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Never before have we discussed and published so much on “the contemporary.” Drawing from the work of anthropologists Johannes Fabian and Marc Augé and Brazilian novelist Bernardo Carvalho, this essay theorizes contemporaneity as the active sharing of time that informs the transnational flow of culture in our global present, and takes a critical stance in this fashionable debate: critical of Giorgio Agamben’s attempt to identify the contemporary to a mode of “untimeliness,” but also wary of any concept of contemporaneity that does not take seriously the need to think the present beyond the idea of a history of the West.

The large gatherings of youths from impoverished urban peripheries in the shopping malls of São Paulo and Rio, known as rolezinhos (little strolls), in the first two months of 2014 and their disputed relation to the wave of political protests in Brazilian cities since June 2013 became the topic of heated debates among intellectuals and journalists in Brazil. Historical parallels ranging from nineteenth-century Paris to colonial Korea help situate the rolezinho phenomenon in a transnational history of urban strolling and to problematize its ambiguous politicality between ostentatious consumerism and revolutionary practice. Durante os dois primeiros meses de 2014, jovens das periferias urbanas do Rio de Janeiro e de São Paulo formavam grandes aglomerações nos shopping centers daquelas cidades. Conhecidos como rolezinhos, esses grupos foram objeto de intenso debate entre jornalistas e intelectuais que estabeleceram uma relação entre o comportamento daqueles jovens e as manifestações de rua que varreram as cidades brasileiras desde junho de 2013. Paralelos históricos, da Paris novecentista à Coréia colonial, ajudam a situar o fenômeno do rolezinho na história transnacional do passeio. Demais, permite articular o problema da ambigüidade política entre o consumismo ostentatório e a prática revolucionária.

Through deeply divergent strategies, W. J. T. Mitchell's What Do Pictures Want? shares with Mieke Bal's Louise Bourgeois' Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing and Ernst van Alphen's Art in Mind the attempt to discuss the ways in which theory materializes in concrete, nontextual objects. Erber analyzes their different positions on the matter, against the background of a questioning of the "object" contemporaneously developed by two avant-garde artists in the 1960s: Hélio Oiticica, from Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo-based Akasegawa Genpei.

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