Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity

1:“A Foot in the Kitchen”: Brazilian Discourses on Race, Hybridity, and National Identity

27 1 “A Foot in the Kitchen” Brazilian Discourses on Race, Hybridity, and National Identity Every Brazilian, even the light-skinned fair-haired one, carries about with him on his soul, when not on soul and body alike . . . the shadow, or at least the birthmark, of the aborigine or the Negro. . . . The influence of the African, either direct or vague and remote. —Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves The sexual license that always characterized colonial Brazil, observed and deplored in all the accounts that have come down to us, whether written by officials, missionaries, and chroniclers or simply made by occasional local observers and foreign travelers that visited her, at least made one positive contribution to the formation of the Brazilian nation: it was thanks to this loose living that it proved possible to fuse races so profoundly different, both in their ethnic characteristics and in the relative positions they occupied in the social organization of the colony. —Caio Prado Jr., The Colonial Background of Modern Brazil The nation-state was never simply a political entity. It was always also a symbolic formation—a “system of representation”—which produced an “idea” of the nation as an “imagined community,” with whose meanings we could identify and which through this imaginary identification, constituted its citizens as “subjects” (in both of Foucault’s sense [sic] of “subjection”—subject of and subjected to the nation). —Stuart Hall, “Culture, Community, Nation” The preceding quotes highlight two important features of Brazilian constructions of national identity: a concern with the African and Afro-Brazilian 28 NEGR A S IN BR A ZIL presence in the country and an emphasis on the role of interracial sexual relations and racial intermixture in the formation of the Brazilian population . Unlike countries, such as the United States, that have historically discouraged racial intermixture, both in the private sphere of intimate relationships and in the public sphere of nationalist discourse, Brazil has long been acclaimed as a society where the races freely mingle. This chapter examines the centrality of racial hybridity in Brazilian nationalist discourse. The analysis seeks to deconstruct dominant representations of Brazil as a racially hybrid society and examine the political and psycho-subjective implications of these representations. By examining elite and popular discourses on Brazilian national identity, I discuss how dominant notions of Brazilianness have shaped contemporary understandings of race and have been used to thwart progressive antiracist mobilization. My analysis departs from recent discussions of racial essentialism (cf. Appiah ; Gilroy a, ) by developing a critique of hybrid or mestiço (mixed-race) essentialism.1 I propose a conceptualization of mestiço essentialism that centers on the salience of race and racial hybridity in Brazilian nationalist discourse. Conceptualizing Brazilian discourses on miscegenation and racial hybridity as forms of mestiço essentialism highlights the ways in which such discourses function as forms of racialism that privilege a hybrid racial essence and, by so doing, both obscure racism and foreclose discussions of racial difference. Through an analysis of elite discourses on the Brazilian nation, I examine how a focus on racial intermixture and the notion of racial democracy has been used as the basis for developing official forms of antiracism in Brazil. The final sections of this chapter explore how the official antiracist discourses that have been developed by Brazilian elites and the Brazilian state have been used to undermine the success of progressive antiracist efforts, particularly those undertaken by black activists.2 The Place of Race in the Brazilian Nation A preoccupation with race, blackness, and African ancestry has characterized Brazilian social thought since at least the end of the nineteenth century . Following the abolition of slavery in  and the establishment of the Brazilian republic in , Brazilian intellectual and political elites showed increasing interest in shaping the nation’s future, both ideologically and racially. The abolition of Brazilian slavery in  was the final step in a gradual campaign to end the slave system. While the first national law in  liberated children born of slave mothers, a second law in  emancipated slaves who were sixty years of age and older. Unconditional and uncompensated abolition took place in  after a considerable decrease in the slave “A FOOT IN T HE K I TCHEN” 29 population, largely due to manumissions by slaveholders and self-purchases of freedom by enslaved people of African descent. With the advent of emancipation in , Afro-Brazilians entered a rapidly changing social and...