Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought
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Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822381761 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/18/1992 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 334 |
| File size: | 485 KB |
About the Author
Thomas E. Skidmore is Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of History and Director, Center for Latin American Studies, at Brown University.
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Black into White
Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought
By Thomas E. Skidmore
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1993 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8176-1
CHAPTER 1
The Intellectual Context of Abolition in Brazil
THE BRAZIL OF 1865
In 1865 Brazil stood out in the Americas as a political anomaly–an Empire with a hereditary monarchy. While the Spanish Americans had fought to expel the Spanish crown in toto, the Brazilians marched to independence under the royal banner of one Braganza fighting the rest of Portuguese royalty. Brazil also stood out as an economic and social anomaly–an essentially rural economy that continued to tolerate slavery, despite the end of the slave trade in 1850. Both the traditional sugar plantations of the North and the newly booming coffee plantations of the South were fueled by slave labor.
In 1865 Brazil was Catholic, although, compared to New Spain, the Brazilian Church lacked both the wealth and the personnel to operate as a powerful and independent institution. The Catholic Church had been reorganized as the established church under the Brazilian Constitution of 1824. Cemeteries were owned and administered by the Church; public primary and secondary education was made a Church responsibility; neither civil marriage nor divorce was permitted; non-Catholics could not be elected to the national assembly; and non-Catholics (although permitted to gather for worship) could not give their meeting place the external appearance of a church. The same Constitution, however, brought a large part of Church finances under Imperial control. Along with this weak power base, the nineteenth-century Brazilian Church had inherited a less militant tradition than that of the crusading Spanish Church. The Brazilian clergy's reputation for personal corruption reflected a similar spirit. As a result, although individual clergy were active in politics, especially in the early Empire, the Brazilian Church itself was not a center of vigorous thought on social and political questions.
The basis for both the philosophy and the political theory which prevailed in the Empire up to 1865 was a curious amalgam of ideas imported from France. It was called Eclecticism, and as its name implies it was little more than a synthesis of the philosophical and religious ideas prevalent in France. Its very vagueness made it the perfect companion to the weak religious tradition, and it carried the day among the leading thinkers of mid-nineteenth-century Brazil–hardly a center of philosophical thought. As Antônio Paim has explained:
Since it was synonymous with a simple juxtaposition of ideas and lacked any guiding principles, it [Eclecticism] lost any negative connotation in Brazil and was almost always combined with the label "enlightened," a qualifier doubtless meant to ennoble it. More important, the victory of political conciliation during the Second Empire can be attributed to the mentality identified with [it].
In politics the climate was dominated by "party conciliation." Two political parties had emerged by 1860–the Liberal and the Conservative. They competed in the national legislature according to the model of the English House of Commons–even their debating style was often derivative. The Liberals had originated as a party dedicated to defending Brazilian interests against the Portuguese. The Conservatives had begun as the defenders of absolutism, which some Conservatives took to mean defending Portuguese interests even when the latter opposed independence. By the 1840's, however, their original character was blurred. Regionalism and republicanism had divided the politicians along new lines, and by the early 1860's the two parties looked very similar (although the Liberals were soon to change). An equilibrium had been reached between, on one side, the powerful planter oligarchies of the most important provinces (Bahia, Pernambuco, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro) and, on the other side, the Emperor. Even the politicians were often straightforwardly frank about their lack of ideological differences.
This political system appeared stable until the strains produced by a war with Paraguay (1865–70) led Pedro II to assert his authority against the parliamentary majority, thereby provoking a torrent of criticism of the entire monarchical structure. In one sense the liberal critics of the crown were justified. However enlightened Pedro II might have been, he stood at the apex of a hierarchical society based on human enslavement. It was under the authority of the Emperor and his ministers that the police and the Army hunted down runaway slaves and returned them to their masters, sometimes for torture and mutilation. An authoritarian structure, however ameliorated in practice, extended down into the family system, where the male head of the household enjoyed a power over the women and children which could border on sadism.
It was also true that the Empire was more centralized than could remain acceptable to the leaders of dynamically growing regions such as the province of São Paulo. They wanted more autonomy to exploit their own resources and demonstrate their ingenuity in areas such as education and economic development. The issue of overcentralization also offered a convenient vehicle for political "outs" who had been unable to break into power because they could not or did not wish to collaborate with the political oligarchies of their provinces. The role of court favor was enormous in the composition of the Senate, for example, since the Emperor had the power to designate the final winner among a short list of three senatorial nominees. Furthermore, the Emperor exercised an effective veto over appointees to administrative posts down to the provincial level, further accentuating the need of local politicians to earn personal support at court. Thus, it could be alleged with some reason that the unitary monarchy was strangling local initiative and distorting the formation of local opinion.
Notwithstanding these complaints, however, established political authority and the cogency of its theoretical justification in 1870 were as weak as established religion. In both cases the object of criticism was more vulnerable than the critics could have believed. Far from being the tyrant depicted by the Republican pamphleteers, Pedro II was more liberal and open-minded on social issues than most of the older political elite, although he resisted liberal efforts to reduce the "moderating power." His real role had been rationalized by the pragmatic constitutional lawyers and the Eclectic Philosophers. This did not save him from becoming the convenient whipping boy of liberal critics, however, because he was easier to attack–more personal and visible–than the tradition of amorphous political thought that had blurred party lines and left the younger generation without a clear justification for the anomaly of a slaveholding, Catholic-oriented agrarian monarchy.
The accompanying intellectual and literary tradition that dominated mid-century literature amply deserved its title of "Romantic." It originated with a small number of writers who had emerged in Brazil at the end of the eighteenth century. Their thought and work was greatly influenced by Europe, as could be seen in their pursuit of the cult of nature so characteristic of European Romanticism. When Brazil broke away from Portugal in 1822, these writers believed that they were articulating an independent national consciousness–glorifying Brazilian natural splendors. Couched in exuberant hyperbole, their romantic invocations of Brazilianness served as a literary mantle for the anti-Portuguese campaigns of the politicians.
In the years immediately following Brazil's independence in 1822 Indianism became a social and intellectual fad among the elite. Portuguese names were discarded in favor of Indian ones. Aspirants to high society even tried to prove they had noble Indian blood. Although there were virtually no dictionaries of Tupí, the most widely spoken Indian language, and although the minor Indian languages of the Amazon basin and the interior highlands (Mato Grosso) went totally unstudied, Tupí was seriously proposed as the new official language to replace Portuguese. Gonçalves Dias, the first great popularizer of Indianist poetry, himself authored a dictionary of Tupí, published in 1857.
With the coming of age of literary Romanticism, the Indian became a symbol of Brazilian national aspirations. He was transformed into a literary prototype having little connection with his actual role in Brazilian history. Like the Indian of James Fenimore Cooper, the Indian of Brazilian Romanticism was a sentimental literary symbol who offered no threat to the comfort of his readers. The parallel with Cooper was clearest in the novels of José de Alencar. The Negro usually appeared in Romantic literature in stock roles such as the "heroic slave," the "suffering slave" or the "beautiful mulatta." The free man of color, who existed at every level of Brazilian society, was conspicuously ignored by the Romantic authors. The contrast with the agonized attempts of later writers–Sílvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha, Graça Aranha–to come to grips with Brazil's ethnic reality could hardly be greater.
This, then, was Brazil in 1865. It was, as summed up by the literary historian Antônio Cândido, a Jesuitical traditionalism supported by an agrarian economy and a "Romantic" ideology. It had its more distant roots in the clericalism and agrarianism of Portugal. This tradition, resting on a weak church, had been greatly altered by the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century–bringing into the traditional culture a dose of political liberalism, thus producing the Brazilian hybrid of a liberal monarchy.
THE RISE OF A REFORM SPIRIT
The most immediate cause of a change in national mood was the Paraguayan War (1865–70), which stimulated many of the Brazilian elite to re-examine their nation. Even the Emperor called it "a good electric shock." The war dragged on and finally it took the aid of Argentina and Uruguay for Brazil to overcome Paraguay–a much smaller and poorer nation–and the effects of this drawn-out conflict on the Brazilian Empire were extensive. Brazil's ineptitude in initial mobilization for the war forced many civilians to wake up to their country's lack of modern facilities in such basic areas as education and transportation. It also embarrassed the military, arousing in officers a consciousness that led them to become a powerful political pressure group after the war. Furthermore, when the Emperor refused a Paraguayan offer to negotiate a peace in 1868 (in the face of the war's general unpopularity in Brazil) he permanently alienated an important political faction and precipitated the founding of the Brazilian Republican party in 1870. Finally, the war dramatized Brazil's shortage of able-bodied freemen. The lack of acceptable volunteers for the Army necessitated the recruitment of slaves, many of whom proved to be good soldiers. They were given their freedom in return, and many became regular soldiers. This, in turn, had an important secondary effect, because in 1887–88 the Army was asked to assume responsibility for hunting runaway slaves. The result was a contradiction, as Army officers had seen the value of ex-slaves when given their freedom. This anomaly, combined with growing doubts about slavery in principle, made Army officers more receptive to abolitionist and Republican ideas after the war.
All these changes wrought by the extended fighting in the Plata basin were reinforced by the penetration of ideas from abroad. Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba were the only slave territories in the Americas after the United States abolished slavery in 1865. Meanwhile political and economic liberalism was moving from triumph to triumph in France and England.
Change was also overtaking the social and economic structure. Urbanization was beginning to produce a social group not directly tied to the agrarian sector. Although class differences produced by urbanization were still minimal in the late Empire, and although economic, political, and family links between the city and the plantation remained very close, change was in the air. Many young men of the 1870's were ready to challenge the established political system and culture. Some were soon absorbed into the establishment structure, but others continued to criticize. A number of these younger men came from their fathers' plantations. Others came directly from urban backgrounds. By the decade of the 1880's they were caught up in the converging tide of abolitionism, anticlericalism, and republicanism.
Political developments were the most obvious harbingers of change. In 1868 the Emperor dismissed his Liberal party Prime Minister, Zacarias. The occasion was a disagreement over the conduct of the Paraguayan War. Pedro II then requested the Conservatives, who had only a minority in Parliament, to form a new government. The Conservatives were happy to cooperate. They immediately called a new election and came back with a majority produced by a degree of manipulation excessive even under the lax electoral standards of the day. The radical wing of the Liberal party, already highly sensitive to what they alleged to be the Emperor's "tyrannical" behavior, responded by splitting off to found the new Radical Liberal party in 1868 (their manifesto appeared in 1869), dedicated to radical political reforms that would include strict controls over crown powers. Two years later (1870) another group of dissidents went farther, founding the Republican party.
Although neither group included more than a small minority of the political elite (with the Republicans concentrated in São Paulo), they did represent a break with the conciliatory political culture on which the monarchy was based; and they appeared to constitute a direct challenge–posed in the language of democratic secularism–to the entire structure of hierarchy and privilege inherited from the colonial era.
These political tremors were accompanied by new intellectual stirrings. Beginning in 1868 a group of ambitious students, who shared little respect for tradition, coalesced in Recife. Their acknowledged leader was Tobias Barreto, a student who graduated from the Law Faculty in 1869. For the following ten years Recife was the center of a small but self-confident cadre of young intellectuals. Barreto, who had taken a schoolmaster's post in the interior of Pernambuco, commuted regularly to Recife. He continued to be a leader among the young graduates and students, spreading the ideas of German materialist philosophy, of which he had become an avid student. Sílvio Romero, a young polemicist from Sergipe who had done his secondary schooling in Rio, was another energetic and influential member of this group (which he later labeled the "Recife School"). Other members, all to become prominent in Brazilian intellectual life, were Franklin Távora, a novelist, Araripe Júnior, a literary critic, and Inglês de Sousa, another novelist (who transferred to the law school in São Paulo to finish his degree).
Positivism, evolutionism, and materialism were studied intensely. Comte, Darwin, and Haeckel were all read, along with Taine and Renan. During the first few years the spell of Romanticism was not quite broken, but by the early 1870's Sílvio Romero and Tobias Barreto had launched a fierce campaign against Indianism and Eclecticism. The Recife School entered a new phase when Tobias Barreto finally won a chair in the Faculty of Law in 1882, which he occupied until his death in 1889. From this prestigious position, he exercised a strong influence over yet another generation of students–among whom were Artur Orlando, Clóvis Beviláqua, Graça Aranha, Fausto Cardoso, and Sousa Bandeira. By the 1880's the defenders of traditional thought, or even of an updated militant Catholicism, were badly outnumbered in Recife.
Although Recife was one of the earliest, and remained one of the most influential centers of the new critical mentality, intellectual unrest soon appeared elsewhere. The province of Ceará became another center of intellectual innovation in the north. Some younger men who had studied in Recife started their own movement in Ceará's capital of Fortaleza in 1874. Their leaders were Rocha Lima, Capistrano de Abreu (later to attain fame as Brazil's first modern historian), and Araripe Júnior, the literary critic.
This new critical spirit was by no means limited to the north, however, as products of the Recife School often later claimed. In the rest of Brazil the break with traditional ideas was identified with the spread of Positivism. The first Positivist Association was founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1876. The following year Miguel Lemos and Teixeira Mendes journeyed to Paris where their involvement deepened from philosophical sympathy to religious commitment. In 1881 they founded the Positivist Apostolate, which declared its loyalty to the Pierre Lafitte faction of European Positivists.
Positivism made rapid inroads among the young cadets at the military academy in Rio, where the doctrine was spread by the officer-professor, Benjamin Constant (Botelho de Magalhães). Positivism was getting a similar boost from other teachers, such as Antônio Carlos de Oliveira Guimarães, a lecturer in mathematics at Colégio Pedro II, the most prestigious secondary school in Rio. Both Constant and Guimarães were founding members of the Positivist Society in 1876. In contrast to the Brazilian Apostolate, however, they adopted the doctrinal position of E. Littré, Lafitte's rival for the loyalty of the divided Positivists in Europe.
One cannot understand the influence of Positivism in Brazil without remembering that it attracted followers of widely varying degrees of commitment. At one extreme there were the orthodox religious Positivists, organized into a formal church in 1881 (the "Positivist Apostolate"); they eventually became so rigid they expelled their own Mother Church in Paris. At the other extreme were Brazilians who read Comte, or more often his popularizers, and sympathized with his general interpretation of the importance of science and the passing of religion without accepting his schematic theories of historical inevitability and his detailed formulae for social engineering. Between these two extremes were the "heterodox" Positivists, such as Luís Pereira Barreto, who accepted Comte's historical theories but rejected the religion founded in his name and institutionalized in Rio de Janeiro. It was Pereira Barreto, a São Paulo physician, who published in 1874 the first Brazilian treatise written from a systematic Positivist position.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black into White by Thomas E. Skidmore. Copyright © 1993 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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