A Tropical Belle Epoque

This book, originally published in 1987, is a socio-cultural analysis of a tropical belle epoque: Rio de Janeiro between 1898 and 1914. It relates how the city's elite evolved from the semi-rural, slave-owning patriarchy of the coffee-port seat of a monarchy into an urbane, professional, rentier upper crust dominating the centre of a 'modernising' oligarchical republic. It explores such varied topics as architecture, literature, prostitution, urban reform, the family, secondary schools, and the salon. It evokes a milieu increasingly marked by Europe, demonstrating how French and English culture permeated the lives of elite members who adapted it to their needs and perspectives as a dominant stratum of relatively recent and varied origin. This exploration of cultural 'dependency' in a unique, cosmopolitan, fin-de-siecle urban culture will also interest those concerned with the broader questions of culture and colonialism during the high tide of European imperialism.

A special issue of PUBLIC CULTURE, this volume of essays examines modernity from transnational and transcultural perspectives, holding that within different cultures, there are different starting points of the transition to modernity that lead to differen

The years before the First World War have long been romanticized as a zenith of French culture—the “Belle Époque.” The era is seen as the height of a lost way of life that remains emblematic of what it means to be French. In a vast range of texts and images, it appears as a carefree time full of joie de vivre, fanfare and frills, artistic daring, and scientific innovation. The Moulin Rouge shared the stage with the Universal Exposition, Toulouse-Lautrec rubbed elbows with Marie Curie and La Belle Otero, and Fantômas invented automatic writing. This book traces the making—and the imagining—of the Belle Époque to reveal how and why it became a cultural myth. Dominique Kalifa lifts the veil on a period shrouded in nostalgia, explaining the century-long need to continuously reinvent and even sanctify this moment. He sifts through images handed down in memoirs and reminiscences, literature and film, art and history to explore the many facets of the era, including its worldwide reception. The Belle Époque was born in France, but it quickly went global as other countries adopted the concept to write their own histories. In shedding light on how the Belle Époque has been celebrated and reimagined, Kalifa also offers a nuanced meditation on time, history, and memory.

The customary division of Latin American history into colonial and modern periods has come into question recently. This new book demonstrates that there was a middle period in Latin America's historical evolution since the European Conquest-one no longer colonial, but not yet modern-which has left a legacy in its own right for contemporary Latin America. This volume is a narrative text on Latin America's "long nineteenth century," from the period of Imperial Reforms in the late eighteenth century up to the Great Depression. Incorporating local and regional studies from the last three decades which have profoundly broadened and altered customary views about Latin America, the book is a synthesis of this "Middle Period." Latin America in the Middle Period re-evaluates the relation between subsistence and market production in the post-independence economy, stressing regional diversity. It also re-evaluates the mechanics of politics, which customarily have been seen as liberal-conservative, caudillo-oligarchy, region-nation, and merchant-landowner-industrialist. The text discusses the acceleration of the forces of modernization, the rise of industrial capitalism, and the beginnings of a national ordering of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which eroded the fabric of Middle Period society, a process consummated in the aftermath of world depression in the 1930s, ushering in modern Latin America. This new volume is an excellent resource for courses in nineteenth-century Latin American history and the second half of Latin American history survey.

This book is the first to trace the origins and significance of positivism on a global scale. Taking their cues from Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill, positivists pioneered a universal, experience-based culture of scientific inquiry for studying nature and society—a new science that would enlighten all of humankind. Positivists envisaged one world united by science, but their efforts spawned many. Uncovering these worlds of positivism, the volume ranges from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe, Russia, and Brazil, examining positivism’s impact as one of the most far-reaching intellectual movements of the modern world. Positivists reinvented science, claiming it to be distinct from and superior to the humanities. They predicated political governance on their refashioned science of society, and as political activists, they sought and often failed to reconcile their universalism with the values of multiculturalism. Providing a genealogy of scientific governance that is sorely needed in an age of post-truth politics, this volume breaks new ground in the fields of intellectual and global history, the history of science, and philosophy.

Examines debates over sexual honor to explore the ways in which private morality was infused with the cultural politics of nation-building and modernization, and was used to legitimate power differentials based on race, gender, and class.

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 the idea of nation, which in turn informed their sense of place in the world. Tracing the origins of Canadian cultural diplomacy to South America, the book underscores the significance of race and religion in the country’s international history, showing how Brazil served as a distant stage where Canadian identity politics and aspirations could play out. Both a timely invitation to think about cultural diplomacy as a critical practice and a reflection on the interplay between internationalism and nationalism, Distant Stage draws attention to the ambiguous yet essential roles played by artists in international and intercultural relations.

The Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story contains a selection of short stories by the best-known authors in Brazilian literature from the late nineteenth century to the present. With few exceptions, these stories have appeared in English translation, although widely separated in time and often published in obscure journals. Here they are united in a coherent edition representing Brazil's modern, vibrant literature and culture. J.M. Machado de Assis, who first perfected the genre, wrote at least sixty stories considered to be masterpieces of world literature. Ten of his stories are included here, and are accompanied by strong and diverse representations of the contemporary story in Brazil, featuring nine stories by Clarice Lispector and seven by João Guimarães Rosa. The remaining 34 authors include Mário de Andrade, Graciliano Ramos, Osman Lins, Dalton Trevisan, and other major names whose stories in translation exhibit profound artistry. The anthology is divided into four major periods, "Tropical Belle-Époque," "Modernism," "Modernism at Mid-Century," and "Contemporary Views." There is a general introduction to Brazilian literary culture and introductions to each of the four sections, with descriptions of the authors and a general bibliography on Brazil and Brazilian literature in English. It includes stories of innovation (Mário de Andrade), psychological suspense (Graciliano Ramos), satire and perversion (Dalton Trevisan), altered realities and perceptions (Murilo Rubião), repression and sexuality (Hilda Hilst, Autran Dourado), myth (Nélida Piñón), urban life (Lygia Fagundes Telles, Rubem Fonescal), the oral tale (Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz) and other overarching themes and issues of Brazilian culture. The anthology concludes with a haunting story set in the opera theater in Manaus by one of Brazil's most recently successful writers, Milton Hatoum.