Sarah McDonald

Embedding Cultural Literacy in Higher Education: a new approach*

Abstract Higher Education institutions face specific challenges preparing graduates to live and work in transdisciplinary and transcultural environments. It is imperative for these institutions to provide their students with the skill sets that will give them the mobility and flexibility to be able to operate efficiently in different cultural and professional contexts. This position paper proposes that developing proficiency in Cultural Literacy will allow graduates of Higher Education institutions to transcend such cultural and disciplinary boundaries. In this paper we define Cultural Literacy in Higher Education as a modus operandi and a threshold concept, following Meyer and Land’s understanding of the term. We also propose ‘Destabilisation’ and ‘Reflection’ as two strategies for teaching Cultural Literacy, and examine three case studies where these strategies were successfully embedded into teaching and learning spaces.

Performing masculinity: From City of God to City of Men

Abstract Since 1995 Brazils always volatile film industry has been going through a rebirth that has created a surge in popularity, both nationally and internationally, and an increase in the production of films that adhere to the technical norms of globalised film production. This current era in filmmaking is known as the Retomada and the release in 2002 of the Brazilian film City of God (Cidade de Deus) ( dirs. Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund) proved a definitive moment in this new phase in the nations film history.

Reading across cultures towards a comparative documentary film studies: Eduardo Coutinho's documentary Jogo de Cena (2007)

Abstract This article examines Eduardo Coutinhos Jogo de Cena (2007) in relation to documentary spectatorship across cultures. Coutinhos documentary contains numerous culturally specific and localised references amongst the stories told by a cast of women actors. These stories and the figures that relate them make available a number of layers of knowledge production constituting a filmic experience that is multivalent and complex. In considering these complexities and their spectatorship, this article utilises Paul Willemens notion of comparative film studies as a springboard to begin a closer consideration of what is possible with a combination of Brazilian cultural knowledge and documentary film theory.

Gendering the Favela : Brazilian National Identities on Screen

This chapter explores how national and individual identities are shaped through cinema. Examining a range of Brazilian films that take place in the space of the favela or poor urban communities, this chapter examines how these spaces have come to define aspects of the Brazilian popular imaginary. Specifically, these constructions are looked at in terms of their implications for gendering the identity of these spaces.

Gender, Race and Patriotism in the Works of Nísia Floresta, by Charlotte Hammond Matthews

and infrastructure while trying to attend to generalised social welfare. That avenue was closed by the CIA-funded 1954 coup and then by practically four decades of right-wing military governments. The orientation of national development projects, as Way’s book makes clear, ended up creating massive arenas of inequality without ever achieving the sought-after elimination of poverty. The author has a point when he reminds us that the socalled ‘informal economy’, often presented as a sort of malady and a transgressive activity, in fact makes life sustainable for many Guatemalans; when analysed in relation to the ‘formal economy’, it appears as a sort of lesser evil, given that the latter not only maintains the lives of many who engage in it out of sheer poverty, but often ends up consuming those lives or exploiting them to the limit. Unfortunately, the book does not advance any ideas about possible solutions for the dramatic structural problems that affect Guatemala, but it has commendable strengths as a critical analytic exercise.

Stephen M. Hart, A Companion to Latin American Film, Woodbridge, Tamesis, 2004, 227pp.

Abstract Stephen M. Harts A Companion to Latin American Film provides an excellent introduction to the last seventy years of cinematic production in Latin America. Hart, a distinguished hispanist, examines a total of twenty-five films, each of which has made a significant contribution to the development of cinema in the region.

Repudiation and redemption: An assessment of the feminine in Central do Brasil

Abstract The construction of female identity within Brazilian society has always been closely linked to a highly exoticised image that has its origins in the colonial experience. In Brazilian cinematic production this is an identity construct that has been replayed and reinforced over time. The sensual and very feminine portrayal of women is evident in the earliest stages of national production, in the Bela Época (1908–1911), through the chanchada of the 1940s and 1950s, and resurgent in the 1980s in productions such as Bruno Barretos Dona Flor e o Seus Dois Maridos (1976) (Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands). 1 This article will focus on the recent period of cinematic renaissance in Brazil by examining the construction of the feminine in Central do Brasil (1998, Walter Salles) and its symbolic links to national reconstruction.