Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924–1968

Regional history has become one of the most vibrant subfields in Brazilian historiography. For over three decades, historians in Brazil and abroad have used the frameworks of “region” and “regionalism” to understand Brazilian culture, politics, and identities. In a field already saturated with high-quality work, Courtney J. Campbell has done something new and deeply important. Much of the existing work on regionalism in Brazil has used area-specific case studies to make broader arguments about the Brazilian nation as a whole, largely as it relates to questions of race and national identities. In Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924–1968, Campbell intervenes in the literature in a way that is as brilliant as it is logical: she goes to the next register of analysis, adding a third level—the world—to what has previously been studied as a two-tiered relationship between region and nation. If most scholarship has...