Autorentext

Lilia M. Schwarcz was born in 1957 in São Paulo, Brazil. She is a professor of anthropology at the University of São Paulo, a visiting professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures and the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University, and the author of The Emperor's Beard and The Spectacle of the Races.

Klappentext

A sweeping and absorbing biography of Brazil, from the sixteenth century to the present

For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazil occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, and yet it remains largely unknown.

In an extraordinary journey that spans five hundred years, from European colonization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich, dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races and postcolonial political dysfunction persist to this day.

Inhalt

Introduction: 'Brazil Is Just Nearby'

1. First Came the Name, and Then the Land Called Brazil
2. The Sugar Civilization: Bitter for the Many, Sweet for a Few
3. Tit for Tat: slavery and the Naturalization of Violence
4. Gold!
5. Revolt, Conspiracy and Sedition in the Tropical Paradise
6. Ship Ahoy! A Court at Sea
7. Dom João and his Court in the Tropics
8. The Father Leaves, the Son Remains
9. Independence Habemus: Instability in the First Empire
10. Regencies, or the Sound of Silence
11. The Second Reign: At Last, a Nation in the Tropics
12. The End of the Monarchy in Brazil
13. The First Republic: The People Take to the Streets
14. Samba, Malandragem, Authoritarianism: The Birth of Modern Brazil
15. Yes, We Have Democracy!
16. The 1950s and 1960s: Bossa Nova, Democracy and Underdevelopment
17. On a Knife Edge: Dictatorship, Opposition and Resistance

18. On the Path to Democracy: The Transition to Civilian Power and the Ambiguities of the Legacy of the Military Dictatorship
    Conclusion: History Is Not Arithmetic

    Afterword to the English Edition
    Notes, Index