Benjamin Arthur Cowan
Biographic Data
| ID | 139041 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Arthur Cowan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin Arthur |
| FAMILY NAME | Cowan |
| SIGNATURE | COWAN B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California San Diego |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7024-1828 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 33 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Nosso Alpinisimo”: Mountaineering, Topographical Nationalism, and the Material Meanings of Brazil
Interwar Brazil saw an explosion of excursionismo (excursionism), with dozens of clubs linked to but distinct from a broader culture of elite athletics. Excursionists aimed to reorganize space, constructing wilderness and making it intelligible to urbanites. This entailed what I call topographical nationalism, which sought to “conquer” Brazil's peaks and valleys; to extol its national landscape to disparate and competing publics, foreign and dome…
I Want My Country Back…and Also My Crown: Monarchists as a Yardstick for the Contemporary Right in Brazil
The terrorist attack on Brazil’s capitol on January 8, 2023, showcased the country’s empowered, embittered extreme right, whose hallmarks will be familiar to students of conservatism further afield: anachronistic anticommunism; hostility to liberal democracy; a sense of embattlement, despite controlling key institutions and platforms; a tapestry of disinformation and conspiracy theory; vaguely Christian cultural sensibilities and militantly Chris…
Fascism in Brazil: From Integralism to Bolsonarism
A small April 2011 demonstration convened a motley collection of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and supporters of Integralism, Brazil's 90-year-old fascist tradition. Brazil in 2011 seemed destined for an increasingly inclusive, stable, prosperous liberal democracy, where such extreme Right groups could only carp from the sidelines that such inclusivity constituted an attack on conservative “freedoms” to exclude. There was, one neofascist demonstrator ann…
Le monde a-t-il un genre
International audience
How Machismo Got Its Spurs—in English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hypermasculinity
This article seeks to shift the framework of decades-long debates on the nature and significance of machismo , debunking the commonly held notion that the word describes a primordial Iberian and Ibero-American phenomenon. I trace the emergence of machismo as an English-language term, arguing that a tradition of unself-consciously ethnocentric scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s enabled the word’s entrance, by the 1960s, into popular sources. In fa…
Lula and His Politics of Cunning
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the focus of a roundtable review on John D. French's Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil. The reviewers offer a reading of Lula and his legacies from perspectives that range from LGBTQ+ studies to racial politics, including an analysis centered on the story of a humble man that rose from below, "a most exceptional common man," from his humble beginnings up to his election as presi…
Marcos Napolitano, Coração Civil. A Vida Cultural Brasileira Sob O Regime Militar (1964-1985). São Paulo: Intermeios, 2017
Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary
James Green has produced a pathbreaking portrait that combines compelling biography with critical historiographical contributions. Herbert Daniel, an important figure in Brazil's left-wing politics and revolutionary movements, transformed his early struggle with homosexual desire into a career as a champion for gender, sexual, environmental, and social justice. Green's vivid portrait is in itself a feat, given the multiple layers of clandestinity…
The “Beauty of Inequality” and the Mythos of the Medieval: Brazil and the Forging of Global Catholic Traditionalism
This paper recovers the untold story of the Brazilians whose reactions to perceived modernization and secularization helped create today’s transnational Christian Right. Catholic traditionalism at and after Vatican II has gained intermittent notoriety in the years since the Council—yet this notoriety has almost always focused around North Atlantic reactionaries. I show that prominent members of Brazil’s ecclesial and lay hierarchies worked at the…
A hemispheric moral majority: Brazil and the transnational construction of the New Right
This essay posits Brazil as one critical locus for gestating the New Right. Often conceived of as a conservative reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the New Right actually developed transnationally, with determinative participation from Brazilian activists. In this article, I focus on a revelatory subset of those activists, who demonstrate collaboration that (1) linked elite reactionaries in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere; (2) f…
Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil
This book argues that Cold War struggles against “subversion” must be understood in cultural terms, as a reaction to the consequences—both real and perceived—of modernization. Inscribing Brazil’s Cold War military rulers and their supporters into a decades-long trajectory of right-wing activism and ideology, and locating them in a transnational network of right-wing cultural warriors, the book demonstrates that anti-modern moral panic animated po…
Holy Ghosts of Brazil’s Past: The reactionary “Bullets, Beef, and Bibles” caucus in Brazil’s national legislature reveals what is new, and not-so-new, about Brazil’s new Right
In recent months Brazil’s national politics have reached an unprecedented crisis, shaking the country’s thirty-year-old democratic order to its very foundations. Controversy and outrage surround th
The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the making of race and nation in Brazil
Gregory Mitchell, Tourist attractions: Performing race and masculinity in Brazil's sexual economy
Sexing Empire
A common, obvious sexual metaphor for empire equates it with rape; yet empire, to some, has felt at once like rape and like seduction.Let us consult, for example, the New York Herald of October 8, 1847.At this late hour in the United States' war with Mexico, the Herald forecast that "like the Sabine virgins, she [Mexico] will soon learn to love her ravisher."As Amy Greenberg shows us, this was a vision of lusty imperial adventure, pregnant with t…
Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the challenge of African decolonization, 1950-1980
In March 1964, a military coup inaugurated two decades of anticommunist dictatorship in Brazil. Six months after the coup, amid ongoing repression in Rio de Janeiro and other cities, Senegal's soci
"Nosso Terreno" crise moral, política evangélica e a formação da 'Nova Direita' brasileira
A direita política evangélica no Brasil tornou-se presuntiva, mas foram prefiguradas durante os processos simultâneos de redemocratização nacional e de politização evangélica na década de 1970 . Nesta encruzilhada, os líderes de várias denominações religiosas adotaram a linguagem de uma crise moral aguda, lançando as bases para uma direita evangélica. A própria crise moral tornou-se "nosso terreno", o ponto de inserção dos evangélicos de direita …
Rules of Disengagement: Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil
Amid pronounced anxieties that "new" forms of warcraft (technological, psychological, guerrilla, nuclear) would obviate manly soldiery in the post-World War II period, Brazilian, French, and US military theorists shared a discursive space in which they worked out these fears via the invention of counterinsurgency doctrine. In so doing, they both demonized guerrilla warfare as an unprecedented innovation of nefarious communists and imagined an ide…
"Why Hasn't This Teacher Been Shot?" Moral-Sexual Panic, the Repressive Right, and Brazil's National Security State
This article takes up the story of right-wing mobilization before and during Brazil's military government of 1964-1985. Understanding the regime's violent countersubversion requires analysis of the ideology that framed it. This ideology flourished among a long-neglected group of far-right intellectuals and organizations that had considerable influence in successive military administrations and worked to define subversion-the military state's ever…
Sheila S. Walker, African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas
"Nosso Terreno" crise moral, política evangélica e a formação da 'Nova Direita' brasileira
A direita política evangélica no Brasil tornou-se presuntiva, mas foram prefiguradas durante os processos simultâneos de redemocratização nacional e de politização evangélica na década de 1970 . Nesta encruzilhada, os líderes de várias denominações religiosas adotaram a linguagem de uma crise moral aguda, lançando as bases para uma direita evangélica. A própria crise moral tornou-se "nosso terreno", o ponto de inserção dos evangélicos de direita …
"Why Hasn't This Teacher Been Shot?" Moral-Sexual Panic, the Repressive Right, and Brazil's National Security State
This article takes up the story of right-wing mobilization before and during Brazil's military government of 1964-1985. Understanding the regime's violent countersubversion requires analysis of the ideology that framed it. This ideology flourished among a long-neglected group of far-right intellectuals and organizations that had considerable influence in successive military administrations and worked to define subversion-the military state's ever…
A hemispheric moral majority: Brazil and the transnational construction of the New Right
This essay posits Brazil as one critical locus for gestating the New Right. Often conceived of as a conservative reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the New Right actually developed transnationally, with determinative participation from Brazilian activists. In this article, I focus on a revelatory subset of those activists, who demonstrate collaboration that (1) linked elite reactionaries in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere; (2) f…
Rules of Disengagement: Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil
Amid pronounced anxieties that "new" forms of warcraft (technological, psychological, guerrilla, nuclear) would obviate manly soldiery in the post-World War II period, Brazilian, French, and US military theorists shared a discursive space in which they worked out these fears via the invention of counterinsurgency doctrine. In so doing, they both demonized guerrilla warfare as an unprecedented innovation of nefarious communists and imagined an ide…
Sheila S. Walker, African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas
"Why Hasn't This Teacher Been Shot?" Moral-Sexual Panic, the Repressive Right, and Brazil's National Security State
This article takes up the story of right-wing mobilization before and during Brazil's military government of 1964-1985. Understanding the regime's violent countersubversion requires analysis of the ideology that framed it. This ideology flourished among a long-neglected group of far-right intellectuals and organizations that had considerable influence in successive military administrations and worked to define subversion-the military state's ever…
"Nosso Terreno" crise moral, política evangélica e a formação da 'Nova Direita' brasileira
A direita política evangélica no Brasil tornou-se presuntiva, mas foram prefiguradas durante os processos simultâneos de redemocratização nacional e de politização evangélica na década de 1970 . Nesta encruzilhada, os líderes de várias denominações religiosas adotaram a linguagem de uma crise moral aguda, lançando as bases para uma direita evangélica. A própria crise moral tornou-se "nosso terreno", o ponto de inserção dos evangélicos de direita …
Rules of Disengagement: Masculinity, Violence, and the Cold War Remakings of Counterinsurgency in Brazil
Amid pronounced anxieties that "new" forms of warcraft (technological, psychological, guerrilla, nuclear) would obviate manly soldiery in the post-World War II period, Brazilian, French, and US military theorists shared a discursive space in which they worked out these fears via the invention of counterinsurgency doctrine. In so doing, they both demonized guerrilla warfare as an unprecedented innovation of nefarious communists and imagined an ide…
Sexing Empire
A common, obvious sexual metaphor for empire equates it with rape; yet empire, to some, has felt at once like rape and like seduction.Let us consult, for example, the New York Herald of October 8, 1847.At this late hour in the United States' war with Mexico, the Herald forecast that "like the Sabine virgins, she [Mexico] will soon learn to love her ravisher."As Amy Greenberg shows us, this was a vision of lusty imperial adventure, pregnant with t…
Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the challenge of African decolonization, 1950-1980
In March 1964, a military coup inaugurated two decades of anticommunist dictatorship in Brazil. Six months after the coup, amid ongoing repression in Rio de Janeiro and other cities, Senegal's soci
Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil
This book argues that Cold War struggles against “subversion” must be understood in cultural terms, as a reaction to the consequences—both real and perceived—of modernization. Inscribing Brazil’s Cold War military rulers and their supporters into a decades-long trajectory of right-wing activism and ideology, and locating them in a transnational network of right-wing cultural warriors, the book demonstrates that anti-modern moral panic animated po…
Holy Ghosts of Brazil’s Past: The reactionary “Bullets, Beef, and Bibles” caucus in Brazil’s national legislature reveals what is new, and not-so-new, about Brazil’s new Right
In recent months Brazil’s national politics have reached an unprecedented crisis, shaking the country’s thirty-year-old democratic order to its very foundations. Controversy and outrage surround th
The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the making of race and nation in Brazil
Gregory Mitchell, Tourist attractions: Performing race and masculinity in Brazil's sexual economy
A hemispheric moral majority: Brazil and the transnational construction of the New Right
This essay posits Brazil as one critical locus for gestating the New Right. Often conceived of as a conservative reaction to the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the New Right actually developed transnationally, with determinative participation from Brazilian activists. In this article, I focus on a revelatory subset of those activists, who demonstrate collaboration that (1) linked elite reactionaries in Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere; (2) f…
The “Beauty of Inequality” and the Mythos of the Medieval: Brazil and the Forging of Global Catholic Traditionalism
This paper recovers the untold story of the Brazilians whose reactions to perceived modernization and secularization helped create today’s transnational Christian Right. Catholic traditionalism at and after Vatican II has gained intermittent notoriety in the years since the Council—yet this notoriety has almost always focused around North Atlantic reactionaries. I show that prominent members of Brazil’s ecclesial and lay hierarchies worked at the…
Marcos Napolitano, Coração Civil. A Vida Cultural Brasileira Sob O Regime Militar (1964-1985). São Paulo: Intermeios, 2017
Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary
James Green has produced a pathbreaking portrait that combines compelling biography with critical historiographical contributions. Herbert Daniel, an important figure in Brazil's left-wing politics and revolutionary movements, transformed his early struggle with homosexual desire into a career as a champion for gender, sexual, environmental, and social justice. Green's vivid portrait is in itself a feat, given the multiple layers of clandestinity…
Le monde a-t-il un genre
International audience
How Machismo Got Its Spurs—in English: Social Science, Cold War Imperialism, and the Ethnicization of Hypermasculinity
This article seeks to shift the framework of decades-long debates on the nature and significance of machismo , debunking the commonly held notion that the word describes a primordial Iberian and Ibero-American phenomenon. I trace the emergence of machismo as an English-language term, arguing that a tradition of unself-consciously ethnocentric scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s enabled the word’s entrance, by the 1960s, into popular sources. In fa…
Lula and His Politics of Cunning
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is the focus of a roundtable review on John D. French's Lula and His Politics of Cunning: From Metalworker to President of Brazil. The reviewers offer a reading of Lula and his legacies from perspectives that range from LGBTQ+ studies to racial politics, including an analysis centered on the story of a humble man that rose from below, "a most exceptional common man," from his humble beginnings up to his election as presi…
I Want My Country Back…and Also My Crown: Monarchists as a Yardstick for the Contemporary Right in Brazil
The terrorist attack on Brazil’s capitol on January 8, 2023, showcased the country’s empowered, embittered extreme right, whose hallmarks will be familiar to students of conservatism further afield: anachronistic anticommunism; hostility to liberal democracy; a sense of embattlement, despite controlling key institutions and platforms; a tapestry of disinformation and conspiracy theory; vaguely Christian cultural sensibilities and militantly Chris…
Fascism in Brazil: From Integralism to Bolsonarism
A small April 2011 demonstration convened a motley collection of neo-Nazis, skinheads, and supporters of Integralism, Brazil's 90-year-old fascist tradition. Brazil in 2011 seemed destined for an increasingly inclusive, stable, prosperous liberal democracy, where such extreme Right groups could only carp from the sidelines that such inclusivity constituted an attack on conservative “freedoms” to exclude. There was, one neofascist demonstrator ann…
Nosso Alpinisimo”: Mountaineering, Topographical Nationalism, and the Material Meanings of Brazil
Interwar Brazil saw an explosion of excursionismo (excursionism), with dozens of clubs linked to but distinct from a broader culture of elite athletics. Excursionists aimed to reorganize space, constructing wilderness and making it intelligible to urbanites. This entailed what I call topographical nationalism, which sought to “conquer” Brazil's peaks and valleys; to extol its national landscape to disparate and competing publics, foreign and dome…
Political science (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · History (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Humanities (4 works) · Law (4 works)