Historical Source and Biographical Context in the Interpretation of Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões

Abstract

This commentary has two purposes: to re-establish, against recent misunderstandings, the intellectual and ethical position of Euclides da Cunha in Os Sertoes, and to follow up some of the sources of his book which have not been adequately traced. For these purposes it is convenient to draw a distinction between his Europeanism and his nativism, which is to say between the European and Brazilian sources of his book and the different ideas he imbibed from them. Either of the two poles of his thought could be charged with positive and negative ambiguities, which then found their way into the writing of Os Sertoes. This short paper explicates only the most salient of them, concerning race. From the mid-forties, when Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertoes was translated into English by Samuel Putnam under the title Rebellion in the Backlands, until the end of the sixties, references to either the Portuguese original or the English translation of this work were very sparse in English and North American publications. Then Ralph della Cava began to study Brazilian millenarianism in Joaseiro and Canudos, lending impetus to further studies of Brazilian peasant societies in the Northeast by other North American historians and cultural anthropologists. This trend of research in the United States has very recently peaked again with the historical 'revisiting' of Canudos by Robert Levine. But the gains from a closer North American acquaintance with Euclides da Cunha and his book have not been commensurate with our newly obtained insights into the train of events at Canudos at the close of the nineteenth century that led to 'war' there between the backlanders and the Republican forces. Just * An initial Portuguese version of this article was delivered in a session of the i9th International Congress of FILLM (Federation Internationale des Langues et Litteratures Modernes), held in August 1993, in Brasilia. I wish to thank the anonymous reader of the Journal for some constructive criticism of the English version, and also Jordina Guitart and Marek Filipczak for much help in the preparation of the final draft of this article. Frederic Amory is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 28, 667-685 Copyright ? i996 Cambridge University Press 667 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.78 on Wed, 22 Jun 2016 06:11:27 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms