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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.

Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Song is a critical study of MPB (música popular brasileira), a term that refers to varieties of urban popular music of the 1960s and 1970s, incorporating samba, Bossa Nova, and new materials.

An intervention in World War I historiography that foregrounds personal accounts of the conflict from its non-European participants and witnesses.

Accounts of World War I tend to focus on Europe, the epicenter of this conflict, and find in its battlefields the later death of empires, spreading revolution, and eventual decolonization. However, the war was also global, drawing in people from all over the world while rapidly circulating ideas and innovations far beyond Europe.

Almost two million non-Europeans participated in the war as soldiers, workers, and professionals, including Asians in particular. They could be found in the battlefields of France, behind the lines in munitions factories and military hospitals, in the frozen construction sites of the Murmansk Railway, and in Mesopotamia’s burning deserts. The voices of these volunteers and conscripts are rarely heard; the war’s narratives are mainly European. And yet, here and there, lone voices pierce the silence.

In a compelling intervention in World War I historiography, Masters of Their Own Destiny offers a history from below, demonstrating how rare personal accounts may illuminate broader historical forces. Alongside the story of Nguyen Xuan Mai, a Vietnamese military doctor whose pursuit of professional recognition ended in disillusionment with colonial promises, this study draws on a wealth of material like Indian soldiers’ letters, Vietnamese workers’ censored correspondence, and records of Chinese laborers who witnessed revolution in Russia. It gives voice to hitherto ignored wartime experiences that later transformed the expectations of millions of colonial subjects and seeded the anticolonial movements that followed.

By one of the most original and learned critical voices in Hispanic studies— a timely and ambitious study of authority as theme and authority as authorial strategy in modern Latin American literature.

An ideology is implicit in modern Latin American literature, argues Roberto González Echevarría, through which both the literature itself and criticism of it define what Latin American literature is and how it ought to be read. In the works themselves this ideology is constantly subjected to a radical critique, and that critique renders the ideology productive and in a sense is what constitutes the work. In literary criticism, however, too frequently the ideology merely serves as support for an authoritative discourse that seriously misrepresents Latin American literature.

In The Voice of the Masters, González Echevarría attempts to uncover the workings of modern Latin American literature by creating a dialogue of texts, a dynamic whole whose parts are seven illuminating essays on seminal texts in the tradition. As he says, "To have written a sustained, expository book ... would have led me to make the same kind of critical error that I attribute to most criticism of Latin American literature.... I would have naively assumed an authoritative voice while attempting a critique of precisely that critical gesture."

Instead, major works by Barnet, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Cortázar, Fuentes, Gallegos, García Márquez, Roa Bastos, and Rodó are the object of a set of independent deconstructive (and reconstructive) readings. Writing in the tradition of Derrida and de Man, González Echevarría brings to these readings both the penetrative brilliance of the French master and a profound understanding of historical and cultural context. His insightful annotation of Cabrera Infante's "Meta-End," the full text of which is presented at the close of the study, clearly demonstrates these qualities and exemplifies his particular approach to the text.