I

It seems fitting to start this review of recently published Anglophone books about identity in Brazil by looking at a classic work. Skidmore's Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964, originally published in 1967, remains mandatory reading for Brazilianists worldwide. Tackling the very complex and sensitive matter of modern Brazilian history in the midst of political repression in Brazil, Skidmore's book offers an accurate account of the political events that led to the fall of the democratic state in 1964, examining these events as part of Brazil's political culture and identity. The narrative, pleasantly written and well supported by primary evidence, takes the reader for a stroll through the complex practices of modern Brazilian politics, from the disabling of the institutions and political culture of the early Republic to the creation of Vargas's Estado Novo in 1933. It examines the removal of Vargas from power and his return to government via democratic election, and the derailing of economic policy and political crisis. Finally, Skidmore looks at the growth of economic crisis and lack of public support for the state, leading, eventually, to the ill-fated government of João Goulart.

The reason to celebrate the forty-year anniversary of Skidmore's book is simple: the work remains a lucid and well-referenced report of the mainstream facts of Brazilian politics in the period between 1930 and 1964. If readers find themselves yearning for a more analytical account of the political culture of different Brazilian groups (the middle class, the military, the positive and negative Lefts, the Right, and the centre-moderates), they will nevertheless find enough information here to attempt to draw their own conclusions. Readers can also look at this book in conjunction with Skidmore's other books, notably Black and white (1974), for a more detailed view of social and racial relations in the formation of an identity that is not simply Latin-American, but specifically Brazilian. Explaining Brazilian politics with all its twists and turns has never been an easy task, and forty years later, Skidmore's book still proves a compelling read and a valid attempt to make sense of the intricacies of Brazilian political life regarding the rise and fall of democratic practices in twentieth-century Brazil, and the implications of this oscillatory democratic order to Brazil's political identity.

II

Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic is not, strictly speaking, a book about Brazilian history. The aim of the editors of this collection of articles was to rethink the process of identity formation in the Portuguese Atlantic colonies. Instead of looking at the Atlantic as a passive space in which the colonized populations developed instruments to confront, resist, and sometimes simply relate to, the colonizer, this book approaches the colonial space as self-constructing and self-developing in a way that was not always – and not entirely – reactive to the experience of colonization.

Written by anthropologists and historians, Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic is a richly referenced study of the cultural practices of Portuguese colonies with respect to the idea of race and the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy which was naturally fostered by slavery and slave trade. The cultural element in the formation of the various identities within the space of the Black Atlantic is the focal point of the book. Often, authors refrain from discussing the political consequences and implications of cultural movements and practices. This is clear, for example, in an article by Assunção dedicated to Brazilian capoeira, and in another by Sansi-Roca about the colonial practices of magic, sorcery and ‘fetish.’ Although Sansi-Roca mentions the connection between the growing enthusiasm for fetish in nineteenth-century Brazil and politics, readers find little analysis of how the Church responded to this, and how the government interacted with both Church and the popular needs of Brazilian social groups. Capoeira was – and still is – in addition to being one of the national symbols, also an instrument of resistance (political, cultural and social) in major Brazilian cities, but readers will not necessarily grasp this from the narrative of Assunção's article. The piece nonetheless offers an excellent appraisal of the ways in which lyrics and dance in modern Brazil seek to restore the memory of a pre-abolitionist past in order to address the issue of race and hybridism. Likewise, Fry's bone-chilling considerations about the creation of a pseudo-‘post-racial-conflict' society in twentieth-century Brazil, especially after the establishment of a quota system to which universities have been invited to adhere, thus ensuring that a number of black and brown students are accepted based on the colour of their skin, misses the bigger political picture. What does the quota system tell us about the attitude of the Brazilian government? Aside from the cultural considerations of ethnicity and racially-defined identity, readers will need to find the political implications of these essential, identity-forming aspects of Brazilian culture elsewhere.

That said, Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic is an excellent book for those looking for a cultural approach to the difficult topic of Portuguese colonization. It is necessary reading for anyone wishing to understand the racial issue in Brazil from a comparative and non-isolationist perspective. Overall, scholars of Brazilian history will profit immensely from this book, as the diasporic character of Portuguese colonization emerges and makes clearer the specificities of the cultural discourses about race identity in the former Portuguese colonies.

Africa, Brazil and the construction of trans-Atlantic Black identities is an excellent complement to the book appraised above. Written from a diametrically opposed perspective (Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic is very much a product of a number of UK-based scholars, some indigenous to the Black Atlantic, some not), the articles presented in this volume almost exclusively belong to the non-European academic environment. In fact, this is the underlying feature of Zambaroni's argument, whose investigation of Mozambique's racial classification, being based on nineteenth-century pseudo-scientific European standards, contributed to the segregation of the non-whites. Likewise, Thiaw, Yon, and Souza emphasize the need to avoid generalization when looking at the construction of racial identities in the Black Atlantic by using a Guinzburg-like, micro-historic approach to Gorée-Island, Santa Helena, and Brazil. Lovejoy and Parés explore the essential elements of adaptation and integration of Africans into America and Brazil through the establishment of social relationships based on ethnicity and religion as well as a cultural identity that was rooted in race (the various Black ethnicities and religions in the American case, and the creation of candomblé in the Brazilian state of Bahia). In an unfinished article which sought to generalize and not to create specificity, Uroh examined the cultural dislocation and shock of transculturation of Black Africans and the construction of an identity which does not depend on geography. The volume's most original articles, one by Santos, and one by Stipriaan, offer case studies of the actual creation of racial identity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazil and Suriname, the first looking at racial classifications (with over twenty different categories for mulatto) and the second investigating name-giving at baptism as part of identity formation.

A final point about Africa, Brazil and the construction of trans-Atlantic Black identities: the volume would have benefited from tighter editing. A careful reader will find hundreds of typos and minor problems of inconsistent spelling, referencing, and citation. Although distracting, these minor problems do not diminish the value of the book to those interested in the racial element of identity-formation in Brazil.

Along the same lines, White negritude by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond is certainly a title that should intrigue historians interested in the problem of race and identity in Brazil and, more broadly, in the new world. The author examines the various discursive trends about mestiçagem in Brazil and their parallels and counterparts in Spanish and North America. Isfahani-Hammond focuses primarily on the literary and scientific discourse about raciality in twentieth-century Brazil. She chose Gilberto Freyre's sociology of plantation relations to investigate why Freyre chose to justify writing about blacks (and why others before him felt it was necessary or appropriate to do so). The main point of the book is to show how non-black Brazilians writing about the black race, slavery, and miscegenation helped form the modern ideas of both racial integration and disintegration in Brazil, and the exclusionary discourse that fabricated Brazil as the safe haven of African culture. The author's command of her literary sources is certainly impressive. At some points, however, it seems that she is still fixated on old stereotypes already dismissed in Brazilian historiography: for instance, the story of Princess Isabel granting slaves their freedom is one that disappeared from Brazilian schools in the 1960s.

The main downfall of the book is, ironically, also its greatest strength: the author creates an elaborate meta-literary narrative using all major texts about Brazilian slavery and race identity, but all viewed through Freyre's lenses (either actually, via Freyre's writings about the authors themselves, or figuratively, as the author herself uses Freyre's analytical categories to examine discourse on racial interactions). The problem is that Isfahani-Hammond does not always read Freyre closely enough, and this results in the text confusing the character whose discourse Freyre was analysing and the character's discourse itself (Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, Joaquim Nabuco, for example). Whilst the book offers a valid reading of Freyre, its ambitious point of departure is never fully realized, and certainly never fully proven. In conjunction with this work, readers will benefit from reading Maria Lúcia Pallares Burke and Peter Burke's Gilberto Freyre: social theory in the tropics (2008) for a more detailed analysis. Moreover, comparisons between Brazilian, Spanish, and North American writers disappear in the last fourth of the book, despite the fact that the fifth (and last) chapter would have benefited from a comparative perspective, which was one of the main attractions of both Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic and Africa, Brazil and the construction of trans-Atlantic Black identities. Similarly, while the author looks at the discursive practices of the authors she examined alongside Freyre in chapters 1–4 (Jorge de Lima, Nabuco and Caetano Veloso), this close look vanishes in the last chapter. Inexplicably, the author chose not to compare Alencar's and Machado's narratives, and instead the chapter relies solely on Freyre's depictions of these two authors. A comparison is not only necessary to her argument, but also important for readers, be they familiar with Alencar and Assis or not.

In terms of historiographical endeavour, the author certainly offers an extensive bibliography of Freyre studies. She dismisses Richard Benzaquén de Araújo's argument (possibly unfairly, as Benzaquén's point was quite different from the one she is trying to make) and hails Maria Luiza Pallares-Burke's book on Freyre (Gilberto Freyre: um vitoriano dos trópicos, 2005) very justly as a great breakthrough in the field. She is also very aware of current debates and legislation about race in Brazil. It is a pity that the volume does not have a separate conclusion to link all of the chapters together and make a few closing remarks about modern-day racial exclusion in Brazil.

III

Racial issues are not the only ones that have led to exclusion in Brazilian society and to the formation of the modern Brazilian state and identity. Political struggle, ideology, and state building offers an excellent case study of the debate involving regional versus central identity in imperial Brazil, examining the threats to central authority offered by various segregated groups in the province of Pernambuco from 1817 to 1850. Pernambuco was one of the key states in colonial Brazil, both economically and politically. Nevertheless, its importance decreased significantly in the imperial years as the coffee-growing states became more economically productive. As a result, the state became a focal point for discontented members of all social classes, festering into an explosive ground for competing political ideologies (liberal and conservative) and defence of different forms of government (central-imperial, republican, federalist). In a brilliant analysis, Mosher shows the intertwined dynamics of social and political struggles in Pernambuco and the construction of state and nation between 1817 and 1850. Examining the dispute between Pernambuco's oldest and most influential families, the role of Portuguese-born officials, of the propertied elites and middle classes in Recife (the capital) and in the rural areas of the state, Mosher shows the paradoxes of the Brazilian power struggle, as provinces such as Pernambuco sought to remain autonomous for their own benefit whilst, at the same time, looking to a strong centralized state at times of crisis.

Mosher's book is certainly a very interesting read for those who wish to understand resistance and rebellion in imperial Brazil, as Pernambuco was in fact the state in which many of the most important and perhaps most distinctive insurrections occurred. The Confederação do Equador offered Pedro I, Brazil's first emperor, the first serious autonomist challenge. Other revolts and rebellions revealed the multiple focal points of dissatisfaction with the new imperial regime's inability to solve social problems (the Setembrizada, organized by the lower classes), as too weak to protect the social order (the Novembrada, staged by military officers and propertied citizens), or as uninterested in the rural poor (the Cabanada). The apex chapter of the book is the one dealing with the Revolução Praieira (1848–50). This was the most critical threat to the imperial order in Brazil. Mosher ends his narrative by pointing to the fact that over the next two decades, the imperial state would face new challenges and threats, but the defeat of the Praieira represented an important step in maintaining the status quo between 1850 and 1870. These challenges are the object of attention of the books appraised below.

Isabel Orleans and Bragança: the Brazilian princess who freed the slaves appears to the careful reader as something of a misnomer. The book dwells extensively on the role of women in the royal family as political actors in late colonial and imperial Brazil. In fact, the book only starts dealing with Isabel's political actions at page 123. The narrative is very pleasant and detailed, although the author is much less critical of sources than an astute reader might have hoped. Much of the evidence the author used for his argument is sourced from biographies, memoirs, and interviews with surviving members of the formerly royal family. All historians are aware of the dangers (and benefits!) of using such materials but the author does not offer any methodological note. Still, this does not diminish the appeal of the book to those who are interested in gender-based studies of Brazilian history, or in the private lives, ideas, and habits of royalty.

Early republican Brazilian history textbooks used to dwell on the importance of the princess as the saviour of the slaves. This image played an important part in Brazilian identity because it was a woman and, moreover, an aristocrat, who was responsible for the noble feat of abolition. The princess and her story are, therefore, still close to the hearts of many Brazilians, and any book on the topic deserves much attention. However, this book is not scintillatingly analytical, and it does not offer new evidence that helps rethink the myth of the princess as the just liberator of slaves. The reader is left wondering why certain political events and their causes and effects are dismissed so quickly. Many angles of the imperial history of Brazil simply fall into a void. The political, social, and economic backgrounds of Brazil's major post-1850 crises somehow vanish, while Longo offers a highly romanticized view of Isabel, promoting the stereotype of the kind, anti-racist princess that was popular until the military dictatorship. The author misrepresents the role of several other famous Brazilian public figures. The part of Marquesa de Santos, for example, whose permanence in the Brazilian imagination is far greater than Empress Leopoldina's ever was, is never discussed, and she is only mentioned in passages that appear to exalt Leopoldina's alleged popular appeal. Without wanting to discredit the empress's magnetism as the first and foremost ‘Brazilian mother’, if the author had not been so concerned with arriving at Isabel's abolitionist ideas, he would have probably picked up on interesting considerations about the process of independence of Brazil and the political crisis that followed it, leading up to the fall of the slave-based economy and, as an inevitable result, of the monarchy. This process is not at all clear in Longo's book. He depicts Isabel's actions in great detail, but only from the perspective of her own conduct. The end-result is a book which seems to corroborate the old view of Isabel as a benevolent anti-slavery princess.

What Longo did not deliver in terms of historical analysis of the creation of Brazilian political culture and identity in the pre-abolitionist period, Schulz's The financial crisis of abolition does. The book discredits the accepted historiographical view that the Encilhamento was the final stage of an economic crisis whose seeds had been planted in 1822 with independence. Schulz offers the hypothesis that the crisis of the 1890s was actually an isolated event, not having been caused by any long-standing failure to address economic and political problems by the Brazilian financial leadership. The author argues that the Encilhamento was a specific response to some very bad decisions made by the imperial financial authorities in their attempt to appease the planters' oligarchy as slavery was abolished and no indemnification was paid by the government. Investigating the republic's first economic crisis, Schulz contributed much to an understanding of something which is still very much a part of Brazilian economic identity: the constant fear that governmental actions and external policies will cause economic catastrophes that will affect Brazil in the short and long term.

Indeed, The financial crisis of abolition offers a vital input to the understanding of the abolition of slavery from a political and economic perspective. The author depicts a very clear portrait of Brazil's economic history from 1830 to 1906, showing how the crises faced did not necessarily mirror international economic developments. Claiming that all nineteenth-century economic crises in Brazil were caused by a cyclical overextension of credit and lack of liquidity, Schulz argues that the fluctuation of Liberals and Conservatives in power led to a cyclicality of increase in circulating banknotes, subsequent inflation, and restricted amount of currency flows, in addition to the consequent economic downturn in the slave-based economy. New legislation led to increasing difficulties for planters wishing to borrow money once the Law of the Free Womb was passed in 1871 (declaring all individuals born after 1871 as free, even if born of slave parents). From that point and with the higher interest rates and demand for collateral for loans (as over half of all the mortgages in Brazil were overdue by over twenty-four months), coffee planters in particular started pushing for more favourable economic policies and for less interference from the central imperial government. The reserved liability laws of 1882, mirrored in English banking laws, were met with great discontent by the oligarchies, and the author argues this was a crucial point in the political crisis that led to the abolition of slavery and the fall of the monarchy.

After the abolition of slavery in May 1888, the government's unwillingness to offer indemnification to slave owners represented an enormous internal crisis in spite of increased foreign investment due to the peaceful transition from slavery to free labour. As a result, Schulz pinpoints the real beginning of the crisis caused by abolition to the period when the government extended interest-free loans to planters. This, in addition to the creation of bond-backed banks, formed the scenario in which corruption and fraudulent loans culminated in the Encilhamento crisis. This crisis, the first economic crisis of the Republic, is still in the minds of Brazilians as the first great republican failure, and as such it is an important part of the construction and maintenance of an economic identity in today's Brazil.

Offering a persuasive argument and a good analysis of economic trends in Brazil since the Republic was proclaimed in 1889, Schulz's book is a necessary read for those who have an academic interest in the economic history of Brazil. Furthermore, it is an elegant, easy read for those who, without specific academic interest in Brazil, are perplexed by the global economic implications of the racial question in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Brazil. The only possible weakness of the book is that it analyses ideas about abolition and economic liberalism/conservatism only tangentially, while a reader less interested in strict economics might find it necessary to delve into non-economic factors as well in order to understand late nineteenth-century Brazil.

IV

A rare example of a book approaching legal matters and the issue of political culture in Brazil is Dulles's Resisting Brazil's military regime. In the second of two volumes containing the biography of Brazil's most active anti-dictatorship lawyer, Heráclito Sobral Pinto (1893–1991), Dulles offers a very well-researched biographical sketch of Sobral Pinto's most famous cases from his anti-Getúlio Vargas years (the subject of the first volume, Sobral Pinto, the ‘conscience of Brazil’, published in 2002) to his involvement in attempts towards legal democratization during the military dictatorship. Dulles ends his analysis after the re-democratization of the 1980s and the first direct elections, which resulted in the unfortunate presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello. Dulles's book offers a fundamentally important piece to the puzzle that is the construction of modern Brazilian political identity, highlighting the debate between the supporters of the military regime and its critics in the political dispute that lasted over two decades.

Dulles worked extensively with Sobral Pinto's private papers and letters in order to compile an amusing and very persuasive account of his democratic spirit, vividly depicting the liberal lawyer and right-wing Catholic, who opposed the military regime and ensured obedience to Brazil's legal system. Sobral Pinto's defence of constitutionalism is as much a part of the construction of Brazilian political identity as any analysis of party politics in mid- to late twentieth-century Brazil, as it touches the intricacies of Brazil's legal system and the flexibility of jurisprudence in modern-day Brazil. Readers concerned with the years of military dictatorship and post-1985 re-democratization will find this volume particularly useful, as will those interested in the changing structure of Brazilian laws throughout the twentieth century. Famed for his concern with legality, morality, and human rights, Sobral Pinto's defence of the enemies of the military regime is especially enlightening to those who want to understand Brazilian democracy through the eyes of one of its most passionate defenders.

Also about the period of re-democratization, Holton's Insurgent citizenship examines the idea of citizenship in Brazil, in particular in two municipalities of the city of São Paulo, over the last two decades. Holston's argument opens with a familiar point: that all democracies are faced with the same dilemma, namely the fact that in spite of promising a more egalitarian and just order, they still often experience conflict. The varieties of conflict are more easily seen in large cities, where inequality and injustice often tend to foment volatile and violent reactions. The case of Brazil is no different, the book argues, from that of other democracies, but the type of citizenship and relations between individual and state, and between fellow citizens, are unique. Holston's anthropological bird's eye view of the city of São Paulo focuses his ethnographic study on two of its municipalities, Jardim das Camélias and Lar Nacional, as the loci of insurgent citizenship.

Holston lived in Brazil for many years. As a result, his insight is both enlightening and original. Noting language-related issues, like the use Brazilians make of the word ‘cidadão’ (citizen), as the ‘other’, Holston draws an alarming and yet accurate picture of the social relations in São Paulo since the 1980s. He analyses the struggles for a ‘casa própria’ (owned house), government emphasis on credit, the inclusive and exclusive legislation regarding land ownership, and the persistence of privilege in Brazilian society and culture. The presence of great inequalities, the author contends, leads to an instable and dangerous democratic order and the erosion of citizenship that is typical of the Brazilian case. Whilst democracy tends to equalize citizens, privileged groups in Brazilian society still make full use of political representation, law, and order to remain distinguished from non-privileged groups. Holston argues that since the fall of the military dictatorship, the unprivileged classes have become more averse to accepting social inequalities and manipulation of institutions that guarantee a stable and unjust order. The frightening result is a space of conflict, danger, and insurgency.

The persistence of inequality and injustice, Holston argues, in spite of the now clearly unfulfilled promises of Lula's government, is setting the stage for a very dangerous new century in Brazil. Showing how history continues to structure the present, Insurgent citizenship is not a call to arms in any way. Rather, it is a beautifully written, very sharp, and erudite analysis of the identities that emerge out of social relationships in one of Brazil's most explosive urban areas. A long discussion of race and an excellent comparative analysis of the Brazilian case and the inequality of racial relations within the United States, do not, fortunately, create a false association of inequality and injustice with racial class. The book is about social relations, public spaces, and institutions, and how inequality and subversion of justice are a common practice in modern-day Brazil throughout a spectrum of racial groups. In a sense, inequality, the book shows, has become an acknowledged part of Brazilian identity.

While Holston claims that democratic theory must be rethought, he does not offer an alternative conceptualization of democracy to fit Brazil's case; nor does he prescribe ways to reinvent the public space of participation and citizenship. Perhaps the book's main fault is its non-committal concluding chapter, which ends abruptly and offers nothing in terms of hope for the future – for Brazil or for democracy itself. Holston's book, nonetheless, represents an important effort towards bringing the inequality and injustice that are common-place in Brazilian ‘democracy’ to a wider audience, helping Anglophone readers re-evaluate the claims of the economic boom of President Lula's government and the impact (and scope) of this economic growth in Brazil.

As a final note, what becomes evident in reading eight brand new books on Brazilian history, plus a classic volume on Brazilian politics, is that the old disciplinary classifications and qualifications are still very much present in Brazilian studies in general. Political history books contain very little analysis of society and culture, and books about Brazilian culture avoid political matters almost entirely. Economic history does not cross paths with political thought, and considerations about gender seem absent from books dealing with political issues. What is needed in Brazilian scholarship is the kind of approach that crosses barriers between analytical modes. All volumes reviewed here could have benefited from asking questions that moved beyond their specific (and often clearly specified) methodological approach. While this is true of most historical narratives regardless of the nation being surveyed, scholars working in Brazilian studies are particularly desirous of analyses that are more comprehensive, as they are necessary when seeking a solution to the puzzling state of modern-day Brazilian economy, politics, society, and culture, without neglecting any of these fundamental spheres of national life. Comparative works seeking to discard old historiographical myths (rather than reaffirm them) will also be especially welcome for Brazilianist scholars, Latin Americanists, and those interested in the intricacies of the issues revolving around identity in developing nations.