Nossa and Nuestra América

Robert Patrick Newcomb

Description

Is Brazil part of Latin America, or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra América: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think. This book charts Brazil's evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic José Enrique Rodó, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazil's preeminent historians. While these writers are canonical figures in their respective national literary traditions, their thoughts on Brazilian-Spanish American relations are seldom investigated, and they are rarely approached from a comparative perspective. In Nossa and Nuestra América, Newcomb traces the development of two parallel essayistic traditions: Spanish American continentalist discourse and Brazil's solidly national exegetic tradition. With these essayistic traditions in mind, he argues that Brazil plays a necessary-and necessarily problematic-role in the intellectual construction of "Latin America." Further, in traversing the Luso-Hispanic frontier and bringing four of Latin America's preeminent thinkers into critical dialogue, Newcomb calls for a truly comparative approach to Luso-Brazilian and Spanish American literary and cultural studies. Nossa and Nuestra América will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian literature and ideas, and to anyone interested in rethinking comparative approaches to literary texts written in Portuguese and Spanish.
Acknowledgments and Note on Translations

Introduction: This Our Disunion

Chapter One: Counterposing Nossa and Nuestra América

Chapter Two: José Enrique Rodó: “Iberoamérica,” the Magna Patria, and the Question of Brazil

Chapter Three: Joaquim Nabuco: Monarchy’s End and the “South Americanization” of Brazil

Chapter Four: Alfonso Reyes: Culture, Humanism, and Brazil’s Place in the American Utopia

Chapter Five: Sérgio Buarque de Holanda: Obscured Roots of Rodó in Raízes do Brasil

Appendix: English Translations

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Latin American
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: Purdue University Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612491509
• Langue: English

Extrait

NOSSA AND NUESTRA AMÉRICA
Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures
Editorial Board Patricia Hart, Series Editor Elena Coda Thomas Broden Marcia Stephenson Paul B. Dixon Allen G. Wood
Howard Mancing, Consulting Editor
Floyd Merrell, Consulting Editor
Susan Y. Clawson, Production Editor
Associate Editors
French
Jeanette Beer
Paul Benhamou
Willard Bohn
Gerard J. Brault
Mary Ann Caws
Glyn P. Norton
Allan H. Pasco
Gerald Prince
Roseann Runte
Ursula Tidd
Italian
Fiora A. Bassanese
Peter Carravetta
Benjamin Lawton
Franco Masciandaro
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Luso-Brazilian
Fred M. Clark
Marta Peixoto
Ricardo da Silveira Lobo Sternberg
Spanish and Spanish American
Maryellen Bieder
Catherine Connor
Ivy A. Corfis
Frederick A. de Armas
Edward Friedman
Charles Ganelin
David T. Gies
Roberto González Echevarría
David K. Herzberger
Emily Hicks
Djelal Kadir
Amy Kaminsky
Lucille Kerr
Howard Mancing
Floyd Merrell
Alberto Moreiras
Randolph D. Pope
Francisco Ruiz Ramón
Íñigo Sánchez-Llama
Elżbieta Skłodowska
Mario Valdés
Howard Young

volume 52
NOSSA AND NUESTRA AMÉRICA
Inter-American Dialogues
Robert Patrick Newcomb
Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright ©2012 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Design by Anita Noble
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Newcomb, Robert Patrick.
Nossa and Nuestra América : inter-American dialogues / by Robert Patrick Newcomb.
p. cm. — (Purdue studies in Romance literatures ; v. 52)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55753-603-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61249-151-6 (epdf) — ISBN 978-1-61249-150-9 (epub) 1. Brazilian literature—History and criticism. 2. Spanish American literature—History and criticism. 3. Comparative literature—Brazilian and Spanish American. 4. Comparative literature—Spanish American and Brazilian. 5. Nationalism and literature—Brazil. 6. Latin America—Civilization. I. Title.
PQ9514.N49 2012
860.098—dc23
2011023378
Contents
Acknowledgments and Note on Translations
Introduction
This Our Disunion
Chapter One
Counterposing Nossa and Nuestra América
I. “Latin America”: A Brief History of a Controversial Idea
II. The Problem: Brazil as Necessarily Problematic
III. One Side of the Coin: Spanish American Identity Projection
IV. The Other Side of the Coin: Brazilian Exceptionalism
V. Simón Bolívar: Brazil at the Margins of “Meridional America”
VI. José Bonifácio: Armed Spaniards, Young Republics, and the “Tempered Monarchy”
Chapter Two
José Enrique Rodó: “Iberoamérica,” the Magna Patria, and the Question of Brazil
I. A Maestro in Spanish America, a Virtual Unknown in Brazil
II. The Americanista Paradigm, Language, and the Magna Patria
III. All of the Latin American Nations, including Brazil?
Chapter Three
Joaquim Nabuco: Monarchy’s End and the “South Americanization” of Brazil
I. The Formation of a Monarchist and Abolutionist
II. The Ends of Constitutional Monarchy
III. Monarchy’s End and the Threat of “South Americanization”
IV. Balmaceda: Chile’s “Parliamentary Republic” as a Solution for Brazil
Chapter Four
Alfonso Reyes: Culture, Humanism, and Brazil’s Place in the American Utopia
I. Reyes, a “Many-Tentacled Octopus”
II. Moderation, Continuity, and the Defense of Culture
III. Critical Humanism, the Public Intellectual, and the Example of Reyes
IV. Latin America’s Utopian Vocation: Última Tule
V. Reyes’s Vision of Brazil in America: Language and Utopia
Chapter Five
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda: Obscured Roots of Rodó in Raízes do Brasil
I. Buarque, a Lost Child of Ariel?
II. From a Theory of America to the Roots of Brazil
III. Rodó, Entangled in Buarque’s Roots, Lost in Paz’s Labyrinth
Appendix
English Translations
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Acknowledgments and Note on Translations
This book would not have been completed without the collaboration and support of a number of individuals and institutions. I would like to first thank my colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California-Davis, my mentors from the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University, and the editorial board of Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures.
Special recognition is due to the following individuals: Onésimo T. Almeida, Leopoldo M. Bernucci, Alfredo Bosi, Sérgio Campos Matos, Lúcia Helena Costigan, Earl Fitz, Richard A. Gordon, James Green, Pedro Meira Monteiro, Victor K. Mendes, and Terry, Koggy, and Michael Newcomb, Marimar Patrón Vázquez, Pedro Pereira, Geoffrey Shullenberger, Luiz F. Valente, Nelson H. Vieira, Lisa Voigt, and Kelley Weiss. Additional thanks are due to the graduate students who participated in my Luso-Hispanic Encounters and Sueños utópicos y pesadillas distópicas seminars, my graduate peers from Brown, and too many staff professionals and research librarians to mention. This project benefited from the institutional support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (Harvard), the Council for European Studies (Columbia), and the Luso-American Development Foundation. Publication of this book was made possible by the financial support of the Office of the Dean of the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies of the College of Letters and Science, Universitiy of California–Davis.
I take full responsibility for any factual, translation, or transcription errors contained in this volume. Quotations from the works under study appear in the original Spanish or Portuguese, while quotations of critics appear in translation. Translations from the Portuguese and of Spanish critics are mine except where otherwise noted. Longer translations of quotations from the two primary Portuguese authors appear in an appendix at the back of the book, keyed by number.
An abbreviated version of Chapter 2 appears under the same title in Hispania 93.3 (2010): 368–79. A condensed Spanish-language version of Chapter 4 will appear in the forthcoming volume Nuevas aproximaciones a Alfonso Reyes, ed. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado and Amelia Barili (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León). I am grateful to the editors of those works for permission to use the material here.
Introduction
This Our Disunion
De todas las literaturas sudamericanas, ninguna es tan poco conocida entre nosotros como la del Brasil [. . .] Sin ser un caso común, á veces un nombre dotado de mayor resonancia, rompe la indiferencia reinante y vence la incomunicación intelectual que separa las secciones de nuestro continente. Sólo por una rara excepción, una obra nacida bajo una estrella propicia, adquiere entre nosotros carta de ciudadanía.
—Martín García Mérou
El Brasil intelectual (1900)
Pouco nos interessam, a nós brasileiros, os assuntos americano-espanhóis. Nossos olhares, nossos pensamentos, nossos gostos embicam quase sempre para o Velho Mundo [. . .] Os mais dados às longas itinerações preferem quase sempre, ao sentir a majestade imponente dos Andes ou a magnificência mirífica da selva amazônica, o gozar da civilidade serena das ruas londrinas ou da apatia risonha de Paris. [1]
—Sérgio Buarque de Holanda
“Santos Chocano” (1920)
In a 1993 call-to-arms for comparative Luso-Hispanic studies, evocatively titled “Down with Tordesillas!,” the critic Jorge Schwartz observes the “problem of integrating” Brazil into a coherent idea of Latin America and calls for a “critical reflection that is capable, when considering Latin America, of duly including Brazil” (186–87). Schwartz’s call should, of course, be extended to address the traditional lack of attention paid by Brazilian writers and scholars to their literature’s ties to Spanish America, and to that of Spanish Americans vis-à-vis Brazilian literature. Further, the scope of Schwartz’s analysis may be expanded beyond Latin America, to include other contexts (peninsular, transatlantic, etc.) in which Luso-Hispanic relations are staged. Schwartz presents comparative Luso-Hispanic studies, which we may succinctly define as an academic approach that calls for sustained comparative analysis of literary and cultural actors, artifacts, and discourses originating in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking areas, as an emergent phenomenon. He exhorts his readers to join the “new generation” of critics, “dedicated [. . .] to the elimination of the line of Tordesillas” (195). Here the boundary established by papal fiat in 1494, dividing the known world into Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence, and which defined the ostensible border between Spanish and Portuguese America, stands in for a long period of literary and cultural non-communication between the Spanish-and Portuguese-speaking spheres, during which substantive cross-border dialogue has been the exception rath