White Negritude (review)

Brazilian and Caribbean literatures have established a long and fruitful dialogue with each other based mostly on their histories of post-emancipation, Afro-diasporic and neocolonial societies. Blackness has also been organized along "inclusive" models of national identity around mestiçagem, or mulataje, that do not solve racial inequalities, since oftentimes models of cultural integration could accommodate and instigate forms of cultural or institutional racism. In her book White Negritude, Alexandra I. Hammond criticizes the problems of these inclusive models of cultural racism by describing their models of representation of what she defines as "white negritude." "White negritude" taken from Norman Mailer's article, "White Negro"(1957), "looks at the rethorical strategies white writers employ to justify their incorporation of blackness," in other words, it "studies the relationship between white authority's incorporation of a 'soulful' aesthetics and the obliteration of the black body" (4-5). Professor Hammond, who has explored the discursive links between Brazil and the Caribbean in her edited volume The Masters and Slaves. Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries (2005), returns to issues of language, writing and representation and the way the invention of the "hybrid" body has articulated miscegenation and contained blackness.

Similarly to my book Travestismos culturales: Literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil (2003), White Negritude departs from the deconstruction of the ethnographic-sociological discourses framed by Gilberto Freyre's ideologies of "racial democracy" in Casa Grande & Senzala (1933) to study the way in which these models have erased the black body. However, White Negritude uses a transnational perspective to identify where other national literatures -such as Puerto Rican, Cuban and U.S. Southern literatures- and their criticism converge. Hammond takes a step forward from the analysis of Brazilian-Caribbean post-plantation ideologies as she relates them to discourses of black identity politics in the United States and their current influence in Afro-Brazilian NGO's and affirmative action policies. White Negritude provides new points of analysis to rethink historically the ways in which black writers in Brazil and the Caribbean have been subjugated to representation models that have contained them. Hammond provides brief examples of how black Brazilian, Caribbean and U.S. authors such as Francisco Solano Trindade, Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, Edimilson Pereira, Marilene Felinto, and Derek Walcott have faced the problems of black authorship.

The central point of the introductory chapter, "Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction," is to put together the canonical ethnographical perspectives in science, sociology and literary criticism in the works of Nina Rodrigues, Arthur Ramos and Sílvio Romero that define the black subject as "deviant," "fetichista," or a "disappearing body" in contrast with Abdias do Nascimento's work of 1968, O negro revoltado. Abdias do Nascimento, writer, activist, educator and founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro wants to free Brazilian blacks from the prison of these "ethnographic accounts" providing them with new forms of representation. While asking blacks to free themselves of these prisons, Nascimento falls into forms of self exoticization (for example, representing the black body as performative, actoral, primitive) and proposes it as a strategy for recuperating the black body. Chapter 2, "Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima's White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective," focuses on Jorge de Lima's Poemas negros. Hammond analyzes Lima's evocative and nostalgic views of the casa-grande organized around emotional portrayals of "love" between the boy and his black maids or nannies, and the ways Gilberto Freyre's nordestino models of racial democracy authorized his poetry as "authentic black poetry." Then, Hammond takes some examples from Negrista poetry from the Spanish Caribbean such as Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos and Cuban Nicolás Guillén to exemplify the consumption of the black female body in plantation narratives, where the body of the mulata becomes the main object of consumption, negotiation and socio-political confrontation. Here, Hammond follows Vera Kutz-inski's analysis of the mulata and the construction of masculinity in Guillén's and Palés' poetry, while it addresses briefly the role of the...