1. A Politics of Hope The Making of Brazil’s Post-Neoliberal New Middle Class
- Author:
- Moises Kopper
- Publication Date:
- 09-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
- Abstract:
- How does hope emerge as a life-altering possibility against the backdrop of economic pre- carity, political disregard, and soaring inequality? This paper explores the role of hope as both a political-economic construct and an infrastructural affect in the wake of policy implementation. It draws on a five-year ethnography among community leaders, housing activists, planners, politicians, state officials, and market representatives involved in the im- plementation of Minha Casa Minha Vida, Brazil’s largest social housing program. In recent years, low-income projects have become the battleground for experimental, post-neoliberal forms of democratic governance via inclusive consumption. These public–private housing infrastructures give insight into the relationship between material hope and the making of Latin America’s “pink tide” new middle classes: how grassroots communities organize around hierarchies of worthiness to allocate wellbeing-enhancing state benefits, and how the uneven distribution of these benefits sustains the constitution of emerging, albeit tem- porary, collectives of consumer citizens.
- Topic:
- Infrastructure, Neoimperialism, Citizenship, and Class
- Political Geography:
- Brazil and South America