Nossa and Nuestra Amrica

Is Brazil part of Latin America, or an island unto itself? As Nossa and Nuestra Amrica: Inter-American Dialogues demonstrates, this question has been debated by Brazilian and Spanish American intellectuals alike since the early nineteenth century, though it has received limited scholarly attention and its answer is less obvious than you might think. This book charts Brazils evolving and often conflicted relationship with the idea of Latin America through a detailed comparative investigation of four crucial Latin American essayists: Uruguayan critic Jos Enrique Rod, Brazilian writer-diplomat Joaquim Nabuco, Mexican humanist Alfonso Reyes, and Srgio Buarque de Holanda, one of Brazils preeminent historians. While these writers are canonical figures in their respective national literary traditions, their thoughts on BrazilianSpanish American relations are seldom investigated, and they are rarely approached from a comparative perspective. In Nossa and Nuestra Amrica, Newcomb traces the development of two parallel essayistic traditions: Spanish American continentalist discourse and Brazils solidly national exegetic tradition. With these essayistic traditions in mind, he argues that Brazil plays a necessaryand necessarily problematicrole in the intellectual construction of Latin America. Further, in traversing the Luso-Hispanic frontier and bringing four of Latin Americas preeminent thinkers into critical dialogue, Newcomb calls for a truly comparative approach to Luso-Brazilian and Spanish American literary and cultural studies. Nossa and Nuestra Amrica will be of interest to scholars and students of Latin American and Luso-Brazilian literature and ideas, and to anyone interested in rethinking comparative approaches to literary texts written in Portuguese and Spanish.