Letras na América Portuguesa : autores – textos – leitores

Os textos produzidos na denominada América Portuguesa (1500-1822) abrangem os mais variados campos das letras ocidentais – lírica, épica, dramaturgia, historiografia, epistolografia, parenética, lexicografia, etc. – e seguem um modelo retórico-poético e teológico-político comum, próprio das Letras do Ancien Régime. Manuscritos e impressos escritos em várias línguas (português, principalmente, mas também em latim, castelhano, francês, italiano, tupi-guarani, língua geral, etc.), por um número de autores considerável (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.), corriam com avidez entre os leitores. São justamente esses textos, esses autores e esses leitores os que conformam o sistema cultural das Letras na América Portuguesa. A historiografia brasileira, portuguesa e inclusive internacional tem se debruçado há já vários decênios no estudo dos Estados do Brasil e do Maranhão e Grão-Pará, tanto de um ponto de vista micro-histórico como macro-histórico, salientando-se nos últimos tempos a sua relação com o resto do mundo, no âmbito próprio da global history. Nos últimos decênios, ao mesmo tempo, a literatura vem perdendo, paulatinamente, o seu poder de conhecimento legitimador das elites culturais de uma nação. Esse esquecido «Parnaso Brasileiro» mantinha, no entanto, um fluido diálogo cultural com Lisboa assim como com outras cidades europeias, diálogo esse que os processos de formação das literaturas exclusivamente nacionais, brasileira e/ou portuguesa, vieram apagar ou até mesmo ignorar. No espaço hermenêutico próprio dos Atlantic Studies, recuperam-se, neste livro, as Letras escritas e lidas na América Portuguesa, estudam-se seus autores, interpretam-se textos escolhidos e indaga-se tanto sobre seus primeiros leitores, como sobre seus leitores de ontem e de hoje. Um conjunto de docentes do Brasil, de Portugal, da Alemanha e da Espanha discute textos de Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto e Santa Rita Durão, entre outros. Die in der sogenannten »América Portuguesa« (1500-1822) entstandenen Texte gehören zu verschiedensten Diskursformen der westlichen Literatur und Kultur: Lyrik, Epik, Dramaturgie, Historiographie, Epistolographie, Homiletik, Lexikographie usw. Sie folgen einem gemeinsamen rhetorisch-poetischen und theologisch-politischen Modell, das charakteristisch für die Texte des Ancien Régime war. Manuskripte und Drucke in verschiedenen Sprachen (hauptsächlich Portugiesisch, aber auch Latein, Spanisch, Französisch, Italienisch, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral etc.) von einer beachtlichen Anzahl von Autoren (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa usw.) fanden eine umfassende Leserschaft. All diese Elemente - Texte, Autoren und Leserschaft – bilden das System der »Letras« in der »América Portuguesa«. Die brasilianische, portugiesische und sogar die internationale Geschichtsschreibung konzentriert sich seit mehreren Jahrzehnten auf das Studium der Kolonialstaaten Brasil und Maranhão e Grão-Pará sowohl aus mikro- als auch aus makrohistorischer Sicht. Gleichzeitig verliert die Literatur in den letzten Jahrzehnten allmählich die Funktion, das Wissen der kulturellen Eliten einer Nation zu legitimieren. Der aktuell wenig beachtete »Parnaso Brasileiro« unterhielt einen intensiven kulturellen Dialog mit Lissabon wie auch mit anderen europäischen Städten, einen Dialog, der der Ausbildung ausschließlich nationaler Literaturen, brasilianischer und/oder portugiesischer, wenig Stellenwert einräumte oder sie sogar ignorierte. Im hermeneutischen Raum, den die Atlantic Studies eröffnen, erschließt dieses Buch die in der »América Portuguesa« geschriebenen und gelesenen Texte, beschäftigt sich mit ihren Autoren, interpretiert ausgewählte Texte und fragt nach ihren ersten Lesern sowie nach ihren Leserinnen und Lesern gestern und heute. Eine Gruppe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland und Spanien diskutiert Texte u.a. von Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto und Santa Rita Durão. The texts produced in the so-called “América Portuguesa” (1500-1822) cover the most varied fields of Western Literature and Culture – lyric, epic, dramaturgy, historiography, epistolography, homiletics, lexicography, etc. – and follow a common rhetorical-poetic and theological-political model, typical for the Ancien Régime. Manuscripts and prints were written in various languages (Portuguese, mainly, but also Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, Tupi-Guarani, Língua Geral, etc.), by a considerable number of authors (Pero Vaz de Caminha, José de Anchieta, Antônio Vieira, Francisco Manuel de Melo, Gregório de Matos, Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, Sebastião da Rocha Pita, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto, Francisco Alves de Sousa, etc.) found a broad reception by readers. Precisely, these texts, these authors and these readers constituted the literary system in the “América Portuguesa”. Brazilian, Portuguese, and even international historiography has focused for several decades on the study of the colonial states Brasil and Maranhão e Grão-Pará, both from a micro-historical and macro-historical point of view, emphasizing recently their relationship with the rest of the world in the context of global history. Currently, literature is gradually losing its power of legitimising knowledge of the cultural elites of a nation. This forgotten “Parnaso Brasileiro” maintained, however, a fluid cultural dialogue with Lisbon as well as with other European cities, a dialogue that the formation of exclusively national literatures, Brazilian and/or Portuguese, came to neglect or even ignore. In the hermeneutic space opened up by the Atlantic Studies, this book deals with texts written and read in the “América Portuguesa”, studies its authors, interprets selected works and inquires both about its first readers and about its readers yesterday and today. A group of scholars from Brazil, Portugal, Germany and Spain discusses texts by Vaz de Caminha, Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Antônio Vieira, Botelho de Oliveira, Basílio da Gama, Antônio da Costa Peixoto and Santa Rita Durão, among others.

Transatlantic Noise

These three books position themselves within Atlantic studies, but despite significant differences in conceiving that frame, they all, to some extent, conflate the Atlantic world with the US. I suggest that this reflex contraction bears out the regular complaints that the field is prone to Eurocentricism, and dominated by northern, anglophone perspectives. Moreover, as the unequal distribution of academic prestige is reflected in our professional culture and its productions, it is worth attending to the effects of global disparities on writers, journals and scholarly organizations, and their responses to them. For Europeans, studying certain issues on the other side of the Atlantic can be a way to avoid facing them at home; meanwhile, the appearance of an African center for studying the US is hailed as a decolonizing event. Yet both manifest the westward pull of research attention that is so often evident in Atlantic studies, including in these books.There is an important difference … between exploring one’s worldliness and mistaking oneself for the world. Each of the reviewed texts could be charged … with sailing an American ship under an Atlantic flag.

Salvador da Bahia

The city of Salvador da Bahia was founded in 1549 under the name of São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos (Holy Savior of the Bay of All Saints). But it was known as the city of Bahia between the 16th and 19th centuries. This major Atlantic port city developed by exporting sugar and tobacco to Europe and beyond and importing slaves from Africa. It was also the capital of Portuguese America until 1763. We cannot really separate the history of the city and that of its hinterland, one of the most prosperous plantation economies in the Atlantic world. It was the plantations of the Recôncavo that made Bahia one of the major slaveholding regions in the Americas and the interaction between the city of Bahia and its hinterland was constant. Nonetheless, this article focuses on the urban setting. Salvador da Bahia was a Portuguese colonial city, built on land of the Tupinambá people, which brought together a multiethnic community made up of European, indigenous, and African populations. It was a cosmopolitan city despite itself, whose development was closely linked to slavery and slave trade. It was a place of mutual influence and deep reconfiguration, where mixing was both obvious and problematic. The society of Bahia was based on exclusion and negotiated forms of integration, influenced by the Portuguese imperial framework. It was a complex slave society, whose transformation between the 16th and the 19th centuries cannot be understood without taking into account the several Atlantic dynamics. Slavery reached its peak during the Brazilian imperial regime, being kept untouched after independence, and the dynamics of the city remained deeply tied to the slave trade, whether illegal or interprovincial. This persistence of slavery through the 19th century raises the question of the traditional chronology of the history of Brazil, whose colonial period would end with independence. This article encompasses both colonial and imperial periods and offers a wide historiographical overview on Salvador da Bahia. The historiography of Bahia has been extensively devoted to slavery history and slave populations. Historians have long been interested in black urban slavery and its specificities, highlighting the complexity of the society of Salvador da Bahia and the strength of the interactions that took place there. In recent years, scholars have explored new perspectives, by taking the path of micro history and collective biographies. They have examined in depth the multiple connections between Bahia and different African regions, which involved different agents and social groups. By focusing on the South Atlantic, they have experimented with approaches beyond the imperial framework and have made a major contribution to Atlantic studies. The political perspectives were also renewed, emphasizing the strength of local powers and the interactions between local and imperial strategies. The indigenous history of the region of Bahia is also experiencing a significant revival. We thus intend to emphasize recent works and ongoing research on Salvador da Bahia.

Sociability in the British Atlantic

Sociability is both a value and a social practice, yet it is not universal. The ability to live in society as well as the degree of sociability of an individual seem to depend on his/her culture and on the character of his nation. The exceptional development of forms, practices, and institutions of sociability in early modern Europe was mainly linked to urban expansion, to the growth of commercial society, and to the expansion of print culture and communication. Recent scholarship has focused increasingly on the emergence of different models of sociability in 18th-century Europe. The French model of sociability was built due to the idealization of the Parisian salon and the ideal of politeness and to the privileged role it granted to women. A distinct British model of sociability took shape from the Restoration period and developed throughout the 18th century, defining itself thanks to exchanges and tensions with France and expressing itself through paradoxes that both reflected and constructed the national character. The relatively new field of British Atlantic studies has opened new paths for the exploration of sociability, a central phenomenon that informs the social, cultural, and political histories of colonial societies and, especially, refines our understanding of the social interactions, behaviors, and structures of the British Atlantic world and of their important role in shaping new identities. The “transplantation” of forms, practices, and institutions of sociability from Britain to its colonial empire with the creation of transatlantic networks of sociability constitutes a fertile research area, benefiting from insights drawn from various disciplinary fields. This article provides a selection of bibliographic references thematically arranged into sections, all topics constituting central aspects of the study of sociability in the British Atlantic.

Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic

The introduction sets out the field of critical kinship studies and its relation to diaspora studies, black Atlantic studies and queer studies. It offers an overview of relevant works of diaspora and black Atlantic studies and queer studies, and how these fields are brought together in theorizations of queer diaspora. It then turns to the question of how to do critical kinship studies to suggest a double-pronged approach to the study of kinship. The study of kinship is both particularly interesting and particularly complex in postcolonial contexts, as kinship can be used both as a tool of colonial power and a means of anticolonial resistance, and the novels studied in this book suggest that kinship often does both.

Trans* Atlantic Religion

This article is about spirit possession in Cuban Santería and how the relationship between an orisha and their devotee reveals an unstable gender identity that avails itself to trans* studies. Taking an ethnographic scene from the work of Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, wherein a female devotee named Belkis is possessed by her male orisha Changó, this article argues that Santería offers a genderqueer way of understanding the relationship between gods and humans. It makes use of Jack Halberstam's differentiation between “trans*” and “trans,” in which the former allows for myriad gender identities and contradictions that the stability of “trans” might otherwise seek to concretize. The modification of “transatlantic” to “trans* Atlantic” allows for a consideration of the fluidity of genders and sexuality that is often missed in black Atlantic studies and highlights the important role of religion in gender and black Atlantic studies.

From Louisiana to Saint-Domingue and from Saint-Domingue to Louisiana

The conclusion explains how this book, by reconsidering the interplay of slavery and race in French New Orleans under the influence of Saint-Domingue, has proposed an alternative way of understanding how an urban slave society operated and what it meant for a slave society to become racialized. It has also tried to better fulfill the promises of Atlantic history. Like other kinds of transnational history, Atlantic studies were conceived of as a way to move away from the primacy of the present-day nation state as a unit of analysis and from the tendency toward exceptionalism inherent to national history, but this historiographical field has not yet succeeded in fully escaping from a North-American-centric perspective. At stake is the recovery of the place the Caribbean occupied within the early Atlantic world as well as the development of a comparative and connected history of racial formation as a sociopolitical process in the Americas.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans’ profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. It makes these claims on the basis of recent scholarship on how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, and evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford importing British cultural products. In doing so, this work merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. This book, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, this book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.