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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Brazil, land of miscegenation (métisse). An indisputable fact and an unending process. But how should we understand its genesis and how should we, while respecting the requirements of a historiography worth the name, interpret it in terms of our hopes for the future? This is the horizon binding these reflections, which is to be put in perspective in the studies published in this issue of Diogenes.
Foregrounding miscegenation, and understanding its origins, has been one of the constant themes among the most distinguished practitioners of Brazilian thought since the 1930s, and has been accepted, indeed demanded, since the 1920s by the artistic and literary movement known as ‘modernism’, of which one of the major figures was the São Paulo writer, Mário de Andrade. Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), who would now have been a hundred years old, comes particularly to mind, as does Sergio Buarque de Holanda (1902–1982). Freyre made history with the publication of his two first works, Casa Grande & senzala [Masters and Slaves] of 1933 and Sobrados e mucambos of 1936. The same year Buarque de Holanda published his Raízes de Brasil [Roots of Brasil]. Motivated by the desire to understand their country, its shaping and – with some kind of concern as to identity – their own origins, both had been led to pave the way for what might be called an ‘open’ sociology, which immediately acquired a strongly anthropological character with Freyre and quickly incorporated increasingly historical aspects with Buarque de Holanda.
1. Concerning Mário de Andrade, poet, novelist and critic, the determining figure in the Semana de arte moderna de São Paulo (1922), and who was, moreover, mulatto, Lévi-Strauss said in a recent interview with the newspaper O Estato de São Paulo 22 April 2000, cademo 2, that "only today are we registering the extent to which Mário's work was avant-garde, once it is compared with what was being written in Europe [in the 1920s and 1930s]". We should note that in his ‘fable', Macunaíma, Mário de Andrade was also inspired by the work of a German ethnographer, Theodor Koch-Grünberg, who had worked in Amazonia and especially Venezuela. It was also a phrase of Mário de Andrade ("sou um tupi tangendo un alaúde …" ["I am a Tupi who plays the lute …"]) which Serge Gruzinski used in his highly illuminating 1999 work La pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard) as an epigraph to the first chapter, entitled ‘Amazonias', which opens with the statement: ‘This line from Mário de Andrade has resonated for a long while in my mind. As if it ought to help me disentangle the sentiments which some countries of America inspired in me.'
2. See the observations of the historian, Evaldo Cabral de Mello, in his afterword, 'Raízes de Brasil e depois', to the 1995 edition of S. Buarque de Holanda's work (published in 1998 in French by Gallimard as Racines de Brésil, in the series, ‘Collection UNESCO d'oeuvres représentatives’).
3. See Thomas E. Skidmore (1985), Race and Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives, in Pierre-Michel Fontaine (ed.), Race, Class and Power in Brazil (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies / University of California), third edition, 1995, 11-23. See also Thomas Skidmore (1976), Preto no branco: raça e nacionalidade no pensamento brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra).
4. As the poet Manuel Bandeira put it in his poem on Casa grande & senzala: "A mania ariana/ Do Oliveira Viana/ Leva aqui a sua lambada/ Bem puxada … Que importa? É lá desgraça? / Essa história de raça,/ Raças más, raças boas/ - Diz o Boas/ É coisa que passou/ Com o franciú Gobineau./ Pois o mal da mestiço/ Não está nisso. / Está em causas sociais,/ De higiene e outras que tais: / Assim pensa, assim fala / Casa Grande & Senzala …" ["The Aryan household / Of Oliveira Viana / Takes here its defeat / Deeply felt … / Does it matter? / Is it a disgrace? / This story of race / Bad races, good races/ - The anthropolo gist, Boas, says/ That this is something that happened/ With the ‘Franciú' Gobineau/ For what is bad about interbreeding / Does not lie in this/ But in the social causes / Of sanitation and other things of that kind/ Thus thinks, thus speaks / Masters and Slaves "].
5. See Bartolomé Bennassar and Richard Marin (2000), Histoire du Brésil, 1500-2000 (Paris: Fayard), pt 1, ‘Le Brésil colonial', by Bartolomé Bennassar, p. 30.
6. See B. Bennassar, op. cit., p. 63: "The return to the offensive (against the land owners), very influential at court, ended with the agreement of 1574, then the law of 22 August 1587, which particularly authorized the Indians to leave of their own free will the plantations where they worked. The legislative apparatus was reinforced in theory by the law of 11 November 1595, which submitted the definition of the ‘just war' to the decision of the kings, then by the laws of 1605 and 1609, which reaffirmed the freedom of the Indians and entrusted their education and protection to the Jesuits, and finally by that of 1611." See also below. Bennassar here draws on the work of Frédéric Mauro (1960), Le Portugal et l'Atlantique, 1570-1670 (SEVPEN).
7. S. Buarque de Holanda (1995), Raizes do Brasil, preface by Antonio Candido and afterword by Evaldo Cabral de Mello (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras), pp. 122-3, n. 40, referring to the works of Father Antonio Vieira (1856), Obras várias, volume I (Lisbon), p. 249.
8. It is true that in 1908 the German, von Ilhering, who was at that time director of the museum in São Paulo, published an article in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo, in which he advocated the extermination of the Kaigang Indians who, in his view, constituted an obstacle to civilization. It was in the wake of the polemic to which this article gave rise that the Department for the Protection of Indians was born, under the army officer, Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon. This great idealist, who ended up as field marshal, aware of his own ‘Indian blood', wanted there to be progressive and peaceful integration. See Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (1993), O espetáculo das raças, cientistas, instituições e questão racial no Brasil (1870-1930) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras), p. 83.
9. This is always a very real question, for there are still isolated communities who, when they come into (even friendly) contact with ‘whites', risk succumbing to illnesses which the latter tend to communicate to them. These populations are also threatened by those seeking wealth who invade their lands.
10. See Jean-Paul Duviols (1998), ‘Les "sauvages brésiliens" dans le miroir européen (XVIe siècle)', and Denis Courzet (1998), À propos de quelques regards français sur le Brésil (vers 1610-vers 1720): entre espérance, malédiction et dégénérescence, both in Katia de Queirós Mattoso, Idelette Muzart-Fonseca dos Santos and Denis Rolland (eds.), Naissance du Brésil moderne 1500-1808, Collection Centre d'Études sur le Brésil (Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne).
11. Among representatives of this romantic literature, see especially José de Alencar, subject of an article by José Mauricio Gomes de Almeida in this issue.
12. See Ronaldo Vainfas (2000), ‘Un descobrimento suspeito', Jornal de Brasil, ‘Idéias Especial' supplement, 20 April. See also his (1995), A heresia dos Indios: catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras).
13. Gilberto Freyre (1973), Além do apenas moderno, sugestões em torno dos possíveis futuros do homem em geral, e do homem brasileiro, em particular (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora), p. 228. Of course, Freyre was careful to add that more than a century of immigrants from Europe, the Near East (Syria, Lebanon) and Japan were grafted onto these ‘Euro-Afro-Amerindian' foundations.
14. See the famous letter of the expedition's recorder, Pero Vaz Caminha, recounting the discovery and first contacts. For a French translation, see Andrée Crabbé Rocha Torga (1978), Poésie, 7: 4 (journal edited by Michel Déguy). The translator renders these words of Caminha to the king of Portugal most tellingly: "On that day, all the time they remained, they danced with our men to the sound of one of our drums, so that they demonstrated most effectively that they were much more our friends than we were theirs."
15. As Katia de Queirós Mattoso has put it, "Well-populated black Africa was to empty to populate the Americas. Black Africa, with its relatively stable institutions and cultures, was to lose that stability and those cultures to assuage the slave-trader's hunger", in her (1979) Être esclave au Brésil (XVI-XIXème siècle), ‘Le temps et les hommes' (Paris: Hachette), p. 110. In this book, de Q. Mattoso, Director of the Centre of Research on Brazil at the Sorbonne, gives what is undoubtedly the best overview of both the constant features and the incredible diversity of the slave condition in Brazil.
16. Simone Weil (1991), ‘Les causes de la liberté et de l'oppression sociale', in Oeuvres complètes, II. Écrits historiques et politiques (Paris: Gallimard), volume II, p. 53.
17. On the trade in African slaves at first with Europe and then, very soon, with the American continent, a remarkable general survey is now available: Hugh Thomas (1997), The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (1440-1870) (Paris: Picador). As Thomas has written in his concluding ‘Reflection' (p. 793), after referring to some slave hunts made by the Portuguese directly in Angola: "But most slaves carried from Africa between 1440 and 1870 were procured as a result of the Africans' interest in selling their neighbours, usually distant but sometimes close, and, more rarely, their own people. ‘Man-stealing' accounted for the majority of the slaves taken to the New World, and it was usually the responsibility of the Africans … But then there was no sense of Africa: a Dahomeyan did not feel that he had anything in common with an Oyo." It should be added that, as far as the state of war or domination between communities was concerned, the situation was the same on all continents, where the communities viewed each other as ‘inferiors' or ‘enemies'. On this point reference must inevitably be made to Claude Lévi-Strauss's incisive reflections in his (1973) ‘Race et histoire', in Anthropologie structurale, II (Paris: Plon).
18. See Katia de Q. Matoso, op. cit., pp. 180 ff.
19. See, among recent works, that on the ‘representation' of the blacks in the press of the province of São Paulo in the second half of the nineteenth century by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (1987), Retrato em branco e negro: jornais, escravos e cidadãos em São Paulo no final do século XIX (Companhia das Letras).
20. Anthony W. Marx (1998), Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of South Africa, the United States and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). The author is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Columbia and is the author of an earlier work on South Africa.
21. Ibid. p. 90 and n. 30.
22. Ibid. p. 93.
23. It could, moreover, be questioned whether demographic factors should not be taken more into account.
24. See Pierre-Michel Fontaine (ed.) (1995), Race, Class and Power in Brazil (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California), proceedings of a symposium of 1980, first published in 1985.
25. See Katia de Queirós Mattoso, op. cit. p. 255. See also the same author's (1997) ‘Être affranchi au Brésil: xviii-xixe siècles' ['The Manumission of Slaves in Brazil in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries'], Diogenes, 179, ‘Routes et traces des esclaves' ['The Routes and Traces of Slaves'].
26. A. Marx, op. cit., p. 69.
27. See Courier international, 494, 20-26 (April 2000), for a translation of an article by Eduardo Junqueira which appeared in the weekly Epoca de São Paulo.
28. S. Buarque de Holanda, op. cit., p. 58.
29. It is tempting to compare the case of Antonio Vieira with that of Pushkin. The great Russian poet was also of black descent. His mother was the granddaughter of Abram Hannibal, an Abyssinian of noble origin bought as a slave in Constantinople and adopted by Peter the Great, whose companion in arms he became. (See also Dieudonné Gnammankou's 1997 article, ‘Entre la Russie et l'Afrique: Pouchkine, symbôle de l'âme russe' ['Pushkin between Russia and Africa'], Diogenes, 179, op. cit. Nor should we forget that the great Brazilian writer, Machado de Assis, who was the first president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, founded in 1896, also had black ancestors.
30. On the Christian Congo of this period, see Hugh Thomas, op. cit., Book 1, chapter 6.
31. Anthony Marx's hypothesis might perhaps be plausible if the region of the South (from São Paulo to Rio Grande do Sul) alone was considered, where the blacks, for economic and historical reasons, were a tiny minority at the time of Abolition and became an even smaller proportion as a result of European immigra tion. There, segregation might perhaps have been possible (if still improbable) in the absence of a legal pronouncement forbidding it. But nowhere else in Brazil. Which leads us to say that law in itself is no great matter.
32. See the chapter, ‘The Uncertain Legacy of Miscegenation', where theories are discussed, in C. Degler (1971), Neither Black nor White (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press); M. Harris (1964), Patterns of Race in the Americas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood), pp. 72-4 and n. 46 at p. 300.
33. The idea that the absence of legal discrimination stemmed from a deliberate and political manoeuvre haunts Marx's discourse: witness the use he makes of the adjective ‘purposeful' or the adverb ‘purposefully'.
34. A. Marx, op. cit., p. 74.
35. For comparison, one has only to remember that in 1939, as a result of the segregation laws, the sublime black (or mixed-race) contralto, Marion Anderson, was forbidden to perform in the Constitution Hall at Washington, and it was only thanks to the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the President, that she was ultimately able to give a concert at the Lincoln Memorial Center.
36. See Eduardo Silva (1995), ‘O Principé Obá, um voluntário da pátria', in Guerra do Paraguay-130 anos depois (Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará), pp. 67-76. See also the same author's (1998) Dom Obá II d'Africa, o príncipe do povo: vida, tempo e pensamento de un homen livre de cor (Companhia das Letras). Hugh Thomas, The SlaveTrade, recounts still more extraordinary cases, such as that of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known to Europeans as Job Ben Salomon, who was a slave in North America and returned to Africa, but first stayed in England where he was received by the great nobles and Queen Caroline. There is still in Africa a community of the descendants of slaves who returned to their native land after living in Brazil and were keen to continue Brazilian traditions.
37. The data presented here concerning José do Patrocínio are printed in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1970), ‘Grandes personagens da nossa história' series (São Paulo: Abril Cultural Limitada).
38. Maria Alice Rezende de Carvalho (1998), O quinto século, André Rebouças e a construção do Brasil (Revan / Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro-IUPERJ, Cândido Mendes University).
39. Ibid., p. 172.
40. The tragic episode occurred some time later when the disinherited of Nordeste, roused by the preaching of a sort of popular prophet, Antonio Conselheiro, took refuge in an old farm in the sertão of Bahia, known as Canudos. After failing on several occasions in their attempts to dislodge them and to put an end to their rebellion, the republican army launched a formidable operation against them and accused them, totally improbably, of being the agents of an international plot to restore the monarchy. There was an appalling massacre. A witness to the determined resistance of the rebels, since he was the correspondent for the newpaper O Estado de São Paulo covering the war, was Euclides da Cunha, a committed republican. He was to render them justice by writing the famous Os sertōes [The Uplands].
41. Cavalho, op. cit., p. 225. Note Rebouças's use of the pejorative term republicanistas or republiquistas to designate the supporters of the republican regime, rather than ‘republicans'.
42. Ibid., p. 227.
43. See R. Marin, ‘Le XXème siècle brésilien', in B. Bennassar and R. Marin, op. cit., Part III, especially pp. 285- 94 (‘Le temps des immigrés’).
44. See Kátia de Queirós Mattoso, op. cit., p. 178.
45. See (1990) Arthur de Gobineau et le Brésil: correspondance diplomatique du Ministre de France á Rio de Janeiro, 1869-1870, annotated edition by Jean-François de Raymond (Presses Universitaires de Grenoble), p. 163. The excellence of this edition of the correspondence should be emphasized.
46. Ibid., p. 143.
47. My thanks here to Professor José Sebastião Witter, of the University of São Paulo, director of the Musée Paulista, who has kindly drawn my attention to the case of Thomas Davatz, schoolmaster, who came to Brazil to write a report on the living conditions of German and Swiss immigrants on the coffee plantations. This is a summary of Davatz's ‘case'. Being himself sent to live as an immigrant at Ibicaba, a farm considered a model for parceria (a sort of share-cropping), he was involved in 1857 in disputes between the overseers and the immigrants, which led to the start of a revolt in the plantation. On his return to Europe, Davatz published a book which made such an impact that to thwart it the Brazilian government had to have another immigrant reply to it. Davatz's book is available in a 1980 edition, Memórias de un colono no Brasil: 1850 (São Paulo: Edusp).
48. See the article by Arlinda Rocha Nogueira in this issue.
49. See the interesting article by Ligia Ferreira (1996), ‘<Négritude>, <Negridae>, < Negrícia>: enquête sémantique et historique sur trois concepts-voyageurs', in Kátia de Queirós Mattoso (ed.), Mémoires et identités au Brésil (Paris: L'Harmattan), pp. 77-99.
50. One of those who understood this best was the painter Lasar Segall, in his quest for the human univer sal. Born in Lithuania, this "Russian Jew", as he called himself, after participating in the German artistic movements (with Feininger, Kandinsky, etc.), decided in 1923 to emigrate to Brazil, where he was on friendly terms with the modernists (Mário de Andrade). In his painting Encounter, of 1924, contrasting with the whiteness of his wife, he paints himself as a mulatto, as if to identify with these Brazilians whom he acknowledged as ‘brothers'. See Stéphanie d'Alessandro (2000), Lasar Segall: nouveaux mondes, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Adam Biro).
51. See also the ‘Conclusion' to B. Bennassar and R. Marin, Histoire du Brésil.
52. ‘Brasilien, ein Land der Zukunft' is the title of an essay written by Stephan Zweig in 1941, shortly before he committed suicide in 1942 at Petrópolis in Brazil. For a French translation see (1998), Le Brésil, terre d'avenir, trans. Jean Longeville, with a new preface by Alain Mangin (Éditions de l'Aube).
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