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 After losing the Civil War, confederates developed a sense of nationalism and nostalgia, which, combined with a bitter resentment toward Northern colonization, was enough to convince 9000 confederates to set up colonies of the confederate cause in Brazil (Lowe 6).
Confederate descendants have an active organization with a Web site (http://www.scv.org/Camp1653/index.htm) and continue to actively establish and maintain links between the Old Homeland and contemporary Brazil. A look at this history and its impact on Brazil shows that os confederados has a great deal to do with Brazil's conception of Faulkner's south and the Southern way of life. The fact that many of the descendants of the original Confederate immigrants now have Afro-Brazilian heritage as well offers yet another interesting counterpoint in comparing Absalom, Absalom! to Brazil. Os Confederados In 1887, the Galveston Daily News warned that "the radical programme of depriving the people of the south of the last vestige of liberty is about to be carried out...and our unhappy country is about to be made the theatre of the most despotic rule the world has witnessed in modern times" (Lowe 17-8). Lowe explains that Brazil had become an exotic interest of Southerners before the war due to glowing accounts of Southern authors comparing the country with the American South. For example, the temperate Brazilian climate resembled that of the South; the parallels that exist between the Amazon and Mississippi River valleys are tremendous; and the fact that Brazil was sympathetic to the South during the war because it too embraced slavery. High-placed Brazilians convinced Dom Pedro II of a need for Southern agricultural and technical expertise, and an association to promote Southern emigration was established in São Paulo in 1866 (Lowe 18). Lowe explains that Southerner Frank McMullan's zeal for the expansion of Southern culture is what led he and many others to explore Latin America before the Civil War (5). McMullan also participated in a failed plot to conquer Nicaragua, such was his ambition for expansion. These memories, coupled with knowledge of the fertile soil and a desire to conquer the "new frontier" of Brazil where Confederate slavery could be reinstituted, led Southerners to form nine significant settlements originally. These immigrants, however, were quickly overshadowed by much larger numbers of immigrants from Italy, Germany and Japan who flooded the state of São Paulo. One thing people from all these countries share is defeat at the hands of the North. The reason Brazilian culture and Southern music such as jazz is highly celebrated in Japan is because all three regions share similar postcolonial histories. Lowe writes that as a people who founded and then lost a new nation, Confederate families were already adept at new beginnings. The Brazilian colonies were an extension of this effort to start over and preserve slavery and the Southern way of life (which colonists felt were mirrored by Brazilian agricultural patriarchies) in a setting similar to the American South. Fortunately, attempts to continue the slave systems failed, however; because Brazilian law forbade bringing slaves from the United States, and the Brazilian slaves purchased by the immigrants were completely different in language and custom and usually ran back to the cities (Hill 52, as cited in Lowe). Americana, São Paulo One of the most prominent of the Confederate immigrants was Colonel William Hutchinson Norris, a native of Georgia and a U.S. Senator form Alabama before the Civil War. Colonel Norris is considered the founder of the town of Americana, which today is an industrial (textiles) city with a population of 160,000 people of mostly of Italian decent (Lowe 19). Under pressure from the majority Italian descendent population, in 1999 the St. Andrew's cross of the Confederate battle flag was removed from the crest of this Brazilian city founded by Confederate immigrants. Nevertheless, Os Confederados host an annual party featuring Southern-fried chicken, corn bread and blue grass music that would be the envy of any Southerner. Politically incorrect rebel flags are very much in evidence as well. They claim, however, that the connotation of racism isn't attached to this symbol in Brazil as it is in the U.S. After all, many are mulatto themselves. I am left with the permanent impression that had he stayed longer in Brazil, Faulkner would have finally found contentment there. There are a number of other ways in which to examine Faulkner's presence in Brazil. In this series I have only discussed the three points of entry that impressed me most. Faulkner's mission to Brazil as the U.S. State Department's good will ambassador, the powerful similarities between Absalom, Absalom! and dependency theory, and finally, following subjugation and defeat by the North in the Civil War, the influence Faulkner's confederate predecessors had on Brazil when they emigrated there. As the political climate in the United States becomes more dictatorial with each passing day, it will be interesting to see if any Americans follow the lead of their confederate predecessors by emigrating to or seeking political exile in Brazil. Works Cited Hill, Lawrence F. Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Brazil. (1932) New York: AMS Press, 1971. Lowe, John. "Reconstruction Revisited: Plantation School Writers, Postcolonial Theory, and Confederates in Brazil." Mississippi Quarterly, v. 57, Winter (2003-2004). This is the third and last of a three-part series on William Faulkner's presence in Brazil. Richard F. Kane, from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Illinois State University, can be reached at
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