Politics as a gate-crasher: literary consecration and publishing controversies in

the Spilt Milk episode (Brazil, 2010)

Abstract
The Brazilian Book Chamber has been promoting the Jabuti Prize since 1959. With
Jos Luiz Goldfarb as its curator between 1991 and 2014, Jabuti has been
consolidated as the most important literary award in the country. While it awards
trophies to authors and publishers from many market niches, including non-fiction,
literature occupies a central place in the media coverage this prize has earned in
recent years.
In 2010, the Fiction Book of the Year award was given to Chico Buarque, for his Leite
Derramado [Spilt Milk] novel, published by the Companhia das Letras. Shortly after, a
heated public debate ensued. The Jabuti Prize was accused of being influenced by
electoral issues, as Buarque had just expressed his support for Dilma Rousseffs
presidential campaign. The accusations came mainly from the Record publishing
house, whose Edney Silvestres Se eu fechar os olhos agora [If I close my eyes now]
was also running for the award, and from Reinaldo Azevedo, another Record author
and columnist of Veja, the largest right-wing magazine in Brazil. This episode revealed
not only the controversies between two major publishing houses, but also the disputes
between So Paulo and Rio de Janeiro as publishing capitals, and between two
fractions of Brazil's intellectual elite that are linked to different political groups.
The main goal of this paper is to describe this debate and analyse its meaning for the
Brazilian publishing field. Our approach to the Spilt Milk episode will consider the
institutionalization of the Jabuti Prize under Goldfarbs curatorship, as well as the
symbolical, economic and political disputes among a generation of publishers that
appeared in Brazil after its return to democracy. The works of Pierre Bourdieu,
Raymond Williams, Sergio Miceli and James English on culture and literature provide
the main theoretical and methodological frameworks for this paper.
Short bio
Jos de Souza Muniz Jr. is pursuing a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of So
Paulo (USP) and is currently doing a doctoral internship at the National University of
Quilmes (UNQ), Argentina. He completed a Bachelor of Social CommunicationPublishing degree and a Master of Communication Sciences program at the USP. His
research is currently focused on the comparative analysis of the main changes in the
Brazilian and Argentinean publishing fields since the 1980s.