XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Curating European Settler Nostalgia: Commemoration and Saudade Tourism in the Brazilian South

• In Event: Towards a Genealogy of Luso-Afro-Brazilian Saudade

Abstract

This paper considers how a particular form of saudade—a longing and nostalgia for ethnic “Europeanness”—is monetized, materialized, and curated in Southern landscapes. From the city of Blumenau to towns like Gramado, various locales have claimed and exalted European settler ancestry. This has manifested in a striking plethora of museums, monuments, festivals, and beyond. The city center of Blumenau, dubbed the “German Soul of Brazil,” is peppered with faux half-timbered building facades. Its Oktoberfest, inaugurated in the 1980s, is now the largest outside Germany. Curating this “living heritage” marks and essentializes such places as separate and different from the rest of Brazil, while also fabricating a temporal collapse that feigns to transport to another racial political epoch. Because of the social power and value of whiteness, this claim to European ethnic and cultural heritage offers local esteem and regional differentiation, while having broader import as what I refer to as “saudade tourism” has proven immensely profitable. Examining how saudade is woven into the sociospatial fabric in the Southern landscape offers new insights into how race is spatialized, and the cultural economies of European settler nostalgia and Brazilian regionalism that underpin and reproduce a hierarchical racial order.

Author

• Katie Jensen, University of Wisconsin-Madison