On the Cultural Studies Threshold

Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Ed. Michael Hanchard. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999.

Hogan, Patrick Colm. Colonialism and Cultural Identity: Crises of Tradition in the Anglophone Literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Albany, NY: SUNY University Press, 2000.

Hunsaker, Steven V. Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

The last fifteen years has seen the rapid growth of cultural studies as an academic discipline, spurred on by (as well as encouraging of) interdisciplinarity and especially the intersection of post-colonialism and postmodernism. Writers like Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Stuart Hall and Gloria Anzaldua, to name a few, constitute key scholars of cultural studies; and the discipline varyingly maintains interest in popular and mass culture; globalization and nationalism; race, gender, sexuality and other aspects of identity and identification; memory, history, and narrative. These four recent works represent forays into the realm of cultural studies: Michael Hanchard's Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil explores race formation in relation to history and political activism; Steven Hunsaker's Autobiography and National Identity in the Americas argues for self-representation as key to nation-articulation; Neil Lazarus's National and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World looks at the impact mass and popular aesthetics have for the establishment of national tradition; and Patrick Colm Hogan's Colonial and Cultural Identity aims to restore a complicated sense of universalism to the investigation of post-colonial literatures. All four works rely heavily on the critical discourse of cultural studies (amongst other schools of thought) and make worthy contributions to the discipline.

The question of racial politics in Brazil has always been a significant one for U.S. scholars to consider, especially because the two countries have been historically imagined as polar opposites in respect to race. Though slavery remained legal in Brazil for nearly two decades after being abolished in the U.S., Brazil did not establish formal and legal institutions of segregation. Further, Brazil is widely regarded as having enacted a less-abhorrent and -violent slavery, and to generally be well-integrated. The legacy of Brazil's racial democracy has been the subject of recent debate, and is discussed in the collection of essays edited and gathered by Michael Hanchard. The collection begins with two clear aims: to add to the disruption of the notion of a Brazilian racial democracy and to investigate the relationship between race and politics in contemporary Brazil.

The first objective finds significant expression in Hanchard's introductory essay, which explains the development of Brazilian "race theory." In the face of a legacy that imagines racism as an individual practice and problem, the writers here offer a staggering amount of evidence that establishes race and racism as social indices of serious import. Perhaps best amongst the essays is Richard Graham's "Free African Brazilians and the State in Slavery Times," which successfully (though perhaps not intentionally) sets up the major points of consideration for the entire collection. One of these points is the need to focus on the relationship between the Enlightenment, the development of Brazilian national identity, and the social caste system that existed prior to the Enlightenment. Graham reveals how these three contexts form a complicated web, where an individual's social position accrues valence along indices that are sometimes in conflict with each other. Furthermore, Graham's arguments also suggest that color, class, and place of birth--along with status as free or unfree--overlap to create a web where, ultimately, people of color have less access to social systems and power or are generally less free than white people. His analysis does not elide the particularities that color or class might play but demands that these particularities be considered in relation to the general status of white Brazilians. The importance of the transition to modernity is also noted in Hanchard's contribution, as well as essays...