Theorising Belle Époque Rio de Janeiro through Opium: João do Rio’s “Visões d’ópio” as a Postcolonial Framework

Abstract

In 1905, Brazilian writer João do Rio published the crônica “Visões d’ópio” (Visions of opium), an account of his forays into the Chinese opium dens of Rio de Janeiro. While opium is often emblematic of both Parisian cosmopolitanism and exotic Orientalism in fin-de-siècle literature, I argue that the drug is less a replication of these coordinates in Brazil than a method of geopolitical thinking. Drawing from opium’s extractive history in China and its versatility as a material thing – plant, commodity, drug, alkaloid – I argue that opium as theory and praxis not only reconfigures the writer’s experience of Rio, but also makes stark the strategies behind and costs of Brazil’s colonial formation. While opium sustains a desire for modernity through its exotic and cosmopolitan imaginaries, its destabilising effects on the body disrupt fantasies of colonial amalgamation, exposing histories of extraction and racialised labour implicit in the drug’s circulation. Through an analysis that bridges empirical and new materialisms – and from a Chinese geographical axis that puts Brazil into a transnational dialogue beyond Europe – opium becomes a medium for thinking through Brazil’s colonial roots and its place in the world among other nation-states during a period of transition from empire to republic.

Keywords:

• Brazilian literature
• new materialism
• postcolonial studies
• China
• Brazil
• critical geographies
• modernity

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Zeb Tortorici for helping me work out a material language for opium and for the ceaseless encouragements to boldly push these ideas further. Many thanks are also due to the interlocutors who read and commented on earlier drafts of this article: Jens Andermann, Laura Torres-Rodríguez, Gabriel Giorgi, the NYU Pacific Working Group (Matthew Nicdao, Erica Feild, Lee Xie, Carlos Yebra López, Andrés Caicedo, and Angela Haddad), and the two anonymous reviewers from the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. Fernanda Senger and Francisco Pires offered their expertise on the nuances of language for the words I close-read.

Disclosure statement

No competing interests reported.

Notes

1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. For interested readers, a superb translation of the entire crônica (titled “Opium Visions”) can be found in Mark Carlyon’s (2010) bilingual edition of The Enchanting Soul of the Streets. I use my own translations of the crônica here to better capture the nuances of the words I close-read. I translate from the H. Garnier edition (1910) of João do Rio’s A alma encantadora das ruas.

2 Jonathan D. Spence writes, “by 1800, the East India Company was buying over 23 million pounds of Chinese tea at a cost of L3.6 million” (1990, 122).

3 European merchants faced many trade restrictions in China. They could only trade in the port of Canton, reside there for only six months of the year, and had no direct access to the Qing government. Rather, their communication was limited to Hong merchants who in turn communicated with the Hoppo, the trade official appointed by the Qing Court (Spence 1990, 122).

4 For an alternative take on how these unscrupulous spaces are coded as Chinese, see Raymond Rast’s “The Cultural Politics of Tourism in San Francisco’s Chinatown, 1882-1917” (2007). Rast’s perspective emphasises the agency of Chinese residents in forming the cultural narratives of Chinatowns.

5 Ramos’s observation is also evocative of studies of how tea stimulated the industrial revolution.

6 Here I am principally thinking of Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano (1940) in a wider Latin American context. Within a Brazilian context, Gilberto Freyre’s (1933) argument that the malleable Portuguese, bridging Europe and Africa, had created a more harmonious postcolonial society in Brazil than other European colonisers is another example of using a “unique recombination” strategy to reckon with colonial legacies.

7 See the work of Junyoung Verónica Kim (2017), Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010).

8 See also Lisa Lowe (2015).

9 Kim criticises the fact that “[t]he only way [Asia-Latin America] can be legitimised, that is, ‘understood’, is by translating the project into the very framework of established knowledge production, which often takes a hegemonic notion of comparison, or by translating it into a particular/local knowledge that adds another special cultural identity – such as the Japanese in Brazil or the Koreans in Argentina – to a larger, more universalistic rubric” (2017, 98).

10 Chinese neocolonialism in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is another story, to be addressed in chapter four of my dissertation, on Adriana Varejão’s reworking of colonial iconographies.

11 Dicionário de português, licensed to Oxford University Press (2016), s.v. “rumorejar”.

12 In 1809 Portuguese armada chief Luis de Abreu Vieira Paiva brought twenty chests of plants to Brazil from the Pamplemousse Botanical Gardens in French-controlled Mauritius, where he was detained after a shipwreck. Cultivated by French botanist Pierre Poivre, the garden boasted flora from throughout Asia and the Americas. The Luso-Brazilian invasion of French Guiana in 1810 also brought 82 new species of plants to Brazil from La Gabrielle garden and other botanical gardens (Lustosa 2007, 9). Also see João Barbosa Rodrigues’s Hortus fluminensis (1895) for a history of the garden contemporary to João do Rio’s time.

13 See João Barbosa Rodrigues’s 1895 Hortus fluminensis, a comprehensive guide to the Botanical Gardens and its species for the general public. Rodrigues was the director of the Botanical Garden from 1890 to 1909 and contributed greatly to its organisation. Finding that the tea specimens of the garden were in ruins, he planted new exemplars as “uma recordação do passado” [a souvenir of the past] (viii). Rodrigues boasts that there are 114 plants that represent Asia and 55 that represent Africa in the gardens (xxxvi). In the descriptions of the plants, he also acknowledges their heritage.

14 I argue elsewhere, however, that consciousness of this position is actually not something new. As early as the start of the nineteenth century, Brazilian elites had imagined Brazil as what I term a “surrogate China” through the plantation of tea. In the early twentieth century, the onset of modern life and its concomitant technologies and changes sharpened this transnational landscape. Cinema (and its montages) in particular helped to fashion the conglomeration of disparate geographies within one space (Conde 2012).

15 João Guimarães Rosa (1965, 70) explains that this understanding of the name Guanabara permeated Brazilian popular culture through the work of nineteenth-century etymologist Batista Caetano, who studied the usage of Tupi-Guaraní during the colonial period. See also: Adriano Pedrosa and Adriana Varejão (2013, 208) on Adriana Varejão’s painting Viagem ao seio da Guanabara (2013).

16 In a previous rendition of this article, I had used as the basis for my close-readings a version of the crônica in the 1997 Companhia das Letras reprint of A alma encantadora das ruas, edited by Raul Antelo. In the Antelo edition, the original “porto de mar” had been misprinted, curiously, as “pomo de mar”, which I had not only understood as fanciful language for “seaport”, but had also read through the word pomo’s richer connotations of “fruit” and “breast”. While I’ve revised my reading, I can’t help but acknowledge the typographical error in a petit aside for its wildly generative resonances, a slippage made all the more uncanny by the linguistic genealogy of the Guanabara Bay. The port that is also the “pome of the sea” speaks to the distinctly sexual nature of the history of the imperial flows of people and commodities alike along the Brazilian coast. Understood as “fruit”, the metaphor is reminiscent of the perennial presumption of Brazil’s super-endowed fertility, from the intermingled ecstasies over the naked Indigenous body on the one hand and the fecund land on the other in Pêro Vaz de Caminha’s letter to King Manuel, to the belief of Brazilian planters – to the point of dogma – that non-native plants thrive better in the virility of Brazilian soil than in their motherlands.

Another reason to acknowledge this typo rather than omit it entirely is that its discovery surfaces more complex methodological issues of textual circulation and reading, including those of printing, publishing, archival work, the immutability of texts, and the fatal flaws of close-reading. Editorial decisions regarding João do Rio’s daring language – Shakespearean in its proclivity towards inventing words – have in fact long been a challenge for circulating the writer’s work to a contemporary audience. João Carlos Rodrigues writes in the introduction to his compilation of the journalist’s crônicas Histórias da gente alegre (1981) that he corrected for printing errors in the first editions of João do Rio’s books (“arraigou-se” instead of “enraigou-se”) and adjusted the spelling of foreign words not yet assimilated into the Portuguese language at that time (“jinriquixá” instead of “djinricksha”) (1981, xviii). Moreover, while the Antelo reprint of “Visões d’ópio” has been publicly cited in only two academic theses – most scholars have preferred earlier editions of the text, usually the H. Garnier (1910) or Organização de Simões (1951) editions of A alma ecantadora, and sometimes the José Olympio (1981) edition compiled by Rodrigues – it is nonetheless both a popular and pedagogical introduction of João do Rio’s oeuvre, a status cemented by its publication with major Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras during the revival of interest in João do Rio’s works in the 1990s, after a period of relative obscurity following the author’s death (see Carvalho 2013, 83; Rodrigues 1981, xv; Croce 2018, 210).

17 The 1899 edition of the Novo diccionário da lingua portuguesa lists the primary definition of “desabrochar” as to “unclasp” or “unbutton”, which complements the word’s connotation of “undoing” or “unfurling” here. While “desabrochar” no longer carries the connotation of “unbuttoning” in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, João do Rio was most likely familiar with this definition at the time of the crônica’s first publication in 1905.

18 Ana Paulina Lee (2018) has also noted the specific association between “delirium” and Chineseness in Brazil, noting that this was a term often used in debates on slave and free labour. She also reads the name of a Chinese character in Artur Azevedo’s play O mandarim, Lírio, as deriving from de-lírio (de-lirium) (98-100).

19 By “social life”, I am drawing on the empirical materialisms described by Karl Marx (trans. Dragstedt 1976), Arjun Appadurai (1988), and Elaine Freedgood (2010), among others.

20 As a chapter on “Portuguese America” in an 1809 edition of Monthly Repertory of English Literature suggests, the term might have circulated widely by João do Rio’s time. The entry “Brazil-wood” in Nelson’s Encyclopaedia (1907) also refers to sappan-wood.

21 This is according to Richard James Wilkinson’s 1901 A Malay-English Dictionary.

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Fan Fan

Fan Fan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. She researches critical geographies, race, and materialism at the intersections of Asia and Latin America in literature, visual culture, and film. Her dissertation examines how the circulation of commodities between Brazil and China shapes Brazilian views towards race, migration, and geopolitics in literature, art, and popular culture.