The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil
The Prestes Column: An Interior History of Modern Brazil
by Jacob Blanc
Duke University Press, 2024 eISBN: 978-1-4780-5908-0 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-2582-5 | Paper: 978-1-4780-3008-9 Library of Congress Classification F2537.B536 2024
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In The Prestes Column, Jacob Blanc offers a new interpretation of the legendary rebellion, in which a band of rebel officers and soldiers marched fifteen thousand miles through the vast interior regions of Brazil between 1924 and 1927. Blanc’s analysis of the Prestes Column is a showcase of what he calls “interior history.” At a pivotal moment in national politics, the long march of the column came to embody the constructed duality of Brazil’s interior: a space that was seen by coastal elites as simultaneously backward—in relation to the more modern coast—and dormant, an expanse of untapped potential waiting to be brought into the nation. Drawing on a range of materials, from officers’ memoirs and local eyewitness accounts to physical memorials and government archives, Blanc’s framework of interior history helps explain the column’s initial rise to fame and also its enduring legacy across the twentieth century, offering a new approach for the study of space and nation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Jacob Blanc is an Associate Professor of History and International Development Studies at McGill University, author of Before the Flood: The Itaipu Dam and the Visibility of Rural Brazil, also published by Duke University Press, and coeditor of Big Water: The Making of the Borderlands between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.
REVIEWS
“Jacob Blanc has established himself as one of the leading historians of Brazil of his generation, and in The Prestes Column he takes a genuinely fresh and innovative look at one of the most intriguing episodes in twentieth-century Latin American history. He has identified key issues raised by the history of the Prestes Column that no previous studies have explored, and he has adopted methodologies that will allow us to appreciate the full import of this movement.”
-- Barbara Weinstein, author of The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil
“Visiting backroads long neglected by historians, and with keen attention to place and narrative, Jacob Blanc brings a much-needed critical eye to the iconic, mythologized Prestes Column. Asking hard why questions, Blanc reads Brazil from the inside out and provides a sophisticated framework for thinking about history, myth, and the many worlds that lie beyond Brazil’s coastal centers, whose own mythologies, Blanc shows, reflect and have taken shape in tandem with those of the interior.”
-- Marc A. Hertzman, author of Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Note on Terminology and Orthography vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Rebellion and the Backlands 21 2. The Accidental March 32 3. Bandeirantes of Freedom 51 4. Competing Visions of the Sertão 70 5. Bandeirantes in Bahia 90 6. Mapping a Myth 114 7. Constructing the Knight of Hope 130 8. Political Conflict and the Spatial Legacies of Tenentismo 160 9. Visions of the Future: Culture and Commemoration 185 10. Memory Battles at the Turn of the Century 216 Epilogue: Memory Sites in the Interior 233 Notes 249 Bibliography 275 Index 289
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