In this talk I will place the ongoing discourse of São Paulo’s exceptionalism in a larger global framework, and discuss similar manifestations of racialized regional resentment in places as apparently distinct as northern Italy and lowland Bolivia. I will also consider how different narratives of modernization and development circulating transnationally have served to bolster or challenge paulista claims of exceptionalism.
Prof. Barbara Weinstein is Silver Professor of History and Past President of the American Historical Association. Her publications include The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983), For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo (1996), and The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (2015).
