Creating ‘Confederate pioneers’: a spatial narrative analysis of race, settler colonialism, and heritage tourism at the Museu da Imigração, Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo

ABSTRACT

Local history museums are important to heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected local, regional, national, and transnational histories. This article explores the settler colonial narrative presented at the Museu da Imigração (Museum of the Immigration), in Santa Bárbara d’Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil. Though much scholarship explores the relationship between the Confederacy and slavery in public memory and heritage tourism studies, the scale of discussion is typically limited to the US South. Less well known is the fact that several thousand Confederate soldiers and their families, rather than face Reconstruction, preferred to restart their lives in Brazil. Applying innovations in discourse analysis and studies of commemorative atmosphere, I analyze a local museum’s spatial narrative. I show how it weaves together a settler interpretation of the past through texts, photographs, and historical objects and artifacts – bringing together discourses like the Lost Cause and Brazil’s ‘racial democracy.’ Ultimately the museum constructs a settler colonial narrative that frames the Confederate migrants as brave ‘pioneers’ striking out to re-create their lives after the US Civil War. I conclude by placing the significance of the museum’s narrative into broader context, highlighting how some scholars have perpetuated this narrative in academic and public discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler colonialism
• Confederacy
• transnational history
• spatial narrative
• white supremacy
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge and thank the members of my dissertation committee, Drs. Michelle Christian, Stefanie Benjamin, and Solange Muñoz, and my PhD advisor Dr. Derek Alderman for their thoughtful contributions to the improvement of this manuscript. I also wish to thank my friend and colleague Dr. Hannah Gunderman and the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful comments. Any and all mistakes are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Jordan P. Brasher is an Assistant Professor of Geography in the Department of History & Geography at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia, USA. His research interests concern how societies selectively remember slavery through monuments, memorials, museums, and other commemorative rituals, practices, and landscapes. His recently completed dissertation work on which this article is based examined the celebration of the Confederacy in the interior of São Paulo, Brazil.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Security Education Program David L. Boren Fellowship; the University of Tennessee’s Penley-Thomas-Allen Fellowship; the W.K. McClure Scholarship for the Study of World Affairs; and the Stewart K. McCroskey Memorial Fund.