Overview

Christopher Dunn’s history of authoritarian Brazil exposes the inventivecultural production and intense social transformations that emerged duringthe rule of an iron-fisted military regime during the sixties and seventies.The Brazilian contracultura was a complex and multifaceted phenomenonthat developed alongside the ascent of hardline forces within the regime inthe late 1960s. Focusing on urban, middle-class Brazilians often inspiredby the international counterculture that flourished in the United States andparts of western Europe, Dunn shows how new understandings of race, gender,sexuality, and citizenship erupted under even the most oppressive politicalconditions. Dunn reveals previously ignored connections between the countercultureand Brazilian music, literature, film, visual arts, and alternative journalism.In chronicling desbunde, the Brazilian hippie movement, he shows how thestate of Bahia, renowned for its Afro-Brazilian culture, emerged as a counterculturalmecca for youth in search of spiritual alternatives. As this criticaland expansive book demonstrates, many of the country’s social and justicemovements have their origins in the countercultural attitudes, practices, andsensibilities that flourished during the military dictatorship.

Full Product Details

9781469628516

Table of Contents

Reviews

Dunn's recurring discussions of the importance of a collective politics of style, his attention to geographic and imagined spaces of countercultural practice, and his analysis of the relationship of the counterculture to a growing consumer culture are especially worth noting. The book is a tour de force of both historical and cultural analysis that will push our understandings of counterculture and of its political potential. It should be of enormous interest to scholars of the long Sixties anywhere.--The Sixties A masterful work of cultural history, sure to be of compelling interest to any student of Brazil in the 1970s and of Latin American counterculture more generally.--HAHR

Dunn's recurring discussions of the importance of a collective politics of style, his attention to geographic and imagined spaces of countercultural practice, and his analysis of the relationship of the counterculture to a growing consumer culture are especially worth noting. The book is a tour de force of both historical and cultural analysis that will push our understandings of counterculture and of its political potential. It should be of enormous interest to scholars of the long Sixties anywhere.--The Sixties A masterful work of cultural history, sure to be of compelling interest to any student of Brazil in the 1970s and of Latin American counterculture more generally.--HAHR Contracultura talks about alternative cultural attitudes during the Brazilian military dictatorship, where arts, writing, journalism, sexual liberation and drugs could serve as escape valves from political repression, censorship and moralism. Christopher Dunn's book thus contributes to the memory of a taboo time that continues to affect the present of Brazilian history.--JAm It

Author Information

Christopher Dunn, associate professor of Brazilian literary and cultural studiesat Tulane University, is the author of Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available