People going to Brazil frequently ask us what they should read and what movies they should watch to prepare for their trip. We have compiled a reading/viewing list related to Bahia, which can prepare you for a trip or just help you understand the culture and conditions
If you have read a great book or seen a great movie and would like us to consider adding it to the list, please email us the information!
You can also download this file in PDF, if you’d like to print or share it.
Movies
Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Director Marcel Camus, 1959.
A retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, set during the time of the Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro.
Central Station, Director Walter Salles, 1998.
He was looking for the father he never knew. She was looking for a second chance. An emotive journey of a former school teacher, who write letters for illiterate people, and a young boy, whose mother has just died, in search for the father he never knew.
City of God (Cidade de Deus), Director Fernando Meirelles, 2002.
Two boys growing up in a violent neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro take different paths: one becomes a photographer, the other a drug dealer.
Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite), Director José Padilha, 2007.
The movie is a semi-fictional account of the BOPE (Portuguese: Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), the Special Policial Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police.
Favela Rising, Director Jeff Zimbalist, Matt Mochary, 2005.
A man emerges from the slums of Rio to lead the nonviolent cultural movement known as Afro-reggae.
Madame Satã, Director. Karim Ainouz, 2002.
Based on a true story, Madam Satã was the infamous drag performer and capoeirista from Pernambuco. He was known as an outlaw, a homosexual, a hustler, and an artist who represented an expression against the stereotypes of black, poor, and other outcasts during the post-abolitionist era in Brazil.
O Pai O, Director Monique Gardenberg, 2007.
A comedic and refreshing film, shot right in Salvador, follows various inhabitants around Pelourinho on the last day of Carnaval.
Waste Land (Lixo Extraordinário), Director Lucy Walker, 2010.
A documentary on the transformative power of art and the beauty of the human spirit. Top-selling contemporary artist Vik Muniz takes us on an emotional journey from Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to the heights of international art stardom.
Books – Fiction
Tieta. Jorge Amado, 2003. Tieta is the story of a rich and powerful widow of from São Paolo who returns to Agreste after 26 years. She needs to call upon her past to save the town’s beaches from developments.
War of the Saints. Jorge Amado, 1995. Jorge Amado beautifully captures the mysticism and liveliness of Salvador in this book where a religious statue comes to life (and at one point runs near Bahia Street’s present day location!)
Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story. K. David Jacksen, 2006. A compilation of stories, which spans four major historical periods in Brazil, they all embody the struggles and ideals of Brazilians during those time periods.
Gender; Discourse, and Desire in Twentieth-Century Brazilian Women’s Literature. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto, 2004. This study explores the poetic and narrative strategies twentieth-century women use to achieve new forms of representation of the female body sexuality and desire.
Xuxa, The Mega-Marketing of Gender, Race and Modernity. Amelia Simpson, 1993. The author explores how the blond sex symbol emerged in the 1980’s to become a cultural icon of extraordinary authority throughout the Americas.
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, 1998. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written as an autobiography, a chronicle of the erotic misadventures of its narrator, Brás Cubas–who happens to be dead. In pursuit of love and progeny, Cubas rejects the women who want him and aspires to the ones who reject him. In the end, he dies unloved and without heirs, yet he somehow manages to turn this bitter pill into a victory of sorts.
Family Ties, Clarice Lispector, 1984. Here are collected thirteen of the Brazilian writer’s most brilliantly conceived stories, where mysterious and unexpected moments of crisis propel characters to self-discovery or keenly felt intuitions about the human condition.
Mario de Andrade: Poetry, Novel, Musicology, Art History, Literature of Brazil. 2009. Andrade was the central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism, and became Brazil’s national polymath.
Industrial Park, Latin American Woman Writers, Patricia Galvao, 1993. This powerful volume by Galvao vividly portrays the turbulent life of workers in Brazil in the 1930s.
First World, Third Class, and other tales of the Global Mix. Regina Rheda, 2005. The stories, like the Brazilian apartment complexes in which they are set, are a microcosm of modern-day urban Brazil. They are witty, consistently caustic, and never predictable.
The Celebration, Ivan Angelo, 1992. Ivan Ângelo’s remarkable novel connects and implicates the lives of a complex of characters, spanning three decades of tumultuous social and political history in twentieth-century Brazil.
The Vampire of Curitiba and other Stories, Dalton Trevisan. 1972.
Conceicao Evaristo. Poncia Vicencio, Paloma Martinez Cruz, 2007. This novel describes the protagonist’s paths, dreams, and losses, from childhood to adulthood. Poncia’s memory takes us, readers, to her universe, revealing to us and to herself emotions related to her present and past, and her family.
The Brothers, Milton Hatoum, 2002. Set in a Lebanese immigrant community in the Brazilian port town of Manaus, this is the story of identical twins, Yaqub and Omar, whose lives take radically different paths: one toward professional success in Brazil’s metropolis Sao Paulo, the other to drunken dissipation in the lowly port of his birth.
The Five Seasons of Love, Joao Almino. 2008. Set amidst the chaos of contemporary Brasilia, a place where even the most basic human affairs – love, friendship, sex, and work – can take unlikely shapes, Ana’s story is both relentlessly modern and profoundly timeless
An Anthology of Twenthieth-Century Brazilian Poetry. Elizabeth Bishop & Emanuel Brasil. 1972
The Centaur in the Garden¸ Moacyr Scliar, 2003. A masterpiece of magical realism by one of Brazil’s most celebrated novelists.
Non-Fiction
Travesti, Sex Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes, Don Kulick, 1998. In this dramatic and compelling narrative, anthropologist Don Kulick follows the lives of a group of transgendered prostitutes (called travestis in Portuguese) in the Brazilian city Salvador.
Waiting for Rain. Nicholas Arons, 2004. Droughts that hit northeastern Brazil made many Brazilians go in search of work in the cities. Arons use of his experience in addition to that of Brazilian poets and authors illustrates human endurance, in the face of corruption and “drought politics.”
Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Michael Hanchard, 1999. Combining U.S. and Brazilian scholars, the book discusses the racial complexities in Brazil in comparison to the U.S.
Behaving Brazilian. Phyllis A. Harrison-Brose, 1991. Harrison studies Brazilian nonverbal communication (i.e. gestures, body and eye contact, posture, dress etc.) in contrast to that of the U.S.
Shock Doctrine. Naomi Klein, 2007. Canadian journalist, Naomi Klein, argues that free market policies are not democratically popular but were passed because citizens were occupied with other upheavals and disasters.
City of Women. Ruth Landes, 1994. A study of Candomblé, City of Women, examines the role of women in Candomblé and what that means within Brazilian society.
Negotiating National Identity. Jeffrey Lesser, 1999. Through the histories of various immigrant populations, Lesser discusses the Brazilian national identity outside of the typical black-white continuum.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins, 2005. Perkins draws from his experience as an economic planner for an international consulting firm to state that wealthy corporations exploit developing nations.
Race in another America, The significance of skin color in Brazil, Edward E. Telles 2004. In this sociological and demographic study, Edward Telles seeks to understand the reality of race in Brazil and how well it squares with the traditional and revisionist views of race relations.
Dreaming Equality, Color, Race and Racism in Urban Brazil, Robin E. Sheriff, 2001. The myth of racial democracy contrasts starkly with the realities of a pernicious racial inequality that permeates Brazilian culture and social structure. The author lived in a primarily black shantytown in Rio de Janerio, where she explored the inhabitants’ views of race and racism firsthand.
Looking for God in Brazil, The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil’s Religious Area. John Burdick, 1993. An introduction to the shifting religious area in Latin American in the 1990’s, a sensitive study of how the several forms of religion in Brazil deal with issues of gender, race and politics in a particular urban community.
An Afro-Brazilian Woman’s Story of Politics and Love, Benedita da Silva, 1997. An excellent introduction to Brazil, and to one of the most exciting new political leaders to emerge from that country.
Brazilian Women Speak, Contemporary Life Stores. Daphne Patai, 1993. A vivid and authoritative picture of contemporary life in Brazil, a work of both passionate humanity and exquisite scholarship.
Death is a Festival, Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, 1991. Joao Jose Reis. This book will appeal to students of Brazil but also to anyone interested in the profound changes in human sensitivity and rituals of death that took place from the colonial to the modern period.
A Discontented Diaspora, Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980. Jeffery Lesser, 2007. Two books in one: a lively and engaging examination of Brazil’s ‘model minority’, and a probing analysis of the ambiguities and complexities of Brazilian ‘racial democracy’.
Violence in the City of Women, Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil, Sarah J. Hautzinger, 2007. Accessibly written study that explores the reality of all-female police stations in Brazil as a window onto the shifting relationship between violence and gendered power struggles.
Hidden Heads of Households, Child Labor in Urban Northeast Brazil. Mary Lorena Kenny, 2007. An ethnographic analysis of labor across the generation in a globalizing urban population: Kenny treats the often taboo subject of child labor with clear-eyed perception.
Laughter out of Place, Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, Donne M. Goldstein, 2003. Drawing on more than a decade of experience, the author challenges much of what we think we know about the idea of a ‘culture of poverty’.
Another Arabesque, Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil. John Tofik Karam, 2007. This book explores both the ways the nation-state exports its ethnicities within neoliberal markets, and the ways Arab-Brazilians regard their own Brazilian-ness and Arab-ness in light of the official ideology racial hybridity.
