InConceiving Freedom, Camillia Cowling shows how gender shaped urban routes to freedom for the enslaved during the process of gradual emancipation in Cuba and Brazil, which occurred only after the ...rest of Latin America had abolished slavery and even after the American Civil War. Focusing on late nineteenth-century Havana and Rio de Janeiro, Cowling argues that enslaved women played a dominant role in carving out freedom for themselves and their children through the courts.Cowling examines how women, typically illiterate but with access to scribes, instigated myriad successful petitions for emancipation, often using "free-womb" laws that declared that the children of enslaved women were legally free. She reveals how enslaved women's struggles connected to abolitionist movements in each city and the broader Atlantic World, mobilizing new notions about enslaved and free womanhood. She shows how women conceived freedom and then taught the "free-womb" generation to understand and shape the meaning of that freedom. Even after emancipation, freed women would continue to use these claims-making tools as they struggled to establish new spaces for themselves and their families in post emancipation society.
"Give me the salt" and "Please pass the salt" make the same request, but in a polite situation the first utterance may give offense, while the second may not. How and why such differences in wording ...and intonation, in a particular context, produce different effects is the concern of pragmatics, the area of linguistics that deals with how speech is used in interaction. In this innovative study of pragmatics in Brazilian Portuguese, Dale Koike analyzes the politeness phenomenon, specifically in the context of speech acts known as "directives." As acts intended to get someone to do something, directives bring into play a variety of sociocultural factors, depending on the relationship between the participants. Using empirical data obtained through natural language observation and from questionnaires of over one hundred adult native speakers, Koike identifies factors—such as age, education, and gender—that influence the strategies of politeness a given speaker is likely to use in making a directive. This research clarifies the unwritten language rules and assumptions that native speakers intuitively follow in phrasing their directive utterances. Koike also includes important material on the acquisition of strategies for politeness by children and adult second-language learners, as well as on gender differences in politeness forms. Her research proposes important additions to the theory of speech acts as conceived by Austin and Searle, particularly in the application of deictic organization to account for a hierarchy of pragmatic forms. Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese will be of interest to a wide audience in diverse fields, including linguistics, anthropology, interaction analysis, communications, semantics, sociology, psychology, and education.
The spectacular favela Robb Larkins, Erika Mary
2015., 20150501, 2015, 2015-05-01, Letnik:
32
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In Rio de Janeiro's favelas, traffickers assert power through conspicuous displays of wealth and force, brandishing high-powered guns, gold jewelry, and piles of cash and narcotics. Police, for their ...part, conduct raids reminiscent of action films or video games, wearing masks and riding in enormous armored cars called "big skulls." Images of these spectacles circulate constantly in local, national, and global media, masking everyday forms of violence, prejudice, and inequality. The Spectacular Favela offers a rich ethnographic examination of the political economy of spectacular violence in Rocinha, Rio's largest favela. Based on more than two years of residence in the community, the book explores how entangled forms of violence shape everyday life and how that violence is, in turn, connected to the market economy. Erika Robb Larkins shows how favela violence is produced as a marketable global brand. While this violence is projected in disembodied form through media, the favela is also sold as an embodied experience through the popular practice of favela tourism. The commodification of the favela becomes a form of violence itself; favela violence is transformed into a commercially viable byproduct of a profit-driven war on drugs, which serves to keep the poor marginalized. This book tells the story of how traffickers, police, cameras, tourists, and even anthropologists come together to create what the author calls the "spectacular favela."
A Miscarriage of Justice examines women's reproductive health in relation to legal and medical policy in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the onset of republicanism ...in 1889, women's reproductive capabilities—their ability to conceive and raise future citizens and laborers—became critical to the expansion of the new Brazilian state. Analyzing court cases, law, medical writings, and health data, Cassia Roth argues that the state's approach to women's health in the early twentieth century focused on criminalizing fertility control without improving services or outcomes for women. Ultimately, the increasingly interventionist state fostered a culture of condemnation around poor women's reproduction that extended beyond elite discourses into the popular imagination. By tracing how legal thought and medical knowledge became cemented into law and clinical practice, how obstetricians, public health officials, and legal practitioners approached fertility control, and how women experienced and negotiated their reproductive lives, A Miscarriage of Justice provides a new way of interpreting the intertwined histories of gender, race, reproduction, and the state—and shows how these questions continue to reverberate in debates over reproductive rights and women's health in Brazil today.
Laughter out of place Goldstein, Donna M
2013., 20131004, 2013, 2013-09-20, Letnik:
9
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Donna M. Goldstein presents a hard-hitting critique of urban poverty and violence and challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty" in this compelling read. Drawing on more ...than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, who cope with unbearable suffering, violence and social abandonment. The book offers a clear-eyed view of socially conditioned misery while focusing on the creative responses—absurdist and black humor—that people generate amid daily conditions of humiliation, anger, and despair. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation among residents of the shantytown.
This book is an in-depth ethnographic and interdisciplinary study about how young people engage in media activism in impoverished and violence-ridden favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It analyzes uses of ...media and mobilization for struggles for human rights and social change in contexts of racial and social inequalities and discrimination.
In an original and ambitious exploration of the relationship between cinema and writing in early 20th-c. Brazil, Maite Conde shows how the broader global culture and consumer market opened up by film ...not only modernized literary production but also altered the very lives and everyday urban experiences of the population.
Consuming Visionsexplores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernization. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernization. Analyzing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city.
The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernization but also enabled new urban spectators-women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population-to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena-popular theater, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines-reflected changes that not only modernized literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population.Consuming Visionsis an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.
The Umbanda religion summons the spirits of old slaves and Brazilian Indians to speak through the mouths of mediums in trance. Its practitioners worship African gods, often calling them by the names ...of Catholic saints; simultaneously embrace the concepts of karma, reincarnation, and Christian charity; and believe in the capacities of both modern science and ancient magic. A relatively new religion dating to the beginning of the twentieth century, Umbanda has its origins in Rio de Janeiro and its surrounding urban areas where Afro-Brazilians, many ex-slaves or the descendants of slaves, practiced versions of the religion handed down to them by their ancestors. Umbanda's popularity has grown tremendously over the past century, attracting not only those who seek the assistance of spirits in solving problems in their lives, but those in pursuit of a path to a rich spiritual life and a fellowship of faith and service. Over the course of nearly a decade, Lindsay Hale spent countless hours attending rituals and festivals and interviewing participants of Umbanda, immersing himself in this fascinating religious world. In describing its many aspects and exploring its unique place within the lives of a wide variety of practitioners, Hale places Umbanda spiritual beliefs and practices within the broader context of Brazilian history and culture.
A revealing study of the giant squatter settlements of Rio de Janeiro and of the vibrant communities of migrants who have risked everything to come to the city to provide more opportunities for their ...children, Favela offers a powerful look at one of the great challenges facing the modern world.
A clear-eyed, critical examination of the social, political, and economic costs of hosting the 2016 summer Olympics The selection of Rio de Janeiro as the site of the summer 2016 Olympic Games set ...off jubilant celebrations in Brazil—and created enormous expectations for economic development and the advancement of Brazil as a major player on the world stage. Although the games were held without major incident, the economic, environmental, political, and social outcomes for Brazil ranged from disappointing to devastating. Rio 2016 assembles the views of leading experts on Brazil and the Olympics into a clear-eyed assessment of the impact of the games on Brazil in general and on the lives of Cariocas, as Rio's residents are known. Edited by sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, the other contributors include Juliana Barbassa, Jules Boykoff, Jamil Chade, Stephen Essex, Renata Latuf, and Theresa Williamson.
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