African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., A cultural history of Rio de Janeiro's Cidade Nova from the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808. The area became identified with Afro-descendents and Ashkenazi Jews, but it was also inhabited by Spanish, Italian and Portuguese immigrants. discusses intersections between literary imaginaries and urban experiences, involving topics like social segregation, cultural memory, spatial porosity, cognitive mapping, and the idea of the city as a palimpsest.
Considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. The music of Rio's streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB, soul, funk, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass), and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio's soundscape have arguably shaped audiences' understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films' visual narratives and dramas. The author discusses some key examples spanning the last 50 years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues's remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, he explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the harder soundtracks of most recent films (centering on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalized depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. In cinematic representations of the city, Rio's musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more real than any other.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally presented as the author's thesis (master's)--Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Faculdade de Ciências e Letras da Universidade Estadual Paulista, 1998., 204 p.
This article explores the "elitist profile" of racial discrimination through eighty in-depth interviews with black professionals in Rio de Janeiro. The results show that interviewees describe their trajectories of social mobility through mechanisms that involve both socioeconomic and racial exclusion. Their perceptions of injustice, however, are more directly related to experiences of racial discrimination.
Recent scholarly interest in the populations of African descent in Latin America has contributed to a growing body of literature. Although a number of studies have explored the issue of blackness in Afro-Latin American countries, much less attention has been paid to how blackness functions in mestizo American countries. Furthermore, in mestizo America, the theoretical emphasis has oftentimes been placed on the mestizo/Indian divide, leaving no conceptual room to explore the issue of blackness.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
423 p., Focuses on the migrations and metamorphoses of black bodies, practices, and discourses around the Atlantic, particularly with regard to current issues such as questions of identity, political and human rights, cosmopolitics, and mnemo-history. Includes Judith M. Williams' "Néritude as performance practice: Rio de Janeiro's Black experimental theatre," Richard Follett's "The spirit of Brazil: football and the politics of Afro-Brazilian cultural identity," Dorothea Fischer-Hornung's "Transbodied/transcultured : moving spirits in Katherine Dunham's and Maya Deren's Caribbean," Elvira Pulitano's "Re-mapping Caribbean land(sea)scapes: aquatic metaphors and transatlantic homes in Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic sound," and Antoinette Tidjani Alou's "Marine origins and anti-marine tropism in the French Caribbean: André and Simone Schwarz-Bart."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
104 p, The history of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro begins in the final years of the nineteenth century as Brazil transitioned from an empire to a republic. As the nation continued to undergo dramatic political changes throughout the course of the twentieth century, the slums of its second largest city grew in size and number, in turn experiencing significant changes of their own. Initially, these communities were loosely incorporated squatter settlements that sprang up organically in order to house internal migrants and itinerant laborers. As they became more numerous and increasingly populated by a burgeoning urban underclass, favela residents began to organize internally, forming associações de moradores, or residents’ associations.
Brazil's tourist-jammed cities are some of the most violent on the planet. A considerable number of the country's 43,000 annual murders occur on the streets of Sao Paulo, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. And Brazilian cities are not alone in what might be called a bad neighborhood. The fact is that most major Latin American and Caribbean cities are today plagued by an epidemic of violence. With more than 20 murders per 100,000 people, the regional homicide rate is roughly three times the global average. Many of the larger urban centers -- from Caracas and Ciudad Juarez to Kingston and Port-of-Spain -- register the highest rates of lethal violence in the world.
