Duke University Press The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Radical Perspectives)

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein focuses on race, gender, and regionalism in the formation of national identities in Brazil; this focus allows her to explore how uneven patterns of economic development are consolidated and understood. Organized around two principal episodes—the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and 1954’s IV Centenário, the quadricentennial of São Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in São Paulo embraced a regional identity that emphasized their European origins and aptitude for modernity and progress, attributes that became—and remain—associated with “whiteness.” This racialized regionalism naturalized and reproduced regional inequalities, as São Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and São Paulo’s racial “Other.”  This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization. Review " The Color of Modernity is a major work in the history of modern Brazil and an important intervention in social theories of race, modernity, regionalism, and nationalism. Barbara Weinstein's history of the construction of regional identity in twentieth-century São Paulo offers a model for building cultural theory from rigorous empirical research in social, political, and intellectual history. It is a work of startling originality by one of the preeminent historians of modern Brazil." Author: Sueann Caulfield, author of Source: In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil " The Color of Modernity is a pathbreaking work. Barbara Weinstein's exhaustive research and nuanced analysis of twentieth-century Brazilian political and social history will substantially reshape the field. The Color of Modernity will be required reading for all students of modern Brazil." Author: Bryan McCann, author of Source: Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro " The Color of Modernity shows how a regional approach can advance the study of race relations in Brazil and demonstrates the intricate interplay among race, class, and gender. Moreover, it expertly reveals the complex relations between regional and national identity." Author: Joseph L. Love Source: Hispanic American Historical Review "Weinstein’s sophisticated analysis shows how Brazil’s most economically powerful state fashioned a regional identity built on whiteness, modernity, and economic success in a nation that has privileged a discourse of racial harmony and mixture." Author: Marshall C. Eakin Source: Journal of Interdisciplinary History " The Color of Modernity provides us with a finegrained representation of history that teaches us about the particularities of regionalism, nationalism, but also modernity, meanings of race and democracy in Brazil.... I recommend this book to any (informed) reader, who is not only interested in the particularities of 20 century Brazil, but who also wants to understand how history and histories are done through the continuity of time." Author: Heike Drotbohm Source: Allegra Lab "Weinstein’s book is a finely researched work on early twentieth century Brazil that will interest not only scholars of São Paulo or Brazilian history, but also students of regionalism, race and gender relations, and media and public events." Author: Victor Albert Source: Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research "... Barbara Weinstein, one of the world’s leading historians of Brazil, offers scholars of the humanities and social sciences a new take on the cultural history of race and nation and of social inequality. This book immerses the reader in the historiography produced in the U.S. of mid-twentieth-century Brazil, of race, and of cultural politics and geography. Weinstein has, moreover, utt