Music inspired by that movement is today enjoying considerable attention at home and abroad. Few new listeners, however, make the connection between this music and the circumstances surrounding its creation, the most violent and repressive days of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. With key manifestations in theater, cinema, visual arts, literature, and especially popular music, Tropicalia dynamically articulated the conflicts and aspirations of a generation of young, urban Brazilians.Focusing on a group of musicians from Bahia, an impoverished state in northeastern Brazil noted for its vibrant Afro-Brazilian culture, Christopher Dunn reveals how artists including Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Tom Ze created this movement together with the musical and poetic vanguards of Sao Paulo, Brazil's most modern and industrialized city. He shows how the tropicalists selectively appropriated and parodied cultural practices from Brazil and abroad in order to expose the fissure between their nation's idealized image as a peaceful tropical "garden" and the daily brutality visited upon its citizens.

    Focusing on São Paulo, and using comparative data on Los Angeles, she identifies new patterns of segregation developing in these cities and suggests that these patterns are appearing in many metropolises.

    In so doing, he proposed that Brazil was relatively free of most forms of racial prejudice and could best be understood as a “racial democracy.” Over time this view has grown into the popular myth that racism in Brazil is very mild or nonexistent.This myth contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates every aspect of Brazilian life. To study the grip of this myth on African Brazilians’ views of themselves and their nation, Robin E. Sheriff spent twenty months in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, studying the inhabitants’s views of race and racism. How, she asks, do poor African Brazilians experience and interpret racism in a country where its very existence tends to be publicly denied? How is racism talked about privately in the family and publicly in the community—or is it talked about at all?Sheriff’s analysis is particularly important because most Brazilians live in urban settings, and her examination of their views of race and racism sheds light on common but underarticulated racial attitudes. This book is the first to demonstrate that urban African Brazilians do not subscribe to the racial democracy myth and recognize racism as a central factor shaping their lives.

    Guggenheim Museum -- is a soaring tribute to the harmonious nature of Brazilian art and culture. Juxtaposing Baroque masterpieces from the 17th and 18th centuries with essential works of modern and contemporary art as well as indigenous and Afro-Brazilian arts, the book's editors explore the integration of sensorial and spiritual experience in Brazilian art -- the union of body and soul.Included are some 350 paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects, ranging from a monumental Baroque altarpiece to contemporary photographic works and installations. Throughout, the text reveals the deep cultural links between the different periods, tracing the indigenous, African, and European influences in Brazilian art from the Baroque era to the present.

    This collection of articles by leading scholars traces the history of Brazilian pop music through the twentieth-century.

    It is an important contribution to anthropological debates on the nature of history and social change, as well as on neglected areas such as myth, visual art, and the methodological issues involved in fieldwork and archival data.