Precarious Democracy

BENJAMIN JUNGE is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil and co-editor of Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship. SEAN T. MITCHELL is an associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of the award-winning, Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race, and Utopia in Brazil and co-editor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency.ALVARO JARRÍN is an associate professor of anthropology at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil and co-editor of Remaking the Human: Cosmetic Technologies of Body Repair, Reshaping, and Replacement.  LUCIA CANTERO is an assistant professor of international studies at the University of San Francisco, California. She is the author of The Waste of Accumulation: The ‘Shock of Order’ Campaign and the Right to Rio 2016.

"Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today." - James N. Green (author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary) "This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left." - Sonia E. Alvarez (co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America) "Precarious Democracy presents a kaleidoscopic view of contemporary Brazil through a rich collection of ethnographies and a range of thoughtful analyses and insights about ordinary people throughout the country as they respond in multiple ways to the rise and political consolidation of the far-right in recent years. It is essential reading for understanding what is going on in Brazil today." - James N. Green (author of Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary) "This collection offers rich, theoretically evocative ethnographies on a range of sites seldom brought together in a single volume, from family frictions that expose the polarization of the past decade to guns and the performance of masculinity to Black queer resilience amid Brazil’s rightward shift. The assembled cases foreground feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial epistemologies and shed unique light on Brazil’s 'unraveling,' bringing into view the precarity often underlying formal democratic arrangements, even, or perhaps especially, those governed by the Left." - Sonia E. Alvarez (co-editor of Beyond Civil Society: Activism, Participation, and Protest in Latin America)

• List of AcronymsEditors’ Introduction: Ethnographies of the Brazilian Unravelling by Benjamin Junge, Alvaro Jarrin, Lucia Cantero, and Sean T. MitchellA Plan for a Country Still Looking for Democracy: A Critical Overview by Lilia Moritz SchwarczPart I: The Intimacy of PowerChapter 1: “Family is Everything”: Generational Tensions as a Working-Class Household from Recife, Brazil Contemplates the 2018 Presidential Elections by Benjamin JungeChapter 2: Among Mothers and Daughters: Economic Mobility and Political Identity in a Northeastern Periferia by Jessica JeromeChapter 3: Dreaming with Guns: Performing Masculinity and Imagining Consumption in Bolsonaro’s Brazil by Isabela Kalil, Rosana Pinheiro-Machado, and Lucia Mury ScalcoChapter 4: Whiteness Has Come Out of the Closet and Intensified Brazil’s Reactionary Wave by Patricia de Santana PinhoPart II: Corruption and CrimeChapter 5: Cruel Pessimism: The Affect of Anti-Corruption and the End of the New Brazilian Middle Class by Sean T. MitchellChapter 6: The Effects of Some Religious Affects: Revolutions in Crime by Karina BiondiChapter 7: “Look at that”: Cures, Poisons, and Shifting Rationalities in the Backlands that have become a Sea (of Money) by John CollinsChapter 8: The Oil is Ours: Petrobras, Corruption and Extractive Global Lawfare by Lucia CanteroPart III: Infrastructures of HopeChapter 9: Despairing Hopes (and Hopeful Despair) in Amazonia by David Rojas, Andrezza Alves Spexoto Olival, and Alexandre de Azevedo OlivalChapter 10: Tempered Hopes: (Re)producing the Middle Class in Recife’s Alternative Music Scene by Falina EnriquezChapter 11: Withering Dreams: Material Hope and Apathy among Brazil’s Once Rising Poor by MoisÉs KopperChapter 12: Bolsonaro Wins Japan: Support for the Far Right among Japanese-Brazilian Overseas Labor Migrants by Sarah LeBaron von BaeyerPart IV: Old Challenges, New ActivismChapter 13: Holding the Wave: Black LGBTI+ Feminist Resilience Amidst the Reactionary Turn in Rio de Janeiro by LaShandra SullivanChapter 14: LGBTTI Elders in Brazil: Subjectivation and Narratives about Resilience, Resistance and Vulnerability by Carlos Eduardo HenningChapter 15: Disgust and Defiance: The Visceral Politics of Trans and Travesti Activism Amidst a Heteronormative Backlash by Alvaro JarrÍnChapter 16: “Barbie e Ken, CidadÃos de Bem”: Memes and Political Participation among College Students in Brazil by Melanie A. Medeiros, Patrick McCormick, Erika Schmitt, and James KaleAcknowledgmentsNotes on ContributorsIndex