Translation, Diasporic Dialogue, and the Errors of Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant

In 1998, the late Pierre Bourdieu published with Loïc Wacquant a vigorous polemic against U.S. cultural imperialism that ignored translation as a crucial node in the international production and consumption of ideas. Appearing in English under the title “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” the essay offered a schematic model of transnational intellectual circulation that foregrounded solely questions of domination/imposition and submission/complicity (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Sansone 2002, 11). Elsewhere, I have dissected Bourdieu and Wacquant's mischaracterization of Orpheus and Power, Michael Hanchard's 1994 monograph on Brazilian “Black Consciousness” movements, which they falsely attacked for its “imposition” of an “American tradition,” “model,” and “dichotomy” of race on Brazil (French 2000; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 44). In this essay, by contrast, I will analyze the dynamics of “reading” and “translation” through which “U.S.” race ideas come to be incorporated into the Brazilian intellectual field, and with results that would have surprised Bourdieu and Wacquant (Teles dos Santos 2002, 184). I will do so by examining the current boom in scholarly publications, by both Brazilians and North Americans, that address questions of race, color, and nation in Brazil within a broader diasporic perspective.

The Missing Dimension:
U.S. “Race” Ideas and their “Consumption” in Brazil

In their polemic, Bourdieu and Wacquant are aggressively dismissive of their adversaries, especially the North Americans and the English,¹ while criticizing the tropism toward power displayed by many intellectuals in the dominated countries. Yet these two European intellectuals themselves display imperial arrogance in their quick and disdainful glance at the “race” debate in the African New World diaspora. They opine freely about Brazil despite their ignorance of this continent-sized country of 170 million people. In their rendering, the poor Brazilians are in need of a foreign defender in the face of the U.S. onslaught, precisely because the intellectual exchange “flows in one direction only”; even “out of place” North American “race” ideas, they lament, “can impose” themselves on Brazil (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 46).

The authors of “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason” give analytical weight solely to the production and transnational circulation of ideas while neglecting the dynamics of “reading” and “translation” through which “foreign” ideas come to be incorporated into national intellectual fields, each with its own historical trajectory, cultural formation, and social mythologies.

² Their simplistic model of U.S. domination/imposition and subaltern submission/complicity is empirically and theoretically wrongheaded. It erases the process of local appropriation while vastly exaggerating the power and influence that U.S.-based notions have had or can have in Brazil. In summary, they make a fetish of the “foreign” origin of ideas (itself questionable) while depicting the process of transnational exchange as inherently one-sided. Worst of all, their call for resistance is vitiated by their own preference for taking refuge behind flimsy nationalist barricades rather than conducting serious transnational intellectual and political debate.

Brazilian researchers on and activists against racism and racial inequality today do not, in fact, adhere to the U.S. racial model postulated by Bourdieu and Wacquant—even when they have been educated in the United States or have been beneficiaries of Ford Foundation funding. Nor did the publication of Michael Hanchard's Orpheus and Power in 1994 lead Brazilian academics and black activists to submit to North American “readings” of race. Instead, it helped to crystallize a Brazilian conviction, across diversity in national origin, race, and gender, that difference is more important than similarity at this moment in the comparative discussion (the vigorous debate can be followed in Bairros 1996; Fry 1995, 1995–96; Hanchard 1994a, 1994b, 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 2000, 2001, 2002; Ferreira da Silva 1998; Gomes da Cunha 1998; and Segato 1998). If the tonic of the 1980s was an emphasis on similarity, the most recent literature highlights Brazilian national specificities and even...