The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil
Jens Andermann,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007
ANY EFFORT to escape the inconclusive debates that have riven mainstream theories of nationalism by reorienting the focus of study away from the overtly political or cultural qualities attributed to nationhood and towards discourse and narrative should be welcome, not least because this is potentially the only way of avoiding becoming trapped in the cage of melancholy – nationalist historiography itself. Jens Andermann’s examination of nationalist imaginaries – the formative portrayals of national heritage, territory and ethnic composition by new states beginning to assert their hegemony over society – is therefore a worthy contribution to a small, but nonetheless growing, corpus of literature exploring the construction and reproduction of national ideology as an inventive process linked to elite statebuilding in the region. Andermann examines attempts by states in Brazil and Argentina to establish and express their hegemony through explicit visual representations, concentrating on museum displays and maps to draw out discourses on the national in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While The Optic of the State is written in a prose that is at times dense and opaque, this book is worth persevering with as it represents a genuinely original contribution to this field at a time when a focus on the “national question” is being restored in Latin America and elsewhere. – GO’T
