Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), pp. 324, $108.00, $27.00 pb.

Abstract

Brazilian society and culture, and that its customs are still influential for the population of all, or almost all, other regions. In short, regionalism is not only about ethnic and cultural mixture, but regional mixture as well. In other words, regionalism acknowledges and nourishes ethnic and cultural mixture across regions. If not, how can one interpret the entrance of folk and country music into Brazilian radio and TV charts, broadcast nationally since the 1980s? And what of the effervescent appropriation of this music by mass media companies? But the author has deep expertise in Brazilian studies and seeks to amplify, in the book's epilogue, his analysis of the linkages between race, regions and national identity across the debate over the imagined community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In addition to the introduction and the six chapters that make up the book, chronologically organised, the epilogue grapples with the difficult challenge of discussing the status of Freyre's ideas today and in the future. Historians, social scientists and intellectuals, in general, cannot ignore Eakin's words on the future of mestiçagem. They are relevant to the assessment of contemporary policies conducted to respond to racial inequality. For example, is the binary white/non-white affirmative action system suitable in such a heterogenic society as Brazil? Readers will find a contribution to this issue in the book's epilogue. This reviewer agrees that Becoming Brazilian is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for non-academic debates. The book has the virtue of providing a compelling synthesis of the history of Brazilian culture with clear and accessible language.