Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues

Introduction: This Our Disunion

1 Introduction This Our Disunion De todas las literaturas sudamericanas, ninguna es tan poco conocida entre nosotros como la del Brasil [. . .] Sin ser un caso común, á veces un nombre dotado de mayor resonancia, rompe la indiferencia reinante y vence la incomunicación intelectual que separa las secciones de nuestro continente. Sólo por una rara excepción, una obra nacida bajo una estrella propicia, adquiere entre nosotros carta de ciudadanía. —Martín García Mérou El Brasil intelectual (1900) Pouco nos interessam, a nós brasileiros, os assuntos americano-espanhóis. Nossos olhares, nossos pensamentos, nossos gostos embicam quase sempre para o Velho Mundo [. . .] Os mais dados às longas itinerações preferem quase sempre, ao sentir a majestade imponente dos Andes ou a magnificência mirífica da selva amazônica, o gozar da civilidade serena das ruas londrinas ou da apatia risonha de Paris. [1] —Sérgio Buarque de Holanda “Santos Chocano” (1920) In a 1993 call-to-arms for comparative Luso-Hispanic studies, evocatively titled “Down with Tordesillas!,” the critic Jorge Schwartz observes the “problem of integrating” Brazil into a coherent idea of Latin America and calls for a “critical reflection that is capable, when considering Latin America, of duly including Brazil” (186–87). Schwartz’s call should, of course, 2 Introduction be extended to address the traditional lack of attention paid by Brazilian writers and scholars to their literature’s ties to Spanish America, and to that of Spanish Americans vis-à-vis Brazilian literature. Further, the scope of Schwartz’s analysis may be expanded beyond Latin America, to include other contexts (peninsular , transatlantic, etc.) in which Luso-Hispanic relations are staged. Schwartz presents comparative Luso-Hispanic studies, which we may succinctly define as an academic approach that calls for sustained comparative analysis of literary and cultural actors, artifacts, and discourses originating in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas, as an emergent phenomenon. He exhorts his readers to join the “new generation” of critics, “dedicated [. . .] to the elimination of the line of Tordesillas” (195). Here the boundary established by papal fiat in 1494, dividing the known world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, and which defined the ostensible border between Spanish and Portuguese America, stands in for a long period of literary and cultural non-communication between the Spanishand Portuguese-speaking spheres, during which substantive cross-border dialogue has been the exception rather than the rule, and misunderstandings and differences of opinion over matters geopolitical, economic, and intellectual have been all too common. This long history of Luso-Hispanic “disconsonance,” as David William Foster has termed it,1 inevitably puzzles those readers outside LatinAmerican and peninsular intellectual circles, as well as those academics working in disciplines other than LusoBrazilian and Hispanic studies: surely the linguistic proximity of Portuguese and Spanish, along with centuries of intertwined history dating back to the Roman occupation of Iberia, or Hispania , would account for a greater degree of mutual influence? While the notion of a Luso-Hispanic relationship characterized by vibrant linguistic and thematic cross-fertilization may be appropriate for medieval and early modern Iberia, in which Galego-português (linguistic ancestor to modern Portuguese) was a prestige language for lyric poetry across the peninsula, and during which men of letters such as Luís de Camões (c. 1524/25–1580), author of the Portuguese national epic Os Lus íadas (The Lusiads, 1572), wrote in both Portuguese and Castilian , this became less and less the case as Portugal and Spain 3 This Our Disunion developed as distinct national polities with competing imperial agendas. This tendency toward intellectual and cultural disengagement became especially pronounced following a sixty-year period of Iberian dynastic union (1580–1640) under the Spanish Habsburgs, a time frequently remembered in Portugal as one of occupation.2 As the two peninsular kingdoms moved away from the center of European imperial power and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries slid toward political and economic marginality, the vibrant Luso-Hispanic literary and intellectual dialogue of earlier times definitively gave way in favor of a shared gaze toward the new centers of global influence—that portion of western and central Europe além Pireneus (“beyond the Pyrenees”), and the Anglo-American world of the North Atlantic. This was such that by the nineteenth century, Latin American and peninsular intellectuals would invariably learn French long before they became conversant in another...