Winner of the 2018 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Brazil Section Book Prize In 1982, the Brazilian Air Force arrived on the Alcântara peninsula to build a state-of-the-art satellite launch facility. They displaced some 1,500 Afro-Brazilians from coastal land to inadequate inland villages, leaving many more threatened with displacement. Completed in 1990, this vast undertaking in one of Brazil’s poorest regions has provoked decades of conflict and controversy. Constellations of Inequality tells this story of technological aspiration and the stark dynamics of inequality it laid bare. Sean T. Mitchell analyzes conflicts over land, ethnoracial identity, mobilization among descendants of escaped slaves, military-civilian competition in the launch program, and international intrigue. Throughout, he illuminates Brazil’s changing politics of inequality and examines how such inequality is made, reproduced, and challenged. How people conceptualize and act on the unequal conditions in which they find themselves, he shows, is as much a cultural and historical matter as a material one. Deftly broadening our understanding of race, technology, development, and political consciousness on local, national, and global levels, Constellations of Inequality paints a portrait of contemporary Brazil that will interest a broad spectrum of readers.

Introduction: relaunching Alcântara -- Mimetic convergence and complementary hierarchy -- Alcântara in space and time -- Interpreting an explosion -- Expertise and inequality -- Racialization and race-based law -- The making of race and class -- Space at the edge of the Amazon -- Conclusion: space and utopia

Drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives on conviviality, this book considers the ways in which Latin America, a continent marked by deep inequalities, has managed to afford, create, sustain, and contest forms of living together with difference across time and space. Interdisciplinary in approach and presenting studies from various nations across the continent – from the medieval period to the present day – it considers the ways in which Latin America might contribute to our understanding of the relationship between inequality, difference, diversity, and sociability. As such, it will appeal to scholars of history, sociology, geography, anthropology, development studies, postcolonial and social theory with interests in Latin American studies, and in the contingencies and contradictions of living together in profoundly unequal societies.

A groundbreaking exploration of contemporary global inequality by leading scholars from across the world.

Although inequality in Latin America ranks among the worst in the world, it has notably declined over the last decade, offset by improvements in health care and education, enhanced programs for social assistance, and increases in the minimum wage. In Democracy and the Left, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens argue that the resurgence of democracy in Latin America is key to this change. In addition to directly affecting public policy, democratic institutions enable left-leaning political parties to emerge, significantly influencing the allocation of social spending on poverty and inequality. But while democracy is an important determinant of redistributive change, it is by no means the only factor. Drawing on a wealth of data, Huber and Stephens present quantitative analyses of eighteen countries and comparative historical analyses of the five most advanced social policy regimes in Latin America, showing how international power structures have influenced the direction of their social policy. They augment these analyses by comparing them to the development of social policy in democratic Portugal and Spain. The most ambitious examination of the development of social policy in Latin America to date, Democracy and the Left shows that inequality is far from intractable—a finding with crucial policy implications worldwide.

This book presents studies from across Latin America to take up the challenge of exploring the plurality of social inequalities from a global perspective. Accordingly, it identifies the structural forces of social inequalities on a world scale as they shape asymmetries observed in a wide array of phenomena, such as racial and gender inequality, urbanization, migration, commodity production, indigenous mobilization, ecological conflicts, and the "new middle class". A rich contribution to the study of the interconnections between the global social structure and multiple local and national hierarchies, Global Entangled Inequalities brings consistently together a variety of conceptual approaches, ranging from ethnographies to legal genealogies, and will therefore appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in social theory, power analysis, intersectionality studies, urban studies, and global social and environmental justice.

The 1980s triggered a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between governments and their publics, in turn shaping the imaginative landscape of the 21st century. Art and culture played a central role in responding to, pre-empting, and articulating these changes. Although globalisation has produced greater inequality and mixed economic results, it has also permitted the emergence of new regional cultural and activist networks, along with the possibility of a new global or transnational culture. How the effects of this shift have impacted our contemporary condition is told in diverse microhistories which compare very different geopolitical situations in Europe and beyond.