THE BRAZILIAN SCENE: DAVID LOWENTHAL, JOHN DOS PASSOS, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF “SCENE” AND BRAZIL TO GEOGRAPHIC INQUIRY

ABSTRACT

This paper applies David Lowenthal’s 1968 Geographical Review article “The American Scene” and John Dos Passos’ 1963 travelogue Brazil on the Move to develop a notion of the Brazilian scene. It argues for the importance of “scene” as a concept in geographic inquiry and the relevance of Brazil to concerns across the discipline. Scene matters to geographers because it provides immense pedagogical value in explaining the character and most important features of a place. As a demographic and socioeconomic “microcosm of the world,” Brazil is fertile ground for constructing a theory of scene. Three interrelated concepts are integral to the Brazilian scene: ufanismo (pride in abundance of land and natural resources), a belief in the promise of the future, and movement inward from the Atlantic. A close reading of Brazil on the Move advances the concept of scene beyond the “long succession of idealized images and visual stereotypes” posed by Lowenthal, and toward including visions that better account for issues of contemporary interest.

Keywords::

• Brazil
• David Lowenthal
• John Dos Passos
• landscape interpretation
• frontiers
• travel writing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Sandro Dutra e Silva, Stephen Bell, William Summerhill, and three anonymous reviewers for their contributions to this paper.

Notes

¹ The sertão (or backlands) is a core concept in Brazilian history. Susanna Hecht’s conception of frontiers that argues the great practical importance of a sertão heritage moves beyond an Atlanticist perspective of Brazilian geography (Hecht 2013). Historian Jacob Blanc’s forthcoming book project on Brazilian history “from the inside,” promises to be another significant contribution to this conversation.

² Though people identifying as indigenous amount to a mere 0.4 percent of the Brazilian population, there has been a renewed scholarly interest in the role of indigenous peoples in shaping the Brazilian landscape since Lowenthal and Dos Passos wrote. This is spurred in part by historical demographers and other authors such as William Denevan and Charles Mann who have concluded that precontact populations were both larger and more active than previously thought. Seminal works by scholars like Shelton H. Davis and Seth Garfield are a reminder that state-sponsored frontier expansion in mid-twentieth century Brazil relied on such “pristine myths” and did little to consider the livelihoods of indigenous peoples (Davis 1977; Garfield 2001). The fact that the bandeirantes who traveled inland during colonial times to catch indigenous slaves were historically recast as pioneers and celebrated as national heroes has also contributed to narratives of movement with few impediments. (On the importance of bandeirantes in Brazilian national identity, see Raimundo 2004. On the movement to remove statues of bandeirantes amidst contemporary racial reckoning, see Sweigart 2020.) While most English-language scholarship on this matter looks at the Amazon and western frontiers, Brazilian scholarship thoroughly points to the fact that indigenous agency is present throughout Brazilian territory, including in the south, the region of Brazil most strongly associated with European settler colonialism (Soares and Fontella 2020).

³ Despite all his attention to frontiers, Dos Passos failed to note the preponderance of gaúchos (people from Rio Grande do Sul state) as actors steering this movement of peoples and land use change. See Gerd Kohlhepp and Markus Blumenschein’s study on the history of southern Brazilians as steering agents (“Steurenakteure”) in the extension of Brazilian frontiers (Kohlhepp and Blumenschein 1999).

⁴ For a geographical study of the Brasília-Belém Highway, see (Valverde and Dias 1967). Perhaps an archipelago is a more accurate metaphor than a strip, given that travel between coastal state capitals happened more often by sea than by land until the advent of air travel, and that these ports were often more connected with Europe than each other until the middle third of the twentieth century. Oskar Schmieder’s study “The Brazilian Culture Hearth” is helpful in arguing that during the colonial era only the coastal zone between Rio and Bahia bore some semblance of a spatially contiguous national civilization (Schmieder 1929).

⁵ For more on Rondon, particularly the construction of telegraph lines, see (Diacon 2004). For more on the expeditions of da Cunha, see (Hecht 2013).

⁶ While population distribution was far and away concentrated in the “seaside strip” and Minas Gerais into the mid-twentieth century, modest nonindigenous settlement had long existed in remote inland parts of Brazil (McCreery 2006; Roller 2014; Karasch 2016; Wilcox 2017).