Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945 (review)

Culture Wars in Brazil: The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945. By DARYLE WILLIAMS. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Photographs. Plates. Illustrations. Map. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xxii, 346 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.

Vargas era elites confronted the same basic question faced by other centralizing political regimes—how to shape Brazil beyond the affairs of Rio de Janeiro (and perhaps even beyond the provincial capitals). Daryle Williams shows how cultural policymakers of the Vargas era confronted the core challenges of political and administrative centralization by looking at the newly created Ministry of Education and Health's initiatives in art, architecture, and historical memory. These included the creation of a program for protecting—in effect federalizing—historical landmarks, including the city of Ouro Preto; the establishment a network of historical museums that often appropriated regional histories and made them "Brazilian"; the promotion a modern and nationalist vision of Brazil at overseas expositions; and the endorsement of modernist art and architecture as an official symbolic language of brasilidade, or Brazilianness.

Culture Wars in Brazil draws the reader into an engaging crossroads in Brazilian history where the politics of a centralizing federal government intersected with the ongoing debate among elites about the nature of national culture. The result is an elegant study of both Brazilian culture in a political context and of Vargas regime politics in a cultural context that should satisfy a broad constituency of readers interested in Brazilian history. Williams's transparent use of sources for cultural history, the clarity of his narrative, the depth of his characterization of the Vargas regime, and his caution in situating the narrative within broader currents of Brazilian history, all suit this book to undergraduate classroom use.

Williams shifts the center of gravity for scholarship on the Vargas era by bringing needed recognition to the importance placed by the regime upon the politics of culture. His analysis reveals not only the ways in which Vargas era cultural politics were embedded in long-standing Brazilian debates about nationhood but also the strategies of state managers who sought to locate the regime within a sympathetic—and often elitist—vision of national history and identity. This is not to suggest that Vargas era culture managers sought to crassly legitimate the regime through appeals to the past. Rather, as the regime courted the participation of artists and intellectuals, it became enmeshed in long-standing cultural, intellectual and aesthetic debates over brasilidade.

Culture Wars in Brazil shows us how the recently formed Ministry of Education and Health was envisioned as a "Ministry of Culture" by Gustavo Capanema, the third official to hold the portfolio of minister of education (1934-45). Capanema became a catalyst linking the Vargas regime's centralizing tendencies and a simmering debate between aesthetic and intellectual modernists and traditionalists about the meaning of Brazilian culture. Within this debate, modernists rejected the Brazil's traditional adherence to European cultural and artistic trends as well as the sentimental embrace of imagery from the Brazilian colonial past. Largely through Capanema's involvement in the debate, the modernists succeeded in placing their imprimatur on the major symbolic projects of the Vargas regime, from state expositions to official art, architecture, and the preservation of historical landmarks. Despite the modernists' ascendancy, traditionalists continued to dominate key institutions which were rendered more prominent by the Vargas regime's considerable support for cultural projects. While Williams acknowledges that figures such as Oscar Niemeyer, Cándido Portinari, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among many others, were the emerging winners of the debate over national culture, the real weight of Williams's analysis lies in his examination of the federal government's choice to become the debate's sponsor. As Williams explains, "As the debate continues over the 'revolutionary' nature of the Revolution of 1930, it is clear that the Vargas era, and most especially the Estado Novo, stood for a time and place in which the...