In 1927, Henry Ford, then the richest man in the world, bought a 5,000 square mile-tract of land in the Brazilian Amazon. There he was going to build a rubber plantation. But Ford wanted more than just rubber. To the unkempt rainforest he would bring order, efficiency and productivity - the principles of mass production. And across the United States, small-town America was giving way to consumerism and crass, brash new society. Ford wanted to create an America in his own image - Fordlandia, full of neat houses, straight roads and restrained Puritanism. But Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. By 1945 it was abandoned in ruins. Greg Grandin tells the powerful fable of the pride and arrogance of the man who thought he alone could tame the Amazon. It is the battle between industrialised capitalism and the raw power of nature; it is the struggle too within Ford himself, the man who despised the new America that he himself had set in motion, who spent twenty years and several fortunes on his Amazonian dream, yet never set foot inside it. Superbly researched and grippingly told, "Fordlandia" portrays a man suffering under the grand delusion that the forces of capitalism, once released, might then be contained.
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| Price : $25.08 | Post Date : Feb 09, 2012 02:21:03Arlene Dávila brilliantly considers the cultural politics of urban space in this lively exploration of Puerto Rican and Latino experience in New York, the global center of culture and consumption, where Latinos are now the biggest minority group. Analyzing the simultaneous gentrification and Latinization of what is known as El Barrio or Spanish Harlem, Barrio Dreams makes a compelling case that--despite neoliberalism's race-and ethnicity-free tenets--dreams of economic empowerment are never devoid of distinct racial and ethnic considerations.
Dávila scrutinizes dramatic shifts in housing, the growth of charter schools, and the enactment of Empowerment Zone legislation that promises upward mobility and empowerment while shutting out many longtime residents. Foregrounding privatization and consumption, she offers an innovative look at the marketing of Latino space. She emphasizes class among Latinos while touching on black-Latino and Mexican-Puerto Rican relations. Providing a unique multifaceted view of the place of Latinos in the changing urban landscape, Barrio Dreams is one of the most nuanced and original examinations of the complex social and economic forces shaping our cities today.
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