Barbara Weinstein.

 The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of

Race and Nation in Brazil. Durham: Duke University Press. 2015.

Argument: Weinstein cites the work of Albert Hirschman about how uneven
regional development creates social and racialized stereotypes about
particular spaces within the nations. Although he suggests they are just the
regrettable and ephemeral result of uneven economic development,
Weinstein argues they’re constitutive elements of historically structured
inequalities. Without dismissing the material factors, she states these
economic factors themselves are mediated “by historical circumstances that
are shaped by discourses of difference and the grids of political and cultural
power that they produce”. A first stage of uneven prosperity may be the
result of fortuitous conditions of timing and topography, but how this gets
transformed into a sustained economic development and how that locale
becomes defined as a region, depend of historical factors such as the
construction of regional identities that seek to naturalize the progress of the
region. In other words: “discourses of difference are generative of policies
and decisions that consolidate and exacerbate regional inequalities”.

Brazil has been an example of uneven regional development. Progress was

concentrated in Sao Paulo. Its economic development date back to the late
nineteenth century thanks to the coffee booming, although it commonly
thought it can be tracked to the colonial era. The construction of the
regional identity of Sao Paulo has been done in opposition to the Northeast’
representation as backward. As Weinstein says, the Northeast “emerged Sao
Paulo’s “Other”, a uniformly backward region plagued by droughts, a
stagnating economy, and, above all, a wretched population whose bodies
bore the stigmata of their poverty and misery. Without this regional “Other”,
the discourse of paulista exceptionalism would be less far compelling”. The
naturalization of this historically constructed uneven economic development
has been achieved through regional identities’ construction fed with racial
stereotypes. The progress of Sao Paulo took place in the times of scientific
racism, so for those who shaped the regional identity it was unthinkable not
to consider the link between progress and whiteness, and poverty and
blackness. For Weinstein, the narratives of paulista exceptionalism are a
variant of the discourses of white supremacy that were widely disseminated
after the WWI.

Yet, accordingly to the tendencies of Neo-Lamarckism, paulistas did not

adopt a full-blown discourse of white supremacy either suggest separation
between blacks and whites. However, this helped to stresses the
naturalization of regional differences since the instability of color line did
not allow the make such differentiation compelling. Weinstein says:
“Regional identity, I will argue, was a racialized category given its recourse
to innate or natural characteristics to explain the contrasting trajectories of
Brazilian regions. In privileging whiteness as a source of regional
exceptionalism, paulista identity also implicitly drew on and reproduced
negative constructions of blackness and African culture that were staples of
Brazilian slave society. But constructions of regional identity, both positive
and pejorative, did not depend upon explicit references to racial difference,
whether grounded in biological and cultural idioms, and thus maintained the
standards of “cordiality” in Brazilian public discourse”.

Weinstein argues historians have failed to understand the link between

region and nation, usually defining the former as part of a whole, assuming
that regional identities were a priori categories, rather than the result of
political struggles. Neo-Marxist Brazilian historians have done a better job
de-naturalizing regional differences and showing they were the product of
historical contingencies and hegemonies sponsored by the national state.
Therefore, regional history cannot be understood out of the national or
global framework. Simultaneously, regional history is also a manifestation of
a broader national history, currents and tendencies. However, this
scholarship, guided by the theory of internal colonialism, tried to find the
flows of wealth from peripheral to dominant regions. Weinstein favored the
works that opted, as Gramsci did it, to understand the region as the space
from where elites constructed their hegemony and form alliances. This shifts
the discussion away from “regionalism as a source of fragmentation or
distortion, and toward understanding how hierarchies of power and
influence can be formed from regional identities”. This literature, however,
accepted the idea of an a priori self-conscious class before the formation of
the region.

Based on the post-structuralist historiography of nations as imagined

communities, Weinstein understands regional as a “discursive effect”
embedded in the national narratives. These national narrative, she contends,
are not necessarily in opposition with regionalism. On the contrary, it
reinforces it. Region is not the antithesis of the nation, but the place from
where it’s imagined. National project implied a hierarchy of regions and Sao
Paulo was at the center of the hierarchy. Rather than separatism, this form
of region/nation imaginary implies to enforce the national membership of
the region.
The problem that Weinstein notes about the internal colonialism’s
framework is that presupposed the racial and ethnic differences as a
preexisting conditions that dominant elites only exploit for their benefit.
Some scholars assumed race and ethnicity were not a determinant issue
since there were not differences in the racial make-up of the regions. She
quotes to Nancy Appelbaum to demonstrate how regional differences are
also racialized through a process that is not reducible to local inhabitants’
skin color. As she argues, paulistas have represented themselves as whites
and the nordestinos as black regardless phenotype or genetics.

For her, “orientalism” (Edward Said) serves better to explain the

construction of regional identities within the Brazilian nation, and how
certain sociocultural groups create a sense of their superiority through
discourses that assert their authority over others. Said saw orientalism as a
key component of the imperial enterprise. She seeks to apply this model to
the internal Brazilian experience. A feature she considers useful is this
model is that orientalism says much more about the colonizing power than
about the colonized. Regionalism has been in Brazil primarily promoted by
the dominant sectors of the nation.

Weinstein suggests Gilberto Freyre wrote Casa Grande é Senzala having in

mind, not only the U.S., but his own Northeast region in opposition to the
whitening efforts of Sao Paulo, which would have assigned to his region a
more marginal role. However, she says he didn’t directly challenge existing
assumptions about whiteness and progress, while portrayed European elites
as civilized enough to absorb the positive features of Indians and blacks.
She notes the different scholarships on the myth of racial democracy, citing
both those who critiqued for silencing racism, and those that highlight its
potential to demand racial equality. The latter explains the coexistence of
racial democracy and racism because of the gap existing between both. For
her, this approach its problematic because assumes either a non-conscious
racism or racism as the product of a cleverly or calculated individual
calculation meant to favor white Brazilians over darker ones. This approach
assumes a gap between practice and discourse.

Weinstein offers a different explanation. She suggests instead there’s no gap

between discourse (racially democratic) and practice (racism), but that the
discourse of modernity or progress also informed discriminatory practices
and policies. The economic success of Sao Paulo has been associated to
whiteness, but it has been expressed in regional terms, what it has allowed
to coexist with the myth of racial democracy. Explicit expressions of racial
prejudice have been avoided but the Brazilian society continues to link
whiteness with economic success. These two discourses complemented each
other. There were some moments where paulistas and Brazilians make shifts
in the way they conceptualized the meanings of racial difference. But in the
period 1920-1960 there is some consistency in linking whiteness with
progress.

Why not a comparison with Rio? The character of Rio is too urban, and it’s
not understood as a region. The relationship between Rio and Sao Paulo is
more in terms of rivalry and not in terms of domination and subordination as
it happens between Sao Paulo and the Northeast.

Weinstein refers to her understanding of the concept of race. Rather than

falling in the duality between biological racism (seen as the real racism) and
cultural racism, for her they both contained forms of discrimination based
on alleged innate characteristics. She agrees with the distinction (not with
the hierarchy) because it helps to understand how racial discourses are
shaped. By “racial discourses” she meant: “I will generally regarding a
discourse as racialized if the language implies traits or characteristics that
are supposedly innate in a particular group, identified with a specific place
of residence or origin, regardless of what the alleged means of transmission
of those traits might be”.

Overview:

The central chapters of the book run along two key events where the city
actively engaged in the construction of a paulista identity: the regional
uprising of 1932, known as the Constitutionalist Revolution, and the four
hundredth anniversary of the city founding in 1954. She argues that the
identity in both events draw from ideas and images that were already
circulating before them, but that only became the basis for collective action
in specific circumstances. Organizations, monuments and locals that
resulted from these historical events (the veterans’ associations of 1932, the
park Ibaripuera from 1954) became important referents and symbols of the
future reproduction of paulista identity. To study these two moments,
besides of allowing her to see the changing meanings of race, modernity,
progress, etc. it also helps to note that regional identity was not in
opposition to nationalism. These two moments of regional identity
construction coincided with the rise of nationalism.

Chapter 1 refers to the boom of coffee economy and the early representation
of Sao Paulo as a region with special proclivity for modernity. In the
meanwhile, other regions, though expressing pride for Sao Paulo’s progress,
started contesting its claims of political hegemony and framed the debate in
terms of regional superiority. The next two chapters explore different
aspects of the regional uprising of 1932. Chapter 2 examines the discourses,
many of them rooted in racist assumptions, that circulated in Sao Paulo
during the 1930s and created a sense of crisis while harden lines of
differentiation between the region and the Northeast. Chapter 3 examines
de different representation about those who get involved in the uprising.
Chapter 4 pays attention to the women who participated in the
confrontation, and the gendered representations of paulista history and
identity. It analyzes how these representations managed the potentially
disruptive presence of women in the public sphere, and they tried to de-
politicize their participation. Chapter 5 closes this section by talking about
the discourses of regional superiority emerging from Sao Paulo, and the
limitations of a national community imagined through the lenses of
superiority.

The next section deals with the fourth centenary. Chapter 6 the different
uses of the centenary, above all in order to cast the Sao Paulo’s proclivity
for modernity. It also looks at the conflicts between those who wanted to
represent the region as refined, and who defended a more popular meaning.
Chapter 7 analyzes the construction of a historical memory that whitened
Sao Paulo’s history during an era where the discourse of racial democracy
was being promoted. Chapter 8 examines the different ways in which the
uprising commemorations served as a marker of paulista identity. The
epilogue/conclusion suggests connection between these two events and the
paulista’s embrace of the 1964 coup. Weinstein considers that in order to
fully understand the coup it’s important to examine the spatial inequalities
and the racial discourses that have informed the Brazilian post-colonial
history.