Review by Choice Review
The conscious desire to create a new cultural identity for a nation or region is no easy matter, as historian Ickes (Univ. of South Florida) demonstrates for Bahia, Brazil. For one thing, such an identity takes time to define. Ickes first looks at Bahia from 1930 to 1937, a period when President Vargas was forging cultural nationalism for the entire country. The author then explores what happened to this identity up to 1954 (when Vargas committed suicide), by which time it had been widely accepted that "'Bahia' was synonymous with African-Brazilian culture." Ickes's careful analysis rejects facile acceptance of hegemonic domination to explain the process of cultural identification. Instead, he examines the many actors who contributed to the formation of the concept of "Bahianess": the elite, the intelligentsia, the political parties, and the Catholic Church, as well as the marginalized people in the street, whose informal input mattered. While the results might bear resemblance to hegemony, the process as Ickes describes it is at once subtle and blatant, artificial and real, and certainly far from unidimensional and directional. A provocative tour de force. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. R. M. Delson American Museum of Natural History
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
