This book traces the rise and decline of Gilberto Freyre's vision of racial and cultural mixture (mestiçagem - or race mixing) as the defining feature of Brazilian culture in the twentieth century. Eakin traces how mestiçagem moved from a conversation among a small group of intellectuals to become the dominant feature of Brazilian national identity, demonstrating how diverse Brazilians embraced mestiçagem, via popular music, film and television, literature, soccer, and protest movements. The Freyrean vision of the unity of Brazilians built on mestiçagem begins a gradual decline in the 1980s with the emergence of an identity politics stressing racial differences and multiculturalism. The book combines intellectual history, sociological and anthropological field work, political science, and cultural studies for a wide-ranging analysis of how Brazilians - across social classes - became Brazilians.

Essays on Brazil, race, childhood, slavery, sociology, literature, art, and travel as well as autobiographical writings.

Zita Nunes argues that the prevailing narratives of identity formation throughout the Americas share a dependence on metaphors of incorporation and, often, of cannibalism. From the position of the incorporating body, the construction of a national and racial identity through a process of assimilation presupposes a remainder, a residue. Nunes addresses works by writers and artists who explore what is left behind in the formation of national identities and speak to the limits of the contemporary discourse of democracy. Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mrio de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the black press, as well as work by visual artists including Magdalena Campos-Pons and Keith Piper, and reveals how exclusion-understood in terms of what is left out-can be fruitfully understood in terms of what is left over from a process of unification or incorporation. Nunes shows that while this remainder can be deferred into the future-lurking as a threat to the desired stability of the present-the residue haunts discourses of national unity, undermining the ideologies of democracy that claim to resolve issues of race. Zita Nunes is associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park.

The book covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, integrating history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies.

BRAZIL- AN INTERPRETATION by GILBERTO FREYRE. Contents include: PREFACE v i. THE EUROPEAN BACKGROUND OF BRAZILIAN HISTORY i ii. FRONTIER AND PLANTATION IN BRAZIL 35 in. BRAZILIAN UNITY AND BRAZILIAN REGIONAL DIVERSITY 66 iv. ETHNIC AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS IN MODERN BRAZIL 91 v. BRAZILIAN FOREIGN POLICY AS CONDI TIONED BY BRAZIL'S ETHNIC, CULTURAL, AND GEOGRAPHICAL SITUATION 123 vi. THE MODERN LITERATURE OF BRAZIL: ITS RELATION TO BRAZILIAN SOCIAL PROBLEMS 155 INDEX follows page 179. PREFACE: These lectures were delivered on the Patten Foun dation at Indiana University during the autumn of 1944. As in my previous essays and lectures on the social history of Brazil, published in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, the point of view is that of one r who at tempts to suggest a philosophy of Brazilian ethnic and social fusionism not the point of vie e w of rigidly impartial historians or sociologists, if such his torians and sociologists really exist. As a work of interpretation or synthesis, prepared especially for an Anglo-American public, these lectures are based on the various monographs that the author has written on the subject. In these monographs, particularly in Casa Grande & Senzala, published in Portuguese and Spanish and soon forth coming in English, the reader will find a more detailed presentation of a number of the topics here discussed and also fuller bibliographies. G. F. I: THE EUROPEAN BACKGROUND OF BRAZILIAN HISTORY. BRAZIL, which was discovered and colonized by the Portuguese, is sometimes called Portuguese America. As Portuguese America it is generally considered an ex tension of Europe, and in its main characteristics it remains Portuguese and Hispanic, or Iberian. It isalso Catholic, or a branch or variant of the Latin form of Christianity or civilization. But the facts that its origins are mainly Portuguese or Hispanic and that its principal characteristics are Latin Catholic do not make of Brazil so simple or pure an extension of Europe as New England was of old England and as New England was of Protestant or Evangelical Christianity in North America. For, as everyone knows, Spain and Portugal, though conven tionally European . states, are not orthodox in all their European and Christian qualities, experiences, and con ditions of life, but are in many important respects a mixture of Europe and Africa, of Christianity and Mo hammedanism. According to geographers the Hispanic peninsula is a transition zone between two continents; it is a popular saying that Africa begins in the Pyrenees a saying sometimes used sarcastically by Nordics. For eight centuries the Hispanic, or Iberian, penin sula was dominated by Africans. Arabs and Moors left their trace there. Though some of the modern Spanish and Portuguese thinkers ( like Unamuno) would have Spain and Portugal Europeanized with all speed, others ( like Ganivet) maintain that Spain and Portugal must look south, to Africa, for their future and for the ex planation of their ethos.

List of Abbreviations. Preface and Acknowledgements. The Importance Of Being Gilberto. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Masters and Slaves. A Public Intellectual. Empire and Republic. The Social Theorist. Gilberto Our Contemporary. Chronology. Notes. Further Reading. Index.

Nationality in Latin America has long been entwined with questions of racial identity. Just as American-born colonial elites grounded their struggle for independence from Spain and Portugal in the history of Amerindian resistance, constructions of nationality were based on the notion of the fusion of populations heterogeneous in culture, race, and language. But this rhetorical celebration of difference was framed by a real-life pressure to assimilate into cultures always defined by Iberian American elites. In Mestizo Nations, Juan De Castro explores the construction of nationality in Latin American and Chicano literature and thought during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Focusing on the discourse of mestizaje—which proposes the creation of a homogenous culture out of American Indian, black, and Iberian elements—he examines a selection of texts that represent the entire history and regional landscape of Latin American culture in its Western, indigenous, and neo-African traditions from Independence to the present. Through them, he delineates some of the ambiguities and contradictions that have beset this discourse. Among texts considered are the Indianist novel Iracema by the nineteenth-century Brazilian author José de Alencar; the Tradiciones peruanas, Peruvian Ricardo Palma's fictionalizations of national difference; and historical and sociological essays by the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui and the Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre. And because questions raised by this discourse are equally relevant to postmodern concerns with national and transnational heterogeneity, De Castro also analyzes such recent examples as the Cuban dance band Los Van Van's use of Afrocentric lyrics; Richard Rodriguez's interpretations of North American reality; and points of contact and divergence between José María Arguedas's novel The Fox from Up Above and the Fox from Down Below and writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Julia Kristeva. By updating the concept of mestizaje as a critical tool for analyzing literary text and cultural trends—incorporating not only race, culture, and nationality but also gender, language, and politics—De Castro shows the implications of this Latin American discursive tradition for current critical debates in cultural and area studies. Mestizo Nations contains important insights for all Latin Americanists as a tool for understanding racial relations and cultural hybridization, creating not only an important commentary on Latin America but also a critique of American life in the age of multiculturalism.