The emerging field of psychosocial studies signifies a confluence ofdisciplines for whom the fantasies, repressions and cultural practices underlying national identity represents a crucial research focus.This book presents a psychosocial portrayal of Brazil?s arrival on the international stage in the economic boom of the run-up to its hosting of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. This formerPortuguese colony is a country of contradictions in need of a newimage, a nation that needs to be able to both love and sell itself intoday?s neo-liberal reality. It argues that a contemporaryrepresentation of Brazilian subjectivity is best enabled through aninterdisciplinary perspective. Five key themes ? to be explored in all their contradictions and ambivalence ? structure the book: fantasiesof the nation, xenophobia and denial, Brazilian cultural practice,transnational mobility, and gender, race and Brazilian identity.

This book accounts for the process of emergence and constitution ofthe human rights movement and discourse during the last militarydictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). Central to this account is thecontention that the movement?s emergence and constitution should notbe understood as a necessary or as a natural response to theatrocities carried out by the last military regime, but instead as the result of a contingent process of political articulation and as aresponse which could have failed in its constitution and success.Thus, the appearance of the human rights movement and discourse in thecountry can only be understood in its full complexity if attention isgiven to this very process of popular mobilisation and politicalarticulation that took place during 1976-1982.

This book is a comparative study of the political emergence of Perónin Argentina and Vargas in Brazil. It seeks to describe and explainhow and why Peronism and Varguism were two different politicalprojects. Using the tools of political discourse theory, this bookscrutinizes the implications Perón and Vargas had for the formation of the political identities of the socio-political actors in bothcountries. The book shows to what extend the differential character of the process of formation of political identities had to do both withthe structural context in which Vargas and Perón developed theirstrategy as well as which the specific ways in which both leadersintervened in the political formation. In this sense, the researchstresses the specific discursive and institutional modes ofintervention that characterized these who leaders? projects and theirrole in the political imaginary they inaugurated. It does so bytracing the responses to Perón and Vargas by different socio-political actors and the polemic context in which those responses took place.