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Ethos and Pathos in Millennial Brazil
This essay reviews the following works:
The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast. By Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. Translated by Jerry Dennis Metz. Foreword by James N. Green. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix + 277. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822357858.
Brazil and the Dialectic of Colonization. By Alfredo Bosi. Translated by Robert Patrick Newcomb. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 373. $35.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780252080845.
Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian Racial Democracy. By John F. Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 463. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822353201.
The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889. By Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. vi + 439. $27.03 paperback. ISBN: 9781107616585.
The Color of Modernity: Sao Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil. By Barbara Weinstein. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Pp. ix + 458. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822357773.
The Rio De Janeiro Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Daryle Williams, Amy Chazkel, and Paulo Knauss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 390. $20.73 paperback. ISBN: 9780822360063.
Brazil continues to be an ensemble of Brazils. But this ensemble of Brazils only makes sense ... within the form of a vast and unitary Brazil.
-Gilberto Freyre, "Introduçâo," Brasis, Brasil, e Brasilia (1960)
Is Brazil one country or many, a plurality completed in unity or a discordant cacophony? The nation can sometimes seem an implausible unit, especially to Brazilians. Colonial rulers claimed territories they had yet to traipse or map. Nineteenth-century statesmen improvised an independent nation from a string of colonial entrepots, "clinging to the coast like crabs" to channel Brazil's interior riches to newly open global markets.1 Conquest, slavery, and land concentration structured a vastly unequal society in which laws and liberalisms preserved patrimonialism and hierarchy. Europeanizing crusaders sought to impose scientific and bureaucratic rationality on Brazil's belle époque land- and cityscapes, falling short when their countrymen tenaciously defended alternate social, political, and spiritual practices. Urbanization nurtured favelas even as architects projected Brasilia's sinuous monumentalism or Säo Paulo's sea of concrete; economic planners underdeveloped Brazil's northeast even as they sent the...