The Three Caravels or from Peri through Abapuru to the Mais Doces Bárbaros

contributes to a history of the Brazilian culture

Abstract

Two decisive moments of Brazilian culture legated us the ideas of our Nation: Romantism and Modernism. The paper accompanies the epic of our first try, still during the Brazilian Empire, to narrate the country and provide an effectively national meaning to the construction of our institutions, that is, the Romantic movement, with its first interpretations of the country, its indigenous romances and the intellectuals connected to the “saquarema” field of politics. To the fall of the Empire, follow some years of arid terrain to the construction of a singularly Brazilian narrative – marked by positivist and scientific hegemony in the symbolism of the Republic –, until the time when Brazilian culture produced the Modernist movement, which announces the novelty of future years and prepares the narrative of a modern country that would lead to the 1930 revolution. Modernism, in this sense, presents itself as the movement – with the particularities of São Paulo’s culture – that wishes to put an end to the old Brazil of the early years of our Old Republic and to recover the idea of a nation, but now with strong cosmopolitan contours. The paper accompanies both the esthetic and ideologic projects of each movement, in an effort to reveal the narratives that would construct the Brazilian State and which would be references to all cultural discussions about our past, present and future.