The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil [Hardcover]

Who decides which stories about a city are remembered? How do interpretations of the past shape a citys present and future? In this book, Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos discusses 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, de Souza Santos applies fine-grained ethnography and historical analysis to discuss the limits of Brazils imagery of social harmony and participatory democracy amid continuous inequality.Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos is the Director of the Brazilian Studies Programme and Departmental Lecturer at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on urban ethnography, incorporating themes of cultural heritage, participatory city planning, and mining economies. Before arriving in Oxford, Andreza completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews; a Masters in Social Sciences at the University of Freiburg, University of KwaZulu Natal and Jawaharlal Nehru University; and her Bachelors Degree in Political Science at the University of Brasilia.

Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos work provides a strong sense of Ouro Pretos evolution as an urban core, as well as inside access to the challenges posed by a student population, exclusive events targeting outsiders, and the political landscape of decision-making during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Americas

In a pessimistic exploration of the clash between historic preservation and local community involvement, de Souza Santos (Univ. of Oxford, UK) presents the results of her ethnographic study of the UNESCO World Heritage site Ouro Preto in Brazil. As a Brazilian scholar from another heritage site (Bras?lia), the author is uniquely qualified to elucidate the difficulties presented when a comml“v