Press, Power, and Culture in Imperial Brazil

Abstract

In this volume, 12 North American and Brazilian scholars explore the evolution of the press during Brazil's imperial period (1822–89). Addressing both content and form, they interpret the press from multiple perspectives: as sources of political and commercial news, as businesses, as vehicles for socioeconomic mobility, as platforms for political and social agendas, as arbiters of taste, and as a rapidly changing genre that incorporated emerging literary and artistic features. The diverse contributors embed their essays within a broader Atlantic world framework and the latest interdisciplinary scholarship produced by Brazilian researchers.The Brazilian press got a relatively late start due to crown prohibitions that remained in effect through 1808. Newspapers and pamphlets dealt primarily with political matters in the eras preceding and immediately following independence in 1822. The volume's contributors show that through the 1830s and 1840s, the press largely lived up to its reputation as a domain that was largely elite, male, and contentious. Most periodicals were ephemeral due to slim profit margins, the vicissitudes of rancorous postindependence politics and patronage, and the occasional sacking of opposition presses, as the essays by Marcello Basile and Hendrik Kraay show. By midcentury, as Brazil entered a period of relatively greater political stability, editors began to move away from overtly partisan approaches. Journalistic neutrality increasingly was seen as emblematic of respectable modernity. While politicians did not cease bickering or critiquing their rivals, they tended toward highbrow humor and competition through poetic flourishes, learned citations, and Latin phrases, as Kraay points out.By the 1850s, genres adapted from French and Anglo press culture gained popularity in Brazilian newspapers and helped to generate sales. These included crônicas, short features that bridged fiction and nonfiction (discussed by Ludmila de Souza Maia); galerias (galleries), illustrated capsule biographies of illustrious figures (addressed by Celso Thomas Castilho); illustrated magazines (the subject of Arnaldo Lucas Pires Jr.’s essay); and apedidos, public letters for which contributors paid a per-line fee (analyzed by Teresa Cribelli). These features also allow glimpses into more quotidian existence as they included representations of popular culture and relatively unfiltered communications from people from all walks of life. Brazilian newspapers also afford glimpses into topics that are otherwise difficult to reconstruct.Some of the contributions will be of particular interest to scholars of race, slavery, and the slave trade. Three particularly deal with slavery and race in novel ways. Alain El Youssef challenges the long-standing view that the press remained silent on slavery and the slave trade by uncovering press debates about the possibility of revising the slave trade after 1831. Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi explores the ambiguities of slave literacy. While less than 1 percent of slaves were literate according to Brazil's 1872 census, elites both feared literate slaves and highlighted slave literacy as a valuable skill in ads for slave sales and rentals. Godoi also reveals that slave labor was employed extensively in printshops and contributed to reducing production costs and prices for Brazilian periodicals. Castilho brings to light an ephemeral paper (of just 12 issues), edited by a self-proclaimed man of color, law school graduate, and teacher who had the temerity to call out racial discrimination in the city of Recife. Finally, José Juan Pérez Meléndez and Roberto Saba show how the slave trade and abolition were embedded in broader debates about free migration and transnational comparisons with the United States.This collection was made possible through the Hemeroteca Digital Brasileira (Brazilian Digitized Periodicals) site launched by Brazil's National Library in 2012. The authors are careful to note that the sudden availability of millions of pages of searchable texts offers both opportunity and liability. Particularly, Zephyr Frank and Matthew Nestler examine the limits of searching antiquated and broken typeface and offer methodological guidance and sampling techniques. Kraay and others observe that Rio's papers are overrepresented but find creative work-arounds, for example by examining contributions by provincial correspondents or reprinted items from regional periodicals that appear in Rio's dailies.There is little to quibble about in this volume. While a contribution about the female press would have been welcome, the existence of such a press is well substantiated throughout. A fuller explanation of the central concept of “public opinion” as a frame for authorial legitimacy is warranted before chapter 9, where Cribelli defines it admirably. Overall, editors Kraay, Castilho, and Cribelli are to be commended for bringing together myriad contributions that both stand on their own and create a coherent whole. The volume covers the economics of printing presses, press legislation, the implications of press anonymity, and limits to press independence. The contributors reconstruct audience with reference to literacy rates, the cost of newspapers, and possible ancillary forms of oral transmission. Finally, they demonstrate how the press's evolution over the course of the nineteenth century contributed to Brazilian ideas of modernity, nationhood, race, and citizenship.