Will readers react to the title of this book, HELVÉCIA: A Swiss Colonial History in Brazil, with astonishment or even incredulity? What does Switzerland, a European country without any colonies, have to do with far-flung Brazil? Will readers expect the images in this volume to provide traces of heroic emigrants or an alpine Swiss folk culture in faraway Latin America? Or will they unconsciously seek Europeanness in the names, and whiteness in the faces of the people from Helvécia?

Yet as the example of Helvécia shows, though Switzerland, like many European societies, did not have colonies of its own, it nevertheless participated in, and benefited greatly from, the colonial project. Not only did the Swiss travel to and settle in areas colonized overseas by their European neighbors, they also engaged in trade with European colonies, missionised there, explored the terrain, and exploited natural resources. As plantation owners, engineers, investors, and traders, or as missionaries and mercenaries, Swiss men and women were involved in local colonial exploitation and plunder, including the slave trade. In academia as in popular discourse, a distinction is still often made between the differences of British, Dutch, German, and French colonial rule. However, it is important to realize that colonialism was a pan-European, multinational project, one that cannot be defined in national terms. It was the commonly shared ideology of “race,” and the claim that by virtue of their superiority “whites” are entitled to rule over others, that led to cooperation and solidarity among the white settlers of various nations within any colony. In short, the Swiss at home and abroad not only benefited from the imperial rule of other European powers. But many Swiss public and private actors actively contributed to the maintenance and expansion of the colonial world order. And, in the other direction, goods, people, assets, images, and narratives that flowed into Switzerland from the colonies created the structural conditions that enabled modern Switzerlandto be built. Without the trade in cotton, sugar, coffee, gold, and enslaved people, industrialization in Switzerland could not have occurred the way it did; its machine and chemical industries, its railroads and its banking system could not have been established the way they were. Besides economic interdependence, it was human zoos, advertisements for colonial goods, schoolbooks, nursery rhymes, museum collections, adventure films, and carnival customs which shaped the Swiss imagination, influencing institutions and public discourse. In the process of modernization, the Swiss learned to perceive and identify themselves – like their European neighbors – as “white” and civilized, distinguished from non-white “Others” who were, and often still are, regarded as exotic, barbaric, primitive, or as “noble savages.” These colonial relations, which have brought forth our world with its binary worldview, are often overlooked in the current perception and treatment of Swiss history. Neither acknowledging nor revising these centuries-old relationships thus perpetuates them.

The power of the images and localizations in this volume allows us to question this deliberate forgetting and leads us to reconsider the spatial boundaries of Switzerland. It allows our historical consciousness to extend beyond the limited territory of the nation-state to encompass the networks and interchanges that tied Swiss cities, institutions, and families to specific places and people in the global South. In The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie, the British-Indian novelist, points out that the British were not familiar with their own history because so much of it had taken place overseas. This is also true of Switzerland, for Helvetia also occurred in Helvécia. And Helvécia is also Switzerland. Such a perspective of entangled histories¹ transcends the simplistic juxtaposition of metropolitan center and colony by locating Switzerland’s past and present identity within a transnational, postcolonial framework.

Attention has been drawn of late to a “race-less racism” in Switzerland that renders itself invisible and, therefore, justifies the claim that Switzerland was, and is, not part of the colonial project.² Switzerland’s highly idealized portrayal of its neutrality, benevolent internationalism and humanitarianism abroadhave shaped this national narrative since the Holocaust and decolonization, thus virtually white-washing the country’s colonial, racialized entanglements. This continuous struggle to be “free of guilt” is probably much more laborious than an honest confrontation with the country’s own past.

In recent years, scholars, activists, and artists in Switzerland have begun to address the heritage of colonialism and migration in Switzerland.³ The Black Lives Matter movement catapulted these efforts into Swiss mainstream consciousness in 2020. The urgency of addressing this heritage is obvious. But the challenges it involves should not be underestimated: How can the stories obscured over the centuries be told in the absence of institutional, documental archives that contain them? How can raceand resistance to colonialism be rendered visible without creating new violent forms ofrepresentation? What role can art – in this case, photography – play in creating new forms of representation and interaction that do not once again reduce people, their culture, and their histories to objects of vicarious consumption? And how can new, postcolonial relationships be established that not only acknowledge historical violence and present-day injustices but also open up paths toward a different, reparative future?

As Helvécia shows, the history of Switzerland also played out in Brazil – and vice versa. What was celebrated in Switzerland as a heroic epic of emigration and a civilizing project appears from the perspective of communities of former enslaved people as brutal colonial conquest. As historians Izabel Barros and André Nicacio Lima have pointed out,⁴ using the history of Nova Friburgo as an example, what is needed to resolve this “clash of histories” is a historiography that both connects different geographical perspectives and incorporates non-academic, resistance-based forms of historiography. Not only is it necessary to simultaneously sift through archives in Brazil, Switzerland, Portugal, and elsewhere; it is also important to make visible transnational networks of voices and perspectives that conjointly report from the counter-archives of resistance-based knowledge.

Artistic (as well as ethnographic, activist, and spiritual) forms of action and expression use the body, the senses, and social relationships to uncover latent knowledge. And indeed, forgot-ten and repressed histories are embedded in emotional, moral, and aesthetic forms that may not be adequately rendered using academic modes of inquiry alone. In Europe, too, artisticstrategies are becoming increasingly important in breaking postcolonial silences and creating new archives, memories, and relationships. At the same time, however, there is always the risk of drifting into appropriation, exoticism, and commodification, which have been inherent in modern European art since its inception, whether in the orientalism of a Gustave Flaubert, or the exoticism of Paul Gauguin, or the ironic appropriation of the “Other” in Dadaism.

Dom Smaz’s sociological artistic depictions of everyday street scenes, candomblé rituals, and people from Helvécia represent an attempt to combine art in a different register with a postcolonial ethic. The photographer both participates in social life and observes it while following the rhythm of quotidian life in Helvécia. The images presented in this volume are as a result embedded in a composition that involves multiple historical and personal vantage points. This enables us to immerse ourselves in a world in which people rebel against the imposition of colonial authority to inhabit their own time and space – then as now.

This poetic, political journey could familiarize us with a world of anti-colonial resistance and portray past interconnections between our two worlds. It may stimulate new debates, research, and other projects. It may also engage a new audience. But is this enough? What must be done to preserve the relations between Switzerland and Helvécia that are conjured up as one looks at these pages? How could these relations be sustained beyond the moment of subjective aesthetic enjoyment or cultural consumption? And what does it take to avoid drifting into deep guilt or into exoticization of the “Others,” or even into a desire for a common humanity, as if there were no existential differences based on one’s location in different postcolonial geographies? Can equality and difference be accepted simultaneously?

In her essay on the European reception of the Haitian revolution, philosopher Susan Buck-Morss notes that “human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits.”⁵ In that sense, humanity exists only as a possibility. For the idea of universal humanity in the sense of the Euro- centric Enlightenment is an abstract illusion that always excludes certain “Others,” thus displacing them from memory, from the narrative, from history, and from the world. This idea of a common humanity is realized only in very specific moments when people acknowledge and engage with postcolonial relations and, working together, establish them anew; when we enter the flow of intertwined histories and listen to voices full of rage, grief, and laughter calling for forgiveness, justice, reparation, and liberty. It is only in the existential experience of the “Other” that the idea of a shared humanity as a possibility surfaces on the horizon. The experiences of voices united in resistance to the colonial project, whether in Quilombo Helvécia or at the Black Lives Matter demonstration on the Bundesplatz in Bern, call for more than historical justice. These experiences embody the complexity, power, and beauty of humanity.

A postcolonial project of shared humanity therefore necessitates not only a different historiography and representation, but transnational processes of reparative justice as well. Neither empty political gestures nor intellectual or artistic engagement can suffice. It is known, for instance, that David de Pury bequeathed part of the fortune he accumulated in Brazil to the city of Neuchâtel. Moreover, he and his colonial compatriots funded the construction of villas and parks, and gave to Swiss society through philanthropy. Max Frey, who went on to establish the Frey chocolate factory in the Canton of Aargau, was undoubtedly present in Helvécia when he earned his wings in the Swiss commercial firm Cramer-Frey in Bahia, where he accumulated wealth for further business in Switzerland. Many a merchant, plantation owner, and naturalist amassed vast fortunes or large collections of cultural artifacts in colonial Brazil. In this sense, the history and prosperity of Helvécia is mutually imbricated with that of Switzerland.

Fragments of these stories that tie Switzerland to Helvécia appear and disappear. Once they have taken shape as images, faces, stories, sources, and witnesses, they can no longer be suppressed. They are also an antidote to imperial nostalgia. Dissipating colonial amnesia, they also signal the end of Swiss innocence. Helvécia and its people, their cosmologies and continuities are proof that the colonial project ultimately did not achieve its goals and that his-tory has not come to an end. In Switzerland, what is called for is a different historiography and a policy of reparations that recognizes the legacy and continuities of colonialism.

Excerpt from the essay “Helvécia = Switzerland?. Countering the Colonization of Attitudes, Perspectives and Remembrance” by Izabel Barros, Rohit Jain and Shalini Randeria, as part of the volume Helvécia: A Swiss Colonial History in Brazil (Lars Müller Publishers, 2022)

Notes

1 Sebastian Conrad, Shalini Randeria and Regina Römhild, eds., Jenseits des Eurozentris-mus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichtsund Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main / New York, 2013).
2 Pinto dos Santos, O. Jovita Dankwa et al., eds., Un/Doing Race. Rassifizierung in der Schweiz (Zurich, 2022).
3 A mong others, Patricia Purtschert, Barbara Lüthi, and Francesca Falk, eds., Postkoloniale Schweiz. Formen und Folgen eines Kolonialismus ohne Kolonien (Bielefeld, 2012); Patricia Purtschert and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds., Swiss Colonial Encounters and Postcolonial Assemblages (Basingstoke, 2015); Institut Neue Schweiz, ed., Handbuch Neue Schweiz (Zurich, 2021).
4 Izabel Barros and André Nicacio Lima, “Geschichte dekolonisieren. Ein kritischer Beitrag zu einer globalen Schweizer Geschichte,” in Handbuch Neue Schweiz, ed. Institut Neue Schweiz (Zurich, 2021).
5 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 133.