1 - The literary historiography of Brazil

Summary

Literature in Brazil began to exist from the moment of the discovery of the country by the Portuguese in 1500, commemorated by a literary event in the broadest sense of the word: the Carta by Pero Vaz de Caminha, scribe of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s fleet, reporting the finding of new land and its inhabitants to King Manuel. However, the first title that legitimized the identity of literature as Brazilian appeared after three centuries of colonization, at the time when political subordination to Portugal had been severed. For only after Independence was proclaimed on September 7, 1822 would literary historiography begin to appear in Brazil, concomitant with the implantation of Romanticism, to which it owes its legitimacy, and in direct relation to the appearance of a national historiography. Amounting to a second beginning, that legitimacy conferred a lawful existence on literature as opposed to its earlier de facto existence during the colonial period. Historiography as the writing of history thereby carried out the singular recuperation of the past of which it is capable in accord with its founding function – a function more pronounced in the countries to which European colonialism gave rise, as in those of the Portuguese and Spanish Americas.

A consequence of political separation, the ambiguous relationship between the Americas and Europe, at times antagonistic and at other times identifying with the earlier state of dependence on the external capitals, disposed the countries of the Americas to the writing of their own history, capable of recuperating the past as a long and continuous phase of preparation for nationhood, highlighting the struggles or the yearning for emancipation during the colonial period of subjugation.