Signs of Coloniality in Brazilian Communicational Approaches: the first quadrennium of the papers from the proceedings of Compós (2000-2003)

Abstract

This article investigates the extent to which signs of modern European and North American coloniality are present in the field of Communication in Brazil. It considers that there is coloniality of Latin American knowledge, delimited in Brazilian communicational approaches, elaborated and systematized in the papers from the proceedings of the first Compós quadrennium (2000-2003), a period not studied in other papers. The event is one of the main events in the country. The investigation considers, above all, the nationality category, as well as the authors’ genders and their skin color, which reverberate such coloniality. The analysis of the manually collected data was carried out using R programming language and paid attention to the most cited works and authors for each category. The results show the prevalence of European and North American white male authors in such references.

Keywords
Latin America; Coloniality; Compós; Epistemology of Communication; Communication Theory

Resumo

O artigo investiga em que medida indícios da colonialidade moderna europeia ocidental e norte-americana se fazem presentes na área de Comunicação no Brasil. O trabalho considera que há colonialidade do saber latino-americano, delimitado nas abordagens comunicacionais brasileiras, elaboradas e sistematizadas nos anais do primeiro quadriênio (2000-2003) do Encontro Compós, período não estudado por outros trabalhos. O evento é um dos principais da área no país. A investigação considera, sobretudo, a categoria de nacionalidade, bem como o gênero e a cor da pele das autorias, que reverberam tal colonialidade. A análise dos dados, coletados manualmente, foi feita por meio da linguagem de programação R e atentou para obras e autores/as mais citados/as, conforme as categorias. Os resultados evidenciam a prevalência de referências de autores brancos, europeus e norte-americanos.

Palavras-chave
América Latina; Colonialidade; Compós; Epistemologia da Comunicação; Teorias da Comunicação

Resumen

El artículo investiga hasta qué punto la evidencia de la colonialidad europea occidental y norteamericana moderna están presentes en el área de la Comunicación en Brasil. El trabajo considera que existe una colonialidad del conocimiento latinoamericano, delimitado en los enfoques comunicacionales brasileños, elaborados y sistematizados en los anales del primer cuatrienio (2000-2003) del Compós, período no estudiado por otros trabajos. El evento es uno de los principales del país. La investigación considera, sobre todo, la categoría de nacionalidad, así como el género y el color de piel de los autores, que reverberan tal colonialidad. El análisis de los datos, recogidos manualmente, se realizó a través del lenguaje de programación R y se intentó mirar las obras y autores más citados, según las categorías. Los resultados muestran la prevalencia de referencias de autores blancos, europeos y norteamericanos.

Palabras clave
América Latina; Colonialidad; Compós; Epistemología de la comunicación; Teorías de la Comunicación

Introduction

The empirical and epistemological scopes of the term “communication” are linked to its different meanings, historically colonized by Western European and North American approaches. As we have seen before (SALGADO; MATTOS, 2019), according to modern European and North American colonization,¹ the term takes on transmissive, informational and technical meanings. Therefore, to the detriment of its etymological meanings, which date from the 14th or 15th century, of common action, sharing, breaking with isolation, gathering and relationships (community, spiritual or religious and rhetorical meanings), the meanings prevalent during modernity (transmissive, informational and technical) are those arising from its anthropocentric and mediacentric coloniality.

With the advent of the media, at the beginning of the 20th century, the term “communication” has been tied to the transmission of information. This impacts on how this word is understood as professional skills in the area, who come to understand it as a tool for a specific purpose or an ordering with rhetorical effectiveness. However, it is worth noting that such coloniality neither takes place nor takes effect in Communication alone, but extends to the Social and Human Sciences, configuring a dominant paradigm, according to Ballestrin (2013) and Quiroz (2016). In view of this, during modernity, marked by rationalist and humanist thinking, there is the coloniality of power, of knowledge and of being.

The coloniality of power and knowledge form a westernized system, which is recognized by science as a valid political and intellectual project, since it is superimposed on other non-colonizing voices (European, white, male, western, northern). The modalities of coloniality, then, delimit subordinates and superiors. In this sense, coloniality builds and imposes a knowledge based on the suppression of the languages and cultures of those who are colonized. This political and economic project establishes, through coercion, a way of thinking that is determined by the colonizers.

We consider coloniality as the concept originally proposed by Quijano (1992, p. 12, our translation): “a colonization of the imagery of the dominated. That is, [which] acts in the interiority of this imagery. To some extent, it is part of it”.² The colonizers’ speech despises, looks down upon, diminishes and voids the intellectuality and knowledge of the colonized. As Ballestrin (2013) summarizes, the project of legitimizing imperial power at economic and political levels forges epistemological paradigms in the Human and Social Sciences based on the generation of identities of the colonizers and colonized. As a result, there is a historical tendency to prefer White, Western European and North American male authors when it comes to the construction of thought. This configures what we consider and investigate as evidence of European and North American coloniality in thought.

In Communication, according to Quiroz (2016), European and North American approaches are characterized by vertical, unilateral and paternalistic models. For Villanueva (2015, 2016), it is “Western Communication” that privileges the emission and effects. In our view, such approaches treat communication through the impossibility of dialogue, confrontation, dissent, controversy, disagreement and resistance. This reinforces and reiterates the historically dominant transmissive, informational and technical meanings of “communication” established and consolidated during the first half of the 20th century. During that time, mass communication was the subject of American functionalist and positivist investigation, and that is why the technical and informative meanings are linked to the word “communication”, reinforcing the term’s coloniality.

Modern coloniality is reviewed by the Critical Theory, formulated by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer – exponents of the Frankfurt School, between 1920 and 1950. In the 1970s, the Latin American thought reviewed the cultural dependence and ideological reproduction attributed to mass communication and emphasized the dialogic dimension of the communication process (BELTRÁN, 1986; QUIROZ, 2016; VILLANUEVA, 2016).

As a premise, we consider that there are indications, in Brazilian communicational approaches, of Western European and North American coloniality based on the gender and skin color of the authors investigated, as well as their nationalities. We hypothesize that scientific works in Communication reverberate the preferential tendency for European and North American epistemologies in citations of authors from these regions, especially white men. Thus, evidence of European and North American coloniality will be investigated based on gender, skin color and nationality.

Even though it is possible to consider the configuration of Latin American thought since the mid-1960s (BERGER, 2018), the authors who initially integrated this proposal (Luís Ramiro Beltrán, Paulo Freire, Mário Kaplún, Juan Díaz Bordenave and Armand Mattelart) are rarely or not even mentioned in the corpus of this research. Jésus Martín-Barbero is an exception. Nevertheless, the goal of this article is to investigate the extent to which signs of modern Western European and North American coloniality are present in scientific works in the area of Communication in Brazil. For this, we will examine 483 texts presented in 16 Divisions at the annual Compós meeting during the quadrennium from 2000 to 2003. All of these texts are freely available on the event’s official website.³

The period was selected to differentiate this work from other works dedicated to specific periods and Divisions. Martino (2014), for example, dedicated himself to research only the Epistemology of Communication Division between 2001 and 2013. França et al. (2016, 2018, 2019), in turn, dealt with the different Compós Divisions from 2005 to 2016, as did Simões et al. (2019, 2020). Lemos and Bittencourt (2020), on the other hand, only investigated texts presented in 2018 and 2019 in the Epistemology of Communication Division.

Despite the short time period selected, this is the first approximation to the collected texts and a first attempt at data processing and analysis. The method used has an experimental character, and the fact that it is being tested for the first time in this article makes it possible to identify its limits and the necessary adjustments.

This paper has five more sections. The first presents a brief history of Latin American communicational approaches and coloniality up until the present. The second section details the method used and explains the collection procedures, decision-making, systematization procedures, treatment and data visualization. The third section presents the broader results, referring to the ten most cited authors and works from 2000 to 2003. The fourth section indicates and analyzes the percentages related to the genders and nationalities of the most cited authors of this period. The fifth and final section, the final considerations, summarizes the paper and highlights limitations and possible developments for future research.

History of Latin American communicational approaches

There is no consensus among Latin American Communication researchers about the existence of a School or communicational thinking on the continent, although the critical perspective covered the trajectory of scholars in the area, in the mid-1960s, as a result of previous years. In this regard, Berger (2018, p. 38) states that “understanding the political dimension of communication engendered the production of a genuinely regional critique”⁴ and the expansion of capitalism in the face of military interventions in several countries. This has exploited peripheral nations by imposing values, lifestyles, ways of thinking and cultural products.

The sociocultural, economic and political submission of Latin American countries to capitalist countries boosted the production of various concepts, theories and approaches aimed at denouncing and criticizing this submission, such as the Cultural Dependency Theory. Alternatives of communication with the popular sectors of the region were proposed, with different denominations: popular communication, community communication, and horizontal and dialogic communication, among others. In this direction, approaches committed to social transformation, democratization and ideological criticism of importing products, knowledge and sociocultural practices were being constructed. Thus, “[the] Latin American turnabout took place with the conjunction of the thinking of researchers with very different and physically distant backgrounds: Antonio Pasquali, Luiz Ramiro Béltran, Paulo Freire and Mario Kaplún, who were joined by Juan Dias Bordenave and Armand joined Mattelart [...]” (BERGER, 2018, p. 39).

Other perspectives were elaborated, such as the semiotic and anthropological studies of Argentinians (Eliseo Verón and Héctor Shumucler), Peruvians (Rafael Roncacliolo and Maria Afaro) and Chileans (Fernando Reys Matta, Juan Somavía and Diego Portales) (BERGER, 2018). We highlight the approaches that intertwine communication and culture, such as the studies by the Spaniard Jésus Martín-Barbero, the Argentinian Néstor García Canclini and the Mexican Guillermo Orozco Gómez. They became a reference for Latin American researchers and had an impact on Latin American studies in other places. Despite this importance, in this work we question whether such authors and contributions are present in Brazilian communicational approaches.

With that said, we return to the modalities of coloniality (of power, of knowledge and of being), proposed by Quiroz (2016). By paying attention to the term “colonial”, Ballestrin (2013) shows that modern coloniality affects the borders of gender, ethnicity and race, in different oppressive situations that extol the ideal of the white race’s purity. The author emphasizes that not all situations of oppression stem from coloniality. In this dynamic, colonial relations are antagonistic, as they prevent the others (non-whites, females, non-Europeans) from being themselves, impacting on the conforming of identities, since the other is silenced. In short, “coloniality is the necessary dark side of modernity; it is its inseparably constitutive part” (MIGNOLO, 2003 apud BALLESTRIN, 2013, p. 100). Thus, there is no modernity without coloniality and no capitalist world-economy without the Americas (QUIJANO, 2000 apud BALLESTRIN, 2013).

In the area of Communication, Chakravartty et al. (2018), between 1990 and 2016, looked at the white/black polarity derived from modern epistemic coloniality in 12 English-language journals registered with the National Communication Association (NCA) and the International Communication Association (ICA). They concluded that non-white researchers continue to be underrepresented in citations, publications, and editorial posts. The results range from 5% to 32% of authors of color cited, according to each person’s surname and photo. Over the decades, racism and sexism have been reinforced in the citations and writing of scientific articles in the area.

Chakravartty et al. (2018) point out that the articles from related fields also perpetuate the “whiteness” found in texts about Communication. Despite the relative growth of non-white researchers in Academia, once the privilege in choosing authors to be cited falls to canonical colonizing knowledge, racial centrality decreases.

In Brazil, we did not identify any work that focused on the percentages related to the authors’ skin colors or genders at events in the area, such as the annual meetings of the National Association of Graduate Programs in Communication (Compós),⁵ and it was due to this that we carried out this research. The event was chosen for its importance and relevance in terms of its geographic and thematic scope, as it brings together different researchers and Divisions from different Graduate Programs in Communication throughout Brazil.

The path taken

The method uses the review of specific literature on coloniality to contextualize the readers and open space for analysis. Likewise, we based ourselves on the simple descriptive analysis of the data, which were manually collected in order to avoid missing information in the Compós database.⁶ Several texts did not present a list of authors in the References section, but rather in footnotes or just in the body of the text. Furthermore, several texts had spelling errors or lacked information regarding the cited co-authors and the titles of the works (only mentioning authors).

We systematized the data in a spreadsheet and ordered the references (names, if co-authored or not, gender, nationality, title of the cited work, title of the work presented at the event, the corresponding Division and the year of presentation) in respective columns for each metadata. To identify gender and nationality, we searched Google, Google Scholar, Google Books, Wikipedia, Lattes Curriculum and the articles and/or books and book chapters cited in each text. It was often not possible to identify such data. We, therefore, systematized only authors whose data (at least one) was available or could be found through these search methods.

In order to identify the gender, we first considered the name. When in doubt, we used Google’s image resource to visualize the author’s face. As for nationality, we considered their birthplace, even if the author has developed an academic career elsewhere. When it was not possible to find this data, we chose the author’s current place of employment or their academic trajectory. We also standardized the names of authors and works – those that only had a title were completed with a subtitle.

We chose not to collect data on the authorship of the main texts presented in the Divisions, as this would require a greater effort and a larger team. Furthermore, other aforementioned authors had already done this. Data processing and the production of results (occurrences, hierarchy, percentages) were performed using specific formulas created in the R language programming and using the R Studio software.

Most cited authors and works

Table 1 presents the ten most cited authors from 2000 to 2003 for all Divisions. We considered the multiple occurrence of authors for the analyzed data and the results achieved, since citing the same author in the same text indicates that different works by this same author were used. This means that the author must be counted according to the number of times they were mentioned in the same article, which may include self-citations.

Table 1
The ten most cited authors - Compós - 2000 to 2003 - Brazil – R Studio

Position	Author	Occurrences	Nationality
1	BOURDIEU, P.	95	France
2	LÉVY, P.	82	Tunisia
3	HABERMAS, J.	80	Germany
4	BARBERO, J. M.	79	Spain
5	FOUCAULT, M.	73	France
6	BARTHES, R.	53	France
7	ECO, U.	52	Italy
8	HALL, S.	51	Jamaica
9	BAUDRILLARD, J.	50	France
10	BENJAMIN, W.	50	Germany

• Source: research data, 2020.

There is no woman among the ten most cited authors. The most cited women, the French Michèlle Mattelart and the Brazilian Lúcia Santaella, are respectively in 31st and 32nd place (out of 3,537 positions by different authors), with 24 mentions each. The first one appears as a co-author to the Belgian Armand Mattelart in the work História das teorias da comunicação. The only black man on the list is the Jamaican-British Stuart Hall. Such aspects evidence the coloniality of Brazilian communicational approaches in the first online quadrennium of the Compós annals by European and North American white men.

As shown in Table 1, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is in first place, mentioned 95 times. His works that stand out, in due order, are O Poder Simbólico, Sobre a televisão: a influência do jornalismo e os jogos olímpicos, A Economia das Trocas Simbólicas and A Economia das Trocas Linguísticas: o que falar quer dizer. The first work is the most cited in the Communication and Politics Division and in the Communication Strategies and Policies Division. This indicates that the discussions about politics in the period focus mainly on the different ways of exercising power and on the fact that symbolic power is an invisible power.

In second place is Pierre Lévy, a philosopher and sociologist of Tunisian origin with a consolidated academic career in France. His most cited works are As Tecnologias da Inteligência: o futuro do pensamento na era da informática, Cibercultura and O que é o virtual?. The Divisions that most cite these works are Communication and Technological Society, Communication and Sociability, Communication and Digital Poetics, Informational Technologies for Communication and Society, and Journalism Studies. Pierre Lévy is the most cited author in different Divisions, as his publications deal with how technologies, cyberculture and the virtual affect the modes of sociability, the aesthetic dimensions of digital communication and journalistic practices and subjects.

In third place we see the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas. His most cited works are Mudança estrutural da esfera pública: investigações quanto a uma categoria da sociedade burguesa, Teoria da Ação Comunicativa and Técnica e Ciência como Ideologia. The first work is most cited in the Communication and Politics Division, and the second is most cited in the Epistemology of Communication Division, which also cites the third work. The results show that the discussion around politics is complemented with the notion of the bourgeois public sphere, treated as a sociological category historically produced by capitalism, and the modern social structures resulting from it. In terms of epistemology, the discussion focuses on the notion of “communicative action” in the critical wake of society, which implies communicative rationality. It is an attempt to explain the paradoxes of modernity, linking them to the real life.

In fourth place is the Spanish semiotician, philosopher and anthropologist Jésus Martín-Barbero, with a strong presence in Colombia. The work Dos meios às mediações: comunicação, cultura e hegemonia is the most cited, followed by Televisión y melodrama: géneros y lecturas de la telenovela en Colombia and then by the book Os exercícios do ver: hegemonia audiovisual e ficção televisiva, written with Germán Rey. The Divisions that most use these works are, respectively, Media and Reception and Epistemology of Communication. In fact, the discussion about media and reception is guided by the propositions of Martín-Barbero, who emphasizes the incidences of multiple mediations in communication processes. There are, as subjects of study favored by this author, television and telenovela, which are also favored in Media and Reception, and which influences analytical choices.

In fifth place is the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The works As palavras e as coisas: uma arqueologia das Ciências Humanas, A Ordem do Discurso and A Arqueologia do Saber are the most cited in the following Divisions: Production of Meaning in the Media, Communication and the Field of the Unconscious, Communication and Culture, and Communication and Technological Society. In his works, Michel Foucault examines contemporary problems, focusing on the question of power, knowledge, the subject and discourse. Other French male authors found were Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, respectively in sixth and ninth place. From Italy, only Umberto Eco appears on the list. From Jamaica we see Stuart Hall, the only black man on the list. There are no Latin American men or women among the most cited authors.

Important authors in the formulation of Latin American communicational thinking, such as Luis Ramiro Beltrán, Paulo Freire, Mario Kaplún and Juan Díaz Bordenave do not appear on the list of the ten most cited authors. The first, third and fourth are not even mentioned. The second, Paulo Freire, is mentioned seven times. Belgian author Armand Mattelart has 30 occurrences, a number seven times higher than Paulo Freire. This indicates invisibility and no foundation of Brazilian communicational thinking.

Table 2 presents the most cited works, considering their versions in different languages. We chose to mention the names of the works in Portuguese. As we will explain, not all authors of the most cited works correspond to the most cited authors of the period, as different works by the same author may be cited more, and this number can exceed the times that the same work was cited. On the other hand, when a work is cited more often, it indicates that the same author is limited to the most cited work(s), indicating little variety of citations of other works by the same author or few citations of these other works by the same author in different texts.

Table 2
The ten most cited works - Compós - 2000 to 2003 - Brazil

Work	Authors	Citations
Dos meios às mediações...	Jesús Martín-Barbero	35
Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem	Mikhail Bakhtin	21
Mudança estrutural da esfera pública	Jürgen Habermas	21
Tecnologias da Inteligência	Pierre Lévy	20
Cibercultura	Pierre Lévy	19
O que é o virtual?	Pierre Lévy	18
Sobre a televisão...	Pierre Bourdieu	18
Teorias da Comunicação	Mauro Wolf	14
A construção social da realidade	Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann	13
Teoria da ação comunicativa	Jürgen Habermas	11
A ordem do discurso	Michel Foucault	11

• Source: research data, 2020.

The work Dos meios às mediações… was an important reference in the texts at Compós, with 35 references during the period, followed by Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem by Mikhail Bakhtin, and by Mudança estrutural da esfera pública by Jürgen Habermas, with 21 citations each. Three works by Pierre Lévy appear on the list, each with a demonstrative number of citations. What stands out in Table 2 are works by authors such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Mauro Wolf, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who are not among the most cited authors, as their works (same title) are more often cited in different texts, whereas for the most cited authors, more distinct works (several titles) are cited. Again, in the most cited works, there are indications of coloniality, with an incidence of males, whites and Europeans, with no mention of women or black people.

Most cited gender and nationalities

We found 6,714 men and 1,373 women when we searched for multiple occurrences, that is, when the same author is cited more than once. Men are cited approximately five times more than women, which reinforces the masculine and paternalistic dimension of modern coloniality presented earlier.

When we look at the number of men and women cited in multiple occurrences per year, we get the systematized data in Table 3. The proportion between men and women cited from 2000 to 2002 shows a slight decrease from 4.92 to 4.82 in one year and then another reduction to 4.68 in another year. However, from 2002 to 2003, there is a jump from 4.68 to 5.15, indicating an increase in the number of citations of men in relation to women. The proportion of approximately five times more remains throughout the period. With this, it is possible to conclude that women represent only 20% of the citations for this period.

Table 3
Number of citations by gender, per year - multiple occurrences - 2000 to 2003 - Brazil

Year	Sex	Number of citations	Proportion
2000	M	1668	4,92
	F	339
2001	M	1954	4,82
	F	405
2002	M	1489	4,68
	F	318
2003	M	1603	5,15
	F	311

• Source: research data, 2020.

Table 4 presents the most cited nationalities. The nationality of the same author can be counted more than once if the author has been cited more times. In first place is Brazil, where the Compós Meeting is held in Portuguese, the official language. The same data indicates a variety of Brazilian works and authors that have not been cited in other texts. This increases the total number of Brazilian authors and their occurrences, impacting nationality and gender related data. In other words, the prevalence of Brazilian nationality indicates, at the same time, multiple occurrences and an exponential number of one-time occurrences. On the other hand, the most cited foreign authors have an even higher incidence of multiple occurrences.

Table 4
The ten most cited nationalities - Compós - 2000 to 2003 - Brazil

Position	Country	Occurrences
1	Brazil	2304
2	France	1441
3	United States	1424
4	England	477
5	Germany	473
6	Italy	237
7	Spain	235
8	Argentina	158
9	Canada	129
10	Austria	112

• Source: research data, 2020.

The most cited male Brazilian authors are Arlindo Machado, André Lemos, Wilson Gomes, Antonio Albino C. Rubim and Muniz Sodré. The most cited female Brazilian authors are Lúcia Santaella, Janice Caiafa, Maria Immacolata Vassalo de Lopes, Vera França and Simone Pereira de Sá.

Six European countries predominate – France (2nd), England (4th), Germany (5th), Italy (6th), Spain (7th) and Austria (10th) – followed by two North American countries – the United States (3rd) and Canada (9th), on a list with 76 positions. Besides Brazil, the only Latin American country on the list of the ten most cited nationalities is Argentina, with Néstor García Canclini, Eliseo Verón and Beatriz Sarlo.

Other Latin American countries include Mexico (17th), Colombia (20th), Chile (21st), Cuba (42nd), Uruguay (44th), Venezuela (52nd), Ecuador (53rd), Puerto Rico (60th), Bolivia (63rd) and Panama (71st). The last two have only one mention in the entire corpus. Among the most cited Latin American authors, apart from Brazil, we have the Chilean Francisco Varela, the Mexican Guillermo Orozco Gómez and the Chilean Humberto Maturana. In fifth place we have the Colombian Germán Rey and the Mexicans Jesús Galindo Cáceres and Jorge A. G. Sánchez. In terms of author variety by Latin American country, Mexico has the most diverse group of cited authors. In contrast, Latin American women, apart from Brazilian women, are hardly cited, with citations ranging from two (only Sònia Munõz) to one (the others).

Even though the ten most cited authors, with the exception of Stuart Hall, are European, Brazilians are the most cited authors overall. This indicates a strong tendency to cite national references, such as in self-citations, which is an aspect that we did not explore in this work, but that is strongly present in the data. The results also point to the predominance of one-time citations of works by Brazilians as highlighted before. This indicates the absence of schools and few standout authors in Brazil.

In search of the most cited male French authors, we found Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, among the top five. The first four, all white men, appear on the list of the ten most cited authors, for all nationalities, during the entire period. Regarding the most cited female French authors, Michèle Mattelart is in the first place.

As for male North American authors, there is John B. Thompson (often credited as being English), George P. Landow, Frederic Jameson, Michael Schudson, and Steven Johnson. The search for female North American authors resulted in Sherry Turkle, Gaye Tuchman, Donna Haraway, Nancy Fraser and Janice Radway. No North American author is among the ten most cited. All North American authors are white.

The most cited male English authors are Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, David Morley, James Curran and Gregory Bateson. The most cited female English authors are Dorothy Hobson, Valerie Walkerdine, Charlotte Brundson, Susan Blackmore and Marie Gillespie. The discrepancy between the percentages of English authors is remarkable because while the variation in men ranges from 34 to 11 citations, the variation in women ranges from 4 to 2 citations for the first five authors. All English authors are white.

Germany stands out in fifth place and presents, among the most cited male authors: Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Niklas Luhmann and George Simmel. The first two appear on the list of the ten most cited and belong to the Frankfurt School. It is worth noting the influence of such authors on Brazilian communicational thinking through philosophy and sociology. Regarding the female German authors, the main one is Hannah Arendt (17 citations), while the others have two citations (two authors) or one citation (the others). The results, again, reveal evidence of Western European and North American coloniality in Brazilian communicational thinking.

Final considerations

The work investigated the evidence of Western European and North American coloniality in Brazilian communicational approaches based on 483 texts, presented between 2000 and 2003, from 16 different Divisions at Compós. Likewise, this article discussed the extent to which such indications are present in these scientific works in the area of Communication, which were analyzed through three categories that show the modality of coloniality of knowledge: gender, nationality and skin color.

The results point to diverse authors and nationalities, with a predominance of white Western European and North American men. Among the European countries, France, Germany, Spain and Italy stand out. The most cited works refer to authors from these countries, but also include authors from Russia (Bakhtin), Austria (Berger) and Slovenia (Luckmann). Among North Americans, those from the United States are prominent. Only one black man, the Jamaican-English Stuart Hall, is on the list of the ten most cited authors, despite not appearing as the author of the most cited works. There is no mention of women, neither black nor white, on the lists of the ten most cited authors or works. Therefore, these results show the modern coloniality of white Western European men and North American men in Brazilian communicational thinking between 2000 and 2003.

As a limitation, we point out the lack of complete data on the search engines about referenced authors used in the texts presented at Compós, as well as spelling errors and lack of information, regarding the authors’ names or titles of works. Likewise, there is no standard, as many references are found in footnotes or in the body of the text. This makes it difficult to create a specific formula for producing results via R, which will be tested in future investigations together with a formula for automating the collection. The vastness of the corpus also makes it difficult, but not impossible, to standardize the names and titles of works.

As for possible developments, we highlight the need to invest in meta-researches that address the theme of coloniality in Brazilian and Latin American communication, since studies of this nature only focus on the period between 1960 and 1980. Another undertaking of ours is the expansion of the corpus from 2004 to 2019, which totals 20 years of communicational approaches in the proceedings presented during Compós. Certainly, from 2003 until now, much has changed, and hence the effort to expand the temporal scope of our research. We do recognize, however, that the authors and works most cited in the analyzed texts are still important references in the field of Communication in Brazil.

• 1
  A period that began with the Great Navigations and the Age of Discovery (between the 15th century and the end of the 16th century), consolidated by the Industrial Revolution and the affirmation of capitalism as a world economic system.
• 2
  Consiste, en primer término, en una colonización del imaginario de los dominados. Es decir, actúa en la interioridad de ese imaginario. En una medida, es parte de él.
• 3
  Compós was created on June 16, 1991. The works presented in years prior to 2000 are not available on the event’s official website, and are, therefore, not considered in this research. Available at: https://www.compos.org.br/anais_encontros.php. Accessed on: 14 Aug. 2020
• 4
  All citations originally in Portuguese used in this article have been freely translated to help in the understanding of the text.
• 5
  Although we recognize other manifestations of gender, we consider the nomenclatures “male” and “female” for this category to avoid discussions about gender issues, which is not the focus of this work, as well as to facilitate the first stage of testing and experimentation.
• 6
  We accessed the data collected between 2006 and 2015, according to the link indicated by Simões et al. (2020), as a model of systematization and collection. However, they present configuration errors and a lack of references, not mentioned by such authors.

Referências

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Edited by

Editora: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 May 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  02 Dec 2020
• Accepted
  13 Feb 2022