Book Review: Blessed Anastácia: women, race, and Christianity in Brazil

Abstract

aspects of the national ethos. At the same time, however, the book inadvertently serves to illustrate one of the very basic limitations of the constructionist approach. In one of the most provocative passages of the book, N. Stargardt observes that ‘most scholars who have taken up ideas such as the ‘‘invention of tradition’’ or ‘‘imagined communities’’ have done so within discrete national units, thereby subtly reinstating at the centre what they claim to be so keen to displace’ (p. 23). With only a few exceptions, this holds entirely true for the essays collected in Imagining nations. The unrelenting preoccupation of most contributors with a single national example and the consistent absence of some comparative referential framework do indeed have the curious but unmistakable effect of enhancing an impression of national distinctiveness and uniqueness, and affirming thereby one of the principal tenets of those who imagined the nation in the first place. This particular critique must be deployed carefully, however, and it is useful not so much for faulting the essays delivered here as for indicating possible fruitful paths for future research. To pick but one example: having considered how British national space was defined and organized through a ‘culture of cartography’, would the logical next step not be to invert and broaden the approach, looking now at cartography and mapping per se as a practice and a mechanism for constructing national spaces – and through this nationhood itself – in the modern period? This would immediately establish links across the ‘classical’ European nations such as France, Germany and Russia, and it would link to more recent examples of nation-building as well, beginning with postcolonial North America and extending eventually over much of the globe. All nations, after all, map themselves, and it is probably fair to assume that this activity has always and everywhere been meaningful in terms of the articulation of national identity. In response to the question ‘how were nations invented?’ Imagining nations provides much valuable material. The question now should become: how can we generalize about the processes of construction across national experiences, and what further insight may be gained thereby into the condition of nationhood?