A Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century


Book Description

A Portrait of Brazil in the Twentieth Century: The Universe of the "Literatura de Cordel" is Curran's most recent project. The book, in effect, is the English version of a major work published in Brazil in Portuguese in 2011, Retrato do Brasil em Cordel. Curran returns to Portrait for several reasons: primary is his strong feeling that the amazingly broad view of Brazil in the twentieth century seen in the thousands of booklets in verse from the Cordel represents a major aspect of Brazilian culture in that century. Second, because there are many important bodies of folk-popular verse in the Western tradition, all distant relatives of the Greek and Roman epic traditions, and because Brazil's folk-popular poetry is one among them. And because a very large reading public interested in such things does not know Portuguese, this volume in English strives to make the tradition available to such readers. Finally, the book in two volumes represents the cumulative efforts of research and writing of Professor Curran in a career of forty-three years of scholarly research and teaching. It reveals a unique portrait of Brazil and its people, informative, instructive, and mainly, entertaining.




Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development in Twentieth-Century Brazil


Book Description

Eve E. Buckley’s study of twentieth-century Brazil examines the nation’s hard social realities through the history of science, focusing on the use of technology and engineering as vexed instruments of reform and economic development. Nowhere was the tension between technocratic optimism and entrenched inequality more evident than in the drought-ridden Northeast sertão, plagued by chronic poverty, recurrent famine, and mass migrations. Buckley reveals how the physicians, engineers, agronomists, and mid-level technocrats working for federal agencies to combat drought were pressured by politicians to seek out a technological magic bullet that would both end poverty and obviate the need for land redistribution to redress long-standing injustices.







Terms of Inclusion


Book Description

In this history of black thought and racial activism in twentieth-century Brazil, Paulina Alberto demonstrates that black intellectuals, and not just elite white Brazilians, shaped discourses about race relations and the cultural and political terms of inclusion in their modern nation. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including the prolific black press of the era, and focusing on the influential urban centers of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia, Alberto traces the shifting terms that black thinkers used to negotiate their citizenship over the course of the century, offering fresh insight into the relationship between ideas of race and nation in modern Brazil. Alberto finds that black intellectuals' ways of engaging with official racial discourses changed as broader historical trends made the possibilities for true inclusion appear to flow and then recede. These distinct political strategies, Alberto argues, were nonetheless part of black thinkers' ongoing attempts to make dominant ideologies of racial harmony meaningful in light of evolving local, national, and international politics and discourse. Terms of Inclusion tells a new history of the role of people of color in shaping and contesting the racialized contours of citizenship in twentieth-century Brazil.




Becoming Brazilians


Book Description

This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mestiçagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mestiçagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mestiçagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mestiçagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.




Region Out of Place


Book Description

The Brazilian Northeast has long been a marginalized region with a complex relationship to national identity. It is often portrayed as impoverished, backward, and rebellious, yet traditional and culturally authentic. Brazil is known for its strong national identity, but national identities do not preclude strong regional identities. In Region Out of Place, Courtney J. Campbell examines how groups within the region have asserted their identity, relevance, and uniqueness through interactions that transcend national borders. From migration to labor mobilization, from wartime dating to beauty pageants, from literacy movements to representations of banditry in film, Campbell explores how the development of regional cultural identity is a modern, internationally embedded conversation that circulated among Brazilians of every social class. Part of a region-based nationalism that reflects the anxiety that conflicting desires for modernity, progress, and cultural authenticity provoked in the twentieth century, this identity was forged by residents who continually stepped out of their expected roles, taking their region’s concerns to an international stage.




Street Matters


Book Description

Street Matters links urban policy and planning with street protests in Brazil. It begins with the 2013 demonstrations that ostensibly began over public transportation fare increases but quickly grew to address larger questions of inequality. This inequality is physically manifested across Brazil, most visibly in its sprawling urban favelas. The authors propose an understanding of the social and spatial dynamics at play that is based on property, labor, and security. They stitch together the history of plans for urban space with the popular protests that Brazilians organized to fight for property and land. They embed the history of civil society within the history of urban planning and its institutionalization to show how urban and regional planning played a key role in the management of the social conflicts surrounding land ownership. If urban and regional planning at times benefited the expansion of civil rights, it also often worked on behalf of class exploitation, deepening spatial inequalities and conflicts embedded in different city spaces.




Brazil Modern


Book Description

Twentieth-century Brazilian furniture design is perhaps the last great largely unknown tradition of modernism, characterized by rich and sensually textured hardwoods and an ingenuity, grace, and simplicity that exemplify the national character of brasiliadade. With well over 400 historic images and new photography, Brazil Modern: The Rediscovery of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Furniture surveys the history and legacy of this innovative design tradition. Featuring the work of the titans of Brazilian design—Lina Bo Bardi, Oscar Niemeyer, Joaquim Tenreiro, and Sergio Rodrigues—as well as numerous designers whose work and reputations only recently reached foreign shores, Brazil Modern is the first comprehensive guide to this untapped vein of modernist design.




Activist Biology


Book Description

Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s.