The “Orient” in the “New World”: The Carreira da Índia and the Flows between Asia and Portuguese America

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
Jorge Lúzio

The history of Brazil in its colonial period is characterized by the movement of Asian people, goods, and merchandise radiating from Brazilian ports that received ships via the Carreira da Índia, the main sea route integrating the Portuguese Empire both commercially and politically. Asian memory and imagination were present in the urban centres of the Portuguese American colonies in the form of cultural material before the actual presence of Asians, which began to occur through cycles of immigration into Brazilian lands during the nineteenth century. This article traces the circulation of ivory carvings from Asia into Portuguese America as a way of illustrating the presence of Asian material cultures in the New World, as well as the relevance of the Carreira da Índia to these cultural connections.


Author(s):  
Axel Körner

This chapter examines the creation of Giuseppe Verdi's American opera Un ballo in maschera, first performed around the time of Italy's Second War of Independence, in 1859. Un ballo in maschera was the first modern Italian opera set across the Atlantic. The history of its creation and the subsequent debate around it serves as a classic example of the cultural imagination surrounding life in the New World as well as the wider social impact of political ideas in nineteenth-century Italy. The chapter first considers Un ballo's close connection to the Unification of Italy before offering a reading of the opera. It also explores how Verdi depicted America in his opera and how his depiction relates to Italian debates about America at the time. Finally, it assesses the impact of censorship on the plot of Un ballo.



1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (02) ◽  
pp. 209-233
Author(s):  
Robert C. Smith

The cutting and shipment of wood is one of the oldest and most important aspects of Brazilian trade with Portugal. The rich red dye produced from the tree called pau brasil or Brazil wood was esteemed so highly that at first it outweighed in importance all other products of the colony. Most historians agree that the very name of Brazil is derived from this wood. Guarded as a royal monopoly throughout the colonial period, the wood trade ranked with the sugar, tobacco and gold of Brazil as one of the principal sources of revenue of the Portuguese crown. When woods for building were added to the exportation of pau brasil, the trade assumed a new importance, for these woods furnished the mother country with the sinews both of war and commerce, providing the hulls and masts of countless vessels that defended and brought together the distant domains of the Portuguese empire.



1963 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 296
Author(s):  
John J. TePaske ◽  
Silvio Zavala
Keyword(s):  


1949 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-233
Author(s):  
Robert C. Smith

The cutting and shipment of wood is one of the oldest and most important aspects of Brazilian trade with Portugal. The rich red dye produced from the tree called pau brasil or Brazil wood was esteemed so highly that at first it outweighed in importance all other products of the colony. Most historians agree that the very name of Brazil is derived from this wood. Guarded as a royal monopoly throughout the colonial period, the wood trade ranked with the sugar, tobacco and gold of Brazil as one of the principal sources of revenue of the Portuguese crown. When woods for building were added to the exportation of pau brasil, the trade assumed a new importance, for these woods furnished the mother country with the sinews both of war and commerce, providing the hulls and masts of countless vessels that defended and brought together the distant domains of the Portuguese empire.



Author(s):  
Richard Parker

I will begin this paper with a brief and partial history of American printing, detecting a shared predilection for a noticeably maverick relation to the printed page in the works (printed and otherwise) of Samuel Keimer and Benjamin Franklin during the colonial period, and the works of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in the nineteenth-century. I term the interrupted, dialectical printing that connects all of these writer/printers ‘not-printing’, and offer some explanation of his term and a description of some of its manifestations. I will then move on to consider how the idea of ‘not-printing’ might be helpful for the consideration of some contemporary British and American poets and printers before concluding with a description of some of the ways that the productive constraints of such a practice have influenced my own work as editor and printer at the Crater Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_2-1_2



1963 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 546-547
Author(s):  
J. Preston Moore
Keyword(s):  


PMLA ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 131 (3) ◽  
pp. 735-742 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Brickhouse

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).



1963 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 757
Author(s):  
Stanley J. Stein ◽  
Silvio Zavala ◽  
Max Savelle
Keyword(s):  


2015 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 602-609
Author(s):  
Matthew Walls ◽  
Pauline Knudsen ◽  
Frederik Larsen

This report re-examines the Morris Bay Kayak, which was discovered in Washington Land, Northwest Greenland in 1921. Kayaks rarely preserve archaeologically, and the find is especially significant because the closest Inuit group, the Inughuit, were thought to have lost the technology sometime before the nineteenth century. In this context, radiocarbon dating of caribou antler pieces from the kayak places the date of the assemblage as surprisingly recent. Through comparison with regional assemblages, we argue that the Morris Bay Kayak is representative of a locally developed tradition of kayaking that was practiced until shortly before the colonial period and that this has important implications for understanding the deeper history of Inughuit open-water hunting.



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