Magazines and Modernity in Brazil: Transnationalisms and Cross-Cultural Exchanges

By Anthem Press

Although published as part of a series on Brazilian studies, central to this collection are not the concepts of nation or nationhood but those of transnational networks and cross-cultural exchanges. The concept of nation is of limited value to account for the periodical print culture as a global phenomenon marked by transnational movements such as those involving capital flows, commodities, people, ideas and editorial models. In this vein, what these chapters explore is not so much the concept of influence – which often plays a central role in Eurocentric analyses – but those of circulation and interaction. The notion of “circulation” here emphasised is more appropriate to the study of cultural exchanges, focusing on the movements of and engagements with ideas and concepts, as well as the appropriated models and the people involved in the publication and consumption of magazines. What the reader will find in these essays are analysis of numerous processes of transnational cultural negotiations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: May 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273995

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Magazines and Modernity in Brazil

Magazines and Modernity in Brazil

Transnational Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchanges

Edited by

Felipe Botelho Correa,Valéria dos Santos Guimarães and Monica Pimenta Velloso

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2020 Edited by Felipe Botelho Correa, Valéria dos Santos Guimarães and Monica Pimenta Velloso editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936704

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-397-1 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-397-3 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction

Chapter 1. The French Periodical Print Culture In Brazil: A Survey of Catalogues and Mediators (1800–1945)

Valéria dos Santos Guimarães

Chapter 2. The Transnational Model of Popular Illustrated Magazines: Three Case Studies from Brazil (1900–20)

Felipe Botelho Correa

Chapter 3. The Transnational Networks of the Modernist Periodical Print Culture: The Magazine Lumière in the Aftermath of WWI

Monica Pimenta Velloso

Chapter 4. Versions of Modernity in the Household Magazine A Casa (1923–45)

Marize Malta

Chapter 5. Panorama Magazine and the Far-Right in Brazil (1936–37)

Matheus Cardoso da Silva and Renato Alencar Dotta

Chapter 6. Against Nazi-Fascism in Brazil: The Case of the Magazine Diretrizes (1938–44)

Joëlle Rouchou

Chapter 7. Literary Inquiries and Disputes on Global Modernism: the Debate in Brazil During WWII

Tania Regina de Luca

Chapter 8. Modernity and Modernisms in the Magazine Sombra (1940–60)

Cláudia de Oliveira

Index

FIGURES

1.1 Le Monde illustré – journal hebdomadaire . Paris, 7 January 1860

1.2 Le Journal Amusant – journal illustré, journal d’images, journal comique, critique, satirique, etc . Paris, 21 January 1860

1.3 Revue Franco-Brésilienne . Rio de Janeiro, 15 January 1914

1.4 La Vie au Grand Air . Paris, 21 August 1909

2.1 Fon-Fon . Rio de Janeiro, 31 August 1907

2.2 Careta . Rio de Janeiro, 5 June 1909

2.3 O Malho . Rio de Janeiro, 11 January 1919

3.1 Lumière . Antwerp, August 1919

3.2 Lumière . Antwerp, September 1919

3.3 Zenith . Zagreb, April 1921

4.1 A Casa . Rio de Janeiro, May 1928

4.2 A Casa . Rio de Janeiro, December 1931

5.1 Panorama . Rio de Janeiro, January 1936

5.2 Panorama . Rio de Janeiro, January 1936, p. 51

5.3 Panorama. Rio de Janeiro, January 1936

CONTRIBUTORS

Felipe Botelho Correa (PhD, University of Oxford) is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King’s College London. His recent publications include Lima Barreto: sátiras e outras subversões (Penguin-Companhia das Letras, 2016), and Crônicas da Bruzundanga: a literatura militante de Lima Barreto (e-galáxia, 2017). He is the editor-in-chief of Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies.

Renato Alencar Dotta (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a lecturer in History at the University of São Caetano do Sul (USCS). He is the co-editor of the book Dos Papéis de Plínio: contribuições do Arquivo de Rio Claro para a historiografia brasileira (2013) and Matizes da Direita: as várias peças de um quebra-cabeças político (2019).

Valéria dos Santos Guimarães (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a professor in the Department of History of the São Paulo State University. She is one the coordinators of the project The French Press in Brazil (https://jfb.franca.unesp.br) and Transfopress Brazil Transnational network for the study of foreign language press (http://transfopressbrasil.franca.unesp.br). She has either authored or edited the following books: Imprensa estrangeira publicada no Brasil: primeiras incursões (2017, with Tania de Luca), Les transferts culturels dans le domaine de la presse: l’exemple de la France et du Brésil (2009) and Notícias Diversas (2013).

Tania Regina de Luca (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a professor in the Department of History of the São Paulo State University. She has published the following books: Práticas de pesquisa em história (2020); A Ilustração (1884–1892): circulação de textos e imagens entre Paris, Lisboa e Rio de Janeiro (2018); Leituras, projetos e (re)vista(s) do Brasil, 1916–1944 (2017); Imprensa estrangeira publicada no Brasil: primeiras incursões (2017); São Paulo no século XX – 2a metade (2011); A Revista do Brasil um diagnóstico para a (N)ação (1999).

Marize Malta (PhD, Fluminense Federal University) is a professor in the School of Fine Arts of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of O olhar decorativo: ambientes domésticos em fins do século XIX no Rio de Janeiro (2011); Casas senhoriais Rio-Lisboa e seus interiores (2013); Coleções de arte em Portugal e Brasil nos séculos XIX e XX: perfis e trânsitos (2014).

Cláudia de Oliveira (PhD, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) is a professor in the School of Fine Arts of the UFRJ. As author and as editor, she has published As Pérfidas Salomés: o tema do amor na estética simbolista e as novas formas de amar na Belle époque carioca – Fon-Fon e Paratodos – 1900–1930 (2008); Corpo: identidades, memórias e subjetividades (2009); O Moderno em Revistas: representações do Rio de Janeiro de 1890 a 1930 (2010); Criações compartilhadas: artes, literatura e ciências sociais (2014), amongst others.

Joëlle Rouchou (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a research fellow at the Department of History of the Casa de Rui Barbosa Fundation. She is the author of Noites de verão com cheiro de jasmim (2008); Samuel: duas vozes de Wainer (2003); Memórias de Ipanema (1995); and organizer of Alvaro Moreyra’s A Cidade Mulher (2016).

Matheus Cardoso da Silva (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of the State University of São Paulo. He is currently preparing a book on the Left Book Club, a publishing group that exerted a strong left-wing influence in Great Britain from 1936 to 1948.

Monica Pimenta Velloso (PhD, University of São Paulo) is a senior research fellow at the Casa de Rui Barbosa Foundation. She has authored or edited the following books: Histoire culturelle du Brésil XXe-XXIe siècles (2019); O Modernismo no Rio de Janeiro (2015); A cultura das ruas no Rio de Janeiro: mediações, linguagens e espaços (2014); and História e Modernismo (2010).

INTRODUCTION

The essays gathered in this book discuss transnational networks as well as cross-cultural exchanges in the context of the modern magazine print culture in Brazil. Covering a century of transformations that goes from the boom of magazine publishing in the mid-nineteenth century up until the emergence of television in the 1950s, the chapters focus on the circulation and diffusion of modernity in the form of ideas, cultural trends, role models, values, experiences and sensitivities that were articulated in the pages of representative magazines as well as in the efforts of key mediators.

Since at least the early nineteenth century, magazines have been dynamic laboratories and privileged observatories of ideas through which editors, intellectuals and artists have engaged with the public sphere in various countries. Many of these periodicals became true communities of thought and opened new channels of communication by commenting on everyday life as well as engaging in heated debates while spreading and spurring modern social practices that were already disseminating at the transnational level. As a medium with great capability for constructing, organizing and spreading ideas, magazines have created links of intelligibility with regard to ideas of modernity in Brazil, often in connection with that in other countries. The contacts of Brazilian publications with those based in London, Paris, New York, Antwerp, Madrid, Buenos Aires and Zagreb are examples of intercultural dialogues that have inspired new ways of editing magazines. It is in this historical context of cross-cultural exchanges that intellectuals and artists have made a critical assessment of the traditions aiming at the implementation of new aesthetic and social projects that were mediated by these ephemeral periodical publications. By focusing on case studies that explore the connections between countries and continents through magazines published or circulated in Brazil, this book presents a set of critical texts that aims not only to make a strong contribution to the studies on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Brazil, but also to disseminate and update these debates to English speakers worldwide.

Although published as part of a series on Brazilian studies, central to this collection are not the concepts of nation or nationhood but those of transnational networks and cross-cultural exchanges. The concept of nation is of limited value to account for the periodical print culture as a global phenomenon marked by transnational movements such as those involving capital flows, commodities, people, ideas and editorial models. In this vein, what these chapters explore is not so much the concept of influence – which often plays a central role in Eurocentric analyses – but those of circulation and interaction. The notion of ‘circulation’ emphasized here is more appropriate to the study of cultural exchanges, focusing on the movements of – as well as engagements with – ideas and concepts, as well as the appropriated models and the people involved in the publication and consumption of these magazines. What the reader will find in these essays are analyses of numerous processes of transnational cultural negotiations.

For many scholars, including those presented here, transnationalism has become a perspective and a search for, as well as an analysis of, the history of cultural transfers, be they in the form of the movement of ideas, people, models or goods. They argue not only that a transnational perspective is key to discussing magazine print culture, but also that local contexts are necessarily connected to international or extranational practices, shifting the accent from the local or national to cross-cultural exchanges and transnational networks.

The growing body of scholarly works focusing on transnationalism since the 1970s indicates, however, that the concept can have various definitions. It has often been used interchangeably with expressions such as globalization, global history, comparative history, connected history, history of cultural transfers and circulation, indicating the need to extrapolate national frameworks. The use of each term may depend on the discipline, language, country or intellectual affiliation, but it is clear that such approaches have gained a firm ground in the academic debate in the form of conferences, book titles, journals, fellowships, courses, research centres and academic posts.

The term transnational was often used loosely by those who tried to make sense of the post-1945 world order. From the late 1950s, it began to surface with some regularity among political scientists researching world politics. However, the first transnational turn in academia took place among the social sciences only in the late 1960s, when international relations scholars focused on transnational relations as opposed to international relations. During the 1970s, the term ‘transnational corporations’ featured more frequently in academic publications, while the United Nations created its Centre on Transnational Corporations in 1975 to monitor their behaviour. Scholars of European integration also used the term more frequently, while it spread to underline the extent of non-governmental activities from terrorism to religious and political practices.¹ Indeed, current online search engines that chart the frequencies of words in text corpora show a huge spike in the number of references to terms related to transnationalism in the 1970s and later on in the 1990s.²

It was on the widespread discussion on globalization in the late twentieth century that the transnational perspective found its second turn, with cultural studies and anthropology as the fields that have helped to foster renewed conceptualizations and uses of this approach. The pulsing cores of globalization – flows of capital, goods, people, ideas, cultures – were making nation states insufficient as units of analysis, and the scholars had to account for this rapid change. It is no surprise, then, that in the 2000s the transnational turn also expanded far beyond these disciplines. Throughout this period of expansion, the transnational perspective went beyond the original themes that focused on the analysis of contemporary and economic phenomena to establish itself as an approach applicable to various fields of study, with an increased presence in history, geography, gender studies, religious studies and political science, as well as in areas such as the study of periodical and print cultures.

In the late 2000s, scholars were already editing large dictionaries and readers to help make sense of the growing scholarship. One relevant example is The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History: From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day, published in 2009, which, like this present collection, also focuses on a time frame that starts in the middle of the long nineteenth century. With over four hundred entries, this dictionary is a sample of key terms that have driven numerous, diverse researches in the early twenty-first century and the ever-growing interest in such a historical perspective. Apart from obvious transnational terms such as socialism, climate change or crime, the editors of the dictionary also provided dedicated entries to nations such as Japan and China. Although Brazil does not have a dedicated article, the country features in a variety of entries such as those discussing: abolitionism; antropofagia; city planning; consumer cooperation; cuisines; debt crises; diasporas; empire and migration; film; human mobility; humanities; industrialization; internationalisms; jazz; liberation theology; nudism; nursing; psychoanalysis; race-mixing; rubber; santería, sport, trade and tropics. It is not a surprise that such a strong presence of transnational terms referring to Brazil points to complex transnational connections that have recently been explored in the field of Brazilian studies, with scholars often focusing on a wide range of topics, often advancing the study of the country in the global arena.

Directly or indirectly, the essays gathered in Magazines & Modernity in Brazil: Transnational Networks and Cross-Cultural Exchanges explore further transnational topics that are not linked to Brazil in the dictionary organized by Pierre-Yves Saunier and Akira Iriye. In fact, the topics discussed in these chapters show that Brazil could have featured as a representative example of a variety of entries such as those dedicated to: architecture; cosmopolitanism and universalism; antisemitism, anti-war movements; visual artistic movements; advertising; anti-racism; avant-garde; bibliographic classification; class; consumer society; design; ethnicity and race; fascism and anti-fascism; intellectual elites; literature; modernity; publishing; and translation, as well as book and periodical exchange, which is the main focus of this collection.

In this vein, the set of essays presented here proposes a critique of traditional comparatist approaches, promoting instead the study of contact zones and intersections, highlighting the place of production and reception of cultural products, as well as the role of mediators. What guide these analyses of magazines are concepts such as those of connected and shared stories, which have been explored by contemporary scholars such as Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Romain Bertrand, Serge Gruzinski and Bénédicte Zimmermann, whose works often emphasize transnational interactions. As Frederic Barbier suggests, Gutenberg’s invention of movable types has propelled print culture into a worldwide integration movement since its inception, giving those who dominate the print culture a key tool to develop knowledge and foster its global circulation.³ Within the spectrum of global history, this recent body of scholarship on cultural transfers is interesting for its methodological and epistemological innovations, which open fertile fields for new research based on the analysis of transnational movements not only of ideas but also of writers and artists.

It is, of course, not a question of downplaying the asymmetries in these cross-cultural exchanges, but one of challenging the often emphasized idea of influence, bringing to light the local appropriations of global phenomena, and this is precisely what the chapters of this volume put forward. Organized chronologically, they explore a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War II, always having key magazines as the focus of their analyses. Valéria dos Santos Guimarães provides a detailed map of the circulation of French magazines in Brazil throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using catalogues and advertisements published by agents, libraries and booksellers as well as those that appeared in periodicals. She argues that these publications in French reflected the ways in which Brazilians regarded French culture as a reference in terms of engagement with modernity, more than any other periodical print culture. She shows how the circulation of these magazines in the two major cities of Brazil – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – fostered a negotiation of local mediators with the growing global Francophonie, which had periodicals as one of its key components.

Felipe Botelho Correa focuses on the emergence of the popular illustrated magazine at the turn of the century, and how it became a transnational model explored in various different countries. He analyses the three main, enduring publications that were launched in Brazil in the early 1900s – O Malho (1902–54), Fon-Fon (1907–58) and Careta (1908–60) – and only ceased publication in the 1950s with the global emergence of television broadcasting. Although these often national periodicals emerged in the United States, Britain and France, their format was transnational, integrating a large number of advertisements, short humorous pieces, caricatures and photographs that were marked by a popular diction. These were appealing publications for the increasing number of literate citizens that benefitted from the mass expansion of literacy, but who were not used to the literary conventions of magazines that catered for well-educated elites. Such magazines helped to spread the category of popular culture and, in Brazil, had an early engagement with the question of mestizaje in growing urban areas.

Monica Pimenta Velloso focuses on the circulation of modernist magazines beyond Paris, London and Berlin, selecting as a case study the Belgian magazine Lumière (1919–23) and its vast transnational networks. Published in Antwerp, and directed by Roger Avermaete (1893–1988), this magazine gathered collaborators from several countries, among whom stands out the young Brazilian literary critic Sergio Milliet. In the years after World War I, Lumière emerged with a clear universalist stance based on pacifist and fraternal ideals, and advocating for a world without borders in a period of growing nationalism. Focusing on literary networks, Velloso highlights the role of intellectual mediators, who bridged the gaps between Europe – including Eastern European countries – and the Americas. Collaborators of Lumière travelled to Brazil, and helped in the creation of Brazilian modernist magazines, such as Klaxon (1922–23) and Estética (1923–24).

Marize Malta discusses A Casa as a representative example of a shelter magazine type in Brazil between the 1920s and 1940s, showing how the accelerated process of modernization that the country was going through created tensions in households. She explores how the architecture of the houses as well as the characteristics of their interiors (distribution of spaces, furniture, objects, incorporation of technology, surfaces, comfort and social interaction) can be helpful references to understand how transnational trendy concepts were presented and negotiated in a publication that claimed to be a mediator between Brazilian and Western modernism in the period between the two world wars.

Matheus Cardoso da Silva and Renato Alencar Dotta also explore the same historical context but focus on how Nazi-Fascist ideas spread in various countries, with magazines helping to disseminate these ideologies. They show how the Brazilian magazine Panorama was one of several magazines that made up the range of publications supported by the Far-rRight movement Ação Integralista Brasileira in the 1930s, which boasted about being part of a global network of Far-Right groups. Apart from national politics, Panorama also featured many pieces that had been published in Europe as well as commissioned articles written by foreign authors who were sympathetic or even members of various Fascist movements in countries such as Italy, Germany, United States, Britain, Portugal and France.

Joëlle Rouchou shows how the magazine Diretrizes (1938–44) can be seen as a counterpoint to Panorama in the same period. She gives a detailed account of how the young editor Samuel Wainer gradually transforms the editorial line of the magazine, eventually making it a bastion for those against the dissemination of Nazi-Fascism in Brazil, until being ordered to cease publication by Getúlio Vargas. The analysis covers not only the team of collaborators and the main topics discussed, but also how the editors struggled to continue publishing support for democracy despite the many difficulties imposed by the censors of the Department of Press and Propaganda.

Tania Regina de Luca explores how the practices of surveys, literary inquiries and interviews that originated in the nineteenth century were used in the 1940s to support political, sociological and journalistic discourses regarding modernism in Brazil. The first part of the text explores the emergence of these practices of interviews and questionnaires, and its rapid transnational diffusion. In the second part, she focuses on the magazine Revista do Brasil during World War II, showing how the editors of the magazine updated these inquiries in order to