Graciliano Ramos And The Making Of Modern Brazil

Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil brings updated criticism in English on the work of the prominent Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953), a key figure in understanding the making of modern Brazil. Building on existing literature, this book innovates through chapters that consider issues such as Ramos’s dialogue with literary tradition, his cultural legacy for contemporary writers, and his treatment of racial discrimination and gender inequality through the multifarious, provocative and enduringly fascinating characters he created. The volume also addresses the question of Ramos’s political involvement during the years of the Getulio Vargas government (1930–45), to revisit established readings of the author’s politics. Through close reading of individual works as well as comparative analyses, this volume takes readers into the complexities of modernisation in Brazil, and highlights the writer’s significance for our understanding of Brazil today.

A peasant family, driven by the drought, walks to exhaustion through an arid land. As they shelter at a deserted ranch, the drought is broken and they linger, tending cattle for the absentee ranch owner, until the onset of another drought forces them to move on, homeless wanderers again. Yet, like the desert plants that defeat all rigors of wind and weather, the family maintains its will to survive in the harsh and solitary land. Intimately acquainted with the region of which he writes and keenly appreciative of the character of its inhabitants, into whose minds he has penetrated as few before him, Graciliano Ramos depicts them in a style whose austerity well becomes the spareness of the subject, creating a gallery of figures that rank as classic in contemporary Brazilian literature.

Latin America and Existentialism is a preliminary intellectual history, prioritising literature and contextualising Latin American philosophical contributions from the 1860s to the late 1930s, decades that coincide with the canon’s foundational years. This study takes a Pan-American approach to move the critical focus away from the River Plate, a region that has received some critical attention. In doing so, it focuses on existentially-neglected writers such as Brazil’s Machado de Assis and Graciliano Ramos, José Asunción Silva from Colombia, Cuba’s Enrique Labrador Ruiz, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal. Underappreciated Latin American philosophical voices and existentialism’s canonical perspectives allow the author to discuss the many problems concerning the experiencing ‘I’ of these authors, and to consider such existential themes as ethical vacuity, forlornness, the crisis of insufficiency, the conundrum of choice, and the enigma of authentic being. The concentration on Latin America’s existentially-hued interest in the human condition is an invitation to the reader to reconsider the peripheral status in the existentialism canon.

Reflecting on some of Brazil’s foremost challenges, this book considers the porous relationship between legality and illegality in a country that presages political and societal changes in hitherto unprecedented dimensions. It brings together work by established scholars from Brazil, Europe and the United States to think through how (il)legalities are produced and represented at the level of institutions, (daily) practice and culture. Through a transdisciplinary approach, the chapters cover issues including informal work practices (e.g. street vendors), urban squatter movements and migration. Alongside social practices, the volume features close analyses of cultural practices and cultural production, including migrant literature, punk music and indigenous art. The question of (il)legalities resonates beyond Brazil’s borders, as concepts such as "lawfare" have crept into vocabularies, and countries the world over grapple with issues like state interference, fake news and the definition of "illegal" migration. This is valuable reading for scholars in Brazilian and Latin American Studies, as well as those working in literary and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, geography and political science.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Argentina was in the midst of its worst economic crisis in decades, the result of years of drastic neoliberal reforms. This book looks at the way ideas about race and nationhood were conveyed during this period of financial meltdown and national emergency, examining in particular how the neoliberal crisis led to the critical self-questioning of the dominant imaginary of Argentina as homogeneously white – allegedly the result of European immigration and the extinction of most indigenous and black people in the nation-building age. The Darkening Nation focuses on how the self-examination of racial and national identity triggered by this crisis was expressed in culture, through the analysis of literary texts, films, artworks and music styles. By considering a wide range of artistic and cultural products, and different forms of racial identity and difference (white, indigenous, Afro-descendant, immigrant and negro as it is understood in local contexts), this study constitutes a timely addition from a literary and cultural studies perspective to recent academic enquiry into race and nation in Argentina.