The Color of Modernity ─ S緌 Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil

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 Centenario, the quadricentennial of Sao Paulo’s founding—this book shows how both elites and popular sectors in Sao 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 Sao Paulo became synonymous with prosperity while Brazil’s Northeast, a region plagued by drought and poverty, came to represent backwardness and Sao Paulo’s racial “Other.” This view of regional difference, Weinstein argues, led to development policies that exacerbated these inequalities and impeded democratization.

Barbara Weinstein is the Silver Professor of History at New York University. She is the coeditor ofThe Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, also published by Duke University Press, and the author ofFor Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964.