Word imagery and painted rhetoric: artists, historians and the invention of the history of Brazil 
25 July 2012
11am
Venue: Room 209, Arts 1 (Building 206)
Host: Genaro Oliveira
This talk focuses on the central place of nineteenth-century painters and historians in the invention of the history of Brazil. Specifically, it shows how painters at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (AIBA) and historians at the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB), with shared epistemological and political agendas, played an important complementary role in inaugurating visual and written interpretations of Brazilian history that actively contributed to the nation-building process during the post-independence era. Despite slavery and continuous warfare against Indigenous peoples, I will document how historians and painters contributed to the widely disseminated self-image of the sovereign nation-state of Brazil as a cohesive, “white” and civilised people who made the transition from colony to nation-state almost entirely peacefully.
