Asphyxiational Modernity, and Other (Brazilian) Clouds

Although the atmosphere has generally been considered as somewhat incidental to the consolidation of Brazil as a colonial-modern project of land, this project looks to consider how how Brazilian cultural producers made sense of the atmosphere (the sky, the clouds, the air, the cosmic) as a media, relevant to questions of nation, identity, and sovereignty. My previous research on literary and juridical works in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries suggested that the air is a rhetorically and juridically crucial figure for Portuguese colonial expansion; that the clouds and sky persist as key media for major cultural figures of nineteenth-century imperial Brazil, such as inventor of photography Hercules Florence and politician Alfredo Taunay; and that contemporary quilombola and Indigenous theorizations of sovereignty often identify atmospheric rivers, wind, and breath as crucial to collective existence and sovereignty. Research in Brazil thus looked towards further archival reconnaissance on atmospheric discourses in written and visual culture, principally in the twentieth century, while also looking to build relationships with publishing collectives and other collaborators working on Indigenous saberes and local theorizations of air, sky, and breath. Through work at the archives of Instituto Moreira Salles and Casa Rui Barbosa, I was able to identify and take notes on a set of more than thirty relevant ‘atmospheric’ crônicas by canonical authors (Rachel de Queiroz, Otto Lara Resende, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, amidst others), as well as gain access to the captions of a previously-identified 1928 photographic album of a ‘cloudy’ railroad project. I was also able to meet and spend considerable time with professors at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and editors of the magazine Piseagrama; as well as with Indigenous academics at the intercultural licenciatura program of the Federal University of Goiânia (UFG). I found that many public special collections require more than two months notice to access, and I was thus unable to access a 1888 work of interest at the Biblioteca Nacional; however, after pivoting and going in-person to the public literary archive of Casa Rui Barbosa, I was able to spend fruitful time with a body of texts I had not initially considered, and that are only available in-person. And, while I was unable to meet up with collaborators at the Ciclo Selvagem collective due to Brazil’s winter vacation schedule, my coincidence with Brazil’s férias period enabled me to spend time learning and building relationships at the UFG’s Intercultural Núcleo Takinahakỹ de Formação Superior Indígena, which gathers exclusively during this time. Both the archival and relationship-building components of the project will be of considerable importance as I begin drafting a transhistorical dissertation proposal centered on Brazilian atmospherics— including works discovered during this reconnaissance trip— and as I continue my practice as an academic-translator for both Piseagrama and the Revista Pihhy.