants and the Amazon: During the boom of the Brazilian rubber industry, many of the workers that moved or were conscripted into the industry came from the arid Brazil Northeast — a pattern that has repeated during rushes for wealth, said Tilley.
“In times and places where literacy was not a given, cordels would be performed aloud at markets,” Tilley said. “The combination of written-aural-visual media was both a way to inform one’s peers of national and world news but also a venue where people otherwise distant from political power could comment, debate and represent their own agendas.
“I’m interested in how the familiar ‘sides’ of environmental debates are represented [in cordels]. After reading work by poets based in Amazonia and cordels on conversation of fragile ecosystems in the Northeast, it was intuitive to wonder how cordellistas would approach the most internationally known environmental topic in Brazil.”
The LASARS has allowed Tilley to travel to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. to review Brazilian cordels within the American Folklife Center. Working with the center’s librarians, Tilley has familiarized themself with more than 10,000 archived cordels this summer and organized which cordels they will follow through with leads.
“[Using] the past few decades of this centuries-old poetic form, I hope to show the state of environmental — including sustainability and development — discourses in Brazil as they have taken shape at the grassroots level, including that by and for people outside the Amazon.”
Applications for Liberal Arts Student Awards for Research on Sustainability
Applications for the next round of Liberal Arts Student Awards for Research on Sustainability open on Aug. 1 and will be accepted through Oct. 15. More information, including the link to apply, can be found on the Liberal Arts Sustainability Council’s website.
‘Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet’
Sustainability is the theme of the current offering in the College of the Liberal Arts’ “Moments of Change” initiative — an undertaking that brings students, faculty, staff, and alumni together to explore what it means to live through historic and contemporary times of change. Throughout the 2023-24 academic year, “Moments of Change: Creating a Livable Planet” will examine the many aspects of sustainability and highlight the ongoing work of the Liberal Arts Sustainability Council and students, faculty and staff in that regard.