Early Twentieth-century Brazil Research Articles

Agrarian Elites, Wealth Inequality, and State Capacity: Evidence from Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

abstract: Traditional agrarian elites have often been portrayed as obstacles to the expansion of the state. Because landed actors are particularly exposed to taxation, inequality is expected to exacerbate their resistance to the development of fiscal capacity. This article argues that when propertied actors are politically dominant and obtain benefits from public spending that are proportional to their capital endowments, wealth inequality is associated with greater elite support for capacity investments. Using early twentieth-century Brazilian data, the author shows that where landed elites faced fewer political threats, higher levels of landholding concentration were associated with increased fiscal and administrative capacity. Tests of mechanisms corroborate the idea that this relationship results from elite demands for specific types of public spending. These findings contribute to the broader literature on state-building by providing new insights into the interaction between economic interests and political dominance in shaping subnational variation in the reach of the state.

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth Century Brazil

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth Century Brazil

Migrant transnationalism and time: divergent trajectories of diasporic political engagement in early 20th century São Paulo

ABSTRACT Why and how do some migrant groups demonstrate greater engagement with homeland politics than others at particular historical moments? Research has examined both individual-level factors such as migrants’ resources and institutional factors such as contexts of incorporation. Less theorised, however, are the ways in which factors are mediated by temporal contexts such as timing and sequence. Drawing on the notion of path dependence, this study analyses how the temporal orders of four institutional factors – 1) the socioeconomic context of reception, 2) incorporative policies of the receiving state, 3) diaspora policies of the sending state, and 4) migrant networks – resulted in divergent levels of diasporic engagement between Italian and Japanese migrants in early twentieth century Brazil. My findings show that the socioeconomic context of reception provides the initial condition on which migrants develop their networks. Second, the timing of when diasporic policies – relative to incorporative policies – reach out to migrant networks affects the breadths of social class involvement in diasporic engagement. This study contends that timing plays a critical role in producing divergent levels of diasporic engagement at the group-level.

Book Review: Religious Conflict in Brazil: Protestants, Catholics and the Rise of Religious Pluralism in the Early Twentieth Century Brazil

Book Review: Religious Conflict in Brazil: Protestants, Catholics and the Rise of Religious Pluralism in the Early Twentieth Century Brazil

Dissonant Discourses: Evelyn Scott and Cyril Kay-Scott’s Experiences in Brazil (1914–1919)

ABSTRACT This article analyses the discourse of individuals who go through the same experience within the context of self-imposed exile. The subjects involved are the American writers Evelyn Scott (née Elsie Dunn, 1893–1963) and Cyril Kay-Scott (né Frederick Kreighton Wellman, 1874–1960). They scandalised their Southern society when, in 1913, they fled Louisiana and eloped to London and then Brazil with little money and no passports. Their experiences were extraordinary. After years of a semi-nomadic existence eking out a living in different parts of Brazil, the Scotts ended up in the country’s arid north-eastern backlands confronting isolation, poverty and near starvation. This work investigates the couple’s perception of the years they shared in the tropics. Carrying with them elite New Orleans values, how did they respond to the hardships of early twentieth-century Brazil? How did gender and emotion affect their daily lives and discourses about the same events? What specific events of their experiences were shared? Given that in different periods they wrote autobiographies about their lives in Brazil, the analysis is based on Evelyn Scott’s Escapade ([1923] 1995) and Cyril Kay-Scott’s Life is too short (1943). Results indicate that their survival in Brazil was unequally challenging, leading them to produce dissonant discourses.

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), pp. xv + 359, £25.99, pb.

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), pp. xv + 359, £25.99, pb. - Volume 54 Issue 3

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Cassia Roth, <i>A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil</i>

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil by Cassia Roth

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women's Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil by Cassia Roth

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, by Cassia Roth

A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil, by Cassia Roth

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Cassia Roth, <i>A Miscarriage of Justice: Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil</i>

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice. Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Cassia Roth, A Miscarriage of Justice. Women’s Reproductive Lives and the Law in Early Twentieth-Century Brazil

Dancing Mestiçagem, Embodying Whiteness: Eros Volúsia'sBailado Brasileiro

This article analyzes the processes ofbranqueamento(whitening) contained within the ideology ofmestiçagem(racial miscegenation) through the work of Brazilian dancer, choreographer, and dance pedagogue Eros Volúsia (1914–2004) in the context of the establishment of the myth of racial democracy in early twentieth-century Brazil. I argue that Eros Volúsia not only embodied Brazil's allegedly harmonious racial mixture through her stylized “folk” dances, but herbailado brasileiro(Brazilian ballet) in fact choreographed Brazil's modernity and aspirations of whiteness. I compare Volúsia's prominent career as a performer and pedagogue in Brazil with her brief film career in the United States, where Volúsia had the opportunity to follow in Carmen Miranda's footsteps and become the next “Brazilian bombshell,” but instead chose to return to Brazil, where she was able to maintain her white privilege and her status as author and artist.

Expressing Motherhood: Wet Nursing and Human Milk Banking in Brazil.

In early twentieth-century Brazil the proponents of human milk banking considered this development to signal the end of wet nursing and the start of a whole new day, one altogether better for the paid donors of human milk, their children, and the children in need of human milk. But wet nursing persisted alongside the new human milk banks for most of the twentieth century. Moreover, as this paper argues, the organizers and directors of milk banks drew on and constructed ideas about wet nursing, and about the generations of poor Afro-Brazilian women who had performed this labor, in the design and operation of the first milk banks.

Infectious disease and federalism in early twentieth-century Brazil

Infectious disease and federalism in early twentieth-century Brazil

Cinema’s Milieu: Negotiating the movies’ public and popular dimensions in early twentieth-century Brazil

Drawing on extensive archival research, this paper examines the controversies over the place and the role of cinema in early twentieth-century Brazil. It situates these debates in the context of Brazil’s struggle to come to terms with the powerful forces of modernity, in particular with issues of race, immigration, class formation and conflict, and changing gender roles. Tracing the discourses of Brazil’s cultural elites and also the practical responses of film entrepreneurs and exhibitors, the paper discusses how these interactions overlapped with changes taking place in Brazil’s cinematic landscape and illustrates how they had profound effects on film content, its function, and exhibition practices.

Women, Gender and Romantic Comedy in Brazil

This essay examines the romantic comedies S.O.S. mulheres ao mar (2014) and Meu passado me condena (2013), which repeat several tropes of the chanchada—a film comedy genre with its beginnings in early twentieth-century Brazil. Both offer a negotiation of changing class status in Brazil during a period of increasing international attention and economic growth (2002 to 2014). Although these films promote new notions of Brazilian cultural identity, they also sustain established hierarchies (of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality) in favor of promoting neoliberal values and ways of being. In particular they promote consumerism, self-improvement, and the cultivation of personal happiness. Unlike Brazilian popular comedy of the mid-twentieth century, these films do not offer self-deprecating critiques of modernity or the failings of capitalism. Rather, S.O.S. mulheres ao mar and Meu passado me condena celebrate and promote the idea of a new emergent Brazil, making gender and sexuality frameworks for thinking about contemporary Brazilian cultural identity.

Emil Kraepelin na ciência psiquiátrica do Rio de Janeiro, 1903-1933

The article addresses the penetration of German psychiatric science in early twentieth-century Brazil. More specifically, it explores how the theory and practices of Emil Kraepelin were absorbed by both Juliano Moreira, director of the National Hospital for the Insane (Hospício Nacional de Alienados) and of the agency for Assistance to the Insane (Assistência a Alienados) in the Federal District (Rio de Janeiro), and also by the circle of physicians with close ties to Moreira from 1903 to 1933. It discusses the ways in which Kraepelin's work was adopted, taking into account the day's medical-mental repertoire, the political and scientific context, and the controversies within the Brazilian psychiatric field. Lastly, the study analyzes these choices based on the prevailing relations between Brazilian and German psychiatry back then.

Consuming visions: cinema, writing, and modernity in Rio de Janeiro

Consuming Visions explores the relationship between cinema and writing in early twentieth-century Brazil, focusing on how the new and foreign medium of film was consumed by a literary society in the throes of modernisation. Maite Conde places this relationship in the specific context of turn-of-the-century Rio de Janeiro, which underwent a radical transformation to a modern global city, becoming a concrete symbol of the country's broader processes of change and modernisation. Analysing an array of literary texts, from journalistic essays and popular women's novels to anarchist treatises and vaudeville plays, the author shows how the writers' encounters with the cinema were consistent with the significant changes taking place in the city. The arrival and initial development of the cinema in Brazil were part of the new urban landscape in which early Brazilian movies not only articulated the processes of the city's modernisation but also enabled new urban spectators - women, immigrants, a new working class, and a recently liberated slave population - to see, believe in, and participate in its future. In the process, these early movies challenged the power of the written word and of Brazilian writers, threatening the hegemonic function of writing that had traditionally forged the contours of the nation's cultural life. An emerging market of consumers of the new cultural phenomena - popular theatre, the department store, the factory, illustrated magazines - reflected changes that not only modernised literary production but also altered the very life and everyday urban experiences of the population. Consuming Visions is an ambitious and engaging examination of the ways in which mass culture can become an agent of intellectual and aesthetic transformation.

Lab Cannibals: Resistance and Contagion in Sonhos tropicais

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY LAB CANNIBALS: RESISTANCE AND CONTAGION IN SONHOS TROPICAIS THOMAS P. WALDEMER THE year is 1887. The precocious Brazilian medical student Oswaldo Cruz listens as his professor praises European achievements in microbiology . The lecturer pauses, takes a sip of Rio de Janeiro’s drinking water, grimaces, then examines the cup against the light: “Está com um gosto estranho esta água. Aposto que se a examinarmos ao microscópio … Melhor não. Onde estava eu?” (20). This sardonic scene from Moacyr Scliar’s Sonhos tropicais (1992) reflects the Belle Époque Brazilian elite’s view of their country as a pathogenic landscape barred from progress by its insalubrious environment. As a disciple of modern bioscience and director of public health policy, Oswaldo Cruz (18721917 ) would counter his compatriots’ fatalism by focusing on elements of microbiology relating “closely to Brazilian problems,” eventually developing a major medical research Institute that would evolve “selfreferentially ” rather than relying exclusively on European and North American paradigms (Stepan 122). In addition to representing resistance to Cruz’s “European science,” Sonhos tropicais presents a variant of the modernist cannibal motif by portraying Cruz’s successful deglutination of foreign scientific influences via narratives of the protagonist’s (and other scientists’) deliberate consumption of infectious microorganisms .1 Critic Luis Fernando Valente has noted that Sonhos tropicais serves as a reminder that Oswaldo Cruz and the imported notions of modernity 1 “Late-nineteenth-century ‘microbe hunters’ such as Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch explained contagion as the interpersonal transmission of infectious microorganisms” (Pernick 859). YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 351 he represented were “out of place” in early twentieth century Brazil, functioning less as a vehicle of true social transformation than as a justification for maintaining the status quo (91).2 Sonhos tropicais does indeed note certain authoritarian elements of Cruz’s curriculum vitae. Addressing popular and upper class opposition to heroic medicine’s potential for tyranny, Scliar’s narrative presents a Foucauldian informed “critique of the tendency of reform to translate into surveillance and coercion” (Burgan 4). The readers of Scliar’s novel will learn (or be reminded) that, along with fears of contagion, many Brazilians viewed Cruz’s sometimes draconian public health measures as an encroachment on their civil liberties. O povo resented the paramilitary invasions of vaccinators and public health inspectors, while upper crust positivists echoed Auguste Comte’s hostility to compulsory inoculation on the grounds that the practice was despotic. Among Rio’s poor and working class there was also a mistrust of mandatory vaccination based on the simple fear of introducing disease into one’s body and more sophisticated doubts about the quality of the vaccine. As Scliar’s vox populi puts it: “O tal negócio da vaccina é um horrô! – É mesmo. Me diseru que os taes dotô vão botá na gente sangue de rato podre!” (121). Scliar’s novel includes the nationalist left’s challenge to Cruz’s initiatives, presenting socialist revolutionary Vicente Souza’s assertion that the government was transforming “o povo em um viveiro de cobaias” (135). Sonhos tropicais also depicts opposition among certain sectors of the military and the bourgeoisie, where the specter of universal immunization aroused a different set of concerns, namely “fears of otherness and transgression” (Girard 22, 28).3 Here universal, government engineered contagion provoked an upper caste phobia of the erasure of social (and even species) distinctions and separations. Scliar’s narrator presents prominent parliamentarian Barbosa Lima echoing Vicente Souza as the former condemns the injection of “pus jenneriano” as a wreckless experiment that would 352 ROMANCE NOTES 2 Valente writes of the “dissabores enfrentados por novas gerações de cientistas brasileiros formados no exterior, ao retornarem a um país que como se sugere na contracapa de romance “se abre com relutância para a modernidade” ( 92). See also Roberto Schwarz’s essay “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination” in Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. 3 This recalls Jean Baudrillard’s description of the phobia of “fluidity” and the “extirpation of difference . . . the viral attack . . . the spectre of the same” (65). transform bourgeois Brazil’s “imaculadas filhas,” “ternos filhinhos” and “castas esposas” into experimental laboratory animals (124).4 In addition to recounting this historically-documented resistance to Cruz’s public health...

The Crônica, the City, and the Invention of the Underworld: Rio de Janeiro, 1889-1922

Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Brazil produced a generation of literary and journalistic writers known as cronistaswho were animated by both a curious desire to know their city and a healthy humility in the face of its impenetrable mystery. In a lighthearted and somewhat sardonic style, Orestes Barbosa's above passage reveals the thoughts of someone whose vocation is to know the city, and yet who pronounces it unknowable. Lame human attempts to place markers on the inscrutable urban terrain are only absorbed again into the chaos, leaving readers to ponder the irony and contradictions that emanate from the eternal enigma of the city. Barbosa's quotation is typical of its time and genre, the crônica, a hybrid form of expression halfway between y and journalism. In their approach to writing about the city, the authors of these crônicas belong equally to the cults of mystery, fact-finding, and reporting. For the historian of urban Brazil, these texts present both a gold mine of insights into the daily life of the past and a minefield of authorial biases, distortions, and idiosyncrasies.