Books, periodicals, and ephemera papers in the Ibero-Atlantic space

Abstract:

Far from being established in a natural, or a-temporal way, Atlantic history presupposes precise circumscriptions, socially and politically configured. In this sense, this issue seeks to contribute to the perception of what is defined as the Ibero-Atlantic space, focusing on a specific aspect: the circulation of written culture, expressed in the movements made by books, periodicals, pamphlets and other sets of papers. Our aim is to understand the multiple processes of literate circulation over time. We also intend to think about long-term processes in order to grasp the changes in the configurations of the Ibero-Atlantic world and their persistence. The issue thus tries to demonstrate how each space of creation and appropriation of texts put into circulation is a concrete product of contingent insertion in networks of diverse complexity and density, through which a flow of manuscript, printed objects and ideas materializes, a movement in which systems of links are established between several regions of the Ibero-Atlantic world.

Keywords:
Ibero-Atlantic; Written culture; Print culture; Circulation

Resumo:

Distante de se estabelecer de modo natural, ou atemporal, a história atlântica pressupõe circunscrições precisas, social e politicamente configuradas. Nesse sentido, este dossiê temático busca contribuir para a percepção do que se define como espaço iberoatlântico, focando em um aspecto específico: a circulação da cultura escrita, declinada dos movimentos realizados por livros, periódicos, panfletos e papéis vários. O objetivo é compreender os múltiplos processos de circulação letrada no decorrer dos tempos. Buscou-se pensar os processos em longa duração, para vislumbrar as mudanças nas configurações do mundo iberoatlântico e suas persistências. Evidencia-se, assim, no dossiê, como cada espaço de criação e apropriação de textos postos em circulação é um produto concreto de inserção contingente em redes de diversa compleição e densidade, por meio das quais se materializa um fluxo de objetos manuscritos, impressos e de ideias, movimento no qual se estabelecem sistemas de ligações entre várias regiões do mundo iberoatlântico.

Palavras-chave:
Iberoatlântico; Cultura escrita; Cultura impressa; Circulação

Far from being established in a natural or atemporal manner, Atlantic history (Armitage, 2009) presupposes precise circumscriptions, socially and politically configured, since as David Eltis (1999, p. 141) notes, what is fundamental about Transatlantic exchanges is that they constituted “a set of societies fundamentally different from what they would have been like without participation in the new Transatlantic network”. In this sense, this thematic dossier seeks to contribute to the perception of what is defined as the Ibero-Atlantic space, focusing on a specific aspect: the circulation of written culture, declined in the circulation of books, periodicals, pamphlets, and various papers.

It is considered that “Atlantic history is the history of a world in movement” (Bailyn, 2005, p. 61) and, for this reason, the objective was to seek to understand the multiple processes of lettered circulation over time. This dossier did not establish a restricted circumscription of time, to the contrary, it is sought to think about an extended time, allowing a glimpse of the changes in the configurations of the Ibero-Atlantic world and its persistence. Thus, rather than just describing structural elements of the Atlantic space, it is important to understand its history as a process.

Within this general theme, studies were sought which explored a set of specific subjects, contextualized in a diversity of socio-historic realities whose final purpose was to present and exemplify the construction processes of the dynamics of creation, intermediation, circulation, and consumption or appropriation of texts, manuscripts, and printed material, in various spaces of cultural, economic, and political expression in Portuguese and Spanish. In this way, it is intended to underline the connected nature of this construction (Curthoys and Lake, 2005) and the connections established in written culture be tween fields and markets situated on both sides of the Atlantic.

This approach is justified by the fact that the global arena of books and other printed materials, as well as ephemera papers related to spaces of power, have come to be analyzed and characterized primarily as the complex result of fields and markets observed and interpreted from a national scale. Although the multiple cases of national histories of the book, the publication, and the circulation of printed materials and manuscripts, published in various works since the beginning of the 21st century - starting with the pioneering and referential work of Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier (1982, 1984, 1985, 1986) which came to light in the 1980s - illustrate the success of this way of understanding the phenomenon and its unequivocal merits for the advance of the in-depth knowledge of a universe until very recently widely ignored and subject to mystifying appreciations, this tradition deserves and has deserved a critical assessment of its fundamentals (Heilbron, Boncourt and Sora, 2018; Sapiro, 2017; Sora; 2017). This critical movement is essentially based on a hermeneutics of the mechanisms of the production, dissemination, and use of observation of printed material and manuscripts as a rough, contradictory, phenomenon imbricated in geo-structural, political, economic, and historical structures that are difficult to contain on a country scale and thus, hard to understand based on this scale.

To achieve the purpose of understanding the modes of enunciation and lettered circulation in the Atlantic space the authors were asked to start with three fundamental methodological shifts. In first place, a shift associated with the fact that this space was formed through a notion of the Ibero-Atlantic world, in other words, which associates the relations established between the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, and Portuguese speaking Africa. In this way, the circulation of printed material and manuscripts and the publication of books was privileged in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking Atlantic space.

This was the analysis presented in the text authored by Ronaldo Vainfas and Roberta Gonçalves Faria, The New Christian Cadornega and his work on the Angolan Wars and the Portuguese in Africa in the seventeenth century. With the aim of investigating the trajectory of Antônio de Oliveira Cadornega, the article discussed his concerns about the Portuguese and Dutch participation in wars in the kingdoms of Congo and Angola. During their investigation they focused on the many editions of the book História geral das guerras angolanas, as well as other texts written by the same author, focusing in particular on the seventeenth century context in Portugal and West Central Africa. Aimed at reflecting on the possibility of discussing the pertinence of the book as belonging to the historiographic genre, the article invests in the reading of the critical fortunes of the work until the twentieth century, especially during the Salazar regime.

The Iberian universe of reference in the relationship with the Atlantic space results not only in the effective transit of written materials, assuming itself as a representational world, organized by axes of valuation. This is what can be observed in the text Gilberto Freyre in the press: An Iberian idea of the city, from 1920s Recife to 1950s Lisbon, by Alberto Luiz Schneider. In this study, Schneider analyzes the, to a certain form anti-democratic, positions which, contrary to his own international and urban biography, Gilberto Freyre presented in the press about certain attributes of large cities. Rejecting a type of false and affected cosmopolitism, Freyre demonstrates a preference for the Iberian legacy and mestizo and tropical vocation, illustrated by his idyllic view of the city of Lisbon or pre-bourgeois Recife. Periodicals emerged as ideal instruments for the building of this positioning by someone who had exclusively lived from his writing for years, a large part of which resulted from his collaboration in newspapers and magazines.

A second shift is related to the time period covered. The term Ibero-Atlantic has already been used as a category of analysis by some historians in referring to the early modern period and the expansion of the Iberian states toward America. In this dossier, as has been stated, an expansion of the chronological framework is suggested, advocating a longer interval, which runs from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century, with the purpose of understanding the plural relations established in this space of production, dissemination, and reception of texts in territories, markets, and communities that spoke the Iberian languages.

In this axis is the text by Kaori Kodama, entitled In the aisles of science: the play ‘Gutenberg - drame historique en 5 actes et en prose’ (1869) by Juliette Figuier. Kodama is concerned with analyzing the translation into Portuguese of the play Gutenberg (1869), originally written in French by Juliette Figuier. The article proposes reflecting on the point that although the phenomenon of scientific dissemination in the nineteenth century is widely observed in the history of science, books, and publications in European and US countries, the place of the participation of women in this process is still quite invisible. Understanding the era sure of Juliette Figuier’s writing, even at the moment of her translation and circulation in Portuguese in the Ibero-Atlantic space, is to evidence how the processes of the circulation of ideas are marked by asymmetries not only in spatial terms, but also gender.

Another text which exemplifies the temporal expansion of the interval for an Ibero-Atlantic analysis is Publishing Brazilian literature in Portugal: Sousa Pinto and the Livros do Brasil collection by Gilberto Gilvan Oliveira. This article focuses on the role of the Portuguese author António de Sousa Pinto, whose Atlantic crossings shaped his perspectives and incited a truly trans-oceanic role between Brazil and Portugal, first with the Brazilian projects Livros de Portugal (also a bookshop) and Edições Dois Mundos and afterwards with the great and long-last ing publishing adventure of his life, the Portuguese publisher Livros do Brasil. Covering a large part of the second half of the twentieth century, starting in the 1940s, a decade that saw the birth of the three publishers, the influence of Livros do Brasil within the sphere of its action and circulation of Brazilian literature in the Portuguese market analyzed through its initial collection and one of the most striking, homonymous with the name of the company, Livros do Brasil, focusing on the publication of the works of Erico Verissimo, the first great Brazilian literary star in the publishers’ catalogue, which commenced in 1944.

Finally, but no less importantly, a third type of methodological shift proposes to look not only on books or printed texts. Since the advent of the printing press did not result in the disappearance of the manuscript (Darnton, 1990; Johns, 1998; Bouza, 2004), it was also sought to equally pay attention to aspects of the relationship between printed and manu script objects in the processes of shaping the modes of circulation of written culture.

Juliana Gesuelli Meirelles’ text The Royal Manuscript Collection revisited by the work of the librarian Luís Joaquim dos Santos Marrocos in the nineteenth century, although anchored on preservation practices developed in the nineteenth century, focuses on a manuscript collection brought from Portugal to Brazil when the Portuguese monarchy came to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. The article centers on the correspondence between Marrocos and his father and through this - also a manuscript collection - the processes of the organization of the collection of the papers in Royal Library of Ajuda, transferred to Brazil.

In a similar form, the text by Pablo Antonio Magalhães, entitled The circulation of the first handwritten and printed Masonic Rites in Brazil (1810-1836), explores the manuscript dimension of the circulation of ideas, forming a polymorphous set of relations with the printed dimension, both of pamphlets, and of greater volumes, including sets of books. These connections between manuscript and printing are studied through a thematization in relation to the circulation in Portuguese America of masonic rituals linked both to the Adonhiramite Rite and the Modern or French Rite, forming a perspective on a secret and historically persecuted world, which partly explains the fact that it is a theme practically un known in the history of written culture, the book, and reading in Brazil.

This dossier evidences how each space of creation and appropriation of texts put into circulation is a concrete product with contingent insertion in networks of various complex ity and density, through which are materialized a flow of manuscript objects, printed materials and ideas, a movement in which systems of connections are established between var ious regions of the Ibero-Atlantic world. In this sense, explaining the forms of movements of texts in this space involves treating them as an element which is integrated in a much vaster set, with dynamics of opening, interpenetration, and appropriation (Chartier, 1996). In other words, forms through which the circulation of written culture is processed and which, through various poles, generated complex circuits of influence and resistance, intersection and specificity, infidelity and incorporation.

Referências

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• BAILYN, Bernard. Atlantic history: Concept and contours Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
• BOUZA, Fernando. Communication, knowledge, and memory in Early Modern Spain Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• CHARTIER, Roger. Culture écrite et société: l’ordre des livres (XIV^e-XVIII^e siècle). Paris: Albin Michel, 1996.
• CHARTIER, Roger; MARTIN, Henri-Jean (orgs.). Histoire de l’édition française, v. 1, Le livre conquérant: du moyen âge au milieu du XVII^e siècle. Paris: Promodis, 1982.
• CHARTIER, Roger; MARTIN, Henri-Jean(orgs.). Histoire de l’édition française, v. 2, Le livre triomphant: 1660-1830 Paris: Promodis, 1984.
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• CHARTIER, Roger; MARTIN, Henri-Jean(orgs.). Histoire de l’édition française, v. 4, Le livre concurrencé: 1900-1950 Paris: Promodis, 1986.
• CURTHOYS, Ann; LAKE, Marilyn. Connected worlds: History in transnational perspective. Camberra: ANU, 2005.
• DARNTON, Robert. The kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in cultural history Nova York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
• ELTIS, David. Atlantic history in global perspective.Itinerario, v. 23, n. 2, p. 141, 1999.
• HEILBRON, Johan; BONCOURT, Thibaud; SORA, Gustavo. Introduction: The social and human sciences in global power relations. In: HEILBRON, Johan; BONCOURT, Thibaud; SORA, Gustavo(eds.). The social and human sciences in global power relations Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. p. 1-25.
• JOHNS, Adrian. The nature of the book: print and know­ledge in the making Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• SAPIRO, Gisèle. Los intelectuales: Profesionalización, politización, internacionalización Ed. Alejandro Dujovne; trad. Alejandro Dujovne, María Virginia García, Agostina Romano. Villa María: Eduvim, 2017.
• SORA, Gustavo. Traducción: potencial heurístico y desvíos teóricos de un tópico eficaz para pensar realmente la globalización. Revista de Estudios Sociales, n. 61, p. 99-105, 2017.

• 1
  Translated by Eoin O’Neill

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  24 July 2023
• Date of issue
  May-Aug 2023

History

• Received
  04 May 2023
• Accepted
  14 June 2023