Wasserman - Exotic nations: literature and cultural identity in the United States and Brazil, 1830-1930

to my parents
Hans and Erna Mautner

As a first-generation Brazilian and later as an American citizen, I have always lived in more than one culture, always had before me an amalgam of nationalities, cultures, and beliefs. Long ago I recognized that identity is necessary but contingent, a construct, but so made as to seem inevitable and natural."

This book grew out of my observations about identity, necessity, power, contact. I hope it does justice to the virtues of those among whom I grew up, from whom I learned: my argumentative parents and their friends; Vilm Flusser, in whose house all ideas were welcome and none taken for granted; Antnio Cndido, whose pioneering course in literary theory at the University of So Paulo shaped my thoughts about literature in general and about Brazilian literature in particular.

I thank all who listened to my ideas while they were a-shaping, read the early versions of various chapters, and gave me encouragement and advice: Rolena Adorno, Charles Baxter, Henry Golemba, Michael Giordano, Marisa Lajolo, Arthur Marotti, Walter Mignolo, Michael Palencia-Roth, Ross Pudaloff, Roberto Schwarz, Elizabeth Sklar. They did much to show me the right direction and save me from blunders.

I thank the English Department and Wayne State University for leaves of absence and grants that allowed me the time to complete this work. And I thank the Newberry Library for its help and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the grant that allowed me to attend the Newberrys invaluable Summer Institute on Transatlantic Encounters in 1986.

Earlier versions of portions of this book have appeared as articles. Parts of Chapter 2 appeared as Travelers Tales about Brazil: Variations, in L'esprit crateur 30 (Fall 1990): 1526; parts of Chapters 6 and 7 appeared as The Red and the White: The Indian Novels of Jos de Alencar, in PMLA 98 (October 1983): 81527; Re-inventing the New World: Cooper and Alencar," in Comparative Literature 36 (Spring 1984): 183200; and The Reception of Coopers Work and the Image of America," in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 32.3 (1986): 13045; an early version of Chapter 8 appeared as Preguia and Power: Mrio de Andrades Macunama, in Luso-Brazilian Review 21 (Summer 1984): 99116. I thank the journals for permission to use these materials.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this book are my own.

Finally I thank my husband, Rick, and my children, Sarah and Daniel, for advice, patience, encouragement, and joy.

R ENATA R. M AUTNER W ASSERMAN
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Despite the attending noise, recent shifts in the distribution of political and discursive power between men and women, whites and nonwhites, First or Second and Third or Fourth worlds reveal how closely the contending sides are interconnected and how interdependent are their interests and even their identities. Alliances among women, among minorities in the United States, among Latin Americans, have been strained as contests for power have redefined interests and hierarchies, as attempts to describe the characteristic traits of a collectivity have become the means of opening rifts within it, as new boundaries have been drawn around subjection by class, gender, or ethnicity while time, history, and opportunity redistribute power among them.

These realignments have prompted new readings of materials from the past, of writings by Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Brockden Brown, and James Fenimore Cooper; of captivity narratives, and reports of the early encounters These readings, which treat matters of power and identity at some length, refer as much to conditions of the present in which they are constructed as of the past they study. In the past, as in the present, issues of power and identity brought a strong emotional and ideological charge to works of the imagination, but time has removed much of the original urgency, and it is possible to gain new profit from their study.

Important shifts in political and discursive power took place in American nations just after they won independence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The literatures of the new nations set themselves the task of contesting the legitimacy and power of the former metropoles, determined to disentangle distinctive national selves from the cultural ties that still bound them to Europe. Yet different former colonies took different ways toward political and cultural independence. Here, I want to compare Brazilian and (North) American writings to understand how these ways, which have come to be seen as necessary and almost natural, were in fact, to a certain point, contingent, non-determined.

Because we are now distant in time from all the American independence movements and distant from many in space or culture as well, we can easily estrange for study what every grade-school mention of Washington in the United States, Bolivar in Spanish America, or Dom Pedro I in Brazil endeavors to naturalize." But those of us who live on the western side of the Atlantic are also close to the history of how the New World sought political and cultural independence, for we remember learning to think of our nations, and of ourselves in them. We can recover what was tentative and contradictory in school explanations of how we became independent, of how our nations defined themselves and how they endeavored to inscribe themselves in a world where history was dominated by the colonial powers.

At the core of concepts of nationality in the New World is historical and ideological material encompassing, first, the encounter between the very different cultures (later identified with races)identity, the notions of history and nature which are so powerful while they are taken for granted. If America is all nature, as it was so often depicted, its inhabitants could be neither partners nor adversaries of Europe, defined as civilization. If American nations wanted to retain a difference defined in terms of nature, yet enter into a civilized relationship with the metropoles, then the line separating nature from culture had to be redrawn, and in being redrawn, it could not be taken for granted.

The questions of identity, nature, history are not always posed in the same terms, but they are repeatedly answered in the literature of nationality and its criticism. Myra Jehlen, for instance (in American Incarnation), finds attempts to connect concepts of national identity with American nature and to merge notions of civilization and nature. Peter Hulme finds that the early accounts of Euro-American contact resolve that problematic connection with an erasure, as when Europe justifies exploration and conquest by insisting on the need to inscribe civilization on an empty continent, and ignoring the contradiction of its own complaints about the difficulty of overcoming the resistance of inhabitants, who had, at first, fed and sheltered the invaders (cf. Colonial Encounters, pp. 128, 15657). The question reappears in eighteenth-century European thought about the origins of society, which in turn provides some of the concepts on which definitions of American national character were based. The difficulty of reconceiving nature and civilization accounts for the tension and sometimes the interest of the new American literatures.

Similarly, the notion of historical origins is defamiliarized if the new nations can decide where national history begins, if origin is chosen rather than given. Preoccupied with the question of historical continuities and discontinuities, the new literatures acquired the deconstructive force of a built-in critical view of themselves and their objects.