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Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in
1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II
communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before
starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian
tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement,
friendship, and all that was positive and good-yet another
indication of the Americanization of Brazil under way during this
period. In this translation of O Imperialismo Sedutor, Antonio
Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader
cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S.
cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians
actively interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured U.S. culture in
a process of cultural recombination. The market, he argues, was far
more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange
than state-directed propaganda efforts because Brazil already was
primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the
framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By
examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence
and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and
political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes
were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing. The
Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian
and American understanding of the forces at play during this
period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of
Latin America, culture, and communications.
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