Publications

This book follows ten political economic histories since the 1970s, showing how different forms of partnership have developed, flourished or declined over the time. The author's argument is supported by rich empirical material. It places partnership schemes in a broader social context and provides a deep insight into the phenomenon.

"Handbook on Cuban History, Literature, and the Arts offers in one volume a comprehensive view of the status of Cuban studies today. The book illuminates the growing salience of social issues and changes in music, literature, cinema, and theater, thus fostering a fuller understanding of historical and current social dynamics of a Cuba in transformation today. This compilation contributes to the development of a framework for understanding the ongoing transformations in the presence of changing structural dynamics."

This book focuses on Cuba’s emergent economic model within a historical framework that includes small businesses and their regulation by the state, new taxation structure, prospects for future cooperatives, Cuban exports and competitiveness in the international market, and prospects for micro-financing.

Additional Editor: Mario González-Corzo

The Brazilian State: Debate and Agenda is part of the Bildner Western Hemisphere Studies Series. This book is a collection of 16 essays from the conference “The Brazilian State: Paths and Prospects of Dirigisme and Liberalization” held at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in November 2009. The Brazilian State explores the changing roles, relations with society, and overall impact of the contemporary Brazilian State, including, the newly elected Dilma Rousseff. Collectively, the papers explore state reform, institutional development, policy effectiveness, and economic dynamics since the 1930s.

Read a book review and comments in Portuguese by Paulo Kramer

Additional Editor: Laura Randall, with the assistance of Janaina Saad

Coffee and Transformation in São Paulo, Brazil advances a distinctive interpretation of the dynamism of the São Paulo region since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Large and entrepreneurial coffee landlords opened the frontier to the west of the state capital, playing a key role in making the state and Brazil the world's largest coffee producer for international markets. However, many of the immigrant settlers from Italy, Japan, Spain, and other countries emerged as major actors in the last phase of frontier expansion in western São Paulo. A substantial number of them found ways to become independent agriculturalists or enact new careers in commerce, industry, and services in the network of towns emerging in this region. This volume pays close attention to the political and economic implications of this region's process of segmentation and transformation, including their links to regionalism, political conflict, and the Revolution of 1930.

Tras del colapso de la Unión Soviética, se abrió un nuevo debate sobre los procesos que transformarían la condición de Cuba. Desde entonces, ha habido una serie de discusiones e interrogantes que giran en torno a los cambios que se están llevando a cabo en los ámbitos culturales, artísticos, económicos, sociales e políticos de ese país. Intelectuales de diferentes disciplinas académicas (arte, antropología, historia, estudios literarios, sociología y musicología) desarrollan tales ideas en los ensayos que integran este libro.

Jose Marti contributed greatly to Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain with words as well as revolutionary action. Although he died before the formation of an independent republic, he has since been hailed as a heroic martyr inspiring Cuban republican traditions. During the twentieth century, traditionally nationalistic literature has reinforced an uncritical idealization of Marti and his influence. However, new approaches have recently explored the formation, reception, uses and abuses of the Marti myth. The essays in this volume analyze the influence of Jose Marti - poet, scholar, and revolutionary - on the formation of often-competing national identities in post-independence Cuba. By exploring the diverse representations and interpretations of Marti, they provide a critical analysis of the ways in which both the left and right have used his political and literary legacies to argue their version of contemporary Cuban 'reality.'

Additional Editor: Alfonso W. Quiroz

While Fernando Ortiz's contribution to our understanding of Cuba and Latin America more generally has been widely recognized since the 1940s, recently there has been renewed interest in this scholar and activist who made lasting contributions to a staggering array of fields. This book is the first work in English to reassess Ortiz's vast intellectual universe. Essays in this volume analyze and celebrate his contribution to scholarship in Cuban history, the social sciences―notably anthropology―and law, religion and national identity, literature, and music. Presenting Ortiz's seminal thinking, including his profoundly influential concept of 'transculturation', Cuban Counterpoints explores the bold new perspectives that he brought to bear on Cuban society. Much of his most challenging and provocative thinking―which embraced simultaneity, conflict, inherent contradiction and hybridity―has remarkable relevance for current debates about Latin America's complex and evolving societies.

Additional Editor: Alfonso W. Quiroz

This groundbreaking work is the first volume in English to examine Brazil's historic policy reforms of the 1990s and the political, economic, and social results. For years the large and ineffective government of Brazil could neither improve the country's greatly uneven distribution of wealth nor maintain inflation at reasonable levels. In the 1990s, long overdue changes bettered the government's fiscal performance, tamed inflation, and addressed chronic social ills stemming from the imbalance of wealth. But many problems, and many questions, remain. Why is Brazil still so poor, and why is inequality so intransigent? Were some of the reforms counterproductive, or could they have been implemented in a more effective way? Collecting essays by top Brazilianist scholars from various disciplines and intellectual traditions, Reforming Brazil provides new insights for international policy makers, economists, and scholars of Brazil.

To preview Reforming Brazil, download Mauricio Font's introduction Dawn of a New Era (PDF).

Additional Editor: Anthony Peter Spanakos, with the assistance of Cristina Bordin

Transforming Brazil explores the complex web of policies, ideas, institutions, social forces, and political actors behind recent Brazilian reforms. By placing them in a broader analytical framework, it sets the backdrop for a better understanding of the character, timing, and sequencing of the reform process. The focus is on the complex reform efforts during the post-1985 democratization era. The introductory chapters place Brazilian reform in comparative perspective and explore theories and accounts of the political, social and institutional context in which the reforms took place, the political process leading up to reforms, and the actors that influenced them, including elites, business, government, institutions and interest groups. The analysis of stabilization and economic liberalization weaves in accounts of policies and of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's election as president in 1994 and his re-election in 1998. The detailed study of privatization, deregulation, trade liberalization and opening of the economy, state and administrative reform, agrarian reform, changes in social security system, fiscal reforms, and related reforms during the eight years of the Cardoso government show that they amount to a turning point in Brazilian politics, even if several reforms remain incomplete. The analysis also points to factors shaping the reform process and the relationship between the reforms and vulnerability to external financial crises and shocks.

The book contains 26 essays written by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil's President and world-class social scientist, at different stages of his impressive and influential intellectual trajectory. The book features an extensive Introduction by M. Font, and Cardoso's bibliography by Danielle Ardaillon. For decades F. H. Cardoso has been among the most influential of Latin American scholars, his writings on globalization, dependency, and politics have reached a world-wide audience. This book, the third by Cardoso to come out in English, is the first to incorporate essays written during his tenure as president of Brazil. The transformation of Cardoso's economic and political approach is nowhere better documented than in this broad-ranging collection of writings that span Cardoso's early theoretical work through his pragmatic agenda for Brazil in a rapidly changing world economy. The book also traces the development of one of the world's leading intellectuals, who took theory into the arena of policy when he became head of state.

Additional Editor: Fernando Henrique Cardoso

El libro trata de comprobar la vigencia de los temas y de las hipótesis de trabajo desarrolladas durante el Seminario Internacional “Integración Económica y Democratización: América Latina y Cuba”, que se realizó en Santiago de Chile, el 26 y 27 de mayo de 1997. A partir de una caracterización del contexto en que tuvo lugar el intercambio de ideas y su evolución posterior, se analiza desde la primacía de la razón política que orienta la política interna e internacional cubana hasta la conveniencia de acelerar o pausar su participación en el proceso de integración latinoamericana y caribeña.

Additional authors: Pilar Alamos Varas, José Augusto Guilhon Albuquerque, Francisco León

This book provides a new interpretation of a crucial period in the history of modern Brazil. It also challenges a pivotal tenet of development theory. The Revolution in Brazil in 1930, and the social, political, and economic movements in São Paulo and the south which led up to and followed it, have long been the subject of scrutiny by Latin American Scholars. The dependencia school of Cardoso and Fernandes and the Paulista school in sociology have generalized from their analysis of change in Brazil to argue a broad explanation of patterns of development: they describe a process in which, characteristically, coalitions of export elites exercise power over policy making, industrialization and the national economy. The coffee exporters of Brazil, they argue, were a classic example of such a powerful elite.