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Daryle Williams Publishes Rio De Janeiro Reader

August 05, 2016 History

Daryle Williams Publishes Rio De Janeiro Reader

Duke University Press has published a reader on Rio de Janeiro, edited chiefly by Professor Daryle Williams.

Professor Daryle Williams has edited and published a Rio de Janeiro Reader with Duke University Press in order to commemorate the beginning of the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  Williams edited the volume with Professors Amy Chazkel (CUNY) and Paulo Knauss (Universidade Federal Fluminense, director of the Museu Histórico Nacional). The description below is taken from the announcement of the volume's publication, which can be found here.

About the Reader:

Spanning a period of over 450 years, The Rio de Janeiro Reader traces the history, culture, and politics of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, through the voices, images, and experiences of those who have made the city's history. It outlines Rio's transformation from a hardscrabble colonial outpost and strategic port into an economic, cultural, and entertainment capital of the modern world. The volume contains a wealth of primary sources, many of which appear here in English for the first time. A mix of government documents, lyrics, journalism, speeches, ephemera, poems, maps, engravings, photographs, and other sources capture everything from the fantastical impressions of the first European arrivals to the complaints about roving capoeira gangs, and from sobering eyewitness accounts of slavery's brutality to the glitz of Copacabana. The definitive English-language resource on the city, The Rio de Janeiro Reader presents the "Marvellous City" in all its complexity, importance, and intrigue.

The Rio Reader follows in the successful Duke University Press series of country and world readers. In crafting the volume, the three coeditors (all historians with strong backgrounds in Rio's principal archives and museums) drew upon some well-tested editorial and marketing expertise. There were, however, a number of adaptations made for the first Duke reader to focus on a city. Chiefly, the framing had to take account of an urban setting that can be experienced in the "real" world of global travel, geolocational apps, and a near-inexhaustible archive of online text and images. In comparison to the continental ambitions of the original Brazil Reader (1999), the Rio Reader speaks to the modern global traveller's expectations for broad expertise and local insight. Whether in situ or not, the reading audience is invited to read the selected documents alongside paratextual maps, images, recorded sounds, and social media postings. One selection's reference to a specific street or plaza, natural feature, or figure invites an open-ended, user-driven journey to similar references within the volume and outside. Falling somewhere between a work of academic urban studies and a travel guide, the Rio Reader invites its readers to construct itineraries of spaces, temporalities, and sociabilities. Section essays and introductory remarks that preface each document map possible itineraries that traverse variegated, confounding landscapes of people, places, things, and practices that make Rio the object of fascination for historians, policy makers, and dreamers.