Tal como somos: a configuração da identidade cultural latino-americana

Abstract

This work aims to examine the setting of Latin-american cultural identity towards televisual production, as it is presented in public, cultural and/or educational medias. The starting point is the concept that Latin-americanity questions are poorly approached by Brazilian private media, considering the multiple interests on stake at each broadcast. The question of identity is approached from Landowski, Bauman, Hall, Canclini, Martín-Barbero and Sarlo, reckoning that it is built based on difference, through interaction with the other and, also, it is defined as such due to its historical development. Having the discursive semiotics of European inspiration as theoretic-methodological basis, the premises of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Greimas, Fontanille, Duarte and Castro, that are widely developed by the COMTV research group, are presented. As empirical objective, the limited TV series Os latino-americanos, produced by Televisión América Latina (TAL), was selected as research corpus. TAL unites audiovisual content from several Latin America independent producers, releasing these productions in its website and distributing them to associated TV channels all over the continent, majorly public, cultural and/or educational ones. In Brazil, the limited series aired on TV Escola, Canal Futura and TV Câmara. The chosen program has a factual profile and it has twelve episodes, each of them showing the identity of a Latin America country. In this sense, the general objective is to verify which traits are common to these different settings, and responsible for the Latin-americanity identity representation.