Axe Bahia examines the unique cultural role played by Salvador, the coastal capital of the Brazilian state of Bahia. An internationally renowned center of Afro-Brazilian culture, Salvador has been a vibrant and important hub of African-inspired artistic practices in Latin America since the 1940s. This volume represents the most comprehensive investigation in the United States of Bahian arts to date and features essays by eighteen international scholars. While adding to popular understandings of core expressions of African heritage, such as the religion Candomble, the essays explore in depth the complexities of race and cultural affiliation in Brazil and the provocative ways in which artists have experienced and responded creatively to prevailing realities of Afro-Brazilian identity in Bahia. Lavishly illustrated, the book features works by artists ranging from modernists, among them Mario Cravo Neto, Rubem Valentim, and Pierre Verger, to contemporary artists Rommulo Vieira Conceicao, Caetano Dias, Helen Salomao, Ayrson Heraclito, and others-including a stunning array of sculpture, painting, photography, video, and installation art. The exhibition was part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative.

Do social classes really exist? Is disinterested action really possible? What do the family, the church, and the intellectual world have in common? Can morality be founded on hypocrisy? What is the "subject" of action? In this new volume, one of France's foremost social thinkers of our time responds to these major questions and to others, thus tracing the outlines of a work that could be called "Pierre Bourdieu by himself."
In these texts, the author tries to go to the essential, that is, the most elementary and fundamental, questions. He thereby explains the philosophical principles that have led to his social science research and the idea of the human that guides his choices there. With the lucidity allowed by retrospect, Bourdieu brings out the fundamental theories of his greatest books, notably "Outline of a Theory of Practice" and "The Logic of Practice" (Stanford, 1990), and, with an eye to the future, presents the first results of his most recent work on the state, the anthropological moorings of the economy, and male domination.
Bourdieu's theory is both a philosophy of science dedicated to revealing the objective relations that shape and underpin social life, and a philosophy of action that takes account of agents' dispositions as well as the structured situations in which they act. This philosophy of action is condensed in a small number of key concepts--habitus, field, capital--and it is defined by the two-way relationship between the objective structures of social fields and the incorporated structures of the habitus.
All in all, this book should be an indispensable introduction to Bourdieu's work, not only to students and scholars in sociology, anthropology, political science, and philosophy, but throughout the social sciences and humanities generally.

From the documentary to the cinema novo and cannibalism, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Vidas Secas to music in the films of Glauber Rocha, this third, revised edition is a century-spanning introduction to the story of a medium that flourished in one of the most developed of 'underdeveloped' nations.

Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, Lonely Woman dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness." Her fiction typically features a woman for whom dreams and fantasies, crime, madness, sexual deviance, or occult pursuits serve as a temporary release from her society's definitions of female identity. The combination of surrealist, feminist, and religious themes in Takahashi's work makes it unique among that of modern Japanese women writers.The five individually titled short stories that constitute Lonely Woman are linked by certain characters, themes, and plot elements. In the first story, "Lonely Woman," a series of arson incidents in her neighborhood causes a nihilistic young woman to become fascinated with the psychology of the person who perpetrated the crimes. Her fantasies of the euphoric pleasure of setting a fire heighten her awareness of her own violent tendencies. "The Oracle" portrays a young widow who becomes convinced, through several disturbing dreams, that her late husband was unfaithful to her. She devises a cruel, ritualistic act as a strategy for defusing her sense of helpless rage. In "Foxfire," a store clerk has a series of encounters with sly, seductive youngsters and is revitalized by her discovery of the criminal and sexual impulses that lurk beneath their innocent facades. In "The Suspended Bridge," a bored housewife's passion is rekindled when a man with whom she once had a sadomasochistic relationship reenters her life. "Strange Affinities" recasts crime, madness, and amour fou as catalysts of a process of spiritual enlightenment: an old woman searches for an elusive man who seems to embody the bliss of self-renunciation.

With such stunning films as Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Bye Bye Brazil, and Pixote, Brazilian cinema achieved both critical acclaim and popular recognition in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming the premier cinema of Latin America and one of the largest film producers in the western world. But the success of Brazilian film at home and abroad came after many years of struggle by filmmakers determined to create a strong film industry in Brazil. At the forefront of this struggle were the filmmakers of Cinema Novo, the internationally acclaimed movement whose flowering in the 1960s marked the birth of modern Brazilian film. Cinema Novo x 5 places the success of Brazilian cinema in perspective by examining the films of the five leaders of this groundbreaking movement—Andrade, Diegues, Guerra, Rocha, and dos Santos. By exploring the individuality of these masters of contemporary Brazilian film, Randal Johnson reveals the astonishing stylistic and thematic diversity of Cinema Novo. His emphasis is on the films themselves, as well as their makers’ distinctive cinematic vision and views of what cinema should be and is. At the same time, he provides a wealth of valuable background information to enhance readers’ understanding of the historical, cultural, and economic context in which Cinema Novo was born and flourished.

Looking back through the prism of the severe economic crisis for filmmaking in the 1980s, The Film Industry in Brazil explores the unusual relationship between the state-supported industry, which often produced politically radical films, and the authoritarian regime that had held sway for twenty years. To ground his analysis, Johnson covers the early years of the film industry, 1898-1930; attempts at industrialization during the 1930s and 1940s; film industry congresses and government film boards, 1950-1966; the National Film Institute, 1966-1975; and the expansion of the state's role from 1969 through 1980.
Well-conceived, carefully researched and documented, Johnson's study fills a major gap in film studies by tracing the development of this industry in Brazil, focusing specifically on its relationship to the state.

Understanding the iconoclastic work of a lifelong cinematic pioneer

With a career spanning over seventy years, Portuguese film director Manoel de Oliveira may be the oldest active filmmaker in the world today. Known for his distinctive formal techniques and philosophical treatment of themes such as frustrated love, nationhood, evil, and divine grace, the director's work has run consistently against the mainstream. Focusing primarily on his feature films, Randal Johnson navigates Oliveira's massive oeuvre, locating his work within the broader context of Portuguese and European cinema. He also examines multiple aspects of Oliveira's conception of film language, ranging from early concerns with cinematic specificity to hybrid discourses suggesting a tenuous line between film and theater on the one hand, and between fiction and documentary on the other.

"A volume in the series Contemporary Film Directors, edited by James Naremore"