Days of National Festivity is a lens on the Brazilian Empire in the nineteenth century as explained through the once capital city of Rio de Janeiro. Hendrik Kraay closely examines several ‘days of national festivity’ when civic ritual and participation imagined the new Brazilian nation and revealed meanings of political independence and Brazilian governance. The author argues that ‘the celebration of days of national festivity served as the occasion for Brazilians to debate the meaning and nature of the political institutions of the constitutional monarchy established in 1822–24’ (p. 2). The book is therefore a political history focused on civic ritual, which Kraay contends may have attracted more people into politics than the electoral system or other political events at the time. The author contends, however, that sources do not provide accurate evidence of the extent of popular political participation in these national festivities. The sources Kraay uses to analyse Rio's national celebrations are newspapers and periodicals, travellers’ accounts, correspondents’ reports and parliamentary debates. Throughout his work, the emphasis on civic ritual and political debate is stronger than any argument about the development of Brazilian civil society.
Interested in the connections between state and society, Kraay's Days of National Festivity explores the cultural realm of nation building, significantly expanding former, more one-dimensional narratives of the Brazilian Empire. Scholars of Latin American independence will appreciate the first chapter's focus on the construction of the Brazilian monarchy in the 1820s, after independence from Portugal. Civic ritual and official portrayals of Pedro I, the first Brazilian emperor, raise the question of an existing national community in the early years of Brazilian independence. The first chapter opens this discussion by examining representations of Brazil's Independence through the civic rituals that honoured Independence Day on 7 September. Other important days of national festivity that Kraay highlights are the promulgation of the Brazilian constitution and Dom Pedro II's birthday. The author identifies in all celebrations not only nationalist symbols and a Brazilian justification for monarchy, but the conservative and liberal politics that swung the pendulum throughout the nineteenth century.
The book's chapters mirror the dynamics between liberal and conservative political groups, including the ‘radical challenge’ of the 1830s, the Regresso of the 1840s, the Paraguayan War of the 1860s, and the decline of the Brazilian Empire in the 1870s and 1880s. While Kraay's analysis is chronological, he gets closer to discussing popular participation in the last chapters, towards the end of the nineteenth century. By the 1870s, liberal (and mostly republican) political elites questioned the national festivities that celebrated monarchy and empire. The general population, in contrast, seemingly remained sympathetic to Pedro II, as war with Paraguay and the gradual abolition of slavery cast an uplifting light on the Brazilian monarchy. Kraay's analysis thus provides further evidence of the monarchy's general popularity among Rio's population at the turn of the century. During this transitional period, which resulted in the eventual decline of the Brazilian Empire, Kraay illustrates how ‘the debates about the constitution, independence, and the monarchy continued and even intensified’ (p. 270). While the first half of the book is dedicated in great detail to the description of national festivities, it is in the last chapters that the focus on monarchists, republicans and Rio's residents illustrates the climate of a declining empire and the attempts at consensus building.
The questioning of official ritual eventually appeared in Rio's press in the 1870s and 1880s, such as in the satirical Revista Illustrada. Here, representations of Brazil often took the form of a subjugated Indian. By then, the Romantic era had ended and so did nationalist depictions representing Brazil as a docile Indian in an idealistic countryside. Before the decades leading to the empire's end, the Romantic project for a national theatre and a national opera between 1820 and 1864 were the only site, according to the author, where ‘[i]ssues of slavery, the place of Indians in the nation, and the appropriate cultural forms for the nation were debated through the newspaper discussion about theater galas’ (p. 239). It is this seventh chapter titled ‘The Empire on Stage, 1820s–1864’ that best summarises how Rio's elites culturally negotiated colonial legacies and the endurance of slavery after independence. The last (tenth) chapter titled ‘Popular Patriots and Abolitionists’ brings the issue of slavery into clearer perspective, illustrating the Brazilian monarchy's turn to abolitionism and the abolitionist movement's impact on days of national festivity, which now reflected the messages of anti-slavery campaigns. Both chapters (7 and 10) could be read as stand-alone pieces.
Days of National Festivity is a book for a specialist audience, but scholars of Latin American independence and postcolonialism will find potential if they are willing to read through pages of detailed description. The research in primary sources is rich and extensive, and so the portrayal of the Brazilian Empire from the perspective of political elites is well-formed. Kraay's work on the Brazilian Empire is also of interest to graduate students learning about nineteenth-century Latin American politics. The main focus on Brazilian elite political culture shows the conservative-liberal dialogues that similarly took place in other Latin American republics of the nineteenth century. The 576-page book is available in hardcover and electronic form, consequently making it difficult to adopt as a text for undergraduate teaching. The book still provides undergraduate instructors with good material for organising a lecture on nineteenth-century nationalism in Latin America or Brazil.
