The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics (review)

The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Edited by Robert M. Levine and John J. Crocitti. The Latin American Readers. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Photographs. Illustrations. Map. x, 527 pp. Cloth, $64.95. Paper, $21.95.

Anthologies of Brazilian history intended for classroom use have a long and distinguished pedigree. E. Bradford Burns's Documentary History of Brazil (1966), appearing two years after the military coup that ousted president João Goulart, was celebratory, stressing territorial expansion, peaceful political evolution, and the growing power of the central state in providing stability for Brazil in contrast to Spanish America. A Century of Brazilian History (1969) by Richard Graham, edited during the "hard-line" period of the dictatorship, drew a grim picture, emphasizing both the social and economic injustices prevalent in Brazil's historical experience and the failure of populists rulers, the Catholic Church or the political left to reverse this course. Recently, Kevin Danaher and Michael Schellenberger, in Fighting for the Soul of Brazil (1995), gathered testimonies from women, Afro-Brazilians, gays and others struggling for a reformed Brazil ready to enter the twenty-first century free of racism and sexism. What no anthologist has attempted until now is to ponder Brazil as a civilization, for that is how Brazilians view themselves: a successful amalgamation of Africans, Europeans, and Indians, city and countryside, rich and poor classes, that can be uniquely compared to North America and Europe. This is the challenge Robert Levine and John Crocitti have assumed in The Brazil Reader; to treat the nation as an organic whole without asking, "which is the real Brazil?" Towards that end they have assembled a collection that runs the gamut from diaries to photographs, recorded dreams, web pages and e-mail messages from Brazil to the First World. They are also the first to give the Brazilianists, American academics whose love of the country rivals that of patriots, equal time. (Regrettably, African, European, and Asian observers of Brazil are not represented.)

The best pieces in The Brazil Reader force instructors to make their Brazil curriculum more contentious. "The First Wave," by the late Warren Dean, belies the myth of the pacifist Indian living in harmony with nature before the Portuguese arrived. "Uprising in Maranhão, 1839-1840," an eyewitness account, demonstrates how deep class and racial divisions have run in the "land of cordiality." On the other hand, "City of Mist," taken from a journal published in 1905, records the rise of an immigrant middle class in São Paulo about the same time as in the United States. Sometimes the editors are less successful in conveying the complexity of Brazil. The section entitled "Slavery and its Aftermath" contains only predictable items--an official report on the runaway slave community of Palmares, abolitionist tirades by Joaquim Nabuco--while the integration of Afro-Brazilians into post-abolition society goes unmentioned, despite the availability of fine studies by Florestan Fernandes and George Reid Andrews. Factory discipline in the early stages of industrialization is the subject of one lugubrious entry, but Brazil's powerful Anarchist movement and pioneering trade unions do not merit a selection, when the editors could have easily turned to the two-volume collection by Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro and Michael M. Hall, A classe operária no Brasil, 1889-1930 (1979).

The modern period is succinctly covered in six sections. "The Vargas Era" and "Seeking Democracy and Equity" trace the painful transition from dictatorship to democracy, starting with the Revolution of 1930 and ending with the inauguration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso as president in 1994. Here one wishes the entries were more consistent in quality. "Ordinary People: Five Lives Affected by Vargas-Era Reforms" neatly captures the Machiavellian flexibility of the dictator in promising something to everyone, but "Fernando Henrique Cardoso: Theory and Practice" raises its subject to messiah status. The section "Women's Lives" cleverly juxtaposes one entry, "Xuxa and the Televisual Imaginary," analyzing the blond superstar, with...