The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast
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The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822357858 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/17/2014 |
| Series: | Latin America in Translation Series |
| Pages: | 294 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d) |
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The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast
By Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., Jerry Dennis Metz
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Cortez EditoraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5785-8
CHAPTER 1
GEOGRAPHY IN RUINS
The Northeast is a child of the ruins of an older conceptual geography of Brazil that posited a national segmentation into North and South. The North was understood as defined by natural attributes, its pastoral essence assumed and its countenance quickly recognizable. But by the 1920s, or even the 1910s, a Northeast was emerging that was identified by harsher natural phenomena and a problematic if ardent embrace of modernity—factories, avenues, the rumbling engines of machinery mobilized in public works against the ravages of drought. Juxtaposed alongside fields of cotton and sugar plantations were now telegraph cables, telephone lines, and railroads. Hudson, Ford, and Studebaker automobiles as well as Great Western railway cars sped commerce but catalyzed its detrimental impacts on the environment, as mountains were scraped clean of foliage and smoke darkened the sky. Traditional modes and rhythms of life were transformed. Cities buzzed with construction, modeled largely on nineteenth-century European urban landscapes of banks and markets, while the new vision for thoroughfares owed much to American sensibilities of flat, straight, and square. These sometimes replaced, but more often coexisted oddly with, the narrow and winding colonial-era carriage streets such as those in old Recife. In city centers, many of the antiquated elite mansions, enormous and faded like shipwrecks, were giving way to hastily built factories crowned by towering smokestacks.
The invention of the Northeast, based on reelaborations of the images and discourses of the older paradigm of the North, was possible only through the crisis of the naturalist paradigm and its traditional models of society. A new way of seeing in relation to space was emerging, and along with it a new social sensibility. There was a growing need to reflect on questions regarding national identity, national character, the national "race," as well as the contours of a national culture that could incorporate all the nation's spaces.
The Regionalist Gaze
The regionalism of the 1920s was different from the regionalism of the previous era, the long nineteenth century (until the 1910s). It was less diffuse and provincial. It reflected the different ways that space was conceived and represented across the diverse areas of the country. Brazil's central South, especially São Paulo, would become a highly differentiated space as a result of such patterned developments as industrialization, urbanization, and immigration from Europe, as well as the effects of the abolition of slavery. At the same time, new forms of artistic and cultural inquiry were fostered by modernism. Modernism and modernization lent a new intensity to the exploration of new codes of sociability. Meanwhile, the old North struggled to cope with deepening economic dependence and its political submission to other areas of the country. It reeled under the strain of new technologies imperfectly implanted and poorly integrated, as well as the lack of skilled manpower to support them. Within the more traditional sectors of its society, especially after World War I, another crisis was brewing that had to do with how the nation was seen, spoken, and represented.
The war had resulted in a global redistribution of power, with the United States in ascension and European cartographies rearranged. With all this, history seemed to have definitively penetrated space itself. If classical epistemology saw time and space as two distinct dimensions, in modern epistemology history became the totality of all things, including spatialities. For Brazil, the war had contributed to hastening the end (already underway) of the belle époque sensibility, which had focused on the tropical environment and exoticness of Brazilian space as factors, alongside race, preventing the nation from advancing in social and cultural terms. The war fostered a new attempt to visualize the nation in its complexity, to reconsider previous categories of thought and space. There was a suggestive new diversity coming into view, and it was the search for the nation itself that led to the discovery of new regions. Different modes of knowledge from art to science were mobilized in the projection of gazes that inspected other areas, measured distances, and weighted discontinuities, but that returned to re-view the nation as synthesizing this very diversity. Every regional discourse would stimulate a diagnostic of causes and solutions for the distances that seemed to separate it from other national areas.
The older proto-regionalism had encountered division as a reflex of nature, and of race. Variations in climate, in flora and fauna, and in the racial composition of populations inhabiting these places explained apparent differences in custom, habit, social practice, and politics. Psychology, along with natural science, could clarify regional types. This intersected with how technologies came to define space across Brazil's vast territory. Unequal development of transportation and communications infrastructure along with the lack of physical human interchange between the North and South helped turn these two spaces inaccessible to and almost unknowable to each other: separate worlds seeking to understand and connect, just as Europe and Brazil regarded each other with curiosity across the Atlantic. Actual visits were limited to a few elites—specialists and intrepid explorers from the South to the North, and the ritual movement of the North's political leaders to the capital city of Rio de Janeiro.
The urge to explore regional particularity was nonetheless still part of a nationalist drive, an impulse to discover Brazil itself, that would take on new emphasis in the 1920s. It is not a coincidence that in this moment, the idea was floated to compile a Brazilian encyclopedia that would contain information describing all the country's diverse realities as a starting point for formulating a politics of unification and nationalization; the stubborn distances that impeded the emergence of the nation might thus be finally transcended. Regionalisms have long been viewed as an impediment to this sort of process of unification, but they are integral to it. They reveal how the nation's constituting was never a neutral or objective process but a deeply political one, which was from the beginning bound up in the hegemony of some spaces over others.
The press played a key role in sparking curiosity about the nation through wide publication of travelers' letters and essays, especially between the 1920s and the 1940s. Already in those discourses a typology of customs emerges: in the North, local habits come across as "bizarre if friendly," while northerners describe the ways of the South as "strange and unscrupulous." These recorded impressions help invent a tradition in which the space from which one speaks is taken as the national point of reference, assumed to be the country's center. Customs here are the national ones; customs we explore as visitors in other areas are regional, the exceptions proving our rule. This creates multiple discursive centers. In particular, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife established themselves as points of distribution for national reference and meaning. The differences and "oddities" perceived elsewhere are marked as primitive and archaic, as affectations and superficialities, or as corruptions attendant on urban metropolitan life.
Such accounts of the strange function to create an identity for the region that is speaking, not just for the region that is being spoken of. The paulista and nordestino participate in each other's construction, agreeing on the spatial boundaries of identity and imposing a homogeneity through text and image that avoids internal difference and complexity. A common subject in this era was custom—characteristic, traditional social practice or attitudes. Writers explore "customs of the North or Northeast" versus "customs of São Paulo," basing their own production on what they have read as much as on what they see. Here are some travel notes submitted to the Estado de São Paulo in 1923:
Before arriving we already knew something through our reading of this land of suffering, whose poor meadows boast only a spindly heather, where there are rough craggy hills instead of mountains, the people live in straw huts without floors, and the sky burns without relent. No dew blesses the ground, and the rivers fade to dust. The Northeast of Brazil received that designation only after the most recent major calamity in 1919, after which it was determined to mount a fight against the persistent droughts.... And waves of squalid wanderers journeyed to the bosom of the South to enjoy our infinite generosity, doubtless marveling at the misery there and the abundance here and doubting whether to return.
All at once, the author reaffirms a prior image of the Northeast absorbed before going there and, in counterpoint, constructs a complementary image of the South. He also calls attention to the precise moment at which the Northeast was delineated out of the older North, in a manner that also depreciates the place and "its" people.
Such novel regionalist discourses were accompanied by new regionalist practices that were related to wider changes in social relations along the 1920s. For instance, in 1920, the following assertion was published in a major São Paulo newspaper: "It is incontestable that the South of Brazil, which is the region that runs from Bahia through Rio Grande do Sul, presents a robust aspect of progress in its material life that stands in grim contrast with state of abandon of the North, with its deserts and its ignorance, its lack of hygiene, its poverty, its wan servility."
The cohering focus on social and material differences between North and South is routinely attributed to the presence of immigrant laborers in the South, and their absence from the North. Abolition and the rapid transition to a free market of wage labor, which in nascent form had coexisted with the last years of slavery, were key elements in the new reordering of Brazil's spaces as well as the militant tone of the emergent regionalisms. The regionalization of the labor market, shaped by abolition and the concentration of European immigrants in the South (especially São Paulo), helped induce a host of regionalist practices and enunciations through the early twentieth century.
Some intellectuals, enchanted with the perceived superiority of the immigrants to national stock, highlighted the figure of the nordestino as the principal example of racial degeneration in its physical and mental forms. Oliveira Vianna and Dionísio Cerqueira, for instance, considered the downtrodden misery of the nordestino as the direct consequence of the encounter between a harsh natural environment and a degraded race, fruit of the "crossing between individuals of extreme lineages, a submixture." In contrast, the superiority of the "race" of paulistas was declared in quasi-eugenic terms; they knew how to take advantage of the more propitious environment in the South, and of course they would ascend to national economic and political dominance. This superiority was taken as natural, not historical, and the Northeast was deemed inferior by its very nature. Paulistas' reputation for a navel-gazing obsession with their own city was denied as legend but implicitly justified as well.
Such travel notes and other published essays show how strong the naturalist perspective still was, how it endured across other historical changes—and how modernism, which emerged in opposition to this visibility and speakability of the nation, was far from having immediate generalized impacts. Paulo de Moraes Barros, a journalist for the Estado de São Paulo who was dispatched on a trip to Juazeiro, blamed the nordestinos' racial inferiority for the presence of "loutish fanatics across the entire region," including the "crowds of rabble that supplicate and jabber with wild-eyed expressions, grubbing in the dirt to get a hold of the priest's cassock." The acts of "violent, villainous bandits" received the same racial explanation, and an exasperated Barros demanded to know how such a people could possibly serve as the base on which to construct a nation.
Soon after its series of articles entitled "Impressions of the Northeast," this newspaper launched another called "Impressions of São Paulo" in order to construct an image of the city in counterpoint to the Northeast it had sketched. The strategy was to demonstrate the superiority of São Paulo and its population, a superiority residing in the European elements of its bloodline. In these articles, the city appears as an empty space that could be filled by earnest Europeans. Slavery and Afro-Brazilians were barely mentioned; neither were Brazil's indigenous, and even less would racial crossings involving these groups be noted. São Paulo and all its people were ostensibly Europeans. "They arrived crossing the Atlantic, settled in and quickly adjusted to this fertile land, realizing the grandness of their destiny through the production of abundance." Even the oldest generation of locals, who traced their heritage back to the early centuries of colonial Brazil, were described as "always an exuberantly productive race, strong in morals and physically eugenic," in order to distinguish them from other national groups.
The regionalism of São Paulo was thus constructed as one of superiority, rather than misery and lack; but it was based on negative comparisons with other Brazilian groups and the affirmation of European, white lineage. In its discourse São Paulo appeared as the cradle of a proper nation, a "civilized, progressive and developmentalist" nation. It was also boldly, unsentimentally modern. Changes to the urban landscape that included the destruction of old architecture such as the "Church of Carmo, the Piques, and the Santa Casa street" represented the progress of the new. The past made way for the future, in the form of incessant community and business construction, "Americanized, metallic, and sparkling." These were symbols of a modernity and civilization that São Paulo was uniquely able to produce, and to generalize to the rest of the country. The modernist movement was also part of this enthusiastic embrace of the new urban world that seemed somehow to belong uniquely to 1920s São Paulo. Even for most of the modernists, with their interest in articulating national identity, the Northeast would appear as a "vast medieval space" to be dominated by "modernizing influxes from São Paulo." The urbanization and modernization affecting cities across the Northeast were largely unknown, because the Northeast's own regionalist discourse cast it as a rural terrain wracked by disasters: a "regionalism of inferiority," not of potential.
Growing curiosity about this Northeast that was being invented as the opposite of São Paulo is suggested by the success of a theatrical production by Cornélio Pires that was presented to enthusiastic audiences at the Fênix Theater in 1926. Called Picturesque Brazil—Journeys of Cornélio Pires to the North of Brazil, the play entertained the public with "odd, exotic, strange, ridiculous aspects of our brothers and sisters in the North." As a dramatic type, the modern nordestino was born as an effective comedic character that was laughed at, more than with, by desirable audience demographics in the South.
This cohering narrative occasionally stood at odds with the earlier conceptions of the North as a place of pleasing natural wonder. Previously internalized archives of images and enunciations could color a tourist's expectations and present a moment of incoherence in face of the sharpening new identity based on harshness and privation. In the early 1940s, Chiquinha Rodrigues, a correspondent for the O Estado de São Paulo who traveled to the Northeast, at first struck a tone of gratified marvel. "In the Northeast, such exuberant green growth! Here there is more rain than anywhere else in Brazil. What causes the droughts, or so say the experts, is the poor distribution of these generous rains." But soon after, in the same essay, she reveals more contemporary influences: "We must be pleased for any oasis in this desert.... Let us uncover the mysteries of this singular region, where a world of sunlight nearly blinds us and the climate is burning hot before it mellows to gentility." The contradictions mount as she expresses growing interest in the blood-red flowers of the cactus and increasingly reaches to Euclides da Cunha's ambivalent classic Os Sertões (1902), written about the interior backlands of Bahia state, for descriptive and analytic support. She seems at times to borrow whole phrases from da Cunha: "The carpet of unyielding, aggressive weeds prevents any genuine contact between a creature and the earth." Or "Like a cruel woman, the cabeça de frade [orb-shaped cactus] that lurks in reefs among the cactus flowers to commit harm ... All of it will burn and sting, all of it will pierce our hands." Still, "At the first rains, everything is transformed; the seething variety of birds and butterflies are like a thousand flowers." This Northeast, then, is one of contrasts and contradictions, of seemingly inescapable confrontations with Euclides da Cunha.
The text makes clear that what it says of region is not a direct reflex of what is seen in, or as, region. Words affect what the eyes see. The two regimes, words and images, are independent. Region thus takes form through discourses, images, and texts that may or may not have interrelations or relationships of representation. The truth of the region is constituted through the negotiation between the visible and the speakable. The visibility of the region that emerges is constructed with the assistance of the speakable, or struggling against it. Of course, not always does the spoken become practice, or does a practice become transformed into discourse. Discourses can make things visible, but the things they make visible might be different from what they say. They are strategies of power that orient parallels and divergences between the visible and the speakable, as well as the contact between them. To speak and see are both methods to dominate the regional object, even if they need not be in strict accordance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast by Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., Jerry Dennis Metz. Copyright © 1999 Cortez Editora. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by James N. Green,Acknowledgments,
INTRODUCTION,
CHAPTER ONE Geography in Ruins,
CHAPTER TWO Spaces of Nostalgia,
CHAPTER THREE Territories of Revolt,
CONCLUSION,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
"In this modern classic of Brazilian cultural history, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. provides a richly documented and theoretically illuminating exploration of how the most 'regional' of all Brazilian regions has been imagined, indeed 'invented,' as a space of alterity, poverty, and authenticity during the past century. In doing so, he reveals the discursive production of regions, the relations of power that produce them, and the stereotypes that make them recognizable to a national audience."
"In this brilliant and innovative study of Brazilian regionalism, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr. traces the surprisingly recent invention of the Northeast as a putatively homogeneous space with particular socio-cultural traits. By exploring various sites of political, literary, and intellectual contention and representation, Albuquerque illuminates the process by which the poor and predominantly rural Nordeste emerged both as the internecine 'other' of the rapidly urbanizing South, and as a means for northern elites to maintain access to national resources and political influence. The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast is an outstanding example of the way in which historical research and interpretation can denaturalize even the most 'natural' categories and boundaries, and allow us new insights into inequalities of wealth and power."