A much-delayed update
From publishing an article about Alberto Santos-Dumont and technological cosmopolitanism to diving the crystal clear waters of Thailand.
It has been quite a while, and I apologize for the radio silence. The past few months have been quite busy, with Emily and I laying the groundwork for some pretty big changes. More on that in a future newsletter, so stay tuned. But here are some professional and personal updates from last semester!
The long journey to publishing an article…
In a bit of self-promotion, I would like to share that last semester I had my proudest professional moment to date. An article that I had been working on for years (seriously, I started writing it in 2015-16!) was finally published in Past & Present earlier this year. Now, for those of you who aren’t historians, that probably doesn’t mean much. But Past & Present is one of the top history journals in the world. It was founded in 1952 by a group of historians who were at the vanguard of methodological innovations, in particular a militant approach to history that emphasized the social experience of workers, peasants, and other groups that had been marginalized at the expense of histories about politicians and military leaders. This “history from below” fundamentally transformed the discipline, and its spirit is perhaps best expressed by a passage from the preface to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson was one of the founders of Past & Present, and his book is one of the classic works in the field of social history):
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.1
Now, history as a discipline is always changing, and Past & Present’s editorial agenda has undergone various transformations in the past seventy years. While preserving certain foundations, the journal has also expanded its reach. As explained by its editors in a fifty-year anniversary recap, “[w]e are sometimes criticized for the broad spectrum of what we publish, for an absence of an editorial line; but what we would be engagé for is, precisely, rigorous eclecticism.” 2 Beyond classic studies of social history, today the journal is also home to pathbreaking articles on gender, cultural, environmental, and even epidemiological history. I’m very proud to throw my own hat into the ring with an article on the history of technology (I’m also very self-conscious about that statement. Academics aren’t supposed to express these kinds of feelings, which is a shame).
The article, titled “Transforming a Brazilian Aeronaut into a French Hero: Celebrity, Spectacle, and Technological Cosmopolitanism in the Turn-of-the-Century Atlantic,” is both a deep dive into the symbolic meanings of one of Brazil’s most celebrated historical figures (the aeronaut Alberto Santos-Dumont) and an attempt to develop a concept that will hopefully be useful to other historians (technological cosmopolitanism).
The reason I ended up studying Santos-Dumont, who many Brazilians still consider the inventor of the airplane, has a long and complicated personal history. As I explain in a post I wrote for the Past & Present blog, it involves struggling to identify a viable dissertation project and finding inspiration in my own personal history (as some of you know, my father is a travel agent and, like most Brazilians, a fan of Santos-Dumont). The article is interesting because it doesn’t actually focus on Santos-Dumont’s relationship with airplanes, but on his earlier experiments with balloons and dirigibles. He became the first global aeronautical celebrity when, at the turn of the twentieth century, he successfully flew his dirigibles around the Eiffel Tower—a story that I explore in depth by unpacking the transatlantic media’s role in constructing his celebrity.
Meanwhile, developing the concept of “technological cosmopolitanism” is what other historians would call my historiographical intervention (which is just specialist jargon for payoff). I use the Santos-Dumont case study to develop a definition of technological cosmopolitanism and analyze its inner workings. In doing so, I hope that others will find the concept intriguing and engage with it—whether to apply it in their own studies, refine it, or even critique it. That’s the payoff. That’s the nature of scholarship.
So, what makes the concept of technological cosmopolitanism intriguing? As I argue in the article, on the surface it’s a worldview that emphasized technology’s potential in facilitating exchanges and unifying people around the world. But that’s only part of the story, for in doing so technological cosmopolitanism also threatened to erase marginalized populations—in this case, the Afro-Brazilians whose labor (much of it enslaved) had produced the fortune that allowed Santos-Dumont to conduct his aeronautical experiments in Paris.
But this is not just a story of oppression and erasure. While Brazilian elites celebrated Santos-Dumont’s aeronautical feats as a way to disassociate the country from its history of chattel slavery, erase signs of blackness, and aspire to an idealized image of European "civilization,” Afro-Brazilians nevertheless found ways to stay inserted in the narrative and reassert their place in visions of Brazilian modernity. For instance, the street singer Eduardo das Neves (who adopted the stage name “crioulo Dudu”) composed “A Conquista do Ar,” a song celebrating Santos-Dumont’s feats that became one of the most popular tunes in the First Brazilian Republic. João do Rio, then Rio de Janeiro’s most popular journalist, described walking into a music hall and seeing “young soldiers, sailors, and patriotic young men” in apotheosis as a “tar-faced” Neves lost his voice singing the song. Although marred in racism, the anecdote reveals how Afro-Brazilians were major contributors to the construction of Brazilian national identity despite the structural barriers that permeated society and institutions. (You can listen to a rendition of the song by another artist on YouTube).
All of this goes to show that technological cosmopolitanism can also be reappropriated and resignified. That is why I’m so fascinated by Carnaval em Madureira, a painting that the celebrated Modernist Tarsila do Amaral completed in 1924. The painting refers to an actual event when residents of one of Rio de Janeiro’s poor and peripheral neighborhoods built their own model of Santos-Dumont flying his dirigible around the Eiffel Tower. It is beautiful because it evokes a more inclusive vision of technological cosmopolitanism. As I explain in the article:
Tarsila’s modernity, inspired by Santos-Dumont’s feat and its reimagining by marginalized Brazilians, is a syncretic modernity — it includes the North and the South, the technological avant-garde and the vernacular of everyday life. In the nineteenth century, the bounded labour of Afro-Brazilians helped constitute the fortune that allowed Santos-Dumont to go to Paris and become a celebrity aeronaut. In the twentieth century, Tarsila depicted descendants of the enslaved appropriating the vision of technological cosmopolitanism that Santos-Dumont’s celebrity had helped nurture and making it their own, just as Neves had done. If the ‘crioulo Dudu’ represented the agency of Afro-Brazilians struggling to reinsert themselves into turn-of-the-century cosmopolitan visions, Tarsila represented the willingness of avant-garde elites to widen the boundaries of cosmopolitanism. The painting signals that modernity was not simply an imperious projection from Europe, but the very thread that connected and enabled these variegated transatlantic exchanges and experiences.
“Transforming a Brazilian Aeronaut into a French Hero” is behind a paywall, but if you’re interested in reading it in full, I would be happy to share a copy. Just send me an email. I’d also recommend you read this entire issue of Past & Present, which features articles on city states in the medieval Mediterranean, Christian hospitality toward Jewish immigrants in 1650s England, the experience of time during the tumultuous French Revolution, pearl fishing in nineteenth-century Sri Lanka, the adventures of a colonial informant in North Africa, the development of an Italian colony in Peru, the experience of women seeking greater gender equality in post-war Britain, and a contribution to the debate concerning the “Justinian Plague” (quite timely in our pandemic world!). As the journal’s editors reflected back in 2002, Past & Present’s ambition is for “the whole of history to be accessible and interesting to our readers, so that, ideally, an issue of the journal could be read from beginning to end and its articles would stimulate non-specialists as much as experts.”3 Needless to say, I’m really excited to be part of an issue that embodies that ambition.
Exploring some of Southeast Asia…
Last semester Singapore really eased its COVID restrictions. So, not only did I get to teach in person, which was a joy, but we also got to travel around the region! The highlight of the past six months was our trip to Thailand. We got to spend five days in Phuket, where we visited beautiful temples, spent time on some pristine beaches, ate delicious food, and enjoyed very affordable massages.
Even more memorable was the scuba diving. Now, I did a PADI Open Water course back when I was a teenager, but it had been almost 20 years since the last time I went scuba diving (it was in Fernando de Noronha, a paradisiacal island off the coast of Brazil). Emily had never done it before, so we decided to do a course together. We had a great time with another German couple and our incredibly buff French-Hungarian instructor, Zolti. We worked with Super Divers, which we strongly recommend if you’re ever in the region (hey, nobody drowned, so there’s that!).
We did a total of six ocean dives, many around the Phi Phi Islands. The water was crystal clear, and Emily managed to spot the biggest moray eel I’d ever seen. Our instructor also spotted a shy seahorse and a rare nudibranch. The only disappointment is that other people in our dive group got to see a whale shark, which would’ve been amazing. Guess we’ll have to go to the Maldives or something to see them …
Here’s to hoping the next update doesn’t take as long as this last one!
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966),12-13.
Lyndal Roper and Chris Wickham, “Past and Present After Fifty Years,” Past & Present 176 (August 2022): 4.
Ibid.
I enjoyed the update - glad to hear you're doing well! I went snorkeling in Thailand a few years ago (would have liked to dive but none of my companions were certified) and I saw a whale shark! It was the coolest nature moment of my life. You gotta get back out there and try again. :)
YOU, continue to be a great writer!