The 1824 Confederation of the Equator and Cultural Production in Brazil

The 1824 Confederation of the Equator and Cultural Production in Brazil The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Degoes, Plinio T. 2015. The 1824 Confederation of the Equator and Cultural Production in Brazil. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467225 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The 1824 Confederation of the Equator and Cultural Production in Brazil A dissertation presented by Plinio Tadeu DeGoes to The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Romance Languages and Literatures Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2015 © 2015 Plinio Tadeu DeGoes All rights reserved Dissertation Advisor: Professor Josiah Blackmore Plinio Tadeu DeGoes The 1824 Confederation of the Equator and Cultural Production in Brazil Abstract During the 1824 Confederation of the Equator revolt in northeastern Brazil, a middle- class junta rose to power and waged a war against the monarchy in Rio, journalists participating in creating pedagogical ideological pamphlets, actively engaging in battles, and governing until the revolt was suppressed after a few months. Despite the short duration of this rebel government, the Confederation of the Equator and its ideology have been addressed in cultural production by authors and painters associated with different political movements in the nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Jõao Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Queiroz Telles, Antônio Parreiras, Gustavo Barroso, Cícero Dias, Murillo La Greca, Heloneida Studart, José Pimentel and Câmara Cascudo. This thesis discusses the history of the event, the content of the message of these thinkers, the spread of their ideas over the course of the nineteenth century and the deployment of the Confederation and its ideas by cultural producers in order to prove that this event has had an impact on the arts in Brazil. iii Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………............................................................1 Chapter 1: The 1824 Movement……......................................................................................28 Chapter 2: The Ideology of the Confederation Equator…………………............................47 Chapter 3: The Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century……….....................................................72 Chapter 4: The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries…….................................92 Chapter 5: The Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries….................................117 Conclusion………………………………………......................................................................166 Works Cited…………………………………….......................................................................172 iv Dedication I dedicate this thesis to my father Plínio, my mother, Janete, my wife Lauren, my sister Bruna, my aunt Jací, my grandmother Lucila, Professor Nicolau Sevcenko, and to my baby Luca on the way. v Introduction: Frei Caneca (Brother Mug) and the State After independence from Portugal, a monarchy was created in Brazil based out of Rio. Consolidating power in the center-south region of the country, elites in Rio struck a bargain with elites in the northeastern region, once the wealthiest part of the nation. In exchange for exporting wealth southwards via taxes to enlarge the royal court, elites in the northeast received the ability to impress anyone who opposed them into a national army, as well as access to that national army to suppress local rebellions, the promise of economic monopolies, and the legitimacy of associating their own local dominance with a king chosen by God to rule the nation. A colonial relationship between the center-south and the northeast arose and led to the formation of an opposition to the court in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. Newspapers had not been widely available in Brazil until after 1820, when a revolution in Portugal known as the Revoluçao do Porto (Porto revolution) obtained guarantees of free speech without prior restraint not only for Portugal but also its colonies. As a reaction to what they viewed as a new colonialism being implanted in the northeast by Rio, journalists in northeastern Brazil began publishing short periodicals comparing the post-independence system to domination by Portugal. The periodicals produced in the northeast in the post-indepence era circulated throughout the country. In 1824, northeastern journalists who published periodicals staged a revolution based out of Pernambuco known as the Confederação do Equador (Confederation of the Equator). Frei Caneca (Brother Mug) was one of the leaders of the revolt, a priest and journalist who published a newspaper titled O Typhis Pernambucano (the Typhis of Pernambuco). Other journalists who 1 led the revolt included Jõao Soares Lisboa and Natividade Saldanha. A journalist named Cipriano Barata was jailed immediately prior to the revolt but he was viewed by authorities and the participants as aligned with their views and his periodical was frequently quoted in Confederation periodicals. The objective of the revolt was to separate from the court in Rio and create an independent confederation of northeastern states, each state with its own local democratic institutions, and to convene a northeastern assembly to deliberate on a constitution guided by federalist principles. Rebel periodicals indicate that the constitution produced by the confederation would then have been offered to the nation as a whole. The revolt was crushed by monarchist troops sent from Rio in a few months, before concrete objectives could be achieved. I argue herein that the Confederation has had an impact on the arts in Brazil. The ideology produced by the journalists of the Confederation of the Equator was adopted in bits and pieces by cultural producers tied to political movements of many orientations in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The Confederation has taken on a life of its own, some of the most important cultural producers in the nation’s history deploying the Confederation for their own purposes: Jõao Cabral de Melo Neto, Carlos Queiroz Telles, Cícero Dias, Antônio Parreiras, Gustavo Barroso, Câmara Cascudo, and others. The repercussions of the ideas behind this short-lived 1824 revolt in northeastern Brazil can, in fact, be felt today, artists and authors continuously producing works about this event and its participants. The State of Scholarship on the Confederation of the Equator as Historical Event and Cultural Production About the Confederation No study has ever focused on the impact of the ideology of the Confederation of the Equator on cultural production in Brazil. The majority of studies discussed below focus on the 2 event itself and most do not pay much attention to the ideas behind the revolt. The studies discussed below do seek to address the economic and political causes of the rebellion. Eurico Jorge Campelo Cabral’s 2008 "O liberalismo em Penambuco: as metamorfoses políticas de uma época (1800-1825)" (Liberalism in Pernambuco: political metamorphoses of an era 1800-1824) argues that classical liberal ideas were originally defended by rural elites prior to independence from Portugal but became the ideology of the middle classes after independence. Campelo Cabral sees the ideology of the Confederation as a populist form of classical liberalism opposed to two ideologies favored by the wealthy: a moderate liberalism and conservatism. Campelo Cabral does not go into the structure of these ideologies in depth but he ties classical liberalism to local autonomy, meaning that the radical classical liberals were the most anti- centralist, while moderate liberals were less anti-centralist and conservatives supported a philosophy of centralism in Brazil. Implicit in Campelo Cabral’s work is the notion that each of these ideologies were tied to a particular class. Radical classical liberals represented the middle class and the poor who were opposed to the colonial relationship between the northeast and the center-south. Moderate liberals organized around the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) tended to be from wealthy families but they were poorer and from less illustrious families than the richest elements in the province. The wealthiest residents supported the centralist Partido Conservador (Conservative Party). Campelo Cabral identifies specific features of the government set up by the Confederation. The rebels instituted a local government with the separation of powers and elected representatives deliberating in public and argued that each state should have its own center tied to the others in a loose chain, and they supported prohibiting the importation of slaves 3 and the gradual abolition of all slavery1. Classical liberalism for Campelo Cabral therefore involves openness in terms of deliberative processes, separation of powers, voting for elected representatives, federalism, and the abolition of slavery. Campelo Cabral argues that landowners mobilized to support the monarchy in Rio de Janeiro while the middle classes made up of small merchants such as artisans, lawyers,

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