Writers don't know what they think until they write. Nor do they know what they've written until they see what colleagues have made of it in print. I have learned a great deal from the probing contributions to this roundtable by an admirably diverse group whose prior and future work has much to teach us about urban working-class life and popular politics. Curiously, I had never thought of describing Lula as a man “who fully lived through the rise and fall of Fordism,” as suggested by Antonio Luigi Negro. Having moved “from the countryside to the city, from the patriarchal logic of a slave past to the hybrid dialectics of Brazilian modernity,” Lula's two presidential terms are described by Brodwyn Fischer as bringing to the whole nation “the dream of egalitarian developmentalism that his own life had embodied.” Indeed, his remarkable trajectory looks different when viewed as a belated manifestation...
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