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The Amazon
In the eight pieces that make up Land Without History, first published in Portuguese in 1909, Euclides da Cunha offers a rare look into twentieth century Amazonia, and the consolidation of South American nation states. Mixing scientific jargon and poetic language, the essays in Land Without History provide breathtaking descriptions of the Amazonian rivers and the ever-changing nature that surrounds them. Brilliantly translated by Ronald Sousa, Land Without History offers a view of the ever changing ecology of the Amazon, and a compelling testimony to the Brazilian colonial enterprise, and its imperialist tendencies with regard to neighboring nation-states.
The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha
A “compelling and elegantly written” history of the fight for the Amazon basin and the work of a brilliant but overlooked Brazilian intellectual (Times Literary Supplement, UK). The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. This scenario ignited a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, the Brazilian author and geographer Euclides da Cunha led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river. The Scramble for th...
Backlands
An important new translation of a fundamental work of Brazilian literature Written by a former army lieutenant, civil engineer, and journalist, Backlands is Euclides da Cunha's vivid and poignant portrayal of Brazil's infamous War of Canudos. The deadliest civil war in Brazilian history, the conflict during the 1890s was between the government and the village of Canudos in the northeastern state of Bahia, which had been settled by 30,000 followers of the religious zealot Antonio Conselheiro. Far from just an objective retelling, da Cunha's story shows both the significance of this event and the complexities of Brazilian society. Published here in a new translation by Elizabeth Lowe, and featuring an introduction by one of the foremost scholars of Latin America, this is sure to remain one of the best chronicles of war ever penned.
The Scramble for the Amazon and the "Lost Paradise" of Euclides da Cunha
The fortunes of the late nineteenth century’s imperial and industrial powers depended on a single raw material—rubber—with only one source: the Amazon basin. And so began the scramble for the Amazon—a decades-long conflict that found Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States fighting with and against the new nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil for the forest’s riches. In the midst of this struggle, Euclides da Cunha, engineer, journalist, geographer, political theorist, and one of Brazil’s most celebrated writers, led a survey expedition to the farthest reaches of the river, among the world’s most valuable, dangerous, and little-known landscapes. The Scramble for the Ama...
Vale of Tears
The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization. In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the...
Rebellion in the Backlands
Euclides da Cunha's classic account of the brutal campaigns against religious mystic Antonio Conselheiro has been called the Bible of Brazilian nationality. "Euclides da Cunha went on the campaigns [against Conselheiro] as a journalist and what he returned with and published in 1902 is still unsurpassed in Latin American literature. Cunha is a talent as grand, spacious, entangled with knowledge, curiosity, and bafflement as the country itself. . . . On every page there is a heart of idea, speculation, dramatic observation that tells of a creative mission undertaken, the identity of the nation, and also the creation of a pure and eloquent prose style."—Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan
The Black Butterfly
The Black Butterfly focuses on the slavery writings of three of Brazil's literary giants--Machado de Assis, Castro Alves, and Euclides da Cunha. These authors wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Brazil moved into and then through the 1888 abolition of slavery. Assis was Brazil's most experimental novelist; Alves was a Romantic poet with passionate liberationist politics, popularly known as "the poet of the slaves"; and da Cunha is known for the masterpiece Os Sertões (The Backlands), a work of genius that remains strangely neglected in the scholarship of transatlantic slavery. Wood finds that all three writers responded to the memory of slavery in ways that depart...
The War of the End of the World
The Nobel Prize–winning author’s classic novel of civil war in nineteenth-century Brazil: “A modern tragedy on the grand scale . . . As dark as spilled blood” (Salman Rushdie, The New Republic). Deep within the remote backlands of Brazil lies Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth: prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and every kind of outcast. It is a place where history and civilization have been wiped away. There is no money, no taxation, no marriage, no census. Canudos is a cauldron for the revolutionary spirit in its purest form, a state with all the potential for a true, libertarian paradise—and one the Brazilian government is determined to crush at any cost. In perhaps his most ambitious and tragic novel, Mario Vargas Llosa offers his fictionalized vision of the story of Canudos, inhabiting characters on both sides of the massive, cataclysmic battle between the society and government troops. The resulting novel is a fable of Latin American revolutionary history, an unforgettable story of passion, violence, and the devastation that follows from fanaticism.
The Children of Evolution
Founded in 1889, the Republic of the United States of Brazil was constructed as a positivist state by republican idealists and pragmatic oligarchs; the political embodiment of ordem e progresso (order and progress). It was a form of government meant to overcome Brazil's imagined and concrete backwardness by strictly adhering to the Natural Laws identified by Auguste Comte, Charles Darwin, and, in particular, Herbert Spencer. Spencerian "progress", however, entailed the elimination of the pathological and monstrous "savage lower races." Non-white degeneration in Brazil, especially amongst its substantial mixed-race populace, was thus understood to be a progressive and advantageous force of Ev...
