Ideologies of Marginality in Brazilian Hip Hop


Book Description

Based on more than five years of anthropological fieldwork in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this book highlights race, class, gender and territory to argue that Brazillian hip hoppers are subjects rather than objects of history and everyday life. This is the first ethnography in English to analyze Brazilian hip hop.




Life in the Megalopolis


Book Description

The modern metropolis has been called 'the symbol of our times', and life in it epitomizes, for many, modernity itself. But what to make of inherited ideas of modernity when faced with life in Mexico City and São Paulo, two of the largest metropolises in the world? Is their fractured reality, their brutal social contrasts, and the ever-escalating violence faced by their citizens just an intensification of what Engels described in the first in-depth analysis of an industrial metropolis, nineteenth century Manchester? Or have post-industrial and neo-globalized economies given rise to new forms of urban existence in the so-called developing world? Life in the Megalopolis: Mexico City and São Paulo investigates how such questions are explored in cultural productions from these two Latin American megalopolises, the focus being on literature, film popular music, and visual arts. This book combines close readings of works with a constant reference to theoretical, anthropological and social studies of these two cities, and builds on received definitions of the concept megalopolis Life in the Megalopolis is the first book to combine urban-studies theories (particularly Lefebvre, Harvey, and de Certeau) with Benjaminian cultural analyses, and theoretical discussions with close-readings of recent cultural works in various media. It is also the first book to compare Mexico City and São Paulo.




The Color of Sound


Book Description

Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. In this highly original account, anthropologist John Burdick explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. By immersing himself for nearly a year in the vibrant worlds of black gospel, gospel rap, and gospel samba, Burdick pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, Burdick shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This deeply detailed, engaging portrait challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil’s Protestants,provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country’s struggle to combat racism.




Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature


Book Description

Considering how literary texts address the transformations that Brazil has undergone since its 1985 transition to democracy, this study proposes that Brazilian contemporary literature is informed by the struggle for social, civil, and cultural rights and that literary production has created spaces for historically disenfranchised communities.




Geography


Book Description

Plate tectonics - Earthquakes and volcanoes - Weathering and slopes - Glaciation - Coasts - Deserts - Weather and climate - Soils - Biogepgraphy - Population - Urbanisation - Farming and food supply - Rural land use - Energy resources - Manufacturing industries - Transport and interdependence - World development.




Remembering World War II Refugees in Contemporary Portugal


Book Description

This book takes an innovative approach to the study of memories of transit and exile in Portugal between 1933 and 1945 in artistic media. Informed by contemporary debates within memory and translation studies, it develops a translational perspective on transcultural memory and explores its ethical implications. This study provides an in-depth analysis of Daniel Blaufuks’s inter-art project Sob Céus Estranhos, Domingos Amaral’s novel Enquanto Salazar Dormia and João Canijo’s documentary Fantasia Lusitana. It examines the heterocultural networks of signification that these artistic media mobilize to implicate the presence of World War II refugees in Portugal in contemporary negotiations of communality. By approaching memory through a translational lens on culture, this book also offers new perspectives on remediation, memory transfer and the ethical dimensions of remembrance in the context of transcultural memory and migration.







Break and Flow


Book Description

Hip hop is a global form of creative expression. In Cuba, Brazil, and Haiti, rappers refuse the boundaries of hip hop’s US genesis, claiming the art form as a means to empower themselves and their communities in the face of postcolonial racial and class violence. Despite the geographic and linguistic borders that separate these artists, Charlie Hankin finds in their music and lyrics a common understanding of hip hop’s capacity to intervene in the public sphere and a shared poetics of neighborhood, nation, and transatlantic yearnings. Situated at the critical intersection of sound studies and Afro-diasporic poetics, Break and Flow draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork and collaboration, as well as an archive of hundreds of songs by more than sixty hip hop artists. Hankin illuminates how new media is used to produce and distribute knowledge in the Global South, refining our understanding of poetry and popular music at the turn of the millennium.




Raciolinguistics


Book Description

Raciolinguistics reveals the central role that language plays in shaping our ideas about race and vice versa. The book brings together a team of leading scholars-working both within and beyond the United States-to share powerful, much-needed research that helps us understand the increasingly vexed relationships between race, ethnicity, and language in our rapidly changing world. Combining the innovative, cutting-edge approaches of race and ethnic studies with fine-grained linguistic analyses, authors cover a wide range of topics including the struggle over the very term "African American," the racialized language education debates within the increasing number of "majority-minority" immigrant communities in the U.S., the dangers of multicultural education in a Europe that is struggling to meet the needs of new migrants, and the sociopolitical and cultural meanings of linguistic styles used in Brazilian favelas, South African townships, Mexican and Puerto Rican barrios in Chicago, and Korean American "cram schools" in New York City, among other sites. Taking into account rapidly changing demographics in the U.S and shifting cultural and media trends across the globe--from Hip Hop cultures, to transnational Mexican popular and street cultures, to Israeli reality TV, to new immigration trends across Africa and Europe--Raciolinguistics shapes the future of scholarship on race, ethnicity, and language. By taking a comparative look across a diverse range of language and literacy contexts, the volume seeks not only to set the research agenda in this burgeoning area of study, but also to help resolve pressing educational and political problems in some of the most contested raciolinguistic contexts in the world.




Racionais MCs' Sobrevivendo no Inferno


Book Description

In 1997 the rap group Racionais MCs (the 'Rational' MCs) recorded the album Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Surviving in Hell), subsequently changing the hip-hop scene in São Paulo and firmly establishing itself as the point of reference for youth across Brazil. In an era when rappers needed to defend the very idea that their work was indeed music and a time when neighborhoods such as Capão Redondo, from where Racionais frontman Mano Brown hailed, often topped homicide statistics, Sobrevivendo empowered as it provoked. As one journalist noted, “the underworld of São Paulo's working-class suburbs is dominated by cheap thrills and provides little space for representation.” Sobrevivendo changed all of that; a brutal but invigorating imagination was born. The lure of Sobrevivendo is the particular combination of word and sound that powerfully involves listeners, especially those millions of young Brazilians who live in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Brazil's megacities. This book celebrates the 25-year anniversary of Sobrevivendo by representing the album's power not only within the hip-hop community but also in other cultural domains such as cinema and literature. The author also provides his own narrative spins on the sentiment of Sobrevivendo, thus making the book a creative mix of cultural analysis and inspired testimony.