NEW BOOK: The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil”, Andreza De Souza Santos
De Souza Santos, A. A. (October 2019) “The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil”, London: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past frame a city’s present and future? In this book, I discuss notions of power and national identity by examining how nation-states negotiate the preservation of urban spaces and how a city interprets, resists, and consents to the functions and meanings that it has inherited and that it reinvents for itself. Looking at the Brazilian city of Ouro Preto, hailed as a National Monument (1930) and as one of the first generations of UNESCO World Heritage Sites (1980), I apply fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazil’s imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.
Dr Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, is the Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme, University of Oxford. Andreza’s research and teaching interests include ethnography, participatory politics, and social memory, particularly looking at how historical events re represented in urban spaces. She is the author of the book: “The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil”.
Before teaching at Oxford, Andreza completed her PhD in Anthropology at the University of St Andrews, a Masters in Global Studies at the University of Freiburg (Germany), UKZN Durban (South Africa) and JNU Delhi (India), and her BA at the University of Brasilia (Brazil). She has worked as a political adviser at the UN in Vienna, the Indian Embassy in Brazil, at the Ministry of Social Development in Brazil and the Brazilian Association of Municipalities.