Duke University Press Log

Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë!

Happy birthday, Emily Brontë! Celebrating what would have been the author’s 196th birthday, we have selected several journal articles in honor of her work. Her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, was poorly received when it was first published and Bronte died of tuberculosis just a year later. Today, Wuthering Heights is considered a classic and a masterpiece of literature.

In “Postcolonial Life and Death: A Process-Based Comparison of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Ayu Utami's Saman,” Tiffany Tsao examines the two novels' respective treatments of internal colonization,a shared thematic concern that only becomes apparent with critical attention to the similarities between scenes found in each work. Read an excerpt below:

Viewing Wuthering Heights and Saman as alike in their portrayals of the violence of domestic colonization inevitably illuminates and augments key aspects of each work. That is, when we focus on the features that the two works have in common, the differences we discover about those features, ones that previously meant little in a sea of innumerable differences, gain new significance. More specifically, we find that the two works diverge in their portrayals of the extent to which the colonization process may transform the “savage” and, consequently, the extent to which a post-colonial life based on pre-colonial ways of life is possible. Whereas Wuthering Heights portrays colonization as enacting a total transformation of the savage into the civilized, Saman portrays “savage” pre-civilization as an enduring and powerful reality that remains unaltered by the attempts of civilizers to change it. As a result, Wuthering Heights regards resistance to civilization as a reversion to a non-existent, pre-civilized past; Saman, by contrast, envisions it as the product of a way of life that has always been ongoing, independently, beneath civilization’s veneer. To put it another way, unlike Wuthering Heights, Saman posits the existence of an alternate reality an unseen primordial realm that continues untouched and undisturbed by the incursion of a so-called civilization that is oppressive.

Read more from “Postcolonial Life and Death” here.

In “'Whose Injury is Like Mine?’ Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and the Sincere Postures of Suffering Men,” Kevin A. Morrison argues that these authors, focusing on the transition from a traditional yeoman economy to a system of capitalist property ownership, present male suffering as authentic and histrionic, indicative of both power and powerlessness, and as an attempt to manage perceived threats to the self. Read an excerpt:

I employ the term sincere postures to describe Brontë’s and Eliot’s efforts to figure the gestural and rhetorical modes of male suffering as suffering while also recognizing them as calculated strategies. Representing male suffering as both authentic and histrionic, indicative of both powerlessness and power, enables these novelists to acknowledge the emotional violence that men inflict on women but then to assign a specific cause for it largely outside men’s individual control. This is less an effort to excuse such behavior than it is, I think, an attempt to authorize Brontë’s and Eliot’s own respective projects of establishing sympathy as the foundational virtue of the new bourgeois owning class whose hegemony they help to bring about. If men’s behavior toward women can be seen as emanating from genuine distress rather than inherent misogyny, women can play an active role in offering the kind of succor that might heal the wound and stop the violence that male suffering produces. However, this paradox, in which suffering is at once both a symptom of masculine precariousness and incoherency and an asset for a man’s preservation and reassertion of authority, allows Brontë and Eliot to resolve one problem only to introduce another. If suffering is constitutive of masculine dominance, then the concept of reparative compassion is incoherent because male authority relies on appeals to female sympathy to keep it intact. In my reading, these novels are poised between conservation and critique, producing an ambivalence that can be reconciled only through “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’” to the disquieting paradox of liberal masculinity.

Read more from “’Whose Injury is Like Mine?’” here.

Robert A. Hill on the Centenary of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association

Today we have a guest post by Robert A. Hill, editor-in-chief of The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers. Hill, Associate Professor of History at UCLA, has been working on the papers for over thirty years. The first ten volumes were published by the University of California Press, and Duke University Press has taken over publication with Volume XI. The latest volume, XII, "The Caribbean Diaspora, 1920–1921" comes out in October. 

As the world gets ready to mark the centennary of the start of World War One, there is another centennary that is worth remembering at this time. It is 100 years since the founding of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA & ACL), the organization which gave birth to the modern black struggle for self-determination, with its cry of "Africa for the Africans" and its motto of "One God, One Aim, One Destiny." 

Marcus Garvey with Potentate Gabriel M. Johnson of Liberia, Supreme Deputy G.O. Marke of Sierra Leone, and other UNIA leaders review the parade opening the 1922 UNIA convention, New York City

Organized and launched on July 20^th, 1914—one week before Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo and the countdown to World War One commenced—the UNIA & ACL held its first public meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, one of the many dusty margins of Britain’s colonial empire in the Caribbean. The two events would become inextricably intertwined.

World War One not only set the colonial empires of Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey on the path to war, but would also witness the end of empire as the world had known it. Dragged into the European maelstrom, with 16 million killed and 20 million wounded before the guns fell silent, the war would spawn the drive for nationhood on the part of millions of colonial and semi-colonial peoples. And when that moment came four years later with the peace that followed the war, Marcus Garvey and his UNIA & ACL were in the forefront of the struggle, calling for African freedom and black emancipation.

As the first internationally organized movement of black peoples to exist in the world, the UNIA & ACL orchestrated a form of popular black politics on an entirely unprecedented scale. With an extensive network of travelling speakers, it recruited thousands of members through orators addressing public meetings. It published and distributed its own influential Negro World newspaper with an international readership that caused it to be banned or suppressed in several African, Caribbean, and Central American countries. Through petition drives as well as the promotion of its own commercial enterprises, most notably the Black Start Line, the "Garvey movement," as it came to be known, with its flamboyant display of popular support was able to mobilize an international movement, the likes of which had never been seen before.

Although the movement’s commercial enterprises would all fail, and Garvey himself was jailed for fraud, the movement helped to raise racial consciousness to an unprecedented level. After one hundred years, its legacy is still being felt in the arts, in the politics of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism, and in the religion of black redemption, particularly in the phenomenon of Rastafari religion.

The "Lost City" of Machu Picchu

On July 24th, 1911, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham and the Yale Peruvian Expedition team followed an eleven year old boy to the ruins of Machu Picchu. The expedition sensationalized the area and opened the floodgates of tourism in Peru. Today, tourists, adventurers, and academic enthusiasts from all over the world still flock to Machu Picchu. In honor of this wonder, sample several articles from two journals, Ethnohistory and Hispanic American History Review.

In “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science: Huaquero Vision and the Yale Peruvian Expedition to Machu Picchu, 1911, 1912, and 1914–15,” Amy Cox Hall delves deeper into the rediscovery of Machu Picchu. She examines the practices and collecting technologies of the expedition to suggest that the objects accumulated as well as the practices used in accumulating helped fashion Machu Picchu into a “lost city” that was “scientifically discovered” by Bingham. Read an excerpt:

Although popular myth associates Hiram Bingham and his global unveiling of Machu Picchu in 1911 with archaeology, Bingham was trained as a historian and “had little interest in stratigraphy” or other methodologies associated with modern archaeological research. Instead, what was practiced on the three forays of the Yale Peruvian Expedition (YPE) to Machu Picchu is better characterized as a late antiquarianism-inspired collecting spree—or, less generously, strategic “grave robbing."

In this article I suggest that the expedition’s practices and technologies helped mythologize Machu Picchu into a “lost city.” ̈ It was initially imagined by Bingham as the lost Inca city of Vilcapampa, and the expedition team’s collecting practices and the frame of science, as well as the types of artifacts collected, helped materialize Machu Picchu as both a vestige of the Inca race and a “scientific discovery.” The collecting practices combined prospecting with the notion that science had a sovereign claim on those objects that might contribute to the accumulation of its knowledge. Rather than representing a nation’s or empire’s sovereign claim over a territory and its history, the expedition relied on the universal virtue and sovereignty of science to make its objects collectible.

Read more of “Collecting a ‘Lost City’ for Science” here.

In “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail,” Keely Maxwell explores how tourism has shaped Latin America by constructing touristic landscapes and impacting environmental problem solving. He utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. Read an excerpt:

Thousands of kilometers of former Inca roads span the Andes. One 40-kilometer section has become a new type of Andean pathway, a tourist trail hiked by 54,000 foreign visitors in 2008 alone. Tourism has emerged as a potent political economic force in twentieth-century Latin America, with concomitant environmental impacts. Yet despite the importance of tourism in the region, there are few scholarly investigations of its history, particularly its environmental history. Research has centered on how tourism developed as a leisure activity linked to modernity and capitalist industrialization, on the social construction of tourism destinations, and on social relations of hosts to guests. In Latin America, tourism histories have focused geographically on the Caribbean and Mexico and thematically on “sun and sand” or on cultural heritage tourism. The Inca Trail is part of the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, created in 1981 and designated a World Heritage Site for natural and cultural heritage in 1983. It is a premiere tourist destination and the center of controversy over environmental impacts, and so it provides a critical case for examining the environmental history of Latin American tourism.

Read more of “Tourism, Environment, and Development on the Inca Trail” here.

The Little Veins of Central America by Deborah T. Levenson

Today's guest post is by Deborah T. Levenson, Professor of History at Boston College, author of Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death and co-editor of The Guatemala Reader. She calls for us to listen to the stories of the undocumented Central American children appearing on the U.S. border.

That tens of thousands of children cross the border from Mexico to the United States without documents presents immediate challenges to all of us. They are coming primarily from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, countries in which not only is unemployment high, and employment very poorly paid, but mere survival—much less a life beyond mere survival—is at stake.  In the Mayan highlands of Guatemala, 70% of the population under age 5 is so malnourished as to stunt growth, and in all these countries violence from gangs and adult mafias is lethal, everyday.

Many of us might agree that nations should take care of "their own"—let’s not hold our breath—and that US bears much of the responsibility for crisis. Its policies have undermined local peasant agriculture and national industry, contributed to the sharp decrease in social programs, and supported military regimes that have modeled the behavior prevalent in gangs. These are vital questions.

However, given the sharp polemics over what to do with these children right now, I want instead to give some face to who “they” are.  I have spent years of researching and writing about youth in Guatemala, and with reference to Central American youth in general, and I want to suggest how the young fit into this schema of high levels of poverty and violence that generates flight, a noun that fails to capture children’s motives and identities.  

For generations, poor people of Central America—as in other places—have depended on the pooling of incomes of family members to guarantee one pot large enough for all.  Central American children have long been part of this familial wage. They have worked in peasant agriculture and as seasonal harvesters. The worse the economic crisis gets, and the less subsistence that is available in their regions, and the farther they go: from the countryside to the city; from country to country; from Central America to Mexico to the USA. For the most part, the Central American youth I have met in Massachusetts are here to remain vital to that traditional family wage economy and to retain a place that gives them esteem and meaning.  A 14 year old from Honduras lives in a crowded apartment in Chelsea and shovels snow in the winter and cleans yards in the spring to send money home for his mother’s expensive heart medicine.  A teenager delivers newspapers in Salem to provide for her siblings in Guatemala.  Many youth—of course not all—leave home to protect home. This is one of the oldest immigrant stories, in US history, a heroic and true one. Befriend a Central American youth and you might hear one.

 You might hear another true story, one about gangs such as Mara Salvatrucha  (MS-13). Most reports indicate that the current increase in immigration of unaccompanied minors is a reaction to the growth of gang violence. Yes, youth are running from gang violence, and, it need be underscored that by leaving, they are also resisting forced conversion into being violent themselves. MS-13 operates in a simple and seemingly airtight manner in which extreme violence plays a pivot role. You join the gangs and get shoved into a life that relies on hurting other people to earn money and prestige; one acquires points for murdering and thus moves up in the ranks. If you are rebuff the gang, you face punishment by death or, if that not, an impossible dilemma.  At 13 years of age, a Guatemalan named Edgar Chocoy refused to join MS-13, which “transmuted” his death sentence into the payment of  “tax” so exorbitant that he would have had to resort to serious crime to pay. He refused to do that as well, and he left the country, fast.  He made it to Los Angeles where he was picked up and deported back to Guatemala after a judge denied his plea that MS-13 would kill him on his return. Edgar’s stance against the gangs was essentially a moral one and he paid a high price for it. Two weeks after he was deported, MS-13 murdered him.

Policy toward unaccompanied children, many of whom have challenged the fatal dynamics of gang control, as Edgar did, or who have “resolved” (personally and successfully responded to) their home nation’s health care crisis in their small way by buying medicines that otherwise would not be supplied, need be based on respecting these youth, who stand for life and against despondency. 

Performance Curators: Transforming the Theater

Performance curators occupy an “increasingly essential role in a transformation of the theater’s defining edges,” a role which has started to overlap with socially engaged and visual art forms.  In this special issue of Theater, Tom Sellar argues that these creative professionals are leading the way toward new forms and alternative practices. Sample a few articles from “Performance Curators,” edited by Tom Sellar and Bertie Ferdman.

 

In “From Content to Context: The Emergence of the Performance Curator,” Bertie Ferdman offers historical context for the recent prominence of curatorial practices in the presentation of performance. Discussing a range of alternative presenting models and bridges between the visual and performing arts, she traces the evolution of the performance curator from the logistic concerns of programming to more conceptual work. Read the excerpt:

 

“The rise of interdisciplinary performance festivals in the last decade has increased the visibility of the curator as a central and powerful figure in the changing landscape of the performing arts. A growing number of artistic directors, festival programmers, creative producers, and artists not only are beginning to pay attention to what gets seen either commissioning new work and/or selecting finished work but are also conceptualizing how, where, when, why, and for whom such events are structured and presented. As more exhibitions in art galleries and museums continue to embrace theater and dance, and visual and conceptual art is presented in performing arts institutions and festivals, the act of “curating” performance is becoming vital to both its development and its reception. If the sixties and seventies were the heyday of experimental theater and rise of postmodern dance in lineage with the historical avant garde the current moment, almost half a century later, is seeing a renewed interest not only in breaking with disciplinary models but also in providing new frameworks in which such work can exist. Presenters are now often faced with the challenge of producing work that does not necessarily fit into preconceived conventions of theater. What practices do they implement? What presentational forms do they create? Does a curatorial paradigm for such trends exist?”

 

To read more from “From Content to Context,” click here.

 

Tom Sellar delves further into the role of performance curators in his article, “The Curatorial Turn,” in which he begins to define their purpose and explores their effect on the rejuvenation and development of theater, dance, and performance in the twenty-first century.  Read the excerpt:

 

“Could the curation of theater, dance, and performance become a catalyst for the rejuvenation and development of those forms in the twenty-first century? The performance curator a figure of rising importance onto whom the aspirations and frustrations of many constituencies are projected has been hailed in some quarters as the great white hope for progressive theater makers and as a transformative agent for art institutions, including museums, turning to live events as the next extension of contemporary practice. In various indications of interest in North America alone, MOMA and the Whitney Museum have recently hired performance specialists; resident theaters have begun presenting devised work created externally by independent ensembles and artists; newly established cross-disciplinary festivals such as Philadelphia Fringe Arts, fiaf’s Crossing the Line, American Realness, and the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland, Oregon, are flourishing; and artists have redefined models for collaboration and expanded definitions of socially engaged art to include town hall meetings on racial segregation in St. Louis and pop-up services centers for immigrants in Queens.”

 

To read more from “The Curatorial Turn,” click here.

Fernando, the Peruvian Neymar by Orin Starn

Our final World Cup guest post is by Orin Starn, author of The Passion of Tiger Woods and co-editor of The Peru Reader, as well as series editor for The Latin America Readers and The World Readers. He is Professor and Chair of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.

I’ve  watched the World Cup from a shantytown in desert Peru.  

I’m here doing intensive ethnographic research—well, actually just hanging out—with my two-year old, Lucien. We’re living with a family I’ve known for almost thirty years. Back when I arrived in their village as a young anthropologist, the Córdovas lived in a mud farmhouse up in the Andes. They later followed the great Peruvian migrant trail, a million Joads, down to the big coastal cites. Their hot sandy slum is just a circle removed from hell, at least by regulation American standards. It’s a place of burning garbage piles and swirling dust storms where turkey buzzards, rats and scabrous dogs everywhere patrol for scraps. Life is still much better for the Córdovas. Now they live in a tin-rooved shanty with real matresses, a gas stove, running water, electricity, and internet pirated from a relative next door. There’s also a television that grabs the World Cup with only some good old-fashioned squiggly static.  I’ve found caring for a two-year old here to be sport in itself without the changing table, diaper wipes, and the Babies-R-Us rest, and an extreme one at that. But Lucien is a celebrity with his little blonde curls in a universe of black straight hair. And he gets passed around between houses and relatives in this world where people do not shut themselves off from each other as we so often do in the United States. 

Few here care all that much about the World Cup, contrary to the stereotype of a soccer-crazed subcontinent. Peru hasn’t made it to the World Cups for two decades. You see high shantytown skills in the fulbito, or mini-football,  played in the concrete schoolyard and sandy streets.  But poverty, league corruption, and bad facilities have kept the country from developing any real top-flight players since Teofilo Cubillas, the graceful Afro-Peruvian star who scored eight World Cup goals. Nor is Peru really much of a sports culture. Its genius lies in music, the arts, history, and, now food, with three Peruvian chefs ranked among the world’s top twenty. And then there’s also the gift and curse of Peru’s spectacular outsized geography of tropical jungles, Saharan deserts, and Himalayan peaks.

That doesn’t mean that soccer doesn’t matter. Consider the Neymar haircut of Fernando, a Córdova nephew:

 

                                                 

Fernando wanted to dye the floppy top blonde for the full Neymar effect.  “But my parents wouldn’t let me.”   He’s still only ten. He’d had the straight line cut of Daddy Yankee, the reggaeton superstar, the year before:

 

Now, Fernando says, four or five other boys in his fifth grade class have also gone Neymar. A  little Peruvian boy with the doo of a Nuyorican music idol and now the fallen Brazilian soccer superstar?  Hair has gone global like everything else.  

I ask Fernando why he likes Neymar. “I saw him in some games. He’s fatal, great – he always makes his team win.”   It’s television and the Internet, of course, that led Fernando to Neymar, the great enablers of global celebrity and sports circuits. “I found his pictures on Google. My Dad showed the barber on his phone.”

Hair, as the old school anthropologists liked to remind us, can stand for many things. Status: the Manchu queue and Sun King’s curly wigs. Rebellion: Cromwell’s roundheads, the Rasta’s dreadlocks, and the punk’s mohawk. Religion: the monk’s tonsure and Sikh’s uncut turbanned hair. And even, by its absence, the darkest human suffering,  as in the chemotherapy patient’s baldness or the concentration camp prisoner’s shaved head. Hair may be the most flexible and polysemous sign in the cabinet of body politics.

But for Fernando, hair is as much as anything about idol worship, the little boy’s eternal copycat desire to be like the mythical Olympians.  He was rooting for Brazil, but mostly for Neymar, though he didn’t seem too distraught about his hero’s injury. The day after, he came to show me this meme on his cousin’s laptop.  It had gone viral in Latin America:

 

The rhyme that makes the meme funny, at least to non-Brazilian fans, only works in Spanish—between ardilla, squirrel, and rodilla, knee. 

Zuñiga asks, “Neymar, did you see the squirrel?” 

“What squirrel?,” Neymar replies.

“The squirrel,” Zuñiga says, “that’s kicking you in the back.”

Fernando didn’t seem too stricken by Brazil’s black day against Germany. He got bored halfway, going out to ride his skateboard on a cracked chunk of sidewalk.

There’s little pan-Latin American solidarity in football fandom. National allegiances trump continental ones; the global south remains a term more for postcolonial academics than a felt sentiment here.  Brazilians have something the reputation of the old ugly Americans here, the arrogant tourists.  Argentina seems very far away, and it has treated its Peruvian immigrants poorly—maids and construction workers. There was a sprinkling of Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and even Dutch supporters among the Córdova clan, though no one was going to lose any sleep over the results:

 

One cousin, Cristina, did say she felt sorry for the Brazilians, a touch of human kindness.

Fernando’s sister, Made, 11, is a Messi fan, rooting for Argentina.  She was the secret weapon for her the sixth grade team at the Nuestra Señora de Lourdes school. Her coach would bring her in to play right wing when the team had to have a goal.  The other coaches complained that having a girl violated school rules, however, and Made didn’t like some of the boys shouting insults at her either. In Peru’s brand of soccer sexism, boys play soccer, and girls, if they play sports at all, play volleyball (and, it should be noted, the Peruvian women’s volleyball team took home the silver medal in the 1988 Olympics in a great underdog story of modern sports).  Made doesn’t play anymore, though with her gold-studded flatbill hat and cool funky look she’s not heading for Barbieland either.

 

I ask Fernando how long he’ll keep his Neymar cut. He’s not sure. Until, smiles his father Yonny, something new comes along from the  “fábrica de los suenos—the dream factory,” the shining online world of myth and fantasy by the gigabyte.

It seems to me enough worth recording the moment to snap one last picture of Fernando outside the house.

He holds his ball in his own little World Cup fold in time.

 

 

Super Marta and Our Own Crises by Marc Hertzman

Today's World Cup guest post is by Marc Hertzman, author of Making Samba. Hertzman is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Illinois.

When my high school soccer team played in the state finals our coach was Ann Cernicek.  Cernicek and her sister, Molly, had decorated college careers and helped push the wave that carried U.S. women’s soccer to global prominence.  Nonetheless, her presence on the sidelines of the boys’ championship was remarkable, all the more so because she was eight-months pregnant at the time. 

Coach Cernicek has been on my mind during the run-up to the World Cup, where Brazilian women will shape the competition—and be shaped by it—as never before.  People like to say that the political fortunes of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, rest in the hands of the men’s team.  If they win the Cup, she’ll be re-elected.  If not, she stands no chance.
If the Seleção doesn’t win, some may also grumble that the roster didn’t include arguably the best soccer player ever. Marta Vieira da Silva (known simply as “Marta”) has won or finished second as FIFA’s women’s Player of the Year an amazing nine times. Like countless other extraordinary female athletes, Marta has drawn attention both for her otherworldly skills and things that have nothing to do with them, all while challenging widespread expectations about gender and sports.

During the Cup we can expect the kind of imagery and division of labor that seems to mark every big sport event.  Barely-clothed women will present awards (FIFA’s notoriously sexist president already drew criticism for the staging of the draw); at least one coach will ban “wives and girlfriends” from the team hotel; and the press will ogle female fans and print sensationalist accounts of prostitution and “sex in the tropics,” even while Brazil (like the U.S.) struggles to crack down on sex trafficking.

It’s still too early to tell what Dilma’s presidency will mean for women’s rights, writ large, but there’s little indication that even she can bring meaningful change to the world of big-money sports.  Marta and groups like GuerreirasProject have campaigned tirelessly for gender justice, funding, and respect for women’s soccer in Brazil, whose supremely talented female squad is perennially crippled by meager government support.  Whether or not sponsorship evolves in Brazil, Marta’s impact is undeniable, evident in her blog, which is full of inspiring messages not only from young women seeking guidance, sending good wishes, or recounting how Marta changed their lives, but also from boys and men who write for myriad reasons.  Marcio posted a message asking if he and his boyfriend, both homesick, could get together with her in Sweden, where she plays for a club team.  Kenedy, age 14, wanted advice about how to help his sisters launch successful careers.  José logged in just to state the obvious, leaving behind a short, straightforward message: “Best player in the world.”

As in Brazil, the future of women’s rights, gender justice, sports, and politics all hang in the balance here in the U.S.  Many in the press have already anointed Hillary as our first female president.  Meanwhile, the bloated, corrupt NCAA—a body that, like it or not, my fellow academics and I are impossibly entangled with—is simultaneously enmeshed in an overwhelming crisis of sexual violence on campus and challenged by the heady, complex prospects of “student-athlete” unionization, a project that holds tantalizing possibilities but also potentially disastrous results for women’s athletics.  As these stories play out, we will do well to think hard about our own relationship with spectacular sporting events abroad and close to home and to pay attention to Marta, Dilma, and less-known trailblazers like Cernicek, all of whom have more than a few lessons to teach us all.

Football in a Serious Country by John Gledhill

Today's World Cup guest post is by John Gledhill, co-editor (with Patience A. Schell) of New Approaches to Resistance in Brazil and Mexico. Gledhill is Max Gluckman Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. 

As the World Cup approached, British newspapers ran stories about facilities not being ready, the horrific possibility of being unable to tweet friends and family during matches because of deficiencies in Brazil’s communications infrastructure, strikes taking advantage of the moment in a Presidential election year, and most popular of all, shootouts between traffickers and police in Rio de Janeiro’s “pacified” favelas. Sporting pages warned England fans of the tropical miseries to be endured during their team’s first fixture in Manaus, and the challenges presented by Brazilian airports and public transport systems. But complementing this negative reporting was a more positive approach to protests about the Cup. That football embodies the pathologies of contemporary capitalism is hardly news to residents of Manchester, whose global sporting brand, Manchester United Plc, was taken over by the US-based Glazer family through a series of controversial loan-based share deals in 2005. Now a New York listed company incorporated in the Cayman Islands, United is currently eclipsed in the English Premier League by local rival Manchester City, 100% owned by the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi. Yet even the English could not fail to be impressed by the depth of the critiques of FIFA that emerged from Brazil’s longstanding experience of the sleazier side of the “beautiful game”.

 

#492738173 / gettyimages.com

Opinion surveys now show that less than half the Brazilian population approve hosting the World Cup. We are not talking simply about an awakened generation of middle class kids but a country of continental scale denying its stereotyping and being “serious” about what kind of social future it wants and its role on the world stage. The legacies of authoritarianism and racism that haunt modern Brazil are daunting. Progress has been made on discrimination and poverty reduction. Increases in real wages and formal employment renewed social mobility. Yet in Brazil as elsewhere, wealth inequalities and the social self-segregation of the more fortunate present formidable challenges to constructing a more humane, less violent, society. The problems that have emerged in Rio’s favela pacification program show that not enough has changed since 2007, when state governor Sergio Cabral ordered the invasion and siege of the Alemão favela complex during the Pan American Games. Securitization unjustly defines favela residents as threats to the rest of society, and “proximity policing” proves difficult to implement because of deep rooted problems within the police corporations themselves. Budgets for the other side of “pacification”, investment in the social development of poor neighbourhoods that ironically preserve stronger patterns of collective sociability than the “asphalt” despite the violence, are inadequate because of spending on infrastructure for the Cup that has scant social utility and the social cost of forced relocations. Accumulation by dispossession remains the rule rather than the exception in neoliberal cities since reducing violence in poor neighbourhoods makes them apt for gentrification. Yet in triggering demands that the money be spent instead on improving public health, education and transport, this World Cup should not only convince foreigners that Brazilians understand that football, like carnival, is about profits for the few, but also put the country at the forefront of any doubts the world’s political classes may be beginning to have about the sustainability of that model.