DIVExamines the role of the Brazilian government as it attempted to create a national culture during a fifteen-year period of authoritarian cultural management./div

Evangelical and Catholic groups are transforming Brazilian politics. This book asks why, and what the consequences are for democracy.

In Culture Wars in Brazil Daryle Williams analyzes the contentious politicking over the administration, meaning, and look of Brazilian culture that marked the first regime of president-dictator Getúlio Vargas (1883–1954). Examining a series of interconnected battles waged among bureaucrats, artists, intellectuals, critics, and everyday citizens over the state’s power to regulate and consecrate the field of cultural production, Williams argues that the high-stakes struggles over cultural management fought between the Revolution of 1930 and the fall of the Estado Novo dictatorship centered on the bragging rights to brasilidade—an intangible yet highly coveted sense of Brazilianness. Williams draws on a rich selection of textual, pictorial, and architectural sources in his exploration of the dynamic nature of educational film and radio, historical preservation, museum management, painting, public architecture, and national delegations organized for international expositions during the unsettled era in which modern Brazil’s cultural canon took definitive form. In his close reading of the tensions surrounding official policies of cultural management, Williams both updates the research of the pioneer generation of North American Brazilianists, who examined the politics of state building during the Vargas era, and engages today’s generation of Brazilianists, who locate the construction of national identity of modern Brazil in the Vargas era. By integrating Brazil into a growing body of literature on the cultural dimensions of nations and nationalism, Culture Wars in Brazil will be important reading for students and scholars of Latin American history, state formation, modernist art and architecture, and cultural studies.

From the first encounters between the Portuguese and indigenous peoples in 1500 to the current political turmoil, the history of Brazil is much more complex and dynamic than the usual representations of it as the home of Carnival, soccer, the Amazon, and samba would suggest. This extensively revised and expanded second edition of the best-selling Brazil Reader dives deep into the past and present of a country marked by its geographical vastness and cultural, ethnic, and environmental diversity. Containing over one hundred selections—many of which appear in English for the first time and which range from sermons by Jesuit missionaries and poetry to political speeches and biographical portraits of famous public figures, intellectuals, and artists—this collection presents the lived experience of Brazilians from all social and economic classes, racial backgrounds, genders, and political perspectives over the past half millennium. Whether outlining the legacy of slavery, the roles of women in Brazilian public life, or the importance of political and social movements, The Brazil Reader provides an unparalleled look at Brazil’s history, culture, and politics.

In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Drawing on little-tapped archival records, he shows that by midcentury, conservatives--individuals and organizations, civilian as well as military--were firmly situated in a transnational network of right-wing cultural activists. They subsequently joined the powerful hardline constituency supporting Brazil's brutal military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. There, they lent their weight to a dictatorship that, Cowan argues, operationalized a moral panic that conflated communist subversion with manifestations of modernity, coalescing around the crucial nodes of gender and sexuality, particularly in relation to youth, women, and the mass media. The confluence of an empowered right and a security establishment suffused with rightist moralism created strongholds of anticommunism that spanned government agencies, spurred repression, and generated attempts to control and even change quotidian behavior. Tracking how limits to Cold War authoritarianism finally emerged, Cowan concludes that the record of autocracy and repression in Brazil is part of a larger story of reaction against perceived threats to traditional views of family, gender, moral standards, and sexuality--a story that continues in today's culture wars.

In this book, Muir explores an era of cultural innovation that promoted free inquiry in the face of philosophical and theological orthodoxy, advocated libertine morals, critiqued the tyranny of aristocratic fathers over their daughters, and expanded the theatrical potential of grand opera. In so doing, he reveals the distinguished past of today's culture wars, including debates about the place of women in society, the clash between science and faith, and the power of the arts to stir emotions.