Brazil's military dictatorship (1964-1985) launched seemingly apolitical official campaigns that were aesthetically appealing and ostensibly aimed to ""enlighten"" and ""civilize."" Some were produced as civilian-military collaborations and others were conducted by privately owned media, but undergirding them all was the theme of a country aspiring to become a developed nation. In Brazilian Propaganda, Nina Schneider examines the various modes of both official and unendorsed propaganda used by an authoritarian regime. Focusing primarily on visual media, she demonstrates how many short films of the period portrayed a society free from class and racial conflicts. These films espoused civic-mindedness while attempting to distract from atrocities perpetuated by the regime. Mining a rich trove of materials from the National Archives in Rio and conducting interviews with key propagandists, Schneider demonstrates the ambiguities of twentieth-century Brazilian propaganda. She also challenges the notion of a homogeneous military regime in Brazil, highlighting its fractures and competing forces. By analyzing the strategies, production mechanisms, and meanings of these films and reconstructing their effects, she provides an alternative interpretation of the propagandists' intentions and a new framework for understanding this era in Brazil's history.

In the tumultuous first decade of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and other leaders saturated the media with altruistic images of themselves in a campaign to win the hearts of Cuba's six million citizens. In Visions of Power in Cuba, Lillian Guerra argues that these visual representations explained rapidly occurring events and encouraged radical change and mutual self-sacrifice. Mass rallies and labor mobilizations of unprecedented scale produced tangible evidence of what Fidel Castro called "unanimous support" for a revolution whose "moral power" defied U.S. control. Yet participation in state-orchestrated spectacles quickly became a requirement for political inclusion in a new Cuba that policed most forms of dissent. Devoted revolutionaries who resisted disastrous economic policies, exposed post-1959 racism, and challenged gender norms set by Cuba's one-party state increasingly found themselves marginalized, silenced, or jailed. Using previously unexplored sources, Guerra focuses on the lived experiences of citizens, including peasants, intellectuals, former prostitutes, black activists, and filmmakers, as they struggled to author their own scripts of revolution by resisting repression, defying state-imposed boundaries, and working for anti-imperial redemption in a truly free Cuba.

Despite the vast body of texts inspired by warfare - from The Iliad to Maus - war writing is perpetually haunted by the notions of unrepresentability and inadequacy. War and Words examines the methods, conventions and pitfalls of constructing verbal accounts of military conflict in literature and the media. This multifocal study draws on a wide array of theoretical perspectives, including feminism, posthumanism, masculinity, trauma, spatiality and media studies, and brings together such diverse material as canonical literature, war veterans' testimonies, imaginative fiction, computer games, English curricula, and Al-Qaeda's propaganda pieces. In five consecutive sections - "Spreading War Propaganda", "Reconstructing War Spaces", "Envisioning War", "Gendering War", and "Teaching War" - the contributors consider war in its manifold aspects: as an ideological tool used for propaganda purposes, as a spatial reconstruction performed for the critical reassessment of past conflicts, as a projection (or extrapolation) of possible future conflicts and their social repercussions, as a political statement to deconstruct the oppressive nature of violence, and, finally, as a didactic tool to foster empathy. This collection will appeal primarily to academics specialising in English and American literature, but also to those researching media, gender, and game studies.

The Reckoning will examine America's national trauma, rooted in its long history of slavery and civil rights abuses, but dramatically exacerbated by the impact of recent events and the Trump administration's corrupt and immoral policies.

America's failure to acknowledge this trauma, let alone root it out, has allowed it to metastasize. Whether it manifests itself in rising levels of rage and hatred, or hopelessness and apathy, the stress of living in a country many no longer recognize has affected everyone. America is suffering from PTSD - a new leader alone cannot fix it.

An enormous amount of healing must be done to rebuild faith in America's leadership and hope for the nation. It starts with The Reckoning.