This is a study of regions, in which one region's political actors came to see their homeland—the state of São Paulo—as the rightful hegemon over the rest. Barbara Weinstein describes how regional superiority was imagined and how this imaginary was produced and consumed. She argues that “racialized, classed, and gendered discourses of modernity have been constitutive elements in the production and reproduction of inequalities—material, political, cultural—naturalized through association with a particular geographic space” (p. 337).The Color of Modernity refers to a São Paulo imagined by its political elites as modern, law-abiding, and racially white. In this portrayal, the state was the Brazilian federation's natural leader, a claim in which paulista ideologues regarded the majority of states, especially those in the Northeast, as populated by impoverished Afro-Brazilians. Brazil's interests were identified with São Paulo's, and São Paulo's with those of its dominant political and economic elites. The Greeks had a word for it: synecdoche, the figure of speech in which the part is substituted for the whole, or vice versa. Weinstein focuses on two moments: the 1932 uprising and the 400th anniversary of São Paulo city's founding in 1954.The author adopts what she calls a neo-Marxist approach, which “treated the definition of region as inherently unstable” and “insisted that regional history could not be understood outside the context of national, and even global, history” (p. 8). Neo-Marxist or not, this seems to me a sensible way to address the regional problem. But while this characterization of region as “always subject to change” (p. 343) works for Northeast Brazil, of course it doesn't fit São Paulo at all, where state and region are coextensive with unchanging political boundaries.In the First Republic (1889–1930), São Paulo's political elite had viewed their state as first among equals, the other two peers being Minas Gerais and, by the 1920s, Rio Grande do Sul. The 1930 revolution, led by Rio Grande and Minas, overturned paulista dominance. From October 1930 to July 1932, paulistas chafed under the Vargas dictatorship, made more grievous by the imposition of a young military officer from Pernambuco as Vargas's “interventor” in São Paulo.The assumption of São Paulo's right to rule became more intense in the first 18 months of Vargas's dictatorship as paulistas called for a constitutional regime and identified their state with progress, whiteness, and democracy. State leaders simultaneously conflated demands for regional primacy and constitutionalism. In these years, the paulista vision of the regional cleavage was simplified to pit São Paulo against “the rest,” rhetorically reduced to the allegedly Africanized, impoverished, and authoritarian states of Northeast Brazil.On July 9, 1932, the paulista political class defied the central government by overthrowing Vargas's interventor and imposing a respected elder statesman of their own. A brief civil war followed, in which 50,000 to 60,000 paulistas took up arms, of whom about 600 may have died before the central government triumphed. Assuming, at the most, that the same number of better-trained and equipped government loyalists died, the total number of deaths would still amount to less than 13 percent of those killed in the Federalist revolt of 1893–1895, the only real civil war of the republican period.Defeated, paulista propagandists with some justification took credit for forcing Vargas to call a constituent assembly in 1933. In their propaganda projecting a united front in São Paulo, the elite found it advisable to include immigrants in the paulista fold, even blacks who fought in São Paulo's Legião Negra. That unit accounted for 2,000 to 3,500 soldiers, segregated as they probably would not have been in any other Brazilian state. Weinstein also studies the white middle-class stereotype of the roles of women, conspicuously visible but subordinate to male actors.The second moment of especial regional pride was São Paulo's quadricentennial. For the occasion a large green space was opened in the central city—Ibirapuera Park, with buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer. An international fair commenced in October, featuring a Bienal de Arte modeled on Venice's. A massive monument to the bandeirantes (pathfinders and slave catchers) was unveiled, and radio programs emphasized São Paulo's role in Brazilian history. While European and Japanese immigrants were lauded in the festivities, blacks were only honored after protests were lodged against their being ignored. The quadricentennial commission, in response, raised a statue to “the Black Mother,” who in slavery had nursed white children. Nordestinos living in São Paulo were only celebrated in folkloric events.The author examines the paulista narrative of the state's role in Brazilian history, the contradictions of which are manifest. For one thing, ideologues developed a myth of the all-conquering seventeenth-century bandeirante, who laid Brazil's claim to the whole subcontinent. He was acknowledged to have Native American and European forebears, but somehow this did not prevent his appearing as white in later representations. For another thing, the paulista solution to regional disparities in wealth and civic culture was a process of racial homogenization in which (somehow) white genes would overwhelm those of racial inferiors. Notions of white superiority coexisted with the notion of a racially harmonious society, in line with a Brazil idealized by Gilberto Freyre. Freyre's later idealization of a racial democracy was “folded into the narrative of paulista whiteness and progress without disturbing its fundamental elements” (p. 294). Apparently such confusion did not bother the propagandists.The Color of Modernity shows how a regional approach can advance the study of race relations in Brazil and demonstrates the intricate interplay among race, class, and gender. Moreover, it expertly reveals the complex relations between regional and national identity.