Jose Carlos Reis rewrites the history of Brazil in book released by FGV Press

The third incursion of historian Jose Carlos Reis in the Brazilian historiography mapping project, the work ‘Identidades do Brasil 3 – De Carvalho a Ribeiro: História plural do Brasil’ [Identities of Brazil 3 – From Carvalho to Ribeiro: Plural History of Brazil] published by FGV Press, claims the need for Brazilians to reassess their history.

The object of the book is to (re)write the History of Brazil, through the construction and reconstruction of discourses on Brazilian history during the 20th century.

It is a reflective study, an intellectual history, a critical assessment of historical-sociological-anthropological production about Brazil, in which the author differentiates a ‘general point of view’ from a ‘plural point of view,’ and defends the need for Brazilian citizens to start seeing Brazilian history differently.

According to Jose Carlos Reis, the ‘general history’ point of view has its array in the ‘universal history’ written by Europeans to legitimize their invasions and conquest of the planet. The French, British, and Germans write the history of other peoples in such a way that they feel redeemed, saved from barbarism, from primitive chaos, from paganism, with their arrival, white European Christians.

From this observation and historiography view, what the native Americans, Africans, Easterners think of their own history does not matter; when they came into contact with the Europeans, their histories gained a center and began to be decided and managed by external actors.

The point of view of this general history dedicated to Brazil was ethnocentric, white, and elitist, with the generalization of the view of a group and a region that saw itself as the center of the whole. This general history expressed a political project of conquest and colonization from a region that considered itself superior to others, with the Court of Rio de Janeiro, since independence, represented as the white, Christian, and Western core of Brazil, which had the heroic mission of ‘saving the country,’ bringing the values of Western civilization to the barbaric interior, with violence, if necessary.

This book aims to problematize this notion of ‘general history of Brazil’ and proposes a ‘plural history of Brazil,’ not ethnocentric, in which the various regions of the country tell the history of Brazil differently, maintain different relationships with the past, and propose different designs for the future. This plural point of view, Reis maintains that there should be a single, ideal narrative of Brazilian experience, because the Brazilian regions lived this experience differently.

For more information about the book, in Portuguese, access the website.