As the most comprehensive introduction to Brazil available in English, Brazil: The Once and Future Country shows Brazil to be a land of the marvelous and the mystical, the sublime and the tragic. Marshall Eakin describes a country defined by paradoxes: immense wealth surrounded by widespread poverty, a modern industrial infrastructure alongside an outmoded agricultural system, a largely white South and a Northeastern coast that is overwhelmingly of African descent. Eakin chronicles Brazil’s development from its origins in the sixteenth century, when it was created as a by-product of European imperial expansion, to the present day. He takes the reader from the hovels of São Paolo to the pleasure palaces of Rio de Janeiro and all places in between to show the rich cultural mix that is Brazil. Brazil: The Once and Future Country is a fascinating read that anyone interested in Brazil will want. It is also the perfect book for the traveler, armchair or otherwise, interested in this endlessly fascinating country.

This narrative history of Latin America surveys five centuries in less than five hundred pages. The first third of the book moves from the Americas before Columbus to the wars for independence in the early nineteenth century. The construction of new nations and peoples in the nineteenth century forms the middle third, and the final section analyzes economic development, rising political participation, and the search of identity over the last century. The collision of peoples and cultures--Native Americans, Europeans, Africans--that defines Latin America, and gives it both its unity and diversity, provides the central theme of this concise, synthetic history.

As the most comprehensive introduction to Brazil available in English, Brazil: The Once and Future Country shows Brazil to be a land of the marvelous and the mystical, the sublime and the tragic. Marshall Eakin describes a country defined by paradoxes: immense wealth surrounded by widespread poverty, a modern industrial infrastructure alongside an outmoded agricultural system, a largely white South and a Northeastern coast that is overwhelmingly of African descent. Eakin chronicles Brazil’s development from its origins in the sixteenth century, when it was created as a by-product of European imperial expansion, to the present day. He takes the reader from the hovels of São Paolo to the pleasure palaces of Rio de Janeiro and all places in between to show the rich cultural mix that is Brazil. Brazil: The Once and Future Country is a fascinating read that anyone interested in Brazil will want. It is also the perfect book for the traveler, armchair or otherwise, interested in this endlessly fascinating country.

This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mesticagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mesticagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mesticagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mesticagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.

This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mesticagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mesticagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mesticagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mesticagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.