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Reviewed by:
  • Imagining Brazil
  • Marshall C. Eakin
Souza, Jessé and Valter Sinder, eds. Imagining Brazil. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005. Index. 311 pp.

This interesting collection of essays strives to provide the reader with a "multifaceted picture" of Brazil. Some fourteen essays are organized around two parts, "society and politics" and "literature and culture." Twelve of the chapters are by Brazilian academics, with two additional chapters by U.S. scholars (Thomas Skidmore and Dain Borges). According to the editors, most of the authors are from a "recent generation" of Brazilian intellectuals seeking to understand Brazil through "new categories and questions" (p. 1). It is a very diverse collection held together by little more than an effort to grapple with "Brazilian reality."

In general, the individual essays are of high quality (although the English prose is at times a bit stilted). One of the major threads of the first seven chapters is an effort to come to grips with some of the major intellectual figures and schools of thought in twentieth-century Brazilian social science. Jessé Souza, one of the two editors of the volume, leads off the first group of essays arguing that the dramatic inequalities in Brazil are the direct result of modernization and globalization. Antônio Sérgio Guimarães and Marcos Chor Maio explore thinkers and theories of race relations, the former focusing on the idea of "racial democracy" and the latter on the famous UNESCO Race Relations Project. Luiz Werneck Vianna ponders the role of Max Weber in social science theorizing among Brazilian intellectuals. Leonardo Avritzer delves into "culture, democracy, and the formation of public space in Brazil," seeking to unravel the debates over tradition and modernity in Brazil (and Latin America). Marcelo Neves takes on the concept of citizenship, and its meanings in contemporary Brazil. The only contribution in this section by a non-Brazilian scholar is Thomas Skidmore's brief essay on the role of the Paraguayan War as a critical turning point in Brazilian history.

The second half of the volume, on literature and culture, is even more wide ranging than the first half, although it also has a strong emphasis on the analysis of previous analysts of Brazilian culture. Valter Sinder (another of the volume editors) and Paulo Jorge Ribeiro open the section arguing the centrality of the 1970s in the emergence of a new generation of intellectuals and critiques of Brazilian culture. Heloísa Maria Murgel Starling writes about literary imagination, modernity, and the suburbs (primarily in the nineteenth century). In his [End Page 200] essay, João Trajano Sento-Sé explores the Western canon and Brazilian identity. Santuza Cambraia Naves takes an original look at popular music from bossa nova to tropicália. Helena Bomeny offers a fascinating look at the relationship between some of Brazil's most notable writers and intellectuals and their relationship to the Vargas regime (especially the role of Gustavo Capanema). The noted writer Silviano Santiago's short piece is a rather idiosyncratic rumination on literacy and literature in Brazil. Dain Borges, the sole U.S. scholar in this section, has an excellent chapter on "the relevance of Machado de Assis."

Like most edited collections, the fourteen essays in this volume are of varying quality and depth, although most of them are very fine contributions, especially to our understanding of intellectuals and ideas in Brazil in the twentieth century. The diverse disciplines of contributors also reflects the breadth and quality of scholars working on Brazil today in Brazilian academia. On a final note, it would have been helpful if the editors had provided the reader with some background on how this volume was constructed, how the contributors were selected, and to what extent they collaborated on producing a coherent series of essays.

Marshall C. Eakin
Vanderbilt University
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