Economic crises in the Global North and South are forcing activists to think about alternatives. Neoliberal economic policies and austerity measures have been debated and implemented around the globe. Author Anthony Pahnke argues that activists should look to the Global South and Brazil for inspiration. Brazil’s Long Revolution shows how the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, or MST) positioned itself to take advantage of challenging economic times to improve its members’ lives. Pahnke analyzes the origins and development of the movement, one of the largest and most innovative social movements currently active. Over the last three decades, the MST has mobilized more than a million Brazilians through grassroots initiatives, addressing political and economic inequalities. The MST and its allies—together known as the Landless Movement—confront inequality by constructing democratic ways of governing economic, political, and social life in collectivized production cooperatives, movement-run schools, and decentralized agrarian reform encampments and settlements. Their strategies for organizing political, economic, and social life challenge the current neoliberal orthodoxy that privileges individualized, market-oriented practices. Based on research conducted over five years, Pahnke’s book places the Landless Movement squarely within the tradition of Latin American revolutionary struggles, while at the same time showing the potential for similar forms of radical resistance to develop in the United States and elsewhere in the Global North.

From the first encounters between the Portuguese and indigenous peoples in 1500 to the current political turmoil, the history of Brazil is much more complex and dynamic than the usual representations of it as the home of Carnival, soccer, the Amazon, and samba would suggest. This extensively revised and expanded second edition of the best-selling Brazil Reader dives deep into the past and present of a country marked by its geographical vastness and cultural, ethnic, and environmental diversity. Containing over one hundred selections—many of which appear in English for the first time and which range from sermons by Jesuit missionaries and poetry to political speeches and biographical portraits of famous public figures, intellectuals, and artists—this collection presents the lived experience of Brazilians from all social and economic classes, racial backgrounds, genders, and political perspectives over the past half millennium. Whether outlining the legacy of slavery, the roles of women in Brazilian public life, or the importance of political and social movements, The Brazil Reader provides an unparalleled look at Brazil’s history, culture, and politics.

An examination of the Brazilian revolution of 1964 which was not the revolutionary effort that Kennedy had sought. Yet it bore an American, anti-communist imprint. When the president was overthrown, Washington embraced the new regime and gave generous support throughout the 1960s.

This book explores new forms of popular organisation that emerged from strikes in India and Brazil between 2011 and 2014. Based on four case studies, the author traces the alliances and relations that strikers developed during their mobilisations with other popular actors such as students, indigenous peoples, and people displaced by dam projects. The study locates the mass strikes in Brazil’s construction industry and India’s automobile industry in a global conjuncture of protest movements, and develops a new theory of strikes that can take account of the manifold ways in which labour unrest is embedded in local communities and regional networks. “Jörg Nowak has written an ambitious, wide-ranging and very important book. Based on extensive empirical research in Brazil and India and a thorough analysis of the secondary literature, Nowak reveals that numerous labour conflicts develop in the absence of trade unions, but with the support of kinship networks, local communities, social movements and other types of associations. This impressive work may well become a major building block for a new interpretation of global workers’ struggles.” —Marcel van der Linden, International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands “Nowak’s book meticulously details the trajectory of strikes and its resultant new forms of organisations in India and Brazil. The central focus of this analytically rich and thought provoking book is to search for a new political alternative model of organising workers. A very good deed indeed!” —Nandita Mondal, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India “Jörg Nowak analyses with critical sense forms of popular organization that often remain invisible. It is an indispensable book for all those who are looking for more effective analytical resources to better understand the present situation and the future promises of the workers’ movements.” —Roberto Véras de Oliveira, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil “In this timely and important study, Nowak convincingly challenges the dominant Eurocentric approach to labour conflict and calls for a new theory of strikes. He stresses the need to engage in a wider perspective that includes social reproduction, neighbourhood mobilisations, and the specific traditions of struggles in the Global South.” —Edward Webster, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa

Long infamous for its severe inequality, infant mortality, and clientelist politics, Brazil in the late 20th and early 21st centuries improved the health and well-being of its populace more than any large democracy. Christopher L. Gibson sheds light on the previously poorly understood cause of this shift, arguing that it was due to a subnationally-rooted process driven by civil society actors, namely the Sanitarist Movement. Gibson improves our understanding of the political and social trajectory of Brazil and similar democracies today.

Often described inadequately as the John Lennon or Bob Dylan of Brazil, Caetano Veloso is unquestionably one of the most influential and beloved of Brazilian artists and has developed a world-wide following. Now, in his long awaited memoir, he tells the heroic story of how, in the late 60s, he and a group of friends from the north-eastern state of Bahia created tropicalismo, the movement that shook Brazilian culture and civic order and pushed a nation then on the margins of world politics and economics into the pop avant-garde. Tropical Truth recounts the story of a country, its most subversive generation, and the odyssey of a brilliant constellation of artists. By turns erudite and playful, dreamlike and confessional, Tropical Truth is a revelation of Brazil's most famous artist, one of the greatest popular composers of the past century.

James P. Woodard's history of consumer capitalism in Brazil, today the world's fifth most populous country, is at once magisterial, intimate, and penetrating enough to serve as a history of modern Brazil itself. It tells how a new economic outlook took hold over the course of the twentieth century, a time when the United States became Brazil's most important trading partner and the tastemaker of its better-heeled citizens. In a cultural entangling with the United States, Brazilians saw Chevrolets and Fords replace horse-drawn carriages, railroads lose to a mania for cheap automobile roads, and the fabric of everyday existence rewoven as commerce reached into the deepest spheres of family life. The United States loomed large in this economic transformation, but American consumer culture was not merely imposed on Brazilians. By the seventies, many elements once thought of as American had slipped their exotic traces and become Brazilian, and this process illuminates how the culture of consumer capitalism became a more genuinely transnational and globalized phenomenon. This commercial and cultural turn is the great untold story of Brazil's twentieth century, and one key to its twenty-first.