Title of dissertation: The Raw and the Manufactured: Brazilian Modernity and National Identity as Projected in International Exhibitions (1862–1922)


My PhD thesis discusses nineteenth– and early twentieth-century representations of Brazil with emphasis on national identity construction and the country’s engagement with modernity. It focuses on the national participations in key international exhibitions, from the London Exhibition (1862) to Rio’s Independence Centennial Exposition (1922). Employing a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological framework, I examine ‘national objects’ — exhibits, exhibition displays, publications and pavilions — shown at home and abroad as indicators of ‘Brazilianess’. I question what national identity, or identities, these objects materialised and how they drove Brazilian experience of modernity. My thesis maintains that the Brazilian state and elite, during Empire and Republic, employed exhibitions for the affirmation and conservation of political power and to their own commercial benefit. Despite being a multi-racial and culturally diverse country, Brazil was represented largely as having nature but not people. Those who did not conform to the national ideal constructed and imposed by the Imperial and Republican states were excluded. Brazilian nature, in turn, was transformed, or manufactured, into artifices, to sustain the ideal of an Earth paradise that would endlessly supply raw materials to manufacturing nations.