Autos and Progress: The Brazilian Search for Modernity

ISBN-13: 9780195174571 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 288 str.

Joel Wolfe

Opis

Autos and Progress reinterprets twentieth-century Brazilian history through automobiles, using them as a window for understanding the nation's struggle for modernity in the face of its massive geographical size, weak central government, and dependence on agricultural exports. Among the topics Wolfe touches upon are the first sports cars and elite consumerism; intellectuals' embrace of cars as the key for transformation and unification of Brazil; Henry Ford's building of a company town in the Brazilian jungle; the creation of a transportation infrastructure; democratization and consumer culture; auto workers and their creation of a national political party; and the economic and environmental impact of autos on Brazil. This focus on Brazilians' fascination with automobiles and their reliance on auto production and consumption as keys to their economic and social transformation, explains how Brazil--which enshrined its belief in science and technology in its national slogan of Order and Progress--has differentiated itself from other Latin American nations. Autos and Progress engages key issues in Brazil around the meaning and role of race in society and also addresses several classic debates in Brazilian studies about the nature of Brazil's great size and diversity and how they shaped state-making.

Recenzje

Autos and Progress provides an important new way to understand the Brazilian obsession with modernity. Joel Wolfe shows how Brazilians linked technology and consumerism by investigating a wide range of topics relating to automobilism, including the relationship between Formula 1 racing and nation-building and the connection between auto workers and democracy. Autos and Progress teaches us that motorized vehicles were more than tools for creating a modern state; they were important cultural symbols of twentieth century Brazilian national identity.

O autorze

Joel Wolfe is Associate Professor of History at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class, 1900-1955 (Duke UP, 1993).