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"A transnational approach to the history of a key Latin American border region"--Provided by publisher.
Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s.
A new history of Brazil told through the lens of the often-overlooked interior regions. In colonial Brazil, observers frequently complained that Portuguese settlers appeared content to remain “clinging to the coastline, like crabs.” From their perspective, the vast Brazilian interior seemed like an untapped expanse waiting to be explored and colonized. This divide between a thriving coastal area and a less-developed hinterland has become deeply ingrained in the nation’s collective imagination, perpetuating the notion of the interior as a homogeneous, stagnant periphery awaiting the dynamic influence of coastal Brazil. The Interior challenges these narratives and reexamines the history ...
It is a little-known fact that the first cultural agreement Canada signed was with Brazil in 1944. The two countries’ rapprochement launched a flurry of activity connecting Montreal to Rio de Janeiro amid the turbulence of war and its aftermath. Why Brazil? And what could songs and paintings achieve that traditional diplomacy could not? Distant Stage examines the neglected histories of Canada-Brazil relations and the role played by culture in Canada’s pursuit of an international identity. The efforts of French-Canadian artists, intellectuals, and diplomats are at the heart of both. Eric Fillion demonstrates how music and the visual arts gave state and non-state actors new connections to ...
Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.
In genetics laboratories in Latin America, scientists have been mapping the genomes of local populations, seeking to locate the genetic basis of complex diseases and to trace population histories. As part of their work, geneticists often calculate the European, African, and Amerindian genetic ancestry of populations. Some researchers explicitly connect their findings to questions of national identity and racial and ethnic difference, bringing their research to bear on issues of politics and identity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, the contributors to Mestizo Genomics explore how the concepts of race, ethnicity, nation, and gender enter into and are affected...
Brazil's Zika outbreak revealed extreme health disparities and reproductive injustice across racial and socioeconomic lines. Brazil's 2015 Zika outbreak led to severe illnesses for many and the birth of several thousands of children with severe brain damage. Even though mosquito-borne diseases such as the Zika virus affect people across society, these children were born almost exclusively to poor, and usually non-white, women. In Viruses and Reproductive Injustice, Ilana Löwy explores the complicated health disparities and reproductive injustice that led to these cases of congenital Zika syndrome. Löwy examines the history of the outbreak in Brazil and connects it to broader questions conc...
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters impa...
This book provides a clear, broad, and provocative synthesis of the history of Latin American medicine.
Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from public health campaigns to totalitarian dreams of the "perfectibility of man." This book dispels for uninitiated readers the automatic and apparently exclusive link between eugenics and the Holocaust. It is the first world history of eugenics and an indispensable core text for both teaching and research. Eugenics has accumulated generations of interest as experts at...