Rebellion in the Backlands, or Os Sertões

Source summary

Euclides da Cunha wrote Os Sertões, or Rebellion in the Backlands, from field notes he made while
embedded as a war journalist in the government forces in the fourth and final expedition of the War
of Canudos in 1897. Military forces of the new First Brazilian Republic attacked Canudos in four
expeditions from November 1896 to October 1897. After the first expedition it was widely
speculated that the rebels were part of a wide network of monarchists, a belief that da Cunha held
until his participation in the fourth campaign.

Cunha portrays his writing as "a protest" against the "barbarism" of the civil war and the cruelty
against the people of the backlands, especially the mixed 'sertanejos' or 'mestizos' living there. He
describes them as "backward" but shaped by their environment, strong and in tune with nature, in
arguments 'shaped by Darwinist philosophy".1 He describes them as unlike the mixed-race
inhabitants of Brazil’s coastal cities, not degenerate but ‘retrograde’, as their uncivilised
environment brings out the positive physical traits of the ‘savage’ and so they are paradoxically in a
good position to be morally developed and brought to ‘civilized life’.

He goes on to describe the appearance and character of ‘the sertanejo’, ‘jagunco’ or man of the
backlands, here assumed to be mestizo (mixed indigenous, black and/or white). The ‘southern
gaucho’ is described in contrast, as someone whose environment is less harsh and so is more joyful
and exuberant.

The railway line is described as where modern progress stops; the backlands and modern Brazil are
alien to each other; it feels like a different country. Alienated and dehumanised, the war prisoners
become a spectacle.

Finally, he describes the military camp and Canudos in the final weeks of the fourth expedition. The
‘jaguncos’ are emboldened by the apparent martyrdom of Conselheiro. Prisoners are brutally
executed, and the soldier’s callousness is described. The violence is compared to a ‘primitive
animality’, pre-civilisation.

Questions:

 What do da Cunha’s references & descriptive language tell us about what audience he's
writing for, and what he wants them to take away from this?
 How and why does he present this as a conflict between civilization and “backwardness”?
 What can this source tell us about wider discourses on race in Brazil at the time?
 What does the Canudos conflict indicate about the future of Brazil for da Cunha?
 How does da Cunha think the Canudos expeditions should be remembered?

1 82, Elizabeth Lowe, "From Backlands: The Canudos Campaign," in Review: Literature and Arts of the
Americas, Issue 92/93, Vol. 49, Nos. 1-2, 2016, 82-84.