One of Brazil’s main historians in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Fernando Novais died this Thursday (30), aged 93, in São Paulo.
Professor emeritus at USP, Novais wrote a work from the 1970s that became classic in the country’s historiography by associating colonization with the formation of commercial capitalism, a vision that influenced generations of intellectuals and students in the following years.
Over more than 60 years of career, he taught at USP and Unicamp, taught courses at European and American universities and coordinated , published by Companhia das Letras. He also established himself as a key name among academics of Marxist thought.
Novais had suffered a heart attack during Carnival. More fragile, he was diagnosed days later with pneumonia and, later, a kidney infection, which led to his death. He was admitted to a unit of the Prevent Senior network, in São Paulo.
In a statement, the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH) mourned the death of Novais, a professor in the history department from 1961 to 1986. “He built a new interpretation of the history of Brazil”, says Iris Kantor, history professor at USP and Novais’s master’s and doctorate student. “He was very rigorous and, at the same time, infinitely generous.”
Information about the wake was not disclosed by the family until the publication of this text.
Born in Guararema, in 1933, he lived with his family in this and other cities in the interior of São Paulo until moving as a teenager to São Paulo, the city where he has lived ever since. At USP, where he graduated in 1958, he was especially influenced by Eduardo d’Oliveira França (1917-2003), professor of modern history.
The year he graduated, he participated in the famous seminars to study “Capital”, which lasted until 1964. These collective readings of Marx brought together names such as the anthropologist, the sociologists and the philosopher, the literary critic Roberto Schwarz and the
“Most of the members of the ‘Capital’ reading group are no longer Marxists. I commented the other day: we are the last ones standing. I am and I intend to be a Marxist historian,” he also told Fapesp.
The friendship between the group members resisted the passage of time, but suffered shocks. “I always voted for Lula, FHC was very upset with me for that”,
At the same event, in Caxambu, he stated that FHC had “created conditions for a center-left government to occur in Brazil”, referring to the administration of Lula, the tucano’s successor in the Planalto.
Even those who disagreed with the interpretations based on “Capital”, such as , admired Novais. For Fausto, he was a “quality Marxist”.
During his doctorate, under the influence of Eduardo França, Novais dedicated himself to research into Portugal’s colonial policy towards Brazil at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. The result was published in 1973 as a thesis and in 1979 as a book.
In “Portugal and Brazil in the Crisis of the Old Colonial System”, he took as a starting point one of the formulations of “Formation of Contemporary Brazil”. This 1942 book was the first, according to Novais, to show the formation of the colony within the process of constitution of modern capitalism.
Novais deepened Caio Prado’s approach, detailing how, at the end of the 18th century, the colonial system had become a significant source of accumulation to strengthen European industrialization and how this system entered into crisis.
HAS Sheet in 2019 Pedro Puntoni, history professor at USP and former student of Novais, said that Caio Prado “saw colonization as a ‘chapter’ in the expansion of commercial capitalism, while Novais relates it to the very process of formation of this capitalism and the transformations experienced at the center of the system”.
Novais played a decisive role as a professor at from 1961 to 1986 and then at , where he retired in 2003.
In 1973, Laura de Mello e Souza, author of books such as , participated in a group of seminars led by Novais, a fundamental experience for her career.
It wasn’t just Brazilian history, we also read French historiography, anthropology, etc., which allowed me to think about the object of study in a much broader sense. Fernando is an extremely intellectually generous man, with an unusual capacity for theoretical reflection,” he told Sheet in 2024. Novais supervised her master’s and doctorate studies.
In 2000, he critically examined the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Portuguese to the lands on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. He also stated that year to the newspaper.
“Brazil is a people that constituted itself as a nation, which in turn organized itself as a State. In 1500, there were none of these three things. Therefore, there was no Discovery of Brazil because Brazil did not exist nor was it hidden. What emerged at that moment were the bases of Portuguese colonization, which in turn is the basis of our formation.”
With, released in 2005, he ended his career as an author. It is a book that brings together essays and articles, as well as interviews he gave.
Novais always said that he wrote little and liked what he wrote. He left a short but unavoidable work.
