Minas world: almost a manifesto

Minas world: cosmopolitanism in Brazilian culture is an expanding network of cooperation involving around fifty researchers from diverse institutions, areas of academic training and work, centered on five universities: UFRJ, UFMG, Princeton University, Unicamp and UFRRJ. Constituted in anticipation of commemorations for the hundredth anniversary of Modern Art Week, set to be celebrated in 2022, the network proposes a review of the meanings of modernism and its legacies in Brazilian culture. 

Dialoguing with contemporary critiques of the nationalization of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century, along with the symbolic and social forms of violence implied in this process, we reflect on the controversial role of modernism as a hegemonic symbolic repertoire in the definition of conducts, feelings, imaginations and languages that continue to intersect us today. 

We also intend to revisit the question of the localism/cosmopolitanism of Brazilian culture that has been informing specific modes of reading cultural difference, and through which artists, intellectuals and public agents organized discursive, institutional, cultural and political practices that helped shape some of the most persistent interpretative approaches to Brazil and its dilemmas. 

The aim, therefore, is to provoke and attain a new understanding of the meaning of cosmopolitanism in Brazilian culture. Provisionally, we take cosmopolitanism as a decentered relation of conviviality with the universal based on local difference, an idea that implies movements and openings in various directions.

And why Minas Gerais? Various empirical signs tell us that cosmopolitanism is not just widely present in Minas Gerais’s cultures, it is crucial to defining their very meaning. From Cláudio Manuel da Costa’s gesture of making the Arcadian muses bathe in the Ribeirão do Carmo, which need not be read as a prototype of an “ideological comedy” but rather as a cosmopolitan experience of “repetition with difference,” passing through the poetry of Carlos Drummond, the prose of Guimarães Rosa, the poetry and translations of Henriqueta Lisboa, or even the adolescent prose of Helena Morley, to the popular music of Milton Nascimento, who sang “I’m from the world, I’m from Minas Gerais” (from which we take the name of the project). And without forgetting the important migratory experience of Mineiros within Brazil and throughout the world, its social sciences so heavily marked by the universal language of mathematics, its impressive museological innovations of which Inhotim is just one of the best most recent examples, the political rationality of state-makers like Francisco Campos, the cosmopolitanism of its rebellions like the Inconfidência Mineira and the Republican language that took shape within it, the problematic insertion of the black presence in the visual culture manifested in the photos of Chichico Alkmin, the urban planning of its current capital, and the Baroque period itself with its notable icons like Aleijadinho and so on.

But why emphasize a Minas case over a Brazilian one? Certainly the question is among the problems that only networked research can answer. In distinguishing a Minas case, though, we do not intend to produce an essentialism, but rather question the paradigm of national identity that domesticated it, homogenizing it, the very comprehension of the formation of Brazilian society. A questioning from both “inside,” since it will promote recognition of the differences “internal” to Brazil, and “outside,” exploring its “external” articulations. Minas, world; Minas-world. Highlighting the question of cosmopolitanism in culture enables a problematization of the very idea of “origin” through the affirmation of difference as rewriting, supplement, a repetition dislocated in space and time.

Reworking the category of cosmopolitanism is an urgent task both theoretically and politically. After all, we are living through a moment of regrowth in nationalisms and national borders in geopolitics, accompanied by the observation that the so-called globalization of culture does not, in fact, seem to be generating multicentric or more equitable relations, despite the intensification of exchanges of all kinds enabled by technological developments. In culture too there persists a geopolitics with asymmetric relations and exchanges that recreates various types of hierarchies. 

Cosmopolitanism is, in sum, a perspective from which one speaks, not just a theme about which one may say something. It is this master idea that defines the collective actions and machinations of the Minas World network, which will consist, primarily, of academic research and the public communication of science, including seminars, exhibitions and publications, as well as actions involving art, memory and documentation. By 2024, the key year of modernism as seen from Minas Gerais, we hope to put cosmopolitanism in, through, with and even against Minas in an academic and public debate.

André Botelho (UFRJ)
Eneida Maria de Souza (UFMG)
Mariana Chaguri (Unicamp)
Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ)
Pedro Meira Monteiro (Princeton University)