Social Science Research Council

“Crisis, Revisionsism, and Modernist Historiographies in 1930s Brazil and Argentina”

This comparative project pairs essayists and fiction writers in Brazil and Argentina to explore the emergence of experimental modes of historiography in conjunction with late modernism in the 1930s.  It explores how a group of writers --- the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, and the Brazilians Gilberto Freyre and Graciliano Ramos --- position themselves with respect to contemporaneous debates on history.  Reading these works as modernist historiographies, I argue that they propose alternative models for thinking historicity and temporality, through critiques of subject-centered histories, narrative closure and transparency, and of the divorce between the spatial and the temporal, the historiographic and the literary.

During a volatile decade of political, social and economic crises, these authors both participate in and depart from official and popular interpretations of the past, especially of the nineteenth-century, a major locus for revisionist works of the 1930s. Through the study of archival material on historical discourse available in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife, I will research debates over historical interpretation in historical, literary, and philosophical journals across the ideological and aesthetic spectrum.  In addition to accessing archival material on my core group of writers, then, I will also examine key historiographical tropes, including change, rupture, crisis, and tradition, considering how they might challenge contemporary periodizations.  Ultimately, I am interested in how the problems of historicity and context that preoccupied these writers are also problems the scholar must face when examining their works. My larger dissertation project will also include a third comparative angle, that of the US, and in particular the works of William Faulkner.