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Overview
Williams draws on a rich selection of textual, pictorial, and architectural sources in his exploration of the dynamic nature of educational film and radio, historical preservation, museum management, painting, public architecture, and national delegations organized for international expositions during the unsettled era in which modern Brazil’s cultural canon took definitive form. In his close reading of the tensions surrounding official policies of cultural management, Williams both updates the research of the pioneer generation of North American Brazilianists, who examined the politics of state building during the Vargas era, and engages today’s generation of Brazilianists, who locate the construction of national identity of modern Brazil in the Vargas era.
By integrating Brazil into a growing body of literature on the cultural dimensions of nations and nationalism, Culture Wars in Brazil will be important reading for students and scholars of Latin American history, state formation, modernist art and architecture, and cultural studies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822380962 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/12/2001 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 372 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Daryle Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland.
Read an Excerpt
CULTURE WARS IN BRAZIL
The First Vargas Regime, 1930-1945By Daryle Williams
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2001 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-2708-0
Chapter One
The Vargas Era and Culture Wars
At the height of the authoritarian Estado Novo, the infamous Department of Press and Propaganda published an essay, written by Oswaldo Teixeira, director of the National Museum of Fine Arts and well-known painter, which acclaimed Getúlio Vargas as a peer to Cósimo de Médici, the wealthy fifteenth-century banker who helped make Florence into the political and cultural epicenter of the Italian Renaissance. Crediting the Revolution of 1930 and the Vargas state with rescuing Brazilian society from a descent into cultural confusion and political disorder, Teixeira portrayed Vargas as a modern-day Renaissance prince. "Getúlio Vargas is the only President who has confronted the full range of problems facing Brazil with a clear, optimistic, and brilliant vision, guided by tranquillity, equilibrium, and the truest principles of Brazilianness [com os mais sadios princípios de brasilidade]," declared Teixeira.
Teixeira was not alone in praising Vargas for a national cultural renewal. In 1940, the arts column of the regime's highbrow political review, Cultura Política, observed that the president's goodwill hadafforded Brazilian artists the kind of official support that could be bitterly contested elsewhere. "The 'conquests' [of state patronage] won in other countries, typically granted only in the most dramatic and dire of circumstances, have come to Brazilian artists as goodwill gifts from the Chief of State," exclaimed the journal. Even Gustavo Capanema, the influential minister of education and health and Vargas's closest advisor on subjects concerning official cultural programming, credited the president-dictator with the cultural gains won since 1930. At the March 1943 inauguration of the Imperial Museum, Capanema praised Vargas for his role in the flowering of Brazilian arts and letters, echoing Teixeira's earlier remarks in characterizing the chief of state as a peer of Pericles, Augustus, and Louis XIV-"great men who have filled History with the fanfare, honor, and joy of the human spirit."
The image of a national cultural flowering cultivated by Vargas was very alluring, but in truth, the minister of education managed federal cultural policy, bestowing personal and institutional favors on some of the most important cultural figures of the 1930s and 1940s. It was the minister who actually changed the nature of cultural policy making. Vargas's interests in cultural patronage were generally limited to ceremonial galas, inaugurations, and civic parades. He rarely took a proactive stance in cultural matters. Looking back at the first Vargas regime, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Capanema's chief of staff, stated bluntly, "Vargas could not care less [for cultural programming].... Capanema's accomplishments, which today are credited to Getúlio, were merely tolerated by the President.... His great concern was signing papers and making politics." As the mineiro poet suggests, the cultural renovação that took place after 1930 must be credited to the initiatives coordinated through the Ministry of Education, not the Presidential Palace. Vargas clearly knew this, but he never disavowed the perception that he was a savior, protector, and patron of Brazilian culture.
Several developments in the evolution of public administration and federal policy making bolstered the image that the Vargas regime, if not Vargas personally, was dedicated to a national cultural renaissance. Thanks to Capanema, the regime fully integrated cultural programming into the lexicon and practice of federal power, making Brazilian culture a charge of the state. Federal culture managers-an entirely new category of civil servant-directed a remarkable amount of energy toward the stimulation, proliferation, and officialization of cultural activities deemed expressive of a national ethos. A systematic approach to cultural management created or expanded nearly two dozen federal institutions tending to the performing and visual arts, historical preservation, museums, letters, and civic culture. Significant federal expenditure accompanied this institutionalization of cultural management and patronage. In addition to the investment of financial and administrative capital into the cultural arena, the federal government plowed substantial amounts of symbolic capital into the patronage of the national cultural patrimony.
Praised by high-ranking culture managers, the state's investment in culture faced opposition from many camps. For critics of Vargas-era cultural policies, censorship, political repression, social control, and cultural authoritarianism fueled the regime's thirst for managing a national cultural renewal. To their critics, federal culture managers, and most especially Vargas, were not humanists, but rather brutal thought police. In 1942, for example, the leftist U.S. publisher Samuel Putnam (1892-1950) spoke out for several Brazilian authors, including prominent novelists Jorge Amado and Graciliano Ramos, who had been silenced through the federal government's proclivity for harrassing intellectuals and literary figures deemed a threat to the regime's political and cultural supremacy. Relaying what would surely have been censored in Brazil, Putnam cited a 1941 speech Amado delivered while in exile in Argentina in which the Bahian novelist denounced the Vargas regime for its draconian cultural policies of mind-control and cultural repression. In a thinly veiled allusion to cultural policies implemented by the German National Socialists, Putnam characterized the Vargas regime's program of cultural management as kulturkrieg. Teixeira's Cósimo had been transfigured into a book-burning Savanarola.
The paradox is that the same state that persecuted left-wing intellectuals as threats to Brazilian culture, while patronizing conservative artists such as Oswaldo Teixeira, exhibited a high tolerance for cultural nonconformists who questioned the political and cultural establishment. Rather than censure the iconoclastic vanguard collectively known as the movimento modernista (modernist movement), the Vargas regime absorbed modernist artists and modernist projects into federal cultural management. Modernist literary figures including Mário de Andrade, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and even novelist Graciliano Ramos (imprisoned during the Estado Novo for his leftist political sympathies) gravitated toward the federal government. With the cover of state support, these figures wielded considerable influence in defining and administering Brazil's cultural identities during the 1930s and 1940s.
Modernist architecture-disparaged by conservatives in Brazil and abroad as communistic, ugly, and wholly unnational-made its biggest strides in Vargas-era Brazil because of state sponsorship. Self-consciously "Brazilian" architecture, exemplified in the neocolonial movement, was certainly tolerated by the Vargas state. Local adaptations to the stolid federalist style favored by American New Dealers, the neoimperial architecture favored by European totalitarian states, and the indigenista public art commissioned by the postrevolutionary Mexican state would also be found in state architecture in Brazil. Nevertheless, the Vargas regime tolerated, and at times embraced, the importation of the principles of modernist architecture promoted by the International Congress of Modern Architecture and its charismatic leader Le Corbusier. The signature building of the Estado Novo, celebrated within Brazil and abroad as the pinnacle of cultural change in Brazil, was the Ministry of Education and Health, a modernist skyscraper whose design was literally taken out of Le Corbusier's sketchbooks. At times, the official architecture of the Vargas regime seemed at direct odds with the regime's clearly stated war on communism, internationalism, and other "threats" to the nation. Official cultural policy making under Vargas was obviously more complex, paradoxical, and contradictory than Teixeira and Putnam might admit.
As a rhetorical device, the bipolarity of Vargas as culture-maker/culture-destroyer is powerful. As an explanatory model, the dichotomy collapses under scrutiny. A political history of culture that looks at the institutional growth, programmatic advances, and aesthetic contradictions of state-sponsored culture during the first Vargas regime is necessary. This political history must decenter Vargas, who received the credit for much of the cultural underwriting/repression but in reality played a supporting role in the articulation and implementation of cultural policy making. This political history of culture must examine the complexities of politics within cultural production. It must expose internal divisions within the state. It must demonstrate the connections and disjunctures between official cultural policy and the modes of cultural production and consumption present outside of the state. Finally, the political history of culture must explain how and why the Vargas regime successfully helped create a mosaic of modern Brazilian culture-graced by Ouro Preto, Cândido Portinari's Café, Jean-Baptiste Debret's watercolors, the uncompromisingly modernist steel-and-glass skyscraper juxtaposed against lush tropical foliage, and the nostalgic memories for Dom Pedro II-that remained forever ill-at-ease with itself and with state intervention.
Writing a political history of Brazilian culture during the Vargas regime is a daunting challenge. The North American brasilianistas (Brazilianists) who pioneered the political history of the Vargas era in the late 1960s passed over the politics of culture when assessing the construction of political power during the Vargas era. E. Bradford Burns, Ludwig Lauerhauss, and Thomas Skidmore examined the ideologies of nationalism, but stuck mainly to intellectual history. The iconoclast Richard Morse looked at the internal ethos and aesthetic genealogies of Brazilianness, but remained largely uninterested in the "on-the-ground" politics of culture. When North American literary critics and art historians took up the cultural history of the Vargas era, they were largely uninterested in the state. In 1967, for example, literary critic Jean Franco published a wonderful overview of Latin American modernism, dedicating a considerable number of pages to the Brazilian literary avant-garde. The Vargas state is incidental to Franco's study, despite the fact that many titans in the modernist canon-Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, Augusto Meyer, and Graciliano Ramos-all maintained intimate contacts with the Vargas state. Similar observations can be made for the work of John Nist, whose 1967 survey of modernism queries whether modernism died in 1930, rather than face head-on how modernism matured under state tutelage following the Revolution of 1930. English-language audiences of the late 1960s and 1970s went largely unaware of the intimate nature of culture and politics under Vargas.
The silences were not mere North American oversights. Numerous factors inhibited Brazilian scholars of the 1960s and 1970s from looking too closely at the politics of culture under Vargas. First, the politics of military dictatorship reinforced the connection between official culture and the culture of repression. Histories too critical of state cultural policies could possibly run afoul of state censors. Less critical histories ran the risk of censure from an academic and cultural establishment that was justifiably suspicious of the cultural machinations of a repressive state. The second factor came from within the state itself, as the federal cultural apparatus created under Vargas verged on collapse in the late 1960s. In 1970, the National Historical Museum-one of the institutions most favored by the Vargas regime-was literally falling to pieces. The Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, created in 1937, had ossified into an understaffed, underfunded state agency that treated cultural patrimony much like a stuffed animal. The decomposition of the documentary, material, and technical artifacts of Vargas-era cultural management nearly damned the history of that management to oblivion. The third and final obstacle surrounded the dynamics of Brazilian cultural criticism, which exalted a triumphalist history of modernism that largely ignored the state. Wilson Martins's widely read history of modernism, updated in 1969 and later translated into English, makes little of modernism and the state. In 1974, João Luiz Lafetá identified an ideological shift in modernism circa 1930, as the modernists turned from aesthetic to political questions. Unfortunately, the study failed to explore the place of public policy in this shift. For these authors, the modernist canon existed outside of state politics.
A paucity of primary source materials posed significant barriers to the reconstruction of the politics of culture of the 1930s and 1940s. The Brazilian National Archives, sadly, received little documentation related to state cultural policy during the Vargas era. Few of the federal secretariats, foundations, and institutes managing culture in the 1970s and 1980s maintained institutional archives dating back to the first Vargas regime. The papers of most major cultural figures of the period remained in personal collections. Most problematic of all was the fact that the institutional archive of the Ministry of Education and Health, the most important regulatory agency in cultural management during the Vargas era, was in the possession of Gustavo Capanema, while the institutional archive for the other major federal agency responsible for cultural regulation, the Department of Press and Propaganda, had disappeared. Without access to these archives, historians were unable to write close histories of the politics of state-sponsored culture.
After 1979, the normalization of an incremental process of political liberalization known as abertura, combined with changes in archival management, presented new opportunities for a more systematic recovery of the cultural politicking of the Vargas regime. Social scientists looked at the cultural policies of the 1970s in relation to the antecedents of the 1940s. In 1984, the well-known literary critic Antonio Cândido made a brief survey of the impact of the Revolution of 1930 on Brazilian culture, noting the process of routinization of cultural renewal that accompanied the regime change. Historians studied ideological currents, educational policy, and propaganda. Finally, a heterogeneous group of social scientists and designers affiliated with the Centro Nacional de Referência Cultural rethought federal cultural policy, revisiting the history of state cultural management to see the paths not taken in the state's institutional relationship to cultural patrimony.
Changes in archive management enabled historians to pursue new themes in the history of culture under Vargas. In a process that could be painfully slow and inefficient, most federal agencies began to organize their institutional memory. (This study draws heavily on institutional archives organized in the 1980s and 1990s.) The single-most important development in archive management came from outside the state, at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação da História Contemporânea do Brasil (CPDOC), a subdivision of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro. Created in 1973, this research institution had by the late 1970s revolutionized Brazilian historical research by collecting and cataloguing the papers and oral histories of many of the most important figures of the Vargas era, including Vargas, Oswaldo Aranha, and Gustavo Capanema. The research team and publication series coordinated by CPDOC gave the history of the Vargas regime an institutional foundation unequalled in any other field in Brazilian history.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CULTURE WARS IN BRAZIL by Daryle Williams Copyright © 2001 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of FiguresList of Tables
List of Abreviations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Brazilian Republic, Getúlio Vargas, and Metaphors of War
1. The Vargas Era and Culture Wars
2. Cultural Management before 1930
3. Cultural Management, 1930–1945
4. “The Identity Documents of the Brazilian Nation”: The National Historical and Artistic Patrimony
5. Museums and Memory
6. Expositions and “Export Quality” Culture
Conclusion: Who Won? National Culture Under Vargas
Biographical Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index