Book of Abstracts: [WG] Popular Culture

RTP-Açores television fictionAn essay on «Açorianidade» While there has been television fiction in Portugal for over 30 years, this genre has achieved special relevance in the last 10 years due to the efforts of TVI, a Portuguese private channel. The television market in Portugal has been forced to adapt all its programming because of TVI’s pointed strategy to produce scripts in Portuguese and interpreted by Portuguese actors. What in previous years was a guarantee of success (e.g. the broadcast of Brazilian telenovelas from TV Globo) faded into the background. The Portuguese audiences, having been familiar to the telenovela genre since 1977, and less than happy with the locally produced telenovelas, received enthusiastically this wave of national production.The high audience ratings guaranteed by these productions confirms that the formal and emotional weight this television genre inflames viewers, the media market, and the researchers. The international academic research in this area is intense, and the critical perspectives that view the fiction programs as texts and the moment of its reception as reading, bearing in mind the kind of receptors, and the context in which it is received, is increasing. More frequently, Latin-American researchers have explored the locally produced narratives as a dense territory of identity cultural redefinitions (Lopes, 2004), allowing the narrative of a disseminated nation (Bhaba, 2006) as well as the real or imagined community (Anderson, 2005). In this line of thought, the fictional stories broadcasted acquire a cultural significance, mirroring the society and culture of a given community and works as a means of inter-cultural communication assuming the statute of a local matrix operating in a global scenario (Lopes, 2006).In RTP-Açores, a regional television channel, we found texts full of cultural dialogues maintaining alive the Azorian identity – Açorianidade – either within the local residents or in the Azorian Diaspora.Açorianidade, a concept word coined by Vitorino Nemésio in 1932, encompasses the concept of traces of a given community, while characterizing concept of a collective cultural entity (Almeida, 1987). To better understand its scope, we must reach for the concept of insularity as the geographic dimension of the Azorian native (Rosa e Trigo, 1990), for whom the pivotal element is the sea and the mesological factors, such as volcanic and seismic activities, give the Azorian native a cuirass of sufferance, as a shell for a somber, sad and closed character (Pavão, ?).