By Robbin Laird
Professor Maxwell is returning to Brazil for a notable conference to be held there soon. This is his latest trip to Brazil with his first one coming nearly 60 years ago. Recently, we published a book of essays by him entitled, Brazil in a Changing World Order which provided his most recent comprehensive look back with regard to Brazil’s changing domestic dynamics and its relations to the world.
In preparation for his return, on March 20, 2024, we talked about his engagement with Brazilian analysis over the years and his thoughts upon his forthcoming visit.
Question: What is the occasion of your forthcoming visit?
Ken Maxwell: “I have been invited to speak at a conference at the University of São Paulo which deals with the 50th anniversary of the so-called Revolution of Carnations in Portugal, which took place on the 25th of April 1974.
“I first lived in Portugal in 1964 ten years before the coup. But in February 1974 while I was the Herodotus Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, I had anticipated that something serious was taking place in Portugal when General Spinola’s book was published in Lisbon. I persuaded The New York Review of Books to send me to Portugal ten years later and arrived a month before the coup took place.
“I was one of the very few people around who actually knew what was going on. And I wrote several articles published in The New York Review of Books and elsewhere. I’m going to be one of the principal speakers at this conerence to be held during the first week of April. The coup in Portugal had a major impact on Africa as well because it was driven by the rejection of the widening war in Africa being fought by Portugal.”
Question: This will be your latest visit. When was your first?
Ken Maxwell: “When I was at Cambridge, I had seen a film called Black Orpheus which inspired me with a glorious color image of Rio de Janeiro.
“But my first visit to Brazil was courtesy of a summer research grant program run by the Institute of Latin America Studies at Columbia University. I had arrived in the U.S. in 1964 to study for a PhD in history under Professor Stanley Stein who was a leading expert on Brazilian history. Professor Stein also taught a course on Brazilian history at Columbia, and I went up to New York City each week to attend his lectures. The Summer research grants were intended mainly for anthropologists, but Stanley encouraged me to apply.
“I received a travel stipend from the Columbia University Institute for Latin American Studies and arrived in Brazil in the summer of 1965. I arrived first in Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon and then to Bahia and on to Rio. I stayed at Maite Bertand in an apartment on the top floor in the apartment block behind the Copacabana palace hotel. I went by bus from where I was staying to do research in the National Archives. That was my first immersion in Brazil.
“Later when I was the program director of the Tínker Foundation I established a competitive summer research grant program open to American Universities. It has sent many thousands of students over the years to Latin America. All of which was a result of my marvelous experience and opportunity of visiting Brazil with a summer research grant in 1965.”
Question: That is just about 60 years ago. Looking back, what would you identify as some of the major changes in Brazil in that period of time?
Ken Maxwell: “The first remarkable change is how Brazil has moved from isolation to being globally connected.
“When I first went to Brazil, the telephone was more expensive than to buy an apartment. I had to communicate by letter to my parents, which would take about a month to get and a month to get back.
“This kind of separation from the world was one of the most remarkable features of the country. Today, young people have in Brazil have I-Phones and access to instantaneous global communications.
“I think another major shift in Brazil has been politically. In the 1970s, Portugal had a military coup which brought in democracy, whereas in Brazil the military brought about crackdowns and repression.
“Portugal had a great opening, getting rid of the dictatorial regime and rapprochement with Europe and an ending its African colonial experience. Whereas Brazil moved into a period of very intense repression by the military regime.
“In my latest book, I focus on the political changes of the past decade and a half which has seen the amazing dynamics of the Lula and Bolsonaro swings in the country. But both tendencies politically are significant to its future.
“It is important as well to comprehend the immensity of the country and its impact on the way of life and its global role. In my new book, I have on the cover a physiological picture of Brazil, which just shows the scale of the country. It is united by speaking Portuguese.
“In the U.S. if you mention Latin America, the assumption is that it is a Spanish speaking continent. It isn’t. The Portuguese language is a key part of bringing the Brazilians together as a single culture. This a key aspect of Brazilian life which has to be experienced to really be understood.”
Question: Your new book focuses on the dynamics of change in Brazil and its relationship to a changing world order. What is your perspective on these changes?
Ken Maxwell: “In my book, I cover the past few years which were quite tumultuous in Brazil. The political leader at the beginning of the period I covered was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He was from the working class and when he left office, he had very high rates of approval. But his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and removed from office. And her successor, Michel Temer, was a short-term President.
“Brazil turned to the right with the election of Bolsonaro, who was a sort of a Trump of the tropics, and very much part of the populist movement. As Lula faced imprisonment and disgrace, Bolsonaro ran the country, but phoenix like Lula returned.
“But he has returned different from his early leadership period. Now he is more anti-American and more left-wing and pursuing a leadership role in the BRICS revolt against the West. He has returned in a world which has changed significantly from the first period of his leadership, China and Russia are working to reshape the world order, and it is not clear that Lula understands how to protect Brazilian interests against these aggressive authoritarian powers.
“Brazil is global in terms of its demographic complexity. There are significant concentrations of various ethnic groups with global links, of Africans with Africans, of Japanese with Japan, and so on. Notably, there are the descendants of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese immigrants concentrated in the city of São Paulo.
“There is the famous statement attributed to General Charles de Gaulle that Brazil is not a serious county. But with the world order changing significantly, how will Brazil find its place?
“And then at the end of the book, I focus on some specific experiences about colleagues and about my research on the globalization of ideas in the 18th century.
“I talked about young Americans who were major scholars of Brazil. Bill Simon was a very close friend of mine, and he was drafted and fought in the Vietnam War. He was there in the middle of the jungle writing about the 18th century and Brazil and sent me correspondence along those lines. But he could never get a job when he came back to the U.S. because of the negative bias of the American academic establishment. But he died far too young, I think probably as a result of Agent Orange or something like that.
“And the other was David Davidson, who went to Cornell, and he was there during an armed uprising of Black students, and he negotiated a peaceful resolution to the crisis. But it had such a major effect on him that he left academic life, he became a guru, and then he also died later of cancer.
“Finally, I have an account of the collaboration I did with students at Harvard, on what one might call trans-Atlantic globalization of ideas. The “Recueil” was a book of U.S. constitutional documents published in French in France at the instigation of Benjamin Franklin and which were discussed by the Minas conspirators in Brazil 1788-89,
“It is an historical account of this extraordinary period in Atlantic history that historians don’t really know about. And the book has the only published version of our complete work on this event in history.
“History is moving again as it was in that period of history. But we don’t know what the current conflicts and global shifts will yield for Brazil and for the rest of us. The 18th century was a dramatic period of change as is our current one.”