Martins, Luciana (2009) Bittersweet images: coffee, landscape and modernity in Brazil. In: American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography, 2009, University of Essex. (Unpublished)
Abstract
In early twentieth-century Brazil, capital earned through coffee export brought the modernization sought by many urban intellectuals. While much attention was devoted to the urban consequences by Brazilian modernists, in particular the booming cultural life of the city of São Paulo, less emphasis was given to the depiction of its landscapes. Unlike Central America, where limitations of good land forced cultivators to take better care of the soil, in Brazil the transience of coffee crops left a devastated hollow frontier in its wake. While coffee production demanded more and more ‘virgin’ land, it also required a constant influx of immigrant labour in the wake of the abolition of slavery. By focusing on a selected visual archive of images of coffee production during a transformative period of Brazilian history (including film and photography), this paper aims to shed light on the ambiguities of the modernizing process.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, Centre for (CILAVS), Birkbeck Knowledge Lab |
| Depositing User: | Sarah Hall |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Aug 2014 15:52 |
| Last Modified: | 09 Aug 2023 12:35 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/10384 |
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