Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian Studies in the United States (review)

Over the last decade there has been a notable increase in academic interest related to Brazil in the United States. Student enrollment in Portuguese language classes has grown, and more colleges and universities are offering an increased number of courses in literature, history, the social sciences, and cultural studies. Students can choose from a wide array of summer or semester-long programs in cities throughout Brazil, and more young scholars are selecting a Brazil-related dissertation topic. Currently there are an estimated 800 college and university professors teaching courses exclusively about Brazil or including themes about the country within their syllabi. More importantly for those embarking on an academic career, there actually seems to be growth in job opportunities. Not since the great boom in Latin American Studies in the early 1960s has there been such scholarly interest in the continent-sized country to the south. At the same time, the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) has solidly established itself as an internationally recognized professional organization with well-orchestrated conferences every two year, alternating between Brazil and the United States, that have attracted significant numbers of Brazilian and U.S.-based academics. Anyone attending those meetings is struck by the diversity and quality of production taking place in the United States.

Envisioning Brazil acknowledges this remarkable growth in the field of Brazilian Studies by offering readers a comprehensive overview of the writings on Brazil by U.S. scholars since the end of World War II. Published originally in Portuguese as O Brasil dos brasilianistas (Paz e Terra, 2002), the volume is a handy guide for understanding the historical development of this area of investigation in the United States and a comprehensive survey of fifty or more years of academic production in English. Discipline-based essays trace the history of the study of Brazil in anthropology, arts and music, cultural studies, economics, geography, history, international relations, language, linguistics, literature, political science, and sociology. They are accompanied by comprehensive bibliographies providing valuable resources for librarians and scholars alike that seek to survey and master the tremendous scope of research and writing produced in this country.

This volume also appears at a moment when many of the pejorative connotations of the term "Brazilianist" have waned among Brazilian academics and intellectuals. While some still regard a U.S.-born or trained researcher of Brazil as an exotic other, this essentialized notion that a person's birthplace or training provides less (or more) intellectual capacity to understand another country and its culture is largely a relic of a bygone era. New generations of U.S. researchers have built collaborative projects with their Brazilian counterparts, and international conferences (visa hassles with U.S. consulates and the embassy notwithstanding) have engendered significantly more scholarly exchanges. Yet, if one counts the numbers of volumes about Brazil originally published in English and then translated into Portuguese, the reverse sharing of knowledge has not yet reached a comparable level. There still remains a lingering interest and fascination among Brazilian publishers, intellectuals, and academics about what scholars to the north are writing about their country. As far as getting Brazilian scholars' works published in English, the reverse trend is less easily achieved. An estimated three times more books about Brazil that first come out in English find a publisher in Brazil than do Portuguese-language works whose authors are seeing a broader U.S. or international audience. As a result, many fewer Brazilian scholars manage to get their work disseminated in the United States beyond the small circle of experts on Brazil and those scholars and students who comfortably read Portuguese, which as we know is still a reduced number of academics. This remains an unfortunate trend that hopefully can be addressed and reversed in coming years.

Not surprisingly, as many of the essayists in this volume point out, the history of the development of the study of Brazil in different disciplines mirrors larger...