White Hegemony in the (Re)Birth of Brazil

Abstract

Abstract On 7 September 1822, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, Prince Regent and future Emperor of Brazil, uttered the most famous cry in Brazilian history: 'Independence or death!' The symbolic power of the royal cry-known as the Grito de Ipiranga-has served to idealise Brazilian independence: the (re)birth of Brazil. The Grito de Ipiranga has been interpreted as the culmination of a peaceful process of political integration destined to give birth to a single nation-state in Portuguese America. This article examines this idealised and ideological portrait of Brazilian independence. The analysis extends from the first anti-colonial manifestations in the early sixteenth century to the consolidation of national unity in the mid nineteenth century. This wide historical framework enables us to discern the criteria used to select the events and figures that came to be part of the national(ist) discourse of Brazilian independence. The analysis reveals how this portrait of Brazilian independence locks out of the nationalist imaginary all those who did not participate in the formal process of independence, managed by Luso-Brazilians. This narrative of the (re)birth of Brazil turns independence into a symbolic pillar of white hegemony in Brazil. White Hegemony in the (Re)Birth of Brazil On 7 September 1822, Dom Pedro de Alcantara, Prince Regent and future Emperor of Brazil, uttered the most famous cry in Brazilian history: 'Independence or death!' The symbolic power of the royal cry ? known as the Grito de Ipiranga ? has served to idealise Brazilian independence: the (re)birth of Brazil. The Grito de Ipiranga has been interpreted as the culmination of a peaceful process of political integration destined to give birth to a single nation-state in Portuguese America ? an interpretation common to both conservative and progressive canonical historians, such as Francisco Varnhagen, Jo?o Capistrano de Abreu, Manuel de Oliveira Lima and Manoel Bomfim. The peaceful character of that process is attributed to the political wisdom of the (white and male) elite of colonial Brazil and their ability to minimise internal conflicts and avoid a direct confrontation with Portugal. This, the argument goes, enabled a smooth transition from colony to nation, without the bloodbath and fragmentation that characterised the process of independence in Spanish America. The result is a historiography that privileges the trope of cordiality and the historical agency of Luso-Brazilians, turning independence into a symbolic pillar of white (and male) hegemony in Brazil. The narratives and the studies of Brazilian independence tend to focus on the period 1808?22, with the turning point being the transfer of the seat of the Portuguese Crown to Rio de Janeiro in 1808, following the invasion of Portugal by Napoleonic troops. The transfer posed a crucial challenge to the colonial relations between Brazil and Portugal. Yet its impact on the process of independence had less to do with the separation from Portugal than with the impulse to the political and symbolic unity of Brazil. The 13-year residency of the Portuguese Crown in Rio de Janeiro brought a series of reforms that promoted the unification of the colony: improvements of transport and communication between population centres, reforms in taxation and the administration of justice, the creation of naval and military academies as well as of schools of medicine and surgery, the expansion of coffee production under royal protection, the building of textile factories, the beginning of the iron and steel industries, the establishment of the Bank of Brazil, the creation of the National Library, and the establishment of the Royal Printing Office. The separation from Portugal did not alter the Eurocentrism that was at the heart of the formation and formulation of Brazil(ianness). Independence signalled 'the climax of three centuries of changing attitudes toward Portugal ? from inferiority, to equality, to superiority',2 but the Brazilian Empire that came about was to be built upon Eurocentric cultural foundations, imitating the nations of the North Atlantic, in particular France ? …