Temporal metonyms are convenient pillars of national histories. In the case of Brazil, mentioning the years 1888, 1889, 1930, and 1964 recalls key chapters in a 500-plus-year saga. However, historian Gregg Bocketti contends that “none carries the import and resonance evoked by 1922” (6), when Brazilians celebrated 100 years of independence. Internationally famous events such as the Rio de Janeiro-based Independence Centenary International Exposition and São Paulo's Semana de Arte Moderna occurred against this larger commemorative backdrop. Bocketti shows how a broad swath of centenary events intensified debates about Brazilianness, regionalism, history, and the future. The book holds that the centenary simultaneously promoted cohesion and “deepen[ed] the divisions of the national community” (11).
This important work of synthesis ties together multiple thematic and topical threads. Many of these—particularly sport, civic ritual, historiography, and immigration—claim vast and rather autonomous scholarly literatures. Bocketti explores their interconnectedness through curated object lessons that engage commemorative events and polemics on their own terms, and as reflections of a larger sociopolitical gestalt. Core examples like the centenary exposition and myriad sporting events have been popular topics of study. Still others—like the “raids” on the capital undertaken by poor fishermen and Portuguese aviators—will perhaps be less familiar to most readers. While combining “official” and unsanctioned occasions is generative, choices in terminology are less clear. Indeed, the book marshals a set of seemingly interchangeable designations (for example, rites, rituals, and performances) to discuss all manner of happenings.
The book enlarges the scope of analysis in other significant ways. Perhaps its most decisive contribution entails looking at Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the avowed “cores” of the Brazilian nation, but also beyond them. The book reveals that these metropolises’ nation-building projects were not only non-hegemonic, but were in fact belied by Brazil's deeply entrenched regionalism. Official commemorative events contrived in the Southeast were met with enmity, indifference, and skepticism farther afield. This is shown to be true in Pernambuco and Rio Grande do Sul, two states gripped by political tumult (both endured federal interventions, in 1922 and 1923, respectively), whose contemporary and historical conflicts “drew on deep wells of regionalist identity and resentment” (85). The book also examines how immigrants and foreign residents used the centenary to “claim Brazil, in ways both tangible and ideological” (231). Although the book has the most to say about communities of Portuguese, Italian, and, to a lesser extent, German descent, it will serve as a useful point of departure for those wanting to understand other groups’ modes of self-assertion.
Bocketti casts a wide net in terms of source material. The bulk of his analysis draws on nearly 50 periodicals published across seven states and captures a broad swath of ideological persuasions and readerships. Particularly intriguing are the book's 22 black- and-white images, which range from political cartoons to photographs of centenary celebrations throughout Brazil. These items are neither enumerated in a list of figures nor fully explicated in the text. The subordinate position of these visual texts is something of a missed opportunity because they offer important clues about those who attended and experienced such events, and how they, at the same time, might have left their own marks on these moments of “time out of time” (8).
The book will be of interest to both specialist and general readers. However, both audiences would benefit from having a timeline of the events cited throughout. For scholars in and of Brazil, the book deepens one's understanding of the events and debates that presaged, or perhaps hastened, the collapse of the Old Republic between 1889 and 1930. Readers might ask whether the Revolution of 1930 and the rise of Getúlio Vargas were as inevitable as the book implies. It is also debatable when what might be called Brazil's “long” (rather than calendar-bound) 1922 came to a definitive end. Whatever the case, Bocketti's well-written and thought-provoking book leaves much to ponder regarding memory and belonging, particularly in the wake of the 2022 bicentenary.
