Myths of Early Modernity: Historical and Contemporary Narratives on Brazil and Angola

In this article I will argue that for the cultural history of S lavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System (Solow 1991), studying The Lettered City (1996), by the Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama, is very useful. Rama’s basic idea was to link the colonial period to the process of independence and modern democratization in the republics of Latin America. According to his argument, the lettered city is a main agency and a cultural reference board for illustrating the complexity of this development from a long-term perspective. The colonial “dream of an order” dating back to European expansion overseas designed a spatial mapping that maintains its impact until today. Such an organization delivers a framework for reading social hierarchies and tensions against which the differential philosophies can be laid out. This lettered city includes everything written and otherwise made visual.

For this lot of material evidence of the lettered city and its ideas on the rise of the Atlantic system, the work of the Dutch poet and philosopher Gaspar Barlaeus—or Caspar van Baerle, who lived from 1584 to 1648—might serve as a paradigm. In the context of their work on slavery and the slave trade in the so-called Dutch period, Barlaeus is familiar as Barléu to Brazilian historians. Barlaeus’s volume Rerum per octennium in Brasilia (1647), regularly consulted in Brazilian research, described the maritime route between Brazil and Africa, and with special emphasis on Angola. In O trato dos viventes (Trade in Human, 2000) about the formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Luiz Felipe de Alencastro resumes Barlaeus’s position by pointing to his premonitions concerning the Christian “justice” of trading humans. Barlaeus is thus seen as questioning this trade, and I will analyze Barlaeus’s treatise in the first part of this essay. Having thereby provided a background, I will compare his vision with its critical projection in three recent narratives by Angolan and Brazilian authors on this same subject.

The Dream of an Order Laid Out by Gaspar Barlaeus

Although the slave trade is not a main concern in Rama’s The Lettered City, it must be noticed that he repeatedly refers to the presence of African languages in America. His point of departure, however, is the insertion of the lettered city into a European network of mercantile relationships, within which the urban settlements overseas functioned as agents of the empire’s “dream of an order.” Rama’s central point emphasizes the effect of long-term continuities and stressing the role of the city founded by Europeans from colonial times. Its three overlapping hemispheres—the ordered city, the city of letters, and the city of protocols—offered colonizers a center for their administration and defense, which obeys the

same regulating principles as the checkerboard: unity, planning, and rigorous order reflecting a social hierarchy. . . . Circular plans perhaps conveyed even more precisely than square ones the social hierarchy desired by the planners, with governing authority located at the centre and the living spaces assigned to respective social strata radiating from the centre in concentric circles.

(Rama 1996, 5)

The principles of this physical mapping and the distribution of space find their echo in writing from the sixteenth century and succeed in creating autonomous space from the imposed norms:

While the lettered city operated by preference in a field of signifiers, constituting an autonomous system, the city of social realities operated in a field of people, actions, and objects provisionally isolated from the letrados’ chains of logical and grammatical signification. . . . This labyrinth of signs is the work of the letrados, or collectively, the achievement of the city of letters. Only the letrados could envision an urban ideal before its realization as a city of stone and mortar, then maintain that ideal after the construction of the city, preserving their idealized vision in a constant struggle with the material modifications introduced by the daily life of the city’s ordinary inhabitants.

(Rama 1996, 27–28)

In accordance with Rama’s view, the methodical planning of this idealized...