In the past few years, a new wave of scholarship on Brazil's military dictatorship has emerged. Moving beyond the political and economic narratives that dominated much of the English and Portuguese publications in the years immediately after the regime, this new research has proceeded to questions of social relations, cultural production, and transnational comparisons. Victoria Langland's Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil is among the best work yet to emerge from these new approaches to Brazil's ditadura. In examining student activism, memory production, gender, and Brazil in the transnational setting, Langland provides a groundbreaking and original work, one of the strongest books on Brazil's military dictatorship era yet.
While 1968 is the fulcrum of Langland's analysis, her scope is much deeper and richer. After an introduction in which she uses Geraldo Vandré's popular 1968 protest song (from which she takes...
