Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown

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Univ of California Press, Sep 20, 2013 - Social Science - 392 pages
Donna M. Goldstein presents a hard-hitting critique of urban poverty and violence and challenges much of what we think we know about the "culture of poverty" in this compelling read. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, who cope with unbearable suffering, violence and social abandonment. The book offers a clear-eyed view of socially conditioned misery while focusing on the creative responses—absurdist and black humor—that people generate amid daily conditions of humiliation, anger, and despair. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation among residents of the shantytown.

 

Contents

Hard Laughter
1
1 Laughter Out of Place
18
Class Culture and the Lives of Domestic Workers
58
3 ColorBlind Erotic Democracies Black Consciousness Politics And the Black Cinderellas of Felicidade Eterna
102
4 No Time for Childhood
136
5 State Terror Gangs and Everyday Violence in Rio de Janeiro
174
6 Partial Truths or the Carnivalization of Desire
226
7 Whats so Funny about Rape?
259
Notes
275
Glossary
313
References
321
Index
341
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About the author (2013)

Donna M. Goldstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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