São Paulo

"Serves as a kind of cultural-historical road map to São Paulo (including alternative routes and detours), one that will be a necessary resource for any subsequent cultural studies of São Paulo and Latin American urbanization."—Justin Read, author ofModern Poetics and Hemispheric American Cultural Studies

"The essays brought together in this volume all focus on the city of São Paulo, in the triple dynamic of cultural production: the critical representation of society, the analytical interpretation of the internal dynamic, and the principled imagination of alternative ways of living."—Pedro Meira Monteiro, author ofA Moralist in the Tropics

David Foster brings an intense curiosity and lifelong familiarity to this unique examination of the cultural tapestry of São Paulo, the largest city in South America and the second largest in Latin America.

Examining everything from the poetics of Mário de Andrade to the Eisner Award–winning graphic novels of Fabio Moon and Gabriel Bá, Foster paints a portrait as colorful and multifaceted as the city it reveals. He offers representative examples of poetry, fiction, graphic art, photography, film, and social commentary to introduce readers to some of the most important cultural dimensions of the city as well as some of its most outstanding writers and artists.

Foster selects his featured artists and works with care and precision in order to reveal insights into the development of the city throughout the twentieth century. This is a tour-de-force overview of the cultural output of one of the world’s great urban centers, one that future researchers on Brazilian culture will ignore at their peril.

David William Foster, Regents’ Professor of Spanish, Humanities, and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, is author of Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production, Urban Photography in Argentina: Nine Artists of the Post-Dictatorship Era, and Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema.