Fabio Akcelrud Durão

This book is a collective journal of the COVID-19 pandemic. With first-hand accounts of the pandemic as it unfolded, it explores the social and the political through the lens of the outbreak. Featuring contributors located in India, the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Bulgaria, the book presents us with simultaneous multiple histories of our time. The volume documents the beginning of social distancing and lockdown measures adopted by countries around the world and analyses how these bore upon prevailing social conditions in specific locations. It presents the authors’ personal observations in a lucid conversational style as they reflect on themes such as the reorganization of political debates and issues, the experience of the marginalized, theodicy, government policy responses, and shifts into digital space under lockdown, all of these under an overarching narrative of the healthcare and economic crisis facing the world. A unique and engaging contribution, this book will be useful to students and researchers of sociology, public health, political economy, public policy, and comparative politics. It will also appeal to general readers interested in pandemic literature.

This book is a collective journal of the COVID-19 pandemic. With first-hand accounts of the pandemic as it unfolded, it explores the social and the political through the lens of the outbreak. Featuring contributors located in India, the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Bulgaria, the book presents us with simultaneous multiple histories of our time. The volume documents the beginning of social distancing and lockdown measures adopted by countries around the world and analyses how these bore upon prevailing social conditions in specific locations. It presents the authors’ personal observations in a lucid conversational style as they reflect on themes such as the reorganization of political debates and issues, the experience of the marginalized, theodicy, government policy responses, and shifts into digital space under lockdown, all of these under an overarching narrative of the healthcare and economic crisis facing the world. A unique and engaging contribution, this book will be useful to students and researchers of sociology, public health, political economy, public policy, and comparative politics. It will also appeal to general readers interested in pandemic literature.

In these crisp, shrewd essays, a scholar of European modernism trains his insights and considerable critical acumen on contemporary Brazil, subjecting to scrutiny those spheres dearest to "Brazilian culture": the S o Paulo Biennial; tropic lia; City of God (both novel and film). Dialectical readings in the best sense, these brilliant, penetrating essays offer not pat resolutions but all the productive, joyous energy of tensions that pull at one another and spark new meanings and musings. Dur o and friends eschew moralism to dwell, for instance, with the paradoxical promises of the pop song, at once utopian and commodified, mass without actually being popular, forging of communities and manipulated affects alike - but they also circle back time and again to the "raging coexistence of domination and resistance" marking contemporary Brazil. Amidst such contradictions, the very concept of equality is subject to ideology critique: neither ignored nor really believed in. Essays Brazilian spans a number of fields and figures, from music, visual art, literature, film, to criticism itself, and from outsider artist Arthur Bispo do Rosario to the contemporary artist Gil Vicente; from reception histories of Adorno, Bakhtin, and 12-tone music in Brazil to Reinaldo Moraes' recent novel Pornopop ia to the surprisingly (and convincingly) profound meaning of goofs in Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film City of God. Throughout, Dur o and friends show how both popular and avant-garde artworks address Brazil's complicated history. If the essays suggest that national allegory has not wholly disappeared in the era of globalization, they also suggest - to cite Dur o and Trocoli's reading of artist Nuno Ramos - that such allegories might well hold for any work of art today, mixing "exhilaration, because everything remains to be done, and mourning, because everything seems always about to disappear, because it is so difficult for things acquire the state of being, to become existent." Rachel Price Princeton University

Modernism and Coherence is an attempt to develop a negative aesthetics conceived as determinate resistance of artworks against the meaning assigned to them by criticism. From the accumulation of arguments on great texts of modernism, the book describes gestures of refusal that generate figures of negativity: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory becomes a whirlpool revolving around a center refusing predication; Wallace Stevens’ poetry exhibits a phonetic escape valve against the pressure of reality; Robert Frost writes a poem that is ahead of you in both senses of the expression; and James Joyce’s Ulysses reads its readers in waves of self-folding. This book is an effort to salvage literature as something in itself in a world that increasingly can only see what is for the other.