Sentencing Canudos : subalternity in the backlands of Brazil /

Using a subalternist perspective, this scholarly, theoretical study asks how certain strategies of representation attain hegemony in the process of national formation. Johnson (Univ. of California, Irvine) organizes each chapter around a particular theoretical issue or concept: voice, sovereignty, state, culture, and transculturation. At the book's center is the 1896-97 peasant revolt in Canudos (in the interior of Bahia, Brazil) against the country's new republican government. The rebellion was put down with great difficulty and cruelty, and it stands as a landmark in Brazil's development as a sovereign state. The rebellion was immortalized by journalist Euclides da Cunha in his eloquent classic Os Sertoes (1902; Eng. tr., Rebellion in the Backlands, 1944), and Johnson attributes the enduring hegemony of Da Cunha's powerful interpretation to the synchrony between his desire to integrate, rather than exterminate, the backlander and the overall project of national integration. She regards the lack of synchrony, and poor form, of contemporaneous accounts as responsible for their having been forgotten. Johnson also compares lireratura de cordel, or popular literature, with newspaper accounts to demonstrate the interface between elite and popular modes of representation. This extensively researched, thought-provoking analysis illuminates not what happened at Canudos but how discourse constituted the event and influences judgments today. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. D. L. Heyck Loyola University Chicago