Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (review)

This lucid, elegant analysis provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of Brazil's Canudos War in the 1890s, an epic struggle that pitted a heterodox backlands religious community against a newly formed republican state. The author seeks to explain how and why Os Sertões (Euclides da Cunha, 1902) achieved canonical status, in part by comparing its content and form to contemporaneous texts that have since faded into relative obscurity. For Johnson, the story of Canudos serves as an exemplar (if not the exemplar) of how writing and culture operate to construct the modern nation state, to mediate between a government and its citizenry, and to naturalize cultural categories that might otherwise seem arbitrary. Her discursive analysis is convincing and beautifully written. Regrettably, the short space of this review is inadequate to do justice to its subtlety and complexity.

As the title indicates, the subaltern studies school informs the author's theoretical approach, particularly Ranajit Guha's notion of counterinsurgency. In Johnson's estimation, none of Canudos' chroniclers successfully "speak" for the subaltern, even if Da Cunha manages to sustain the conceit that he does. This illusion is the key to his text's endurance, she argues, "because he acts out the 'regulative idea' of intellectuals speaking for the people" (p. 18). To further support her interpretation, the author deftly and appropriately incorporates theoretical concepts articulated by Homi Bhabha, Slavoj Žižek, Jules Michelet, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Laclau, Angel Rama, and Fernando Ortiz, among many others.

As backdrop, Johnson documents the complexity of competing notions of state and citizenry that existed in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Brazil. Johnson cites numerous non-canonical texts including travel accounts, government documents, and the popular press to demonstrate that, prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the community's leader, Antonio Conselheiro, was seen primarily as an inoffensive oddity who was basically benign. As a lay religious leader in the beato tradition, he promoted order, stability, and a modest prosperity for his followers. His first clash with the police was similar to countless other backlands skirmishes, none of which were inscribed in historical memory.

However, the escalation of hostilities with a not fully consolidated Republic caused his actions to be reinterpreted and rendered an otherwise-ordinary Canudos extraordinary. The relatively poor, nonwhite inhabitants of Canudos with their monarchical sympathies and preference for material simplicity bore little resemblance to an elite-imagined citizenry. Da Cunha, in turn, grappled with the perceived reality of a people who lived beyond the modern Brazilian state as he simultaneously sought in them the basis for a unified and authentically Brazilian national identity. For the most part, however, Da Cunha and other contemporaneous observers denied sertanejos political agency and dehumanized them variously as inchoate mobs, forces of nature, monsters, and even undifferentiated polyps. Johnson handily debunks the prejudice that they were too primitive to engage in meaningful political protest by linking the 1870s Quebra Quilos revolt to the Canudos community, both of which had good reason to resist modernizing, intrusive reforms by the Brazilian state.

Johnson concludes by comparing Da Cunha's rendering with two other period texts, Os jagunços (Afonso Arinos, 1898) and O rei dos jagunços (Manoel Benício, 1898). Arinos's rendition is unabashedly monarchist, steeped in romanticism and quaint local color. Benício, who served briefly on the front as a war correspondent, moves incoherently between fictional and non-fictional conventions in a series of fractured vignettes and romantic entanglements, rendered "authentic" by his use of sertanejo songs, legends, and dialect. Unlike da Cunha, neither author uses Canudos as an "empty signifier." And perhaps for that reason, both have been forgotten. In comparison, Os Sertões "remains a surface on which political meaningfulness is negotiated. It is a place of judgment about the possibilities and limits of politics. A sentence" (p. 173).