“Brazil in the original” (1937)

Essay on the denialism of bandeirante violence in the 17th and 18th centuries

Abstract

In order to contribute with the approach on the period from 1930 to 1945, we intend to recover the conflicts within the Brazilian elites. In order to break with this forgetfulness, this article reads the ideology of the Bandeira Movement as an example of the political proposals that were launched in the dispute for power in the second half of the 1930s. We will discuss the role of Cassiano Ricardo as a leader of the “new bandeirantes” and how this intellectual re-signified the “bandeirante symbol” and the Modernist literary statements to supply the needs of his political field in the 1930s. We found that in trying to give meaning to the historical fact of the Bandeiras of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this intellectual did something close to what authors such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1988), Enzo Travesso (2004), Luís Edmundo de Souza Moraes (2011), Denise Rollemberg and Janaina Martins Cordeiro (2021) call “negationism”. To develop our argument, we will read the manifesto of the Bandeira Movement and the essay Brazil in the Original (1937) to demonstrate how this appropriation minimized the violent actions of the bandeirantes in favour of a supposed construction of the Brazilian Nation.