The Inequality of North-South Cultural Exchanges 

Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni is Professor of Sociology of Art at the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, since 2005. She has been a visiting professor at several foreign institutions, including the École Normale Supérieure (rue d’Ulm, Paris), where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship between 2016 and 2017.
Ian Merkel is an Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of Groningen with tenure. He received his Ph.D. in cotutelle between New York University and the University of São Paulo and has taught at Cornell University, the University of Miami, the University of Turin, and Leipzig University.

Q: Your books are based on extensive research in archives in different countries. Could you tell us a bit about the development of these projects into monographs?

Ian Merkel (IM): During my doctorate, I became interested in Brazilian intellectual and cultural history. Initially, my plan was to write a history of São Paulo inspired by what Carl Schorske (1979) did many years ago for Vienna. I wanted to examine the effervescent cultural sphere of the city in the first half of the twentieth century in its various manifestations: artistic, social-scientific and political. It is through this that I came upon the “French missions” to Brazilian universities. Initially, these missions were only part of a broader project, but I quickly came to realize the potential for a monograph focused on them. Ultimately, it was the archives that informed my approach. Both Lévi-Strauss and Braudel’s archives had recently been made available in Paris, and the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB) at USP [Universidade de São Paulo] housed many papers from Monbeig and Bastide. Between these four thinkers, I had a significant basis from which to build outwards. I could reconstruct their experience and the Brazilian thinkers with whom they were in dialogue, including Mário de Andrade, Caio Prado Júnior, and Florestan Fernandes. [1].

Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni (APCS): My book was the outcome of many years of research dedicated to modernist women in Brazil. This research began in 2005 when I studied the trajectory of Regina Gomide Graz (1897-1973), who introduced modern textile arts (Art Deco) in Brazil. Despite her innovative approach, she remained largely obscured in Brazilian art history. Regina was married to the Swiss artist John Graz (1891-1980) and the sister of the Brazilian painter Antonio Gomide (1895-1967.) Together, they brought a modernist approach to decoration aligned with the principles of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total art, to Brazil. Regina’s name, however, was over-shadowed and subordinated compared to her male counterparts. Moreover, in dedicating herself to textiles, Gomide Graz renewed a traditional pattern in the gendered division of labor; she was less studied and exhibited than her husband and brother, and her work was less preserved.
In 2009, I joined the IEB at USP, an institution that houses important modernist archives fundamental to Brazil’s cultural history. At that point, I felt compelled to include more noteworthy examples, such as the artists Anita Malfatti and Tarsila do Amaral. Here, the challenges were different: it would be inaccurate to say that they were excluded, but it is also impossible to claim that gender played no role in shaping their careers and public recognition. Both are regarded in Brazil as prominent figures of national modernism, a role rarely attributed to women artists in a global context. How-ever, this recognition is not granted despite their gender; on the contrary. I point out that all three artists occupy narrative positions deeply shaped by notions of femininity: Tarsila do Amaral as the muse, Anita Malfatti as the victim, and Regina Gomide Graz as the collaborative wife. In that regard, Bourdieu’s thesis that the figure of the artist as a genius, and therefore individualized, is the product of a process within the artistic field itself contributes greatly to historicizing, and therefore denaturalizing, this vision. While Bourdieu provides the foundation for rethinking the creation of the singular artist as a myth, or collective illusion, when considering the myth of “female exceptionality” specifically, and particularly in the arts, I elected to draw on other references, such as Griselda Pollock, Tamar Garb, Christine Planté, Patricia Mayayo, and Séverine Sofio.

Q: Ian, in studying the importance of Brazil in France’s reshaping of the social sciences, you mention having drawn on Pierre Bourdieu’s lectures on the painter Édouard Manet to analyze Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “rebellion” against Émile Durkheim and the emergence of structuralism. Could you explain in further detail how Lévi-Strauss’s time in Brazil resonated in his thought, and how Bourdieu’s work informs your argument?

IM: It is a matter of the broader question of fields and how to understand the individual agents within them. Bourdieu recognized in Manet’s painting a kind of “symbolic revolution” that had trans-formed the world of art. Perhaps uncharacteristically of Bourdieu, he granted Manet a significant amount of autonomy in doing so. And yet, as he argued, Manet depended upon fellow painters, artists, and writers in homologous positions to enact the revolution for which he became so well-known. For Lévi-Strauss, I would argue that something similar occurred. He was inspired by Durkheimian social science but frustrated by its limitations. Ethnology (what we would now call Anthropology) provided a way out. Whether in 1930s São Paulo where he advocated for Cultural Anthropology instead of Sociology, or in 1950s Paris as the father of Structural Anthropology, Lévi-Strauss effectuated a kind of symbolic revolution. He was far from alone, however, in this task. We tend to think of structuralism as the fruit of Lévi-Strauss’s dialogues in New York with the linguist Roman Jakobson. But Brazilians such as Mário de Andrade, Heloisa Torres [2] and Luiz de Castro Faria [3] were invaluable collaborators on the ground. Lévi-Strauss’s French colleagues from Brazil, too, helped to bring both attention to and institutional support for his structuralist method.

Q: Ian, when dealing with the French missions to Brazil in the 1930s, you focus less on the contribution of these academic missions to the development of Brazilian social sciences and consider more thoroughly the impact of Brazil and Brazilian intellectuals on the work and future careers of French researchers in the beginning of their trajectory. Could you tell us more about this “effet de retour,” or in other words, how the Brazilian experience was reinvested in the French academic context?

IM: This question gets to the heart of what I ultimately argue in the book. I should recognize up front that the question of these “missions” has been one of serious scholarly research for some time now. Fernanda Arêas Peixoto’s work (1991), in particular, is pioneering in examining these French intellectuals in Brazil. But the archival sources made me profoundly aware of just how important this nucleus of Franco-Brazilian scholars in the 1930s was for the French social sciences after World War II.
Measuring influence is always a tricky thing to do in intellectual history. What I try to do in the book is to recontextualize “French” concepts such as structuralism and the longue durée in the transatlantic space in which Brazilians played a crucial role. As just one example, I highlight Caio Prado Júnior as a transformative influence on Braudel’s understanding of transatlantic trade and temporality. But there is also a broader institutional effect of the Brazilian missions on French intellectual life. The archives made it clear to me that the four French scholars who make up the heart of the book remained in close contact as they constructed their own social-scientific institutions in France. The École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, le Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale and the Institut des Hautes Études de l’Amérique Latine all bear the mark of the Brazilian years, not only because they hosted “Latin American” subjects, but also because they represented new kinds of empirical research.
Q: Ana Paula, concerning authors from peripheral nations who try their luck in central countries, Pascale Casanova (1999) argues that “if they wish to be noticed, they have to show that they are different from other writers – but not so different that they are thereby rendered invisible.” To what extent does this analysis shed light on the international circulation of the works of Regina Gomide Graz, Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral? Is it relevant to say that the small percentage of these artists’ cultural production that achieved international recognition can be interpreted both as a form of exoticism and contingent on their exchange with the northern hemisphere?

APCS: Traveling abroad was fundamental both for artistic training and for gaining recognition. In the nineteenth century, women were not allowed to enter art academies, neither in France nor in Brazil. Access to academic training was no longer the main issue for the modernist generation, but becoming a vanguard artist still required a period abroad. It was in Geneva that Regina Gomide Graz received the theoretical and practical training that enabled her to become a modern decorative artist; Anita Malfatti encountered artistic movements in Germany and the United States that allowed her to introduce modernism in Brazil in 1917. Interestingly, Tarsila do Amaral was in Paris between 1920 and 1921, but did not embrace modernism at that time. It was in São Paulo, after the Modern Art Week of 1922, that she better understood the debates among different artistic languages through her contact with the São Paulo modernists. During her subsequent stay in Paris, beginning in 1923, she took a “leap” into cubism, producing the most valued works of her career. Very few artists who did not study abroad managed to stand out; one rare exception is Mário de Andrade.

Q: Ian, you reject the thesis of the unidirectional transfer of ideas from privileged societies to those that are less privileged. How can we implement restrictions on the traditional approach to international borrowing without succumbing to relativism and cultural populism?

IM: Social theory is at a difficult crossroads. The main difficulty, in my view, is a global rightward turn combined with austerity that seeks to dismantle critical educational projects. There is also the broader question of how to remake curricula in the social sciences: for the most part, European and North American authors remain the classical, canonical references. They are “universal,” whereas thinkers from other parts of the world are valued primarily for their understanding of their local or national contexts.

In that sense, Bourdieu and Wacquant’s article (1998) is helpful for thinking critically about how authors and concepts circulate internationally. In the Netherlands, where I live and work, I try to use Latin American authors whose texts help to think beyond their local experience. Nowadays, U.S. based scholars are overrepresented in social scientific discourse. Remaining vigilant about why this is the case as we read them remains important.

Q: Ana Paula, in discussing the difficult recognition of Latin American artists in the Parisian art scene of the 1920s, you note that all those who achieved some measure of success took advantage of hailing from regions perceived as primitive and exotic. Could you tell us more about the expectations shaped by these artists’ national origins?