Stefan Zweig in Exile: A Cosmopolitan Citizen’s Interpretation of Brazil

Abstract

This article sets out to analyse Brazil, land of the future, by Stefan Zweig, highlighting the links that connect the book to the Brazilian, North American and European intellectual contexts, as well as to travel writing, exile and cosmopolitanism. Brazil, land of the future contains a tense dialogue, full of failed encounters, between Zweig and the Brazilian milieu: between the author’s cosmopolitan and multilingual horizon, the impossibility of belonging and his constant feeling of maladjustment. We examine Brazil, land of the future as another manifesto of the 1930s and 1940s anti-racist agenda, the product of cross-dialogues that were not limited to the social reflection on Brazil, but encompassed an international intellectual and political agenda that was continually discussed and disseminated in the United States and Europe and that approached Brazil as a field for experimenting, certifying and positivizing human relations.