Brazil and the USA: Similarities in Urban Development

 

Introduction

My dissertation focused on the Brazilian production and reception of representations of the United States as a growing model of modern society in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Based on the analysis of parliamentary debates, newspaper articles, diplomatic correspondence, books, students' journals, and textual and pictorial advertisements in newspapers, among other historical documents, my findings indicate that the United States emerged as a new axis of reflection on the meaning of modernity for Brazilians well before the historical break traditionally chosen by historians as a landmark in the development of the United States as a modern world. By doing so, a gap in historiography has been identified: there has been no comprehensive examination of the United States' influence in Brazil previous to that historical watershed, as well as prior to Brazil's first republican regime's open relationship with the US government. My findings also challenge and supplement the widely held belief that Britain and France were the dominant paradigms of modern civilisation in the Brazilian imagination, demonstrating that as early as the 1860s, the United States became at least as important, if not more so, as an example of how to become modern not only in the political arena but also in the economic, social, and educational spheres. While these were my contributions to nineteenth-century Brazilian historiography, the fundamental conclusion about the analytical framework was the necessity to reformulate the concept of 'Americanisation'.

The thesis's Introduction defined the concept of 'Americanisation' and acknowledged certain obvious limits, the most visible of which was a sense of uniformity in the direction of influence (as even imprinted in its name). The use of this notion to study how a specific culture developed images of (North) America appears incongruous at first glance. Furthermore, this decision may appear even more perplexing when, while examining the primary sources, I discovered that Brazilians were actively engaged in the receipt and consumption of images of the United States made by them for their own reasons. The apparent disregard for any plural dimension contained in the (usually imbalanced but most likely mutually permeable) relationship between the United States and the societies it encountered in its ventures abroad may be interpreted as a threat or conspiracy. However, such a unified view of the process of 'Americanisation' may be the result of an approach to studying US imperialism that concentrated on many sorts of US interventions abroad. Recent studies on 'Americanisation', as well as my own research on Brazilian representations of the United States, have expanded my knowledge of this very contentious topic and suggested that it may be more creatively applied.

A rising topic of research on 'Americanisation' and the real utility of this conceptual construct is concerned, for example, with the spread of the 'American way of life' to other European societies.

 

This body of historiography, which is now under process, focuses mostly on how the economic, political, and social crisis in European nations following the two World Wars created a fertile ground for the United States to propagate distinctly American patterns and standards of life. Some of the recent literature I consulted to further my understanding of the unfixed boundaries of the concept of 'Americanisation' include Victoria de Grazia's Irresistible Empire, Richard F. Kuisel's Seducing the French, and Mary Nolan's Visions of Modernity, all of which are concerned with the European reception of (North-)'American' modernisation.

According to the works cited in the Introduction, Europeans in the first half of the twentieth century identified the United States with a new and firmly established pattern of development based on the mechanisation and standardisation of production, the rationalisation of working methods, the modernisation of industry through technological innovation, and the formation of a consumer society and a mass culture. More importantly, current debates on 'Americanisation'/modernisation, which deal with the exportation of U.S. domestic social and cultural values to the post-war European landscape, also suggest that the aspiration of the United States to influence or, at least, inspire at a global scale posed (and still poses) cultural and identity dilemmas to the societies it encountered, part of the dilemma consisting of what elements of the social model in question were to be picked and chosen.778 While conducting my research, I learned that the idea of 'Americanisation' may be applied flexibly, with recognition of indefinite borders, making it beneficial for the topic of my dissertation.

Certainly, this thesis has examined the United States not as an entity in its own right, but as a Brazilian representation, one discursive creation among many constructed by a specific social actor in Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. This thesis has been organized around four Brazilian images of the United States: the immediate abolition of slavery with no compensation to slaveholders (chapter 1), the granting of political and civil citizenship rights to all social sectors (chapter 2), the democratic access to scientific and applied training and education (chapter 3), and the general access to goods of consumption, which included the idea of comfort as distinct from luxury cons.

When taken together, these images portrayed the United States as the new model of modern social order. 

Overall, this study, like others, is a historical case study of how people battled (and continue to struggle) to adapt to the demands of'modern' civilisation. Brazilian liberal elites of the second half of the nineteenth century viewed U.S. life and society positively, and actively sought to adopt elements of U.S. social organization. The concept of 'Americanisation' was useful in understanding Brazilian perceptions of the emerging U.S. civilisation.

Far from implying that Brazil was (North)-'Americanized' through voluntary or involuntary action taken and carried out by the United States, we now know that Brazilians did not passively accept the United States' actions and/or models. Furthermore, it may be argued that Brazilians in the latter half of the nineteenth century were active agents of their own (North)-'Americanisation'. Despite the fact that the concept of 'Americanisation' entails the idea of a monolithic, unidirectional process of influence from the United States towards the outside world, after having studied the nineteenth-century Brazilian images of the United States, this thesis argues that not all the U.S. expansion abroad results in processes of 'Americanisation'—as the example of the U.S. involvement in the Amazon region has demonstrated (chapter 4), and that not all the examples On the contrary, (North)-'Americanizing' parts of individual cultures is a complex process in which local communities rejected, adjusted, negotiated, or, to use cutting-edge terminology, 'hybridised' the imported or imposed U.S.