Sentencing Canudos : subalternity in the backlands of Brazil / Adriana Michéle Campos Johnson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Johnson, Adriana Michéle Campos, 1972- author.

Series:

Illuminations (Pittsburgh, Pa.)

Illuminations : Cultural Formations of the Americas

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Brazil--History--Canudos Campaign, 1893-1897--Historiography.

Brazil.

Canudos (Euclides da Cunha, Brazil)--Historiography.

Canudos (Euclides da Cunha, Brazil).

Canudos (Euclides da Cunha, Brazil)--In literature.

Cunha, Euclides da, 1866-1909. Sertões.

Cunha, Euclides da.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (236 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In the late nineteenth century, the Brazilian army staged several campaigns against the settlement of Canudos in northeastern Brazil. The colony's residents, primarily disenfranchised former slaves, mestizos, landless farmers, and uprooted Indians, followed a man known as Antonio Conselheiro ("The Counselor"), who promoted a communal existence, free of taxes and oppression. To the fledgling republic of Brazil, the settlement represented a threat to their system of government, which had only recently been freed from monarchy. Estimates of the death toll at Canudos range from fifteen thousand to thirty thousand. Sentencing Canudos offers an original perspective on the hegemonic intellectual discourse surrounding this monumental event in Brazilian history. In her study, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson offers a close examination of nation building and the silencing of "other" voices through the reinvisioning of history. Looking primarily to Euclides da Cunha's Os Sert›es, which has become the defining-and nearly exclusive-account of the conflict, she maintains that the events and people of Canudos have been "sentenced" to history by this work. Johnson investigates other accounts of Canudos such as local oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, and the writings of Cunha's contemporaries, Afonso Arinos and Manoel Benicio, in order to strip away political agendas. She also seeks to place the inhabitants and events of Canudos within the realm of "everydayness" by recalling aspects of daily life that have been left out of official histories. Johnson analyzes the role of intellectuals in the process of culture and state formation and the ensuing sublimation of subaltern histories and populations. She echoes recent scholarship that posits subalternity as the product of discourse that must be disputed in order to recover cultural identities and offers a view of Canudos and postcolonial Latin America as a place to think from, not about.

Contents:

The voice of others

A prose of counterinsurgency

The event and the everyday

Os Sertões : nationalism by elimination

Another Canudos.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780822977650

0822977656

OCLC:

896846651