Becoming Brazilians

Becoming Brazilians poses a familiar and seemingly simple question: How, over the course of the twentieth century, did so many Brazilians come to feel that they belonged to a national community defined by racial and cultural mixture, or mestiçagem? Eakin provides a novel, complex answer by harnessing the power of a vast interdisciplinary field as part of a generous conversation with Brazilian and Brazilianist colleagues, producing an impressively panoramic—while detailed and nuanced—view of the cultural, social, political, and communicational forces that brought mestiçagem to the forefront of Brazilian national identity in the twentieth century's early decades and led to the decline of that ideal by century's end. Eakin usefully notes that mestiçagem does not necessarily imply “racial democracy,” which allows him to explain how and why mestiçagem remains such a powerful cornerstone of Brazilian identity, even among Brazilians who recognize the need to redress racism.Becoming Brazilians meditates on the situated historicity of national identities and thus is an important contribution from Latin America to the literature on nationalism. Eakin reconfigures the standard time lines of nation building in Brazil (and Latin America more generally), joining scholars who question how effective the region's nineteenth-century states were in creating what Benedict Anderson famously called “imagined communities.” Unlike Anderson, Eakin argues that “these [national] communities emerge in the mid-twentieth century out of visual and aural cultures,” not print culture (p. 13). Full civic and participatory citizenship would come even later, with Brazil's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s.Eakin unfolds this argument over seven chapters, each focused on different stages in the development and diffusion of the mestiçagem narrative by the state, the media, and the Brazilian people. Opening chapters chart early twentieth-century Brazilian thinkers shifting from a pessimistic appraisal of Brazil's extensive racial mixture to a celebration of the nation's unique hybridity and partial Africanness—a position most famously forwarded by sociologist Gilberto Freyre in the early 1930s. Subsequent chapters trace the mass dissemination of Freyre's vision through successive “technological waves” that reached ever-broader swaths of the Brazilian population. A first wave, during Getúlio Vargas's nationalist regime, broadcast the mestiço sounds of samba and Carnaval via radio; a second wave transmitted via film powerful images of Carnaval and Freyre's idealized mulata; and a third wave, during the 1970s and 1980s, televised a shared vision of Brazilian identity across the nation, particularly via telenovelas, soccer matches, and live music shows.The book's final chapters demonstrate that the very forces through which Freyre's vision matured and was disseminated also led to its demise. Building on the literature on Brazilian citizenship and popular culture, Eakin argues that by the democratic opening of the 1980s and 1990s, the feelings of intense cultural belonging that had taken hold for a half century empowered Brazilians to demand full civic rights. Ironically, he notes, the very emergence of a more dynamic civil society, together with the radically decentralizing force of the internet, brought different voices to the fore—especially black movements—that challenged ideas of mestiço homogeneity and called for a racially pluralistic, multicultural society. Eakin's careful attention to the relationships among media technologies, state, society, and racial ideologies is one of his analytical synthesis's great strengths.Throughout, Eakin convincingly shows that the idioms of Brazilian national identity were (and are) not unilaterally imposed by the state and its media apparatus on a reluctant or duped population. The Brazilians in Eakin's account embrace, adapt, contest, and repurpose the notions of mestiçagem disseminated through the media, birthing new images, conversations, and counternarratives. Yet in one important sense, Eakin misses an opportunity to give Brazil's popular sectors more credit. Perhaps for heuristic purposes, he makes Freyre the central character in the mestiçagem creation story, despite thoroughly acknowledging that Freyre was only the most successful exponent of ideas shaped by other Brazilian intellectuals. One could go further: these ideas circulated widely well before Freyre codified them, among both elite thinkers and popular sectors more broadly. Scholars working on popular music, theater, and religions, on Afro-Brazilian organizations and publications, or with police and court records demonstrate that nonelite, nonwhite Brazilians took leading roles in developing ideas about cultural and racial mixture, disseminating them upward through cross-racial and cross-class encounters (as Eakin's footnotes partly acknowledge; see, for example, p. 31n15). Looking past Freyre to these ideologies' popular roots only strengthens Eakin's compelling arguments about the “bottom-up” as well as “top-down” flow of ideas of national identity and suggests that ideas of mestiçagem spread so rapidly and thoroughly among everyday Brazilians because, to a large extent, that's where they originated (pp. 203–4). Skepticism about mestiçagem, moreover, similarly has deeper and broader roots.With its sweeping range, engaging, accessible prose, and fresh insights into a familiar topic, Becoming Brazilians will be fundamental for scholars and students of race and nationalism in Brazil, Latin America, and beyond

Media studies · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, Identity, and Education in Brazil