Embodying Modernity

Since the late 20th-century, mainstream popular culture in Brazil has developed an intimate relationship with fitness culture face=Calibri>– a vast, fluid, and pervasive network of images and commodities, bodies of knowledge, and discourses pertaining to idealised corporality and personhood.Embodying Modernity works toward a conceptualisation of fitness culture, tracing its development and locating its broad existence in the contemporary Brazilian public sphere. Silva examines the role of fitness culture and the visualisation of 'fit bodies' within the history of western imperialism and its existing discourses of white supremacy, gender binarism, patriarchy, ableism, and heterosexism that continue to define Brazilian nationhood and power structures. Fitness culture in Brazil has developed within and through projects of national modernity and modernisation carried out by national elites looking to build a national population aligned with Eurocentric cultural practices and notions of normative bodies.

"Embodying Modernity is a highly innovative, provocative, and interdisciplinary study that shows how 'building' the body was central to the very construction of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and modernity in Brazil. With theoretical rigor and historical depth, Silva unveils how the bodies at the heart of Brazilian fitness culture are in fact rich historical, cultural, and political archives by which to read and understand Brazil's past and present." --Lamonte Aidoo, author of Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History , "In this groundbreaking study of visual imagery of fitness cultures, Silva demonstrates how the asymmetrical attribution of value to different bodies and body parts, as well as the distribution and reordering of fitness practices have become integral to hegemonic narratives of modernity and Brazilian exceptionalism. This is a major contribution not only to Brazilian studies, but also to the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race, and disability studies." --César Braga-Pinto, Northwestern University

Daniel F. Silva is associate professor of Luso-Hispanic Studies, director of Black Studies, and director of the Twilight Project at Middlebury College. He is the author of Anti-Empire: Decolonial Interventions in Lusophone Literatures and Subjectivity and theReproduction of Imperial Power: Empire's Individuals. He has edited and coedited multiple anthologies and is coeditor of the Anthem Press book series Anthem Studies in Race, Power, and Society.