XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Spinning the Wheel of Fortune: Urban Amazonian Decadence in Dalcídio Jurandir’s Belém do Grão-Pará

• In Event: Places in Brazilian Studies

Abstract

In this paper I will analyze the early twentieth-century decadence of the Amazonian port city of Belém in Dalcídio Jurandir’s 1960 novel "Belém do Grão-Pará." Decadence serves as an apt metaphor for extractivism, which inevitably exhausts (natural) resources and, therefore, produces crises (socioeconomic, environmental, and political), now exacerbated even more in our present Anthropocenic moment. Jurandir’s novel, the fourth of his ten-volume “Ciclo do Extremo Norte,” follows the young Alfredo’s arrival in Belém from Cachoeira, on the island of Marajó, west of the city across the Baía do Marajó. Alfredo’s arrival in Belém coincides with a dual decadence: that of the city, in the aftermath of its heyday from the initial stages of the rubber boom, and that of his extended family, the Alcântaras, whose myriad internal problems lead Alfredo to consistently question his place in the family. The parallel familial and economic crises apparent in Belém’s urban landscape underscore how extractivism affects different realms: from social to personal spheres, from economics to affective relations. Jurandir’s novel contests cultural and socioeconomic domains of the colonial matrix of power—engaging with Aníbal Quijano (2000) and Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh’s (2018) formulations—through its examination of this dual decadence, the Alcântaras and the city both confronted with their reliance on an extractivist economy. A decadent Belém remains an Amazonian extractive zone, to use Macarena Gómez-Barris’s (2017) term, seeped in the wreckage from the accumulation and collapse of wealth in the city.

Author

• Kevin Ennis, Brown University