Urban Reforms,Cultural Goods and the Valongo Wharf Circle: Understanding Intervention in Rio de Janeiro's Port Area

Between 2012 and 2016, the Valongo Wharf Circle employed capoeira to make sense of the complex and enduring legacies of the Valongo Wharf, namely, the impact and intersection of racial discrimination and cycles of redevelopment that have remade Rio and marked the history of the site. This article uses ‘products’ that record the project to consider the vicissitudes and contingency of how it both used and reconfigured the selective valorisation of the everyday to probe and disrupt the quotidian dynamics of Rio's port area.     

Youth Gang Members in Rio de Janeiro: The Face of a ‘Lost Generation’ in an Age of Fear and Mistrust

This article analyses the relationship between stigmatisation, violence and marginality, and its limits to social justice and citizenship. It involves a critical reflection on the way groups living in ‘a social and symbolical shade’ are represented and treated by governments and their institutions, and the way such practices reinforce a cycle of socio‐symbolical marginality and the limits to life in the city. The article will explore the findings of a research within drug gangs in which I have been involved ( Observatório de Favelas, 2006 ; Silva et al., 2009 and, Silva and Urani, 2002 ), and my own research on violence, urban marginality and stigmatisation ( Fernandes, 2009, 2012 ).     

Breaking the ‘Silence’ of the Military Regime: New Politics of Memory in Brazil

This article elucidates the latest developments in the ‘politics of memory’ regarding the military regime in Brazil. Only recently, I argue, has the Brazilian state abandoned its ‘politics of silence’ and started to actively champion the memory of the left‐wing ‘resistance’. This new strategy climaxed in a governmental crisis over a historic plan to establish a National Truth Commission to investigate human rights violations during the military regime. The article analyses key incidents and debates prior to the crisis, and contrasts the post‐dictatorial collective memory of Brazil with that of other Latin American countries.     

Popular Culture, Power Relations and Urban Discipline: The Festival of the Holy Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro

The Festival of the Holy Spirit was considered the most important religious celebration in nineteenth‐century Rio de Janeiro. I discuss the popular practices of music, dance and theatre during the festival. By merging European waltz and the African batuque, the heterogeneous public re‐created and re‐invented a number of new genres that are at the roots of twentieth‐century Brazilian popular music. The festival of the Holy Spirit allows an examination of elite strategies and municipal policies regarding popular culture. In this respect, it is remarkable how much political use the Brazilian Empire made of the festival of the Holy Spirit and how its revellers fought for their celebration.     

Indigenous Peasant ‘Otherness’: Rural Identities and Political Processes in Bolivia

Since Morales's election, rural movements have become the new protagonists of Bolivian politics. Previous analyses have emphasised their active role in shaping national politics, often focusing on those organisations as a compact block. However, their relationship is marked by both cooperation and fragmentation. This article provides a narrative of Bolivian socio‐political history over the last 60 years, establishing four main phases of identitarian articulations/disarticulations. It demonstrates the high degree of interdependence and fluidity of ethnic and class identities, as well as their interconnections with the broader socio‐political context and the national legal and institutional changes.     

E‐Informality in Venezuela: The ‘Other Path’ of Technology

The study explores arguments concerning the concept of the informal economy and makes the case that new media technologies, or more broadly, information and communication technologies (ICTs), as a socio‐economic phenomenon, tend to be exploited in the same way as other economic activities by those actors that operate in the informal economy. Moreover, this exploitation tends to show similar patterns in terms of growth and ownership concentration. In this context, the study analyses the patterns and tendencies that transpire when informal actors exploit ICTs. It aims to question the validity of the neoliberal paradigm that portrays informality and new media technology as a creative process that requires deregulation. The article is based on a field study carried out in Venezuela between 2003 and 2004.     

From la guerra sucia to ‘A Gentleman’s Fight’: War,Disappearance and Nation in the 1976–1983 Argentine Dictatorship

Analysing the last Argentine dictatorship in the light of contemporary re‐examinations of war, this article argues that the 1976–1983 dictatorship can be understood as a shift in war(s), from la guerra sucia to the Falklands/Malvinas conflict, from a limitless and unsustainable internal war to a bracketed external war. That external war is shown to be an attempt to re‐found a nation imploding through disappearance. Drawing on the history of disappearance in Argentina reveals that, despite obvious differences, there are many continuities between the dictatorship and other regimes, emphasising the dangers of a politics that encourages a nation ‘re‐malvinizada’.     

On Tourism and the Constructions of ‘Paradise Islands’ in Central America and the Caribbean

A comparative perspective of the tourism industry in the islands of Colón, Panama and Carriacou, Grenada is presented in this article. The islands have long histories of association with colonial powers, coupled with more recent histories of ‘discovery’ as tourist destinations. The historical constructions of ‘paradise islands' and the appropriation of tourism for nation‐building purposes in these territories are analysed. The discussion assesses the underlying reasons for the differing responses by African Caribbean populations toward tourism development, in spite of similar colonial and postcolonial histories.     

‘There Can Be No Revolution without Culture’: Reading and Writing in the Bolivarian Revolution

Under Hugo Chávez's ‘Bolivarian Revolution’, the government made itself present in all stages of literary production, applying the official idea of reading and writing as ‘socialist practices’. The Bolivarian government envisaged a popular counter‐hegemony, courting popular support while delegitimising cultural elites and reinforcing class tensions. Bolivarian cultural policy is anachronistic in an age of global literary markets, while the emphasis on a national collective of writers over internationally promoted representative writers of the revolution is particularly radical.     

Ignorance and ‘Habitus’: Blinkered and Enlightened Approaches Towards the History of Science in Latin America

In broad terms, European students of the history of Latin America have concentrated their researches upon colonial policies, interactions between Europeans (and their American‐born descendants) and indigenous peoples, economic and commercial structures, and political life (whether of elites or, more recently, of subaltern groups). The last two decades have witnessed a significant expansion in Britain and elsewhere of research into gender studies and cultural studies. Although the latter discipline embraces an awareness of the importance of the history of science, this has tended to be rather narrowly focussed upon travel writing, and the extent to which there were links between the promotion of scientific travel and both imperial and national projects, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, like the great British scientific travellers of the nineteenth century in Latin America, the works of cultural studies specialists tend to reveal more about European attitudes and misconceptions than Latin American reality.     

Changing Narratives of Race and Environment in the Nineteenth‐Century and Early‐Twentieth‐Century Brazilian Amazon

The Amazon has been the object of numerous reflections upon the relationship between the natural environment and the categories of human society. This article analyses Brazilian writers who considered the relations between space and race over the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focuses on João Henrique de Mattos, José Veríssimo and Euclides da Cunha, placing them in relation to each other and within local, national and international discourses on race, nature and development. Its aim is to examine how a racialised geographical understanding of the Amazon changed over the course of the nineteenth century and was tied to Brazilian nation‐building.     

From ‘Green Laggard’ to Regional Leader: Explaining the Recent Development of Environmental Policy in Chile

Environmental policy in Chile has developed rapidly in recent years, and the country has become a regional leader in renewable energy, climate change policy, recycling, and nature conservation. This contrasts with the previous neglect of environmental issues in the country and its depiction as a ‘green laggard’ (Orihuela, 2014: 251) within Latin America. In this article the recent development of environmental policy in Chile is reviewed and five factors affecting this development are analysed: international influences, institutional legacies, a window of opportunity opened by environmental movements, policy entrepreneurship, and business power.     

The Social Function of Carlos Fuentes: A Critical Intellectual or in the ‘Shadow of the State’?

This article seeks to raise meaningful questions about the role, or wider social function, of the intellectual within state–civil society relations in Latin America characterised by conditions of socio–economic modernisation. It does so by pursuing such questions through a detailed examination of the social function of Carlos Fuentes as an intellectual in Mexico. Through a focus on the social function of Carlos Fuentes, it is possible to distinguish the role intellectual activity can play in the construction and contestation of hegemony in Mexico. Most crucially, the article prompts consideration of the social basis of hegemony and the agency of intellectuals organically tied to particular social forces functioning through state–civil society relations in the struggle over hegemony. Put differently, it is possible to grant due regard to the mixture of critical opposition and accommodation that has often confronted the intellectual within Latin America.     

‘Soft’ forms of direct democracy: Explaining the occurrence of referendum motions and advisory referendums in Finnish local government

This study investigates ‘soft’ forms of direct democracy and identifies factors that explain their occurrence. Soft direct democracy refers to non‐binding referendum motions and advisory referendums, which the literature on direct democracy has largely ignored. Strategic motives have dominated previous explanations of the occurrence of initiatives and referendums, but are less useful in exploring non‐binding procedures of direct democracy. The article distinguishes four types of factors – socio‐structural, party system, political support and learning – and tests hypotheses on their effects with sub‐national data from Finland. The data enable us to compare two different types of instruments – non‐binding referendum motions and advisory referendums – while controlling for many unobserved factors. The findings show that erosion of political support, participatory traditions and policy diffusion explain the occurrence of bottom‐up referendum motions, while the last two together with small population and party system factors predict the occurrence of advisory government‐initiated referendums.