INTRODUCTION: TRAVEL WRITING, EXILE AND COSMOPOLITANISM

This study analyzes the texts written by Juana Manso (1819-1875), an Argentine teacher, pedagogue, writer and intellectual, during her exile in Rio de Janeiro: between 1845 - when she first arrived with her family - and 1853 - when she returned, though not definitely, to Buenos Aires. Her stay in Rio de Janeiro was interrupted only once, due to a trip she made to the United States, the Caribbean, Cuba and the Dominican Republic along with her husband, a trip that will be examined briefly. The model of exile and of the cosmopolitan intellectual’s travel work as starting points to analyze the complex nature of the mediation between different cultural imaginaries carried out by the author.

As previous critics have shown, travel literature is a comparative genre: it is a privileged space for observing, experiencing and witnessing what is done in the space of the other, as well as for reflecting on the contrasts and similarities with one’s own reality (^{Gondra, 2010}; ^{Gondra & Schueler, 2010}). The concept of cosmopolitanism, mobilized by recent historiography and cultural criticism to analyze diasporas and intellectual exiles (^{Apter, 2013}; ^{Burke, 2017}), is also highly relevant, since the trajectory and production of Juana Manso in this period point to a transnational idea of citizenship and of the intellectual. Cosmopolitanism is linked to a type of citizenship whose focus is not on belonging to a nation-state, but, as in the case of the trajectory and production of exiled intellectuals, on the deprovincialization of the national canon, its relation with transnational texts, traditions and authors (^{Apter 2013}; ^{Burke, 2017}; ^{Bourdieu, 2002})¹. In the particular case of Latin America, cosmopolitanism has been mobilized as a way of challenging at the same time Eurocentric exclusionary structures and nationalistic patterns that tend to marginalize Latin-American intellectuals (^{Siskind, 2014})². The study of cosmopolitanism, in this sense, would open the possibility of decentralizing nationalistic and Eurocentric views, on the basis of which cultural production and education have often been conceived (as closed only around one national tradition) and would allow an interlocution with a transnational and cosmopolitan axis (^{Said, 1996}).

Juana Manso’s perspective combines a cosmopolitan horizon (the appropriation of European and North American cultural models, which she admired as examples of civilization, but also criticized) and a focus on issues characteristic of the intellectual fields of Brazil and Argentina. In this transnational relationship, multiple movements and comparative effects arise, in the complex relations that she established between her culture of birth, that of exile and the European and North American social worlds with which she came in contact through her travels and readings.

Because of the familiarity that Juana Manso developed with Brazil and her cosmopolitan and transnational view of culture, her trajectory as an intellectual has the potential to challenge the political and legal-administrative divisions of the nation-state and allows for the problematization of these borders³. As an exiled subject, Juana Manso at the same time participated in the romantic need to name, classify and define national culture, and experienced the permanent feeling of not belonging, the outsider’s point of view, the traveler’s displacement.

As argued by Flora Süssekind, the genre of travel writing has played a key role in the foundation of an image of Brazil as a synonym of an exuberant nature and has marked Brazilian fiction with a ‘feeling of not being there completely’, similar to that of the foreign visitor (^{Süssekind, 1990}). With her position as mediator between languages and different intellectual communities - she spoke and wrote in a Portuguese contaminated with Spanish and in a Spanish also modified by the contact with Portuguese -, Juana Manso participated in this uprooting that is characteristic of Brazilian fiction. This counterpoint between two cultures and homelands is reinforced by the fact that, like many Brazilian romantics, she was an admirer of the imperial regime - sought the support and patronage of the Empress - and, like most of the Argentine romantics, she was a republican and contrary to the regime of Juan Manuel de Rosas - symbol of the barbarism that threatened the country’s progress and civilization⁴.

Moreover, her detachment from social conventions, which is characteristic of the exiled intellectual, was intensified by her condition as a woman who sought to intervene in the public sphere. A reader of the European and American Enlightenments, she uses the universalist discourse of the rights of the individual to claim her belonging to a cosmopolitan community, as well as her own right as a woman to access the lettered world and the benefits of citizenship⁵. As historian Joan Scott has argued in her study of post-revolutionary France, the intellectual woman’s position was characterized by a paradox: if, on the one hand, her discourse was based on the universalist and abstract notion of the individual – the belief in the universal and natural rights of man and the citizen – on the other, it referred to difference (sexual, racial, etc.) as a parameter of exclusion of those who, lacking the necessary requisites for citizenship, were defined as non-individuals (^{Scott, 1997}; ^{Margadant, 2000}). Even more complexly, since she belongs to a peripheral region of the world, Juana Manso’s claim to cosmopolitan citizenship is paradoxical: in order to be included in a cosmopolitan world order, she must define herself based on the abstract discourse of the rights of man and, at the same time, must start from the categories of sexual, racial and geopolitical difference that function as parameters of exclusion from this cosmopolitan community⁶. This ambivalence between the discourse of abstract equality and that of difference is central to understanding the two articulations of her thought, which are the object of this article: her intellectual relation with Latin American and cosmopolitan culture, and the education as a way for women, children and the lowest strata of the population to access citizenship.

AN INTELLECTUAL TRAJECTORY BETWEEN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA

Juana Manso was born in Buenos Aires in 1819, the daughter of a liberal, highly educated engineer, José Maria Manso, who very early became interested in her education. In those decades, because of Juan Manuel de Rosas’ (1793-1877) rise to power, and due to civil war and political-military turbulence in post-independence Argentina, the Manso family was forced into exile in the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, moving to Rio de Janeiro later in 1845.

In fact, the Rosas regime was the main reason for the exile of an important part of the generation of Argentine romantic intellectuals who were in Brazil between 1830 and 1870, during the reign of Emperor Dom Pedro II: Margarita Sánchez de Thompson, José Mármol, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Juana Manso herself, among many others (^{Amante, 2010}).

In Rio de Janeiro, Manso met her future husband, Francisco de Sá Noronha, a Portuguese violinist whom she accompanied on his travels through the United States, the Caribbean, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. During these trips, Juana gave birth to two daughters and had her first encounter, full of ambiguities, with the United States, a country that would be central to her intellectual positions and networks during the following decades.

After returning to Rio de Janeiro, in addition to taking Portuguese classes, Manso continued the pedagogical work that she had begun much earlier in Montevideo, where she had opened a teaching institute for girls and taught Spanish, English, French and other subjects. In Rio de Janeiro, in 1852, she created O Jornal das Senhoras - considered by critics as one of the first Brazilian newspapers written and directed by women, and in which a considerable group of women of the imperial court participated and collaboratedxref ⁷. O Jornal included articles on ‘Fashion, Literature, Fine Arts, Theaters and Critics’, as the subtitle states, as well as costumes and sheet music. She was editor-in-chief of the newspaper during the first six months, that is, until July 1852, when she lived near the Forte de Gragoatá, in Niterói. In addition, she contributed with articles on the education and emancipation of women and with the historical and pedagogical novel Los Misterios del Plata, published in Portuguese (although the title remained in Spanish) as a leaflet until July 1852.

Once her father died, Juana was abandoned by her husband, who fled to Portugal with another woman, leaving her alone and in need of ensuring the maintenance of the two daughters. Influenced by the example of Madame Durocher, a famous midwife who instituted the Midwives Course at the Medical School of Rio de Janeiro, she naturalized Brazilian with the hope of enrolling as a midwife and of graduating from the Faculty of Medicine, which proved impossible (^{Peard, 2008}).

In 1853, after the defeat of Juan Manuel de Rosas, she decided to return to Buenos Aires, where, in 1854, she used her last resources to publish the newspaper Álbum de señoritas, which lasted eight numbers and included her novella, which was highly critical of Brazilian slavery, La familia del Comendador. The newspaper was a commercial failure and, therefore, she considered the possibility of returning to Brazil. However, in 1858, with the help of Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-1888), whom he met through her friend José Mármol, she obtained the position of director of the first coeducational school in Buenos Aires.

From that moment on, and thanks to her intense dialogue and intellectual alliance with Sarmiento, Manso came to occupy a central place in the foundation of Argentinian educational institutions during the second half of the nineteenth century. She acted as school principal and inspector, was the first woman to occupy the National Education Council, taught various disciplines, organized and offered public readings, wrote in several newspapers, composed the first school manual for the study of Argentine history, translated texts and disseminated the pedagogical doctrines of Horace Mann, Giovanni Pestalozzi and Henry Barnard. Between 1865 and 1877, she also published, the educational journal Anales de la Educación Común, which included pedagogical and methodological texts and current educational bibliography.

During this period, she produced a transnational and comparative pedagogical thought, which brought the rural reader in contact with European (France, England and Italy), South American (Chile, Argentina and Brazil) and North American (from the states of Washington, Massachusetts and Philadelphia) pedagogies. As is evident, Manso’s pedagogical thought was profoundly modern and inter-American: her model, like that of Sarmiento, was North American pedagogy, motivated by the readings of Horace Mann, among others, and by her correspondence with Mary Peabody Mann. She supported the professionalization of teachers and the modernization of teaching methodology: she opposed mnemonic learning, excessive routine and rhetoric education. She emphasized the student’s experience and development and had a pragmatic view of education, which highlighted the scientific study of the physical and natural environment. Moreover, she supported the need for a popular pedagogy, ‘funded by all and for all’, and a kind of education that would take care of ‘others’: children and women from the lower classes, as well as the ‘underprivileged’, marginalized from the educational system.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the dual articulation of Juana Manso’s thought – her cosmopolitan and modernizing Americanism and her concern with social inequality - in the texts written during her exile in Brazil between 1845 and 1853. During this period, she came in contact with Portuguese language and investigated Brazilian social and cultural dilemmas: the emancipation of women, the education of children, the expansion of citizenship, as well as the relationship between cosmopolitanism, South American community and national identity.

2 O JORNAL DAS SENHORAS: COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE PRINTED PRESS

Manso conceived O Jornal das Senhoras as a conjunction of the private and the public, of printed culture and of the pedagogical, national and cosmopolitan spheres. The newspaper modeled behaviors and values aimed at training future citizens: women, girls and the general population. In the first issue’s opening article, she placed the newspaper in a cosmopolitan context and tried to legitimize it as the vehicle of an enlightened ideal, comparing it to women’s periodicals in Europe and the United States. She stated:

Will South America only remain stationary in its ideas, when the whole world is progressing and tending towards the moral and material improvement of society? No! It cannot. Rio de Janeiro’s society, mainly, the Empire’s Court and Capital, South American Metropolis, will welcome with certain satisfaction and sympathy O Jornal Das Senhoras, which was written by a lady herself: by an American who, if she does not have talents, at least she has the project to enlighten the population, and to contribute with all her forces to women’s improvement and moral emancipation. We begin a campaign, as the banner of Enlightenment waves gracefully to the Tropics’ perfumed breeze: welcome it, all of you who possess a spark of intelligence, come [sic] (^{O Jornal das Senhoras, 1852b}, p. 1)¹⁵.

Manso’s argument is astute: as a publication written by and for women, the newspaper should have an excellent reception in imperial society, since the city was seen as one of the largest cosmopolitan metropolis in South America, ‘Court and Capital of the Empire, South American Metropolis’. It would be a symbol of progress, of the ‘moral and material improvement of society’. What is implied is that, if not welcomed, the periodical would be a symbol of the opposite, of the society’s traditionalism and its distance from the cosmopolitan and liberal ideals of women’s emancipation. She portrayed herself as an ‘American lady’, whose purpose was to fight for women’s enlightenment and emancipation. The metaphor of the newspaper as a ‘banner of illustration’ that ‘waves gracefully to the perfumed breeze of the Tropics’, attracting the female readership, is a symbol of the desire to belong to the cosmopolitan, progressive and enlightened world, but also of the obstacles to reach this emancipatory ideal, especially in the case of women and other marginalized subjects.

Her project was to integrate enlightened ideals into Brazilian culture, to combine a worldly imaginary with national identity, the public and the private, and to include new subjects in the public sphere. However, what appeared to be a process without problems or conflicts, was actually full of difficulties, incongruities and mismatches. Manso said in the same article: “Well, a Lady, the head of a newspaper editor! What seven-headed animal will it be? But in France, England, Italy, Spain, the United States, and even Portugal, examples abound of ladies dedicated to literature that collaborate in different newspapers” [sic] (^{O Jornal das Senhoras, 1852b}, p. 1)¹⁶. As it turns out, the cosmopolitan argument functions as a legitimating tool and creates a language of rights and citizenship for women’s cause: it combines a claim to geopolitical equality with an argument in favor of gender rights.

The first issue included part of the historical and pedagogical novel Los misterios del Plata - with the title in Spanish -, published as a serial until July 1852. The historical action of the book was set in the Rio de La Plata, during Juan Manuel de Rosas’ government. The narrative focuses on the arrest of Valentín Alsina, a unitary leader in exile who intended to return to his homeland. It narrated his liberation thanks to his allies’ help and, above all, to his wife’s courage. The text was rewritten several times; the version published in the Jornal, as is obvious from its agile narrative and its condensed descriptions, was adapted to the public of the printed press, and particularly to the Brazilian readership, since it contains explanations about the Argentine characters and clarifications on the historical context¹⁷. Its pedagogical intention is evident - what the critic Elvira Narvaja de Arnoux has called ‘a didactical adaptation to the other’ (²⁰⁰⁶) - , as well as its political-ideological intention of training both Brazilian and Argentine future citizens according to Enlightenment ideals. Given its dual readership, this version of the novel privileges general political and moral reflections from an enlightened and universal perspective.

The title, Misterios del Plata, is a reference to the novel by Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, written in 1842¹⁸ and its epigraph was taken from the História da França, by Michelet. However, the author declares her intention to depart from European models and to create a new type of literature: If the nascent literature of our America is always to seek its types in old Europe, we will never have an American or a national literature” (^{O Jornal das senhoras, 1852b}, p. 7). In her search for an ‘American’ literature, however, she encounters the great ‘mystery’ of the South American culture of her time: the dilemma of importing and adapting enlightened ideals to local realities. Thus, Michelet’s epigraph suggests a struggle [...] of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of freedom against fatality (O Jornal das senhoras, 1852b, p. 6). Here, cosmopolitan Enlightenment is associated with the spiritual world, while local realities are thought of as ‘matter’, ‘nature’ and ’fatality’.

In the novel, Manso compares this ‘mystery’, the struggle between spirit and matter, with the very state of the exiled subject, who oscillates between the cosmopolitan world and the homeland: However, as the last flower deposited by the pilgrim at the door of the domestic home that he will abandon, we write this novel, in the agonies of the extinguished love of the country; and when by force of suffering, we were drawn into indifferent cosmopolitanism [sic] (^{O Jornal das senhoras, 1852b}, p. 7). The author is torn between nostalgia for the lost homeland, the ‘love of the country’, which has been ‘extinguished’ by the frustrations of the exile, and the search for a cosmopolitan horizon, which, although attractive, still seems indifferent and alien. As can be seen, she portrays herself as a twice- displaced subject, who is excluded from a future homeland, and exiled from a cosmopolitan world to which she does not yet belong. The text upholds a humanist and universal ideal, a virtuous and disinterested republicanism that privileges the collective over the individual. This discourse has no marks of national belonging, only political and moral reflections. Moreover, almost all the characters in the novel, Valentín Alsina, his son, his wife and the gauchos that accompany them, are deeply melancholic subjects who feel exiled from their homeland: I do not take care of my life, answered the young man with a melancholic voice, as for the homeland [...] I have not, I’ve never had a home [sic] (^{O Jornal das senhoras, 1852c}, p. 111). These characters, in their nostalgia for a lost homeland, represent the central role of the pursuit of citizenship.

3 O JORNAL DAS SENHORAS AS A PEDAGOGICAL AND CIVIC TOOL

O Jornal das Senhoras was part of a printed culture that, as the critic William ^{Acree (2011)} has argued, transformed the practice of private reading and writing into a mode of participation in the public sphere and of civic formation in the Rio de la Plata. In addition, it was part of a pedagogical culture that, according to studies by ^{Gondra e Alessandra Schueler (2008)}, experienced the transformation from private and domestic models of education into emerging state school forms. As part of the state-building strategies of the Empire, secular education systems were organized on the basis of a series of normative, homogenizing, and regulatory measures of instruction. Professors started to occupy a privileged place in the mission of civilizing the nation, charged with the task of carrying out a broad educational project.

Besides that, throughout the nineteenth century, the educational process promoted women’s insertion in the reading world and in the teaching profession. There was a remarkable increase in the number of female enrollments in public schools and in women’s participation in the teaching profession, in both public and private institutions (^{Gondra & Schueler, 2008}). The process was determined by disputes, ambiguities and contradictions between opposite conceptions of the social role of women and the character of their education. Thus, women’s instruction was regarded from antagonistic perspectives: as a moral and religious formation for domestic duties, as scientific training in notions of child hygiene or as a way of participating in professional and public life (^{Gondra & Schueler, 2008}). One of the most relevant examples of women’s role in nineteenth century Brazil was that of the intellectual and educator Nísia Floresta Brasileira Augusta (1810-1885), who became deeply involved in the defense of girls’ education and the central role these would have in the future national formation. Nísia Floresta was Juana Manso’s model and inspiration. She mentions her in the following note published in issue 8 of O Jornal das Senhoras:

We are pleased to announce to our Subscribers the arrival of Mrs. Nísia Augusta Floresta, Brazilian, so well-known among us for her intelligence and illustration; so respected for her long teaching, has spent 16 years with care in the education of her patricians; and so praiseworthy and worthy of our admiration for her devoted constancy to the love of wisdom and the exaltation of her country. Mrs. Nísia had been absent from us for two and a half years, traveling in this interval to France and England, where she visited the best colleges of instruction, the most erudite men of letters, and the illustrated ladies; and lately she was in Portugal, from where she returned to our arms, admiring the Herculans, Garrets, Castilhos and other respectable men in science. There is, therefore, among us Mrs. D. Nísia, let us give her a hug of lively friendship and gratitude, in the name of our sex [sic] (^{O Jornal das senhoras, 1852d}, p. 63)¹⁹.

As it is observed in the note, she portrays Nísia Floresta as a woman, an enlightened intellectual and as a participant of the civilizing and patriotic mission of girls’ education. In addition, she highlights her travels throughout Europe, her cosmopolitan character and her contact with enlightened European scientific and pedagogical models. All these characteristics point to the model of an enlightened woman, an advocate of girls’ education, a cosmopolitan traveler who is no stranger to European culture, a model emulated by Juana Manso herself.

Juana Manso also contributed to O Jornal with articles on women’s education and emancipation. She took a stand in favor of women’s civic participation in an ambiguous effort not to contradict gender norms: thus, the figure of ‘republican maternity’ helped her to defend women’s public intervention at the same time as her role as mother and wife, educator of future citizens²⁰. In this way, Manso’s pedagogical philosophy coincided with the ideology of feminine textbooks, manuals of civility and domestic economy that circulated during the nineteenth century in Brazil and the Rio de la Plata. At that moment, the woman - student, mother, educator, and administrator of the home – was situated at the heart of the process of expansion of the educational system as a mediator between the school, the home and the public sphere of the nation²¹. However, unlike most of these publications, which celebrate the domestic sphere in a sentimental and sweet tone, Juana Manso’s articles were controversial and sarcastic, as strong public interventions. She declared in an article entitled The moral emancipation of women:

In the poor classes of society is where the most baleful results are harvested from the brutalization of women. All industrial careers are banned. And therefore, only as a servant, she can find the piece of bread that will mitigate her hunger. It should be noted that I speak of our Americas: in Europe and the United States, women practice almost all the professions that among us concerns deny them […]. No doubt there are natural duties that bind women to the domestic household, but it is precisely from the bosom of her family that she can have a direct influence on the family, on the nation, on the whole of humanity. How? Can the woman have any influence other than the pots? Another mission beyond the seams, another future that is not to do the laundry? Really? [sic] (^{O Jornal das Senhoras, 1852e}, p. 14)²².

In this text, she denounced the condition of impoverished women, who were doubly marginalized, because of their gender and because of their poverty: they were excluded from public sphere and lacked access to education. She also criticized the still small proportion of educated South American women compared to European and North American ones. However, her demand for the modernization of women’s role, based on a comparison with central countries, is slightly contradictory with her intention to respect gender conventions, that is, the paradigmatic role of women, as mothers and wives. Her sarcastic tone, particularly when she criticizes the restriction of women’s roles, implies her denouncement of women’s ‘brutalization’ and her demand for women’s access to the multiple spheres of modern society. Although the Journal’s circulation was restricted to the women of the Imperial Court, Manso insisted in many of her articles on the importance of educating women of all social strata and particularly of poor women, which she considered a requirement for social progress. Girl’s education, she said, should be practical and comprehensive and should include not only singing, sewing and piano, more traditional subjects, but also notions of mathematics, geography, literature and medicine. Manso argued that the professional education of women would function as a thermometer of social progress and civilization, as well as of the possibilities of the less favored classes in modern society.

O Jornal also included a section called ‘Studies on education’, in which Manso stated:

We do not cease to demonstrate the absolute necessity of a sound and judicious foundation on which to base the moral teaching of youth, as well as the total lack of easy methods for teaching children of both sexes. However, we are already aware that, as far as our ideas are concerned with what has been practiced to this day, as well as the prejudices which bias the education of the young, we will not fail to state that they should be exposed with all the frankness that is adequate for ideas of such importance. Difficult is the task, but with the aid of our goodwill, the counsel of experience, and the fruit of some readings, we have the sweet hope of saying something worthy of listening, and perhaps of drawing some advantages to the overall good. It is undeniable that South America is one of the places on the globe that is farthest behind in what pertains teaching methods. Primary education among us deserves the name of moral allopathy: it is the scourge of children [...] it would be more convenient to adopt a plan of education that would better meet the needs of the suffering children, and not to saturate them with these rancid and defective methods which mortify them [sic] (^{O Jornal das Senhoras, 1852f}, p. 28)²³ .

Her commitment to innovative and dynamic modalities for youth and children’s education is noticeable here. She intended to denounce the lack of adequate teaching methods and to renew them radically. With her characteristic accusatory tone, she observed the backwardness of South American pedagogies, ‘one of the most backward places on the globe’, and denounced the lack of pedagogical commitment to the experience of children. She believed in adapting the pedagogical method to the student, by taking into account their experiences, perceptions and abilities, which reveals her deep sensitivity for the other, the boy and the girl that enter the educational system. Her reflections on the renewal of teaching methods were published in the following issues of the Jornal: in a series of philosophical and psychological lessons for girls, she presents the notions of ‘free will’ and freedom of conscience as central to girls’ initiation to the rational world, to self-confidence and self-will. She also stressed the need to modernize pedagogical methods and to adapt them to children’s needs, to reform school schedules, including games and amusements, and to standardize education for all levels of society. According to her, all schools should have the same programs, and should be specifically adapted to poor girls’ needs for a practical education.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: REMEMBRANCE OF BRAZIL

After her return to Buenos Aires, Manso published a series of texts in which she reflected, in a nostalgic tone, about her relationship with the country. Among them, there is an autobiographical text, entitled Recuerdos del Brasil, which reveals the fundamental impact that the Brazilian exile left in Juana Manso - both at the intellectual and the biographical level. A connoisseur of Brazilian Romantic poetry, she created a romantic and lyrical tone that critics have compared with that of Gonçalves de Magalhães and with the song of the exile by Gonçalves Dias, to describe her extraordinary Brazilian experience: “Hay algo en la vida del Brasil que no he hallado en parte alguna […] no puedo explicar qué hay en Rio de Janeiro que me interesa y me gusta” (^{Velazco y Arias, 1937}, p. 370). In this text, the exiled subject’s affective and emotional relationship with the homeland is evident. The text also includes the poem Adiós, Rio de Janeiro:

Adiós altivas montañas

Cielo del Trópico, adiós!

Mi estrella brilla del Plata

En la querida región,

Aquí llegué peregrina

Llena de ensueños el alma

Y de esperanzas sin nombre

Rebosando el corazón.

[...]

Adiós playas, adiós montes

Flores, pájaros y mares,

Cenizas dejo en la tierra

Mi vida, esparza en el aire!

Dejo páginas sin nombre

Di mi juventud pasada,

Un altar que derribaron.

Una tumba abandonada!

Amores despedazados,

Decepciones y recuerdos

Quién sabe cuánto fantasma,

Todo acaba, así es el mundo,

Me ausento, vuelvo a la patria,

Pero inolvidable imagen

Llevo gravada en el alma!

(^{Velazco y Arias, 1937}, p. 374-375).

The poem is completed with a section in prose: “Esa imagen inolvidable es la tuya, mi bello Rio de Janeiro, princesa de los valles! […] No volveré a verte, pero he cantado tu belleza y dejádote algo de mi misma como el solo recuerdo de mi peregrinación sobre tu suelo” (^{Velazco y Arias, 1937}, p. 275).

Brazil and, more specifically, Rio de Janeiro appear as objects of nostalgia and pleasure for the exiled subject: they are idyllic spaces of a picturesque nature, as well as of intense personal experience. In this text, the poetic subject is represented as a pilgrim, an itinerant subject, always between the space of exile and that of the homeland. Her Brazilian exile constituted a form of initiation that coincided with the period of her youth and was linked to the beginning of her intellectual life. Manso’s exile appears as fundamental in her intellectual formation, being associated to her initiation as a writer and a pedagogue. Her travels and her exile should be analyzed as processes of intellectual formation – linked to the German notion of bildung -, a practice defined by the experience of otherness, whose essence would be to place ‘myself’ in a movement that makes me become an ‘other’ (^{Peixoto, 2015}). Her Brazilian exile, as a transformative encounter with otherness, resulted in the fact that, back to her country of birth, Manso would be indelibly marked by estrangement, becoming a sort of foreigner even in her own homeland.

In fact, exile is essential to understanding Juana Manso’s intellectual and pedagogical project, as she continued to occupy polemical and controversial positions even after having achieved a central space in Argentine public and intellectual life²⁴.

Shortly after returning to Buenos Aires in 1854, she published the novel, which was critical of slavery, La familia del Comendador, in Spanish and as a serial in the newspaper Álbum de Señoritas. Although the analysis of the novel does not form part of this article’s goals, it is worth affirming that the question of slavery had already appeared in her remembrances, Recuerdo del Brasil, in which she narrated an event in Niterói: a slave who was going to be separated from her lover because of the yellow fever epidemic, decided to throw herself in the sea. Manso found her corpse on the beach and decided to bury her²⁵. In the act of drowning herself in the sea, the slave sought to free herself from an unfair system; Manso, in turn, by burying her, tried to restore her identity, rights and citizenship. The topic of slavery, which is central in La familia del Comendador as well as in this narrative, points to Manso’s fundamental concern with equality and social difference, with inclusion and exclusion from civic community, her reflection on excluded, exiled or marginalized individuals, a concern which, in her thought, crossed national and linguistic frontiers, was transnational and transcultural.

Manso’s production during this period reveals two fundamental preoccupations. First, to mediate between the cosmopolitan ideal and the Latin American countries’ realities: to think of South American cultures in transnational terms but with their own autonomy. Secondly, to ensure women’s and men’s, girls’ and boys’ access, especially from the less privileged classes, to education and citizenship. She considered this a requirement for social progress, which would only be possible through a renewal of pedagogical methodologies. Considering the exiled as a displaced, transplanted, translated subject, who points to otherness in terms of language and national belonging, but also of race, gender and age, these two concerns, closely related to her experience in Brazil, become one. Juana Manso’s exile in Brazil would have sensitized her to the understanding of the experience and perception of otherness, a concern that would mark her later production and accompany her for the rest of her life.