Donna M. Goldstein challenges much of what we think we know about the 'culture of poverty'. Drawing on more than a decade of experience in Brazil, Goldstein provides an intimate portrait of everyday life among the women of the favelas, or urban shantytowns. These women have created absurdist and black-humor storytelling practices in the face of trauma and tragedy. Goldstein helps us to understand that such joking and laughter is part of an emotional aesthetic that defines the sense of frustration and anomie endemic to the political and economic desperation of the shantytown.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword Acknowledgments Introduction: Hard Laughter 1. Laughter "Out of Place" 2. The Aesthetics of Domination: Class, Culture, and the Lives of Domestic Workers 3. Color-Blind Erotic Democracies, Black Consciousness Politics, and the Black Cinderellas of Felicidade Eterna 4. No Time for Childhood 5. State Terror, Gangs, and Everyday Violence in Rio de Janeiro 6. Partial Truths, or the Carnivalization of Desire 7. What's So Funny about Rape? Notes Glossary References Index

Author Biography

Donna M. Goldstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.