Brazil through French Eyes

Travelogues have long figured as among the most alluring and most fraught sources for scholars of Latin America's past. Their authors pursued personal and professional interests yet also endeavored to offer panoramic perspectives on social, political, and economic conditions in foreign lands. Their illustrations can include rare visual evidence of these conditions and corroborate conclusions drawn from other sources. At the same time, as Ana Lucia Araujo reminds us, beginning in the sixteenth century travel writing produced knowledge about America that forged and sustained imperial and colonial hierarchies. Here, in a translated and substantially revised version of her Romantisme tropical (2008), Araujo, who has written extensively on memory, heritage, and slavery in the Atlantic world, examines this complexity and the politics of representation in the French artist François-Auguste Biard's (1799–1882) Deux années au Brésil (Two years in Brazil), published in 1862. As Araujo explains, Biard's work is part of a lineage of French travel writing about Brazil. Within this tradition, what she calls “tropical romanticism” took shape as nineteenth-century travelers affirmed the opposition between European civilization and the South American wilderness. Based on meticulous research and careful readings of Biard's textual and visual account of his journey to Brazil, Araujo shows how he both refined and overturned elements of tropical romanticism and disrupted Brazilian representations of social order.From the 1820s through the 1850s, Biard worked as an art teacher for the French navy, traveled to the Arctic, exhibited paintings in Parisian salons, received commissions from King Louis-Philippe, and cultivated an impressive social circle. The last cut both ways; in 1845 he encountered his wife in flagrante with Victor Hugo. In 1858, no longer married and with his career on the wane, Biard went to Brazil, where his reputation as an artist ensured entry into elite social circles. But Brazilian cities disappointed him, and so he used the money he earned painting portraits to travel to Amazonia. This independence, Araujo argues, allowed Biard to observe, draw, and write without concern for offending his hosts. His satirical visual and textual representations of Brazilian society extended to local elites' dependence on slaves. Yet Araujo lays to rest characterizations of Biard as an abolitionist, explaining that, while some of his paintings portrayed slavery's history, these responded to a mid-nineteenth-century European audience's interest rather than his own moral outrage. In Brazil, he derided certain aspects of slavery but adopted a “slavocratic mentality” toward the Afro-Brazilians he encountered (p. 91). He both ridiculed the slave market and effaced the terror of being sold and separated from family that lurked there.Araujo argues that Deux années is exceptional in that it privileges narrative as a representative mode. Moreover, the narration turns around Biard himself as a heroic adventurer who collects objects, sketches diverse peoples and their rites, and takes on the forces of nature and human evil, wielding a machete and a rifle as well as an easel and a camera. With its emphasis on conflict, the travelogue also departs from contemporary romantic representations of the forest as sublime. Rather, Biard portrays the forest as a dynamic and unpredictable place, an indomitable terrain filled with beasts that he must be prepared to slay. Araujo's expert readings of Biard's text and drawings also illuminate the manifold mediations that marked the encounters between Brazil's indigenous peoples and Europeans in the nineteenth century. Biard recounts the negotiations and deceits that led up to his drawings, such as plying native models with alcohol, while his images expose their own staging. We see Biard in front of an easel and behind a camera as natives observe him at work. As “a symbol of modernity,” Araujo writes, the camera operated as “a weapon that Biard points in the direction of the models” (p. 148). The antagonism between Biard and Brazilian natives crystallizes in his relationship with Polycarpe, his Mura guide. Biard resented his dependence on Polycarpe, whom he regularly ridiculed and then almost murdered by strangulation in a fit of rage. In a moment of shallow self-critique following an assault on other noncompliant native guides, Biard observed that in his violent expression of frustration he had become a “demon” (p. 182). His textual and visual portraits of untrustworthy native Brazilians, Araujo argues, contributed to “the construction of an original and modern image of Brazilian Natives,” no longer savage but instead “corrupted by civilization and modernity” and, therefore, still menacing (p. 141). Deux années was widely disseminated in France but almost unknown in Brazil until the twentieth century, when it was judged to have devalued Brazilians. As Araujo observes, while Biard indeed disparaged people from across Brazilian society, his emphasis on conflict also “disturbed the widespread idealized images of cordial race relations that allegedly existed in Brazil” (p. 189). Clearly written and argued, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of Brazil and transatlantic cultural exchange

Archaeology · Art history · Civilization · Colonialism · Opposition (politics) · Painting · Political science · Politics · Romanticism · Wilderness · History · History, Culture, and Diplomacy · Law · Travel Writing and Literature

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