Scholarly attention has frequently turned towards prominent questions about national identity that preoccupied Brazilian politicians and intellectuals during the First Republic (1889–1930) and the first Getúlio Vargas era (1930–45). Thomas Skidmore once said that turn-of-the-century debates about the character of the nation and its people took place ‘in the shadow of two determinisms: race and climate’. Intellectuals and elites worried about the connections between the two, and their implications for mental and physical health, criminality and economic development, among other things. One familiar narrative of Brazilian history casts this process as fairly uniform and explicitly national, with Gilberto Freyre and his ideas about racial democracy playing a central role from the 1930s onwards. But the country had just passed through a century of regional upheavals, most rooted in local concerns and some pursuing secession. And in spite of Vargas' centralising initiatives, conversations about identity took on a distinctly regional flavour; Barbara Weinstein has made this point clearly in her contribution to Nancy Appelbaum et al. (eds.), Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (North Carolina University Press, 2003).
From the vantage point of the Brazilian south, the first decades of the century crystallised the north-east's reputation as a place where climate exerted a bullying force and racial demographics skewed depressingly away from the European toward the African. Rather than revisiting these familiar ideas from that perspective, Stanley Blake examines north-eastern identity from the inside out (which is not to say that locals did not sometimes come to similar conclusions). Blake's book documents the creation of an image of the homem do Nordeste, or man of the north-east, born of the ruling class's needs and desires. Seeing their power ebb toward rapidly developing southern states, north-eastern economic and political elites helped to foster a notion of their labouring classes as pliant, racially uncompromised and vigorous. Drawing on state legislative papers and on documents from the executive branch, public health agencies and Recife's medical and law schools, Blake tells a minutely detailed story of how politicians and intellectuals crafted an enduring identity in dialogue with broader trends.
The core of the book treats Pernambuco, which saw itself for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the heart of the north-east. Blake follows some developments in Bahia, such as the influential racial and criminological work of Nina Rodrigues, but the story unfolds largely in Pernambuco. Some Pernambucanos, such as the state's long-time public health director, Amaury de Medeiros, find roles all the way through the book, as Blake tracks their reaction to and innovations of new ideas about race, science and region. Given the book's level of detail, it is not surprising that much of the narrative actually focuses on the state capital, Recife. The politicians, legal scholars and medical professors who feature in this careful intellectual history mostly worked there, after all, carrying out research and applying public health policies. Blake pays particular attention to the powerful interveners appointed by Vargas during the 1930s and 1940s who followed conservative political paths that reinforced the power of the landholding elite. He highlights divergences between these politicians and more progressive-minded intellectuals such as the psychiatrist, Ulysses Pernambucano.
Blake consistently refuses to cast regional intellectual developments and trends as simply appendages of larger processes, whether national or international. His exposition of decidedly local political and intellectual dynamics sometimes cuts against the idea of even a regional identity, much less a national one. Social hygiene policies, for instance, were ‘local in origin and addressed local concerns’, even as they drew on ideas circulating from outside the region (p. 115). Similarly, in examining mental hygiene research, he emphasises that he is not ‘concerned with outlining the ways in which [local reforms] differed from similar reforms in Brazil and abroad’. Rather, he focuses on how psychiatric and psychological health efforts in Pernambuco ‘reflected concerns about local and regional social and economic development and how it was used to formally define north-eastern regional identity’ (pp. 151–2). Eugenics and racial science and biotypology found highly localised expressions as well. Blake takes seriously the north-eastern intellectual milieu as a place with its own character and history.
The notion of ‘identity’, of course, is always relational, and therefore the north-east's identity was fatally tied to other parts of Brazil (and to Europe or North America, for that matter). And since the people defining north-eastern identity in this story were political and intellectual elites, we must consider their concerns with national political and economic exigencies. Blake acknowledges that they consciously configured their image of the north-east and the nordestino in relation to (and sometimes in contrast to) national identity. The outside, ascribed characteristics that play into identity formation receive less attention in his book, no doubt because other scholars have addressed the dynamic processes of national refiguring that took place during the First Republic and the Vargas years. The book adds considerable regional depth to the investigation of racial science that Lilia Moritz Schwarcz pursued in her national-level survey, The Spectacle of the Races (Hill and Wang, 1999), and it dialogues well with Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr.'s literary study, A invenção do Nordeste e outras artes (Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, 1999).
The book's seventh and last chapter synthesises Blake's main arguments and engages most energetically with charged historiographical questions, including interpretations of the work and influence of Gilberto Freyre. Blake acknowledges Freyre's crucial role in the process of regional identification but offers contextual details of this distinctive thinker's emergence. He provides a rich picture of the intellectual and political context in which the north-eastern brand of regionalism emerged in the 1920s and developed thereafter. Blake's assiduously researched book should find an audience among all scholars and graduate students interested in these crucial questions about the complex processes of Brazilian identity formation.
