Brazil Imagined: 1500 to the Present

Introduction

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee i n t r o d u c t i o n This book originated in a plan to write a large-scale history of Brazilian literature, showing how different authors have contributed to ideas of Brazilian national identity. Had I followed through with my initial aims, the result might have vaguely resembled Peter Conrad’s Imagining America (1980), which describes how certain nineteenth-century English writers who visited the United States imagined the country for their respective readerships. (Niagara Falls, for example, was a mandatory stop for Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and others, and it assumed iconic status in their works.) My plan changed, however, when in the course of researching in the Lilly Library and Newberry Library’s Brasiliana collections I began to realize the importance of early cartographic iconography to the formation of the Brazilian colonial imaginary. From cartography, it was a short step to studying early woodcuts and copperplate engravings, a topic that I had addressed in an earlier study of Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s 1971 Como era gostoso o meu francês (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman), a tongue-in-cheek film about sixteenth-century European expansionism and indigenous anthropophagy . Before long, my book had grown to include not only literature but also maps, book illustrations, architecture, painting, films, and broadcast media, and my history of the nation ranged from the sixteenth century to the present. Although my study is broad, even panoramic, I should perhaps make clear at the outset that it is focused on various forms of art or mass communication and takes a particular approach to the question of national identity . By using this last term I mean to designate anything that contributes to the individual subject’s sense of belonging to a nation. Does national identity therefore actually exist? Yes, but as I hope to show, it always exists discursively, as a representation or as an idea that is open to contestation and change over time. How does it take shape in Brazil? In many ways— for example, we can observe its workings through a study of law, politics, religion, and even historical linguistics. My own interests, however, are slightly apart from these matters and indeed from the economic relations,  | brazil imagined technologies, and institutions that determine ideology. Unlike Benedict Anderson’s valuable and highly influential Imagined Communities (1983), which explores many of the material conditions that gave rise to ideas of nationhood, my book exclusively addresses imaginary representations; thus I speak only about the cultural superstructure and allude indirectly to certain concerns of historians, political scientists, and anthropologists. For instance, I have little or nothing to say about constitutional law, definitions of citizenship, geographical-territorial boundaries, industrial economies, or popular customs. I do not deal, except obliquely, with the development of print cultures or representational technologies, and I do not write about the formation of “public spheres” such as the ones that have been theorized by Jürgen Habermas. My subject is the relatively manifest ideological effect of fine art, literature, architecture, film, and television on the shaping of “Brazilianness.” The modes of cultural expression I have chosen to analyze are obviously determined by economic and political forces, but in themselves they contribute to the shaping of national identity and give us a window onto political and social struggles. They are worthy of study in their own right and have been given relatively little attention, at least in the academic world, along the lines in which I have tried to discuss them. The process of selecting writers, artists, and works was challenging, partly because I was covering five hundred years in a changing culture. In lieu of an encyclopedic survey of the arts, I constructed a series of historical moments in which one or more art forms become dominant or strongly influential. Thus my discussion of the colonial period focuses chiefly on cartography and visual arts, while in my chapter on the nineteenth century I give most of the attention to literature. When I reach the twentieth century, the materials under consideration are increasingly public, so that I discuss modern architecture, city planning, films, and television. I have also tried to explore the ways in which both foreigners and native-born Brazilians have imagined the country. Anyone who has studied Brazil knows that there are myriad accounts of the nation written by foreign travelers. In recent years, scholars José Carlos Barreiro, Felix Driver, and Luciana Martins have focused attention on nineteenth-century illustrations and writings by...