2008 - 2009 Fellow
Tania Regina de Luca
Professor, Department of History, Sciences and Literature Faculty
Assis, São Paulo State University (UNESP)
January 8-February 26, 2009
Work in Progress Talk: "Cultural Propaganda: The Getúlio Vargas Regime and U.S. Academic Library Collections (1930-1945)"
Thursday, February 12
3:30-4:30pm
The Latin American LibrarySeminar Room
4 th floor, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library
Join us for refreshments after the talk.
Note: The talk will be in Portuguese with full English translation shown on PowerPoint.
|
The authoritarian regime of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil was a period in which anti-democratic practices dominated all facets of government, especially between 1937 and 1945. In an effort to control nearly all aspects of cultural production and political discourse, Vargas created the Department of Press and Propaganda (DIP) in 1939, whose mission was to censor information, intellectual production, cultural expression, and also promote the ideology of the regime. The Department was under the direct supervision of the President, and thus exerted a profound influence on public life during this period. However, the internal records and files of the DIP have never been found, thus hampering research into the internal workings of this important office. My project focuses on one aspect of the regime's propaganda and promotional efforts, namely the dissemination of published material outside of Brazil, specifically through publishing and promotional efforts to cultural institutions in the United States. In this way, I hope to piece together part of the history of the DIP. I examine holdings, acquisition histories of printed works published or sponsored by the DIP in key U.S. academic libraries, as well as the institutional history of Latin American studies collections and programs in university archives.
This event was made possible through an endowment from Tulane Emeritus Professor Richard E. Greenleaf. |
Project: The Image of the Getúlio Vargas Government Through the Latin American Library's Collections, Tulane University
Synopsis: The first government of Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) has garnered considerable attention among scholars in Brazil and abroad. The regime's political and social policies, foreign policy, labor regulations and relations, the suppression of the Left and cohersion of political opposition, as well as the cultural project of the Estado Novo (1937-1945) spearheaded by Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda (DIP) have all received considerable attention. However, the propaganda efforts of the regime targeted towards an international audience have not been widely studied, especially when we consider that the Vargas era was contemporaneous with the Good Neighbor Policy and World War II, which urged the union of the whole continent. In this context, library collections preserved in important US institutions can help determine what kind of materials and information North American scholars had access to about the Vargas regime.
The subject is relevant especially when one takes into account that collections policies that determined the systematic acquisitions of books, special collections and microfilm projects started only in the mid-1950s, a full decade after the period I propose to research. The materials gathered in the libraries most likely came as donations from the Brazilian government and its agencies or they could be a result of professors interested in Brazil as their subject of studies or who had the opportunity to visit the country. My research will identify these books as evidence of propaganda produced directly or indirectly by the DIP, as well as the books published by editors and authors who promoted Vargas.
Tania Regina de Luca is professor and researcher at Department of History, Sciences and Literature Faculty at Assis, São Paulo State University (UNESP). She holds a Master's degree in Social History with a dissertation on Mutual Benefits Societies in São Paulo (1890-1930) and a Ph.D, also in Social History, with a thesis on Revista do Brasil a diagnostic to the nation (1916-1925) that analyzed, throughout the press, the positive image constructed about the state of São Paulo in the Brazilian federation. She has published widely on the history of the Brazilian press the use of periodicals as source and object of research by historians. At the moment she is conducting research on the press during the Vargas era, sponsored by National Council of Research (CNPq). She received the John M. Tolman Essay Prize, at BRASA IX in New Orleans in 2008.
|
