Powers of Misrecognition: Bourdieu and Wacquant on Race in Brazil

In the polemical essay “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” the late Pierre Bourdieu and fellow sociologist Loïc Wacquant (1999) forcefully revive the idea of cultural imperialism. Looking beyond the “easy to spot” ideological content of grand theories and policy prescriptions, they draw attention to the “insidious” work of the small bundles of “isolated and apparently technical” concepts remaking the global intellectual landscape. From “employability” (labor flexibility) to “multiculturalism,” the authors argue, many of the building blocks of the “great new global vulgate” are in fact little more than the impoverished distillation of U.S. experience into normative theoretical concepts (42).

This trenchant critique of “neoliberal newspeak” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001) is a welcome corrective to more triumphalist visions of the shifting geopolitics of knowledge. After summarily treating several key examples, Bourdieu and Wacquant center their analysis on two recent trends they take to be exemplary: scholarly debates about the “underclass” in Europe and about “race” in Brazil. They present the latter as a particularly telling mapping of U.S. simplifications onto a far more complex local reality. Recent scholarship on Brazil, they maintain, is “undoubtedly one of the most striking proofs of the symbolic dominion and influence exercised by the USA over every kind of scholarly and, especially, semi-scholarly production” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 44).

Yet imperialist reason is so cunning that one may well succumb to it even when denouncing it. Bourdieu and Wacquant are right to draw attention to the “symbolic dominion” of U.S. models, but their Manichean rhetoric offers limited means of understanding and overcoming that dominion. Their discussion of Brazil reveals a careless ignorance of the intellectual context whose particularity they are supposedly defending.

By ignoring this context, moreover, they fail to bring to bear the rich Brazilian (and Latin American) theoretical production on heterogeneity and mixture, of races and of ideas. Focused on how “misplaced ideas” have proven quite productive to colonial and postcolonial domination, the more critical strands of this work would have been especially useful in thinking through the specter that haunts the entire argument of Bourdieu and Wacquant: translation (see especially Schwarz 1992 and Santiago 2001). The failure to engage this work weakens the authors' analysis and tacitly contributes to maintaining the “specificity” of Brazilian reflections in contrast to the “universality” of Bourdieu and Wacquant's own theories.

More important, they also fail to grasp the extent to which Brazilians themselves, as well as several U.S. scholars, have addressed the problems they point out. These scholars have reframed the debate, developed new conceptual tools, and advanced toward the kind of “true internationalization” Bourdieu and Wacquant defend. This is not an occasion for exaggerated optimism, since those advances are only weakly reflected as yet in the global intellectual field. But they come from precisely the groups Bourdieu and Wacquant portray as most dominated by imperialist reason, and from the “carriers” in ideas they most ferociously denounce. By ignoring such work, and even suggesting its impossibility, Bourdieu and Wacquant are enacting the symbolic domination they set out to oppose.

While sympathetic to their overall aims, then, I suggest here a more careful consideration of how to achieve those goals. In this essay I use the recent scholarship on race in Brazil to “think with Bourdieu against Bourdieu” (Brubaker 1993, 226) in developing a broader sense of the pitfalls and possibilities of scholarship on identity in the shadow of “identity politics” on the U.S. model.

Critique

The embedded power and reflected glory of empire, Bourdieu and Wacquant suggest, make the allure of metropolitan “theory” difficult to resist, resulting in the systematic misrecognition of global realities. Spread across the world by local “carriers,” these newly universal bases of reasoning make “transnational relations of power appear as neutral necessities” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999, 48, 42). More than a partisan project of the Right, this global extension of imperial reason is a broad tendency...