Lauri Tähtinen
In April 2017, congressman Jair Bolsonaro took the stage at the Club Hebraica of Rio de Janeiro, an institution whose founders in the 1950s included many Holocaust survivors. Bolsonaro’s appearance at a leading cultural and social institution exposed divisions within the city’s and country’s Jewish community. Jewish religious leaders and activists had been leading opponents of the military dictatorship (1964–1985), and his appearance at the club triggered protests and lamentations. Yet, Bolsonaro’s vocal support of Israel—having been baptised in the Jordan River—and connections to leading right-wing Israeli politicians also appealed to some Brazilian Jews who often share the frustrations of other wealthier white Brazilians regarding crime and public order. Public security, together with corruption, would become the leading theme of Bolsonaro’s successful run for the presidency in 2018.
At the club, he declared that once he becomes president ‘everyone will have a firearm in their home and there will be not one centimetre demarcated for an Indian reserve or for a quilombo’—a maroon community founded by descendants of escaped slaves known as quilombolas.1 Bolsonaro had visited such a community and found that ‘the lightest Afro-descendant there weighed seven arrobas’, one arroba equalling a bushel of 15 kilograms, an agricultural term used for evaluating cattle. Bolsonaro continued his remarks by claiming that a quilombola is ‘no longer good for even breeding’. Yet, he did find someone to praise as well; by contrast, Bolsonaro offered the Japanese as a ‘race’ with appropriate shame and who you never find begging. It was vintage Bolsonaro, focused on dividing Brazilians, and offering a particularly bleak, fin-de-siècle—yes, the one over a hundred years ago—reading of Brazilian race relations. Just as he divided Cariocas (as Rio’s inhabitants are known), he went on to divide Brazilians, e.g. with contested readings of the years of dictatorship, and, finally, in 2019 took his talent for divisiveness on to the global stage.
This essay is not really about Jair Bolsonaro, but about how his emergence forces a critical reassessment of some cherished narratives about Brazil. It is an essay about a peculiarly Brazilian eschatology focused on the millenarianism of the present. Before we had the Country of the Future—a phrase known to all—, there was the history of the future, one of many prophetic discourses in colonial Brazil. Therefore, this distillation is, necessarily, about the respective weight given to the future and the past. Its argument is that all the future talk was never truly about progress—much less order, to cite that other Positivist emblem from the Brazilian flag—but about the End of History, before it was even a thing, or as framed by Francis Fukuyama. The Country of the Future was about leaping from the present into the future with the levity rather than the weight of the past. Thus, this journey is structured as one from the present through the future into the past—the surest route for making one’s way from the past into the present and onwards.
Brazil had been living through the politics of inevitability, at least since the age of Getúlio Vargas in the early-to-mid-twentieth century—and in some important ways even earlier through millenarianism. According to this line of thought Brazil’s transformation is not only inevitable but it is also imminent and immanent. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his presidency, which ended with an approval rating of 87%, was the final and, perhaps, most important vehicle of this transformation. Timothy Snyder provides the language of inevitability—and eternity—, and this classification captures well what has happened in Brazil before, during and, most fatefully, after Lula.
The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do. Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.2
Before we move on to the doom, let us pause for a moment to contemplate what a historian of Eastern Europe is doing in this essay, by providing formulae for the interpretation of Brazil in a book with ‘Russia, Europe, America’ on its cover. While Snyder is no scholar of the Land of the Holy Cross—as Brazil was known before the crude, materialist moniker based on a prized export replaced the older name—he is certainly a leading interpreter of the vast agricultural polities created in the aftermath of serfdom and in a complicated relationship to Western modernity. What both Brazil and Russia share with the American South is the experience of chattel slavery and serfdom well into the second half of the nineteenth century—all legacies of the long tail of Atlantic and Eurasian feudalism, powered by the logic of an emerging capitalist economy.
The connection between Brazil and Russia—at least as much in its imperial-orthodox as in its Marxist-Leninist variety—was one that Gilberto Freyre, the father of Lusotropicalism, was fond of highlighting. Perhaps his most celebrated formulation of the proximity flows from analogue to hybridity:
Another transition people between Europe and Africa, the Russian is now revealing to the world a new and in some ways successful type of social organization that includes miscegenation (especially Euro-Asiatic race mixture) among its solutions of social problems. In more than one aspect of its ethnic and social situation, Brazil reminds one of Russia; it is almost an American Russia.3
This formulation is based on the Patten lectures that Freyre delivered at Indiana University in late 1944 in an attempt to draw Brazil and the United States closer to each other. Yet, in that process he was forced to recognise many issues that divided the two countries—including race—and, in the process, he almost unnoticeably also built a bridge between Russia and Brazil. It is now Snyder who completes the triangle for us with his study of the twenty-first-century relationship between Russia and the United States and engages in something quite akin to Freyrean parallel construction—a fraught yet rewarding exercise.
Bolsonaro is a departure from the traditional narratives about Brazil and the future, ones in which Brazil’s multiracialism and hybridity positioned it, at one extreme, as humankind’s saviour. They often intermingled with narratives about why the country had not turned out ‘right’ and one reason was often found in Brazilian flexibility. The introduction of classical liberal political economy intermingled with slavery, during the court of Dom João IV in Rio de Janeiro (1808–1820) and the early days of the Brazilian empire, and this was evident, for example, in the thought and praxis of the political economist José da Silva Lisboa. Thus, while Brazilian history offers many examples for many ends, it does not offer a serviceable twentieth-century fascism, one thoroughly and openly committed to racial hierarchy. The military dictatorship (1964–1985) that Bolsonaro celebrates was one that espoused immanent Lusotropicalism, a multiracial force for good, whatever the structured realities of a post-slavery society may have been. It was an ideology focused on uniqueness and, ultimately, ameliorative race relations in former Portuguese colonies, providing the foundation for the Country of the Future and the ground on which the politics of inevitability could rest. Bolsonaro has been willing to drop all of this and turn the country ‘right’ by turning it right. Where should Brazil be taken next?
Before there was Bolsonaro—through Getúlio Vargas and democracy, dictatorship and Lula—Brazil was living its own End of History for decades, at least since the 1930s or 1940s. This was enabled, amongst other things, through the inevitable politics of Lusotropicalism and, now with Bolsonaro’s politics of eternity, Brazil has crashed into history, forcing us to dissect what exactly that label, ‘the future’, and its association with the country of Brazil has hidden in plain sight for decades—or, perhaps, even longer. Ultimately, it moves us on to ground on which race as an ingredient of the term ‘New’, the qualifier of ‘World’, is dissected and contested. If ‘the future’ has failed not only Brazil but those who placed their hope in it, we may have to choose. Do we follow Bolsonaro into his alternative future, in which multiraciality is no longer a strength but a weakness, a future which calls for racial hierarchy and dominance? Or should we instead reassert the value of history by practicing history, moving back in time, uncovering a layer at a time? An alternative to a politics of inevitability or eternity is one that happens in time, in the present and the past: not merely in the future.
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When did the future begin? Our search should begin, at the latest, with Stefan Zweig. After the success of director Wes Anderson’s brilliant The Grand Budapest Hotel, inspired by Anderson’s reading of Zweig, this ‘futurist’ is perhaps better known than he has been for quite some time. An Austrian-born Jewish writer, he had been cast afloat in the early twentieth-century world and landed in Brazil during the Second World War. As George Prochnik has demonstrated in a compelling biography, Zweig ‘never really felt at home anywhere’.4 In 1936, as part of a PEN Tour, Zweig had first emerged as a Brazilianist, especially with his Kleine Reise nach Brasilien about his ‘Small trip to Brazil’. In 1941, Zweig’s final word on the country, Brasilien: Ein Land der Zukunft, saw the light. By 1942, Zweig and his second wife, Lotte, committed suicide in Petrópolis, the city famed as the imperial summer residence. Zweig, who had despaired for the future of Europe and civilisation, chose as the venue for his final protest a location dedicated to upholding Brazil’s slavocratic ancien régime through most of the nineteenth century—a point that should not have been lost on a son of Vienna.
In German literature, there had and has been a longstanding question regarding Brazil and its future including, at least, the publication of Heinrich Schüler’s Brasilien, Ein Land der Zukunft (1912) and Heinzbernd Krauskopf’s Brasilien, Zukunft für Alle? (1980). In the English, Brazil is either just plainly ‘Land of the Future’ or directly from the German ‘A Land of the Future’. In the Portuguese it first became Um pais do futuro—but soon in more general circulation it seems to have evolved to O Pais do Futuro, or the country of the future. Alternatively, Brazil is ‘the land of the future’, and it will always remain as such.5 Zweig is the godfather of this old Brazilian chestnut, although he would have disproved of the sardonic addendum. For this ‘Tocqueville of Brazil’, his subject was almost the Lincolnian ‘the last best hope of earth’.6
Brazil should have been the way out of the dead end in which Zweig found himself. The country had ‘a special intellectual and moral position among all the nations of the earth’.7 Zweig’s generation, just like all that preceded it, would have to settle for itself how humans can coexist peacefully despite ‘all the disparate races, classes, colors, religions, and convictions’. For Zweig this was the most pressing question, one that concerned all countries and states. Brazil in all its diversity would have been expected to be challenged like no one else, yet it alone had tackled the challenge ‘in a more felicitious and exemplary manner’ than anyone else—with Zweig writing an entire book to drive home this truth. In Zweig’s estimation Brazil deserves not only our attention but ‘also the admiration of the world’.
Brazil had solved the problems of the twentieth century; yet, Zweig was also writing a political apology for the Vargas dictatorship, which had hosted and celebrated him. To make matters worse, Zweig emerges from his text as an apologist not only for Vargas but also for the regime that upheld the institution of slavery: the Brazilian empire (1822–1889). In a truly astonishing passage Zweig argues that white is black and black is white, while saluting Brazilian civilisation:
It is no accident that what was for decades the only monarchy among all the American countries had as its emperor the most democratic, the most liberal of all crowned regents, and that today, when it is regarded as a dictatorship, it knows more individual freedom and contentment than most of our European countries. For that reason, one of our best hopes for a future civilizing and pacification of a world that has been desolated by hate and madness is based upon the existence of Brazil, whose will is directed solely toward peaceful construction. But where moral forces are at work, it is our task to strengthen that will.8
Zweig raises himself to the role of Brazilian propagandist ‘in our distressed times’ with the main aim of providing ‘hope for a new future in new areas of the world’.9 His duty and the objective of his book is to highlight such possibilities, including how impressed he was with the country’s geography that would serve to attract people from ‘overpopulated areas’. Brazil remained within early days of its development—to an extent that made it difficult to fully imagine the role it would play in the future, for the coming generation.
As much as Zweig said he would look into the future, even he saw the codependence between the present and the past. Or in his words: ‘Anyone who describes Brazil’s present unconsciously already describes its past. Only he who looks at its past sees its true meaning’.10 Too bad that the meaning Zweig discovered was both escapist and apologist. In a remarkable turn of events, the last country to have ended slavery in the Western hemisphere had become the country that had solved racial and other societal problems. For Zweig, ever yearning for the ‘World of Yesterday’ and the kings and queens of Europe, Brazil’s nineteenth-century history under two emperors was a welcome one. Zweig definitely stood in a long line of European travellers, artists and philosophers who saw in ‘new worlds’ the possibility of exit from the dreadful politics of older worlds. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally many of Zweig’s contemporaries were aghast at his refusal to involve himself in politics. For him, progress lay not in abstract ideas or even practical politics, but in cultural and moral transformation. Here Brazil was the model, one that underlined rather than contradicted his escapist tendencies. How would Zweig’s observations translate into practical politics? He died before anyone had a chance to learn.
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Zweig did make a rather profound point about viewing his present from a Brazilian perspective. In Brazil, and its neighbourhood, the Second World War did not divide the long middle of the twentieth century, leaving behind an unbridgeable chasm. Sure, some Brazilians had served alongside other Allies in Europe, but time had not stopped and restarted as a result of that conflict. There was no specific trauma to process, no American world order to construct. To put it almost flippantly, the 1930s became the 1960s just like that. Therefore, the ideological development of Brazil was also not singularly defined by that conflict; instead one particular idea carried weight in that era. It was the notion that there was something special about the Portuguese empire and the world it still ruled or had left behind. The special sauce meant that the kind of strong racism that had conquered the Congo or the South (that is, of the United States) could not and did not exist in the Portuguese territories. Instead, miscegenation had built these societies and therefore they not only looked but also were substantively different.
This thought had a father: Gilberto Freyre, the abovementioned Pernambucan polymath who was the master of that most Brazilian literary form, the long-form essay. He wrote thousands upon thousands of pages of lyrical copy, becoming in the process the greatest defender of the Brazilian way of life (and also an apologist for late European empire). In the process, the position of Brazil was elevated. For example, it was not only the United States that provided a mirror for Brazil, which it still often does in Brazilian discourse, but also Brazil for the United States. Brazil was held up, however problematically, as the solution to racial oppression and concomitant strife. In this mid-twentieth-century moment, English-reading and other foreign audiences were consumed by Brazil, and some examples of other authors included Vianna Moog and Frank Tannenbaum. Moog explained the differences between criminal-leaning, slave-raiding bandeirantes and the more wholesome and industrious pioneers. Based on this divergence in early exploration, the two countries also turned out differently. In the United States many detected meaningful parallels between their polity and that other federal republic of continental dimensions that was also forged from transatlantic slavery. Tannenbaum and his Slave and Citizen are one obvious example of this tendency.11
Freyre propagated that Brazil would settle the question of race relations on a planetary scale because of its peculiar historical formation, an argument on which Zweig agreed. Freyre had several avenues for sharing these ideas and even putting them into practice.12 The first was the UN, which he addressed with title of Ambassador in 1949. Freyre’s promotion of Brazilian race relations resulted in a UNESCO commission on the question, and the famed anthropologist Florestan Fernandes led a group of researchers at the University of São Paulo. Later, Freyre had a second avenue for pursuing these interests. Although the Portuguese dictator Salazar had earlier in life—in the 1930s—detested the racial-mixing implications of Freyre’s thesis, emphasised as it did the African origins of not just Brazilians but also the Portuguese, by the 1950s he invited the Freyre to tour the contemporary colonies of Portugal.13 This was a sign that Portugal—feeling anticolonial pressure from other corners of Europe and especially the United States—had to distinguish its own practices from those of colonialists who were not as enlightened on race. In the event, Freyre found Lusotropical race relations not only in Brazil but also in Portuguese Africa and elsewhere in the empire. As too often with those who wanted to essentialise a Portuguese model of race relations, Freyre ended up an apologist for power, buttressing the very last European colonial empire. Ultimately, this and his support for the Brazilian military dictatorship, starting in the 1960s, had him fall out of favour in many circles. It turned out that Freyre’s in its own way extreme racial theory, like its European counterparts, could serve specious ends. Both Zweig’s ‘future’ and the benign description of race relations that underpinned it were inflections of reactionary poetics.
Freyre’s interventions did, however, highlight the connection between the politics of Portugal and Brazil. In meaningful ways, they have been tighter than those of any European metropole and New World colony. Originally, this was because Portugal resented giving Brazilian colonists any independence, including printing presses or universities. Later on, due to Napoleon’s onslaught that swept across Europe a little over two centuries ago, the king of Portugal would rule his empire from Brazil. Lisbon is dead; long live Rio de Janeiro. Later, in the post-dictatorship era, both countries showed an aversion towards naming parties with anything but left-wing labels. Social democrats were the centre-right option, while socialist or Worker’s Party was reserved for the centre-left option. It is in this context that we should understand the seemingly ludicrous name of Jaír Bolsonaro’s Partido Social Liberal; it is anything but socially liberal, especially these days. Yet Bolsonaro brings us to a clear divergence between the two countries. Portugal has not had a right-wing emergence or emergency; Brazil has suffered the most powerful or pressing one on its continent since, at least, the days of Augusto Pinochet.
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As important as that mid-twentieth-century moment was for Brazil, the beginning of future talk did not entail the beginning of history—at most it was the beginning of the end of history. Both discourses concerning the future and discussions of race had long and sometimes even (in their own context) venerable histories. One such discourse was Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões, a work known to all Brazilian school children. This turn-of-century work documents the Canudos Rebellion (1895–1898) from the early days of the republic and frames it as a battle between modernity and backwardness—a topic and theme that Mario Vargas Llosa resuscitated in his 1981 La Guerra del Fin de Mundo. These are what Rolena Adorno has called ‘polemics of possession’ in the long line of Latin American disputation over the long shadow of the Conquest.14 In this particular case, Millenarian ‘Backlanders’ rise up only to be crushed by an overwhelmingly powerful army marching in the name of progress. The politics of inevitability beat those of eternity, because the former had mightier arms.
Os Sertões, or Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, is a lengthy and variegated document to which we cannot do justice here. For our discussion, it is intriguing how the battle between two kinds of future talk is intermingled with hard racial theory. In this 1902 work, Euclides da Cunha does give the Backlander his due for hardiness—he is ‘above all a strong person’15—, but only amidst denunciations of racial mixing. The whole description of Canudos is almost as much about the people who descend into the conflict than strictly about the conflict itself.
Miscegenation taken to the extreme signifies regression. The Indo- European, the Negro, the Brazilian-Guarani, and the Tapuia are racial groups in different stages of evolution that have come into contact with one another. Intermarriage not only erases the better qualities of the superior race but also is the catalyst to the reappearance of the primitive characteristics of the inferior one.16
If anyone was left unsure regarding the identity of the foe, the enemy of progress, da Cunha underlines how ‘interspersed with these mad teachings [of rebellion leader Antônio Conselheiro] were the messianic ravings urging racial rebellion against the republican government’.17 There we have it; Brazil’s greatest civil war was framed as a struggle in terms of the hermeneutics of sacred time and race versus secular progress and deep hierarchies that carried over from the empire to the republic.
Without providing anything than the most cursory of final comments, it remains to be said that Brazilian millenarianism had strong colonial roots and such roots were necessarily intertwined with race. Its strongest proponent was none other than Antônio Vieira (1608–1697), a Portuguese of partially African heritage and also the seventeenth-century architect of a millenarian Fifth Empire on Luso-Brazilian foundations. Vieira, the orator, missionary, and adviser to kings and queens, brought together what he had learned about both political and missionary work in his ‘History of the Future’. As a missionary along the Amazonian frontier Vieira became convinced that the Portuguese could look forward to an even greater age than the one of the Discoveries. It is for this very reason that unlike others before him Vieira considered himself a historian of the future and not of the past. History, as promised in biblical prophecies, was unfolding in the New World and Vieira, the missionary, was an agent of this process. The missionary work brought together the meeting and mixing of races and the progress of the Militant Church.
In this view, Brazil was the land of prophecy, where the history of the future would be written. Broader millenarian thinking did not originate in Vieira’s seventeenth century or even with the Portuguese. Already in the sixteenth century, the indigenous belief in the ‘Land without Evil’ (Terra sem mal) served as a form of ritualistic rebellion against the Portuguese slaveholder, a rebellion which could be actualised by travelling into a more peaceful interior. This interior provided an escape from the conditions of oppression that had taken shape after the Portuguese had landed in Bahia in 1500 and especially after the colonial enterprise had begun to take fuller shape in the 1530s. Yet, the interior would close and, in the mid-twentieth century, the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado played with this indigenous-colonial concept in wonderfully dystopian fashion in his novel about warring land barons: Terras sem fim, or Lands without end.
Why did the Portuguese come to Brazil? In their own telling, the endless future tense of the papal bulls that gave the Portuguese dominion over their discoveries guided them there and in the most zealous accounts even compelled them forward. The bulls themselves came from Rome, both once home to the ideal imperium, a source of emulation, and also the keeper of the missionary call, which sought to bridge the chasm between the City of God and the City of Man—yet never succeeding in doing so. Whether Rome, or European monarchs who gave it pride of place, held one, two or more swords was ultimately of limited consequence. Rome was the fourth of five great monarchies or empires, as developed in the Book of Daniel, itself a derivative, a prophecy within sacred time. That is, perhaps, also the meaning of all the future talk embedded in (multi)racial theory: the immanent within the ugliness of modernity, the lipstick on the pig of supremacy.
Vieira and his many intellectual successors have sought to imagine and build a fifth monarchy or empire in Brazil. Perhaps it is time for something different: History as one sheet delayered after another. The ‘land of the future’ has a long, escapist past, but it not need have such a future. A longstanding millenarianism helps explain the seemingly eternal future orientation of Brazilian cultural, intellectual and political thought, rhetoric and praxis. Future as salvation can be violent; future made today, in the present, day by day, need not be and it can serve as the foundation of democracy. The country of the future is a country, like all other countries, in need of history.
2 Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018), 8.
3 Gilberto Freyre, Brazil – An Interpretation (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945), 89.
4 George Prochnik, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (New York: Other Press, 2014), 354.
5 The term itself seems to have been the invention of Stefan Zweig’s English translator’s rather than his own. In Brazil, the phrase used—both in the translation of Zweig’s work and more broadly—‘country of the future’.
6 Abraham Lincoln, State of the Union address, 1862.
7 Stefan Zweig, Brazil: A Land of the Future, translated by Lowell A. Bangerter (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2000), 9.
8 Ibid., 15.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., 71.
11 Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1946).
12 For a fuller account of Freyre, see Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia Pallares- Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008).
13 Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Salazar: A Political Biography (Enigma Books: New York, 2009), 356–7.
14 Rolena Adorno, Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).
15 Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 96.
16 Ibid., 92.
17 Ibid., 142.