Spring 2013 Catalog - Duke University Press

Speaking of Flowers
Student Movements and the Making and
Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil
victoria langland
“Clear, concise, and full of engaging and dramatic stories, Victoria
Langland’s Speaking of Flowers is an important contribution to our under-
standing of the history of the Brazilian student movement and its vital role
in twentieth-century politics. In addition, through her analysis of the
constructed memories of 1968, Langland provides readers an excellent
opportunity to consider a series of methodological questions about how
history is written and how Brazilians have shaped the recollection of
that history.”—JAMES N. GREEN, author of We Cannot Remain Silent:
Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States
Speaking of Flowers
is an innovative study
of student activism
during Brazil’s military
dictatorship (1964–85)
and an examination
of the very notion of
student activism, which
changed dramatically
in response to the
Volunteer pallbearers carry Edson Luis’s coffin to the João student protests of
Batista cemetery in a funeral directed and controlled by
students. Correio da Manhã collection, Arquivo Nacional. 1968. Looking into what
made students engage
in national political affairs as students, rather than through other
means, Victoria Langland traces a gradual, uneven shift in how they
constructed, defended, and redefined their right to political participation,
from emphasizing class, race, and gender privileges to organizing
around other institutional and symbolic forms of political authority.
Embodying Cold War political and gendered tensions, Brazil’s increasingly
violent military government mounted fierce challenges to student
political activity just as students were beginning to see themselves
as representing an otherwise demobilized civil society. By challenging
the students’ political legitimacy at a pivotal moment, the dictatorship
helped to ignite the student protests that exploded in 1968. In her
attentive exploration of the years after 1968, Langland analyzes what
the demonstrations of that year meant to later generations of Brazilian
students, revealing how student activists mobilized collective memories
in their subsequent political struggles.
Victoria Langland is Assistant Professor of History at the University of
California, Davis.
LATIN AMERICAN HISTORY/SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
June 352 pages, 32 photographs
paper, 978–0–8223–5312–6, $24.95/£16.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5298–3, $89.95/£67.00
latin american / caribbean studies
Singing for the Dead
The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico
paja faudree
“Singing for the Dead makes major theoretical and ethnographic contributions
to studies of indigenous literacy, ethnic revival movements, and the
ways in which politics functions through cultural forms. The book is historically
and theoretically rich, situating the different examples of ethnic
revival—the Day of the Dead song contest, the Mazatec Indigenous Church,
and the work of indigenous Mazatec writers—in a wonderfully rich context.”
—LYNN STEPHEN, author of Transborder Lives: Indigenous Oaxacans in
Mexico, California, and Oregon
Singing for the Dead chronicles
ethnic revival in Oaxaca, Mexico,
where new forms of singing
and writing in the local Mazatec
indigenous language are producing
powerful, transformative
political effects. Paja Faudree
argues for the inclusion of singing
as a necessary component
in the polarized debates about
indigenous orality and literacy
and considers how the coupling
of literacy and song has allowed
people from the region to create
texts of enduring social resonance.
She examines how local
young people are learning to
read and write in Mazatec as
a result of the region’s new Day of the Dead song contest. Faudree also
studies how tourist interest in local psychedelic mushrooms has led
to their commodification, producing both opportunities and challenges
for songwriters and others who represent Mazatec culture. She situates
these revival movements within the contexts of Mexico and Latin
America, as well as the broad, hemisphere-wide movement to create
indigenous literatures. Singing for the Dead provides a new way to think
about the politics of ethnicity, the success of social movements, and the
limits of national belonging.
Day of the Dead observed in the Sierra Mazateca
of Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by the author.
Paja Faudree is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University.
ANTHROPOLOGY/LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES/INDIGENOUS STUDIES
June 328 pages, 26 illustrations
paper, 978–0–8223–5431–4, $24.95/£16.99
cloth, 978–0–8223–5416–1, $89.95/£67.00
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