Charles Perrone
Romance Literatures and Languages, CLAS
Portuguese-Language and Brazilian Culture
Portuguese-Language and Brazilian Culture: an upper-division culture & civilization class within UFIC's program at IBEU (Instituto Brasil Estados Unidos) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The organizing concept is "Tradition and Renewal," honoring the past of the program while shaping its present and future. The culture course serves as a sort of feeder into more advanced classes at UF for the minor / major / electives in Portuguese and/or Latin American Studies, as well as any other affiliated field: History, Political Science, Sociology, tropical Life Sciences, Fine Arts, Urban Planning, et al. The summer course will follow the lines of "Tradição e renovação no Estudo da(s) Cultura(s) Brasileira(s)" [Tradition and renewal in the study of Brazilian culture(s)].
The general idea of the proposed course will be to compare and contrast conventional approaches to the study of the national entity with more recent inflections of such considerations. One of the guiding principles will be the centrality of diversity and multiplicity in one of the largest nations in the world. The course concentrates on expressive behaviors of the modern period, from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Primary manifestations and themes to be considered include folklife, the transition from rural to urban culture, electronic media (radio-film-television), performance arts, especially popular music, forms of national identity, and governmental institutions.