Micol Seigel . Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States.(American Encounters/Global Interactions.)Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press . 2009 . Pp. xxii, 386. Cloth $89.95, paper $24.95.

Abstract

Carmen Miranda and barely clad mulata women dancing samba are among the varied stereotypical images of Brazil that have circulated internationally in the twentieth century. A parallel foreign fascination has focused on Brazil's racial configurations, as historians, social scientists, and journalists have visited the continent-sized country to decipher its understandings of racial categories, identities, hierarchies, and discrimination. Numerous scholars have written comparative studies of how these racial systems operate differently in Brazil and the United States. Most of these analyses argue for the existence of alleged all-encompassing, nationally bound social and cultural configurations of skin color and their relationship to class, status, and people of mixed races. In embarking on a self-described transnational history of interactions among North Americans, Brazilians, and Europeans that rejects this comparative methodology, Micol Seigel seeks to uncover the complex webs of interchange that were spun in the 1920s as Afro-Brazilians sought to occupy larger political, cultural, and social spaces in the decades after abolition. As the title of this broadly conceptualized study proclaims, power relationships framed these exchanges, placing Brazilians, and particularly Afro-Brazilians, on an unequal playing field with those with whom they interacted at home and abroad.