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Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in 1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement, friendship, and all that was positive and good—yet another indication of the Americanization of Brazil under way during this period. In this translation of O Imperialismo Sedutor, Antonio Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S. cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians actively interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured U.S. culture in a process of cultural recombination. The market, he argues, was far more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange than state-directed propaganda efforts because Brazil already was primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing. The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

Following completion of the U.S. air base in Natal, Brazil, in 1942, U.S. airmen departing for North Africa during World War II communicated with Brazilian mechanics with a thumbs-up before starting their engines. This sign soon replaced the Brazilian tradition of touching the earlobe to indicate agreement, friendship, and all that was positive and good—yet another indication of the Americanization of Brazil under way during this period. In this translation of O Imperialismo Sedutor, Antonio Pedro Tota considers both the Good Neighbor Policy and broader cultural influences to argue against simplistic theories of U.S. cultural imperialism and exploitation. He shows that Brazilians actively interpreted, negotiated, and reconfigured U.S. culture in a process of cultural recombination. The market, he argues, was far more important in determining the nature of this cultural exchange than state-directed propaganda efforts because Brazil already was primed to adopt and disseminate American culture within the framework of its own rapidly expanding market for mass culture. By examining the motives and strategies behind rising U.S. influence and its relationship to a simultaneous process of cultural and political centralization in Brazil, Tota shows that these processes were not contradictory, but rather mutually reinforcing. The Seduction of Brazil brings greater sophistication to both Brazilian and American understanding of the forces at play during this period, and should appeal to historians as well as students of Latin America, culture, and communications.

The thesis analyses Bertolt Brecht's reception in Brazil and has as advisor Prof. Margret Herzfeld-Sander, a Brecht expert, and as primary reader Prof. Leslie Damasceno, a Brazilian Theater expert. The goal of this study is twofold: firstly, to establish the factors that led Brecht to become the most staged foreign author in the 1960s, and secondly, to show the importance of his work in the search for a national Brazilian theater. The approach chosen was to present a panoramic view, showing different trends of Brecht's reception worldwide, including the development of the \"New Latin American theater\" as basis for comparison with his reception in Brazil. The other 80% of the thesis are dedicated exclusively to Brazil. Starting with the Jesuit theater, it differentiates their didactic theater from Brecht's new appropriation of \"educational theater\". The study scans through the Brazilian theater history pointing out developments that prepare the ground for Brecht's reception, which began with the publication of a poem in 1942 and a dramatic reading in 1945. However, the first professional staging only took place in 1958 and the climax was reached in 1968. The consolidation of the military dictatorship in the same year was mainly responsible for the decline in the stagings of Brecht's plays. The decrease of censorship and regression in the Geisel administration (1974-1979) favored a second climax in 1978. Besides analyzing the staging of Brecht's plays, the study also demonstrates Brecht's influence on playwrights in creating new plays and new work methods, combining them with Brazilian popular theater forms, as well as the activities of four main theater groups (Arena, Oficina, CPC, Opiniao) instrumental in promoting his work. I reached the conclusion that a confluence of three main factors contributed to Brecht's reception in Brazil: namely the space prepared for Brecht's reception, the nature and ideology of Brecht's work, as well as the development of the theater groups concerned with socially engaged theater favored by a political instability. The research was based on books about Brazilian culture and theater, essays from various publications, clippings from magazines and newspapers, interviews and correspondence with people such as directors and/or teachers, currently involved in working with Brecht in Brazil.

When dealing with the reception of literature outside its land of origin, it is natural to reflect on how the text is read and understood by an audience of a different culture, living in a different time zone, with a different climate, and speaking a language diffe rent from that of the author. What changes in this transfer of literature between cultures? How is the reader affected when exposed to a text from an alien culture? What role does the previous experience of the reader play in his understanding and interpreting of the text? There are many questions. and even more answers. While what follows will inevitably touch upon such questions, I shall for the most part leave the discussion of reception theory to the experts in the field, concentrating rather on a practical summary of Bertolt Brecht's reception in the Brazilian theatre, with special attention to indigenous theories of anthropophagy — what might be called cultural cannibalism.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder and the most common form of dementia in the elderly. Susceptibility to AD is considerably determined by genetic factors which hitherto were primarily identified using case-control designs. Elucidating the genetic architecture of additional AD-related phenotypic traits, ideally those linked to the underlying disease process, holds great promise in gaining deeper insights into the genetic basis of AD and in developing better clinical prediction models. To this end, we generated genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping data in 931 participants of the European Medical Information Framework Alzheimer's Disease Multimodal Biomarker Discovery (EMIF-AD MBD) sample to search for novel genetic determinants of AD biomarker variability. Specifically, we performed genome-wide association study (GWAS) analyses on 16 traits, including 14 measures of amyloid-beta (Aβ) and tau-protein species in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). In addition to confirming the well-established effects of apolipoprotein E (APOE) on diagnostic outcome and phenotypes related to Aβ42, we detected novel potential signals in the zinc finger homeobox 3 (ZFHX3) for CSF-Aβ38 and CSF-Aβ40 levels, and confirmed the previously described sex-specific association between SNPs in geminin coiled-coil domain containing (GMNC) and CSF-tau. Utilizing the results from independent case-control AD GWAS to construct polygenic risk scores (PRS) revealed that AD risk variants only explain a small fraction of CSF biomarker variability. In conclusion, our study represents a detailed first account of GWAS analyses on CSF-Aβ and -tau related traits in the EMIF-AD MBD dataset. In subsequent work, we will utilize the genomics data generated here in GWAS of other AD-relevant clinical outcomes ascertained in this unique dataset.