The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil

The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil
Author: Roger A. Kittleson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2005-12-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822972891

The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil traces the history of high and low politics in nineteenth-century Brazil from the vantage point of the provincial capital of Porto Alegre. In the immediate postcolonial period, new ideas about citizenship and freedom were developing, and elites struggled for control of the state as the lower classes sought inclusion in political life. In a shift from the Liberal Party to Positivist or Conservative rule during the bloody Federalist Revolt of 1893-1895, new leaders sought to bring about a more balanced structure of government where the capitalist was sympathetic to the worker, and the worker more passive toward the elite. This represented a complete change of opinions—a new regime of ideas. Termed a "scientific" approach by its proponents, the movement was based on historical process and would be brought about through civic education. Against the backdrop of the abolition of slavery and subsequent assimilation, the rise of European immigration, and industrialization, Kittleson investigates how "the people" shaped changing political ideologies and practices, and how through local struggles and changes in elite ideology, the lower classes in Porto Alegre won limited political inclusion that was denied elsewhere.

The Politics of Political Science

The Politics of Political Science
Author: Paulo Ravecca
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2019-02-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351110535

In this thought-provoking book, Paulo Ravecca presents a series of interlocking studies on the politics of political science in the Americas. Focusing mainly on the cases of Chile and Uruguay, Ravecca employs different strands of critical theory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the development of the discipline in the region, emphasizing its ideological aspects and demonstrating how the discipline itself has been shaped by power relations. Ravecca metaphorically charts the (non-linear) transit from “cold” to “warm” to “hot” intellectual temperatures to illustrate his—alternative—narrative. Beginning with a detailed quantitative study of three regional academic journals, moving to the analysis of the role of subjectivity (and political trauma) in academia and its discourse in relation to the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, and arriving finally at an intimate meditation on the experience of being a queer scholar in the Latin American academy of the 21st century, Ravecca guides his readers through differing explorations, languages, and methods. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences offers an essential reflection on both the relationship between knowledges and politics and the political and ethical role of the scholar today, demonstrating how the study of the politics of knowledge deepens our understanding of the politics of our times.

The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship

The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship
Author: Ayelet Shachar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 854
Release: 2017-08-03
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0192528424

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.

After the Long Silence

After the Long Silence
Author: Claudia Tatinge Nascimento
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0429881894

After the Long Silence offers a ground-breaking, meticulously researched criticism of Brazilian contemporary performance created by its post-dictatorship generation, whose work expresses the consequences of decades of state-imposed censorship. By offering an in-depth examination of key artists and their works, Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento highlights Brazil’s political trajectory while never allowing the weight of historical events to offset key aesthetic trends. Brazilian theater artists born around the time of the nation’s 1964 military coup experienced the oppressive rule of dictatorship throughout their formative years, but came of age as Brazil re-entered democracy some two decades later. This book showcases how the post-dictatorship generation developed performances that mapped the uncharted territories of Brazil’s political trauma with new dramaturgies, site-specific and street productions, and aesthetic experimentation. The author’s in-depth research into a wide array of archival materials and publications in both Portuguese and English demonstrates how the artistic practices of significant post-dictatorship artists such as Cia. dos Atores, Teatro da Vertigem, Grupo Galpão, Os Fofos Encenam, and Newton Moreno were driven by critical thinking and a postcolonial sentiment, proving symptomatic of the nation’s shift from an ethos of half-truth telling into a transitional justice that fell short in affirming citizenship. Ideal for scholars of the intersection of theatre and politics, After the Long Silence: The Theater of Brazil’s Post-Dictatorship Generation offers insight into the function of theater in times of political turmoil and artmaking practices that emerge in response to oppressive regimes.

Breaching the Colonial Contract

Breaching the Colonial Contract
Author: Arlo Kempf
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2009-05-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1402099444

Almost a decade in, Empire remains the 21st Century's dominant mode of cultural production, and North America remains at the apex of the colonial imperative. The contributors to this volume argue that, far from being a post-colonial world, the struggle for independence of polity and culture is still alive and relevant. The book brings together relevant examples of anti-colonial discourse and struggle from across the US and Canada, providing unique perspectives on resistance, activism, scholarship and pedagogy. Anti-colonialism is an evolving framework to which this book hopes to make a unique contribution, with the range, depth and analytical approach of the chapters it contains. The emphasis on anti-colonial resistance here is significant, as it consistently reveals the personal commitment required for the undoing of domination, as well as the ways in which people can collectively pursue radical politics in their aim of bringing about social justice. The book examines a multitude of actions which could be termed anti-colonial, from student walkouts along the US/Mexico border, to interrogations of the relationship between indigenous and anti-racist struggles in North America, to analyses of the implications of anti-colonialism for community unionism as well as disability rights struggles. Chapters also look at the movement for Africentric schools in Toronto, provide an annotated and comparative look at the myriad struggles for and by the Fourth World and Fourth World nations, and analyze the creation of an anti-colonial classroom in a Montreal university. They also explore the colonial underpinnings of multicultural education in the US. With contributions from leading thinkers such as Henry Giroux, Ward Churchill, and Peter McLaren, as well as fresh perspectives from junior academics, this book provides a diverse and varied survey of anti-colonialism in the US and Canada. It will be a thought-provoking read for those working in a wide variety of disciplines, from Sociology to Politics. In daring and incisive ways, Arlo Kempf's collection further positions anti-colonialism as the necessary educational project for the colonizer and colonized within us all; it reflectively re-sets the radical education agenda, with telling historical and current instances that are used by the book's authors to move constructively forward in critical ways. John Willinsky, Stanford University, USA

The Postcolonial Politics of Development

The Postcolonial Politics of Development
Author: Ilan Kapoor
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 363
Release: 2008-02-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135976791

This book uses a postcolonial lens to question development’s dominant cultural representations and institutional practices, investigating the possibilities for a transformatory postcolonial politics. Ilan Kapoor examines recent development policy initiatives in such areas as ‘governance,’ ‘human rights’ and ‘participation’ to better understand and contest the production of knowledge in development - its cultural assumptions, power implications, and hegemonic politics. The volume shows how development practitioners and westernized elites/intellectuals are often complicit in this neo-colonial knowledge production. Noble gestures such as giving foreign aid or promoting participation and democracy frequently mask their institutional biases and economic and geopolitical interests, while silencing the subaltern (marginalized groups), on whose behalf they purportedly work. In response, the book argues for a radical ethical and political self-reflexivity that is vigilant to our reproduction of neo-colonialisms and amenable to public contestation of development priorities. It also underlines subaltern political strategies that can (and do) lead to greater democratic dialogue.

The Color of Modernity

The Color of Modernity
Author: Barbara Weinstein
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2015-04-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822376156

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.” This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.

Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial Theory
Author: Leela Gandhi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231548567

Published twenty years ago, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory was a landmark description of the field of postcolonial studies in theoretical terms that set its intellectual context alongside poststructuralism, postmodernism, Marxism, and feminism. Gandhi examined the contributions of major thinkers such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and the subaltern historians. The book pointed to postcolonialism’s relationship with earlier anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and M. K. Gandhi and explained pertinent concepts and schools of thought—hybridity, Orientalism, humanism, Marxist dialectics, diaspora, nationalism, gendered subalternity, globalization, and postcolonial feminism. The revised edition of this classic work reaffirms its status as a useful starting point for readers new to the field and as a provocative account that opens up possibilities for debate. It includes substantial additions: A new preface and epilogue reposition postcolonial studies within evolving intellectual contexts and take stock of important critical developments. Gandhi examines recent alliances with critical race theory and Africanist postcolonialism, considers challenges from postsecular and postcritical perspectives, and takes into account the ontological, environmental, affective, and ethical turns in the changed landscape of critical theory. She describes what is enduring in postcolonial thinking—as a critical perspective within the academy and as an attitude to the world that extends beyond the discipline of postcolonial studies.

Homicide Justified

Homicide Justified
Author: Andrew T. Fede
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 2017-07-15
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0820351113

This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases—across time, place, and circumstance—to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters’ rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as “property,” from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters’ rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners’ families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws consistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.