Ideas and images of tropicality: negotiated Brazilianities and imagined political identities of a “tropical civilization”

As other “exoticizations”, the most commonplace images and ideas about the tropics (“vibrant” flora, succulent fruits, malleable sociability and their own ailments, etc.) underwent discursive and ideological constructions that suffered from different cultural and political influences. Influences that were and are elaborated in view of contexts of dispute about the meanings of the European colonies overseas and about the identities of these places with the de(s)colonization in the most diverse fields. The central question that we focus on is how these ideals and images were negotiated, in a productive tension between localism and cosmopolitanism, by some important political and cultural agents in Brazilian social and artistic history (artists in the Empire, parts of the modernisms and in the dissonant tropicalisms of Gilberto Freyre and the tropicalists) in the sense of producing active representations of Brazilianness. We tried to read texts and images with two purposes: (i) to identify discourses and ideas about tropicality in Brazil and its effects in order to produce decisive representations about the country and (ii) to verify the absorption and twists operated, in different ways, by some artistic and cultural sectors, in Brazil, from this repertoire of symbolic artifacts in an attempt to produce interpretations about Brazilian difference, Brazilianness and “Brazilian civilization”. There are three important methodological points in our work: (a) ideas and artistic objects have a functioning that goes beyond their context; (b) intellectual and artistic artifacts are social and political forces that offer interpretations which forge meanings and meanings for social life and for the political and intellectual disputes that constitute it, and (c) symbolic artifacts are modes of representation active in political and intellectual disputes. decisive social factors for society, the state and culture. The partial conclusions are three. First, this symbolic repertoire was decisive for negotiating, in different ways, aspects such as national political identity, the conformation of a “Brazilian” culture and art, and the constitutive differences of this “tropical civilization” vis-à-vis the world. Second, this symbolic repertoire had been formally and politically reused in different, even opposite ways, by different cultural and political agents and movements in the country. Thirdly, the discourses on tropicality contain internal nuances that cannot be left out, so that they would not be monolithic constructions, but rather laden with heterogeneities.