“Indians, Jesuits and Bandeirantes” nativism, evolutionism and myths of progress in Júlio de Mesquita Filho’s “South American Essays”, in the 1940s

Abstract

The work discusses how a certain thought marked by positivism and evolutionism shaped the work of the journalist and intellectual Júlio de Mesquita Filho in his analysis of Brazil, reflecting on how it contributed to crystallize key characters of a proto-history of Brazil , bequeathing to the Indigenous people a role of passivity, as it establishes a connection with a linear vision of Universal History. The text starts from propositions expressed in the book “Ensaios Sul-Americanos”, written in the first half of the 1940s, during the second of the two exiles suffered by the subject in question. I seek to intertwine dimensions of his trajectory as a character-writer, demonstrating how a mythical cosmovision of Brazil arises from dialogues with Eurocentric and nativist thinking, in the quest to promote the naturalization of a linear, homogeneous and empty time. The character Mesquita Filho is projected as the operator of a certain Philosophy of History that understands the West as the engine of Civilization, and in this writing venture he engenders indirect dialogues with contemporaries, such as Gilberto Freyre, who in turn founded the notion of ‘plasticity’” Portuguese. Authors who contribute to situate the proposed debate: Eric J. Hobsbawm, Darcy Ribeiro, Marilena Chauí and Walter Benjamin, defining historiographical and theoretical concepts. Contributing to the conclusions is the thought of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and his postulates on Amerindian thought, which reflects on the cosmological clash with European naturalism, of which Mesquita Filho is a part.