Overview
- Explores how Brasília’s art has been influenced by its status as a national capital and as a comprehensively planned city
- Draws on a wide array of scholarly perspectives, including those Massey, Susan Ruddick, Dominick LaCapra, and Aldo Paviani
- Each chapter focuses on a different genre of art, including cultural journalism and art events in public spaces; a novel; a film; rap and poetry competitions; music; and a cultural guidebook
Part of the book series: New Directions in Latino American Cultures (NDLAC)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
People from outside of Brasília often dismiss Brazil’s capital as socially divided, boring, corrupt, and emotionally cold. Apparently its founders created not a vibrant capital, but a cultural wasteland. However, as Sophia Beal argues, Brasília’s contemporary artists are out to prove the skeptics wrong. These twenty-first-century artists are changing how people think about the city and animating its public spaces. They are recasting Brasília as a vibrant city of the arts in which cultural production affirms a creative right to the city. Various genres—prose, poetry, film, cultural journalism, music, photography, graffiti, street theater, and street dance—play a part. Brasília’s initial 1960s art was state-sanctioned, carried out mainly by privileged, white men. In contrast, the capital’s contemporary art is marked by its diversity, challenging norms about who has a voice within the Brasília art scene. This art demystifies the capital’s inequities and imagines alternative ways of inhabiting the city.
Reviews
“The Art of Brasília offers scholars and students in Brazilian Studies, Latin American Studies and Cultural Studies the dynamic scope of Sophia Beal’s cultural reach, made accessible here to an English-speaking audience. … her study presents Brasília as a vibrant, living, arts city, worthy of recognition.” (Marguerite Itamar Harrison, Hispania, Vol. 103 (4), December, 2020)
“The aspirations behind Brasília, and its shortcomings, have generated outstanding scholarship. Here, Sophia Beal leads readers through the complex debates on the city, which enrich and inform her sensitive and wonderfully inspired readings of art. Through the arts we discover a Brasília full of diversity, vibrancy, and life. It’s certainly not a modernist utopia, but the city we find here, like the book itself, is anything but unsurprising – a constant reminder that in the history of urban planning, the unintended and the improbable happen often. Impressively-researched, yet fresh and captivating, The Art of Brasília is a brilliant achievement and will appeal to experts and first-time travelers alike. This is an important contribution to our understanding of the relations between urbanization and culture, the pursuit of art and justice, and cities as lived and imagined spaces.”
--Bruno Carvalho, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, HarvardUniversity
“Beal’s study of the cultural production associated with the Brazilian capital of Brasília is an exemplary piece of research. Created virtually out of scratch seventy years ago in the north central desert plain of Brazil to be a symbol of that country’s definitive achievement of international stature, the city has been praised for its ingenious architectural and design concepts. It has also been ridiculed as a paradigmatic example of the inhumanity now often viewed as central to modernism and its enormous legacy in Brazil. This study is singular in that Brasília’s cultural production has not previously been systematically examined. Among the merits of this study is the recognition that regional cultures remain enormously important in Brazil. Also, Beal pays close attention to the importance of popular culture and its particular importance in providing often trenchant sociocultural assessments. Beal’s secure grasp of the scope of her material andthe quality of her analyses confirm her emerging stature as a major
voice in contemporary Brazilian cultural studies.”
--David William Foster, Regents Professor of Portuguese & Spanish, Arizona State University
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Since May 2015, she has been an International Collaborator of the Contemporary Brazilian Literature Research Group, a Brazilian federally-funded initiative. She earned her PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Tulane University in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Art of Brasília
Book Subtitle: 2000-2019
Authors: Sophia Beal
Series Title: New Directions in Latino American Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37137-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37136-4Published: 30 January 2020
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-37139-5Published: 30 January 2021
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-37137-1Published: 29 January 2020
Series ISSN: 1554-4028
Series E-ISSN: 2634-520X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 252
Number of Illustrations: 8 b/w illustrations
Topics: Latin American Culture, Arts, Latino Culture