Brazil Through Elimination or Ethnicity?

Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. Jeffrey Lesser. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999

DISCUSSIONS ON IDENTITY IN LATIN AMERICA HAVE FREQUENTLY BEEN CONceptualized based on comparisons with metropolitan models, in which the "positive aspects" are constituted by those models and the "local" is constructed as the negative aspects, or vice versa. By eliminating the bad, dangerous elements, only a pure and good national essence would remain. Literary critic Roberto Schwarz describes Brazilian thought on national identity as employing a similar process of elimination. ¹ As citizens of a former colony and "underdeveloped" country, each intellectual generation was traditionally more interested in the recent theoretical production of the metropoles than in that of the generations that preceded it in its own country. As they became conscious of the "inadequacy" of imported models, many intellectuals went to the opposite extreme of believing that it was sufficient to not reproduce the metropolitan tendency in order to attain a substantive intellectual life. They saw the recovery of "genuine" national culture as a reconquest, an expulsion of the invaders, and an elimination of what was not indigenous. The residue in this operation of subtracting would be the authentic substance of the country. Schwarz points out that this same approach was used in the nineteenth century, when the renewal of Brazilian culture was to be attributed far less to the exclusion of the Portuguese model than to the "diversification" of European models, and the elimination of the African and indigenous elements.

Jeffrey Lesser, a professor at Emory University, takes Schwarz's critique of nationalism by elimination to heart and wants to include "inauthentic" Brazilianess. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil is in this sense a continuation of a direction taken in his previous work, Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question (1994). The widely-held thesis, Lesser claims, that elite conceptions of national identity were predicated on the elimination of ethnic distinctions, should be modified. Rather than taking the process of elimination for granted, scholarship should focus on the ways in which notions of Brazilianness were continuously contested and negotiated. Up to the present day, Lesser argues, Brazil remains a country where hyphenated ethnicity is predominant yet unacknowledged.

One of the biggest merits of this study is that it criticizes the still too often undisputed "triangle theory." In this theory, Brazil is seen as a society created from the "collision of three races"—Africans-blacks, Europeans-whites, and Indians-indigenous—where the mixture of peoples found within the area enclosed by the border of the triangle created infinite genetic possibilities. Since disease and murderous politics of Brazilian governments, both in colonial as in post-independence times, largely removed indigenous peoples almost entirely from the equation, he compressed the triangle into a continuum that combined ethnicity and skin color by placing Africans at one end and whites on the other. Thus, according to the traditional paradigm, Brazil is a country struggling with an identity that always exists at some point along the continuum, and many academics have presumed or implied that anyone without African or indigenous ancestry is, by definition, in the "white" category. A number of studies make this point in their titles, such as Roger Bastide and Florestan Fernandes's Brancos e negros em São Paulo, Thomas Skidmore's Black into White, Carl Degler's Neither Black nor White, Lídia M. Schwarcz's Retrato em branco e negro, to name but a few.

The flaw of the triangle theory is of course the danger of not interrogating these fixed, ahistorical categories of "black" and "white." Lesser does not want to dismiss race as a factor in discussions on Brazilian nationality, but, he argues, although "whiteness" remained one important component for inclusion in the Brazilian "race," what it actually meant to be "white" shifted markedly between 1850 and 1950. The...