David Treece - Böcker

This is the first global study of the single most important intellectual and artistic movement in Brazilian cultural history before Modernism. The Indianist movement, under the direct patronage of the Emperor Pedro II, was a major pillar of the Empire's project of state-building, involving historians, poets, playwrights and novelists in the production of a large body of work extending over most of the nineteenth century. Tracing the parallel history of official indigenist policy and Indianist writing, Treece reveals the central role of the Indian in constructing the self-image of state and society under Empire. He aims to historicize the movement, examining it as a literary phenomenon, both with its own invented traditions and myths, and standing at the interfaces between culture and politics, between the Indian as imaginary and real.As this book demonstrates, the Indianist tradition was not merely an example of Romantic exoticism or escapism, recycling infinite variations on a single model of the Noble Savage imported from the European imaginary. Instead, it was a complex, evolving tradition, inextricably enmeshed with the contemporary political debates on the status of the indigenous communities and their future within the post-colonial state. These debates raised much wider questions about the legacy of colonial rule-the persistence of authoritarian models of government, the social and political marginalization of large numbers of free but landless Brazilians, and above all the maintenance of slavery. The Indianist stage offered the Indian alternately as tragic victim and exile, as rebel and outlaw, as alien to the social pact, as mother or protector of the post-colonial Brazilian family, or as self-sacrificing ally and voluntary slave.

During the last hundred years, the private and public voices of Latin American poetry have offered a wealth of imaginative responses to the region's social and political experiences. In the face of capitalist modernization, dictatorship and imperialist domination, poets have fought back. The Gathering of Voices argues that the best of Latin American poetry has set out to rediscover its roots in local experience and to enter a dialogue with the "ordinary" discourses of popular culture and tradition. The implication is that an alternative response to oppression is possible, one inspired by the shared global experiences of alienation, exclusion and exploitation. The possibility of a universal emancipation is evoked in the transformation of language. Each chapter of the volume explores a crucial moment in this dialogue of voices, focusing on key texts, including works by Cardenal, Neruda, Vallejo and the Andrades. With extensive studies of the previously neglected tradition of Brazilian verse, the book provides a guide to the history of poetic debate and practice in 20th-century Latin America. The book includes complete poems of the artists discussed and should appeal to a general readership interested in Latin American culture. It is also a useful text for courses in literature and poetry.

More and more people are discovering Brazil’s fascinating culture, especially the striking exuberance and inventiveness of its popular music. In Brazilian Jive, David Treece uncovers the genius of Brazilian song, both as a sophisticated, articulate art form crafted out of the dialogue between music and language and as a powerfully eloquent expression of the country’s social and political history.Focusing on the cultural struggles of music-making in Brazil, this book traces their journey from the rise of samba through the bossa nova revolution of the late 1950s to the emergence of rap in the 1990s. It describes how Brazilian music grew out of the pain and dispossession of slavery and, inspired by African traditions, how it celebrates new ways of moving freely in time and space. Resonant with the rhythms and tones of the modern, the Brazilian soundscape also expresses the country’s dissonances and contradictions, while the conversation between melody and word often signifies a larger dialogue between its artistic and political cultures.Looking deep into those cultures, Brazilian Jive provides fresh insight into how the life of a nation has been performed in some of the world’s most remarkable music.

‘Music Scenes and Migrations’ brings together new work from Brazilian and European scholars around the themes of musical place and transnationalism across the Atlantic triangle connecting Brazil, Africa and Europe. Moving beyond now-contested models for conceptualizing international musical relations and hierarchies of powers and influence, such as global/local or centre/periphery, the volume draws attention instead to the role of the city, in particular, in producing, signifying and mediating music-making in the colonial and post-colonial Portuguese-speaking world. In considering the roles played by cities as hubs of cultural intersection, socialization, exchange and transformation; as sites of political intervention and contestation; and as homes to large concentrations of consumers, technologies and media, Rio de Janeiro necessarily figures prominently, given its historical importance as an international port at the centre of the Lusophone Atlantic world. The volume also gives attention to other urban centres, within Brazil and abroad, towards which musicians and musical traditions have migrated and converged – such as São Paulo, Lisbon and Madrid – where they have reinvented themselves; where notions of Brazilian and Lusophone identity have been reconfigured; and where independent, peripheral and underground scenes have contested the hegemony of the musical ‘mainstream’.