Il Guarany for Foreigners: Colonialist Racism, Naïve Utopia, or Pleasant Entertainment?

Abstract

Based on José de Alencar's homonymous novel, Carlos Gomes's opera Il Guarany (1871) was one of his most successful endeavours, by pandering simultaneously to the Europeans' exoticism fetish, and to the Brazilian elite's desire to be considered European. The novel, a product of the Indianismo literary movement, was for a long time considered a benign fantasy; however, many authors have recently uncovered the political ramifications of this movement, showing how it served as a justification for oppression. The opera librettists received much criticism for cleansing some of the original aspects, creating a conventional and hackneyed operatic plot; thus, Maria Alice Volpe (LAMR 23, no. 2) decries the fact that they maimed the mythological grandeur present in Alencar's work. Nonetheless, one might alternatively affirm that this made the opera less dependent on the most pernicious aspects of Indianismo, and therefore less vulnerable to the accusation that it is an expression of colonialist racism.