Brazil: A Biography by Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling (review)

Brazil is a country of superlatives. It is home to the largest river system and rainforest in the world, the third-largest democracy, the fifth-largest national territory, and the sixth-largest population. What happens there is deeply consequential for the rest of the world, which makes its past equally consequential. Excellent news, then, that we have a new history of the country, written by two distinguished Brazilian scholars.

The book offers several signal achievements. First, the authors masterfully bring into balance earlier canonical interpretations of the country's history, written from the 1930s through the 1980s, with the more recent outpouring of historical and social science scholarship produced from the 1980s through the present. Given the dramatic expansion of Brazil's university system during those decades, and of the research produced in those universities, this is a major accomplishment, and a major service as well to English-language readers unable to access that research in its original language.

To that feat of historical synthesis, the authors add a firm command of Brazilian cultural history and the works of its many authors, songwriters, filmmakers and other cultural practitioners. From the book's opening quotation—Lima Barreto commenting on the public jubilation set off by the abolition of slavery in 1888—to its conclusion—Oswald de Andrade's Cannibal Manifesto—Schwarcz and Starling deftly employ those works to comment on, dialogue with, and further illuminate the historical story that they tell.

Portuguese colonialism in Brazil began with the enslavement and resulting devastation of the colony's indigenous population, partly from overwork and extreme culture shock but mainly from European diseases. Enslaved indigenous people were soon supplemented by enslaved Africans, at first by the tens of thousands and then, in the 1700s and 1800s, by the millions. The consequences for Brazil were profound: a "naturalization of violence" that laid the foundations for continuing police and state violence down to the present; a social structure based on "every possible type of discrimination" against Africans and their descendants (63); and a racially mixed society and culture that provoked constant unease and anxiety among the nation's elites.

As Schwarcz and Starling inform us at the outset, their central theme is "the challenging and tortuous process of building citizenship" (xviii), and they faithfully follow that theme through Brazil's experiments with constitutional monarchy, oligarchical republicanism, military authoritarianism, and modern, mass-based democracy. Yet their approach is anything but dry and institutional. Vivid personalities and events abound, always connected to, and shedding light on, the interplay of state, society, and culture. Along the way, we learn how the French artists brought to Brazil in the early 1800s worked to create a visual language for the new nation (212-14); how one hundred years later, in the 1920s, Modernist artists, writers, and intellectuals grappled with the challenges of creating modernity in the tropics (382-84; one wonders what Machado de Assis, had he lived to that decade, might have said about their enterprise); and in the 1950s, the astounding effort to make modernity concrete, literally, by building a new national capital at Brasília (485-88).

The 2015 Brazilian edition of the book concluded with an "intuition: we believe democracy will never be extinguished in Brazil," because "the struggle against the dictatorship [of 1964-85] taught Brazilians that democracy is a value in and of itself." (576, 575) The country continued to face the challenges of widespread political corruption, police violence, and extreme social and economic inequality. But under Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-10), "democracy in Brazil was extended to many sectors of the population that had been previously been excluded" and "for the first time Brazil's working classes became a power to be reckoned with" (581). (Though I disagree with the latter observation, since the book clearly shows that workers and their unions had been "a power to be reckoned with" during...