Mandarin Brazil
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Mandarin Brazil

Race, Representation, and Memory

Ana Paulina Lee

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Mandarin Brazil

Race, Representation, and Memory

Ana Paulina Lee

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In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music, literature, and visual culture, as well as archival documents and Brazilian and Qing dynasty diplomatic correspondence about opening trade and immigration routes between Brazil and China. In so doing, she reveals how Asian racialization helped to shape Brazil's image as a racial democracy.

Mandarin Brazil begins during the second half of the nineteenth century, during the transitional period when enslaved labor became unfree labor—an era when black slavery shifted to "yellow labor" and racial anxieties surged. Lee asks how colonial paradigms of racial labor became a part of Brazil's nation-building project, which prioritized "whitening, " a fundamentally white supremacist ideology that intertwined the colonial racial caste system with new immigration labor schemes. By considering why Chinese laborers were excluded from Brazilian nation-building efforts while Japanese migrants were welcomed, Lee interrogates how Chinese and Japanese imperial ambitions and Asian ethnic supremacy reinforced Brazil's whitening project. Mandarin Brazil contributes to a new conversation in Latin American and Asian American cultural studies, one that considers Asian diasporic histories and racial formation across the Americas.

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Year
2018
ISBN
9781503606029
ONE
Brazil’s Oriental Past and Future
In 2009, China surpassed the United States in becoming Brazil’s largest trade partner; today, the largest Chinese population in Latin America lives in Brazil, totaling approximately 250,000 to 300,000 people. What may appear to be a new economic and political relationship, however, has a history that dates back nearly five hundred years.
Within the first decades of the sixteenth century, European voyages opened new trade routes that connected vastly distant parts of the world through establishing new links among Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. While extensive trade networks had already been in place for centuries along the silk and spice routes, sixteenth-century globalization, migration, settlement, and cultural exchange reshaped trade on a global level, and marked a world historical transformation.1 Geopolitics and global trade established the beginning of international law, and state power was extended to the seas.2 World trade relations produced new collisions of local and diasporic knowledge, and it created new ways of knowing and representing places, people, and objects from distant lands.
Following Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World, King Manuel I of Portugal commissioned Portuguese explorers Pedro Álvares Cabral and Vasco da Gama to lead their fleets to find swifter trade routes to the Indies, a name that stuck even after Europeans quickly realized that the Americas were not India. Indeed, the earliest map to depict the Western Hemisphere, made by German geographer Martin WaldseemĂŒller (1470–1519) in 1507, shows that the Americas are located on a separate continent from Asia, Africa, and Europe (Figure 1.1). Regardless, European explorers and cartographers continued to refer to Asia and the Americas as the Indies. The malleability of the word Indies—it could refer to Asia or the Americas—indicates that the notion of continents as a fixed and evident aspect of the Earth’s surface is itself a myth whose borders, place names, and regions like Orient and Occident tell us more about the spatial divisions through which people organized knowledge about themselves and the world than the earth’s geographical terrains.3 Multiple and at times conflicting names for people and places indicate the emergence of a new, modern world order where imperialist projects were emerging and had not yet defined and claimed geopolitical borders. For example, the word Indies could refer to people or objects from Mexico or India. Its variable definitions never referred to culturally and historically significant Indigenous Mexicans or Indians, but the word racialized Mexicans and Indians together. Processes of overlapping racialization give insight into how notions about nearness and farness became bound to emotions, bodies, and collective imaginaries.4 This economy of racialization reveals geopolitical and economic interests that shaped the imaginative geography of a place and ideas about people in that place.
Race to the Indies
The race to find the quickest route to the Indies—which instead led to the discovery of the Americas—was also about the founding of the modern/colonial order.5 The Carreira da Índia, a transoceanic trade circuit led by the Portuguese, established a global trade route that linked distant and not-so-distant economies. In 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral first reached the land that would come to be called Brazil, he was in search of the natural and cultural materials of China and India. Portugal’s efforts to reach Asia were closely linked to the desire for the colonial riches that the Americas would come to symbolize and fulfill. Vasco da Gama became the first person to make the ocean voyage from Europe to Asia, when in 1497 he set sail from Lisbon and led his navy down the West African coast, around the Cape of Good Hope, and upward along the East African coast to India. Then he continued on to Southeast Asia and China. In 1511, Gama arrived in Macau. Mercantilism drove the voyages to the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and Portuguese trade interests were often unilateral. Portuguese mariners, who had quickly gained a reputation for violence, attempted to establish trade in the South China Sea, but due to mismanagement and the Ming dynasty’s reluctance to deal with the “barbarian intruders from the Great Western Ocean,” initial attempts were met with hostility.6 According to a letter written by Father Gregorio González in 1557, the Portuguese were at first allowed to stay only through winters, at the end of which they had to tear down their temporary homes made of wood and straw and leave.7 Nevertheless, a combination of persistence and clandestine trading eventually led to the first Portuguese colonial settlement in Macau in 1557.8 Although the Portuguese settlers created a local government and paid an annual fee of 500 to 550 taels per year to the magistrate of the Heungshan district, Chinese authorities in Macau asserted that ultimate sovereignty belonged to the Ming and thereby overruled Portuguese claims to authority.9
FIGURE 1.1. First known map to name America, by Martin WaldseemĂŒller. Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii alioru[m]que lustrationes. (Strasbourg, France?: s.n., 1507) Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3200.ct000725C/.
The Ming forbade all maritime voyages and prohibited direct trade and migration between China and Japan.10 Portuguese mariners swiftly capitalized on these bans, serving as intermediaries between Chinese and Japanese merchants. A single voyage consisting of loads of Chinese raw silks and textiles to Nagasaki would yield returns of 18 to 20 tons of silver. Profits earned from a single voyage provided a license holder of a carrack (Portuguese trading ships with three or more masts) enough financial security to last a lifetime.11 By the end of the sixteenth century, Macau and Nagasaki became flourishing seaports, a result of mutually profitable and clandestine trade facilitated by Portuguese carrack circuits.12
The Delicate Art of Trade
The history of Sino-Portuguese trade might be better thought of in terms of transactions of inconsistencies, accidents, competition, and mutual acts of appropriation and exploitation that were propelled by new trade relations and the establishment of interdependent markets. Polycentric economic and political interests, as well as mutual acts of cultural appropriation such as those that occurred in the trade in porcelain, export porcelain, and chinoiserie (imitation porcelain), allow us to examine how visual and material objects circulated images and motifs of Asia and Europe to Asian and European consumers alike. These objects played a critical role in shaping new geographical imaginaries about Europe and Asia, filling many minds and rooms with otherworldly representations. The world trade in these highly coveted foreign goods also expanded the slave trade. Ships that carried porcelain teacups destined for the royal palace in Lisbon also trafficked slaves who would disembark in Brazil. The beginning of free trade went hand in hand with the worldwide expansion of the African slave trade.
Global economic ventures and competition-led production significantly affected geopolitical relations and cultural production about the so-called Orient and Occident. Portuguese mariners and merchants working with their counterparts in China jointly supplied the idea of the Orient in the form of hybrid material culture; for example, Chinese porcelain was inscribed with European-commissioned motifs and transported alongside other items that Europeans could sell, trade, or keep as souvenirs. Porcelain objects made in China were so popular that the word china became metonymic for porcelain. Shards of china found in archaeological sites around the world serve as evidence of the crucial role the porcelain trade played in establishing the interconnected global economy.13 These shards also attest to the critical part that material and visual culture played in creating, displaying, and circulating ideas about China and Chineseness. Portuguese traders were particularly interested in porcelain, an item of high-art material culture that emperors throughout Chinese history prized. Each dynasty had characteristic patterns, forms, and motifs on its porcelain.14 The lightness, durability, and impermeability of porcelain made it superior to clay ceramics. Its characteristics were unprecedented in Europe, and it was prized for both beauty and utility. For example, the bottom and top rims of a porcelain bowl enable its user to hold hot liquids without risk of burning.15 Such innovations made these objects particularly attractive to elite European consumers who began to adapt Chinese customs such as drinking tea from porcelain cups. Along with shipments of porcelain, the Portuguese also brought back exotic teas from the Orient, and tea became a popular drink among the Portuguese court and elite society. The Portuguese word for tea, chá, is a transliteration of the Mandarin word for tea. Porcelain’s exorbitant prices made it exclusively available to the wealthiest, and customs such as tea drinking that accompanied the use of porcelain quickly became a symbol of refinement and high culture.
Blue-and-white porcelain was a particular favorite of the Portuguese and later influenced the now famous blue-and-white tiles of Portuguese architecture (Figure 1.2). The Sino-Portuguese porcelain trade represents the earliest example of porcelain objects with Chinese motifs sold to a European empire. The armillary sphere motif was invented in China in the second century (Figure 1.3). In the sixteenth century, it acquired new meaning when Kings Manuel I (1495–1521) and João III (1502–1557) used it to symbolize Portuguese maritime discoveries.16 Along with the armillary sphere, it became a common practice for Portuguese royalty and aristocrats to commission familial coat-of-arms designs on Chinese porcelain objects. The royal Portuguese commissions of motifs on porcelain emblematized the Portuguese standard of the cultured and military man. The armillary sphere continues to hold significant political symbolism for modern-day Portugal. The sphere forms part of the Portuguese national flag, a reminder of its great seaborne imperial history, and testimony to a nostalgic part of Portuguese national identity that remembers its empire with longing.
FIGURE 1.2. Mandarin in blue and white on tile, Portugal, c. mid-nineteenth century. Source: Aaron David Smith Private Collection.
FIGURE 1.3. Porcelain bowl with armillary sphere motif, Lisbon, Portugal, sixteenth century. Source: Nuno de Castro, A porcelana chinesa ao tempo do Império (Portugal and Brazil: ACD Editores 1987): 68.
The global trade in porcelain, export porcelain, and chinoiserie objects attests to how the production, circulation, and consumption of material and visual culture, including representations and motifs about both the East and West, made Asia and Europe into exotic products and status symbols for consumers in China, Japan, France, Portugal, England, the Netherlands and other places around the world. To understand the complexity of these relationships, we must analyze the way that both the East and West profited from and exploited images of each other to expand and reach larger markets. In some instances, trade produced enterprising alliances as well as competitive markets in Asia and Europe, and in others, market demand induced new genres of porcelain production. It is not enough to examine this history as an example of Orientalism or Eurocentric cultural hegemony in which Europeans produced an imaginary of the Other, thereby facilitating colonial domination.17 The porcelain, export porcelain, and chinoiserie trade produced and circulated images of Asia and Europe that were seen as foreign by Asian and European perspectives alike and thus appeared exotic to all who looked at the objects depicting images from these differing cultures.
A number of significant moments in the global porcelain trade reveal the impact that the trade had in conditioning ways of seeing and knowing the East and West. During the transitional period between the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1911), political turmoil in China led to a halt in porcelain production, which caused a supply shortage in the highly profitable European marke...

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