Los textos-río de Giovanna por Maria Victoria Taborelli y Jamila Medina Ríos
Bojear a una ávida lectora como Giovanna Gobbi Alves-Araújo implica sumergirse en una escritura-río que acuna en su lecho lenguajes, temporalidades, bibliotecas transatlánticas y territorios latinoamericanos, meciéndose en un vaivén entre riberas, en un allá y acá que no encuentra reposo en su cuidado. La ecocrítica, las exploraciones andinas de José María Arguedas, la historiografía luso-brasileña y las herencias africana e indígena de su país, iluminadas a través de autores como Castro Alves y Gonçalves Dias son algunos de los afluentes que nutrió con su producción intelectual. Sus conceptualizaciones ensayísticas bebieron de lo teórico y lo poético para imaginar, desde un presente amenazado por la crisis climática, un mañana decolonial arraigado en saberes y repertorios ancestrales o subalternizados que resisten en los márgenes del archivo. Apeló al caos y la cacofonía para vislumbrar las desconexiones y las estrategias de entendimiento entre los imaginarios imperialistas y las cosmovisiones de los pueblos del Nuevo Mundo. Asimismo, en busca de prismas relacionales, se asomó colaborativamente a etimologías inestables, al inaugurar un glosario como “palimpsesto líquido” que integra términos europeos y asiáticos con aproximaciones a vocablos indígenas del Sur y el Norte (desde el quechua y los Krenak brasileños hasta los Lakota y los Cherokee). Sus sueños nos entregaron coordenadas simbióticas que instan a develar, en el espej(e)o longevo de los ríos: “un flujo de memorias en el que el pasado no está muerto, sino que guarda en sí mismo una capacidad movilizadora, generadora de significados en el futuro” (GGG-A). El corpus de Giovanna, como la corriente fluvial, lleva y trae oralidades y escrituras añejas y contemporáneas, invitándonos a derribar la antinomia positivista sujeto-naturaleza para pensarnos otra vez en lo ya dicho y lo por-venir.
Water Bodies by Yaz Murray and Irene Rihuete Varea
Thinking through water bodies as a concept, not just as a category of natural elements, allows us to condense Giovanna's interests in environmental questions and her work on dispossessed communities, collective resistance and racial ecologies. In the Fall of 2024 and the Spring of 2025, Giovanna co-organized a reading group called “Embodied Ecologies: Environmental Humanities in Latin America”. The reading list included environmental dystopic novels, texts about contemporary Latin American critical thought, a book on artistic methodologies that involve the use of mushrooms, a volume on decolonial aesthetics and Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa's book The Falling Sky. This experience was, for the ones privileged enough to attend, a way to witness Giovanna's passion for ecological practices and for the study of Indigenous thought and philosophy. In particular, we want to memorialize how preoccupied she was about the ethics of academic work, raising questions about ways to investigate the knowledge of Indigenous communities through respectful and non-extractive means From nineteenth century literary depictions of rivers in Latin America, with a specific interest in waterfalls, to broader ontologies of water, or how water could be understood as a conceptual tool that traverses bodies and political assumptions, and broader environmental histories, Giovanna's work was full of critical and generative questions.
Four Seasons of Giovanna's River by Felipe Martínez Pinzón
In these two pages I undertake a double task: to celebrate Giovanna's intellectual legacy and, in dialogue with it, to explain a little about the event we are hosting to celebrate her today. I want to begin by thanking all the people in the department. Sarah Thomas, our chair, for all her firm and constant support, great heart and leadership. Artist and archivist Patricia Figueroa, the Hispanic Studies team (Sheena, Candace, Olivia), and especially the students on the committee for Giovanna's life celebration — Yaz, Jamila, Helo, Mari, Flor, Victoria, Roberto, Molly, Sara, Irene, and Henrry. They have made a collage of affections and talents to celebrate Giovanna. In the multiple registers we have had and will have today — the sung, written, read, and painted voice — lies the multiple portrait of Giovanna, but also a picture of the heart and talent of this, her community.
Giovanna joined Hispanic Studies in 2022. She was already a fluvial intellectual, a connector of spaces, languages, traditions, and histories. Her writing, like a river, has several ports of call. I will dock at four very briefly, pausing also at the stations of the program.
First Port. Giovanna, Archivist and Fabulist
As I said, today's program is a collage of voices, a living archive of Giovanna's intellectual legacy and the impact she has had on all of us. That living archive reflects the archivist and fabulist who came to us from Brazil, from São Paulo, after completing her PhD in letters at USP.
Her doctoral thesis had as its object — its muse, we might say — what she called the "poet-historians" of nineteenth-century Brazil: Gonçalves de Magalhães, Gonçalves Dias, and Castro Alves. Progressive, republican poets, interested in retelling history and, for that reason, like her, travelers between the present and the past, readers and fabulists of the colonial archive. Under her pen, these three poets become discoverers of possible poetic histories of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in the colonial archive, makers of a new nineteenth-century nation, caught between its present of monarchy and slavery and the future to come: the republic and abolition. From that immersion in her archival passions emerges her beautifully written and documented thesis, entitled "Tamoio, Timbiras, Palmarinos: representação indígena e afrodescendente no romantismo brasileiro." This text has had a continental life in several languages. Her contribution on Gonçalves Dias appeared in 2023 in the book A Ideia como Paixão; her essay on Castro Alves, "El Quilombo de Palmares, del relato histórico colonial a la literatura del siglo XIX: desfiguraciones y resistencias," will appear this year in Chasqui. We hope her review of Planetary Longing will come out in English in the journal Contracorriente. Like the poet-historians of her thesis, she went to the past in order to contribute to the future. Her texts open a continental dialogue in Portuguese, in English, and in Spanish — as this multilingual tribute will be as well.
Second Station. Giovanna, Latin American Utopian
Another characteristic of Giovanna's fluvial poetics, as we have called it her critical praxis, was her commitment in her writings to utopia. Utopia — that fluvial and "brackish" horizon, half true fantasy, half fictional history — is what the painting that artist Patricia Figueroa will unveil for us will honor: a painting that, as you will see, connects the continent. I will say no more about it so as not to spoil it. If her three poet-historians rowed against the currents of colonialism and empire, propelled by the multiple winds of abolitionism, republicanism, and the romanticism of their era, Giovanna se out at Brown to row upstream, placing her new muses, the rivers, as protagonists and connectors. From the body to the landscape, Giovanna shifted from the subaltern subjectivities that the liberal and radical Brazilian Romantic poets de-marginalized setting toward the representation of the river in Spanish America during the nineteenth century. Her fluvial project was a tropical delta of rivers from the Colombian Pacific, the Venezuelan Orinoco, and the cosmopolitan Amazon. The writers and artists of that corpus are torrential: Martí, Heredia, Candelario Obeso, Gil Colunje, Julio Flórez, José Eustasio Rivera, Pérez Bonalde, Manuel María Madiedo, Agripina del Valle, Gutiérrez de Alba, Carmelo Fernández — "among others," as she used to remind me when we would get carried away with the corpus.
Third Station. Giovanna, Connector of Worlds
A weaver of voices and a continental writer, our program today also celebrates Giovanna as a connector of worlds. The vastness of her reading flowed through our classes. It has been a joy tinged with pain — "brackish" as well — to read, over these past months, what she wrote across 13 of our seminars. She delved into the histories of gold in the Colombian Pacific and wrote about the film Chocó. She wrote about the "serpentine, agile, and vibrant writing" (her words) of Arguedas in his poetry collection Katatay, which she called a "river-writing." With her ear finely tuned to the water-music of that poetry, she sharpened her critical lens to say that "in Katatay, rivers sound, roar, and sing. They acquire a voice that projects from the deepest depths to the most distant landscapes, becoming the vehicle of Andean deities." She wrote about the climate crisis in Mary Louise Pratt's book Planetary Longings. She wrote about the songs of the boatmen on the Magdalena River in the nineteenth century. She led study groups with you on environmentalism, race, and gender.
She lived across from the Providence River and said farewell to us there. In the second part of this celebration of her life, we will go to that river. There, we will release a double offering for her — of flowers and of poems — so that it may travel until it reaches her. At Brown, for Giovanna, the ever-changing river transformed, like her own writing, into many things. When she wrote about Arguedas, she seemed to me to be writing about herself. She also wrote in her luminous Spanish (I translate): "the river was a representation of vitality, a vehicle of welcome and memory; a striking and trembling form of Latin American writing, destructive power, renewing force, and 'capable of engendering revolutionary social resonances,."
Last but not least, from the waters of Portuguese to Spanish to English, her prose will live on the virtual page of our department through a prize Victoria will unveil, explain and inaugurate during this celebration. On that page her legacy will live in the form of a prize, bearing her name for the best essay, in the Ibero-American world. Like her critical prose, that prize will bring new waters of future voices that, with new stories, new archives, and new rivers, will continue to keep alive the "encontro das águas" — the meeting of the waters — of her intellectual and vital project. The essays prized in her name will be, and I quote from Arguedas's poem "Oda al Jet," "golden scales from all the seas and rivers."
Last Stop: The Station of Memory
We arrive at the last of my ports of call. A cultivator of a sensibility attuned to the archive, Giovanna adored the tactile world of paper and handwriting. Many of us have exquisite letters from her, beloved and adorned with her serpentine calligraphy. And so today, to celebrate her, we have letters to take with us as a keepsake of her memory — a reminder to carry home of what we are doing here today: hearing words from her colleagues so as to keep speaking with her through her texts; seeing paintings to bring her back through the river of memory; delivering for her flowers and messages into the river. These are all offerings —pagamentos— to a presence that brought us so much love and left a living inspiration among us.
Thank you, Giovanna.
May 6th, 2026 — Giovanna’s Celebration of Life, Rochambeau House
