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Courtney Campbell's Region out of Place offers an engaging examination of the construction of regional identity in Brazil's Northeast that looks beyond the nation and the usual subjects of such accounts. From intellectual networks to World Cup football matches, Region out of Place shows that northeasterners looked to the world to cultivate a sense of belonging and identity while hedging against the inferior place assigned to them within Brazil's cast of regions, especially vis-à-vis economically ascendent São Paulo. In so doing, Campbell innovates relative to what is now a highly developed and mature historiography on regionalism in Brazil that has hitherto largely restricted itself within the nation's borders.Campbell achieves this by including new actors alongside fresh appraisals of more familiar faces across seven thematic and loosely chronological chapters. Intellectuals like Gilberto Freyre still figure prominently (chapter 2), for instance, but the focus shifts to the international circuits of fellow regionalists through which Freyre developed his ideas of region and nation and in turn, influenced incipient regionalisms elsewhere. Equally compelling, artists, fishermen, filmmakers, popular authors, and pageant contestants played important roles, demonstrating that popular culture broadly constituted a key arena in which regional identities were forged. In some cases, northeasterners looked at events abroad such as with the Miss Universe pageant in the United States (chapter 6) and film festivals (chapter 7). In others, they grappled with notions of foreignness within Brazil as in popular cordel literature about northeastern migrants and the region's periodic droughts (chap. 1). More often, the world came to the Northeast, including through Orson Welles's film on four northeastern fishermen (chapter 3), discourse on romantic partners of US soldiers stationed there in World War II (chapter 4), World Cup matches (chapter 5), and the Movimento de Cultura Popular, inspired by a French educational movement (chapter 7).The picture that emerges of northeastern identity is as ever-changing and fraught with internal tensions as ever, including in terms of race, a major focus of previous works on the subject. A particular highlight in this regard is Campbell's discussion of the ambiguous place of the city of Salvador, widely regarded as a center of Afro-Brazilian culture and identity, within the Northeast. Through press coverage of Miss Universe pageant contestants from the region, we see how some northeasterners regarded Salvador and coastal areas of Bahia as sometimes belonging and sometimes not to the Northeast. By considering the global, fractures within the subnational come into focus.The paradox that regionalism has had a profoundly global life cycle points to the emergence of a distinctive spatial imagination, one intimately concerned with questions of authenticity and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Agricultural regions ranging from Oaxaca, the Scottish Highlands, southern Italy, and the US South, to name but a few examples cited by the author, functioned as both foils to more industrialized, ostensibly metropolitan counterparts and epitomes of national authenticity in a rapidly changing world. This account of Brazil's Northeast reconstructs this process from one of its peripheries, showing that regions and associated identities offer a "framework for understanding our place in the nation and the world" (11). Region out of Place should serve as a generative reference point for scholars of regional and national identity regardless of their nation or area of focus.
Daniel McDonald (Wed,) studied this question.