16 - The essay: architects of Brazilian national identity

Summary

For more than a century Brazilian intellectuals have agonized over their country’s national identity. Until the 1950s they attempted to capture its essence by relying on colorful language and historical allusions. Building on a paradoxical combination of faith and doubt, they wrestled especially with the troublesome question of how racial intermixture had affected the Brazilian character. Such a preoccupation had been common among elite thinkers of Latin America since the late nineteenth century, when the theories of white racial superiority arrived with the prestige conferred by North Atlantic “science.” The questions remained constant. Who are we? How have we become this way? Does a racially mixed people have a future in the “civilized” world?

This chapter focuses on some of the most influential Brazilian writers who have taken up these themes. They all tried to define Brazil’s national identity in both a cultural and a political dimension. For each historical period, the context is sketched and the focus turns to one or two of the period’s most widely read books on Brazilian national identity. All of these works went through numerous printings and are still read in Brazil.

The years from 1870 to 1889 saw the Brazilian empire in decline. Despite Brazilian victory in the Paraguayan War (1865–1870), Emperor Dom Pedro II faced increasing opposition at home from a republican movement. In 1889 the higher military, endorsing republican ideology, deposed the only genuine monarchy that nineteenth-century Latin America had ever produced. These years also saw the rapid rise of coffee as Brazil’s chief export, restricted largely to the south central areas, especially the states of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo.