Gray F. Kidd was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship for his project “Retreat from the Big House? Sociability, Race, & the Politics of ‘Culture’ in Recife, 1958-1987.”
His dissertation deals with the evolving dynamics of interclass and interracial interactions between Recife’s literate minority (letrados or bacharéis) and largely nonwhite plebeians (the povo). Unique in its focus on the creative works of Recife’s letrados, whose products cross written, visual, and aural forms, the project deploys an innovative “history in images” oral history methodology to investigate evolving conceptions of urban space, sociability, and the ‘popular.’ Beginning with a reassessment of the sociopolitical effervescence of the late 1950s, Kidd drives his analysis through the final decade of Brazil’s military regime, when ‘red Pernambuco’ once again emerged as a cultural innovator and central actor in the national struggle that restored democracy in 1985.
History
