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Surveying the varied experiences of women in colonial Spanish and Portuguese America, this book traces the effects of conquest, colonisation, and settlement on colonial women, beginning with the cultures that would produce Latin America.
With Brazil’s largest concentration of historic landmarks and famous landscapes, Rio de Janeiro’s passionate heritage debates have helped to define both the city and the country. Taking a critical preservationist stance, Brian Godfrey explores how historic designation and urban rebranding have shaped Rio’s distinctive sense of place. Official heritage programs date from the 1930s, when federal authorities centralized power and promoted nationalism. The city began a heritage-based strategy of urban revitalization and rebranding in the 1980s––the “Cultural Corridor” of historic places downtown. Subsequent rediscovery of the old “Little Africa” district and continuing struggle...
Branding Brazil examines a panorama of contemporary cultural productions including film, television, photography, and alternative media to explore the transformation of citizenship in Brazil from 2003 to 2014. A utopian impulse drove the reproduction of Brazilian cultural identity for local and global consumption; cultural production sought social and economic profits, especially greater inclusion of previously marginalized people and places. Marsh asserts that three communicative strategies from branding–promising progress, cultivating buy-in, and resolving contradictions–are the most salient and recurrent practices of nation branding during this historic period. More recent political crises can be understood partly in terms of backlash against marked social and political changes introduced during the branding period. Branding Brazil takes a multi-faceted approach, weaving media studies with politics and cinema studies to reveal that more than a marketing term or project emanating from the state, branding was a cultural phenomenon.
Arms and Letters is the first study in English dedicated to the literary and cultural analysis of early modern Spanish military autobiographical texts.
Through the analysis of a variety of favela-based visual cultural productions by young people and contemporary theorists, Postcards from Rio examines the complex relationship between citizenship and urban space in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. By analyzing videos and photographs, Kátia da Costa Bezerra illustrates how citizens of favelas are reshaping their sense of belonging as subjects and as a legitimate part of the city. A groundbreaking study that examines more deeply the relationship between urban space, citizenship, and imagery originating in the favelas, Postcards from Rio sheds crucial light on how contemporary lenses are defining and mediating the meanings of space and citizenship as strategies of empowerment. The city emerges as a political space where multiplicities of perspectives are intertwined with demands for more inclusive forms of governance.
This book is about the impact of literature upon cities world-wide, and cities upon literature. It examines why the city matters so much to contemporary critical theory, and why it has inspired so many forms of writing which have attempted to deal with its challenges to think about it and to represent it. Gathering together 40 contributors who look at different modes of writing and film-making in throughout the world, this handbook asks how the modern city has engendered so much theoretical consideration, and looks at cities and their literature from China to Peru, from New York to Paris, from London to Kinshasa. It looks at some of the ways in which modern cities – whether capitals, shanty-towns, industrial or ‘rust-belt’ – have forced themselves on people’s ways of thinking and writing.
The authoritative source for information on the people, places, and events of the African Diaspora, spanning five continents and five centuries. The field of African Diaspora studies is rapidly growing. Until now there was no single, authoritative source for information on this broad, complex discipline. Drawing on the work of over 300 scholars, this encyclopedia fills that void. Now the researcher, from high school level up, can go to a single reference for information on the historical, political, economic, and cultural relations between people of African descent and the rest of the world community. Five hundred years of relocation and dislocation, of assimilation and separation have produced a rich tapestry of history and culture into which are woven people, places, and events. This authoritative, accessible work picks out the strands of the tapestry, telling the story of diverse peoples, separated by time and distance, but retaining a commonality of origin and experience. Organized in A–Z sections covering global topics, country of origin, and destination country, the work is designed for easy use by all.
Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.
Institutions in Recife, Brazil, have restructured subsidies in favor of encouraging musicians to become more entrepreneurial. Falina Enriquez explores how contemporary and traditional musicians in the fabled musical city have negotiated these intensified neoliberal cultural policies and economic uncertainties. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Enriquez shows how forcing artists to adopt “neutral” market solutions reinforces, and generates, overlapping racial and class-based inequalities. Lacking the social and financial resources of their middle-class peers, working-class musicians find it difficult to uphold institutional goals of connecting the city’s cultural roots to global markets and consumers. Enriquez also links the artists’ situation to that of cultural and creative workers around the world. As she shows, musical sponsorship in Recife and the contemporary gig economy elsewhere employ processes that, far from being neutral, uphold governmental and corporate ideologies that produce social stratification. Rich and vibrant, The Costs of the Gig Economy offers a rare English-language portrait of the changing musical culture in Recife.
This book serves as a study of poets' reflections on the use of the Portuguese language as a tool for the nation building project of Angola during and after the war of independence. The writers studied fall into two categories: those of a first phase, in the context of the war of independence, during which time poets often focused on linguistic unity as a reflection of the nation's plurality through the inscribing of notions of singular identity simultaneous to the incorporation of elements of linguistic plurality; and those of the second phase, within the context of the post-war and ensuing civil strife which, if taken as a more or less continuous Civil War, lasted from 1975 to 2002, and during which writers would use techniques seen in many postmodern poets to deconstruct the utopian discourse of poets from the previous generation.The essay elucidates existing arguments regarding political and social movement as well as to less-recognized arguments regarding literary evolution in Angola during this period.