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  • Emergent Brazil: Key Perspectives on a New Global Power ed. by Jeffrey D. Needell
  • Anthony W. Pereira
Needell, Jeffrey D., ed. Emergent Brazil: Key Perspectives on a New Global Power. Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, 2015. 309 pp. Figures. Notes. Index.

Brazil's recent recession and political conflict have made the titles of books such as this one sound somewhat dated. The recent literature on Brazil includes many titles referring to Brazil's status as a "rising," "emerging," or "emergent" power. No doubt Brazil is still influential as a UN peacekeeper, a model for designers of social programs, a proponent of climate change mitigation, and a partner in the solution of global health issues, to give some examples of areas where Brazilian contributions have made a difference to global governance. But two of the pillars of Brazil's recent rise—its economic vibrancy and political stability—have been seriously shaken in the last two years, as a severe recession in 2015 and 2016 has occurred in tandem with debilitating political stalemate and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff.

Despite the limitation of a questionable title, this book offers an analysis of important elements of Brazil's recent trajectory, as well as some of its contemporary challenges. The book covers recent changes in the Brazilian economy as well as society, culture, politics, environment, and foreign relations. Its contributors have a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including anthropology, economics, history, political science, religious studies, and sociology. Edited and introduced by the historian Jeffrey Needell, the book is based on a February 2013 conference at the University of Florida at Gainesville that cemented a partnership between the Center for Latin American Studies at Florida and the Center for Research and Documentation of the Contemporary History of Brazil (CPDOC) of the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Rio.

The book is organized into six main sections. The first is an overview of continuity and change in Brazil's history. This includes a chapter by the historian Marshall Eakin, and an analysis of June–July 2013 protests by the political scientist Fernando Lattman-Weltman. Eakin claims that the development of a cultural nationalism revolving around a myth of mestiçagem (racial mixture) laid the foundation for social movements claiming rights of citizenship in the 1970s and 1980s (25). For his part, Lattman-Weltman argues that what was really new about the 2013 protests was the protestors' use of social media, the unique window of opportunity offered by the Confederations Cup, and the influence of other social [End Page E1] protests outside of Brazil such as Occupy in the US and UK, the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the indignados in Spain, student protestors in Chile, and the Gezi Park protestors in Turkey (37–38). This chapter also points to an important new research agenda—understanding the cultural, social, and political implications of the redistribution that took place under President Lula (2003–2010).

Part II deals with politics, with an analysis of presidential popularity by Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco Jr., and another chapter by Fernando Lattman-Weltman about the media democratization agenda in Brazil under President Lula. Lattman-Weltman writes that the agenda was basically abandoned, in part because Workers' Party (PT) presidential candidates could win elections without the support of most of the major media outlets (81). This points to one of the distinctive features of Brazilian politics during the Lula and Dilma Rousseff presidencies. It is very rare in a democracy for candidates to be able to win despite opposition from most of the mainstream media, but that is what Lula and Dilma did in 2006, 2010, and 2014.

Part III concerns crime, "pacification urbanism" and popular culture, with chapters by, respectively, Charles Wood and Ludmilla Ribeiro, Mariana Cavalcanti, and Bryan McCann. The chapter by Wood and Ribeiro mentions the provocative claim, currently being researched by specialists in crime and violence in Brazil, that part of the recent drop in homicides in São Paulo was caused by organized criminal groups (104). Part IV, unusually for a volume of this type, concerns religion, both the global spread of Brazilian religions (Christina Rocha and Manuel Vasquez) and the role...

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