Latin American & Caribbean Studies
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The Environment in Brazilian Culture

Name: The Environment in Brazilian Culture
Author: Patricia Vieira
ISBN: 9781683405030

Literature, Cinema, and the Arts

Edited by Patricia Vieira

Published by: University of Florida Press

This volume explores the centrality of the natural world in shaping Brazilian literature, cinema, and art from 1900 to the present, portraying the human connection to nature in the most biodiverse country in the world.

320 Pages6.12 × 9.2513 b/w illus., notes, index, bib

Hardcover
9781683405030
Published: May 27, 2025

$95.00

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9781683405245
Published: May 27, 2025

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Description
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Praise
Table of Contents

Examining Brazilian artists’ engagement with the natural world from 1900 to the present

The Environment in Brazilian Culture explores the centrality of the natural world in shaping Brazilian literature, cinema, and art since 1900. This collection, exceptional in its representation of material from diverse locations and cultures within Brazil, as well as in its investigation of a range of artistic mediums and genres, portrays the human connection to nature in the most biodiverse country in the world.

From the forests of the Amazon to the mountains of the Serra do Mar, this volume examines Brazilian depictions of different geographical regions and the plants and animals found in each. Contributors pay particular attention to the environment’s integral place in Indigenous identity and art. They also discuss artistic references to environmental devastation, underscoring the connection between ecological degradation and contemporary socioeconomic inequality. Works discussed in these chapters include novels by Itamar Vieira Junior and Maria José Silveira, poetry by Marília Floôr Kosby, Guarani and Bororo verbal arts, Huni Kuĩ documentary films, and paintings by Candido Portinari.

These wide-ranging analyses highlight the value of Brazilian cultural production to critical plant and animal studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities. And, in grappling with Brazil’s extractivist past, they search for alternatives to a predatory approach to the land and its inhabitants, looking for pathways to environmental justice in the Anthropocene.

Patricia Vieira is research professor at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra. Vieira is the author or editor of many books, including States of Grace: Utopia in Brazilian Culture.

“A timely contribution to the environmental humanities field as well as a wonderful overview of Brazilian cultural production.”—Carolina Sá Carvalho, author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America
”Makes an important contribution to our understanding of how the environment and environmental crises are represented in Brazilian culture. The book’s breadth is impressive, not only in terms of its expansive definition of ‘environment’ but also in terms of the cultural media examined, such as literature, cinema and visual arts, as well as the attention to different geographical areas.”—Lúcia Sá, author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Cultures
“Nature, territoriality and cultural manifestations are deeply intertwined in the historical construction of Brazil, the only country named after a tree. Getting away from stereotypes, this collection presents the latest and most sophisticated scholarship on the environmental dimensions of Brazil’s complex and multifaceted cultural life.”—José Augusto Pádua, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction. The Environment in Brazil’s Cultures
Patricia Vieira

Part I: Plants and Animals in Brazilian Literature

1. Zooliterary Exercises: Animals, Animality, and the Frontiers of the Human in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Brazilian Literature
Maria Esther Maciel

2. Latent Agency and Vegetal Subjectivity in Babel Babilônia and Sozinho no Deserto Extremo
Benjamin Burt

3. Necroterritories: Politics of Life and Death at the Brazilian Slaughterhouse
Valeria Meiller

Part II: Indigenous Peoples and the Environment

4. Cosmopolitics and the Translation of Indigenous Verbal Arts in Contemporary Brazil
Malcolm K. McNee

5. Suspending the Fall: Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, and Interspecies Kinship
Martiniano Alcantara Neto

6. Indigenous Documentaries: Art, Self-Representation, and the Environment in Huni Kuĩ Films
Juliana Luna Freire

Part III: The Aesthetics of a Natural World under Threat

7. A Land with History: The Amazonian Frontier in Alberto Rangel’s Texts
Cinthya Torres

8. Flesh of the Earth: Bio Art, Eco Art, and the Aesthetics of Extinction
Jens Andermann

9. Rainforest Cinema: A Post-Anthropocentric Amazon Sublime
Patricia Vieira

Part IV: Social and Environmental Justice

10. Environmental Apocalypse in the Retirantes Series of Candido Portinari
Rex P. Nielson

11. Landscapes of Dispute: Decolonial Discourse and the Representation of Nature in Torto Arado
Leila Lehnen

12. Reimagining Hydropower: Ecofeminist and Transnational Perspectives on Belo Monte
Victoria Saramago

13. Breathing Spaces in Marília Floôr Kosby’s Mugido and Diego Moraes’s Poetry and Fiction
Nuno Marques

List of Contributors

Index

Books

Authors

Journals

On The Site

Books

Authors

Journals

On The Site

The Environment in Brazilian Culture

Literature, Cinema, and the Arts

The Environment in Brazilian Culture

Literature, Cinema, and the Arts

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