White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

  • Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
  • Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
  • White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
  • Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
  • From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing
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