Drawing from a variety of historical sources, theory, and fictional and non-fictional production, this book addresses the cultural imaginary of domestic servants in modern Brazil and demonstrates maids' symbolic centrality to shifting notions of servitude, subordination, femininity, and domesticity.
"The book analyzes post-1980 films, texts, and digital media produced in collaboration with paid domestic workers or inspired by their experiences to explore such workers' sociocultural status and struggles"--
This book examines the vibrant field of documentary filmmaking in Brazil from the transition to democracy in 1985 to the present. Marked by significant efforts toward the democratization of Brazil's highly unequal society, this period also witnessed the documentary's rise to unprecedented vitality in quantity, quality, and diversity of production-which includes polished auteur films as well as rough-hewn collaborative works, films made in major metropolitan regions as well as in indigenous villages and in remote parts of the Amazon, intimate first-person documentaries as well as films that dive headfirst into struggles for social justice. The transformations of Brazilian society and of filmmaking coalesce and become entangled in this cinema's preoccupation with archives. Historically linked to the exercise and maintenance of power, the concept of the archive is critical for the documentary as a cultural practice that preserves images from the present for the future, unearths and repurposes visual materials from the past, and is historically invested in filmic images as records of the real. Contemporary films incorporate, reflect on, and rework a variety of archives, such as documents produced by official institutions, ethnographic images, home movies, and photo albums-and engage not only with what is preserved but also with lacunas in the record and with alternate forms of remembering, retrieving, and transmitting the past. Through its interaction with archives, this book argues, the contemporary documentary reflects on and intervenes in the distribution of visibilities and invisibilities, centers and margins, silences and speech, living memory and its preservation in the record-thus locating the documentary on archival borders that concern Brazilian society and filmmaking alike.
The first book-length edited collection on Machado de Assis, this volume offers essays on Machado de Assis' work that offer new critical perspectives not only Brazilian literature and history, but also to social, cultural, and political phenomena that continue to have global repercussions.
One of the few interdisciplinary volumes on Bahia available, The Making of Brazil’s Black Mecca: Bahia Reconsidered contains contributions covering a wide chronological and topical range by scholars whose work has made important contributions to the field of Bahian studies over the last two decades. The authors interrogate and problematize the idea of Bahia as a Black Mecca, or a haven where Brazilians of African descent can embrace their cultural and spiritual African heritage without fear of discrimination. In the first section, leading historians create a century-long historical narrative of the emergence of these discourses, their limitations, and their inability to effect meaningful structural change. The chapters by social scientists in the second section present critical reflections and insights, some provocative, on deficiencies and problematic biases built into current research paradigms on blackness in Bahia. As a whole the text provides a series of insights into the ways that inequality has been structured in Bahia since the final days of slavery.
What makes domestic work a bad job, even after efforts to formalize and improve working conditions? Erynn Masi de Casanova's case study, based partly on collaborative research conducted with Ecuador's pioneer domestic workers' organization, examines three reasons for persistent exploitation. First, the tasks of social reproduction are devalued. Second, informal work arrangements escape regulation. And third, unequal class relations are built into this type of employment. Accessible to advocates and policymakers as well as academics, this book provides both theoretical discussions about domestic work and concrete ideas for improving women's lives. Drawing on workers' stories of lucha, trabajo, and sacrificio—struggle, work, and sacrifice—Dust and Dignity offers a new take on an old occupation. From the intimate experience of being a body out of place in an employer's home, to the common work histories of Ecuadorian women in different cities, to the possibilities for radical collective action at the national level, Casanova shows how and why women do this stigmatized and precarious work and how they resist exploitation in the search for dignified employment. From these searing stories of workers' lives, Dust and Dignity identifies patterns in domestic workers' experiences that will be helpful in understanding the situation of workers elsewhere and offers possible solutions for promoting and ensuring workers' rights that have relevance far beyond Ecuador.
This volume explores the character of the domestic worker in twenty-first century Latin American cinema and analyzes how recent filmic representations of the housemaid question the marginalization of domestic servants, in particular women, by making them the center of their narratives, their families, and society. The essays in this book posit the female domestic worker as an emergent subjectivity, a complex character who problematizes and contests the hierarchical power structures within the family dynamics and new socioeconomic orders found in contemporary Latin America. Readers will find a variety of representations across the continent as well as transnational commonalities of the cinematic figure and role of the housemaid, including the negotiation of a multilayered politics of affection in the framework of prevalent paternalism, and the complex and contradictory dynamic between private and public spaces, where domestic paid labor occupies a central role in maintaining gender, class, and ethnic inequalities.
In Bahia, Brazil, the decades following emancipation saw the rise of reformers who sought to reshape the citizenry by educating Bahian women in methods for raising “better babies.” The idealized Brazilian would be better equipped to contribute to the labor and organizational needs of a modern nation. Backed by many physicians, politicians, and intellectuals, the resulting welfare programs for mothers and children mirrored complex debates about Brazilian nationality. Examining the local and national contours of this movement, Progressive Mothers, Better Babies investigates families, medical institutions, state-building, and social stratification to trace the resulting policies, which gathered momentum in the aftermath of abolition (1888) and the declaration of the First Republic (1889), culminating during the administration of President Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945). Exploring the cultural discourses on race, gender, and poverty that permeated medical knowledge and the public health system for almost a century, Okezi T. Otovo draws on extensive archival research to reconstruct the implications for Bahia, where family patronage politics governed poor women’s labor as the mothers who were the focus of medical interventions were often the nannies and nursemaids of society’s wealthier families. The book reveals key transition points as the state of Bahia transformed from being a place where poor families could expect few social services to becoming the home of numerous programs targeting the poorest mothers and their children. Negotiating crucial questions of identity, this history sheds new light on larger debates about Brazil’s past and future.
This book reflects the development of Latin American labour history across broad geographical, chronological and thematic perspectives, which seek to review and revisit key concepts at different levels. The contributions are closely linked to the most recent trends in Global Labour History and in turn, they enrich those trends. Here, authors from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Spain take a historical and sociological perspective and analyse a series of problems relating to labour relations. The chapters weave together different periods of Latin American colonial and republican history from the vice-royalties of New Spain (now Mexico) and Peru, the Royal Audiencia de Charcas (now Bolivia), Argentina and Uruguay (former vice-royalty of Río de La Plata) and Chile (former Capitanía General).
A collection of essays, interviews, and conversations by and between scholars, activists, and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean that paints a portrait of Black women's experiences across the region. Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer a triple erasure: as Black people, as women, and as non-English speakers in a global environment dominated by the Anglophone North. Black Feminist Constellations is a passionate and necessary corrective. Focused on and written by Black women of the southern Americas, the original works composing this volume make legible the epistemologies that sustain radical scholarship, art, and political organizing by Black women everywhere. In essays, poems, and dialogues, the writers in Black Feminist Constellations reimagine liberation from the perspectives of radical South American and Caribbean Black women thinkers. The volume’s methodologically innovative approach reflects how Black women come together to theorize the world and challenges the notion that the university is the only site where knowledge can emerge. A major work of intellectual history, Black Feminist Constellations amplifies rarely heard voices, centers the uncanonized, and celebrates the overlooked work of Black women.