Aguafuertes cariocas e um Brasil ao oriente do Oriente

Abstract

In 1930, Roberto Arlt travels to Rio de Janeiro in a mission to present the most diverse aspects of brazilian life and culture to his public reader in Argentina. In this paper, throughout the reading of this criative project of 40 chronicals written in the two months he spent here, reunited and released in 2013 under the title Aguafuertes cariocas, we intend to reflect critically on the process of imagination of the nations Brazil and Argentina in that historical moment. In order to do so, we propose the reading of his chronicals not only as an atemptive to understand and describe Brazil, but as a discourse in a larger network that points us the disputes around the ideas of civilization and modernity, involves different people, ideas and institutions and determine in a lot of ways what can and can’t be said about Brazil, as well as about Argentina and the South American nations. At the same time it stablishes and mantains dinamics of power and domination. Because of this, it says less about the local reality than about the foreign ideas transplanted, not without violence, to our context. We focus our aproach on his understanding of the world of work and the presence of black people in Brazilian society.