Brazil through French Eyes—A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics by Ana Lucia Araujo (review)

Travel books have been considered an important source of information for historians of Brazil and Latin America. Sometimes they have been so eagerly taken into account by scholars that they have been treated as reliable records of the daily life and habits of past societies. Additionally, some traveler-artist's pictures were seen as documents containing the first features of an allegedly intrinsic "identity," which, later on, would have emerged spontaneously along with the national independence movements. Ana Lucia Araujo's book about the travelogue Deux Années au Bresil (1862) written by the painter François-Auguste Biard (1799–1888) avoids these pitfalls. In the path opened by postcolonial studies, Araujo's work identifies in the travelogue a discourse which composes and legitimizes a colonialist vision built on stereotypes about Brazil and its multiracial population.

This book is an expanded version of a PhD thesis first published in French in Canada. In five thematic chapters, the book depicts how Biard's travelogue represents the rain forest, the Amerindians, enslaved Africans and Brazilian nineteenth-century society as a whole. The Author inserts Biard's text in a long tradition of French travelers' accounts of Portuguese America that began in the sixteenth century. Araujo identifies Biard's travel account as what she calls "tropical romanticism," a concept related to Edward Said's idea of Orientalism as a European discourse that helps the West to define itself. This remarkable book is also connected to Nancy Leys Stepan's work, Picturing Tropical Nature, in the way that it shows how tropical places and peoples were depicted in Biard's travelogue.

Chapter 1 focuses almost exclusively on Biard's journey in Brazil, although the painter had had previous travel experiences in North Africa, the Arctic, and the Middle East, among others. The artist landed in Rio de Janeiro in May 1858 and left the country in December 1859. During this period, Biard visited the provinces of Espirito Santo, Para, and Amazonas, where he made an incursion in the virgin forest.

In chapter 2, "Tropical Romanticism," Araujo briefly refers to other travelogues by authors such as Wied-Neuwied, Spix and Martius, Hercules Florence, Rugendas, and Jean-Baptiste Debret. She states that these travelogues, especially those written in French, combined to build the "tropical romanticism" (35) view of nineteenth-century Brazil, which reinforced the idea of a country inhabited by a racially mixed, lazy, and treacherous people. Even though Biard and the earlier travelogues shared a common view on Brazil in many aspects, Araujo argues that his narrative is an innovative approach to the "popular adventure novel" (69).

Chapters three and four analyze Biard's depiction of tropical peoples through the images and text of the travelogue. "Black Brazil as Satirical Commentary" shows how Biard criticizes the habits of a slave society without an explicit critique of slavery. Unlike other travelers, like Rugendas who was horrified by the deplorable conditions of the enslaved, Biard describes a slave auction as an amusing caricature (92).

Chapter four focuses on the representation of the rainforest, arguing that Biard was the only "well-established nineteenth-century European artist to visit tropical forests of Espirito Santo and the Amazonian region" (111). In Biard's account, the rainforest sometimes figures as a sort of antagonistic force, against which the painter, as a real hero, must fight in order to survive and overcome the dangers of the tropical world. Finally, in chapter 5, "Evil Natives," probably the most interesting chapter of the book, the author examines the narrative about Biard's contact with natives. In a clear colonialist attitude, Biard paid his Amerindian models with cachaça, necklaces, and tobacco. The artist also had many conflicts with his guides and servants. His perception about them was permeated by derogatory stereotypes. Araujo suggests that some stereotypes of Indigenous and black people would have an impact on later scholars' views, such as the "libidinous...