Faith in Disguise follows Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican digital historian and research assistant to Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan scholar curating an exhibition in Chicago on enslaved and freed Black women in Latin America. As Martín becomes increasingly enmeshed in Fe’s intellectual and erotic orbit, his role as subordinate and interpreter exposes the entanglement of race, power, and desire in the production of historical knowledge. Through the interplay of archival fragments and contemporary encounters, Mayra Santos-Febres illuminates how the afterlives of slavery persist within Latin American racial and sexual imaginaries, and how the erotic, as both method and experience, may gesture toward forms of liberation from them.

Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil was originally published by the University of California Press in 1992. Alida Metcalf has written a new preface for this first paperback edition.

The silent rage that seizes a matriarch whose family is feting her eighty-ninth year.The tangle of emotions felt by a sophisticated young woman toward her elderly mother. An adolescent girl's obsessive fear of being looked at. The "giddying sense of compassion" that a blind man introduces into a young housewife's settled existence. Of such is made the world of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer whose finest work is acknowledged to be her exquisitely crafted short stories. Here, in these thirteen of Lispector's most brilliantly conceived stories, mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition. Her characters mirror states of mind. Alienated by their unsettling sense of life's absurdity, they seem at times absorbed in their interior lives and in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them.

Giovanni Pontiero's translation has been lauded by Gregory Rabassa as "magnificent."

Winner, Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2011
Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize, 2011

On the eastern coast of Brazil, facing westward across a wide magnificent bay, lies Salvador, a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Those who distributed and sold food, from the poorest street vendors to the most prosperous traders—black and white, male and female, slave and free, Brazilian, Portuguese, and African—were connected in tangled ways to each other and to practically everyone else in the city, and are the subjects of this book. Food traders formed the city's most dynamic social component during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constantly negotiating their social place. The boatmen who brought food to the city from across the bay decisively influenced the outcome of the war for Brazilian independence from Portugal by supplying the insurgents and not the colonial army. Richard Graham here shows for the first time that, far from being a city sharply and principally divided into two groups—the rich and powerful or the hapless poor or enslaved—Salvador had a population that included a great many who lived in between and moved up and down.

The day-to-day behavior of those engaged in food marketing leads to questions about the government's role in regulating the economy and thus to notions of justice and equity, questions that directly affected both food traders and the wider consuming public. Their voices significantly shaped the debate still going on between those who support economic liberalization and those who resist it.

Regina Rheda is a contemporary award-winning Brazilian writer whose original voice and style have won her many admirers. First World Third Class and Other Tales of the Global Mix presents some of her finest and most representative work to an English-speaking readership. Stories from the Copan Building consists of eight tales set in a famous residential building in São Paulo. The stories, like the apartment complex, are a microcosm of modern-day urban Brazil. They are witty, consistently caustic, and never predictable.

Also in this volume is the poignant and often hilarious novel First World Third Class. It depicts young middle-class professionals and artists who, as opportunities in Brazil diminished, opted to leave their country, even if it meant taking menial jobs abroad. At the center of the narrative is Rita, a thirty-year-old aspiring filmmaker who migrates to England, and then Italy. She looks for work and love in all the wrong places, moving from city to city and from bed to bed.

The last three stories in this collection also happen to be among the author's most recent. "The Enchanted Princess" is an ironic title for a postfeminist tale of a South American woman being wooed to marry an old-world gentleman who promises to take care of her every need. "The Sanctuary" concerns the living conditions of immigrant workers and farm animals. Equally piquant in nature, "The Front" deals with ecology, labor environments, and gender politics.

Winner of the 2023 Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize from the New England Council for Latin American studies

In the middle of the twentieth century, governments ignored the negative effects of large-scale infrastructure projects. In recent decades, many democratic countries have continued to use dams to promote growth, but have also introduced accompanying programs to alleviate these harmful consequences of dams for local people, to reduce poverty, and to promote participatory governance. This type of dam building undoubtedly represents a step forward in responsible governing. But have these policies really worked?
 
Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of these approaches through a close examination of Brazil’s Belo Monte hydroelectric facility. After three decades of controversy over damming the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, the dam was completed in 2019 under the left-of-center Workers’ Party, becoming the world’s fourth largest. Billions of dollars for social welfare programs accompanied construction. Nonetheless, the dam brought extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the region. The population soared, cost of living skyrocketed, violence spiked, pollution increased, and already overextended education and healthcare systems were strained. Nearly 40,000 people were displaced and ecosystems were significantly disrupted. Klein tells the stories of dam-affected communities, including activists, social movements, non-governmental organizations, and public defenders and public prosecutors. He details how these groups, as well as government officials and representatives from private companies, negotiated the upheaval through protests, participating in public forums for deliberation, using legal mechanisms to push for protections for the most vulnerable, and engaging in myriad other civic spaces. Flooded provides a rich ethnographic account of democracy and development in the making. In the midst of today’s climate crisis, this book showcases the challenges and opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable ways.

Forest Lost is an ethnography of forest carbon offsets and the wider effort to make the living rainforest valuable in the Brazilian Amazon. Unlike other forest commodities, forest carbon offsets do not involve resource extraction; instead, they require keeping carbon in place through forest protection. Maron E. Greenleaf explores forest carbon offsets to understand green capitalism—the use of capitalist logics and practices to mitigate environmental damage. She traces cultural, environmental, governmental, material, and multispecies relations involved in making forest carbon valuable as well as how forest carbon’s commodification in the Amazon turned it into a source of redistributable public environmental wealth. At the same time, Greenleaf shows how making forest carbon monetarily valuable created an unexpected set of uneven, contingent, and contested social and political relations. While forest carbon in the Amazon demonstrates that green capitalism can be socially inclusive, it also shows that green capitalism can reinforce the marginalization it purportedly seeks to combat. By outlining these complex relations and tensions, Greenleaf elucidates broader efforts to create a capitalism suited to the Anthropocene and those efforts’ alluring promises and vexing failures.

The worship of Yoruba deities known as oriṣa is commonly understood as an indigenous African religion, but Ayodeji Ogunnaike argues that these traditions initially differed from the modern Western concept of religion. In Forms of Worship, Ogunnaike analyzes how the configuration of oriṣa worship has changed across the Yoruba diaspora and homeland. As the meaning of the Yoruba word ẹsin, usually translated as “religion,” is closer to “form of worship,” he examines how reorienting understandings of oriṣa traditions as multiple forms of worship changes how religious identity, practice, and dynamics can be understood in contemporary and historical perspectives. By developing indigenous models for religious phenomena, Ogunnaike accounts for Yoruba cultural dynamics, including the high degree of religious harmony, syncretism, and interaction prevalent both in Nigeria and Brazil. Furthermore, he tracks the subtle and largely unperceived shift in oriṣa worship toward a more modern, closed, and rigid conception of religion and its resulting complications. Forms of Worship demonstrates how the advent of Western religious rigidity regarding practice and identity has led to rising religious tensions and fragmentation.

Francisco de Paula Brito is a biography of a merchant, printer, bookseller, and publisher who lived in Rio de Janeiro from his birth in 1809 until his death in 1861. That period was key to the history of Brazil, because it coincided with the relocation of the Portuguese Court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro (1808); the dawning of Brazilian Independence (1822) and the formation of the nation-state; the development of the press and of Brazilian literature; the expansion and elimination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade; and the growth of Rio de Janeiro’s population and the coffee economy. Nevertheless, although it covers five generations of Paula Brito’s family—men and women who left slavery in the eighteenth century—this book focuses on its protagonist’s activities between the 1830s and 1850s.

During that period, Francisco de Paula Brito became one of the central figures in the cultural and political scene in the Imperial capital, particularly through his work as a publisher. Paula Brito’s success was due in part to his ability to forge solid alliances with the Empire’s ruling elite—among them leading politicians responsible for the unification of the vast Brazilian territory and for the maintenance of slavery and the illegal trafficking of Africans. Consequently, through the books and newspapers he published, Francisco de Paula Brito became part of a much larger project.

An examination of struggles over race and gender in contemporary Brazil, as reflected in conflicts over a national social welfare program.

Bolsa Familia was a social welfare program launched in Brazil in 2003 that made cash payments to poor families, provided they kept their children in school and got them vaccinated. Over time, the program became controversial, intertwined with struggles over race and gender, and President Jair Bolsonaro canceled it in 2021. This book examines the discourse around the program and its effects, illuminating conflicts over national identity and the roles of sexism and racism in Brazil.