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6 Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars
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175 Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars the post–world war ii period in Brazil was a time of relative democratization after the demise in 1945 of Vargas’s authoritarian New State first installed in 1937. Internationally, the defeat of Nazism led to the global discrediting of fascist racism. After 1945, the chauvinistic right-wing movement called “Integralism” was on the defensive, and democratic, union, and black movements were on the upswing. At the same time, Brazilian left intellectuals expressed support for the decolonization of much of Asia and Africa, including in the region that most directly concerned Brazil: the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique , Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé, which ultimately achieved independence relatively late, in the 1970s. Many left Brazilian intellectuals sympathized with Indian independence in 1947, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and Algerian independence in 1962. At the same time, left intellectuals began to analyze Brazil’s status as a geopolitically“neocolonized,”“dependent,” and“peripheral” country. The Brazilian left’s strongly nationalist political project was also marked by “the rejection of European and U.S. economic liberalism and cultural imperialism . . . and the construction of state-regulated capitalism and an indigenous national culture with a popular foundation.”1 In this conjuncture, Brazilian intellectuals focused on colonial aspects of the Brazilian situation. Dependency theory, to which Brazilian intellectuals were major contributors, was a product of this colonial awareness, which went in hand in hand with a critique of U.S. political and economic hegemony. While left sociologists in the United States attacked the dominant“sociology of celebration,” Marxist social scientists such as Florestan Fernandes and Octávio Ianni dismantled its rough equivalent in Brazil , what might be called the Freyrean“anthropology of celebration.” The challenge for Brazilian intellectuals of all colors was to move away not only from academic dependency on the dominant codes and lexicon of U.S. and European social sciences but also from the conservative Freyrean tradition. “Racial Democracy” and Black Consciousness At the same time, postwar Brazil witnessed a growing black consciousness movement . Building on earlier black journals such as Menelik and A Voz Negra in the 1920s, Afro-Brazilian actor/poet/dramatist/plastic artist/activist Abdias do Nascimento founded Quilombo, which published from December 1948 through 176 Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars July 1950. The journal came in the wake of Nascimento’s founding of the Black Experimental Theatre (BET; 1944–1968), an institution whose goal was to train black actors and fight against discrimination. Outraged by a Lima, Peru, performance of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones starring a white actor in blackface, Nascimento resolved to valorize actors of color. In a summary of the group’s goals, he wrote, Both on a social and artistic level,the Black Experimental Theatre strives to restore, valorize,and exalt the contribution of Africans to the Brazilian formation,unmasking the ideology of whiteness which created a situation such that,as Sartre puts it,“As soon as he opens his mouth,the negro accuses himself,unless he tries to overthrow the hierarchy represented by the European colonizer and his civilizing process.”2 The goals of the BET were (1) to integrate blacks into Brazilian society, (2) to criticize the ideology of whitening promoted by the dominant social sciences, (3) to valorize the African contribution to Brazilian culture, and (4) to promote the theater as a privileged medium for these ideas. The BET also organized the National Black Conference (1949) and the First Congress for Black Brazilians (1950). The BET highlighted the theatrical aspects of African and Afro-diasporic culture, exemplified by the continent’s religious feasts, its danced liturgies, and the primordial role of performance. No more “folkloric” than Christianity, African religions deployed song and dance to “capture the divine and configure the gods, humanizing them and dialoguing with them in mystic trance.”3 Quilombo from its first issue took an uncompromising stance on racism:“Only someone characterized by a perfectly obtuse naivete or by cynical bad faith,” Nascimento wrote in the inaugural editorial,“could deny the existence of racial prejudice in Brazil.”4 The leading figures in Quilombo—Guerreiro Ramos and Nascimento —fused class-conscious Marxism with pan-Africanism. But as Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento note in their preface to the facsimile version of the journal, Quilombo was riven by tensions between the more radical black-activist insiders and the largely white guest-essayist outsiders (including Gilberto Freyre), some of whom clung to the nostrums of...