Course Description:
Brazil has long loomed large on the globe for its size and for its cultural production. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest country in landmass and in population (at 211 million), and has the eighth largest economy. The nation’s size brings variety in its ways of life, spoken accents, and cultural production. Brazil seems an inexhaustible fount of cultural traditions. Music serves as a solid example. Boasting a strong recording industry and an endless number of live performances, the nation has provided a soundtrack for the world with its Bossa Nova, Samba, Bloco-Afro, and Tropicalia/MPB music, while providing its own citizens an even broader selection featuring genres such as forró, funk, samba-reggae, sertaneja, and many others. Today, Brazil is on the international radar for another reason: the nation’s current political crisis. With one president impeached last year and another now under investigation (alongside similar indictments and investigations into many of the nation’s congressional representatives), the international audience awaits the outcome of the lengthy investigations. How will Brazil change in the coming decade, and what brought the nation into this situation?
LAH 4600 “Nation Under Construction” is an upper-level history course designed to provide an engaging survey of Brazilian history, one that is as relevant and valuable for history majors as it is for students interested in Brazilian culture, language, music, and urban development. The course will cover colonial foundations all the way through today’s current political crises. Special attention will be paid to the people that have worked to build Brazil as a nation. Some of these were elite writers, politicians, and architects. But many more were everyday citizens who, not content with Brazil as it was, endeavored to change their communities, regions, and state. “Nation Under Construction” will provide students a strong understanding of Brazilian history in its political, social, and cultural forms, and then additionally provide history majors the chance to develop competency with such historical concepts as agency, nation-building, and state-formation.
Course Objectives:
This is an upper-level history topics course. As such, the course demands that you read, write, and discuss historic events and processes with careful language and a preference for complexity over facile generalizations.. We will call this a “scholarly discourse” and it should be considered the required register for all discussions, whether in-class, during office hours, or via email. Of course, I will be generous and gracious in training those students who do not navigate such discourse with ease (thus making “scholarly discourse” the preliminary learning objective for the course). With this established, there are three remaining objectives in the class.
This course was a very impactful course, for me it was one of the courses that I had to do work for to serve my secondary culture course, I learned a lot about Brazil in the post colonial era, and the way that they are seen today just through Brazilian music, literature and speakers this course was one of the courses that I took mid hurricane Irma and that was a huge impact in the way that I would see things as a student too. I really learned to much in this course about other cultures, and to be a " scholar". like Dr. Oelze would say.
Brazil has long loomed large on the globe for its size and for its cultural production. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest country in landmass and in population (at 211 million), and has the eighth largest economy. The nation’s size brings variety in its ways of life, spoken accents, and cultural production. Brazil seems an inexhaustible fount of cultural traditions. Music serves as a solid example. Boasting a strong recording industry and an endless number of live performances, the nation has provided a soundtrack for the world with its Bossa Nova, Samba, Bloco-Afro, and Tropicalia/MPB music, while providing its own citizens an even broader selection featuring genres such as forró, funk, samba-reggae, sertaneja, and many others. Today, Brazil is on the international radar for another reason: the nation’s current political crisis. With one president impeached last year and another now under investigation (alongside similar indictments and investigations into many of the nation’s congressional representatives), the international audience awaits the outcome of the lengthy investigations. How will Brazil change in the coming decade, and what brought the nation into this situation?
LAH 4600 “Nation Under Construction” is an upper-level history course designed to provide an engaging survey of Brazilian history, one that is as relevant and valuable for history majors as it is for students interested in Brazilian culture, language, music, and urban development. The course will cover colonial foundations all the way through today’s current political crises. Special attention will be paid to the people that have worked to build Brazil as a nation. Some of these were elite writers, politicians, and architects. But many more were everyday citizens who, not content with Brazil as it was, endeavored to change their communities, regions, and state. “Nation Under Construction” will provide students a strong understanding of Brazilian history in its political, social, and cultural forms, and then additionally provide history majors the chance to develop competency with such historical concepts as agency, nation-building, and state-formation.
Course Objectives:
This is an upper-level history topics course. As such, the course demands that you read, write, and discuss historic events and processes with careful language and a preference for complexity over facile generalizations.. We will call this a “scholarly discourse” and it should be considered the required register for all discussions, whether in-class, during office hours, or via email. Of course, I will be generous and gracious in training those students who do not navigate such discourse with ease (thus making “scholarly discourse” the preliminary learning objective for the course). With this established, there are three remaining objectives in the class.
- First are heightened reading skills. Students will read primary sources, social science scholarship, and cultural production, and learn to understand these statements in relation to how they attest to individual agency, contribute to the construction of collective identities, and forge a national identity.
- Second, students will become comfortable engaging foundational debates in Brazilian culture, history, and politics and in the literature of social history as it pertains to Brazil.
- Third, and most pointedly, students will come to understand concepts including agency, governance, identity, and ritual. As we will spend ample time discussing in class, students are expected to first be able to define these concepts, second anchor them in historic and contemporary examples, and third scale these discussions on the level of the individual, the city, and the nation.
This course was a very impactful course, for me it was one of the courses that I had to do work for to serve my secondary culture course, I learned a lot about Brazil in the post colonial era, and the way that they are seen today just through Brazilian music, literature and speakers this course was one of the courses that I took mid hurricane Irma and that was a huge impact in the way that I would see things as a student too. I really learned to much in this course about other cultures, and to be a " scholar". like Dr. Oelze would say.
lah_4600_syllabus.docx | |
File Size: | 160 kb |
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final_exam_lah_4600.docx | |
File Size: | 9 kb |
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reading_response_1_lah4600_brazil_.docx | |
File Size: | 17 kb |
File Type: | docx |