Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Throes of Democracy: Brazil since 1989

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2010-078

1527-1900

Edward A. Riedinger,

Youth, Politics, and Society

The Throes of Democracy: Brazil since 1989 is a volume in a series that traces the historical context of developments in nations and regions since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Previous volumes have included China, Mexico, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the two Koreas. For a Brazilianist, the year 1989 is significant not only in an international context but also a national one. Brazil’s new constitution was promulgated in 1988. The following year marked the first direct election of a civilian president in 29 years, inaugurating what has proved an extraordinary sequence of constitutional presidential successions. This work by Barry McCann is a concise, compelling narrative that folds the micro aspects of Brazil’s courte durée into the macro aspects of the moyenne durée. It recognizes the perennial axis of change/no change in Brazilian history and the development of a new core, throbbing along issues specific to the renascent democracy.The first of these developments is the rise and mass acceptance of the Left. In the late seventies and early eighties, the Left magnetized the issues and consolidated movements opposed to the military regime. The presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva solidified support for the left by reconciling socialist policy with international capital and regional clientelism, wedding “ideology and physiology.” Two socioeconomic issues further characterizing contemporary Brazil are the rise of urban violence and the conflict between agribusiness and landless workers. The former divides populations living in cities along fault lines of a formal, gated, market economy against an informal, clandestine economic sector dominated by the drug trade. The tensions of this confrontation are fostered by and benefit from corrupt police and judiciary forces. Rural tensions pit the landless proletariat rooted in a slavocracy against whirlwind global demand for Brazilian cultivated and extractive primary products.McCann further identifies three issues of a sociocultural nature. The cornucopia of Brazilian music and culture has become even more fecund as regional centers expand their technical and marketing prowess, producing ever more creative genres and hybrids. The rapid advance of Pentecostal and Evangelical religions and the acceptance of Afro-Brazilian spiritism have patently eroded one of the country’s most historic characteristics, its premier position as Catholic. Moreover, there is now official government recognition of Brazilian racism. Further blending and spreading of Brazilian culture have occurred through mass adoption of digital media, founded on the country’s pioneer role in South America in developing television, electronics, and computers.Those who teach Brazilian history will appreciate that McCann offers an exceptional classroom resource. How often in such courses one is forced, for lack of time or consolidated materials, to give short shrift to “Brazil today.” This work both concisely and insightfully fills that lacuna. Moreover, it offers a sorely needed example of integrated, interdisciplinary historiography. Over the past decade and a half what was once a dearth of textbooks in English on Brazilian history has become a plethora. However, each disappoints in varied ways: total lack of or most paltry attention to geography; passing coverage of the colonial period, losing the weight of land and labor patterns in Brazilian history; or emphasis on the modern period and particularly economic and political issues, giving a country of such color no more character than the gray columns of a GDP printout.Brazil from 1922 to 1960 was in the cultural vanguard of international modernism with exceptional production in painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, building and landscape architecture, interior design, classical and popular music and dance, poetry, fiction, belles lettres, theater, drama, cinema, photography, and public and private philanthropy. The extraordinary phenomenon of this “renaissance in the tropics” is rarely recognized or incorporated into general histories of Brazil. Furthermore, although Brazil is increasingly seen as a Luso-African phenomenon, its nature as a Mediterranean-Atlantic amalgam still lacks recognition or development. Indeed, how intriguing, even startling, that so much of the Roman Mediterranean persists in a vast tropical land of the southern hemisphere: code law, basilica architecture, coliseum stadia, stone mosaic walkways, Lusitanian Latin, purple-clad hierarchy, município government, patriarchy, a household lareira, and social and religious practices based on patron-client relations.McCann has his Brazilianist roots in Brazilian music (Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil). This perspective, in conjunction with a firm, penetrating grasp of economic, political, and social issues, demonstrates what is marvelous in a país de maravilhas. The ultimate issue judging democracy is the extent to which it reflects a stakeholder society. Citizens have sufficient material means to participate in preferred political, social, and cultural processes. McCann has carefully delineated lines along which to measure such stakes. Brazil has never been a country for principiantes (beginners). How gratifying that it is now developing a democracy so intriguingly multifaceted.