The emerging field of psychosocial studies signifies a confluence of disciplines for whom the fantasies, repressions and cultural practices underlying national identity represents a crucial research focus. This book presents a psychosocial portrayal of Brazil’s arrival on the international stage in the economic boom of the run-up to its hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. This former Portuguese colony is a country of contradictions in need of a new image; a nation that needs to be able to both love and sell itself in today’s neo-liberal reality. It argues that a contemporary representation of Brazilian subjectivity is best enabled through an interdisciplinary perspective. Five key themes – to be explored in all their contradictions and ambivalence – structure the book: fantasies of the nation; xenophobia and denial; Brazilian cultural practice; transnational mobility; and gender, race and Brazilian identity.

Reflecting on some of Brazil’s foremost challenges, this book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions. It brings together work by established scholars from Brazil, Europe and the United States to think through how (il)legalities are produced and represented at the level of institutions, (daily) practice and culture. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the chapters cover issues including informal work practices (e.g. street vendors), urban squatter movements and migration. Alongside social practices, the volume features close analyses of cultural practices and cultural production, including migrant literature, punk music and indigenous art. The question of (il)legalities resonates beyond Brazil’s borders, as concepts such as "lawfare" have crept into vocabularies, and countries the world over grapple with issues like state interference, fake news and the definition of "illegal" migration. This is valuable reading for scholars in Brazilian and Latin American Studies, as well as those working in literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, geography and political science.

Decolonization represented the end of colonial rule, but did not eradicate imperial and colonial categories and mythologies. Situated in the wider context of European colonial legacies, this book looks at the legacies of the Portuguese empire in today's Portugal. Using an interdisciplinary agenda, with contributions from experts in the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and sociology, the several case studies included in the volume look at a wide range of colonial legacies. These include a set of commemorative practices that feed on imperial mythologies, old colonial and racial classifications that condition citizenship rights, and post-imperial modes of culture consumption. Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire is the first book written so far in English on this topic, enabling the Portuguese case to enter into a broader dialogue with other national experiences relating to the legacies of colonialism and empire in today's Europe.

In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia. Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan. This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.

Global efforts to combat human trafficking are ubiquitous and reference particular ideas about unfreedoms, suffering, and rescue. The discourse has, however, a distinct racialized legacy that is lodged specifically in fears about "white slavery," women in prostitution and migration, and the defilement of white womanhood by the criminal and racialized Other. White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking centers the legacies of race and racism in contemporary anti-trafficking work and examines them in greater detail. A number of recent arguments have suggested that race and racism are not only visible, but vital, to the success of contemporary anti- trafficking discourses and movements. The contributors offer recent scholarship grounded in critical anti- racist perspectives that reveal the historical and contemporary racial working of anti- trafficking discourses and practices globally—and how these intersect with gender, citizenship, sexuality, caste and class formations, and the global political economy.

Economic and social difficulties at the beginning of the 20th century caused many Japanese to emigrate to Brazil. The situation was reversed in the 1980s as a result of economic downturn in Brazil and labour shortages in Japan. This book examines the construction and reconstruction of the ethnic identities of people of Japanese descent, firstly in the process of emigration to Brazil up to the 1980s, and secondly in the process of return migration to Japan in the 1990s. The closed nature of Japan's social history means that the effect of return migration' can clearly be seen. Japan is to some extent a unique sociological specimen owing to the absence of any tradition of receiving immigrants. This book is first of all about migration, but also covers the important related issues of ethnic identity and the construction of ethnic communities. It addresses the issues from the dual perspective of Japan and Brazil. The findings suggest that mutual contact has led neither to a state of conflict nor to one of peaceful coexistence, but rather to an assertion of difference. It is argued that the Nikkeijin consent strategically to the social definitions imposed upon their identities and that the issue of the Nikkeijin presence is closely related to the emerging diversity of Japanese society.