LILIA M. SCHWARCZ Libros

"This book, written in the aftermath of the 2018 election of the right-wing populist politician Jair Bolsonaro, is a historically-grounded analysis of authoritarianism in Brazil. In the tradition of Zola's J'accuse, Lilia Schwarcz takes up and debunks the popular and cherished national myth of Brazil as a tolerant, open, peaceful, and racially-harmonious society. In that country's history textbooks even Brazil's centuries of slavery have been described as an ultimately benign, paternalistic order in which the races freely mixed and the cruelty of the U.S. slave experience was absent. This, Schwarcz argues, papers over centuries of racially-motivated violence, cruelty, and exploitation. These centuries of slavery under colonial and monarchical rule have left their indelible mark and are at the origins of the structural racism and oppression experienced today by Brazil's black and indigenous peoples. The book outlines the roots of Brazil's contemporary authoritarian oppression of these peoples and paints a vivid portrait of just how dire the situation is at present. Schwarcz's account also details the series of events leading to the 2018 election, demonstrating how Brazil's historical legacy of slavery and inequality, despite an appearance of democracy and tolerance, enabled the defeat of the country's social democratic left and the ascendancy of Bolsonaro's far right political movement. Schwarcz also calls on Brazilian intellectuals to play a role in combatting authoritarian oppression in their country"-- Provided by publisher

Written by two leading historians, Brazil: A Biography is a sweeping and absorbing portrait of Brazil from its origins to the twenty-first century. For many Americans, Brazil is a land of contradictions: vast natural resources and entrenched corruption; extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty; beautiful beaches and violence-torn favelas. Brazile received more than 40 percent of the African population that was stolen from the continent, and was the last country in the Western world to abolish the slave system. Brazil is larger than the contiguous United States and occupies a vivid place in the American imagination, yet it remains largely unknown. In an extraordinary journey that spans more than five hundred years, from the Amerindian civilization to the 2016 Summer Olympics, Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling's Brazil offers a rich and dramatic history of this complex country. The authors not only reconstruct the epic story of the nation but follow the shifting byways of food, art, and popular culture; the plights of minorities; and the ups and downs of economic cycles. Drawing on a range of original scholarship in history, anthropology, political science, literature, and economics, Schwarcz and Starling reveal a long process of unfinished social, political, and economic progress and struggle, a story in which the troubled legacy of the mixing of races, postcolonial political dysfunction, and inequality persist to this day. Even now, Brazil stands as one of the world's great experiements - creative, harsh, unique, and as compelling a story for outsiders as for its inhabitants. -- From dust jacket