Archive for February, 2010

27 FebLula and the Workers Party in Brazil


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A new edition examining the electoral victory and record of the left government in Latin America’s largest country. “Look, my friend. I don’t speak the language here, I’ve got no money, the food stinks, there’s no rice, no beans. I’d rather be arrested in Brazil than stay in this dump of a country.” —Lula, the new Brazilian president, on being advised to stay in the United States after his brother’s arrest for political activity in Brazil, 1975 In October 2002, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made history when he became Latin America’s first democratically elected socialist leader since Salvador Allende. Lula and his Workers Party won comfortably with nearly 62 percent of Brazil’s popular vote. This book tells the story of the Workers Party’s origins and electoral history, outlining the key politicians behind it and the riveting story of their four successive tries for power. It features an exclusive post-election interview with Lula that charts his extraordinary life story, rising from poverty, through decades of struggle in the country’s union movement, to increasing political influence and eventual victory.

With unparalleled access to Lula over the first two years of his administration, the authors have updated the book to include an analysis of his early attempts at social reform, his growing leadership on the international stage, and his response to charges of abandoning the Left of his own party and the hopes of his staunchest supporters.

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Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil

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25 FebBrazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present


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The first comprehensive cultural history of Brazil to be written in English, Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present captures the role of the artistic imaginary in shaping Brazil’s national identity. Analyzing representations of Brazil throughout the world, this ambitious survey demonstrates the ways in which life in one of the world’s largest nations has been conceived and revised in visual arts, literature, film, and a variety of other media. Beginning with the first explorations of Brazil by the Portuguese, Darlene J. Sadlier incorporates extensive source material, including paintings, historiographies, letters, poetry, novels, architecture, and mass media to trace the nation’s shifting sense of its own history. Topics include the oscillating themes of Edenic and cannibal encounters, Dutch representations of Brazil, regal constructs, the literary imaginary, Modernist utopias, “good neighbor” protocols, and filmmakers’ revolutionary and dystopian images of Brazil. A magnificent panoramic study of race, imperialism, natural resources, and other themes in the Brazilian experience, this landmark work is a boon to the field.

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Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present

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21 FebThe Throes of Democracy: Brazil since 1989


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In the 1980s, Brazil emerged from two decades of military dictatorship and embarked on an experiment in full democracy for the first time in the nation’s history. Since then, Brazilians have sought to live up to the ideals of this experiment while negotiating dramatic economic and cultural transformations.

In The Throes of Democracy, Bryan McCann gives a panoramic view of this process, exploring the relationships between the rise of the political left, the escalation of urban violence, the agribusiness boom and the spread of pentecostal evangelization. Brazil remains a land marked by deep inequality, but in the last two decades the structure of that inequality has changed substantially.

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The Throes of Democracy: Brazil since 1989

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19 FebLegalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast


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Anthropologists widely agree that identities–even ethnic and racial ones–are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity. Through ethnographic, historical, and legal analysis of successful claims to land by two neighboring black communities in the backlands of northeastern Brazil, Jan Hoffman French demonstrates how these two communities have come to distinguish themselves from each other while revising and retelling their histories and present-day stories.

French argues that the invocation of laws by these related communities led to the emergence of two different identities: one indigenous (Xoco Indian) and the other quilombo (descendants of a fugitive African slave community). With the help of the Catholic Church, government officials, lawyers, anthropologists, and activists, each community won government recognition and land rights, and displaced elite landowners. This was accomplished even though anthropologists called upon to assess the validity of their claims recognized that their identities were “constructed.” The positive outcome of their claims demonstrates that authenticity is not a prerequisite for identity. French draws from this insight a more sweeping conclusion that, far from being evidence of inauthenticity, processes of construction form the basis of all identities and may have important consequences for social justice.

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Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast

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15 FebSacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil


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Candomblé, an African religious and healing tradition that spread to Brazil during the slave trade, relies heavily on the use of plants in its spiritual and medicinal practices. When its African adherents were forcibly transplanted to the New World, they faced the challenge not only of maintaining their culture and beliefs in the face of European domination but also of finding plants with similar properties to the ones they had used in Africa. This book traces the origin, diffusion, medicinal use, and meaning of Candomblé’s healing pharmacopoeia–the sacred leaves. Robert Voeks examines such topics as the biogeography of Africa and Brazil, the transference–and transformation–of Candomblé as its adherents encountered both native South American belief systems and European Christianity, and the African system of medicinal plant classification that allowed Candomblé to survive and even thrive in the New World. This research casts new light on topics ranging from the creation of African American cultures to tropical rain forest healing floras.

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Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil

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14 FebBrazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia


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What connects films of a particular nation, in a particular time?  What makes them especially interesting and revealing?  This book offers an original answer to these central questions for world cinema, focusing on the case of Brazil and the return of the utopian gesture into its cinema.  In this extensively illustrated book, Lúcia Nagib argues that the foundational utopian imaginary that has permeated culture in Brazil since the time of the first discoverers has had a decisive influence on its film aesthetics, especially at creative peaks, such as the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early ’70s, and the cinematic revival from the mid 1990s onwards.  She shows how utopian motifs like images of the sea or the classical Greek myth of Orpheus establish a bridge between these two periods, guaranteeing thereby historical continuity from a cinema concerned with the national project to another engaged in a globalised dialogue.  In focus are classics of Cinema Novo, such as ‘Black God, White Devil’, ‘Land in Anguish’ and ‘How Tasty was my Little Frenchman’, alongside representatives of a more recent transnational aesthetics, including the anti-utopian ‘City of God’and the urban dystopia of ‘The Trespasser’.

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Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia

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03 FebUfo Danger Zone: Terror & Death in Brazil


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Bob Pratt has spent over eighteen years researching the Brazilian UFO phenomenon. He has made eleven visits to a number of localities in the Brazilian countryside and investigated over two hundred cases, during which time he has interviewed over seventeen hundred people. The fruits of his labor are always intriguing, sometime frightening, and should give pause to those who would thoughtlessly maintain, without studying the complete score, that all our extraterresrial visitors are friendly and have out best interest at heart.

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Ufo Danger Zone: Terror & Death in Brazil

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01 FebLittle Brazil


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Walking west on 46th Street in Manhattan, just three blocks from Rockefeller Center, one passes Brazilian restaurants, the office of New York’s Brazilian newspaper, a Brazilian travel agency, a business that sends remittances and wires flowers to Brazil, and a store that sells Brazilian food products, magazines, newspapers, videos, and tapes. These businesses are the tip of an ethnic iceberg, an unseen minority estimated to number some 80,000 to 100,000 Brazilians in the New York metropolitan area alone. Despite their numbers, the lives of these people remain largely hidden to scholars and the public alike. Now Maxine L. Margolis remedies this neglect with a fascinating and accessible account of the lives of New York’s Brazilians.

Showing that these immigrants belie American stereotypes, Margolis reveals that they are largely from the middle strata of Brazilian society: many, in fact, have university educations. Not driven by dire poverty or political repression, they are fleeing from chaotic economic conditions that prevent them from maintaining amiddle-class standard of living in Brazil. But despite their class origin and education, with little English and no work papers, many are forced to take menial jobs after their arrival in the United States. Little Brazil is not an insentient statistical portrait of this population writ large, but a nuanced account that captures what it is like to be a new immigrant in this most cosmopolitan of world cities.

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Little Brazil

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