Abstract
On the opening day of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition a multitude assembled in front of the Memorial Hall to watch the ceremonial inauguration. US president Ulysses Grant was joined on the grandstand by Emperor Pedro II and Empress Teresa Cristina of Brazil, the first reigning monarchs to visit the country. The ceremony featured pageants, anthems, prayers, specially commissioned poetic recitations, songs, and official speeches, all of which might have been expected as a performance protocol for such a spectacle. However, one of the most indelible images of the day came from a different scene that took place immediately after the opening ceremony. A procession of notables and foreign commissioners followed President Grant and Dom Pedro to the Main Building and then to the Machinery Hall, where American engineer George H. Corliss, centennial commissioner of Rhode Island, stood waiting at the giant steam-engine power generator he had built. The image published in the popular Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Historical Register of the Centennial (figure 1.1)1 shows the ceremonial aplomb of its main protagonists who, wearing matching top hats and frock coats, face the cheering crowd, a cosmopolitan audience of travelers and locals who present a diverse portrait of the immigrant population of Philadelphia at the time.
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Notes
For a detailed account of the architectural and design projects of the Centennial, see architecture historian Bruno Giberti’s Designing the Centennial (2002),which provides a rich history of competing plans, construction, and installation of the exposition and its ideological underpinning. See also, John Maas, The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and J. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief (1973).
The Brazilian critics Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos, worldwide known for their radical work on concrete poetry, have advocated incisively for a revision of the Brazilian literary tradition. One of their most important contributions to this revisionist program has been the study of the poetic work of Sousândrade, long considered a marginal figure—a mere “bibliographic rarity”—in the Brazilian Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. They published a third and revised version of the critical anthology Re Visão de Sousândrade (1st ed.1964, 2nd ed. 1982, 3rd ed. 2002), which proves an invaluable source for critical commentary and historical data on the poet’s major work, O guesa errante, which includes Canto X, known as “Inferno de Wall Street.” Oguesa was originally published in New York in 1876 and 1877 but in incomplete form, and subsequently in 1888 in London with its thirteen cantos. The latter is the edition the Re Visão follows while noting the variations and corrections. I thank Gonzalo Aguilar for his insight on Brazilian poetry, the work of the brothers de Campos, and Sousândrade’s work in particular. See G. Aguilar. Poesía concreta brasileña: las vanguardias en la encrucijada modernista (2003).
Charles Frederick Hartt was an Canadian- American geologist who in 1861 worked with Louis Agassiz at Harvard University and in 1865 accompanied him to Brazil in the Thayer Expedition. He spent more than a year researching the coastal regions from Bahia to riode Janeiro and in 1870 published his Geology and Physical Geography of Brazil. In 1868 he took a post as professor at Cornell University. He participated in a total of 4 expeditions in Brazil from 1870 to 1878. See William Rrice and Silvia F. M. de Figueiroa, “Rock Stars: Charles Frederick Hartt—a Pioneer of Brazilian Geology,” GSA Today, Geological Society of America, 13(3) (2003): 18–19;
and M. V. Freitas. Hartt: expediçcoes pelo Brasil Imperial 1865–1878. São Paulo: Metalivros, 2001.
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© 2016 Alejandra Uslenghi
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Uslenghi, A. (2016). Modern Vistas: Latin American Photography at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. In: Latin America at Fin-de-Siècle Universal Exhibitions. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137553966_2
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