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In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion.

Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-à-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya’s view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication—all markers of the aesthetic—while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

Moving next to de facto independence, Yadav and Mukherjee bring together data from 103 democracies in the developing world, complemented by case studies of Brazil, India, and Indonesia. Honing in on the effects of electoral institutions, the authors find that, when faced with short time horizons, governments that operate in personal vote electoral systems are likely to increase de facto judicial independence whereas governments in party-centered systems are likely to reduce it.

Recipient of 2019 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, Foundation for Landscape Studies
2021 On the Brinck Book Award Winner

“Burle Marx created a new and modern grammar for international landscape design.”
—Lauro Cavalcanti, quoted in the New York Times

“The real creator of the modern garden.”
—American Institute of Architects

Presenting the first English translation of Burle Marx’s “depositions,” this volume highlights the environmental advocacy of a preeminent Brazilian landscape architect who advised and challenged the country’s military dictatorship.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) is internationally known as one of the preeminent modernist landscape architects. He designed renowned public landscapes in Brazil, beginning with small plazas in Recife in the 1930s and culminating with large public parks in the early 1960s, most significantly the Parque do Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro. Depositions explores a pivotal moment in Burle Marx’s career—the years in which he served as a member of the Federal Cultural Council created by the military dictatorship in the mid-1960s. Despite the inherent conflict and risk in working with the military regime, Burle Marx boldly used his position to advocate for the protection of the unique Brazilian landscape, becoming a prophetic voice of caution against the regime’s policies of rapid development and resource exploitation.

Depositions presents the first English translation of eighteen environmental position pieces that Burle Marx wrote for the journal Cultura , a publication of the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture, from 1967 through 1973. Catherine Seavitt Nordenson introduces and contextualizes the depositions by analyzing their historical and political contexts, as well as by presenting pertinent examples of Burle Marx’s earlier public projects, which enables a comprehensive reading of the texts. Addressing deforestation, the establishment of national parks, the place of commemorative sculpture, and the unique history of the Brazilian cultural landscape, Depositions offers new insight into Burle Marx’s outstanding landscape oeuvre and elucidates his transition from prolific designer to prescient counselor.

Signed into law in 2014, the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet) appeared to offer pioneering legislation for a digital bill of rights that addressed issues like network neutrality and privacy. Guy T. Hoskins chronicles the Marco Civil’s development and its failure to confront the greatest concentration of power in the digital age: informational capitalism. Combining interviews with discourse and political-economic analysis, Hoskins reveals why the legislation fell short while examining the implications of its emergence in Brazil, which remains on the margins of the global system of informational capitalism. Hoskins places collectivist and public service principles at the core of any framework’s effectiveness. He also shows why we must create systems sensitive to the sociocultural and political-economic contexts that will shape digital rights and their usefulness.

Compelling and contrarian, Digital Rights at the Periphery looks at communications policy and internet governance in the Global South and the lessons they provide for the rest of the world.

How the memory of military dictatorship shapes Brazil's political divides and the far-right's rise.

Brazil’s military dictatorship ended in 1985, but its history still looms large over the country. Since the restoration of democracy, national politics have been shaped by heated contestation over the dictatorship’s legacy. Cristina Buarque de Hollanda and José Szwako examine how the state, the military, and civil society have variously mourned, celebrated, and suppressed memories of Brazil’s violent past—and to what ends.

As the dictatorship faltered under pressure from the opposition in the streets and in Congress, popular opinion favored democracy, which often meant forgetting. Today, the Brazilian left contends that the past has been silenced, paving the way for Jair Bolsonaro and the far right. Yet the past has been intensely contested: media outlets, social movements, and official commissions have long documented the dictatorship and spurred reparations. Disputed Pasts argues that the conservative ascendency is a reaction to these efforts of remembrance. The right seeks to rehabilitate the violent past by discrediting victims and elevating the dictatorship’s anti-communist ideology. Far from forgetting the past, Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo actively remember and celebrate it.