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A view from outside Brazil that seeks to understand how Brazilian society is responding to the processes of global integration. Also documents the plurality of ways that social actors and analysts interpret the transformations.
Like their Hollywood counterparts, Latin American film and TV melodramas have always been popular and highly profitable. The first of its kind, this anthology engages in a serious study of the aesthetics and cultural implications of Latin American melodramas. Written by some of the major figures in Latin American film scholarship, the studies range across seventy years of movies and television within a transnational context, focusing specifically on the period known as the "Golden Age" of melodrama, the impact of classic melodrama on later forms, and more contemporary forms of melodrama. An introductory essay examines current critical and theoretical debates on melodrama and places the essays within the context of Latin American film and media scholarship. Contributors are Luisela Alvaray, Mariana Baltar, Catherine L. Benamou, Marvin D’Lugo, Paula Félix-Didier, Andrés Levinson, Gilberto Perez, Darlene J. Sadlier, Cid Vasconcelos, and Ismail Xavier.
How do people come to think of themselves as part of a nation? Dramas of Nationhood identifies a fantastic cultural form that binds together the Egyptian nation—television serials. These melodramatic programs—like soap operas but more closely tied to political and social issues than their Western counterparts—have been shown on television in Egypt for more than thirty years. In this book, Lila Abu-Lughod examines the shifting politics of these serials and the way their contents both reflect and seek to direct the changing course of Islam, gender relations, and everyday life in this Middle Eastern nation. Representing a decade's worth of research, Dramas of Nationhood makes a case for t...
This book is based on a mixed-method, longitudinal study of the transmission, production, and reception of Spanish- and Portuguese-language television in four global cities with expanding Latinx diasporic populations. The author tracks and analyzes the production practices of Spanish-language broadcasters, the highlights of news and cultural affairs coverage, changes in the shooting locations and sociocultural discourses of telenovelas (both imported from Latin America and domestically produced), the presence of SLTV in the national political sphere, and the modes of media access and opinions of over 400 viewers in Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, and Madrid. The possibilities created by SLTV and PLTV for achieving a sense of enfranchisement are explored. Intended for a general, as well as academic reading audience.
"In time for Brazil's hosting of the 2014 World Cup, this book uses the stories of star players and other key figures (based on over 40 interviews) to create a contemporary history of Brazilian soccer from the 1950s to the present. It also explores race and class tensions in Brazil and shows how soccer is central to the country's dramatic trajectory toward modernity and economic power"--
In Afro-Brazilians in Telenovelas: Social, Political, and Economic Realities, Samantha Nogueira Joyce examines representations of Blackness on Brazilian TV, interrogating the role of mass media in developing racial equality and social change. Nogueira Joyce challenges assumptions that place the inclusion of Afro-Brazilians in mass media as a step towards racial progress while contextualizing media representation with the social, political, and economic realities of the Brazilian society at large, thus linking media representations to progressive gains and conservative backlashes in the Brazilian public sphere. This book joins conversations with other works on multiculturalism, Blackness, and whiteness within media studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and Latin American studies. This multilayered approach combines textual analysis with studies of political and economic systems and digital media activism to carefully unravel Brazilian racial dynamics.
For years now, leadership studies have emphasized functional social psychology approaches that reduce leadership to a couple of traits, styles, or recipes that supposedly give us the steps to follow when leading. The latter have taught us a lot, but are not enough to cope with the immense challenges of leading in a chaotic, intricate, complex and nonsensical world. This book compiles essays on alternative leadership theory from leading authors who have been defending unorthodox approaches to leadership. As such, it provides students, academics and researchers with options in terms of leadership theory. If mainstream approaches to leadership are not enough, then why do we not look for novel and different ones? Thus, this book is an effort to develop sui generis leadership theory, by exploring leadership from novel lenses from the arts and humanities, sciences, and sociology, as well as other social sciences.
Consumption Intensified examines how self-identified middle class Brazilians in São Paulo redefined their class during Brazil’s economic crisis of 1981–1994. With inflation soaring to an astounding 2700 percent, their consumption practices intensified, not only in relation to the national crisis but also to the expanding global consumer culture. Drawing on her observations of everyday practices and on representations of the middle class in popular culture, anthropologist Maureen O’Dougherty explores both the logic and incoherence of middle- to upper-middle-class Brazilian life. With the supports of middle-class living threatened—job security, quality education, home ownership, savin...
Media Rituals rethinks our accepted concepts of ritual behaviour for a media-saturated age. It connects ritual directly with questions of power, government, and surveillance and explores the ritual space which the media construct and where their power is legitimated. Drawing on sociological and anthropological approaches to the study of ritual, Couldry applies the work of theorists such as Durkheim, Bourdieu and Bloch to a number of important media arenas: the public media event; reality TV; Webcam sites; talk shows and docu-soaps; media pilgrimages; the construction of celebrity. In a final chapter, he imagines a different world where the media's ritual power is less, because the possibilities of participation in media production are more evenly shared.