Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews by Cathy S. Gelbin & Sander L. Gilman

Author:Cathy S. Gelbin & Sander L. Gilman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Zweig briefly considers some of slavery’s atrocities, such when he describes the “nightmare” slave ships, where “half of the Negroes, chained and herded together, die on the voyage” (ZB, 91). Although these ambivalent passages denounce the murderous consequences of slavery, Zweig’s objectified and aestheticized portrayals of the slaves and their labor ultimately vindicate those horrors, as in the case of Zweig’s description of “a plundered and depopulated Africa” (ZB, 91), which has supplied Brazil with millions of slaves, albeit at uncertain economic gain. Although the slaves themselves may generate profit, costs are also incurred in importing “a strong-boned Negro from Guinea or Senegal” (ZB, 91) as a consequence of the freight price and “loss of merchandise damaged and thrown into the sea during the voyage” (ZB, 91–92). The objectifying term merchandise refers to human beings. Fetishistic portrayals of Africans as a faceless and only partially embodied mass in colonialist production—that “machine kept going by these millions of black arms” Page 178 →(ZB, 92)—further reiterate the objectified state of Africans in the discourse of slavery. Zweig’s colorful depiction of colonial sugar production, then, aestheticizes slavery and consequently minimizes its horrors: “With amazing rapidity white sugar, extracted from brown canes with green leaves by black slaves, is being converted into heavy yellow gold” (ZB, 87).

Zweig’s sentimental portrayals of colonialism and slavery climax in his suggestion that they have become objects of melancholia even for the former slaves themselves. In the evenings, he claims, black plantation workers would sit and sing “their melancholy songs. Perhaps one or two of the white-haired Negroes walking calmly and contently around here still remember the old days” (ZB, 228). Zweig’s descriptions of present-day Brazil are similarly problematic. Black people add color and exoticism to his perception, for example when he argues that black settlements render Rio “so colorful and picturesque” (ZB, 195). Such passages airbrush the brutal postslavery social conditions and suggest that these descendants of former slaves voluntarily live in the most primitive conditions because that is the unchanging nature of their origins. Their huts, although built from discarded rubbish, are exactly the same as those “which their ancestors built hundreds of years ago in their African kraals” (ZB, 196). Climbing up remote cliffs to these favelas, Zweig observes guileless and gold-toothed people in “the lowest form of living conditions” (ZB, 142)—indeed, in their “primitive original state”93 in their clay and bamboo huts: “The Negro carrying water smiles at one with gleaming teeth, even helps one up the slippery muddy steps. Women nursing their children look up kindly and without embarrassment” (ZB, 142).

These images oscillate between Zweig’s racist perception of black Brazilians as particularly threatening and his equally problematic images of their excessive naïveté. Both meanings are signified by the mention of the men’s shiny teeth, which suggest both the claims of Africans’ cannibalism and their primitive lust for adornments. And indeed, Zweig goes to some lengths to discuss cannibalism in his treatment of native Brazilians, whose depiction remains similarly problematic. Zweig identifies culture wholly with

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