Courtney J. Campbell's Region Out of Place is an insightful work of cultural history that examines ‘how groups within a marginalized region of Brazil’, the Northeast, ‘asserted their world belonging, relevance, and uniqueness through the creation of regional cultural symbols and institutions’ (p. 2). Chapter 1 sets up the book by presenting data on droughts and out-migration, and describing emerging conceptions of the Northeast as an area whose economic problems required national state intervention and tutelage. Starting with Gilberto Freyre's 1952 publication of his Manifesto regionalista de 1926, Chapter 2 shows how his ideas about the importance of mixture (both racial and cultural), ecological appropriateness, popular cultural practices and ‘cultural vulnerability’ (p. 56) remained largely unchanged as they gained widespread currency. Regionalism was not separatist but ‘an alternative form of nationalism’, more authentic for ‘it proposed valuing each region's culture’ (p. 52).
Chapters 3–7 constitute linked essays that examine key moments of discussion about Northeastern identity, not just in the periodical press, but also in literature (including the popular cordel [chapbook] genre), music, film, and even liquor-bottle labels. Chapter 3 examines the 1941 voyage of four jangadeiros (raft fishermen) from Ceará to Rio de Janeiro to demand professional recognition and labour rights, followed by Orson Welles’ abortive 1942 effort to make a film about their exploits. The impact of US military bases in Northeastern cities and the women who established relationships with US servicemen are the subjects of the next chapter. Derided as ‘Coca-Colas’ for their embrace of the foreign, these women crystallised the ambivalence that many Brazilians felt toward the US presence and the associated changes.
The successful effort to bring a World Cup football match to Recife in 1950 (Chapter 5) ‘created a centerpiece for a discussion of regional inequalities, representation, shame and pride’ (p. 128), as recifenses organised a fundraising campaign to bring their stadium up to international standards. Chapter 6 examines the press coverage of the four Northeastern women crowned Miss Brazil between 1954 and 1968, with particular focus on Bahia's Maria Martha Hacker Rocha (who placed second in the 1954 Miss Universe pageant).
The final chapter turns to more conventionally political questions, the Movimento de Cultura Popular (Popular Culture Movement, MCP) in the early 1960s and understandings of banditry. The MCP was a literacy campaign with the explicit political goal of enfranchising adults who could not read and write (between 1881 and 1988, illiterates lacked the right to vote in Brazil) that presented the Northeast as ‘strong, resistant, and mobilized’ (p. 172). This leads to a brief discussion of contemporary thinking about social banditry, which similarly highlighted social injustices and interpreted banditry as resistance.
Several recurring themes run through Region Out of Place. People from all walks of life participated in the discussions that defined regional identity; regionalism was no ‘lifeless intellectual token to be posited at conferences’ (p. 61). Regionalism had important international dimensions, both in the sense of the broader consideration of regions as constituent parts of nations that took place elsewhere in the twentieth century and in Freyre's connections with US scholars like Francis Simkins and Rüdiger Bilden. Freyre thus ‘leveraged international intellectual support to limit foreign cultural influence on the region’ (p. 43). International influences on Brazil – Welles’ film project, the US bases, the World Cup, Miss Universe contests, and the concern about the region's revolutionary potential in the 1960s – all prompted reflection about Brazil's relationship with the outside world (and in the case of the pageants, efforts to find Miss Brazils who met US beauty standards). Whenever Northeasterners stepped ‘out of place’, out of their expected subaltern role, the national press worried that the Northeast might shame Brazil. Thus, the four jangadeiros were welcomed in 1941 as heroic navigators and humble supplicants for labour rights, but derided as ‘poor, dark-skinned Northeasterners’ (p. 86) for playing themselves in Welles’ film. Ultimately, an anonymous ‘jangadeiro became an archetype of northeastern folklore’, as documented in the six (!) cachaça labels that illustrate this point, while the four fishermen's names were largely forgotten.
The problematic place of Bahia in mid-twentieth-century depictions of the Northeast is another recurring theme. Salvador's emerging Black identity meant that the state capital did not fit well within the mestiço Northeast, although the state's vast sertão (backlands) clearly belonged to the region. Bahia's press did not embrace the campaign to bring a World Cup game to the Northeast and Bahia's Miss Brazils (not recognised as Northeasterners by Recife's Diário de Pernambuco) followed Carmen Miranda's lead in wearing Afro-Bahian baiana costumes (which made them legible to US audiences). Campbell concludes about Hacker: ‘it was easier for a white woman with a German last name to stand in as Afro-Bahian than it was for Bahia to accept being part of the Northeast – a region defined not only by race, but by poverty and decline’ (p. 159). The profound cultural influence of José de Alencar's indigenist novel, Iracema (1865), about the relationship between a sixteenth-century Indigenous woman and a Portuguese man, which results in the birth of a mestiço (mixed-race) son and her death, is another theme. The novel was invoked in discussions about the Coca-Colas, 1955's Miss Brazil (Ceará's Emília Corrêa Lima), and the jangadeiros, characterised as caboclos (people of Indigenous and European ancestry), not Afro-Brazilians.
Campbell ultimately highlights the unresolved contradiction in portrayals of the Northeast. The region simultaneously represents Brazil's ‘authentic’ culture and exemplifies the country's problems: relative poverty, underdevelopment, and potential for rebellion. Inevitably, her sources skew toward those that might be characterised as elite, whose silences and omissions she carefully parses. At times, I wished for more extensive discussions of the cordel literature (the closest to a popular voice), which usually come at the end of the chapters and sometimes seem rushed. Nevertheless, Region Out of Place helps to explain the still problematic place of the Northeast in Brazil.
