Representing/Erasing the Other in Colonial Brazil’s Eighteenth-Century Epic Poetry

doi:10.1017/9781108976893.025

Chapter 24 - Representing/Erasing the Other in Colonial Brazil’s Eighteenth-Century Epic Poetry

from Part VI - Identities

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2022

Sandra Sousa

Edited by

Rocío Quispe-Agnoli and

Amber Brian

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Rocío Quispe-Agnoli: Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Amber Brian: Affiliation:
University of Iowa

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Summary

This chapter addresses proto-nationalist, Indianist discourses based on early colonial depictions of Brazil’s lands and people in the epic poems Uraguai (1769) by José Basilio da Gama, and Caramuru (1781) by José de Santa Rita Durão. Both poems offer examples of Indianist tradition that would go on to become models for the aesthetic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Given that the eighteenth century represents a coming of age in Brazilian literature, the absence of Africans in these two poems is noteworthy. This essay explores the simultaneous prominence of Natives and invisibility of Africans in colonial Brazilian literary texts and proposes that the mythological idealization of the Indian was used as a pretext to conceal the problem of the “Negro.” As with any ideology, the literary texts that committed to the building of Brazilian nationhood enforced ways of thinking about Afro-Brazilian people that endure through time.

Keywords

Colonial Brazil Uraguai Caramuru Basílio da Gama José de Santa Rita Durão Indianism Brazilian epic poetry noble savage African slavery national literature

Type: Chapter
Information: Latin American Literature in Transition Pre-1492–1800 , pp. 362 - 376

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976893.025 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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