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Book Review: Remaking the nation: place, identity and politics in Latin America

The first thing one notices about Remaking the nation: place, identity and politics in Latin America is its cover: it is metallic silver with a vintage Brazilian photograph. Unfortunately, as with many Routledge titles, more effort has gone into producing an eye-catching cover than into copy-editing, and numerous typographical errors mar the text. This may be read as a metaphor for the book as a whole. While its theoretical aims are attractive, its overall presentation is diminished by analytical gaps. In their Introduction, Radcliffe and Westwood assert that ‘The post-modern world of Latin America offers a vision of pluri-nations and ethnicized identities which is of crucial relevance for all parts of the world’ (p. 1). Indeed, Remaking the nation provides a timely, if imperfect, analysis of the contested terrains of nationalism and the construction of collective identities. Given the ongoing political–economic transformations influencing the third and first worlds alike, the issues addressed by the authors have relevance well beyond the postcolonial states of Latin America. Radcliffe and Westwood are concerned with analysing ‘social life as text’, and attempt to move away from literature, art and ‘high culture’ as the sole markers of the nation, toward an exploration of the quotidian. From this starting point, the authors set out to examine ways in which national identities are formulated, contested and reproduced through both official and popular discourse. The book is organized into seven chapters, each of which address a different theme relating to the work’s central premise: that the national imaginary is discursively constructed through the interaction of elements ‘external’ to the nation (flag, anthem, government, icons) and those ‘internal’ to it (the subjective experiences of citizens, place, class, gender). Perhaps the strongest of the seven is Chapter 1 (‘Imagining the nation: rethinking national identities’) in which the authors set out their theoretical framework. Here, Radcliffe and Westwood bring together Anderson’s ideas of the nation as imagined community and Said’s notion of imaginative geographies to explore the linkages between nation, citizenry, space and place. The authors introduced two concepts which serve as analytical tools in subsequent chapters. The first of these is the notion of geographies of identity: ‘the sense of belonging and subjectivities which are constituted in (and which in turn act to constitute) different spaces and social sites’ (p. 27). This concept is drawn from Lefebvre’s notions of ‘spaces of representation’ and ‘representations of space’, that is, they are both lived, 490 Book reviews