264 REVIEWS Beal, Sophia. Brazil Under Construction
REVIEWS Beal, Sophia. Brazil under Construction: Fiction and Public Works. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. 198 pp. ISBN 978-1-137-3247-0. Sophia Beal’s Introduction situates her line of investigation in the context of “cultural studies, new historicism, and postcolonial studies” (2). She maintains that once the Brazilian Empire (1822-1888) gave way to the Republic, the élite sought a new identity for Brazil, and their building of “connective” public works (e.g. water works, electricity, roads, highways, bridges, dams, and power lines) was an essential part of this effort. Beal considers these endeavors public insofar as they are government sponsored or endorsed and because they were undertaken, purportedly, to benefit the populace. But they “often have had the opposite effect” (3), which much of the literary work she examines points out. Concerning Brazilian literature, Beal accepts Antônio Cândido’s libel that “Latin American writers [before 1925] had copied […] styles […] passé in Europe [… creating much] mediocre literature” (13), which achieved no purchase abroad. She maintains that soccer, bossa nova, concrete poetry, and Brasília have achieved international stardom for Brazil. However, as Beal herself admits, “concrete poetry and Brasília appropriated European traditions” (16). Likewise, soccer and bossa nova are hardly autochthonous. Indeed, bossa nova began as a middle-class melding of 1950s progressive jazz with samba, hence its exportability. Likewise, it was the Brazilian style of and expertise in soccer that achieved international renown. In Chapter 2, “Conquering the Dark: Literature, Lighting, and Public Space in Rio de Janeiro in the Early 1900s,” Beal notes that in the Republic’s early days, its capital, Rio de Janeiro, seemed a pestilent backwater compared to either Montevideo or Buenos Aires.
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