Unlike 1992 in Spanish America, last year's commemorations of the
quincentennial of Portugal's arrival at what today is called Brazil
did not promote the publication of significant academic works in
the field of Colonial studies. A first explanation for this may
reside precisely in the fact that much had already been discussed
and published in 1992, and to a lesser extent, in the years preceding
and culminating with 1998, when Portugal commemorated the 500 years
of Vasco da Gama's first voyage to India with numerous publications,
sponsored by the "Comissão Nacional para os Descobrimentos
Portugueses."
Among last year's publications, only a handful of new titles in
Colonial studies are worth mentioning, such as Eduardo Bueno's best-selling
introductory series Terra Brasilis, about the first Portuguese
expeditions to the New World, or the book by veteran music critic
José Ramos Tinhorão, entitled As Festas no Brasil
Colonial (Ed. 34); but these books can hardly be described as
academic. There were also a few reeditions of classic primary and
secondary texts, which may promote Colonial studies in the near
future: travel narratives, such as the several editions of Caminha's
"Letter of Discovery," and the captivity narrative by
Hans Standen, which also had a feature film and a CD-ROM based on
it; or some seminal works on colonial history which had been out
of print for several years, such as Capistrano de Abreu's O Descobrimento
do Brasil. Perhaps the most important original contribution
to the field was O Trato dos Viventes, by historian Jose
Felipe de Alencastro--a study discussing the constitution of Brazilian
society in the Atlantic trade between Bahia and Angola.
These works were not enough to reshape the field of Colonial studies,
and seem to have been assimilated into the general spirit of the
commemorations, synthesized under the slogan "Brasil 500 Anos."
There were in fact a great number of publications associated with
the 500 years, but mostly, they were concerned not with the colonial
encounter in the sixteenth century, but with the necessity of a
new encounter: that is, the encounter of Brazilians with Brazil.
In other words, the general message was that Brazilians did not
know Brazil, and therefore that Brazil had to be re-discovered.
What is apparent in such a project is the notion that there is a
division not only in the representation of Brazil (there is a true
and a false, or hidden, country), but also within Brazilians (there
are those who know and those who do not know Brazil)--and that this
division must be resolved.
The notion of re-discovery was present in a number of studies published
or reissued in 2000, studies which focused on any period of Brazilian
history. Several of them were quite explicit in proposing new interpretations
for 500 years of Brazilian history as well as new definitions of
Brazilian identity: Intérpretes do Brasil, for example,
is a thirteen-volume collection organized by Silviano Santiago that
deals with some of the canonical critics of Brazilian identity,
such as Gilberto Freyre, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and Euclides
da Cunha (Ed. Nova Aguillar). Other titles include Viagem Incompleta,
organized by Carlos Guilherme Motta (Senac), and Para Entender
o Brasil, which contains interviews with economists, politicians,
as well as journalists and rappers, about their own views and definitions
of Brazil; other books were more specific, such as Revisão
do Paraiso - Os Brasileiros e o Estado em 500 anos de Historia,
by Mary del Priore, or A História do Brasil são
outros 500, de Claudio Vieira (Record)--but they all reflect
the same strategy of using the 500 years as way of rewriting Brazilian
history and revealing to the general public a New World which had
remained concealed. In the end, the slogan "Brasil 500 Anos"
could be appropriated by any group that intended to discuss its
own history and identity, as in the book A Descoberta do Brasil
Gay (with a preface by João Silvério Trevisan),
or in conferences such as one strangely called "500 years of
Physical Education"!
This notion of re-discovering Brazil was most apparent in the largest
event intended to commemorate the 500th anniversary, called precisely
"Mostra do Re-descobrimento." The exhibit lasted from
April 25th to September 10th, displayed 15,000 works, and was visited
by almost 2 million people. It was a quite ambitious, and indeed
impressive endeavor, which was documented in fourteen catalogues.
It is now travelling around Brazil and will soon visit other museums
outside the country, including the Guggenheim Museums in New York
and Bilbao
. According to Edemar Cid Ferreira, the president
of the organizing committee, the event was intended to show a trajectory
of 30,000 years of history--of Brazilian history!
The Mostra was organized in three modules, housed in three buildings
in the Ibirapuera Park, São Paulo. The first module displayed
archeological pieces, such as pottery and the head of 11,000 year-old
Luzia, supposedly the oldest skeleton in the Americas. It also showed
some indigenous artifacts for the first time in Brazil, such as
the Tupinamba cloak, taken by the Dutch to Europe in the early seventeenth
century. The purpose of this module was, first, to restore dignity
to Indigenous cultures, and to prove that their art was more developed,
or sophisticated, than what's been thought traditionally; even more
importantly, however, it was intended to trace the origins of Brazil
as far back as possible, thus legitimizing the occupation of the
land and, at the same time, reducing the role of colonial history
and the effects of colonization.
The second module was divided in three parts: "Arte Popular,"
"Negro de Corpo e Alma," and a whole section dedicated
to the most important document reporting the Discovery of Brazil:
the letter written by Pero Vaz de Caminha. The original document
was brought from the Torre do Tombo in Portugal, and displayed with
all the aura a manuscript can have. The third module was divided
chronologically into Baroque, Afro-Brazilian Art, nineteenth century,
Modern and Contemporary Art, a section on Brazil seen by foreigners
and "Imagens do Insconsciente" (Artur Bispo do Rosario)
that gathered the works of psychiatric patients. I do not intend
to discuss in much detail the whole organization of the exhibit,
but one can easily perceive some of the implications of, for example,
making popular culture into an ahistorical category (except, perhaps,
the section on Lampião and the cangaço), and in many
instances, taking it from its social and historical contexts--in
contrast to high art, which is clearly divided in periods and movements.
And we cannot help being suspicious of a section that was labeled
"Negro de Corpo e Alma," and the extent to which this
reference to "soul" is able to counter the old racist
discourse embodied in the expression "negro de alma branca;"
not to mention its possible relation to the (Gilberto) Freyre-like
notion that all Brazilians are African in their souls. As we know,
this argument, which is the basis of the notion of Brazilian racial
democracy, can be found throughout his book, in statements as the
following: "Todo brasileiro, mesmo o alvo, de cabelo louro,
traz na alma, quando não na alma e no corpo...a sombra, ou
pelo menos a pinta, do indígena ou do Negro
."
Indeed, the intention of the exhibit is wholly Freyrean, and confirms
the project of creating a unified, even though diverse, picture
of Brazil, and turning that into the object of a rediscovery as
well as of a self-discovery. It is aimed at depicting the "contributions"
of different ethnic groups to the constitution of Brazilian society,
characterized by "racial democracy" and "antagonismos
em equilíbrio," to use two expressions created by Gilberto
Freyre. This project is quite apparent in Edemar Cid Ferreira's
(president of the Associação Brasil 500 anos) comment
regarding the last day of the exhibit (November 9th, 2000): "Terminamos
bem, com um dia lindo e uma miscigenacao incrível no parque"
["We ended well, with a beautiful day and an incredible miscegenation
in the park"]. The obvious suggestion of his remark is that
the exhibit faithfully reflected Brazilian mestizo society
and, moreover, that the true exhibit had not ended, since its objects
are not confined to the museums, but they will live on, out in the
streets of Brazil.
Of course, there were also cracks in the harmonious picture of
Brazil proposed by the exhibit, such as the concern for and attention
given to the foreign gaze in the constitution of Brazilian identity,
or in the truly provocative section on the art of psychiatric patients.
Yet, not only official discourse, but also important critics and
academics emphasized, and indeed praised, the exhibit's synchronic
and totalizing interpretation of Brazilian culture and identity.
Concretist poet Haroldo de Campos, for example, translated the exhibit
into a Tropicalist allegory, as he compared the seventeenth-century
cloak of indigenous chiefs (pajés) to tropicalist
parangolés--the 1960's costumes created by Hélio
Oiticica (Folha, 7/10). The anthropologist Lilia Schwarz, who is
one of the most respected writers on the history of race theories
in Brazil, celebrated the fact that all "the different exhibits
seemed orchestrated by one single melody," and summarizes her
review of the catalogues (particularly, "Negro de Corpo e Alma,"
"Arte Popular," "Arte Afro-Brasileira," and
"Imagens do Inconsciente") as follows:
... several languages repeating the continuous movement of remembering
and idealizing a particular past, whose relationship with Africa
have never been so present: in the colors, in the bodies, in the
sensations. And as if, history having been abandoned, along the
lines of synchronicity and by means of reiterations, a particular
way of narrating "brasilidade" were taking shape. Against
the grain of official discourse, the exhibits move as if they
were letting the great sensibility of a people (povo) of so many
colors speak, a people which, even without knowing, wanting or
suspecting, makes art, and parade an explosive imagination. (Folha
de S. Paulo, 12/08/00)
Schwarz's conclusions confirm the extent to which the "Mostra
do Re-descobrimento" stressed integration and assimilation.
In spite of herself, the anthropologist only reproduces official
discourse and stereotypes: (1) by associating blacks with "bodies
and sensations;" (2) by repeating the notion of an authentic
"people" who produces art without being aware of it; and
(3) by reiterating the narrative of a "brasilidade" that
takes shape through African culture (or the African soul), but not
necessarily through black citizens.
The colonial encounter is not absent from the Mostra, but constitutes
only one among many elements in the mosaic of Brazilian identity
which it is intended to display. One of the modules, in fact, does
focus on the colonial encounter, and the year 1500 itself, and its
central attraction is the exhibition of Pero Vaz de Caminha's "Letter
of Discovery" as well as other pieces associated with the Portuguese
early navigations to Brazil. Even though the Mostra displayed the
Letter together with a number of pictorial commentaries by Portuguese
and Brazilian contemporary artists, the attention was ultimately
focused on the original manuscript itself, commonly known as Brazil's
"birth certificate" (the expression is by Capistrano de
Abreu). As we know, although the document was written in 1500, it
was not published until 1817--five years before the independence.
Since then, the document has had a particularly important symbolic
role in narratives of Brazilian national identity. It was first
published together with a number of other sixteenth and seventeenth-century
documents and travel narratives related to Brazil, and it became
particularly representative because, until then, the first account
about Brazil was not found in the writings of a Portuguese writer,
but in the texts of the Italian Americo Vespucci. The letter thus
synthesized Brazilian identity through the first encounter of the
Portuguese explorers with the Indigenous peoples of Brazil.
As we know, Caminha's letter, as well as a number of other documents
published at the time, have repeatedly been appropriated by Brazilian
writers and intellectuals who saw the Indigenous man (and sometimes
woman) as the privileged symbol of Brazilian nationality. Romanticism,
and particularly the works of José de Alencar, relied strongly
on such a body of texts in order to create a specific mythology,
from which slavery was excluded, and in which characters such as
Iracema, or Guarani and Ubirajara constituted the best representation
of Brazilian difference. For many years Brazilian literature continued
to appropriate the image of the Indians--not just any, but specifically
the Tupi Indians--and, at the same time, to dissociate this image
from any particular reality; this gesture was present even when
the image changed from the innocent or heroic native to the parodic
and anti-European cannibal who, since Modernism, has represented
a particular way of both incorporating and resisting foreign ideologies;
or even when writers such as Oswald de Andrade posed the question
"Tupi or not Tupi" in his Manifesto Antropofágico,
or used exerpts of Caminha's Letter as a response to European hegemony.
This canonical gesture of appropriating the Indian in order to convey
Brazilian subjectivity was still present in some works of fiction
published last year, such as Meu querido Canibal, by Antonio
Torres, and Memorias de um Antropófago Lisboense, by Domingos
Vera Cruz.
Now, whereas both official and literary discourses continue to
appropriate the Indian as a metaphor for the origins of Brazil,
such a stable image has recently been shaken by the reality the
Indigenous (as well as other subaltern) groups, a reality which
can no longer be overlooked by the elite or by the media. During
the opening ceremonies of the "Mostra do Redescobrimento"
in São Paulo, for example (April 25th), Brazilian president
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio
watched a performance by Xavante and Mehinaku Indians, after which
Cardoso was handed a letter, a book, a video and a CD containing
information about the present situation and demands of several indigenous
groups in Brazil. In spite of the organizers' and the exhibit's
attempt to show Brazil to Brazilians, it seems that there were also
Brazilians, including indigenous peoples, who had their own
version of Brazil which was not part of the official celebrations,
a picture of Brazil which was strongly related to its colonial history.
And indeed, in spite of many attempts to efface colonial history,
"Brasil 500 Anos" was after all marked by a number of
events that revealed antagonism and violence, rather than the image
of a harmonious encounter of races.
The incident in the exhibit is only one example of responses to
the commemorations of the 500 years. On April 22nd, the actual date
of the anniversary of the Portuguese arrival in Brazil, a number
of events had been organized in Porto Seguro, including the presence
of Brazilian and Portuguese presidents. Even Pope John Paul II sent
a telegram congratulating all Brazilians for their birthday. McDonald's
opened its store number 500, with the theme "Descobrimento
do Brasil," located in a colonial building designed to match
Porto Seguro's original architecture. Almost 2 million dollars were
spent in a replica of the Nau Capitânia--the ship used by
Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500--which was supposed to depart from
Salvador to Porto Seguro and be used as a floating museum; ironically,
the ship experienced technical problems and could not sail until
a few months after the official events. This was the first sign
that the re-discovery of Brazil was not going to take place without
surprises, or in the way official authorities had planned it.
Indeed, the most significant event was not organized by the government,
but, on the contrary, in opposition to it. A few hours before the
official events started in Porto Seguro, four thousand sem terras
were stopped from reaching the colonial town, where they were heading
in order to take part in a protest. Yet, 2000 Indians, from 140
different ethnic groups protested outside of Porto Seguro; 141 activists
not only from indigenous organizations, but also from black and
landless people organizations were arrested, and 30 were injured
by police repression. Later on, Fernando Henrique Cardoso gave a
speech, thanking the president of Portugal, whose presence, according
to him, symbolized "tudo aquilo que Portugal representa para
o Brasil e para os brasileiros... na origem histórica, na
cultura, na língua e, mais que isso, nos laços indissolúveis
de uma amizade que é única."
Antagonisms were also present a week after the official events
of April 22nd, when Rede Globo aired the "Missa dos 500 Anos
de Evangelizacao," from Porto Seguro, making it coincide with
the 35th anniversary of the TV network. The Vatican had sent the
Brazilian clergy explicit instructions against the politicization
of the event, but they were caught by surprise as the ceremony was
interrupted by a group of forty Indians, among which was the Pataxó
Jerry Adriani Santos de Jesus. The Pataxó Indian read a speech,
which closed with the following words of protest: "Quinhentos
anos de sofrimento, de massacre, de exclusao, de preconceito, de
exploracao, de exterminio de nossos parentes, de acultaramento,
estupro de nossas mulheres, devastacao de nossas terras, de nossas
matas, que nos tomaram com a invasao." The presence of Indians
in the Brazilian media had been growing steadily in the prior few
years, and the protest of the Pataxó Indian on national television
could not be dissociated by what had happened exactly three years
before the celebrations of the 500 years. On April 20th, 1997, Galdino
Jesus dos Santos, from the Pataxó Hã-Hã-Hãe
group (southern Bahia), was set on fire by five teenagers while
he slept at a bus stop in Brasilia, and waited for next day's manifestations
of national indigenous peoples' day. The whole incident was surrounded
by a number of compensatory arguments: that the father of one of
the kids was a judge, and that in the past he had ruled important
decisions in favor of indigenous peoples in Brazil; that Galdino
himself had set his own nephew on fire a few years before he died
of the same cause; and that, according to the confession of the
teenagers, they only wanted to play a prank, and that they thought
the man was homeless, rather than an Indian.
The colonial encounter was thus being reenacted and rewritten,
not in books or museums, but, among other places, in the streets
of Brasilia and Porto Seguro. This new picture of the encounter
was no longer harmonious, and the Indigenous peoples were no longer
seen as passive--Brazil was hardly the undivided nation which official
discourses attempted to portray, and neither national television
nor the President could ignore this reality. It is true that, to
some extent, Fernando Henrique Cardoso did try to account for such
undeniable antagonisms in his speech. The president claimed to have
learned that, beneath the official history that was taught in schools
when he was a child, he discovered that there "fluia e continua
a fluir, como um vasto rio subterraneo, a historia de milhoes de
homens e mulheres anonimos. Os destinos entrelacados desses homens
e mulheres formam o tecido vivo daquele que e ao mesmo tempo o grande
motor e o produto mais extraodinário destes 500 anos: o povo
brasileiro." In a typical populist and mystifying move, the
"people" is celebrated and described as both the origin
and the product of the nation. Or, as Giorgio Agambem has acutely
defined "[the people] is what always already is and yet must,
nevertheless, be realized; it is the pure source of every identity,
but must, however, continually be redefined and purified, through
exclusion, language, blood, and land." Thus, Fernando Henrique
attributes both the origins and the realization of the Brazilian
nation to those who are excluded from the nation and, moreover,
those who are not aware of their role. The promise here, as always,
is the promise of inclusion through education:
... the Brazilian people, in the moment in which it awakens for
citizenship and discovers itself, at the fifth centenary of the
Discovery of Brazil, as the protagonist of history. To celebrate
a historical heritage does not mean to idealize the past. Today
in Brazil we have an accute awareness of the social plagues (chagas)
that are part of the heritage of these 500 years...Other voices
of protest and reivindication make themseves heard in this celebration.
They are the echoes of a past of slavery, oligarchy and patriarchy
which still weighs over Brazilian society and makes it one of
the most unjust societies in the world...but I have expressed
very clearly my disagreements with the antidemocratic vein of
the discourse and the violent forms of action induced by some
leaders of this movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra). But this does
not devaluate in my eyes and in the eyes of the nation, the authenticity
of the drama lived by these workers. Their presence here brings
the bothersome, but necessary memory, that the concentration of
land property continues to determine the exclusion of millions
of Brazilians from the benefits of development, in spite of the
considerable advances in land reform which we were able to make...
But the most important message which the voices of the excluded
ones bring does not concern the past, but the future. They announce
that the moment has arrived to turn the page of exclusion in the
History of Brazil... I ask all of you to make a toast with me,
to the future. And this toast we will make with the most authentic
of Brazilian drinks: our sugar cane alcohol, our cachaça!
What the events of the 500 years in Porto Seguro illustrate
is that the Indigenous peoples of Brazil can no longer be seen as
a past reality that has become a symbol of the future, the future
of the Brazilian nation, bur rather that one Pataxó-Hã-Hã-Hãe
Indian can be, today, the spokesperson for 350 thousand indigenous
peoples from 227 ethnicities who speak 175 different languages.
Perhaps there is still a good deal of mystification when the Indigenous
person becomes representative of so many ethnicities and, moreover,
a figure representing all the dispossesed in Brazil. Yet, the effects
of colonialism are more evident than ever, and the national discourse
of assimiliation and integration can hardly accommodate the demands
of those emerging discourses. If in both academic and oficial contexts
the colonial encounter was not the object of reflection, it is because
there was never a true encounter, but rather a history of conflicts
and antagonisms which myths of nationality can no longer conceal.
On the one hand, exhibits such as the "Mostra do Redescobrimento"
attempted to assimilate colonial history by absorbing it into a
unified picture of the nation. On the other hand, some critics and
academics, as well as activists from different political and ethnic
groups, seem to have equated colonialism to the entire 500 years,
that is the whole colonial history of Brazil.
Before I conclude, I would like to suggest that last year's commemorations
of the 500 years present important questions regarding the status
of Colonial studies in Brazil--as well as in the United States.
It seems that institutionally, and for hiring purposes, colonial
Latin America remains a temporal category, as opposed to, say, nineteenth-century
or twentieth-century Latin America. This division poses two problems.
On the one hand, it may exclude issues of colonialism after independence,
such as the conflicts that ocurred in Porto Seguro, or the riots
that took place in São Paulo on February 17, 2001. On the
other hand, the classification by period may overdetermine the interpretation
of texts produced prior to Brazilian political independence in 1822.
The history and the literature of the eighteenth century, for example,
are often caught in between issues that recently have become the
focus of Colonial studies (issues of alterity, hybridity, etc.),
and issues associated with nation building, which have been the
central concern of nineteenth-century studies. In the case of Brazilian
literature, for example, for a long time now, there has been hardly
any work on the Enlightenment or Neoclassic literature, not to mention
other eighteenth-century texts that do not easily fit in these categories.
Perhaps Colonial studies should be seen as a broader interdisciplinary
field of research, analogous to, say, Ethnic studies, Gender, Queer,
Diaspora studies, and so on. This field would be concerned with
issues of colonialism or decolonization across temporal and geographical
divides. If in the case of Brazil and Latin America it makes little
sense to speak of Post-colonial studies, understood in terms of
chronology, then we might argue that there is only Post-colonial
studies, understood, as we generally do today, as the study of the
effects of colonialism. (I will not discuss the already much
debated problems with the use of the term "post-colonial"
in relation to Latin America. But I must say that the term "Colonial
studies" for our field and "colonialist" for our
profession also makes me uncomfortable). Some scholars may want
to emphasize the fact that studies on colonialism should constitute
one among other oppositional practices, focused on the constitution
of alternative knowledges and subjectivities; others would prefer
to focus on issues regarding the dominant discourse, or how colonial
discourses are constituted and how they operate. In both cases,
however, what makes Colonial studies or studies of colonialism parallel
to fields such as gender or ethnic studies is not its object, but
its contestatory motivation.
And still, one cannot avoid some overlaps, since, institutionally,
we also tend to divide the profession in more or less defined geographical
categories: Brazilianists, Caribbeanists, Mexicanists, students of
"Cono Sur," the Andes, etc. Each of these geographical
areas have their own version of colonial history, which may be studied
according to different projects. Finally, the institutional position,
motivation, or even political agenda of the scholar may also define
how the field is to be shaped; but in spite of increasing dialogues,
I believe that, for institutional or socio-political reasons, there
is still a remarkable distance between Colonial studies in Brazil
(and probably Spanish America) and the United States.
I would say that, to a great extent, Colonial studies in Brazil
has always been constituted by prophetic discourses. The quest for
origins, which Colonial studies often represent, have always been
tied to a promise of nationality and development: such prophetic
discourses are present in the literature of Romanticism and Modernism,
as well as in all the essays on nationality that originated in the
1930's (such as the canonical interpretations of Brazil by Gilberto
Freyre, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Caio Prado Jr.), and which constituted
almost a field, or a genre, known in Brazil as "Formação":
thus, we have "Formação da Família Patriarcal
Brasileira" (Gilberto Freyre), "Formação
Econômica do Brasil" (Caio Prado Jr.), "Formação
da Literatura Brasileira" (Antonio Candido), and many other
"formações." Almost every important title
of colonial historiography in Brazil contains the word "Formação"
either in its title or in its subtitle.
Take, for example, the most important book on colonial history
published last year, O Trato dos Viventes. The subtitle of
this groundbreaking study by José Felipe de Alencastro is
precisely "Formação do Brasil no Atlântico
Sul." Its hypothesis, stated in the preface, is closely associated
to one of the themes proposed for our meeting here today--the constitution
of Brazilian society in the Atlantic. At the same time, the work
"formação" in the title reflects a desire
for explaining Brazilian difference, and the preface of the book
makes this quite clear:
Portuguese colonization, founded on slavery, made room for an
economic and social space that is bipolar, which encompasses a
zone of production based on slavery situated on the coast of South
America, and a zone of slave reproduction centered in Angola.
As early as the end of the sixteenthth century, there emerges
an a-territorial space, a lusophone archipelago constituted by
the ouposts in Portuguese America and the factories in Angola.
It is from this zone that Brazil emerges in the eighteenth century...
My purpose is to show how those two areas united by the ocean
complete each other in one single system of colonial exploitation
whose singularity still deeply defines Brazil.
Such histories, as they are intended to define Brazilian
singularity, are also histories of a desire; in other words, they
constitute the history of a promise which, ultimately, they continue
to reiterate. The genre "Formação" is always
an attempt to show the extent to which the study of origins can
either indicate signs of redemption or, at least, reveal the solutions
for the crises of present reality. Perhaps there is no way of escaping
from this desire and this sense of urgency that has always characterized
Colonial studies in Brazil. Yet, I do believe that a greater dialogue
between Latin American and US scholars may be a way of finding the
intersection in which studies concerning colonialism can respond
to that sense of urgency posed by local and global realities and,
at the same time, avoid mystifications resulting from nostalgia,
on the one hand, and Messianisms, on the other.
Notes
1 Guggenheim, New York, September 23rd to January 20th. Bilbao,
April 2002.
2 Casa Grande e Senzala. (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1995,
p. 283)