From 1865-1866, James accompanied the director of the recently established Museum of Comparative Zoology on a research expedition to Brazil. This critical, bilingual (English-Portuguese) edition of his diaries and letters includes reproductions of his drawings. This original material belongs to the Houghton Archives at Harvard University.
In 1858 François-Auguste Biard, a well-known sixty-year-old French artist, arrived in Brazil to explore and depict its jungles and the people who lived there. What did he see and how did he see it? In this book historian Ana Lucia Araujo examines Biard’s Brazil with special attention to what she calls his “tropical romanticism”: a vision of the country with an emphasis on the exotic. Biard was not only one of the first European artists to encounter and depict native Brazilians, but also one of the first travelers to photograph the rain forest and its inhabitants. His 1862 travelogue Deux années en Brésil includes 180 woodcuts that reveal Brazil’s reliance on slave labor as well as describe the landscape, flora, and fauna, with lively narratives of his adventures and misadventures in the rain forest. Thoroughly researched, Araujo places Biard’s work in the context of the European travel writing of the time and examines how representations of Brazil through French travelogues contributed and reinforced cultural stereotypes and ideas about race and race relations in Brazil. She further summarizes that similar representations continue and influence perspectives today.
In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography---and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.
"This book discusses how some works of art produced in Latin America in the sixties, seventies, and eighties forged a different understanding of the female body, understood as space for the expression of a dissident subjectivity in relation to socially normalized places. Representations of art and of feminist activism interrogated the disciplining of the female body that entails as well the disciplining of the male body. Before a history of highly regulated artistic representations-regardless of the occasional exceptions a historian might point out-images erupted that questioned the social and institutional naturalization of the feminine and the masculine"--
This edited volume brings together some of the most prominent scholars in the fields of theoretical, critical, and political psychology to examine crisis phenomena. The book investigates the role of psychology as a science in times of crisis, discusses how socio-political change affects the discipline and profession, and renders psychological interventions as forms of political action. The authors examine how notions of crisis and the interpretation of crisis scenarios are heavily intertwined with governmental and state interests. Seeking to disentangle individual subjectivity, subjectification, and science as forms of politics, the volume works toward an explicit goal to decolonize psychology. The chapters elaborate on the importance of the psychological sciences in times of crisis and the role of psychologists as practitioners. Ultimately, the diverse contributions underline the connection of scientific theory, practice, and politics. Interdisciplinary in scope and wide-ranging in its perspectives, this timely work will appeal to students and scholars of theoretical and political psychology, critical psychology, and cultural studies.
The Thayer Expedition is a fascinating chronicle of one of the most ambitious scientific expeditions of the 19th century. Led by the legendary naturalist Louis Agassiz and his collaborator Charles Frederick Hartt, the Thayer Expedition explored the geology and biology of the Amazon River basin like never before. This book offers a rare glimpse into the scientific process and the excitement of discovery, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of science. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.
The second edition of A Concise History of Brazil features a new chapter that covers the critical time period from 1990 to the present, focusing on Brazil's increasing global economic importance as well as its continued democratic development.
This book offers a new and insightful look at the interconnections between the United States, Brazil and Mexico during the nineteenth century. Gerassi-Navarro brings together U.S. and Latin American Studies with her analysis of the travel narratives of Frances Calderón de la Barca and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz. Inspired by the writings of Alexander von Humboldt these women, in their travels, expand his views on the tropics to include a social dimension to their observations on nature, culture, race, and progress in Brazil and Mexico. Highlighting the role of women as a new kind of observer as well as the complexity of connections between the United States and Latin America, Gerassi-Navarro interweaves science, politics, and aesthetics in new transnational frameworks.
