The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation in Brazil, 1864-1945

415 Pages·2001·2.04 MB·English

by  Peter M. Beattie, Walter D. Mignolo, Irene Silverblatt

The Tribute of Blood
A book in the series
Latin America Otherwise
Languages, Empires, Nations
Series editors:
Walter D. Mignolo, Duke University
Irene Silverblatt, Duke University
Sonia Saldívar-Hull, University of California
at Los Angeles
The Tribute of Blood
army, honor, race, and nation
in brazil, 1864–1945 Peter M. Beattie
duke university press
Durham & London
2001
2nd printing, 2007
∫ 2001 Duke University Press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Carter & Cohn
Galliard with Franklin Gothic display by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
About the Series
Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series. It
aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to
define ‘‘Latin America’’ while at the same time exploring the broad inter-
play of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin
American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial
designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and
geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a
starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political,
linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demand a continuous
reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history, and of the ongoing
process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that
have characterized Latin America’s experience. Latin America Otherwise:
Languages, Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts established geo-
cultural constructions, that rethinks area studies and disciplinary bound-
aries, that assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and
that, correspondingly, demands that the practices through which we pro-
duce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be
subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny.
Colonial administration and the postcolonial nation-state in Latin
America followed a di√erent pattern when compared with colonized
countries in Asia and Africa. The early decolonization from Spain and
Portugal placed most Latin American countries in peculiar positions with
emerging imperial powers such as England and France. Latin America’s
incipient nation-states, indirectly dependent on these dominant European
powers, were in turn shaped by these relations. Peter M. Beattie’s book
traces the gloomy picture of eighty years of nation-state formation in
Brazil, focusing on military history and race relations.
By telling the story of Domingos, the son of an Angolan slave and a
Portuguese nobleman, Beattie unravels the conflicting intersections of the
army code of honor, the racial prejudices underlying the value system of
postcolonial Brazil, and the constitution of its civil society. In the forming
Brazilian State, ‘‘whiteness’’ was associated with honor, prestige, and
wealth. However, in the international order of the period under study, the
distinction between Anglo and Latin whites was being made, as ‘‘white-
ness’’ in Brazil was not the same as ‘‘whiteness’’ in the United States. This
superb study of the relationships between honor, race, and the army in
Brazil also o√ers a wealth of information and ideas on the configuration of
racial prejudices in Latin countries during the second half of the nine-
teenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
about the series
vi
To my mother,
Jean O’Connor Beattie
To the memories of my father,
Francis Martin Beattie
And my sister,
Natalie Childress Beattie

Man to the hills, woman to the shore.
—Gaelic proverb
Cuchulain stirred,
Starred on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
—W. B. Yeats, ‘‘Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea’’
I shouldered a kind of manhood
Stepping in to lift the co≈ns
of dead relations.
—Seamus Heaney, ‘‘Funeral Rites’’