|9780822948643|Gender and Moviegoing in Early Twentieth-Century Urban Brazil|Gender and sexual morality, and their intersections with race and class, were central to the formation of urban Brazil in the twentieth century. In the Darkness of the Cinema takes a wide-ranging and innovative approach to gender and moviegoing culture in Brazilian society. By focusing on the flirtations and romances of the movie theater, as well as the intrigue and moral panic that they caused, Suk creates a rich portrait of spectatorship. Where women went to the movies, who they met, and what they did in the darkness were key questions that brewed…

|9780822948506|Corruption, Anticorruption, and the Formation of Venezuela’s Neopatrimonial State, 1908-1948|During the crucial period of its formation, the opposing forces of corruption and anticorruption shaped Venezuela’s new national state and its relationship with society. National strongman Juan Vicente Gómez, who ruled from 1908 to 1935, fastened control over key areas of the economy, extracted wealth from the Venezuelan people, and distributed resources to favorites. Utilizing a variety of discursive strategies, Venezuelans denounced this profiteering, and in 1945 reformers seized power in an attempt to create a new political system free from the last remnants of Gómez’s government. The tragic unraveling of…

|9780822967477|Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru|The Matter of Empire examines the philosophical principles invoked by apologists of the Spanish empire that laid the foundations for the material exploitation of the Andean region between 1520 and 1640. Centered on Potosi, Bolivia, Orlando Bentancor’s original study ties the colonizers’ attempts to justify the abuses wrought upon the environment and the indigenous population to their larger ideology concerning mining, science, and the empire’s rightful place in the global sphere. Bentancor points to the underlying principles of Scholasticism, particularly in the work off Thomas Aquinas, as the basis of the instrumentalist conception of matter…

|9780822948339|Counterweights to Five Centuries of Eurocentrism| Longlist, 2025 Architecture Book Awards – Architectural Theory To study the built environment of the Americas is to wrestle with an inherent contradiction. While the disciplines of architecture, urban design, landscape, and planning share the fundamental belief that space and place matter, the overwhelming majority of canonical knowledge and the vernacular used to describe these disciplines comes from another, very different, continent. With this book, Fernando Luiz Lara discusses several theories of space—drawing on cartography, geography, anthropology, and mostly architecture—and proposes counterweights to five centuries of Eurocentrism. The first part of Spatial Theories for…

|9780822948063|Dictatorship, Resistance, and Solidarity|Philosopher Michel Foucault’s cultural criticism crosses disciplines and is well known as an influence on modern conceptions of knowledge and power. Less well known are the five trips he took to Brazil between 1965 and 1976. Although a coup in 1964 had installed a military dictatorship, Foucault kept his opinion on the Brazilian government largely to himself until October 23, 1975. On that date, he delivered a manifesto at a student assembly in São Paulo expressing his solidarity with students and professors protesting a wave of arrests and torture. This manifesto caught the government’s attention and became…