On April 30th of this year, historiography suffered a great loss. Fernando Antônio Novais, one of the greatest among Brazilian historians, departed this world as one leaves a dance hall: light, satisfied, and certain of having mastered all rhythms.
What almost no one knew was that, in addition to being a renowned historian in public life, Fernando was also known for being an excellent dancer in his private life. A surprise? Not at all. After all, for someone whose profession was that of historian—a craft—and historical reconstruction a kind of art, nothing could be more obvious than the professor also being a remarkable dancer.
For Novais, in the dance through multiple temporalities, the rhythm of the historical choreography was dictated by the present time, as advocated by Marc Bloch and Benedetto Croce, intellectuals for whom he had deep admiration. Following in the footsteps of these historians, for whom history was always contemporary, Fernando Novais never ceased to consider the contradictions of the society in which he lived when defining the problems that guided his work.
His inaugural work, Portugal and Brazil in the crisis of the Old Colonial System (1777-1808) Published in 1979, it was the culmination of a series of reflections that the historian had been carrying out since the 50s. His proposal, in accordance with Caio Prado Junior's idea of the meaning of colonization, was to understand the genesis of Brazil not only as an unfolding of Portuguese maritime expansion, but also as a consequence of the process of formation of the Portuguese State as a centralized power structure and as a territorial unit with well-defined borders.
Now, if the moment when he was writing Portugal and Brazil While the period was marked by a series of transformations, such as the hardening of the dictatorial regime at the end of the 60s and the criticism of state intervention in the economy in the 70s, Novais suggested that by returning to the process of shaping colonial Brazil, the problems of that time could be illuminated. The Old Colonial System, the interpretative key he proposed, connected the past to the present, showing that Brazil's dilemmas at that time, such as its peripheral and dependent condition, were the result of a given meaning that had been ingrained in the deepest structures of the nation's history.
In the same vein, shortly before publishing his thesis as a book, but after defending it in 1971, Fernando Novais published "The Political Independence of Brazil," inaugurating a new interpretation of the Brazilian independence process, but concluding, like Caio Prado Jr., that it had been incomplete. The colonial pact was broken, but Brazil did not escape its peripheral condition, passing from the sphere of domination of the Portuguese state to British hegemony. To a large extent, it is still the export of primary products that allows Brazil's insertion into the world market, and the current context, marked by conflicts in different regions of the globe, shows the vulnerability of this position.
Despite the criticism he received in the 80s and 90s, it cannot be denied that the concept he developed inspired and reshaped the paths of successive generations of historians. His critique of the Old Colonial System, for example, allowed for a deeper understanding of the slave trade and slavery during the colonial period, as well as its consequences for the present day.
Following in the footsteps of Eric Williams, for whom slavery was fundamental to the development of capitalism, Novais defended the primacy of the slave trade over slavery: "It is not slavery that justifies the slave trade, it is the slave trade that justifies slavery." In the works of historians who came after him, such as Luís Felipe de Alencastro and Manolo Florentino, the clarification of the connections between the slave trade and slavery in the Atlantic would be extremely important for understanding the racial inequalities that still persist in contemporary times. Once again, the importance of their contributions to understanding present-day Brazil is demonstrated.
Fernando Novais himself readjusted his approach with each new criticism he received, seeking, through successive essays, a more measured pace. Thus, the historian made historical materialism, which always dictated the rhythm of his works, a theory open to contributions from other historiographical frameworks, such as the New French History, and other methods, such as Foucault's archaeological method. The mixture that emerged from the combination of various theories of history did not, however, eliminate its critical power in relation to the society in which he lived.
In one of these attempts at reconstruction, Fernando Novais organized the collection. History of Private Life in Brazil in 1997. The introduction, "Conditions of Privacy in the Colony," written by him, proposed a new arrangement for understanding the specificities of colonial society, which would bring the notion of the Old Colonial System into dialogue with Foucault's concept of "conditions of possibility."
Thus, always criticized for being "economistic," the professor delved into the domains of cultural history and expressions of sociability, pointing to another structural trait of our social formation: the inversion between the public and private spheres, continuing classic reflections on patrimonialism, such as those of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Roberto Schwartz, his colleague in discussions at the Marx seminar, and Raymundo Faoro. In times when corruption scandals dominate the political-economic news, nothing is more opportune than to revisit his interpretation of the conditions of possibility for the existence not only of the private sphere, but also the limits that it imposes on the functioning of the public sphere.
And in two-step Between past and present, Novais allowed both to recognize each other and pave the way for a Brazil unlike any that had ever existed before.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
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