Brazilian Culture: Race, Gender, Environment

Undergraduate / Graduate

This course examines Brazil's history, literature and culture through the intertwined lenses of racial formation, gender politics, and environmental change. From the nineteenth-century slaveholding society of the post-Independence period to contemporary debates over the Amazon, including topics such as urban inequality and Indigenous land rights, the course traces how culture registers and contests power. We will cover works of literature, essays, film, music, and visual art alongside key theoretical texts to understand how Brazilian writers and artists grapple with the legacies of slavery, settler colonialism, and extractive economies. Particular attention is given to Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions, feminist and queer interventions, and the cultural politics of development and climate crisis. Topics include Afro-Brazilian religions, migration and urban peripheries, land struggles, rural modernity, and the aesthetics of resistance. Students will analyze how narratives of nation and nature are shaped by race and gender, and how environmental questions are inseparable from social justice. Taught in Portuguese. Students who are not proficient in Portuguese but have advanced competence in another Romance language and believe they can follow the course should consult the instructor.