Marcus Wood. The Oxford Handbook of Propaganda Studies. Editor: Jonathan Auerbach & Russ Castronovo. December 2013.
In 1886, the height of the popular abolitionist movement in São Paulo, Brazil, the sufferings of the slave were articulated in the form of a complicated popular improvised ritual. Antonio Bento, a solipsistic abolitionist propagandist of genius, a mystic, and the self-styled “fantasm of abolition,” combined the objects of slave torture, the representation of the crucifixion, the religious enthusiasm and sentimentality of the Paulista crowd, and more than a hint of Afro-Brazilian syncretism to produce a propagandistic gallimaufry that highlights exactly how different Brazilian slavery propaganda could be from that of the Anglo-American tradition. A slave, who had recently been tortured almost to death, wrapped in chains, and wearing a punishment collar, staggered at the head of a mass procession through the center of the then-expanding but still relatively small coffee town of São Paulo. The chained slave moved forward before a vast and peculiarly decorated chariot on which stood Bento in the religious costume he had designed for himself. The scene was witnessed by the abolitionist Antônio Manoel Bueno de Andrade, who left the following account:
Between the platforms of the saints, suspended on long staffs, appeared instruments of torture; iron collars, chains, yokes, whips, etc. In front, beneath the livid image of Christ crucified, walked the unfortunate slave, numb and tottering. Never have I attended such a sad and suggestive ceremony. The impression on the city was profound! The police did not dare to impede the march of the popular mass. The multitude followed silently. All felt deeply moved except the unfortunate martyred black man, who was maddened by his pain.
There could be no more explicit propagandistic fusion of the suffering of the slave, with the suffering of Christ and his martyrlogical followers. The integration is spatially precise: between each statue of a saint, an object that has been used to torture a slave, is suspended. Directly in front of the crucified Christ walks a living, suffering slave. Bento’s process is locked within a variety of performative codes that include the Catholic Church’s ritual, the street theater of carnival, and the complicated symbolic fusions that energize Afro-Brazilian syncretic cults. Supposedly the exhibition “cooled the moral force of the angriest slave holders” and led people to open their homes en masse to the fugitive slaves fleeing the coffee plantations.
Why this performance might have had such power relates to a number of issues, some of them peculiar to Brazil, but some of them with wider implications for the propagandistic appropriation of slavery. Brazilian abolition drew, in unexampled ways, on the performative and exhibitionistic elements within Brazilian culture. Religion, theater, and carnival formed the ritualistic focae of Bento’s procession because they formed the ritualistic focae of the people; in Brazil propaganda emerges as the bedfellow of fetishism. The intensely fetishistic relationship between Catholic martyrological art, and the suffering of the slave, had been spectacularly exploited in the sadomasochistic religious art of the Luso Brazilian Baroque, and in the work of the black slave sculptors Aleijadihho and Francisco Xavier Chagas in particular. The fetishistic focus on the physical brutalization of the slave body continued to saturate the popular processions and performances of the abolitionists. Not only Bento but other abolitionist showmen, most notably Jose do Patrocinio, developed a theater of fetishistic cruelty around the celebration of the abused slave body. These focae also provide a Brazilian solution to the problem of how to humanize the objects of torture, the tools of the torturers. For Bento, the Church was central to this process; he hung the sacristy of the Church of his order, the Igreja do Nostra Senhora de los Remedios, with objects of slave torture brought in from the plantations. Yet his religious organization and his procession are also developed out of the sorts of narrative and symbolic elisions, which the Catholic Church had been working with for centuries. Bento’s essentially Brazilian fusion of objects, artistic representations of victims, and exhibition of living slave victims came out of a culture that combined performance, exhibitionism, parody, and sincerity in a manner that was not echoed in either English or North American abolition propaganda. The historiography of Brazilian abolition has habitually attempted to read Brazilian slavery propaganda in terms of how it mirrors the basic structures of preceding Anglo American traditions. Frequently, revisionist approaches have had a distorting effect on the construction of Brazilian propaganda techniques. The role of printed texts in particular has been overplayed at the expense of a serious confrontation with the role of popular performative elements and the development of an explicitly Brazilian cultural symbology and mythography.
It is important to stress how different the organizational and symbolic operations of Brazilian abolition propaganda were, particularly in their preparedness to draw on Afro Brazilian cultural narratives and syncretic religions and on the extreme emotionalism of a variety of performative elements within Brazilian popular cultures. Above all, the energized unrespectability of much Brazilian abolition propaganda performance possesses a very different timbre from any Anglo American precursors. Brazilian abolition also embraced a variegated social mix, which, in its range, differed from that of American abolition in that abolitionist leaders, most spectacularly Bento, Gama and Patrocinio, drew their supporters from every level of society. These men were prepared to use the skills of miracle painters, votive sculptors, balladeers, and various types of merchant and street salesmen to get their message across. Bento famously converted a leading tobacco merchant to his Caiphazes order, who then marketed his cigars in abolitionist packaging. Whereas North American abolitionist societies were carefully policed and obsessed particularly that slaves and ex-slaves did not puncture their respectable public façade, Brazilian abolitionists of Bento’s ilk operated chaotically and even hysterically, drawing on popular superstition, fiction, and religion for their symbols and performance styles. The spectacular performative antics of Henry Box Brown, which raised so many eyebrows in East Coast America, and caused so much consternation within abolition circles in England, would not have appeared extreme in São Paulo in the 1870s or 1880s and would have been enthusiastically embraced by Bento or Patrocinio.
Brazil/America/Slavery/Propaganda
Brazil and North America constituted the two biggest, most powerful, and most long-lived Atlantic slave systems. Both systems generated extensive and powerful bodies of propaganda, some of it defending slavery, most of it attacking the institutions of Atlantic slavery from a variety of abolitionist perspectives. These archives of visual propaganda have, on the one hand, a lot in common, but on the other they have a good deal that is completely distinctive. The following discussion attempts to think through some of the things that separate Brazilian slavery propagandas from the related propagandas of North America, by focusing on the most significant of the mass disseminated visual propaganda of the period, namely nineteenth-century graphic satire.
There are, of course, fundamental social and cultural differences in the way slavery and abolition operated in Brazil and North America, and these might be seen to account for many aspects of the very different slavery propagandas that emerged. Although, as will become apparent, I am not trying to provide a historical survey of the American and Brazilian slavery propagandas, it may be useful at the outset to block in some of the most significant differences between the two inheritances in order to explain why Brazilian propagandistic responses to slavery are in so many ways unique. First, there was no North/South slavery divide in Brazil, let alone the kind of colossal separation of slaveholders from non-slaveholders that occurred in America over the course of the eighteenth century. The intense and conflicting responses to key slavery legislation, and the propagandas they generated in the run-up to the Civil War, emphasize the stark divisions that had developed in North America between slave and nonslave states by the mid-nineteenth century. No such clean divide existed within the Brazilian slave diaspora. The debates and explosive visual propaganda generated in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska act, the Dred Scott decision, and, finally and most violently, the Fugitive Slave Law find no equivalent in Brazil at any time. Brazil introduced successive waves of legislation (most significantly the “Law of the Free Womb” in 1871 and the “Law of the Sixty-Five Year Olds,” 1885) that were theoretically supposed to inaugurate nationwide moves toward emancipation. Yet response to these limited and compromised legal maneuvers was never geographically polarized between free and slave states. In Brazil, all states were slave states and Brazilian slavery was not based on a color line. The long-established and thorough sexual miscibility of the Brazilian population, which from the earliest times had involved the interbreeding of Portuguese with blacks and with indigenous Indians, and the existence of slave systems across every area of the country, and through virtually every form of labor, meant that Brazil was fundamentally, and one might even say conceptually, different from America in its slavery inheritance.
Second, essential differences between the Brazilian and American slave legacies, which directly inflected how and why visual propaganda was produced, relate, as the opening example powerfully indicates, to religion. Religion was of course a vital force in both slave systems in terms of establishing the form and content of much of the visual arts of slavery, yet it functioned very differently within the two societies. There was, for a start, no mainstream connection between abolition and the Church in Brazil. Brazil had no significant evangelical abolitionists; it was a Catholic nation and, as was demonstrated so furiously in the political writings of such abolition luminaries as Joaquim Nabuco, Andre Rebouças, and Antonio Bento, and, as we shall see in the print satires of Angelo Agostini, the Catholic Church was not merely complicit in slavery but was completely embedded in the formation and continuation of the authority of the slave power. Also Brazil had no tradition of literate runaway slaves who could contribute narratives, lecture and perform on the abolition circuit, or indeed produce any mainstream propaganda materials that helped the cause of abolition. There are some spectacular exceptions to this generalization; Luis Gama is probably the most notable. He was, in formal terms, an intensely experimental propagandist, and in his Primeiras Trovas Burlescas used popular verse forms and the rhetoric of the law to devastating effect. Certainly the physical manifestations of slave resistance finally embodied in mass exodus from the coffee plantations became increasingly significant in hastening the official abolition of slavery. Yet Brazilian slavery, when compared to North America, did not generate a slave narrative tradition, and I shall be discussing some of the propagandistic implications of this fact later on.
Third—and most crucially—Brazil did not have the same broad-based propagandistic dependency on the printed word, whether in the form of newspapers, satiric prints, novels, or poetry, that North America did. This priority of the visual over the printed word was partly owing to the technological lack of development and the low levels of literacy in Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet it was also a result of the endemic popularity of distinctive oral, politico-religious, and performative traditions. Popular print culture in Brazil had an intensely visual base. Even in the late nineteenth century, there was still a vibrant tradition of illustrated ballad and broadside literature, forms that had long died out in Europe and North America. The mass-produced “cordel” literature that was endemic in urban centers of the North East constituted what was basically the survival of a chapbook tradition that had always been intensely politicized. The small primitive pamphlets, folded out of a single large sheet, crudely sewn up with a single string, and carrying striking and often hand-colored woodcut illustrations and texts composed in popular ballad forms, had been a staple of entertainment for the poor since the early eighteenth century. Cordel literature, which remains popular to this day in Bahia and Pernambuco, recycled ancient folk tales, tales of miracles and martyrdom, sex scandals, and murders and celebrated contemporary criminals, especially famous bandits and malandros. Abolitionists saw the potential of the cordel form and harnessed this vibrant visual medium to bring notorious cases of slave abuse before the public in the 1870s and 1880s, and to advertise as latter-day saints abolition celebrities including Castro Alves, Andre Rebouças, and Joaquim Nabuco. Indeed abolition leaders had their images marketed in various ingenious ways, which incorporated propaganda and emergent cutting-edge forms of product advertising. Nabuco was featured on the packaging of numerous brands of beer and cigars that had been named after him. Here, for example, he appears, advertising a new brand of cigar, the ingeniously coined “Nabuquistas,” and flanked and simultaneously displayed by two sexy topless blonds, on a Fabrica Susana cigar packet sold in Pernambuco in the 1870s. The back of the pack carried a rampant lion symbolizing “Liberdade” or “Liberty” for the slaves. An enormous variety and volume of such abolition product advertising has survived in the Fundação Joaquim Nabuco, and it testifies to the fact that this was a carefully orchestrated and genuinely popular wing of abolition publicity in the North East of Brazil.
Brazilian illustrated periodical literature, as will become apparent in the following discussion of the print milieu in which Angelo Agostini operated, also allowed woodcut and lithographic imagery to dominate in a manner that clearly indicated that it could cater to a semiliterate or even illiterate audience. The richly illustrated periodical literature that came out in the provincial areas of Recife and Bahia incorporated remarkably crude yet polemically forceful lithographic prints. The radical Bahian abolition periodical A Faisca (The Spark) contained spectacular whole-sheet prints that frequently required no accompanying text in order to be understood and that often drew on local flora, fauna, and social customs to make their satiric points. A typical example would be the following: a fantastic assault on the literal slothfulness of Brazilian abolition legislation. This untitled front-page lithograph from 1886 showed a giant three-toed sloth, with a white man’s face, awkwardly signing the “Cartas de Liberdade,” or emancipation papers, of Brazil’s slaves. The satiric argument is made with striking economy by incorporating a particularly symbolically charged creature from Brazil’s rain forests and jungle. Brazil possessed musical and theatrical popular cultures that allowed political messages to be spread among the people without the aid of the printing press. Castro Alves first reached a mass audience as “the poet of the slaves” not through printed editions of his work but through recitals to mass crowds in theaters in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. Theater, carnival, and the survival and development of communal African-evolved religious, ceremonial, and dance forms led to a plethora of performance environments that allowed the cultural inheritance of slavery to be explored in unique ways. Conversely, Brazilian abolition publication was primarily a white patriarchal affair, and, compared to North America, had virtually no textual input from slaves and ex-slaves. Closely related to the issue of patriarchal dominance, women did not constitute a major element within the slavery debates of Brazil as they did in the Northern states of America. Again there are some minor exceptions, but it is fair to say that Brazil generated no female propagandistic phenomena equivalent to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, or the Grimké sisters, let alone Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, or Ellen Watkins Harper. A radical but small-scale female literary movement did develop around abolition at a relatively late stage up in Pernambuco, centerd on Recife. There was also the ecstatic eulogizing of Princess Isabel as the female “saviour of the slaves” when she signed the Golden Law in 1888. In reality, Isabel was a magnificent propagandistic icon, a bejeweled smoke screen that finally served to cover up the otherwise almost-wholesale exclusion of Brazilian women from the abolition movement. There was in truth no mainstream or lasting contribution by women across Brazil’s urban centers to the propagandas of antislavery. The reason for this lack can be debated, but it basically came out of the manner in which a remarkably dominant patriarchy saw to it that, even in the higher classes, Brazilian women were kept uneducated, passive, and subservient. Clearly when a slave system and the oppositional cultures it generates are so fundamentally different from those of Europe and North America, as were those of Brazil, then the form and content of the slavery propagandas that were generated are bound to be substantially different as well.
When thinking about what separates both the archives and the legacies of visual slavery propagandas in Brazil and North America, the importance of graphic print satire holds a central place. What concerns me in the remainder of this meditation is the extent to which the bodies of material to come out of North America and Brazil give insights into the distinctive manner in which each of the great surviving slave powers of the second half of the nineteenth century saw themselves through the ironic and violent lenses of satiric graphic propagandas. Each slave power imaginatively engaged through prints with the slave body, slave abuse, slave masters, and abolition, but their modes of engagement differed in many vital essentials. The United States and Brazil both generated a mass of printed material, in the form of engravings on copper and wood, etchings, and, from the 1840s onward, lithographs and photographs that confronted slavery and abolition from many unpredictable positions. The two bodies of work, although they share some common elements, sources, and devices, particularly when they take the form of abolition propaganda, finally emerge as quite radically incomparable with each other. Whereas American and Brazilian prints are both ultimately developed out of European, and particularly British, graphic, iconographic, and linguistic models, which go back a very long way, what they do with their shared inheritance is strikingly individual. Both the substance and the implications of these differences form the central theme in the remainder of this analysis. As I will be arguing, it was the ability of the Brazilian prints to get under the skin of slavery and to explore the intimate sides of the social life of slaves and masters, and their preparedness to incorporate aesthetic qualities drawn from the new reproductive technologies of photography, which made their work new.
Within Britain, the basic languages of mass-produced graphic satire, rooted in caricature, parody, animalization, infantilization, sexuality, and scatology, had been developed with unique energy and imagination during what is referred to by art historians as “the Golden age of print satire.” This “age” came to maturity during the American War of Independence and ended in the early 1820s. The etchings of James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Robert Newton, and the three Cruikshanks, Isaac, Robert and George, were mass produced, avidly consumed across a surprisingly wide social range, and exerted a lasting impact on how processes of empire and enslavement would be popularly imagined, first in Europe and then in the Americas. These artists and their followers developed methods of social commentary and critique, and evolved graphic devices to encode gender, nation, race, and violence, which had lasting implications and practical effects on how slavery was to be imagined in the print propagandas of the Americas. Neither North America nor Brazil had really developed a domestic visual print market by the time the work of the English masters had come and gone. Yet in the ensuing decades of the nineteenth century, as the production of pro- and antislavery propagandas in both countries became an increasingly big issue, when slavery and slaves were taken up in political prints, they were subjects that had already been experimented with, in mass-produced and highly complicated visual propagandas, since the 1780s in Britain, and to a lesser extent in France. Whereas North American nineteenth-century satiric visual propaganda looked to the formal functionalism and imaginative surreal extremity of the British single-sheet etching tradition, Brazilian print satire and the work of Angelo Agostini in particular looked also to France. The pervading influence of French culture and art on the intellectual elite of Brazil, especially in the wake of the Francophilia exhibited by the emigrant court of the Portuguese king Dom João VI in the early nineteenth century, led to caricature in Brazil from the 1830–1860 period being increasingly inflected by French models and, in the area of stone lithography, by Daumier in particular. Because of the intimate links between Britain and the emerging American nation, the impact of English styles of print satire had been strong at the time of the Revolutionary War and it endured. In fact, British print propagandas during the Revolutionary War were largely sympathetic to the grievances and activities of the colonists; the Americans were seen as bullied victims, if not persecuted martyrs. British graphic satire had a tradition of defending the underdog and ridiculing authority, and, as the War developed, the hypocrisies and confusion of British politicians, and the blundering of the military in an unpopular and badly managed colonial war, became familiar subjects. It was at this point also that African Americans first tentatively entered the graphic satire of the Americas. As abolition became an established political subject from the 1830s onward, American print satirists increasingly conducted a dialogue with earlier English prints focused on the representation of liberty and of the black slave body. Although the prints produced in the last two decades of American slavery, and generated mainly out of the North, were produced in the new reproductive form of lithographs, they looked back in their content and methods to this Old World body of work.
Unlike Brazil, North America did not throw up any prolific graphic or social satirists of genius. North America harbored and nurtured no equivalent to either Angelo Agostini or Jean Baptiste Debret. There is no body of focused high-quality graphics by outstanding visual artists, anchored in the subtle analysis of the political architectures or the social intimacies, generated under the slavery systems of the United States. In place of such a tradition, North America features a technically shifting and formally unstable propagandistic archive. The vast majority of the prints were produced in the Northern states and stretch over a period of almost exactly a century, although it is not until the second decade of the nineteenth century that a large volume of prints devoted exclusively to the subject of blacks, enslavement, and liberty starts to appear. All this work comes at the subject of slavery through a set of political agendas and ideological filters that reflect political and social biases, which are inflected primarily by the relation of the North to the South. Almost always, the slave appears as a stereotypical and frequently as an abstracted entity, as a political ingredient within the larger mix of the metaphorics of political dispute created by the increasingly divided antebellum Union. Viewed as a whole, American graphic satire up to 1865 treats the black body according to a set of rather brutal and coarse codes. As an entity within these visual propagandas, black males and females emerge as inevitably ideologically passive, physically comic and grotesque, sexually libidinous, and as not only problematic but as basically a problem or conundrum, to which the hard-put North must evolve solutions. These slaves exist in an imagined world of exaggerated Southern bestiality and barbarism. For the most part, the slave body seems to be envisioned merely as a catalyst to enable Northern fantasies, which demonize the Southern slave power, in all its depravity and aristocratic pretension.
Diminution and marginalization are the typical elements used to encode the slave body in the majority of slave satires, where the “peculiar institution” appears as a phenomenon that the Northern free states must be forced to absorb. There are countless examples that approach the slave body in this context, and there is only space here to give one detailed example. The idea that the slaves, as a physical reality, constituted an unwelcome food source that must be forcibly consumed by the North, became a popular metaphor. The concept was taken to its propagandistic limit in the violent and disturbing extremity of Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler. Here, it is the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act that provide the basis for the satire. The leading Democrats, President Franklin Pierce and Senator Stephen Douglas, are presented as tiny figures who attempt to ram an equally diminutive black slave into the open mouth of the giant head of a “Freesoiler” (the term used to describe settlers in the new territories who opposed slavery’s extension). As is usual in the American political prints concerning slavery, caricature is not egalitarian but operates selectively. The white politicians are all recognizable representations of leading Democrats, whereas the “Freesoiler” and the slave are anonymous stereotypes. The scene of force feeding has a horrifying realism about it, which is paradoxically emphasized by the way it draws in destabilizing fantastic elements.
The dramatic situation alludes directly back to that urtext of propagandistic infantilization, the first book of Gulliver’s Travels. When Gulliver first washes up on the beach in Lilliput, he awakes to find himself bound down, top to toe, by the Lilliputians. Even his hair has been fastened down, and as he lies prone, the little people lade food and drink into his colossal maw. Here the giant Gulliver/Freesoiler has his head violently held back by Lewis Cass and James Buchanan, each tugging down on two thick locks of the giant’s hair. The back of his head rests against raised wooden planks labeled “Democratic Platform,” while each plank carries an inscription of a new territory that the Democrats supposedly have their eye on for extending American slavery. Not content with “Kansas” they appear intent on moving into Spanish “Cuba,” and in the wake of the Mexican War the whole of “Central America.” The narrative and emotional crux of the print centers on the equally horrified and agonized responses of the black slave and the Freesoiler to the process of oral rape in which they are mutually involved. A brilliantly ambiguous speech bubble is placed at the center of the print. It is impossible to tell whether the speech emanates from the mouth of the Freesoiler or from the slave who is about to dive down his throat. The bubble reads “MURDER!!! Help—neighbors help. O my poor Wife and Children.” The implication is that the process of forcing the black slaves into the free territories is going to be ruinous for both the new settlers and the slaves alike and that it will result in the destruction of both parties and by implication the slave power as well. The violence of the scene metaphorically essentializes the very real atrocities carried out in Kansas by proslavery factions, although, in fairness, antislavery activists, most famously John Brown and his followers, also notoriously contributed to the barbarism. As far as the representation of the slave body is concerned, however, this print manages to combine just about every element that typifies the propagandistic construction of blackness. The slave is disempowered, passive, consumable, undesirable, and irreducibly comic in its suffering. Black agency is utterly absent. Yet this brutal construction of the slave body as a useful ingredient within an objectifying body of political satires should be set off against other elements within the American graphic archive of slavery. The visual propaganda created in and around the slave narratives treat the black body in more complex and sympathetic ways, which find no echo in Brazil.
The most spectacular chasm that differentiates the American and Brazilian slavery propaganda archives is the visual content of the slave narratives, and their accompanying marketing materials within newspapers and emergent print cultures generally. It is almost unbelievable, but true, that Brazil produced absolutely no slave narratives as such. There is only one surviving published text that has a claim, and not a very good claim, to be considered a Brazilian slave narrative, namely the Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo, in the Interior of Africa, printed in Detroit, Michigan, in 1854. The slave narratives not only constituted a textual space that allowed the slave a unique opportunity for testimony, confession, and self-expression, but the narratives as a whole also developed an equally charged and varied set of propagandistic graphic modes for celebrating the individuality and imaginative life of escaped slaves. Although there is not space to look at the sophisticated operations of visual propaganda within the American slave narratives here, they should be registered as important in the present context because of the manner in which they incorporated a great variety of graphic elements that exist in contrast to, and in dialogue with, graphic satire focused on the slave body. In other words, U.S. slave narratives generated a largely positive and unironic visual propaganda celebrating black agency and self-empowerment. Crucially, the ex-slave authors themselves often became centrally involved in their own imagistic marketing. Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth are probably the most remarkable operators in this context, yet numerous other ex-slaves including William Wells Brown, Henry “Box” Brown, and William and Ellen Craft also used visual propaganda to construct sophisticated and evolving self images. Brazil possessed no equivalent to the body of visual material generated in and around the slave narratives. It will, however, be argued below that the development of antislavery satire within the sophisticated medium of the emergent illustrated periodical market of the late nineteenth century provided another set of options. Brazilian mass-produced graphic imagery and visual propaganda, in fact, managed to humanize the slave body in unprecedented ways. The later works of Agostini in particular show how lithography was capable of melding the new realist visual codes emanating from photography into the older conventions of graphic print satire. The result was a wholly new kind of print, which achieved the seemingly impossible by throwing pure old-fashioned symbolism up against the unflinching and unblinking gaze of the camera lens. In the late work of Agostini, action photography and the emblem book are brought into a remarkable visual intercourse, and the result is one of the most forceful manifestations of visual satiric propaganda ever to have come out of Atlantic slavery.
The graphic culture of Brazil is substantially different in many vital ways from that of the American traditions, which were briefly summarized in the first part of this discussion. It is a generalization, but a true one, to assert that both the English and American abolition audiences and the graphic propagandists who serviced them did not look too closely into the intimate domestic existence that slavery enforced on everyone living within the system. Angelo Agostini was centrally engaged with finding ways of articulating intimate relationships. Consequently, he and the print satirists working around him in Rio often made work that stands in stark relation to the Anglo-American tradition of graphic satires on slavery. As we have seen, the American prints were increasingly inflected by a tendency to abstraction and by a crude Negrophobia that has few visual analogues in Brazil. In short, the Anglo-American graphic traditions have notable limitations when set against the graphic propagandas coming out of Brazil from 1860 to 1888. English and North American print satires on slavery right through the period 1807–1865 remained largely closed to the domestic world of psycho-sexual turmoil generated in the human interchanges initiated by slavery. It was as if this space was too dark, too conflicted, and just too hard to take into the realm of popular propaganda. Brazilian graphic propaganda did not sheer away from confronting the knowing racial propinquities generated by Brazilian slavery systems, and these intimate elements are most fully anatomized in the work of Agostini. Gilberto Freyre, when surveying the eroticized power politics of Brazilian slavery, famously asserted that “there is no slavery without sexual depravity.”
I want to end this discussion by thinking about the complexities of Brazilian visual propaganda focused on the slave body when violence and depravity are the main subjects. Angelo Agostini is the most crucial of propagandists in this context. He saw slavery as generating a language of sexual and sadistic compromise. What is fascinating about Agostini’s work is that, although it flooded the drawing rooms, taverns, market squares, and coffee houses of nineteenth-century Rio, it demands that the viewer go beyond the facile and commonly Manichean extremities on which Anglo-American liberation fantasies are based. At his best, Agostini produces a subtle sociopolitical propaganda that is locked into a critique that suggests that freedom may not be easily expressed or attained within slave societies by anyone either before or after legally encoded acts of liberation. Agostini’s work shares with Joaquim Nabuco’s Abolicionism (the most influential and brilliant propaganda tract generated by Brazilian abolition) a central concern with the possibility that the effects of slavery may be something that perpetually contaminate the societies and populations they dominated and saturated.16 Emancipation proclamations do not destroy underlying social patterns that continue to condition the outlook of ex-slaves and ex-slaveholders alike. With Agostini, we are taken back to Joaquim Nabuco’s terrible formulation that under slavery: “nada é prohibito,” that is, “nothing is prohibited … As a rule the master can do anything.”
Angelo Agostini—the Brazilian Daumier: Print Satire as a Propaganda on the Peripheries of Photorealism
Agostini was the preeminent visual propagandist working in Brazil during the latter stages of Brazilian slavery. I take a deep breath before writing this, but I think he was arguably the greatest visual propagandist in the world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Born in Italy in 1843, a Piedmontese, and educated significantly in France, which was producing the most extreme graphic satire in Europe from the 1840s through to the period of the Paris Commune, Agostini arrived in Brazil in 1859. By this period, Rio had a flourishing lithographic print trade; there were no fewer than thirty registered lithographic presses in the capital in 1855. Lithographers were producing illustrated technical manuals, prints for the burgeoning foreign tourist market, and illustrated periodicals of different sorts, although, unlike North America, there was a restricted market for political satire until the 1870s. With political caricature still very much in its infancy, Agostini started out in the then quite provincial setting of São Paulo, working on a variety of journals including Diabo Coxo and O Cabrião. The work he did at this time was rather whimsical light-weight social satire, and he had not developed the fierce commitment to black rights and the plight of the Indians that is so evident in the later work. He moved to Rio in the late 1860s and reached his mature style during the Great War with Paraguay in 1870. Rio in the 1870s saw political satire come alive in the illustrated periodical journals. Agostini suddenly found himself surrounded by a host of other graphic propagandists, including Candido Aragonez de Faria, Ernesto Augusto de Souza e Silva e Rio (who fortunately worked under the sobriquet of Flumen Junius), João Pinheiro Guimarães, Pereira Netto, and the Portuguese Pinheiro Bordello, a remarkably assured draftsman. A host of more hard-hitting politically satiric journals sprang up of which the most significant were Mephistopheles, O Mequetrefe, and O Mosquito. It was also during this period that Agostini began to produce powerful prints attacking the slave power and the Monarchy’s and the Church’s role in supporting slavery, while defending the slaves from physical abuses. Yet not all Agostini’s prints approach slavery in a direct political manner. One of the distinguishing features of Agostini as a satirist of the Brazilian slave systems lies in the subtlety and range of the social analysis. He is prepared to get into unsettling situations and into strangely suspended areas where sexuality, authority, the family, and the power relations of slavery within urban domestic settings are interrogated at many levels.
Agostini could do things with slavery, memory, and intimacy that are, quite simply, unexampled within the visual archive of Atlantic slavery. Agostini’s experimentation comes across as all the more astonishing when it is remembered that he was working within an environment for the visual arts that was stiflingly conservative and politically unadventurous. Outside the crude lithographic albums of slave types popularized by the tourist print trade, and dominated by the productions of Frederico Guilherme Briggs and his imitators, there was very little interest in producing art focused on slavery. With regard to printmaking, the popular market was dominated by formally conservative and technically backward-looking wood engravers. In the area of academic oil painting, all the major figures were extreme Europhiles producing dull and derivative narrative history paintings. The two most influential painters in the grand tradition Vito Mireiles and Pedro Américo spent long spells during the 1850–1870 period in Paris, and were desperate to be exhibited at the Salon. They both produced work aimed fawningly at the Parisian cultural elite, histrionic neoclassical narrative paintings romanticizing the myths of emergent nationhood. This stuff is indisputably visual propaganda, but it is also watered-down nationalistic pap. The most popular and widely disseminated of the late nineteenth-century academic painters was José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, yet, although he incorporated the black body into his work as an element of exotic primitivism, his subjects were constructed as nostalgic and picturesque props.
Agostini worked in a place and at a time riven with contradictions that resulted from the manner in which incipient urban capitalism was thrown up against the survival of a slavery system with veritably medieval social structures. Agostini produced thousands of lithographs on stone for mainstream illustrated periodicals creating social and political satiric art across a wide range of issues. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s the abuses of slavery and its abolition became subjects he increasingly concentrated on. Agostini was living in a metropolitan center full of English engineers, designers, and businessmen intent on profiting from Brazil’s sudden incorporation into the industrialized world. It was an environment in which slave labor existed hand in hand with the development of new technologies including gas light and steam power. At this time Rio had more operative photographic studios than any city in the world with the exception of London. Although Agostini incorporated the modern developments into the subject matter of his work, he was also trying to produce print satires in a traditional medium that dealt with ancient social abuses. To further complicate his satiric purposes, this Italian émigré was producing large whole- and double-page ambitious political satires at a time when the print satire of Europe had entered a period of decline if not decrepitude. Serious political satire and allegory had long since given way to the whimsy and trivial cartoons of the bourgeois illustrated periodicals typified by Punch and Charivari, a kind of art that had foregone any serious claim to be deemed political propaganda. In their compositional complexity and metaphorical ambitions, many of Agostini’s prints, in fact, resonate with much earlier forms of powerful political graphic propaganda. His most successful prints are best compared with the work produced by James Gillray and Francisco Goya at the height of the great period of Romantic print satire in England and Spain, well over a half-century earlier.
Agostini’s final reputation as a visual propagandist rests on the work he did for two journals, O Mequetrefe [The Good for Nothing] and the more dominant and widely circulated Revista Illustrada [The Illustrated Journal]. The latter was the flagship for visual arts satire attacking social abuses, but what was quite new and brilliant about Agostini’s work was the manner in which he could take what looked like whimsical social satire into dynamic and terrifying new propagandistic terrain. I have only space for two examples and will start off with a brief consideration of the terrific print S. Sebastião de Actualidade Quantas Facidinhas! Pobres Papais! (St. Sebastian in Reality. What a lot of little spongers! Poor fathers!). This is an explosive example of how an apparently apolitical, seasonal, and social satire could operate as a mask for something much more unsettling, and I would argue quintessentially Brazilian.
The print shows a thick-set, middle-aged, smiling, affluent white father, standing in a smoking cap and jacket, with his hands tied behind his back, in front of the family Christmas tree. He bends at the knees, slouching, his stomach is pushed out and he grins, his expression contains both inanity and unease. Before him the assembled family, consisting of four house slaves, seven white children, and a white wife, launch an assortment of lethal long knives at his body, converting him into the ironic parodic Saint of the title. He has already been penetrated by nine blades, which are stuck into his abdomen from just above his thighs to just below his rib cage, forming an arc. The scene takes place in a disconcertingly modern domestic space, a spacious drawing room with a mirror and paintings on the walls, illuminated by elaborate gas lamps. The immediate satiric message is clear, the father is being financially bled dry by his wife, children, and dependent slaves, all of whom expect Christmas presents. The print in one sense is simply an elaboration of a pun within the printed title. In Brazilian Portuguese, the word facadista is slang for a sponger, hence facadinhas is “little spongers,” but facada is a stab and colloquially is a touch, a gift, or a loan of money. Hence the caricature takes the analogy between spending money and being stabbed and literalizes it. And yet the more one considers it, this print is anything but semiotically stable or narratively cut and dried; it contains secondary and tertiary elements that critique both slavery and patriarchy. The activities and spatial arrangement of the figures is not arbitrary but ruthlessly hierarchical and operates in ways that not only question the power dynamics of slavery but that introduce a fundamental taboo of abolition rhetoric, namely slave violence against the master within a domestic setting. The great Joaquim Nabuco, the most perceptive and profound commentator on the peculiarities of Brazilian slavery and of Brazilian abolition, stated emphatically that Agostini’s Revista Illustrada was “a Biblía da Abolição para os que não sabem ler” [“the Bible of Abolition for those who do not know how to read”], and in Brazil at this time that was statistically pretty much everyone.23 This print is a triumphant demonstration of how Agostini could use the new, illustrated nineteenth-century bourgeois periodical to produce savage political propaganda that got under the skin of the abuses of domestic slavery. Agostini, like Nabuco, was also aware that his prints could be seen and interpreted by the house slaves who serviced every household that bought his journal. What did the house slaves of Rio think when they saw that sly old black slave lurking at the back of this print casually holding a knife? What would a slave child think, looking at the confused and agonized face of the little child at the back of the room, wanting to become part of the violent attack on the slave patriarch, but simultaneously terrified of doing so? How quickly would the eyes of slaves have connected the slouched puppet-like posture of the master and seen that it precisely mimicked the figure of the male marionette perched in the Christmas tree?
In the work Agostini produced for O Mequetrefe, a less celebrated journal than Revista Illustrada but a more politically confrontational one, Agostini developed a number of quite distinct approaches to graphic slavery propaganda. Agostini appears somehow creatively and technically more untrammeled in many of the large, double-page horizontal format prints he produced as centerpieces for O Mequetrefe. The sparseness and uncluttered formal arrangements of these prints should not be mistaken for simplicity or crudity. Rather, Agostini seems to have entered a satiric world closer to the pared-down, amplified, and monumental choices of Goya’s late etchings, and of the parable-like Disparates in particular.
In the best of the work he did for O Mequetrefe, Agostini takes the political lithograph into new satiric and descriptive territories, and his innovations seem to grow out of his ability to embrace elements that photography had introduced into visual culture. Photography had injected new and unsettling elements of realism into the conventions of many extant visual genres including portraiture, landscape, and the tableau vivant. In the following print he fuses all three of these areas to create what remains a genuinely unnerving interrogation of slavery and ignorance, an image that has a claim to be a new kind of graphic propaganda. The centerpiece print for the issue of O Mequetrefe for May of 1887 simply carried the title “The Entreaty of the Slave Bernardo.” The reader is directed to the long accompanying article that takes up two preceding pages of the issue. Under the stark headline “Um Crime Impune” [“An Unpunished Crime”] the text provides a melodramatic account of the circumstances leading up to the death of Bernardo as a result of his prolonged torture and abuse at the hands of a gentleman, one Antonio de Atahyde e Souza, described as “a widower, farmer and native of Portugal.” Bernardo, who had been given his emancipation papers a year earlier, on March 4, 1886, was still being kept as a slave by Atahyde. The “slave” had gone to the authorities to state that he was free and to complain of his abuse at the hands of Atahyde, only to be returned to the now-irritated “master.” Bernardo was put in the stocks, then repeatedly whipped and beaten, the abuse leading to terrible wounding of his back and buttocks. He finally died when subsequently kept in the stocks. He lay on a cold brick floor for fifty-two hours without food or water, and continually aggravated his wounds by rubbing them against the floor. The article ends with outraged condemnation not only of all who participated in the atrocity, but with the statement that if such things can happen in this nation, then Brazil itself is “a land of barbarians.”
Agostini’s task was to create, within a single visual narrative, a commentary on this all-too-typical set of circumstances. The choice of subject and the descriptive method are quite different from anything that had appeared in earlier print propaganda dealing with slave trauma in Europe and North America. The approach Agostini adopts is also dramatically different, in rhetorical terms, from that of the written text. He opts for a strategy of severe restraint and narrative understatement. The time and the event he chooses to describe are carefully choreographed. The viewer is placed inside the outhouse in which the atrocity occurs. We stand on the same brick floor on which Bernardo is tortured, and witness the beginning of his ordeal, knowing that the violence we witness will damage his body in ways that then cause his lonely and extended death during the ensuing night. The design ironically exploits its landscape format. The middle and background of the print consist of a view of the farmhouse and outbuildings poking up from a sloping field. It is the sort of outside view that people never bothered to paint, but which the camera frequently would record, because, quite simply, it is there. The ordinary, open, calm, uninhabited, agricultural yet neo-suburban land is monumentally banal. The foreground, on the other hand, is formally dramatic and occurs, like so many narrative studio photographs of the period, within a narrow stagelike foreground, complete with proscenium-style frame and props. Part of the propaganda’s power comes from the manner in which it suggests frozen action on a stage, in other words, a tableau vivant. The composition is set up through a series of strict rectilinear forms and spaces. The outhouse architecture sternly encases the human action, a large horizontal beam runs across the top, and two vertical beams point down, like mighty arrows into the composition. Set at a slightly oblique angle against this stark frame are two rectangular box forms: the first is the massive stocks, the second the packing case on which Atahyde sits. The stocks itself is drawn with great accuracy and precisely conforms to the typical structure of the communal tronco that occupied such a central and self-consciously dramatic symbolic space in the fazendas and town squares of nineteenth-century Brazil. Made of hardwood, these vast structures, with their geometric holes, still stand in public spaces and museums across the North East of Brazil. Agostini insists that the tronco is not a theatrical monument to the memory of slavery, but merely a useful part of the furniture of the farm outhouse. It thrusts dramatically into the composition from the left. The far end remains invisible, shooting out of the picture frame and suggesting that there is no end to this terrible set of parallel lines.
In Barthesian terms, the punctum of this design, the most charged space of visual/ emotional punctuation, are the sets of black holes into and out of which the slave limbs penetrate. The great planks are periodically cut through by these ghastly orifices, perfect circles that are obscenely polished pebble, smoothed by the twisting limbs of innumerable victims over immemorial time. The manner in which Agostini inhabits these holes is inspired. On the left of the design, the further set are filled by two anonymous legs, the body tumbling back and out of the left margin of the design. This faceless disembodied victim is challenging us, as witnesses to give him, or her, an identity, to make the suffering mean something. One detail is terrific: pushed up above the horizon line of the tronco we see four toes. These pitiful digits are the only part of any body that reaches though a hole and becomes visible out beyond the stocks, inhabiting the free space of the landscape.
The ultimate terror that the narrative embodies relates to the fact that the only white witness, the torturer himself, seems completely oblivious or, to use the vernacular phrase, “out of it.” The vertical support beam creates a separate performative space for Atahyde; he is set up in his own little compartment on the right-hand margin, almost as if he is posing in a studio for his portrait. Agostini has given the slave power a new kind of face, that of a modern man, an urban gent, a man who could step straight into a Machado de Assis dinner party. He has a manicured beard and elegant brushed back grey hair. He is dressed in a city suit, with white wing collar and bow tie, and he is holding a large cigar with casual ease in his right hand, his left hand resting on the box top. He doesn’t look particularly good or bad, he doesn’t look handsome or ugly, he doesn’t look at all. There is no moral decay or inhuman barbarity written into this face, there is no emotional engagement of any sort. The crucial thing is the detachment, a psychological detachment to match the spatial one. What defines both this man’s evil and the social tragedy his actions create is the fact that there is no sadistic engagement in what he has instigated, and no interest in what is happening or will happen. Agostini has risen above the melodrama and monstrousness with which the Anglo-American abolition propaganda archive had so energetically and easily demonized the slave power. Rejecting the easy and pornographic spectacle of grinning planters bathed in the blood of writhing mulattas or of slaves foundering in boiling vats of sugar cane juice, Agostini has given us something far more terrifying and of infinitely greater moral worth. His Atahyde represents an unexpected kind of demon who is uninterested, uninteresting, and one of us. Agostini demonstrates how a supposedly benign capitalism can ruthlessly enable and indeed succor bonded labor systems. He has created a new spirit in the propagandas of slavery.