Opening conference

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Profesor Dr. Hal Langfur - University of Buffalo, EUA

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Fronteira/Frontier: Transnational Divergence and Convergence in the Study of Internal Colonialism.

 

Adopting a transnational perspective, this lecture explores the idea of the “frontier” as a concept applicable to Brazilian Colonial History.  During most of the time of the twentieth century, the idea captivated historians of the United States.  In Brazil, scholars considered its potential as relevant but often rejected its utility for analyzing Portuguese colonial expansion into the countryside.  Their aversion to the concept derived from excesses perceived in its application in the United States, where the idea assumed a status that was at once mythical, utopian, and exceptionalist.  It was also profoundly dismissive of indigenous peoples and other non-Anglo-Saxon historical actors.  The reservations of Brazilian academics proved prescient, as their North American counterparts belatedly came to share many of the same objections.  In pushing the idea aside, however, Brazilian scholars often overlooked the historical importance and complexity of processes of inland territorial incorporation during the colonial period.  When they did explore the subject, they often turned to other notions—specifically, the sertão and bandeirismo—that suffered from many of the same limitations and misconceptions inherent in the North American historiography of the frontier.  Furthermore, they neglected earlier Iberian applications of the concept that made it relevant not only in Portugal but also Portuguese America.  A recent renewal of scholarly interest in the subject points to a growing conviction that the colonial history of Brazil cannot be adequately understood without paying greater attention to the colony’s internal territorial consolidation, whether or not the term frontier is used to describe this process.  It is now fair to say that this foreign paradigm from the past century, a concept that never captivated many Brazilian intellectuals, is being reshaped and rehabilitated as a result of an energetic hemispheric dialogue.

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Presentation and coordination- Kittiya Lee (California State University)

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Closing conference

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Profesor Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra - University of Texas-Austin, EUA

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Sixteenth- Century Forgotten Radical Modernites: The global Iberian ancien-regime origins of science, abolitionism, skepticism, and legal democracy.

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This lecture argues that the Americas witnessed a radical transformation in the 16th century from old to new ancient regimes, since the negotiation through violence toppled old native elites and recreated new ones. A system of brokerage through the persona of the king created mountains of petitioning and litigation. Hundreds of thousands of new laws inventing new legal categories and institutions emerged through a massive expansion of legal “democracy.” This manuscript culture of petitioning and legislation from the ground up, in turn, generated  an endless archive of new knowledge and genres. The knowledge resulted from the antagonistic and counter-argumentative nature of petitioning. Debate conducted in manuscript for small audiences of magistrate (king in council) created one of the largest archives of knowledge the world had ever seen. As the lecture focuses on the process of recreation of non-liberal ancien regimes, it challenges a series of historiographical categories associated to the triumph of  Anglo-American liberalism and the categories of the Enlightenment. The lecture highlights that modern knowledge did not come out of the public sphere and print culture. The lecture also explores an ancient regime system of legislation-grace-litigation that bred skepticism and doubt and promoted rhetorical persuasion, not “truth.” The system, however, also sought to secure legitimacy for the prince-broker. New institutions were therefore created to secure a “moral” outcome. The search for morality, in turn,  led to the pursuit of “objectivity.” Modernity was created in the very innards of a new ancien regime that had to be reinvented from the ground up by forms of massive participatory legal writing via petitioning.

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Presentation and coordination - Carmen Alveal (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte)