A Invenção do Nordeste e Outras Artes Quotes

“For those of us with ties to the region, if we simply take on northeastern identity as it is, one based on exclusion and submission, we will continue to occupy the expected places in Brazilian hierarchies. Our voice will be only for begging and lamenting, our gaze only for bearing stoic witness and tearfully appealing to the consciences of faraway leaders. On the other hand, if we denounce the networks of power that marginalize and stereotype the great majority of people living in the Northeast, we must not fall into the trap of leveraging the identity of the region as inherently, collectively resistant and revolutionary. We should affirm all the ways we are not nordestinos at all, in the consecrated sense. The ways of being nordestino are innumerable and untold. We need to question the lenses through which nordestinos are seen and see themselves, as well as the words that circulate about them through the mouths and writings of nordestinos and non-nordestinos alike.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“This is another of this book’s conclusions. Call them what you will, elites or dominant classes or “winners” on both the right and left in Brazil have, at least until now, shared an abstract and authoritarian vision of the people, reducing them to one homogeneous category or another (masses of poor, masses of potential criminals, masses of laborers)—a herd to be seen, organized, led, and improved by select others who are different from them and who “know what is best for them.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“The point is not to search for “true” national or regional culture, to finally discover our national identity (pulling it up, as it were, from the bottom of a stream bed or catching it in a butterfly net); but to seek out cultural difference, striving to be always different not only from others but from ourselves. Historians can contribute decisively to the collapse of the traditions and identities that imprison us, that reproduce us as a nation always looking for itself or a region always clamoring for charity. For this to happen it will be necessary that each historical work be as much a meditation on how history is written, its language and narrative and its ostensible relation with the “real,” as on history itself as past issues and processes. The thrust of historical analysis should be on the present, discovering it in its multiplicity of spaces and temporalities, considering the various pasts that are in each of us and the diverse futures that may come to pass.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“Cabral’s poetry, as with Guimarães Rosa’s prose, constituted a critical reply to the relations of determination that existed in regionalist literature between material poverty and cultural poverty. Both writers attempted to show that material poverty could be accompanied by cultural riches, and that, while in a world characterized by contradiction and mixture not everything could be resolved in synthesis, the resulting tension could be fruitful for popular knowledge and resistance.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“1960s—enshrined the Northeast as the most representative example of Brazil’s problems with hunger, poverty, subdevelopment, alienation, and despair. Accepting without question the spatial existence of the Northeast, these “leftist” works ultimately reinforced a series of images and enunciations of the region that had emerged through the discourse of the droughts by the end of the nineteenth century. They combined the idea of the Northeast as victim, as a place of ruin (product of droughts), with the idea of the Northeast as poor and wretched (product of entrenched oligarchies), adding to the mixture a jarring dose of stern Marxist topicality and aestheticized realism”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“It is an intriguing paradox that while on the whole Brazil’s cultural economy was increasingly homogenized along the strategies of capitalism, the Northeast would be hailed as one of the country’s most culturally rich and resistant regions. How was it that the Northeast, its society subordinated both politically and economically, its people regularly displaced, managed to “preserve its origins and maintain its cultural traditions”? This was possible precisely because “northeastern culture” was like the Northeast itself a recent invention,”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“Coronelismo arose as a symptom of the decadence of rural patriarchies and the growing dependence of landowners on public officials. This was to maintain their own privileged position, which was built on the latticework of dependency of the popular sectors under them. As a form of brokerage, coronelismo emerged from the new need for compromise between urban groups and rural economic interests and was formed around the manipulation of an electorate that had grown significantly since the declaration of the republic. It developed as a mediating zone between the diminishing mechanisms of private power and the progressive strengthening of public power.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“The white author, educated by the black nursemaid who also cured his illnesses and accepted his first searching caresses, was the “racial democrat” who proclaimed solidarity with those lower on the social scale as long as they “showed their respect” and stayed in their place. 133 This literature had and has a resilient effect on readers’ subjectivities, creating an idealized vision of slavery that masked its cruelties and thus reconciling the present with a past (of the region and the country) that would otherwise be embarrassing and potentially contentious.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“In sum, the Northeast was forming through practices that shaped its cartography through the persistent struggle against drought; violent measures against messianic movements and banditry; and political adjustments by elites to ensure the preservation of their privileges. But”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“It was with this book, according to Lins do Rego, that “the Northeast discovered itself as a fatherland (o Nordeste se descobriu como patria).” In its preface, Freyre affirmed that it was “an investigation into northeastern life; the life of five states whose individual destinies have merged into one and whose roots have thoroughly intertwined over the last hundred years.” This hundred years was also, coincidentally, the age of the Diário de Pernambuco as well as of Recife’s law school.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast

“The Portuguese word saudade has no direct English translation; applied to a range of human experience it conveys longing, nostalgia, homesickness, the desire for something that was. The central feeling is lack or loss. It is a personal sentiment of one who perceives that she is losing important pieces of herself, or the places that made her who she is. But it can also be a collective sentiment, affecting a community that loses its spatial or temporal referents, a social class that loses its position of power to history.”
― Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Jr., The Invention of the Brazilian Northeast