Beginning in the early 1820s, the government of Brazil, looking both to populate and "whiten" the south of the country, began actively to recruit European immigrants as settlers. Among those groups from abroad who would establish themselves in the southern-most province of Rio Grande do Sul, Germans were amongst the first to arrive. For decades, most Teuto-Brazilians (as they were called) lived in ethno-linguistically homogeneous communities, wherein German, not Portuguese, was the lingua-franca. Furthermore, isolation from the national or even provincial community marked most German settlements. While expanding infrastructure and growing trade networks largely ended the physical isolation between the German interior and the coast, my presentation focuses on the end of the community’s discursive isolation through the creation of a Teuto-Brazilian public sphere.
Beginning in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, a vocal group of Teuto-Brazilian authors and journalists, many of whom had participated in the failed revolutions of 1848, created a thriving German-language press in Rio Grande do Sul. Through newspapers and books, this group constructed an image of the German settler population that would become the public face of the community, both nationally and internationally.
My presentation will investigate the nature of this public image through a transnational lens. I will examine the ways in which Teuto-Brazilian elite claims regarding the settler
community illustrate a strong connection to concerns among nationalist thinkers within Germany, and I will demonstrate how this connection helped defined the emphases that writers in Rio Grande do Sul used in their presentation of the settlers, both in Brazil and abroad. I will focus especially on concerns regarding the preservation of
Deutschtum overseas and the German radical nationalist focus on colonial spaces (both official and unofficial) as zones for the creation of a unified and harmonious German society.
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