Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, Duke University Press, 2015).

In The Color of Modernity, Barbara Weinstein examines two episodes of the history of São Paulo— the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution and the 1954 IV Centenário—to show the convoluted, yet discernible discourses that constructed the ideas of race and nation in twentieth-century Brazil. She traces the rise of São Paulo, the state and the city, as an imagined regional Other: a place where referents associated with whiteness and modernity—progress, industrialization, middle-class politics, civilization—differentiated it from the rest of the country—an array of backward places, with poor development and stagnant economies, filled with racialized bodies, poverty, and misery. The book draws from a wide range of sources besides usual archival materials—memoirs, photographs, posters, statues, films—to challenge the traditional linear narrative of the triumph of nation over region. Weinstein’s work yields a compelling portrait of the (re)making of paulista identity and its shifting conceptions of race, progress, democracy, and Brazil.

Building on the work of Edward Said in his classic Orientalism, Weinstein shows how these discourses were both cause and effect of São Paulo’s exceptionalism. The identity that emerged from the idea of a distinct, racially, and economically superior region brought with it and made thinkable a set of policies, practices, and events that eventually shaped its development. Representations are not just representations; by shaping the production of otherness and setting a distance between “us” and “them,” they pave the way for subjugation, conquest, and empire. And as shown in The Color of Modernity, depictions of otherness say more of the makers than of the referents.

Weinstein uses this framework to explore paulista intellectual’s claims to whiteness, modernity, and political authority. Their imagined superiority warranted greater political autonomy, a louder voice in national affairs, and the right to go to war to get them in 1932. Representations and discourses are, then, more than causes or effects—they entail a politics, a process that blurs the line between what is thinkable and what is not. “Regionalist discourses,” Weinstein writes, “not only offered paulistas a language with which to understand and explain the rapid changes occurring in their region, but also helped to shape the form and directions those changes would take.”

The book blends political history with social, art, and intellectual histories to argue that the events of 1931-1932 and their later remembrance in the 1950s escaped the logics of preexisting “interests,” ideas, and identities. Weinstein carefully navigates between simplistic “top-down” and “bottom-up” approaches and offers a narrative from the middle: a combination of orchestration by elites and popular participation, of presence and erasure in visual representations, of the local and the national. While the idea of modernity looms large in her analysis and in the words of her subjects, the concept only got a brief explanatory paragraph that does not lay out what kind of interpretive work is it doing. “Europe,” “whiteness,” “liberalism,” and “race” seem to be part of a list of complicated, interrelated words that obscure as much as they reveal—and they deserve deeper questioning.

The Color of Modernity shows that the imagined and real separations between São Paulo’s and the rest of Brazil did not entail discarding national narratives. Paulistas usually framed the making of region and nation as, if not constitutive, at least not mutually exclusive political projects. Region is not the antithesis of nation, but a site to image in it and invent it. Whether it was by following the model of São Paulo—a model that implied whiteness, order, industrialization, and civilization—or letting the city be the locomotive pulling a line of empty cars, the regional discourse could form the base for a national project: an unequal, exclusionary, defeated, and racialized one, but a project nonetheless.