Courtney J. Campbell. Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968. Pitt Latin American Series. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Illustrations. 314 pp. 60ドル.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8229-4621-2.
Reviewed by Thomas Rogers (Emory University)
Published on H-LatAm (July, 2023)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Brazil’s tightly contested 2022 presidential election pitting the former two-term president Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva against the crypto-fascist incumbent Jair Bolsonaro went to a second round of voting. During the final count, a major protagonist emerged on social media platforms: the country’s northeastern region. The only region where Lula won a majority of votes, the Northeast supported the Workers Party candidate at a rate of nearly 70 percent and pushed him to victory. Memes and commentary about the region’s role in the outcome featured abundant stereotypes, including racialized imagery, portrayals of poverty, and references to cultural authenticity. The Northeast’s prominence supports Courtney J. Campbell’s claim that the region has been Brazil’s "foil and its epitome" (p. 9).
Campbell ends her story decades before the 2022 political drama, but readers of her excellent book will finish it fully equipped to interpret the recent memes and understand their historical roots. In her argument, a coherent northeastern identity began to consolidate almost exactly a century before. The time span she covers, between the mid-1920s and late 1960s, saw the crystallization of regional discourses through a series of episodes in which the Northeast projected itself into the world. These moments generally coincided with national rejection or marginalization, but the region moved "out of place" and refused the subaltern role assigned to it (pp. 190-91). Especially after acute droughts in the late nineteenth century, poverty and migration threatened to subsume the region’s identity. But many northeastern voices told stories of a region that was richer and more complicated than just a place in need of salvation.
In her first two chapters, Campbell covers the period when the Northeast became the Northeast, a story tied to national politics and intellectuals’ debates. The owners of political power in the comparatively more industrialized South eyed northeastern writers and artists warily, suspicious of a supposed separatism in their regionalist movement. Campbell narrates the period well and builds ably on the well-known work of Durval Muniz de Albuquerque. She parses the movement and its participants, offering a compelling explanation of the timing and meanings of the well-known social scientist Gilberto Freyre’s Regionalist Manifesto of 1926 (1955). In the remaining five chapters, Campbell approaches the languages, tropes, ideas, and feelings about the Northeast through specific stories. She describes the four celebrated fishermen who sailed 1,500 miles to Rio de Janeiro in search of presidential support for their coworkers; northeastern women entering beauty competitions and negotiating regional, national, and international body politics; soccer fans working to secure World Cup games; communities engaging the United States through military bases and mass consumption; and young activists in the 1960s trying to build political momentum one newly literate voter at a time. In each case, Campbell underlines how actors in the region projected it on a supranational level, insisting on recognition and relevance.
The serial treatment of these moments of national and international visibility for the Northeast makes Campbell’s book a model for constructing individual chapters that contribute to the whole while also standing alone. She encourages readers to approach the chapters in various orders or one at a time, and they can be assigned singly without worrying about students floundering without the rest of the book’s architecture. All readers will appreciate the numerous illustrations Campbell includes. These work well with her arguments about the centrality of fundamentally visual phenomena to the Northeast’s definition—human phenotypes, for instance, and markers of poverty or typical clothing. Also, the instantly recognizable woodcuts featured in the popular poetry booklets (cordel literature) that Campbell draws from in many chapters.
The region is a concept that is good to think with. Regional identity sometimes takes firmer shape than national identity, Campbell argues, making the region a likely portal through which people can identify with the nation. It is an analogous process to the one Alon Confino describes in his book, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997), of Germans identifying with the nation via their local homelands. The reverberation between region and nation might not take place everywhere in Brazil, however. One imagines, reading Campbell, that the Northeast is the most legible region in the country, less the quintessence of a Brazilian region than an outlying extreme. For this reason, it would be interesting to extend the book’s approach comparatively. I wondered, too, how much the lieutenant revolts of the 1920s and Luís Carlos Prestes’s famous march around the country—including through the Northeast—affected regional dynamics as they unfolded precisely when the regionalist movement flowered.
Campbell navigates deftly through a broad literature on regions in Brazilian historiography and beyond. She notes that professional history’s orientation toward the nation-state for a long time made little space for the region as an analytical category. In recent decades, though, historians have embraced that scale and offered nuanced treatments of regionalization, regional identity, and the relationships between region and nation. The list of contributors would be too long to mention, but among the key themes cutting across the literature, race is probably the most prominent. Among the historians exploring the salient divisions and discourses of Brazilian cultural geography, Frederico Freitas (Nationalizing Nature: Iguazu Falls and National Parks at the Brazil-Argentina Border [2021]) and Jacob Blanc (Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil [2019]) have featured the theme in their respective books and by convening a symposium on notions of the interior in Brazil. As Campbell explains, regionalization has its Brazilian version but it also fits within a global paradigm of the twentieth century. Her convincing spatial analysis in the book fits well alongside her illuminating 2016 article in Past & Present canvassing patterns of spatial analysis in the journal over time.[1]
Against portrayals of the Northeast as diverging from Brazilian modernity, Campbell argues that the very creation of northeastern cultural identity was a cosmopolitan, modern process. The popular culture movement and mass literacy campaigns in the 1960s lifted up tradition while opening new political horizons. This was an example of the region "out of place"—not waiting to be saved but instead building a vision of the future. When the newspaper writer Antônio Callado joined other journalists visiting the region at the time, he declared the broad peasant and rural worker mobilization a "pilot revolution" for the country.[2] The movement fell victim to the 1964 military coup and Campbell ends her book with the regime’s tightening repression. When Bolsonaro, an admirer of the dictatorship, ran into fierce resistance from northeastern voters, a steady stream of TikToks featured the phrase "The Northeast arriving to save Brazil." Read Region Out of Place to grasp how the Northeast has arrived repeatedly over the decades.
Notes
[1]. Courtney J. Campbell, "Space, Place, and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History in Past and Present," Past & Present 239, no. 1 (2016): 23-45.
[2]. Antônio Callado, Tempo de Arraes: Padres e Comunistas na Revolução sem Violência (Rio de Janeiro: José Alvaro Editor, 1964), 31.
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Citation:
Thomas Rogers. Review of Campbell, Courtney J., Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2023.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=58187