Silvano Santiago bases his text on an analysis of the cosmopolitanism of the men and women of letters in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth century, connecting the figures of Joaquim Nabuco and Machado de Assis, both of whom were able to detect signs of the dilemma at play in a Brazilian identity that wavers between the local and the universal as Santiago argues. The cosmopolitan modernists that emerged in the twenties were crucial not only to the reinvention of the popular and the local, but also to the formation of a dominant class that looked to Europe. Meanwhile, in the thirties, the influence of Marxism gave rise to the paradox of a radical universalist stance capable of scrutinizing Brazilian reality and of positing the possibilities of a proletarian revolution. Finally, in the nineties, in the wake of two decades of military dictatorship, cultural models that had been insinuated by earlier generations came into their own in the shape of antiglobalization movements, open rejection of North American multiculturalist hegemony, and a certain return to the idea of “the national.”
For further reading, see the following texts by the same author: “Apesar de dependente, universal” (doc. no. 1111340); “Debate: o artista e a crítica” (doc. no. 1110951); and “O entre-lugar do discurso latino-americano” (doc. no. 807968).