The thread and the stitches of the academic literature on the disappearance of people in contemporary Brazil

Abstract

The recent publication of academic works on the disappearance of people in contemporary Brazil has shown that researchers from different disciplines have become increasingly interested in exploring the phenomenon, in contrast with the scarcity of academic studies on the subject in the 2000s. This bibliographical essay is a reflection on the analytic movements made by more recent articles, dissertations and books on the disappearance of people in post-dictatorship Brazil. Initially, the few academic works on the subject focused on describing and trying to define the phenomenal specificity of disappearance. More recently, though, dissertations and books have moved away from treating disappearance as a particular empirical phenomenon in favour of using the term as an analytic category. These works explore the term “disappearance” as a tool capable of threading together, for analytic purposes, phenomena as diverse as slavery, the non-identification of bodies, mass incarceration and emigration, among others. The essay comments on this recent movement and questions its possible effects.