Brazil marked its centennial as an independent country in 1922. Claiming Brazil explores how Brazilians from different walks of life commemorated the event, and how this led to conflicting ideas of national identity. Civic rituals hold enormous significance, and Brazilian citizens, immigrants, and visitors employed them to articulate and perform their sense of what Brazil was, stood for, and could be. Gregg Bocketti argues that these celebrations, rather than uniting the country, highlighted tensions between modernity and tradition, over race and ethnicity, and between nation and region. Further, the rituals contributed to the collapse of the country's social and political status quo and gave substance to the debates and ideas that characterized Brazilian life in the 1920s and then under the transformative rule of Getúlio Vargas (1930—1945). Now, at the bicentennial of Brazil's independence, which itself unfolds in a period of political crisis and economic dislocation, and in the aftermath of several large civic events, it is an opportune moment to consider how Brazilians used civic rituals to engage with questions of identity, belonging, and citizenship one hundred years ago.
"Gregg Bocketti's new book offers a fresh examination of a key moment in the history of modern Brazil, the hundredth anniversary of the country's declaration of independence from Portugal. All the more exciting, it does so just in time for another Brazilian centennial and, perhaps, another inflection point in the trajectory of the South American giant. Not for these reasons alone, Claiming Brazil
James Woodard, Montclair State University
"Brazil's 1922 Centenary was marked by marches and monuments. Claiming Brazil asks why elites believed their own unifying rhetoric about public displays even as the events emphasized long-term fractures. Skillfully analyzing bifurcations like modernity/tradition, nation/region, citizenship/foreignness, and whiteness/Blackness, Gregg Bocketti shows how the Centenary contributed to the rise of the V
