About his Academy project
Combining oral histories with written sources, Green’s Academy project traces the emergence and impact of student-led mobilization efforts in the years preceding the fall of the Brazilian dictatorship. Centered in São Paolo between 1976 and 1978, these efforts went beyond the prior generation’s opposition to the dictatorship and served as an incubator for budding social movements focused on issues of personal identity and their relationship to politics and social change. By bringing formerly secondary considerations to the forefront of political struggle, these student mobilizations further energized the labor strikes of 1979-80, which, in turn, challenged the dictatorshop economically and enabled the rise of new political leadership, including future President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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PROJECT FROM FALL 2020: The Crossroads of Sin and the Collision of Cultures: Entertainment, Commerce, and Pleasure in Rio de Janeiro (1860-1930)
In his Academy project, Green examines the multiple layers of interactions and sociability that
took place in the Tiradentes Square in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s largest city in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. This public space—a district of bars, brothels, vaudeville
reviews, highbrow theatres (and later movie houses) — shaped popular and elite cultures, as well as
influenced forms of entertainment, business, and leisure activities. Above all, it was an area where social classes, races, genders, and occupational groups intermingled to create a unique and lively environment. Green traces the transformations that reconfigured broader Brazilian society and urban life at a time of transition from slavery to freedom, mass immigration from abroad, migration from the hinterland, and a revolution in gender norms. Originally an elite venue, this
district became a space visited by all social classes and racial groups: newcomers experienced life in a big city; the desperate became thieves or prostitutes; working and middle-class women accessed a vibrant public sphere. In this way, Tiradentes Square in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century experienced “overlapping uses by members of bourgeois society, working-class men and women, Bohemians, slaves and free people of color, rogue figures, and prostitutes, which led to
tensions in the social fabric,” Green writes. By studying these intersecting worlds, he reconsiders Brazilian notions of urban social boundaries and their permeability in times of dramatic transformations.
——-
PROJECT FROM FALL 2020: The Crossroads of Sin and the Collision of Cultures: Entertainment, Commerce, and Pleasure in Rio de Janeiro (1860-1930)
In his Academy project, Green examines the multiple layers of interactions and sociability that
took place in the Tiradentes Square in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s largest city in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. This public space—a district of bars, brothels, vaudeville
reviews, highbrow theatres (and later movie houses) — shaped popular and elite cultures, as well as
influenced forms of entertainment, business, and leisure activities. Above all, it was an area where social classes, races, genders, and occupational groups intermingled to create a unique and lively environment. Green traces the transformations that reconfigured broader Brazilian society and urban life at a time of transition from slavery to freedom, mass immigration from abroad,
migration from the hinterland, and a revolution in gender norms. Originally an elite venue, this
district became a space visited by all social classes and racial groups: newcomers experienced life in a big city; the desperate became thieves or prostitutes; working and middle-class women accessed
a vibrant public sphere. In this way, Tiradentes Square in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century experienced “overlapping uses by members of bourgeois society, working-class men and
women, Bohemians, slaves and free people of color, rogue figures, and prostitutes, which led to
tensions in the social fabric,” Green writes. By studying these intersecting worlds, he reconsiders
Brazilian notions of urban social boundaries and their permeability in times of dramatic
transformations.
About
James N. Green is Professor of Brazilian History and Culture at Brown University, where he currently directs the Opening the Archives Project. He received his BA from Earlham College and PhD in Latin American history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Green has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and spent over a decade in Brazil, where he worked as an advisor for the Brazilian National Truth Commission to investigate the state’s human rights violations during the military dictatorship (1964-85). His books include Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary (Duke, 2018), We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United States (Duke, 2010), and Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chicago, 1999), as well as several co-edited volumes.
He is the former director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Brazil Initiative at Brown University and the New England Council on Latin American Studies. He is the current National Co-Coordinator of the US Network for Democracy in Brazil, and the president of the board of directors of the Washington Brazil Office. Green’s work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment of the Humanities, among others.Combining oral histories with written sources, Green’s Academy project traces the emergence and impact of student-led mobilization efforts in the years preceding the fall of the Brazilian dictatorship. Centered in São Paolo between 1976 and 1978, these efforts went beyond the prior generation’s opposition to the dictatorship and served as an incubator for budding social movements focused on issues of personal identity and their relationship to politics and social change. By bringing formerly secondary considerations to the forefront of political struggle, these student mobilizations further energized the labor strikes of 1979-80, which, in turn, challenged the dictatorshop economically and enabled the rise of new political leadership, including future President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
