Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States by Micol Seigel (review)

Book Reviews well were how to find girls and drinks” (54). Significantly, Schoonover posits that the Abwehr realized that Lüning was incompetent and used him as a decoy to misdirect Allied efforts at unveiling other, more significant , German espionage activities in Latin America. Lüning, who was never able to assemble his radio, sent a series of forty-four secret ink messages to Germany that were virtually useless. In addition to the fact that his communications took weeks to arrive at German military headquarters, Lüning “misnumbered the messages and mixed the inks improperly” (56). On 31 August 1942, Lüning was captured by Allied agents. At his trial, “the unsubstantiated and erroneous charge that Lüning’s contact with UBoats took Cuban lives” led to his execution on 10 November 1942 (110). Schoonover asserts that executing Lüning “contributed nothing to reducing German U-Boat activity or success. It did, however, greatly increase the public perception that Cuba and the United States were turning around an important part of the war against the Axis” (120). Schoonover’s study is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the role of Latin America in World War II. Hitler’s Man in Havana is also an exciting tale that should be of interest to fans of espionage novels. Schoonover argues that novelist Graham Greene, who had first-hand knowledge of the Lüning case, based the protagonist of his novel Our Man in Havana (1958) on Lüning. Schoonover’s portrayal of Lüning is just as engaging (if not more so) as Greene’s portrayal of James Wormold. Michael R. Hall Department of History Armstrong Atlantic State University UNEVEN ENCOUNTERS: MAKING RACE AND NATION IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES. By Micol Seigel. Durham: Duke UP, 2009, pp. 408, $24.95. Micol Seigel’s book reads like an anthology of transnational encounters. She showcases some obscure and other better known cultural exchanges to show how these early twentieth-century episodes shaped notions of race and nation in Brazil and the United States. Uneven Encounters, through an eclectic cast of historical actors and ideas, posits that constructions of race and nation are not separable but rather mutually constructed in dialogue. This dialogue, Seigel argues, consists of transnational encounters that peer into a distant other to define race and nation in one’s own backyard. Chapter 1 opens with an extensive textual analysis of advertisements for Brazilian coffee in the United States. She sees advertising as representing the transition from a producer to a consumer-centered North American society, arguing that “consumerism is a racially discriminatory nationalism ” (16). She reads coffee advertisements as trying to create domestic and racial understandings in the United States, looking at magazines and posters that portrayed a black servant serving coffee as a form of work folk 139 The Latin Americanist, June 2010 wisdom, to others that portrayed romanticized Latin figures as producers of coffee, to others showing barebacked blacks bearing coffee sacks as fetish of imperial consumption. Seigel notes that after the mostly Brazilianfunded advertising committee was extinguished, Brazil vanished from coffee ads; she sees this as a backlash towards Brazil’s coffee valorization policy, making the point that Brazilian agency shaped consumerist nationalism in the United States. Yet others could also jump to another conclusion: that the new advertising simply was not financed by Brazilian coffee planters and thus did not feature them. Considering the innovative transnational methodology employed by Seigel, it seems odd that this chapter does not consider the effects of coffee’s power in constructing Paulista or Brazilian nationalism. Seigel then shifts her analysis to the music and dance of Brazilian maxixe and its short-lived fad in the United States. She correctly finds that the early twentieth century rather than the bossa nova era was the first instance of transnational collaboration on music between Brazilians and Americans. However, arguing that “metropolitan subjects joyously, ravenously sought to consume the colonial world in popular cultural form” (70) seems to reify metropolitan-periphery relations as culturally unequal rather than complicate them. One could argue that contrasting this fascination by “exotic” dances with the vogue of jazz in Brazil could have been a much more...