The transition debate in Brazilian history: The bourgeois paradigm and its critique

Abstract

The origins of capitalism in Brazil have been traditionally overlooked by the literature on its developmental trajectory, either considered as an outcome of colonial exploitation or described through a broad notion of ‘bourgeois revolution’. The recent discussion between the consequentialist interpretation of bourgeois revolutions and the Political Marxist critique of the bourgeois paradigm allows for a reassessment of these narratives, with a stronger emphasis on the specific disputes of early‐20th‐century Brazil. In this paper, I engage with Florestan Fernandes as the main representative of the bourgeois paradigm within Brazil. As an alternative, I present a reassessment of the ‘capitalist transition’ understood as a set of social property relations organised around market dependency. By tracing this form of market dependency through Brazilian historiography, I present a narrative that posits the development of capitalism in Brazil through the nonrevolutionary rise of an industrial bourgeoisie during the Old Republic and the competing strategies of declining (British) and rising (US/Germany) financial imperialism in the 1920s. Therefore, it highlights the role of (geo)political disputes by pointing towards the policy changes introduced by the Vargas regime in the 1930s as a key factor in the transition to capitalism in Brazil.

O legado de Florestan Fernandes a partir de uma revisão bibliométrica (2000-2022)

“…Já o artigo representativo do Reino Unido, por seu turno, projeta Florestan Fernandes como o principal intelectual para a compreensão do paradigma burguês no Brasil (Salgado, 2021).…”

Hypertextuality and the fall of the structuralist paradigm: a genettian reading of the Odyssey's selected hypertexts

“…Narratology attempts to make pronouncements about the narrative text as part of the corpus of reality. (Salgado, 2021). Accordingly, it can consequently be said that narratology is the study of a narrative, and since the focus of this study is Gérard Genette's narrative discourse theory, the term narrative is defined from his perspective.…”

“…His wife, Penelope, is the target of suitors' rivalry, informed of her husband's death, holds fast to the throne, and stayed faithful to his husband and the throne. When it comes to narrative, there would be no difference between types or genres, according to Mieke Bal, "a narrative text is text in which an agent relates ('tells') a story in a particular medium, such as language, imagery, a building, or a combination thereof" (Salgado, 2021), or according to Fludernik, "In addition to what we often think of as the prototypical kind of narrative, literary narrative as an art form, the narrative is a widespread and often unconscious spoken language activity that encompasses a wide variety of text types, such as journalism or teaching. (Doležel, 1979).…”