This course examines the history of Latin America's largest and most populous nation, shedding light on Brazil's political history, economic development, and cultural formation. The course looks at principal topics in postcolonial Brazilian history: Independence and Empire, slavery and post-emancipation society; formation of racial, class, and gender identities; urbanization and industrialization; foreign relations; frontier expansion; and bureaucratic-authoritarianism. We begin with the fundamental premise that nation-states are sociocultural constructions whose inclusiveness, legitimacy, and viability vary from one historical moment to another. The challenges to nation-building that confronted Brazil--with its oligarchic, patriarchal, and slavocratic heritage, economic "underdevelopment," multiethnic population, and pronounced regionalism--are the matters to be interrogated through the readings.
As a graduate course in history, we will explore not only events and processes in the past but focus closely on questions of argumentation, evidence, and historiography.
Assignments
Over the course of the semester, students will write eleven book reviews (2-3 pp. each). The essay should highlight the factual, methodological, and historiographical contributions of the text. The final paper (8 pp.) will consist of a comparative/historiographical essay that examines at least four texts to analyze divergences or overlaps in the treatment of a given historical theme.
Readings
Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories
João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil
Zephyr Frank, Dutra’s World
João José Reis, Death is a Festival
Julyan Peard, Race, Place, and Medicine
Paulina Alberto, Terms of Inclusion: Black Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Brazil
Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro
Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964
Susan Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy
Amy Chazkel, Laws of Chance: Brazil’s Clandestine Lottery and the Making of
Urban Public Life