INSULARITY

Brazil, Brasil, Brasilitatis?

Overture: meditations on fitting  what is it with Brazil that doesn’t fit?

1. TAKES ON IT
a) Robert Newcomb’s Nossa and Nuestra America: Inter-American Dialogues
Argument: “where Brazilian writers have attempted to characterize Spanish American history, culture, or
identity in relation to Brazil, as in the cases of Vianna Moog, Manoel Bomfim, and Gilberto Freyre, these
Luso-Hispanic comparisons have almost always served as secondary features of more sustained
comparisons with the US-Europeans center, and have frequently been limited to cursory discussions of
Brazil and Spanish America’s shared Iberian ‘roots’” (10)
- p. 7  “While this book covers the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a series of decades in
which Latin American elites attempted to adapt national and continental identities to the challenges of
uneven economic modernization and the consolidation of US hemispheric hegemony, the problem of
Brazil’s place in Latin America predates this period, and continues to be relevant today”
- p. 8-9  “The minority of Spanish American intellectuals who have taken substantive interest in Brazil,
as well as those relatively few Brazilian intellectuals who have dedicated themselves to studying Spanish
America, have LAMENTED a general lack of mutual awareness across the Luso-Hispanic frontier,
particularly in terms of dialogue on literature, culture, and ideas.”

“Latin America: a brief story of a controversial idea”

p. 12  AMÉRIQUE LATINE  First coined by French writer Michel Chevalier in 1836ish: DIALECTS:
North (Teutons/ Anglo-Saxons) x South (Latins)
GENEALOGY
“C. describes the North/ South—or Teutonic/Latin—exchange as the operative dynamic at work in
shaping history… [he] places the emphasis on the contribution of race to the formation of distinct ‘Latin’
and ‘Teutonic’ characters, and points out fundamental differences btw the two groups. (the dynamic that
‘carries mankind forward). Though he presents both the Northern European, proto-Germanic peoples and
Southern Greco-Roman civilization as central to progress, he invests North and South with different
historical functions…”
p. 12  “These differences manifested themselves principally in the modes of settlement practice in the
North and South (predatory conquest in South America, productive colonization in North America), and in
religion, with the North Americans’ industrious Protestantism contrasting to the South’s Catholicism, under
which Hegel alleges that ‘only force and voluntary subservience are the principles of action”
p. 13  France, thus, is the natural “head of the Latin group”, the “depository of the destinies of all the
Latin nations” : “This paternalistic idea wuld manifest itself in the foreign policy of Emperor Napoleon III
during the 1861-63 French-led punitive expedition to Mexico…As Napoleon III’s economic advisor,
Chevalier supported France’s Mexican adventure in a series of articles…”
DEFINING HISTORICALLY
p. 19  “scholars like Ardao, Sergio Guerra Vilaboy and Alejo Maldonado Gallardo acknowledge that the
term was initially applied by Spanish American nationalists like Bilbao and Torres Caicedo to Spanish
America only, as an expression of the Spanish American nations’ shared ‘Latin-ness,’ and in binary
opposition to the ‘Anglo’ US. This leaves Brazil, Haiti, indigenous and Afro-Latin communities, and
various Caribbean islands outside this binary and in state of conceptual limbo”
DEFINING CONCEPTUALLY
p. 19  “For others, including post-colonial critic Walter Mignolo, the frustrating contradiction btw the
reality of America’s ‘invention’ by European explorers and cartographers and the persistent belief in its
essential ‘American-ness’, along with the ideological implications and exclusionary tendencies manifested
in the term ‘Latin America,’ necessitate a more radical effort to ‘uncouple the name of the subcontinent
from the cartographic image we all have of it’ in order to ‘unravel the geopolitics of knowledge from the
perspective of coloniality, the untold and unrecognized historical counterpart of modernity’ (Idea x-xi).
 Sum: América Latina (unity: “identified tradition” grounded in claims of shared linguistic,
historical, racial heritages) x Nuestra América (unity: “identified camp” grounded in a collective
experience of deprivation and oppression and region’s place in the global economic system)
CONCLUDING
p. 14  “’Latin America,’ therefore, should NOT be viewed as a perfect descriptor for the region it
represents, but rather as a historical and ideological creation with a particular intellectual genealogy, a term
that has as much capacity to exclude as it does to include, an artificial designation without ontological
value, whose effective ‘reality’ exists to the extent that it is popularly accepted as referring to, and perhaps,
embodying, the essence or spirit of a specific region… ‘America’ and ‘Latin America,’ while they may
refer to actually existing landmasses, are not a priori features of the American landscape, but geographical
and historical inventions—an eminently sensible idea pioneered by Edmundo O’Gorman … (1958)”
INTERESTING  a whole branch of critics that see the term as coherently and implicitly affirming the
non-coherence of Latin America and, as such, absolutely genuine and handy. They are called the
REFORMIST POSITION: “this potential for multiplicity is a dynamic feature of the American condition
rather then a problematic contradiction, with regional and nomenclatural diversity ultimately resolving
itself in geo-cultural and terminological unity. As Rama notes in his influential study Transculturación
narrativa en América Latina (1982): … from this unity, which is real to the extent that it is a project [real
enquanto proyecto], real in terms of the bases that ground it, bursts forth [se despliega] an interior or
diversity that is the more precise definition of the continent. Unity and diversity has been the formula
preferred [for Latin America] by analysis in a variety of disciplines” (the seeds for hemispheric studies. All
these guys initiated it, somehow, and to different extexts: Martí & Carlos Bunge’s “nuestra américa,”
Bolívar’s “América meridional,” Reyes, Freyre, Rama, Rodó’s aerielismo, O’Gorman, Arturo Ardao’s
(Génesis de la idea y el nombre de América Latina, 1980, “Latin Am. is a ‘terminological creation’),
Mignolo (The Idea of Latin America, 2005)

Next  Archive of the ones who denied the term

In Brazil, he brings Mário’s “Argentine Modernist Literature”, in Diário Nacional, 1928
p. 18-19  “Andrade declares that he is ‘horrified’ by ‘all this about ‘Latin America’. His
negative reaction may be accounted for by his perennial skepticism toward nationalism in general, and by
his sense of Brazil’s regional uniqueness and difference from its neighbors. Andrade explains that he
rejects patriotism in all but the most local sense, considers being born in Brazil a ‘fatality,’ and is wary of
the abstract international ‘fraternity’ of the kind espoused by Pan-Americanists such as Joaquim Nabuco…
As such, Andrade ‘consider[s] odious any enlargement of the concept of the homeland [patria] that does
not embrace all of humanity.’ (what does he mean by humanity?). Moreover, he inveighs against the idea
of a ‘continental psychological or ethnic unity,’ and adds that ‘[e]ven if for argument’s sake we accept that
the historical and economic conditions facing the countries of a given continent are exactly the same, this is
not sufficient to create a continental social idea [conceito social continental] because these are neither
permanent nor intrinsic conditions’ (165). In other words, shared history or economic challenges do not, for
Andrade, translate to Latin American fraternal ties, which would for Andrade have to be based on racial
and civilizational commonalities he views as non-existent. Andrade fixes on the case of Brazil to drive
home his contention that PanAmericanists’ calls for continental solidarity, which he terms ‘false little
infatuations,’ are based on a misguided assumption of continental sameness: ‘[S]ocially, in its corner of
South America, Brazil is a stranger and a giant. Different races, different pasts, different ways of speaking
—these are reasons for undeniable difference!” (166). (SO SO interesting. Mário always kicking ass. He
denies, a priori at least, any ontological claims made on behalf of ‘Latin America’ as a category. Ronald’s
parallel—he translates ‘indefiniteness’ to Latin American fraternal ties. And this indefiniteness, firstly
recalled and attempted at a poetic translation by Whitman, is illuminated mostly with USAmerican ties.
This notion has both revisionist and revolutionary applications!)
2. Foundational Texts (to read, if needed)
a) Candido’s “Os Brasileiros e a Nossa América” (his “accentuated asymmetry”, Brazil “has been
more concerned with the Hispanic [American] bloc than the latter is with Brazil”
b) Rondó’s Ariel
c) Bonifácio’s
d) Schwarz’s “Abaixo a Tordesilas!”

3. Contemporary texts on this issue of Latin American intellectual history (for archive, too)
a) Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities
b) Vickie Unruh’s Latin American Vanguards
c) Rosenberg’s The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin America