White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures)

New Concepts in Latino American Cultures A Series Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga Ciphers of History: Latin American Readings for a Cultural Age by Enrico Mario Santí Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place by Jacqueline Loss Remembering Maternal Bodies: Melancholy in Latina and Latin American Women’s Writing by Benigno Trigo The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise edited by Erin Graff Zivin Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity: From Sensuality to Bloodshed by Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

Forthcoming Titles Essays in Cuban Intellectual History by Rafael Rojas

New Directions in Latino American Cultures Also Edited by Licia Fiol-Matta & José Quiroga New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone by Raquel Rivera The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901 edited by Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan, and Michele Rocío Nasser Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, with a Foreword by Tomás Ybarra Frausto Tongue Ties: Logo-Eroticism in Anglo-Hispanic Literature by Gustavo Perez-Firmat Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations edited by Doris Sommer Jose Martí: An Introduction by Oscar Montero

New Tendencies in Mexican Art by Rubén Gallo The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative and Theory by Idelber Avelar Intellectual History of the Caribbean by Silvio Torres-Saillant None of the Above: Contemporary Puerto Rican Cultures and Politics edited by Frances Negrón-Muntaner Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé

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White Negritude Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond

WHITE NEGRITUDE

Copyright © Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7595–9 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7595–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Isfahani-Hammond, Alexandra. White negritude : race, writing, and Brazilian cultural identity / Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond. p. cm.—(New concepts in Latino American cultures series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7595–7 1. Brazilian literature—History and criticism. 2. Literature and society— Brazil. 3. National characteristics, Brazilian, in literature. 4. Race in literature. 5. Freyre, Gilberto, 1900–1987—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ9522.R24I74 2007 869.099355—dc22

2007021982

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2008 10

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Printed in the United States of America.

For my parents Azar Isfahani-Hammond and Peter B. Hammond, with love and gratitude

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Contents

List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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1 Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction 2 3 4 5

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Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima’s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective

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White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre

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Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism, Erasure, and the Slave’s Narrative

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From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

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Notes

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References

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Index

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Illustrations

Cover Illustration: “Jovem da Familia Costa Carvalho, de São Paulo, Sentada em Cadeirinha, Ladeada Por Dois Escravos Com Libré” [Youth From the Costa Carvalho Family, of São Paulo, Seated in a Sedan-Chair, Flanked by Two Freed Slaves]. Ca. 1860, artist unknown. Figure 1 Figure 2

Figure 3

Storefront in Parque da Jaqueira, Recife, Mar. 2004.

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Billboard for “Slave Barracks Motel” in Apipucos, Freyre’s hometown, Mar. 2004.

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Entrance to “Slave Barracks Motel.” The billboard reads “Slave Barracks Motel: Man Makes Love and Love Remakes Man. Complicity at All Times.”

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without the affection, inspiration, and support provided by Azar Isfahani-Hammond, Moneera al-Ghadeer, Susan Meltzer, Alicia Lorenzo, Kirsten Ernst, Maritza Stanchich, Sylvia Ortiz, and Akbar Khan. I am deeply grateful to Orlando Bentancor for his tireless and ingenious reading and rereading of my introduction and to Gabriel Giorgi, Dain Borges, Roberto Diaz, Michael Lucey, Nancy Ruttenberg, Candace Slater, Luiza Moreira, and Charles Perrone for their responses to various incarnations of this project. Warm thanks to James Green for a timely historical consultation, to Stephanie Diani for photographic help and confidence boosting, and to Bernardo Jurema for supplying a steady flow of articles from Recife. Ruthie Gilmore, Fred Moten, Lanita Jakobs-Huey, Dorinne Kondo, Susana Draper, John Carlos Rowe, Judith Jackson Fossett, and Kim Clements provided invaluable intellectual and emotional encouragement. I am indebted to the University of Southern California’s James H. Zumberge Faculty Research and Innovation Fund for backing to finish White Negritude, to Denise Ferreira da Silva for her thought-provoking remarks about the field of race studies in Brazil, to Licia Fiol-Matta and José Quiroga for including me in their series, and to Ella Pearce, Luba Ostashevsky, Joanna Mericle, and Maran Elancheran for their expert guidance through the publication process. Thanks above all to César Braga-Pinto, Hilda Llorens, and Peter B. Hammond for their generous intellectual engagement, for their painstaking feedback on draft after draft of the entire manuscript, and for thinking White Negritude along with me.

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1 Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself, has been almost barred from court. —W.E.B. du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935, 721) Don’t go getting offended by my use of the quote unquote “n’’ word. I’ve a black wife and two biracial kids so I feel I have a right. —Dunwitty, in Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled” (2000)

This is not a history book. It is an analysis of Brazilian mestiçagem. I think this discourse in relation to Homi Bhabha’s theorization of colonial authority’s duplicitous hybridity, whose legitimacy rests simultaneously on its incorporation of, and radical difference from, the colonized object (The Location of Culture, 1994). My book is also a study of paratextuality, for the majority of the works considered reflect on the writing process. Two of them are prefaces, and resonate with white-authored apologies for black writing, from U.S. introductions to slaves’ narratives to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Black Orpheus.”1 The critical difference is that the primary texts enframed here are themselves white-authored. Of course, white authorship is not itself the problem. Frantz Fanon reflects on the masquerade of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Afrocentrism: “From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me. Negro sculpture! I began to flush with pride. Was that our salvation?” (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, 123). 2 Blackness as rhythmic aesthetic coincides seamlessly with the lesson Fanon learns when he is immobilized by

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the white gaze: “the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye” (109). The result of this scrutiny is insight into the interface of race science with afrocentrism, both connected to an ultimately eurocentric enframing: “I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all: ‘Sho good eatin’ ” (112). Fanon’s reading of celebrations of blackness that reinscribe eurocentered binaries are at the heart of this inquiry into a specific form of “negritude” that may help us think other cannibalistic commemorations, encompassing not only race and ethnicity, but also gender, sexual orientation, religion, species—“bare life” in any of its forms. It is in the oxymoronic moment when we seem to rejoice in otherness that a particular usurpation is observed, one that has nothing to do with friendship and everything to do with the accumulation and transparency of power: “The white man had found a poetry in which there was nothing poetic. The soul of the white man was corrupted, and, as I was told by a friend who was a teacher in the United States, ‘The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance’ ” (129). What might the relation be of this insurance policy to Brazilian Racial Democracy and other Caribbean and Latin American creolisms? With this literary interpretation not only of traditionally considered “fictive” accounts of race relations and slavery, but also of social scientific discourse, I participate in a comparative, interdisciplinary discussion of race in the postplantation Americas. Even more specifically, this study is in dialogue with contemporary debates about quotas and affirmative action that have emerged since the decline of the Brazilian military dictatorship and the transition to neoliberalism in the mid-1980s. The implementation of quotas for black, indigenous, and public school students in Brazilian universities has generated a discussion that speaks to the transnational context in which race itself emerges in Brazil, 3 calling into play the Orwellian resonance of Racial Democracy—what Sérgio Costa calls the “civil religion of Brazil”4 —with the deployment of “democracy” and “civil rights” on the contemporary geopolitical stage. Whereas Afro-Brazilian rights groups seize U.S. identity politics as a tool for empowerment, critics argue that the introduction of affirmative

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action reflects the universalization of U.S. segregationism and the one-drop rule. 5 Rather than interrogate the eugenics-informed artifice of “blood,” they insist that studies of Brazilian race relations supported by the Ford Foundation and an array of U.S. NGOs impose black/white dialectics on a context that is distinct from the United States, constituting one-dropism as the universal standard against which all postcolonial realities are to be measured. How, they ask, can Brazil’s array of cafuzos, mulatos, pardos, and morenos be negotiated when deciding which “black” students will be admitted under these new policies? In the United States, the above-cited continuum of racial categories recalls a discourse of mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons, long suppressed for its association with slavocratic sexual exploitation, dividing and conquering, mixed-race deviance, and the perception that it masks a starker, black/white reality. The hybridism suggested by the “other” category on U.S. censuses remains untranslatable into the idiom of U.S. racial knowledge even as it sustains the black/white dialectic it purports to resist. The question of Barak Obama’s authenticity speaks to this: isn’t the “conundrum” of his African/AngloAmerican descent itself a conundrum? Obama’s invocation of Civil Rights to relate the story of his grandfather’s experiences with British racism in Kenya—the obligatory enframing device to convince voters that colonialism and racial exclusion are “real” beyond U.S. borders— and his insistence that this movement in the U.S. south “sent a shout across oceans so that my grandfather began to imagine something different for his son” reveal the common sense of reading global structures of domination in terms of the overarching U.S. norm.6 The commodification of Civil Rights in the presidential campaigns of both Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton speaks to the vigilance with which we need to regard the local and global deployment of liberatory discourses. Indeed, for the first time in history, democracy and freedom are the language of empire. Even more chillingly, black contestation and Civil Rights—wielded as an accomplished fact vis-à-vis icons like Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell—mediate “regime change” and justify the summoning of a “new Middle East.” A distinct though comparable appropriation is observed in Brazil, where Gilberto Freyre’s paradigm of master/slave synthesis has been the dominant reading of Brazilian race relations since the publication of Casa-Grande e Senzala [The Plantation Manor and the Slave Barracks] in 1933.7 In his seminal narrative of plantation life, Freyre substitutes eugenic lamentations of the effects of miscegenation with

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a redemptive reading of the fusion of European and African cultures during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He situates the paternalism of the northeastern plantation economy as the origin for a society that is free of the racial tensions and violence that mark the United States. Premised on Portugal’s unique accommodation of nonEuropean difference, Casa-Grande e Senzala constitutes what Carlos Guilherme Mota calls a prototype for African/European contact realized within a patriarchal order, whose epicenter is the casa-grande (Ideologia da Cultura Brasileira, 58). Integral to Freyre’s formulation is the idea that Brazilian slavery is distinguished from other slavery economies by the fact that Brazilian masters identify with slaves. His model has mediated systems of domination both within Brazil’s borders and without, since it became a key defense for the perpetuation of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa in the 1970s. How might we understand the intersection of eugenics, Civil Rights and (Racial) Democracy in the United States, Brazil and the empires, past and present, with which they are affiliated? And where does White Negritude fit into this geopolitical arrangement? Whereas the debate about race in Brazil has long been the territory of social scientists, I want to propose literary analysis as a method for teasing out the logic of Racial Democracy. My title is a provocation inspired by Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” (1957), in which he endows blackness with the potential to redeem a crassly industrialized United States. It also makes reference to Warren Beattie’s “Bulworth” (1998), centering on a sellout white senator who dons metaphorical black face to save his soul, bedding Halle Berry’s character, “Nina,” and quoting Huey Lewis to Don Cheadle’s character, “L.D.,” a gang banger alienated from his race/ class interests until Bulworth teaches him Civil Rights. What is the relation between white authority’s incorporation of a “soulful” aesthetic and the obliteration of the black body? How does this appropriation relate to sexuality? In Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s article, “The White Negro” (New Yorker, Vol. 74, n11, 11 May 1998), “Bulworth” cowriter Aaron Sorkin reports that the movie’s message is that interracial sex is the way to overcome racism.8 Like cannibalizations of Africa as the source of aesthetic inspiration, and as in Leopold Senghor’s trope of Africa’s primordial “rhythmic abandon” as a remedy for tired “Western” rationalism,9 the “black vogue” I want to evoke not only constitutes Europe as normative but is also intransigently owned by whites. White Negritude is informed by Thomas Skidmore’s seminal discussion of the intersection of Racial Democracy with branqueamento,

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the Brazilian compromise with eugenics that emerged as a popular discourse in the 1880s and advocated the elimination of black genes as the inevitable result of miscegenation and immigration policies favoring Europeans (Black into White, 1974; Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 104).10 But it is also attentive to the ways that countervening discourses accommodate an equally artificial, “bipolar” common sense (Fry, A Persistência da Raça, 2005, 34). Expanding the analysis of Racial Democracy beyond the social sciences to consider it as a speech act that enunciates itself through white-authored representations of black experience, I think how White Negritude wants to contain black articulation, providing symbolic compensation for genetic whitening through its embodiment of African “survivals.” I approach sociological prose as a language, a performance whose underlying discursive assumptions I want to uncover. In looking at the rhetorical strategies white writers employ to justify their incorporation of blackness, I am particularly concerned with Freyre’s discussion of white-authored black text as evidence of hybridization and, by extension, of Brazil’s superiority to the United States. This conflation of patriarchal white supremacism with resistance to U.S. Empire is at the heart of the contemporary debate about quotas and affirmative action. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant argue that U.S. culture is most efficiently imposed when produced and utilized by “dominated minorities” who “would appear to be above suspicion of promoting the hegemonic interests of a country against which they wield the weapons of social criticism” (“On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason,” 1999, 27).11 The defense of Racial Democracy is central to canon formation and authorship. In “Cotas da Discôrdia: o Risco da Reserva de Vagas nas Universidades do Brasil” [Quotas of Dischord: The Risk of Reserving Spaces in the Universities of Brazil] (2004), Hermano Vianna warns that affirmative action could lead to changes in required reading in universities. Though he disavows the currency of Racial Democracy—“Não conheço uma só pessoa que defenda hoje ser o Brasil uma democracia racial” [I don’t know a single person who today defends the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy] (6)—he resists quotas on the grounds that they threaten Brazil’s open-ended approach to racial categorization, a panacea in opposition to U.S. bipolarism: “Se adotarmos que ‘branco é branco, preto é preto, certamente perderá força uma alternativa ‘indefinida’ para o mundo” [If we adopt that “white is white, black is black,’’ an “undefined’’ alternative will certainly lose its power in the world].

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Vianna observes that its was not easy “inventar esse orgulho de ser mestiço no Brasil” [to invent this pride in being mestiço in Brazil] in the face of eugenic theories to which “O pensamento brasileiro corajosamente tentou dizer o oposto: que misturar diferenças é bom” [Brazilian thinking courageously tried to say the opposite: that mixing differences is good] (7). He adverts that this tradition should not be abandoned in favor of identity politics, attributing to Racial Democracy a quasi-messianic potential: “uma experiência única de valorização da mestiçagem, que não foi levada às suas últimas liberta´rias consequências” [a unique experiment of valorizing miscegenation, that has not yet been taken to its ultimate libertory consequences]. Vianna’s defense of mestiçagem echoes Freyre’s interpretation of the eroticized northeastern plantation complex as a model for Portuguese Empire and as a panacea against Americanization, now called Globalization. His exaltation of Brazil’s indefinition discloses its racialized and gendered internal logic when he cites Caetano Veloso’s “Americanos” to illustrate the fundamental difference between Brazil and the United States: “Para os americanos branco é branco, preto é preto, e a mulata não é a tal, bicha é bicha, macho é macho, mulher é mulher, e dinheiro é dinheiro” [For Americans, white is white, black is black, and the mulatta isn’t all that, fag is fag, macho is macho, woman is woman and money is money] whereas down here (aqui embaixo), “dançamos com uma graça cujo segredo nem eu mesmo sei” [we dance with a grace whose secret not even I know] (Vianna, 8). With Caetano, Vianna wields the “inbetweenness” of the mulata as evidence of Brazil’s open-ended approach to identity and, whatsmore, its bacchanalian alternative to U.S. materialism.12 There are parallels between Freyre’s acclimated—that is, “Africanized”—Euro-Brazilian national prototype and James Clifford’s observation of ethnography’s self-justifying gesture of salvaging cultural practices threatened by extinction: “Ethnography’s disappearing object is, then, in significant degree, a rhetorical construct legitimating a representational practice: ‘salvage’ ethnography in its widest sense. The other is lost, in disintegrating time and space, but saved in the text” (Writing Culture, 1986, 112). Whereas Clifford points to how ethnography legitimates itself as the guardian of non-European traditions in decline, the relationship between writing and the vanishing other is inverted in the texts under consideration. That which is “saved in the text” are the cultural and discursive remnants of black identity that are absorbed by whites at the same time that

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sociohistorical blackness is targeted for elimination. This proprietary anthropological usurpation is inextractable from eugenics and police action. Indeed, criminal ethnographer Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862–1906) is the first in a genealogy of “specialists” to document Afro-Brazilian cultural influences. Originating with Rodrigues’ endeavor to catalogue and regulate the unruly African “element” in his influential studies including Os Africanos no Brasil (written between 1890 and 1905 and published posthumously in 1932) and O Animismo Fetishista dos Negros Bahianos (1900), Afro-Brazilian studies evolved into a “celebratory” enterprise crystallized by Freyre’s Casa-Grande e Senzala, in 1933, seeking to replace sociohistorical blackness with a discourse about blackness—what Derrida calls “obliterating the proper” (Of Grammatology, 1967, 110). A provocative illustration of this exclusion is encountered in the intersection of two works in the field of Afro-Brazilian studies, Edison Carneiro’s Antologia do Negro Brasileiro (1950) and Abdias do Nascimento’s O Negro Revoltado (1968). The first essay of Carneiro’s anthology, Arthur Ramos’ “Os Estudos Negros e a Escola de Nina Rodrigues” [Black Studies and the School of Nina Rodrigues], observes that works such as Nina Rodrigues’ O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Baianos [The Fetichist Animism of Bahian Blacks] (1905) informed, “na sua quase totalidade” [in virtual totality] (21), the study of the Brazilian black. Ramos/Rodrigues’ production of blackness as animistic and fetichistic constitutes it as that which is chaotic and needs to be contained, but also in opposition to the “natural” whitening body that will consume and erase it. In another essay in this volume, “O Negro—Objeto de Ciência” [The Black—Object of Science], Sílvio Romero calls for a study of Brazilian blacks that will exceed and exclude European ethnography: “Quando vemos homens, como Bleek, refugiarem-se dezenas e dezenas de anos nos centros da África somente para estudar uma língua e colegir uns mitos, nós que temos o material em casa, que temos a África nas nossas cozinhas, como a América em nossas selvas e a Europa em nossos salões, nada havemos produzido neste sentido! É uma desgraça” [When we see men, like Bleek, taking refuge for dozens and dozens of years in the centers of Africa only to study a language or collect some myths, we who have the material at home, who have Africa in our kitchens, like America in our jungles and Europe in our salons, have produced nothing in this sense! It’s a disgrace] (22). Romero articulates the proprietary stance of Afro-Brazilian studies both in relation to black “material” and European social science. Unlike Europeans, “we”

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Brazilians have Africa in “our” kitchens. At the same time, writing that blackness, Brazilian ethnographers confirm their Europeanness— located in “our” salons—exceeding in their ownership of subaltern raw matter men like Bleek who must travel to Africa to scrutinize black “objects of science.” Like Caribbean celebrations of blackness as a tool against yanqui imperialism—Alejo Carpentier’s-¡EcueYamba-O! (1933) comes to mind—Romero’s defensive aggression toward European ethnography speaks to the critical status of the black object in Brazil’s cultural nationalism and poses the intriguing paradox of how, whereas Afro-Brazilian studies and Afro-Cubanism have been suspiciously employed as tools against postcolonial domination, U.S. Civil Rights has more recently been associated—in a highly contested fashion—with the conservation and dissemination of U.S. hegemony. In “O Medo da Raça” [The Fear of Race, Correio Brasiliense, 2006], Sueli Carneiro addresses ethnography’s complicity with the erasure of blackness. She cites Silvio Romero’s observation that “o negro não é só uma máquina econômica; ele é antes de tudo, e malgrado sua ignorância, um objeto de ciência” [the black is not only an economic machine; he is above all, and notwithstanding his ignorance, an object of science] in his preface to Nina Rodrigues’ Africanos no Brasil (1932). Romero warns that the Brazilian black should be scrutinized before he is consumed through whitening: “Appressam-se, senão terão de perdê-lo de todo” [Hurry up or you will loose him completely].13 Carneiro contrasts the “academic virtuality” of Afro-Brazilians with the disappearance of the black as a sociohistorical and political entity: “como virtualidade acadêmica, os negros existem; fora desse espaço, é desejável que desapareçam, porque o reconhecimento dessa racialidade, como uma dimensão das desigualdades sociais, promoveria a ‘racialização’ de um Estado supostamente neutro em termos de raça” [as an academic virtuality, blacks exist; outside of this space it is desirable that they disappear, because the recognition of this racialness, as an element of social inequalities, will promote the “racialization’’ of a State that is supposedly neutral in terms of race] (“O Medo da Raça”). This ethnographic obliteration of blackness is demonstrated by the essay that draws Edison Carneiro’s Antologia to a close, Ciro de Pádua’s “O Negro em São Paulo Durante o Século XX” [The Black in TwentiethCentury São Paulo], a cautionary analysis of the undiminished growth of Brazil’s black population. Pádua laments that with continued northeastern immigration, even “Se morrem negros, devido a fatores econômico-sociais, em compensação, caso assim pudéssemos chamar

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à tal corrente de migração interna,—a contribuição dos homens de cor, com suas tradições mais ou menos uniformizadas, continua, acentuando em São Paulo o complexo racial índio-branco-negro” [if blacks die, due to socioeconomic factors, in compensation, if indeed we may so term this tendency of internal migration,—the contribution of men of color, with their more or less uniform traditions, continues accentuating in São Paulo the Indian-white-black racial complex] (466). Whereas Carneiro’s Antologia announces itself as a collection of short texts “sobre o negro” [about the black] (iv), Abdias do Nascimento articulates the urgency of “a presença do próprio negro em ativa participação” [the presence of the black himself in active participation] (15). Activist, actor, and founder of the Teatro Experimental do Negro in 1944, Nascimento sets up O Negro Revoltado as a defiant rejoinder to this ethnographic erasure. In his introduction, he describes how, together with Edison Carneiro and Guerreira Ramos, he coorganized the 1950 Primeiro Congresso do Negro Brasileiro, an event that was defined by the confrontation between two groups: “a maioria, constituída do povo negro, pessoas destituídas de títulos acadêmicos ou honoríficos; e do outro lado, os que se auto-intitulavam ‘homens de ciência’ ” [the majority, constituted by black people, people deprived of academic or honorary titles; and on the other hand, the self-described men of science] (15). Nascimento reports that the confrontation reached a climax when, following the assembly’s approval of a Final Declaration, the “men of science” approved a second declaration signed by themselves alone and conveyed the majority of the essays presented at the conference to Luis Aguilar Costa Pinto for his UNESCO-funded study of blacks in Rio de Janeiro, “A Unesco e as Relações de Raça” [Unesco and Race Relations].14 O Negro Revoltado consists in the congress’ “minutes,” accentuating tensions between black participants and “homens de ciência.” Citing L.A. Costa Pinto’s retort to the demand of black participants to be published in the Congress’ anthology—“Duvido qua haja biologista que depois de estudar, digamos, um micróbio, tenha visto esse micróbio tomar da pena e vir a público escrever sandices a respeito do estudo do qual ele participou como material de laboratório” [I doubt that there is a biologist who, after studying, shall we say, a microbe, has seen that microbe come forth in public and write sottishly about the study in which he participated as laboratory material] (17)—Nascimento documents blacks’ reactions to this ethnographic hijacking. A participant’s “misplaced’’ study of domestic laborers underscores this exclusion. Guiomar de Mattos explains that her thesis about domestic workers is

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with a discussant, who has not appeared to read it (249). The absenting of de Mattos’ written thesis is exacerbated by the board’s request for oral testimony from black maids to validate her position that domestic laborers should be included in one of the Institutos de Previdência [Social Welfare Institutes] (249). Guerreiro Ramos repeatedly solicits such oral testimonial, asking various domestic workers to take the floor, but his demands are met by silence, marked by “pauses” [pausas] (253). Failing to elicit a response, the executive board omits Mattos’ study from the proceedings. Nascimento positions O Negro Revoltado in opposition to this disavowal, for it “revelará que o negro brasileiro não aceita nem paternalismo nem intermediários para suas reivindicações” [will reveal that the black Brailian accepts neither paternalism nor intermediaries for his revindications] (15). He identifies the emphasis on black religion and folklore as sustaining white social scientists in the role of “masters” [senhores] (17), and argues that socioeconomic democratization requires the refutation of blackness as picteuresque “matéria prima” [raw matter]. Much of Nascimento’s argument draws upon the authority of U.S. Civil Rights: he cites Martin Luther King (18) and narrates the story of Katherine Dunham’s racial slight in a Rio de Janeiro hotel that resulted in the ratification of the antidiscrimination, Afonso Arinos law in 1951 (27). Nascimento challenges the place of the Mãe Preta (black nurse maid or “Mammy”) as a “passaporte à condição de amigo do negro” [passport to the condition of friend of blacks] (51–52) and accuses the anthropological stance toward blacks in Brazil of retarding black economic and moral development (55). As in his introduction to O Negro Revoltado, in “The Negro Theater in Brazil” (1967), Nascimento dismisses Brazil’s international image as a racial utopia: “We do not have the apartheid laws of South Africa nor the blood-tinged race relations of the United States. Nevertheless, a more subtle mechanism has grown up in the country, a kind of ‘white lynching,’ bloodless, of the physical body of the Negro by means of the glorified miscegenation” (44). But Nascimento’s identity discourse is undermined by praise for a problematic genre of black representation. On the one hand, he criticizes social scientists who “turned the Negro into a question, ethnographic material; that is, the Negro-as-museum piece” (Negro Theater, 38), indicting black face as the expression of this perversion of black sociohistoricity—“Why a white man made up as a Negro? I asked myself. For lack of a Negro actor?” (35)—and situating theater as the medium

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for reconstructing black agency: “I would organize a theatrical group that would open the role of protagonist to the Negro, enable him to rise from his status as a secondary or folkloric character to become the subject and the hero of the plays in which he appeared” (36). On the other hand, in his “Prologue for Whites,” the introduction to his Dramas para Negros e Prólogo para Brancos—Antologia do Teatro Negro Brasileiro [Dramas for Blacks and Prologue for Whites— Anthology of Black Theater in Brazil, 1961], Nascimento refers to the African “histrionic function” as the basis for blacks’ “natural born” capacity as actors: “O africano é um ator congênito devido a sua extraordinária emotividade em busca de expressão” [The African is a congenital actor due to his extraordinary emotiveness in search of an outlet] (in Mauês, “Entre o Branqueamento e a Negritude,” 1988, 96). Maria Angélica da Motta Mauês notes how Nascimento reinscribes colonialist knowledge about black “primitivism,” citing his address to the Confêrencia Nacional do Negro in 1949: “A mentalidade de nossa população de cor é ainda pré-letrada e pré-logica. As técnicas sociais letradas ou lógicas, os conceitos, as idéias, mal a atingem” [The mentality of our population of color is still pre-literate and pre-logical. Literate or logical social techniques, concepts and ideas barely reach them] (93). During the same address, Nascimento concedes that the problem is not socioeconomic but inherent to the condition of the black as “preso às raízes africanas, alguém que quardaria em si as ‘marcas’ da raça” [prisoner to his African roots, one who retains within him the “stamp” of the race] (94). He identifies TEN as an “experimento psicossociológico, tendo em vista adestrar gradativamente a gente de cor nos estilos de comportamento da classe média e superior da sociedade brasileira” [psychosociological experiment set on gradually instructing people of color in the style of behavior of the middle and upper classes of Brazilian society] (93–94). Maués situates Nascimento’s claims in the context of the ambivalent discourses of the black elites during this period, wherein “primitivism, emotion, passion and exoticism,” proper to the “alma negra” [black soul], are the qualities blacks can and must contribute “ao processo de ‘revitalização’ do Ocidente e do próprio homem branco, que ‘está empedernido,’ e ‘sua arte abstracionista depauperada de paixão’ ” [to the process of “revitalizing” the West, and the white man himself, who is “hardened,” and whose “abstract art is passionless”] (95). The ending of O Negro Revoltado performs this paradox. Whereas Nascimento has identified Brazilian “Negritude” as the logical

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continuation of U.S. Civil Rights and African independence movements, ridiculing Carneiro’s accusation that he and others have analyzed Brazilian race relations “de acordo com a inspiração, a fórmula e a solução norte americanas” [in accordance with North American inspiration, formulas and solutions] (50) and that in the face of this “forced Americanization” it is incumbent on the social scientists to “reorientar os estudos do negro” [reorient black studies] (50), O Negro Revoltado closes with the Congress’ Final Declaration, suggesting that Unesco consider Brazil’s “tentativas bem sucedidas de solução efetiva dos problemas de relações de raças, com o objetivo de prestigiá-las e recomendá-las aos países em que tais problemas existem” [successful attempts at effective solutions for race relations problems, with the objective of holding them in high esteem and recommending them to countries where such problems exist] (294). Though it is presented as the object of ridicule—as conclusive evidence of the silencing operation of white social science—there is a sense in which this declaration squelches the angry retorts of the congress’ black participants, submitting their interventions to the same hybridizing paradigm Nascimento intermittently purports to deconstruct. As in Carneiro’s anthology, this hybridized national script— ever approaching Bleek’s scientific cannibalization of African “raw matter”—seeks to expropriate black oppositional agency. Indeed, the Final Declaration deems “black only” organizations messianic and “ameaças à tranquilidade da família brasileira” [threats to the tranquility of the Brazilian family] (294), echoing Freyre’s equation of black authorship with U.S. segregationism and anticipating Bourdieu, Waquant and Fry’s censure of Hanchard’s identity politics. How does the circumvention of oppositional agency relate to a practice of totalizing, exclusionary discourse? Chapter 2 of White Negritude thinks Carneiro’s/do Nascimento’s hybridized scripts in relation to several genres of black poetry. In “Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima’s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective,” I analyze poetic representations of the plantation as a Fanonian “insurance policy” on humanity. I show how Jorge de Lima constitutes the plantation as the stage for the transmission of an ethereal, discursive blackness to whites, wielding a model of Brasilidade that is at once hybrid and “white beyond words.” Lima emphasizes his childhood interactions with black nursemaids, writing from the perspective of a young boy to establish his formative acquisition of blackness and to neutralize the violent context in which he incorporates slaves’ “stories.” Following an exploration of Lima’s

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Poemas Negros, I situate the question of authorial identity and the poetic interpretation of slavery’s legacies in relation to the poesia negrista and poesia negra of Puerto Rico’s Luis Palés Matos and Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén. Whereas, as Vera Kutzinski points out, Palés cannibalizes the mulata’s body to situate his writing as the generative source for interracial national identity, Guillén constitutes a homosocial mestizo cubanía that displaces the mulata from the cycle of racial and discursive consumption and production. In the final section of this chapter, I look to subversive interpretations of slavery’s legacies in the work of Solano Trindade, Langston Hughes and Derek Walcott to think the problem of reading racial authorship across north/south lines and in relation to identitarian/hybrid fictions and the coloniality of power. Chapter 3, “White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre,’’ interrogates these questions in the context of Freyre’s apology for Lima’s white authorship. Justifying Lima on the grounds of his northeastern seigniorial upbringing, Freyre disavows black authorship, dismissing Lima’s Afro-Brazilian contemporaries and distinguishing his writing from the “harsh, aggressive” poetry of the U.S. Harlem Renaissance. Freyre wields the Poemas Negros as evidence of a nongenetic synthesis he constitutes as the basis for Brazil’s superiority to the United States. I trace the logic of Freyre’s argument in relation to Jorge de Souza Araújo’s Jorge de Lima e o Idioma Poético Afro-Nordestino (1983) and Roger Bastide’s Poesia Afro-Brasileira (1943), and explore the perseverance of this reasoning through a reading of Marilene Felinto’s apology for Freyre, wherein she defends his eroticized seigniorial relation to blacks and dismisses Freyre’s critics on the basis of their engagement with U.S. identity politics (1995). Finally, I reflect on U.S. and Caribbean paradigms of racial and authorial authenticity in relation to Freyrean hybridism. I show how Freyre contorts James Weldon Johnson’s conceptualization of “African transfusion” (The Book of American Negro Poetry, 1922), then think this rereading within the broader field of anthology-production and sociohistorical versus “poetic” gauges for “black text” in Emilio Ballagas’ Mapa de la Poesía Negra Hispanoamericana (1946), Edimilson de Almeida Perreira’s bilingually edited “Panorama da Literatura Afro-Brasileira” / “Survey of African-Brazilian Literature” (1995) and critiques of Phyllis Wheatley as “Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century” and “too white to interest black critics in the twentieth” (Gates, “Phyllis Wheatley on Trial,” 2003).

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Chapter 4, “Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism, Erasure, and the Slave’s Narrative,’’ elucidates a particular genre of “slave narrative.” Foregrounding my discussion with a reading of Caetano Veloso’s homage to Joaquim Nabuco in “Noites do Norte” (2002), I consider how Nabuco’s O Abolicionismo (1883) inaugurates a white writing voice that purports to interpret, and act upon, the slave’s “latent” desire for freedom. Nabuco’s white-authored treatise excludes blacks from the activities of writing and self-representation. Reading his intervention as an effort to contain both genetic and discursive Africanization, I show how his anxiety about delimiting the African influence informs Gilberto Freyre’s exclusionary resolution of Brazilian heterogeneity fifty years later. Finally, I turn to Freyre’s preface to O Abolicionismo to read his attribution of Nabuco’s “black mandate” to his seigniorial proximity to blacks and consider Nabuco’s and Freyre’s dialogues with Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–2). Chapter 5, “From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing,” unravels the periodization of Freyre’s career into an early, progressive phase and a late conservatism. Following an exploration of Maria Lúcia PallaresBurke’s recent intellectual biography of Freyre, Gilberto Freyre: Um Vitoriano dos Trópicos (2005), I investigate continuities between “early” and “late” Freyres through a reading of two essays in which he elaborates the relationship of hybridization to writing. In “Como e Porque Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala” [How and Why I Wrote Casa-Grande e Senzala, 1968], Freyre situates himself as a seigniorial figure who has equal domain in elite and marginal sites, displacing people of mixed European/African ancestry from the embodiment of hybridization and, therein, from the ability to narrate or speak about national identity. In “Reinterpretando José de Alencar” [Reinterpreting José de Alencar] (1962), Freyre excludes Machado de Assis on the grounds that his African/European descent prevents him from interpreting either the realm of the slaveholding elite or that of the black and mulatto underclasses. In my readings of both essays, I flesh out Freyre’s enigmatic use of the terms culture, nature, and the atmosphere to show not only how race science and white supremacism are implicated in his hybridism but how his neolamarckean reading of identity relates to authorship, authority, and knowledge production. Of course, a reflection on the consistency of Racial Democracy with empire-building speaks to a larger project of deconstructing power. Whereas Roberto Schwarz theorizes Brazil’s schizophrenic, slavery-era

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incorporation of French revolutionary ideals, these ideals have always been “fora do lugar” [out of place] (1990). Are there ways that Racial Democracy’s “insurance policy” may help us think the operations of the current empire? How can we understand white supremacism in relation to the veil of multiculturalism? To the (eugenic and political) obliteration of blackness? Or to the “axis of evil” the West deems antithetical to its civilizational trajectory?

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2 Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima’s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective Let the people, for whom I write, recognize themselves in my voice, and discover there that their demons are pacified in the substance of time. — Miguel Barnet, Afterword to the English translation of Biography of a Runaway Slave (1968, 207).

The principal motif of Brazilian modernismo is the cannibal, a polymorphous figure that ingests and incorporates that which is foreign to it. In his Manifesto Antropófago [Anthropophagic Manifesto] (1928), Oswald de Andrade proffers man-eating as a metaphor for national character: “Só a antropofagia nos une, socialmente, politicamente, economicamente” [Only anthropophagy unites us, socially, politically, economically]. Though Oswald’s manifesto itself “cannibalizes” African and Indigenous culture, it does so by identifying with the figure of the “man-eating” tupi. Oswaldean cannibalism emphasizes difference and, moreover, gives precedence to that which is non-European: the “primitive” consumption of “civilized” culture. The trope of the cannibal as leitmotif of Brazilian cultural identity is by now a cliché, having been reinterpreted and rehearsed ad infinitum in popular cultural production and academic prose. It has also contributed to a misleading association of Brazilian culture with a kind of contestatory reverse anthropology. The pages that follow consider a different figure for cultural absorption. Instead of the indigenous subject who “eats” Europe, I will look at the Euro-Brazilian writer who “consumes” Afro-Brazilian culture. Like the cannibal, this figure

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emblematizes Brazilian assimilationism. Unlike the cannibal, his authorial African incorporation is a metaphor for the appropriation of black “voice.” And while European fantasies about man-eating others register fear of miscegenation, the white-authored black discourse I will discuss is a strategy for the dual linguistic-genetic containment of Brazilian blackness. I discuss this appropriation through the figure of Jorge de Lima (1893–1953),1 a white poet from the northeastern state of Alagoas who received the greatest critical acclaim for Invenção de Orfeu [The Invention of Orpheus] (1952), but is best known for his depiction of the beguiling slave woman who seduces her master in “Essa Negra Fulô” [The Negress Fulô]. First published in 1928, “Essa Negra Fulô” belongs to Lima’s northeastern regionalist phase, the principal collection of which is his Poemas Negros [Black Poems] (1947). This poem is key to the “common sense” about eroticized, harmonious master/ slave relations in Brazil, both within Brazil and in the Caribbean. It is interpreted by the Orquesta Broadway Symphony in “La Negra Fulô”—“que sabor, que sabor/quien es la negra Fulô”—as well as by Brazilian composers Oscar Lorenzo Fernandez (1934) and Waldemar Henrique (1935), and the Cuban declamador, Luis Carbonell.2 It has given name to a popular brand of cachaça and at least one retail clothing establishment (see figure 1). The poem bears an uncanny resemblance to Carlos Diegues’ “Xica da Silva” (1976), a film about a slave woman’s affair with her master that was subsequently adapted as a popular telenovela airing on Brazil’s Rede Globo from 1996 to 1997 and in much of the rest of the world thereafter. Lima’s whiteauthored black poetry eroticizes master/slave relations and projects the young, male senhor as the symbolic progeny of enslaved African women. On a metatextual level, his authorial mediation of blackness displaces sociohistorically constructed blacks and, with them, oppositional black articulation. This symbolic inheritance substantiated by his black verse accommodates Eugenic anxiety by erasing the genetic Africanization of the body politic. By ascribing the term “White Negritude” to Lima’s poetics, I do not mean to equate it with Francophone Negritude or HispanoAmerican Negritud. Rather, I wish to call attention to the contrast between Lima’s white status and his “black poems” and, therein, to the question of sociohistorical versus authorial race. Notwithstanding debate regarding thematic and stylistic criteria for inclusion in Negritude or Negritud, few critics have challenged the assumption that either literary movement is defined, before all else, as writing

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produced by people of African descent. While the black identities of authors associated with Negritude or Negritud is by no means transparent, there is, to my knowledge, no critical tract that compares with Freyre’s claim in his “Preliminary Note” to the Poemas Negros that the absence of African descent is a requirement for the production of authentic black text.3 The duality of white authorship and black text reiterates the “anthropophagic logic of modernity that consumed slave bodies” (May Joseph, in Sheller, 177). It also reverses the colonialist-cum-eugenic fear of consumption, whether imagined as literal man-eating or, later, pseudoscientifically, as miscegenation. What does Lima’s black speech reveal about the ethnographic and authorial structures by which Brazilian blackness is contained? What is the relationship between White Negritude, with its linguistic and genetic strategies of enclosure, and other black vogues that situate African primitivism as a remedy for European depletion? How is a particular form of folkloric blackness invented, one that continues to be celebrated and deployed today? The first section of this chapter analyzes Lima’s rhetorical strategies for constituting a symbolically Africanized model of national identity that accommodates eugenicist anxiety. In the second section, I turn to certain of Lima’s contemporaries and successors in the Caribbean and the United States. By tracing the rhetorical movements and logic of the Poemas Negros, I hope not only to lay a foundation for questioning the intersections between authorship, authenticity, and racial exclusion in the Brazilian imaginary but also to include Brazil in a broader, transnational reading of postplantation symbolics.

Poesia Negra In Lima’s most iconic poem “Essa Negra Fulô,”4 he depicts slavery as the culmination of an erotic attraction between Portuguese men and African women. This sexualized representation of systems of domination is more familiar in the United States in relation to colonial encounters between European men and indigenous “help-mates,” as in Terrence Malick’s recent film “The New World” (2005), a retelling of the purported love affair between Captain John Smith and Pocahontas. This is due both to the complex mythification of white/Indian liaisons and because the more rigid othering of Africans makes an Afro-European body politic unacknowledgeable in the United States. Like Malick’s film, Lima’s poem constitutes a “kinder, gentler” model of patriarchal authority who succumbs to—rather than rapes—his non-European

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partner. His “negra” speaks not only to the erotization of slavery in the Brazilian imaginary but also, by extension, to the way that gender is informed by plantation-era paradigms of submission and domination. In addition to being a transformation of “black,” “nego” and “nega” are often used as terms of endearment by whites and blacks in the northeast. The opening lines of Carl Degler’s seminal U.S. sociology of Brazilian racialism, Neither Black Nor White (1977) ruminate on this question and, in so doing, show how Brazil’s gendered race discourse has been read against its U.S. “antithesis”: “In Brazil, the phrase minha nega, which means literally ‘my little Negro,’ is often used by a white man in speaking to his white wife or mistress. The phrase has connotations of warm affection and sympathy. To anyone familiar with race relations in the United States such a use of the word Negro is not only unknown but inconceivable” (3). Lima’s poem relates the story of Fulô, a mucama [female house slave] who arrives at the speaker’s grandfather’s sugar mill plantation to care for the Sinhá [senhora, or mistress]: to massage her scalp, rock her hammock, and tell her stories from Africa. When the Sinhá accuses the mucama of stealing and sends the Sinhô [senhor] to whip her, the enslaved woman disrobes and seduces him instead: O Sinhô disse: Fulô! (A vista se escureceu que nem a negra Fulô) The Sinhô said: Fulô! (His vision darkened as dark as the negra Fulô.) (Poesia Completa, Vol. 1, 119–21)

Like the use of “minha nega” as a term of endearment, Lima’s plantation sexual economy is constituted by a raced, gendered inversion of relations of power. The master’s acquiescence to the “negra’s” invitation confirms his claim to her commodified body. Blinded by the mucama, the master’s vision is darkened by the spell she casts over him, “as dark as the negra Fulô.” His power is unmotivated and, hence, absolute, while the reiteration of her blackness and her nonname throughout the poem, “Fulô” [flower] anxiously objectifies her and covers up her rape. This alibi of unmotivated mastery grounded in the consumption of the black body reflects a populist conceptualization of power and subalternity. “Essa Negra Fulô”

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speaks both to an image of the state as the voice of the (submissive, infantilized) “people” [o povo] and also to the sadosexual paradigm of national character that became hegemonic with the publication of Gilberto Freyre’s interpretation of plantation relations in CasaGrande e Senzala in 1933. Lima’s master/slave encounter relies upon a conceptualization of powerful white masculinity and seductive black femininity. Black men are erased from this encounter while white women are, if not quite masculinized, at least desexed. The listless, embittered white woman is both an inadequate sexual match for the Sinhô and the agent for plantation abuse. Corrupted by luxury and quick to exact violent discipline, the mistress suspects that Fulô has robbed her perfume, her brooch, and various other feminine props and calls upon her husband to punish her. Her entreaty backfires, for she is the catalyst that brings the Sinhô and Fulô together. In addition to substituting the master as the agent for plantation violence, the mistress’ jealousy of Fulô establishes white masculine desirability and situates the mucama in an enviable position, not as raped but, rather, as the recipient of the slaveholder’s coveted attentions. Indeed, by the end of the poem, the mistress declares that the Sinhô is missing and accuses the mucama of stealing him (121). Whereas the perspective of “Essa Negra Fulô” is the slaveholder’s grandson’s reminiscence of what he casts as a delightfully sinful plantation domesticity, Lima incorporates certain elements of a stylized black dialect: cadê [where is], cafuné [scalp massage], Fulô, Sinhá, and Sinhô. As in other “black poems” such as “Xangô,” “Exu Comeu Tarubá,” “Obamba é Batizado” and “Rei é Oxalá, Rainha é Iemanjá,” Lima’s stylized black references are intended to Africanize his representation of slavery. The terms “Sinhô” and “Fulô” in particular suggest the introduction of the slave’s idiom at precisely the moment where the interracial lovers are produced as prehistoric national memory. For Gilberto Freyre, one of the most important African influences on Brazilian culture is the “softening” and “sweetening” of continental Portuguese in the mouths of enslaved blacks. As I will discuss in chapter 5, Freyre’s study of this linguistic mestiçagem centers on the softening of command forms. If black speech is constituted as the surrendering of blacks to whites, so it is that master/slave relations are Africanized and, one and the same thing, eroticized, transforming enslavement into a mutually gratifying economy. In the context of “Essa Negra Fulô,” Lima’s articulation of the constructed black denomination for master—Sinhô—situates white masculine

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authority as the product of the slave’s imaginary. This containment and reinvention of submissive black diction is underscored by the transcription of Fulô’s bed-time story, a childish tale about a princess who lived in a castle, set in quotation marks within the larger body of the poem. In Imperial Eyes (1992), Mary Pratt interprets nineteenth-century European representations of romantic relations between European men and African and indigenous women as “imaginings in which European supremacy is guaranteed by affective and social bonding; in which sex replaces slavery as the way others are seen to belong to the white man” (97). As in these “transracial love plots,” the intertwining of ownership and sexuality in Lima’s poem is marked by the mucama’s sexual aggression and the master’s acquiescence. Lima underscores this seigniorial passivity by casting the protagonist of many of his depictions as a child-master. In two narrative passages from A Mulher Obscura [The Dark Woman] (1939), published together with the Poemas Negros, a young male figure spies on black women washing clothes through a window in the plantation manor. In Banho das Negras [The Black Women’s Bath], the speaker observes: “Achei-as ágeis, diferentes. Mas Lacéio me advertira que era proibido vê-las assim nuas; e se elas soubessem que nós as espreitávamos no banho, contariam aos nossos pais e êstes ralhariam conosco e seríamos castigados [I found them agile, different. But Lacéio had warned me that it was prohibited to see them naked like that; and if they knew that we spied on them bathing, they would tell our parents and our parents would scold us and we would be punished] (172). In Zefa Lavadeira [Zefa the Washerwoman], Lima not only casts the master as a child but situates plantation exploitation as payback for Ham’s transgression, a commonplace rationalization for enslavement in the Americas now used to legitimate sexual violence: “. . . a pasta branca de sabão se despenha pelas coxas, as mãos côncavas esperam a fugidia espuma nas pernas, para conduzi-la aos sexos em que a A´frica parece dormir o sono temeroso de Cam” [. . . the white foam of the detergent hurls itself down their backs, the hollow hands wait for the slippery foam on their legs, to direct it to their sexes in which Africa seems to sleep the terrible sleep of Ham] (167). As I will show in chapter 3, this narrative reiterates Freyre’s thesis of whites’ erotic possession and consumption of blackness in the plantation economy. It also resonates with the hypersexed, unrepresentable mulatas of Puerto Rico’s Luis Palés Matos and Cuba’s Nicolás Guillén. On the other hand, unlike Antillean negrismo, both Lima and Freyre

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charge their white heir’s symbolic black mother with a weightier role in the formation of hybrid national identity. Indeed, it is the young master’s relationship with his enslaved mãe preta [black mother] that distinguishes Brazilian racialism and substantiates the Euro-Brazilian acquisition of black discourse. In “Zefa Lavandeira” [Zefa the Washwerwoman], Lima’s speaker reminisces about his plantation upbringing and describes “a torrente declamatória interior de minha juventude nos dias de convalescência” [the declamatory interior flood of my youth on convalescent days] (166). His abundant oratory originates with his contact with Zefa the washerwoman. At the same time, his sickness situates her as the cure for a disease: the speaker is both physically incapacitated and discursively unrealized until he is served by her. Like the primitivist vogues that produce Africa as a remedy for Europe’s decadent artistic expression, Lima substitutes anima for forced labor and surplus production as the European need that is fulfilled by African enslavement. In “Ancila Negra” [Black Servant/Support], Lima depicts a white male child’s filial relationship to an enslaved black servant, or “supporter,” and associates this peculiar form of kinship with both the incorporation of her language and her life force. The poem is an eroticized ode to Lima’s childhood “companheira e babá” [companion and nursemaid], in which she tells him stories about Africa and thereupon takes her life: Há muita coisa a recalcar e esquecer: o dia em que te afogaste, sem me avisar que ias morrer [There is still much to reiterate/suppress and forget: the day on which you drowned yourself, without advising me that you would die] (Poesia Completa, Vol. 1, 170–71)

Lima conjoins writing with the speaker’s infantile interaction with his babá in a number of ways. First, the poet’s dedication to Celidônia situates her as the inspiration for “Ancila Negra.” Within the poem, she is the purveyor of black discourse, imparting “stories of (her) kingdom” and “stories about creatures” to the youthful protagonist. In addition to the violent end she meets and the fact that her young white charge survives her, her iteration is attached to a distant time and place—Africa—that precedes and is marginal to that which is center and present: the speaker’s implicitly more developed idiom.

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Having related her African “stories,” the black mother dies. The speaker describes her lips “me bubuiando” [keeping me afloat]: the medium for the transmission of language, her lips sustain him, while, with their purple hue, they register her demise. Celidônia drowns herself and, as she does so, supports the child-poet above water, where he can breathe and speak. While the description of her death as an evasion—“black woman escaped in death”—suggests an assailant, the speaker insists that her drowning is self-inflicted. Celidônia’s death by drowning renders her unable to protest or to voice an accusation; at the same time, her blocked vocal passages register the displacement of her oratory by the white child. The speaker’s guilty reflection on this event is brought to bear through the repetition of “recalcar,” meaning both to reiterate and to suppress, but also to step on. The placement of the phrase “Há ainda muita coisa a recalcar” [There is still much to reiterate/suppress] at the beginning of each stanza frames the activity of writing and joins it to the desire both to recuperate and to efface his contact with Celidônia; indeed, to destroy her by writing her. The ioiô’s sexual attraction to Celidônia provides further reason to efface or “repress” her, and also to reconstruct and reinvent her. He describes his mãe-preta’s “black hands soothing me” and calls the “beautiful Yoruba girl” his “first sorceress.” Even in death, Celidônia, with her “purplish lips” and “lost flesh,” is eroticized. She is a “sorceress” cast as the agent not only of her own death but also of their sadosexual encounter. A “black angel forever degraded,” she is condemned for an accumulation of sins (suicide, sorcery, and the incestuous desire that sorcery provokes). Lima’s ioiô’s innocence is confirmed by his diminutive stature and extreme youth (he is “really very little”), his unconscious state (he is “very much sleeping”) and the complaint that Celidônia has abandoned him, drowning herself “without advising me that you would die.” His lack of agency establishes Lima’s unmotivated incorporation of her discourse, constituted as an inheritance, moreover, by virtue of his status as her figurative son. Celiônia’s death coincides with the transference of her spirit to him, signaled by his “bewitching.” Forever “stopped in childhood” in that “stagnated night,” he will “reiterate” and reinscribe their encounter. In “Ancila Negra,” Lima legitimates the ioiô’s arrogation of the enslaved woman’s story-telling capacity on the basis of her primitive discourse (“stories about creatures,” “stories from your kingdom”). In “Bicho Encantado” [Enchanted Creature], he underscores black incomprehensibility to justify the white mediation and containment

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of African voice. In the form of a guessing game, he represents the dialogue between two blacks who discover a starfish they are unable to identify: Só tem olhos, Só tem sombra, Babau! Naõ é jimbo, Não é muçum, Não é sariema. O que é que é Janjão? E a estrela-do-mar que quer me afogar. [It only has eyes, It only has a shadow, Babau! It’s not a jimbo, It’s not an eel, It’s not a crane. What is it Janjão? It’s the starfish that wants to drown me.] (Poesia Completa, Vol. 1, 161)

The first speaker identifies only those traits the “creature” does not bear: no belly, no intestines, no lungs, and so on. He is unable, moreover, to combine those nonattributes and name the found object. Though the second speaker recognizes the starfish, he concludes that it must bear a bad omen. He cannot fix it in the real: animistically, he interprets it as a manifestation of the supernatural, as the starfish who wants to carry him away. Lima’s black speakers’ wordlessness and irrationality offset the poet’s authority to contain and represent their jumbled idiom. As blacks lack language, Lima’s poems appropriate nothing but are situated, rather, as helpful interjections in a linguistic void. Blacks’ failure to interpret or communicate their experience entitles whites to transcribe it or, as Lima puts it, to reiterate the “stories” from Celidônia’s “kingdom.” By situating the childmaster as the symbolic progeny of an effaced black mother and by insisting upon the master’s noncoercive sexual access to Fulô, Lima installs a patriarchal model that speaks for Afro-Brazilians while remaining “genetically” untouched. Though the authority of this Africanized seigniorial figure derives from his contacts with black women, his figurative inheritance from them means that he is never mixed-race but always unwaveringly white. The simultaneity of

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Lima’s benevolent patriarch with Brazil’s exclusionary hybridism is never more apparent than in “Retreta do Vinte” [Parade of the Twentieth]. In this poem, the interplay between a white observer and mulatto performer is the mise-en-scène for Lima’s white-authored black text. The poem’s white observer is none other than Dom Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil following the transition of the seat of the Portuguese Empire back to Lisbon in 1822 and the abdication of Pedro I in 1831 in favor of his native-born son. With his overdetermined link to Europe, Dom Pedro II is the ultimate figure for Brazilianized, albeit uncompromisingly white, authority. The mulatto conductor leads his orchestra in the street: “O cabo mulato balança a batuta” [The mulatto commander swings his baton], as the emperor’s bust “spies” on him from above: “No centro da Praça o busto de Dom Pedro escuta” [In the center of the Plaza, the bust of Dom Pedro listens]. While Dom Pedro II is a canonized bust, the mulatto commander is designated by his genealogical identity and physical gestures—swinging his baton, tossing his head, and blinking his eyes. Lima contrasts this frenetic corporeality with the cognition suggested by the patriarch’s bodiless head. The mulatto performs in the street—the popular, the public, the pedestrian—while Dom Pedro II’s bust observes from the podium above. These oppositions, and especially the principal racial disparity, interface with Dom Pedro’ II’s gaze and, by extension, Lima’s observation and documentation of Afro-Brazilians. The last stanza relates that the Portuguese patriarch “spies” upon the mulatto and that his whiskers are “tão alvas nem sei!” [white beyond words!]. Dom Pedro II’s surveillance of the commander’s musical routine stages his assimilation of subaltern “sound” while the mulato’s overdetermined corporeality and intense movement anticipate the father’s arrogation of this mixed-race “son’s” subjectivity. His race is unaltered by this incorporation, revealing a conceptualization of multiculturalism that is devoid of the threat of genetic interference. This process is reiterated in another of Lima’s “black poems,” “Pai João” [Father John, a term commensurate with the U.S. “Uncle Tom”], in which he laments the whipping and mutilation endured by the ever-suffering Pai João while presenting the dissolution of his blood as a form of compensation: “O sangue de Pai João se sumiu no sangue bom / Como um torrão de açúcar bruto / Numa panela de leite” [The blood of Father John disappeared into the good blood / Like a lump of raw brown sugar / In a pot of milk] (Lima, Antologia Poética, 1974, 111).

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Lima’s Dom Pedro II represents the culmination of a seigniorial prototype whose legitimacy ensues from his unmotivated access to black oratory or “sound.” In “Ancila Negra,” Lima mitigates this figure’s dominance by characterizing him as diminutive and youthful [“I was small, really very small”]. In “Essa Negra Fulô,” the adult master’s surrender to the mucama’s sexual entreaty is the alibi that justifies his ownership of blacks. This innocent proprietary consumption of blackness wields knowledge that is confirmed by “Bicho Encantado,” wherein an omniscient white narrator lends unity to fragmented, incomprehensible black diction. Just as Lima casts the master’s sexual relations with the mucama as the antithesis of rape, this accommodating gesture effaces the narrator’s proprietary and disciplinary function vis-à-vis black discourse. Finally, in “Retreta do Vinte,” Lima mitigates the imperial gesture of speaking for black others by representing the Brazilian emperor’s passive absorption and containment of the mulato’s “routine.” Elevating this linguistic and genetic containment to the level of national patrimony, he confirms his own poetic authority and sustains a model for Euro-Brazilian national identity that is, at once, “hybrid” and “white beyond words,” “mestizo” yet unwaiveringly Eurocentered.

Poesia Negrista Lima’s authorial “substantiation” of mestizaje has a lot in common with Hispanophone Caribbean paradigms of racial mixing, especially with the poetry of the white Puerto Rican poet, Luis Palés Matos and the Afro-Cuban poet, Nicolás Guillén. In the same way that Lima’s poetry merges with Gilberto Freyre’s sociology, the works of Palés and Guillén are “poetic parallels to the essays of sociocultural interpretation written during those years by other Latin American intellectuals, such as the Mexican José Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica (1925), the Cuban Jorge Mañach’s Indagación del Choteo (1928), the Argentinean Ezeguiel Martínez Estrada’s Radiografia de la Pampa (1933), the Puerto Rican Antonio S. Pedreira’s Insularismo (1934) and others” (Pérez, “Ballad of the Two Poets,” 1987, 286). In addition to this, Palés Matos was influenced by Spengler’s scientific race theory in Decline of the West (1918–22) as well as Fernando Ortiz’s criminal ethnography, La Hampa Afro-Cubana: Los Negros Brujos (1906) (Pérez, 288). Rather than elaborate a reading of Afro-Antilleanism, I will summarize Vera Kutzinski’s interpretation of this literary movement as well as her observations of Palés’ and Guillén’s poetry in Sugar’s Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (1993). Kutzinski

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traces Afro-Antillianism’s proprietary mediation of black dialect and shows how the iconization of the mulata in Cuban literature from the 1920s onward becomes a tool for male authors, black and white, to appropriate black female generative productivity: Regardless of formal or thematic variations, regardless even of the different racial affiliation of their individual authors, these poems share one thing: they speak emphatically to what Teresa de Lauretis has called “the nonbeing of woman”: “The paradox of a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of but of itself inaudible or inexpressible, displayed as spectacle and still unrepresented or unrepresentable, invisible yet constituted as the object and the guarantee of vision; a being whose existence and specificity are simultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled.” (From “Eccentric Subjects,” Kutzinski, 164) Once the evidence of messy (that is, sexual) female participation in historical processes of racial mixing is eliminated by being made unrepresentable, mestizaje becomes legitimated as an exclusively male project or achievement in which interracial, heterosexual rape can be refigured as a fraternal embrace across color (and, in this case, class) lines and, significantly, across a female body absented by rape. (168)

As I will show, a corollary to the erasure of rape in Afro-Antilleanism is the articulation of a nongenetic form of hybridism akin to that produced in Lima’s Poemas negros. One of the strongest parallels with Lima’s transcriptions of mulatez is the poesia negrista of Luis Palés Matos (1898–1959). Like Lima, the paradox of Palés’ racial identity, and the “race” of his poems, is reflected in the ways critics have defined his work. Though he is socially constructed as white, he is from Guayama, known as a “black town” of Puerto Rico.5 While Vera Kutzinski calls his poetry poesia negrista, it has also been termed poesia negroide, poesia mulata, or as Julio Marza´n calls it, poesia negra. Writing during the same period as Jorge de Lima, Palés produces a comparable model of exclusionary hybridization, combining white male authorial subjectivity with black female corporeality. But unlike Jorge de Lima, there are no mãe-pretas playing caretaker to an emergent child-master-cum-national subject. Palés’ Afro-Caribbean woman is a consistently hypersexed object through whom the poet reiterates colonial forms of domination, collapsing her bodily movements with sugar mill plantation labor or rendering her as a landscape to be colonized. Her sexual objectification nonetheless performs a

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generative function in relation to the white poet: writing the mulata, Palés performs Africanization as linguistic and authorial/authoritative but never genetic or sociohistorical. In Palés’ most famous “mulatto poem,” “Mulata-Antilla,” he conflates the Afro-Antillian woman’s body with “Columbus’ sea.” By producing her as a map of islands to be seized, Palés feminizes the Caribbean and its original inhabitants, eliminating non-European men and imagining colonial domination as an eroticized encounter between European men and women of color. He also situates his contact with her as the basis for his hybridized voice: En ti ahora, mulata, Me acojo al tibio mar de las antillas. Agua sensual y lenta de melaza [In you, mulatta, I now embrace the lukewarm sea of the Antilles. A sensual, molasses-slow water] (Selected Poems, 82–87)

Palés’ speaker is both the colonial proprietor who lays heterosexual claim to the mulata’s body—and with it, the bounty of the colonized Caribbean (muslin, star apples, rum, pineapples, tobacco, sugar)—as well as her figurative son; situating himself inside her womb in the first stanza, he is reborn “from her tepid Antillean waters” in stanza three (Kutzinski, 189). The mulata-antilla is thus figured as an eroticized mother who gives birth to the white poet’s hybridized text, for “en tu vientre conjugan mis dos razas” [in your womb my two races are conjugated]. The lush, exuberant natural landscape of the Caribbean produces an atmospherically “mulatto legacy,” mystifying the coercive origins of hibridez as well as the production of a “degenerated” national body, while the “conjugations” of his poetic inscription of Puerto Rican hybridity substitute the sociohistorical mestizo. What is left of Palés’ mulata, like Lima’s Celidônia, is an eviscerated shell. While Celidônia drowns in the waters above which she holds her ioiô afloat, Palés’ emerges from the mulata’s uterine fluid [“la bahia de tu cuerpo”] as the author of that which is Antillean, creole, mulatto. As in Lima’s poemas negros, mestizaje occurs in the poetic representation of the mulata’s hypsersexed, violated body that also, with its “amor torrido de mulata,” naturalizes her rape. Also like Lima (and, indeed, Freyre), Palés is engaged in a confrontation with the United States. Since the early nineteenth century,

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British colonialists and, later, white North Americans, have tried to legitimize their mixed-race polities on the grounds of their unadulterated link to Europe, constituting their whiteness by contrast with the “degenerative” racial mixing of the Hispanophone Caribbean and Brazil. Possessing and displacing the mulata, Palés responds by fashioning himself as a superior colonial master. On the one hand, he establishes his Europeanness in opposition to the mulata’s naturalized body. Symbolically Africanized by his contact with her—white yet the author of hybridization—he incorporates the descendents of both masters and slaves, distinguishing himself from northerners’ inability to reckon with, and subsume, African difference. By further contrast with northerners’ puritanical denial of the flesh, he brags of his sadosexual pleasure with the mulata, wielding the legacy of the Caribbean’s eroticized plantation economy in masculinist defiance against U.S. incursions—with their “contraband of blond tourists”—in his Afro-feminized Caribbean turf. In spite of the in-your-face misogyny and racism of “MulattaAntilla,” critics have resisted readings that emphasize what they insist is only one side of Palés’ negrista poetry. Echoing Juan Antonio Corretjer and Arcádio Díaz Quiñones, Aníbal González Pérez argues that “rather than blaming Palés for being a (white) man of his time and place, the positive elements of his Afro-Antillean poems should be stressed. This includes their anticolonialism, their occasionally overt tone of social protest, their artistic vindication of the Hispanic Caribbean’s black heritage, and their utopian vision of Pan-Caribbean unity” (González Pérez, “Ballad of the Two Poets,” 1987, 290, emphasis mine). Alan West-Durán also insists that Palés’ poetry should not be reduced to its racist and sexist connotations: “Following Žižek, one could say that enjoyment is at the heart (or gut) of the Palesian ethos, and that enjoyment is something that both resists symbolic identification, and is beyond the pleasure principle” (“Puerto Rico: The Pleasures and Traumas of Race,” 2005, 56). He insists that in Palés, the “national being includes the Other (blackness), and not only as a social-racial construct, but both as national pleasure and enjoyment (jouissance)” (56). Even if we accept for a moment that sexism and racism are not all his negrista poems are about—and notwithstanding his defiance of U.S. imperialism—Palés’ point of view is unmistakably seigniorial and Hispano-colonialist. It is certainly not the mulatta’s pleasure that is in question. Apologies for Palés focus on upholding the “alibi” of black and brown womens’ hypersexuality while emphasizing his poetry’s

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liberatory significance. Of “Mulatta-Antilla,” West-Durán claims that it is an “erotic-celebratory (albeit sexist) reconstruction of the mulata” and that in spite of its racism and sexism it contains a message of freedom and liberation for the Caribbean (57). For West-Durán, the extreme irony of Palés’ poetry provides a reconceptualization of national identity that is decidly not elitist, paternalistic, Hispanophile, or concerned with racial purity (58), even as he acknowledges that “It’s germane to recall that in Puerto Rico miscegenation is viewed as a whitening process” (58). He privileges the mulata’s significance as part of a collective symbolic consciousness and imaginary, sublimating the mulata’s historicity (59). Granted, the subject of his essay is poetic representation, but does that poetic representation have so little bearing on women of African descent as subjects in history, particularly since Palés’ poetry is committed to the question of national identity and in dialogue with the social science of Pedreira, Vasconcellos, and Ortiz? The interface of Palés’ jouissance with plantation sadism and the usurpation of black voice is reflected in “Majestad Negra.” Whereas in “Mulatta-Antilla,” his language and tone are European and symphonic, in “Majestad Negra,” he employs what he conceives of as a syncopated black rhythm to describe the black woman’s “majesty” (Kutzinski, 188). Read together with “Mulata-Antilla,” one could argue that Palés situates his proprietary sexual/filial interaction with the Afro-Antillian woman—with its ensuing “racial conjugations”—as the basis for his authority to speak in an imagined black dialect in poems like “Majestad Negra.” The regality he describes in this poem, is utterly macabre, for it is the quality attributed by a spectator who reads in the black woman’s dance the eroticized rhythm of forced labor and sexual violence: Por la encendida calle antillana Va Tembandumba de la Quimbamba —Rumba, macumba, candombe, bámbula— [Down the dance-hot Caribbean street, shakes Tembandumba of the Quimbamba —Rumba, macumba, condombe, bámbula—] (Selected Poems, 58–59)

Like Jorge de Lima’s incomprehensible, incognizant blacks in “Bicho Encantado,” Palés’ enunciation of stylized, rhythmic black speech constitutes black articulation as oral and chaotic, rendered

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knowable—and even then, only partly—through his written transcription. At times, Palés descends into jitanjáfora, “presumably nonsensical words and syllables employed as phonic signifiers of ‘blackness’” (Kutzinski, 179) as in the last lines, “Va Tembandumba de la Quimbamba.” While his adoption of black dialect is a form of seigniorial mimicry—he “talks black” while he enjoys watching the black “queen’s” somber dance—that dance is itself a mimicry of forced plantation labor, a dance in which he delights in watching her “sweat until she bleeds.” Like the incorporation of Afro-Brazilian vocabulary in Lima’s “Essa Negra Fulô,” Palés’ “phonic signifiers of blackness” efface his dominant location as he takes pleasure in the black woman’s gesticulations. His Africanized speech is the remnant of the cannibalized black body as it is transformed into a linguistic, stylistic trait incorporated by whites. But is African syncopation in Afro-Antilleanism always problematic? Is it always akin to a black-face routine? Are there moments when African sounds speak through Spanish, reflecting a reverse colonization? Before turning to a discussion of the Afro-Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, I would like to linger for a moment on these questions. Kutzinski articulates the problem of how to read the line between African “survivals” in Spanish and Eurocentric inventions and appropriations of a supposedly Africanized idiom: Eduardo González has fittingly described mulatez, or mestizaje, as “maleness sublime.” In the case of poesía mulata, the “inescapable” rhythms of Afro-Cuban popular music played a major role in the construction of that sublime, which, González argues, “led to the exorcism of the demons of race.” Always the rhythm, as Benítez Rojo would have it. Poesia mulata’s peculiarity resides in the debt it owes to the percussive rhythms of specific Afro-Cuban musical forms, most frequently to the son and the rumba. The most obvious vehicle for this kind of musicality is so-called jitanjáfora. Many of Palés’ early poems, for instance, use certain words for their supposed “black” sound. It is, however, a common (and convenient) misconception that jitanjáfora is a mere playful onomatopeia and to that extent nonrepresentational. That convenience reveals itself to be ideologically functional at the point where words of actual and possible African origin, such as Guillén’s “sóngoro cosongo,” are dismissed as jitanjáfora rather than being recognized as elements of languages with their own discreet histories. (Kutzinski, 179)

Kutzinski may be right that Guillén’s poems contain elements of African languages with their own discursive histories. The problem is

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that “African sounding” poems like “Sóngoro Cosongo” run the risk of catering to white expectations of black primitivism. Many of these “nonsensical” words persist today as signifiers of blackness in the Hispanophone Caribbean, where the folkloricism imagined in poems like “Majestad Negra” is taken as authentic black vocabulary.6 Kutzinski suggests the danger of fueling this stereotype with her reference to the Cuban black middle classes’ hostility toward Afrocubanism (152). On a related front, Jacqui Alexander questions the subversiveness of Jamaican Dancehall, “given the ease of its recontextualization as a commodified raunchy and primitive ‘black’ sexuality serving the needs of the national tourism and music industries” (summarized in Sheller, 156). Doesn’t poesia mulata’s emphasis on black rhythm too neatly fit a comparable colonialist stereotype, given its adaptability to a trope of festive, musical, nonwriting blackness? Regarding this problematic, Houston Baker addresses the impossibility of enunciation outside the dialogical field inaugurated by the master/slave dialectic. For Baker, the enslaved’s recognition of his freedom first comes to light on the stage of his “servile mask.” The minstrel’s consciousness of his performance anticipates his mastery, since “mastering the available mask of minstrelsy was to open a field not only of discursive possibilities but also of radically altered black life choices” (102). Whereas Homi Bhabha suggests that there is no border between the mask and the face behind it, but an “essentially” camouflaged “hybrid” (1994), Baker seems to imply that there is an authentic subject behind the mask of blackface, or, one could add, behind the stylized blackness of jitanjáfora. Baker’s discussion suggests an additional question that pertains to the poems under consideration. In the texts Baker addresses by Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, as in Guillén, mimicry and the eruption into mastery are indistinguishable from the desire to recuperate black masculinity. Thus, mimicry is not always a strategic, fully conscious political maneuver, but contains elements of real, oedipal identification with the master. In constituting his mastery, for instance, Frederick Douglas by no means redresses the “cult of true womanhood” (the invention of white women as delicate, asexual, spiritual, and moral by contrast with the masculinization and animalization of black women, Carby). Like the absenting of the feminine required by Lima’s, Palés’ and Guillén’s black/mulatto poetry, Douglas’ hypothetical threat to rape the master’s daughter suggests identification with his master’s whipping of his Aunt Esther (Sundquist, 99) and, whatsmore, risks “playing a part that was to become in the wake of

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Reconstruction the archetypal projection of white racism—the black man as savage rapist” (Sundquist, 100). And though he writes that he reacted to the death of his mother as to the death of a stranger, he describes his mistress as “a pious, warm and tender-hearted woman” corrupted by the institution of slavery (in Carby, 28). Nicolás Guillén’s poetry also speaks to the ambiguities of mimicry and (masculine) empowerment in a discursive context generated by the master/slave dialectic. But while Guillén participates in the same “black vogue” as Palés and, in many of his poems, adopts the same musical black speech as his white, poesia negrista contemporaries, it is not Guillén’s “dialect” poetry that most interests me. Rather, I will concentrate on the absenting of Afro-Cuban women in his elaboration of mestizaje, and consider the relation of his masculine genealogy of national history to his own Afro-Cuban sociohistoricity.

Black Negritude? The white masculinist poems of Lima and Palés produce an exclusionary model for hybridization predicated upon the erasure of women of color and the articulation of a disembodied mestizaje. Nicolás Guillén (1902–89)—a “mulato” poet not only in the sense that he is the author of black or mulato poetry but that he is socioeconomically constructed as a Euro/Afro-descendent—complicates our discussion of AfroAntilleansm’s dematerialized miscegenation. Like Lima and Palés, Guillén produces a formula for racial mixing that displaces the AfroCaribbean woman. In poems such as “Secuestro de la Mujer de Antonio,” he objectifies her frenetically dancing body, announcing his intention to possess her and make himself the agent for mulatez: “te voy a echer en la copa de un son, / prieta, quemada en ti misma, / cintura de mi canción” [I am going to drown you in the cup of a son / mulata, burning within yourself, / waist of my song] (West Indies Ltd., 1934). In “Mulata,” (Sóngoro Cosongo, 1931), Guillén derides the mixed-race woman as the white man’s accomplice and compares her disfavorably with the “coal black gal” of his desire. In “Mujer Nueva” (Sóngoro Cosongo), he exalts an African woman but she is pre-American, untouched by the legacy of plantation rape. Guillén’s assault on postcolonial black women is illuminated by bell hooks’ inquiry into black machismo, whose rebuke of white patriarchy repeats its foundational premise: the absenting of the black female body (We Real Cool, 2004). As Guillén’s postcolonial black woman is a cause for shame, in poems such as “Balada de los dos Abuelos” (West Indies Ltd.),

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“El Abuelo” (West Indies Ltd.), and “La Canción del Bongó” (Sóngoro Cosongo), he constructs a homosocial, interracial genealogy for Cuban mulatez. In “Balada de los dos Abuelos,” Guillén identifies the embrace between white and black grandfathers as the origin for his speaker’s mixed-race. As in Lima and Palés, an eroticized interracial exchange produces a sound—in this case a song—that is the poet’s own voice. “Yo los junto”: the speaker’s master and slave grandfathers sigh in one another’s arms as Guillén, like Palés, becomes the author of mestizaje. —¡Federico! ¡Facundo! Los dos se abrazan. Los dos suspiran [Federico! Facundo! They embrace. They sigh] (66–71)

But whereas Palés appropriates the mulata’s generative capacity, emerging from her womb as the author of mixed race, and though in “Secuestro de la Mujer de Antonio” the mulata becomes the “waist of (Guillén’s) song,” in “Balada,” Guillén reads women out of Cuba’s history altogether. Don Federico and Taita Facundo’s mutually consenting, interracial embrace becomes the stuff of mestizaje, eracing rape and miscegenation and reconstructing a history of slavery wherein black and white men suffer equally and share the same desire (“ansia negra y ansia blanca, los dos del mismo tamaño” [a black longing, a white longing, / both of equal size]) for one another. Though Guillén imagines his master and slave grandfathers’ differences disappearing, their homoerotic embrace suggests the impossibility of interracial, male friendship; it is only as lovers that Guillén is able to reconcile them. For César Braga-Pinto, in cultures marked by colonialism and enslavement, there is no conception of interracial fraternity/friendship with the result that interracial male relationships are consigned to the realm of the erotic (“Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks,” 2005). In rethinking the ways that mestiçagem and homosexuality intertwine in Brazilian fictions, Braga-Pinto turns to Leslie Fiedler’s analysis of U.S. literary imaginings of eroticized relationships between black and white men: for Fiedler, this fictional love “is more than a dream of reconciliation; it is the desire for full acceptance, beyond guilt or the

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need for forgiveness: the black or brown man ‘will comfort us, as if our offence against him were long ago remitted, were never truly real’” (25). In “Balada de los dos Abuelos,” Guillén articulates a similar desire for comfort in the embrace of his master and slave grandfathers. But is it the white man’s desire for forgiveness in the arms of the man whom he abused? The black man’s wish to forget his subjugation by relativizing his experience in relation to that of his enslaver? Both? Guillén seeks not only Dom Federico and Taita Facundo’s reconciliation, but also the sublimation of their history of inequality. Despite the trader’s harsh whip and the “tears and blood” of the Atlantic crossing, in Cuba, the site of their encounter, there is only the desire to embrace. Where Lima and Palés refer to black men only as preverbal minstrels, Guillén’s Afro-Caribbean man is central to Cuba’s hybridization, yet his desire is to forget his difference, to efface his experience in an embrace with his enslaver. Though the black father cries that he is dying (“¡me muero!”) while the white grandfather is merely fatigued (“¡me canso!”), the reiteration of their equal stature and equal longing for one another sublimates the coercive origins for the speaker’s/Cuba’s Afro-European synthesis. At the same time, the nation is whitened through the black man’s emasculation and death. Where Guillén omits the history of rape through Dom Federico and Taita Facundo’s embrace—or misogynistically dismisses it as black womens’ betrayal of black men—this history is central to Langston Hughes’ (1902–67) critical account of the mixed-race body politic. A comparison of the poemas negros and poesia negrista of Brazil and the Hispanophone Caribbean with the Harlem Renaissance poet may seem jarring. How can we conceive of Hughes’ (poetry’s) blackness in the “one-drop” United States in relation to the questions of racial versus textual identity that I have outlined in relation to Lima and Palés? How do we read the history of erasure in Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba (where the African legacy is constituted as rhythmic, linguistic, sexual, and culinary) alongside the U.S. taboo against speaking of sexual and racial mixing during slavery? In the United States would Jorge de Lima’s poetry be considered black? Would Palés’? The difficulty of finding a vocabulary for comparing the identity politics of African American literature with the black/mestizo fictions produced “south of the border” is reflected in discussions about literary-racial authenticity across north/south lines. An anthology of Afro-Brazilian writing edited in the United States, Callaloo’s

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“African Brazilian Literature” (Vol. 18, n4, 1995), provides an example. In the annotated bibliography at the end of this volume, Edimilson de Almeida Perreira describes the opposing criteria that have variously been employed to define African Brazilian literature: “the ethnic criteria (that links the work to the black or mestizo origin of the author) and the thematic criteria (that identifies Afro-Brazilian derived content as the principal characteristic of Afro-Brazilian Literature)” (1035).7 Almeida Perreira ultimately concludes that ethnicity is an inadequate measure of authorial legitimacy since “we Brazilians have always had black and mestizo writers working with classical European models, and non-black authors writing about African-Brazilians” (875). Nevertheless, the U.S. context in which Pereira publishes this bibliography apparently demands that he employ ethnic criteria in his selection of authors. He expresses resistance to this standard through subtle critiques of the inadequate black “style” and perspective of many of the writers who comprise his list (1035–40). Perreira is right to challenge the U.S. obsession with binary racial classification and the premise of essential difference that informs that obsession. On the other hand, it is important to attend to the dehistoricizing implications of Lima and Palés’ “black authorship.” This is not to say that the poems themselves are not disturbing—as disturbing as Guillén’s—but that the question of “racial authorship” is important for what it reveals about how power is constituted in the Greater Caribbean contact zone. Langston Hughes speaks to the trouble of reading race across north/south cultural lines, but also to the slipperiness of the border. In the near void of discussion about the African/European United States—except in imagining the “tragic mulatto”—he undermines both U.S. assertions of racial purity and Caribbean and Latin American conceptualizations of the United States as a nation that “failed” to participate in the mestizaje that differentiates their racially democratic polities from the segregationist north. Hughes’ friendship with Guillén, his visits to Cuba and particularly his translations of Guillén contribute to a critical awareness both of one-dropism and identity politics and of the ways in which U.S. and Hispano-Caribbean race discourses emerged in dialogue with one another.8 “Mulatto” (1927) reflects the artificial distinction between northern separatism and southern hybridism while articulating a vision of mixed-race that, radically different from Palés’ celebration of plantation sexuality, indicts rape and the false pretenses of the white father of the nation: “I am your son, white man!”9 Unlike Lima’s, Palés’ and

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Guillén’s displaced, unrepresentable mulatez, mixed-race is sociohistorically located in Hughes’ speaker. His address to the white father who refuses to acknowledge him figures both mestizaje and white masculinity very differently. In Lima, an innocent ioiô absorbs his babá’s stories from Africa to become the author of the poemas negros. In Palés, the speaker emerges from the mulata’s womb as colonial proprietor and generator of poesia mulata. Guillén conjoins African and European legacies by writing a history of interracial contact without female participation. By contrast, Hughes makes a “little yellow bastard boy” the site of contestation. His ironic description of racial abnormality and illegitimacy is underscored by the force of his enunciating voice and self-conscious indictment of the brutal history of U.S. hybridization. Unlike Palés’ eroticized colonialist map of the islands, Hughes’ U.S. landscape is inundated with violence: its lingering pine scent and turpentine air preserve the rapes and lynchings that gave origin to the nation’s mixed-race. Of course, Hughes’ articulation of U.S. mulatez, and its coercive foundation, remain virtually unutterable. Even with the unveiling—replete with DNA evidence—of the open secret of Thomas Jefferson’s family with Sally Hemmings, the idea of a hybrid United States flies too far afield of the perseverant binary conceptualization of race produced by eighteenth-century pseudoscience. Whereas the Caribbean/Brazilian response to rape as national origin is to rewrite it as an erotic encounter—provoked, moreover, by black women—in the United States this topic is negotiated by a typically puritanical silence. There is continuity between Hughes’ inquiry into the problem of white paternity and Derek Walcott’s meditation on the legacy of colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean. In “The Muse of History,”10 Walcott offers “strange thanks” for the violent entanglement between his black and white grandfathers that gave origin to an exceptional Caribbean present: “I give the strange and bitter and yet ennobling thanks for the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds, like the halves of a fruit seamed by its own bitter juice, that exiled from your own Edens you have placed me in the wonder of another, and that was my inheritance and your gift” (27). Walcott applies his appreciation for the “soldering” of African and European worlds to a Caribbean poetics that is by no means race-less but that surpasses political, racial, and national genealogies. He dismisses the idea that Saint-John Perse’s French parentage would exclude him from the same literary tradition that embraces Aimé Cesaire. Though they are “racial opposites to use the language of politics, one patrician and conservative, the other

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proletarian and revolutionary, classic and romantic, Prospero and Caliban” (16), both share a New World sensibility: If we think of one as poor and the other as privileged when we read their addresses to the New World, if we must see one as black and one as white, we are not only dividing this sensibility by the process of the sociologist, but we are denying the range of either poet, the power of compassion and the power of fury. One is not making out a case for assimilation and for the common simplicity of all men, we are interested in their differences, openly, but what astonishes us in both poets is their elation, their staggering elation in possibility. (16–17)

How can we read Hughes’ speaker’s demand that his white father acknowledge him in relation to Walcott’s rejection of the concept of white or black authorship and, indeed, of linear genealogical/historical descent? How might Hughes’ depiction of a potentially beauteous nature, scarred but not spoiled by the excruciating soldering of African and European histories, anticipate Walcottt’s admonition that the Caribbean’s disavowal of his colonial legacy reflects Oedipal rage? Or that the perseverance of the traumatic link to the white father should be cast aside in favor of a conscientious incorporation of the nonvolitional origins of the mestizo body? Is it possible to bring Walcott’s entreaty to bear in the context in which Hughes or, indeed, Lima or Palés wrote? Can we adapt the incorporation of multiple racial legacies proposed by Walcott in his black island nation to the segregationist U.S. or to the Brazilian/Hispanophone Caribbean context in which an exclusionary model of mestiçagem/mestizaje seeks to bar black self-representation? An investigation of the poetry of Francisco Solano Trindade (1908–74) returns us to Brazil to further complicate the potential for such self-representation. Poet, activist, and actor, Trindade is the author of two books, Poemas de uma Vida Simples (1944) and Seis Tempos de Poesia (1958), both of which were incorporated into the larger collection, Cantares ao Meu Povo (1961). Like Jorge de Lima, he is from the northeast (Recife) but, unlike Lima, he is a black poet by sociohistorical rather than aesthetic or poetic standards. Trindade is a pioneering twentieth-century writer who influenced a generation of Afro-Brazilian poets including Cuti, Lepê Correia, Míriam Alves and Edimilson de Almeida Perreira, though, perhaps tellingly, he remains relatively obscure outside of Brazil’s black movement circles. Whereas Jorge de Lima’s nostalgic depictions of slavery-era interracial contact are predicated upon the disappearance of the black body, Trindade’s “Sou Negro” [I Am Black] centers on the speaker’s African

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origin and his grandparents’ resistance to slavery in Palmares, the largest and longest-lasting maroon community in the Americas,11 and during the Malê Revolt (1835), the largest and most formidable urban slave uprising in the Americas. By contrast with Walcott, who speaks of his white and black fathers as a soldered-together “muse of history,” Trindade articulates a black oppositional subjectivity that undermines the commodification of blackness in Brazil. Relocating blackness in a tangible series of historical circumstances, traced to Luanda and through the Middle Passage—“como mercadoria” [like merchandise]— to Brazil, he challenges the conceptualization of an ahistorical blackness that “tropicalizes” whites and requires the erasure of the black body. Mesmo vovó não foi de brincadeira Na guerra dos Malês [Even my grandmother was no joke In the war of the Malês] (Cantares ao meu Povo, 1961)

With his emphasis upon his ancestors’ socioeconomic mobilization and resistance as both quilomberos [maroons] and militants in the Malê Revolt, Trindade describes a black historicity grounded in race and class consciousness that informs not only his poetry but also his activism. Trindade founded the Frente Negra Pernambucana in 1932 and the Centro de Cultura Afro-Brasileira in 1934. In 1945, together with Abdias do Nascimento, he created the Comitê Democrático AfroBrasileiro. Trindade was affiliated with the Communist Party and, during the persecuation of communists by the Dutra government, he was arrested. He was also imprisoned by the Vargas regime in 1944 for his Poemas de Uma Vida Simples. His political engagement is reflected in poetic meditations on postslavery socioeconomic inequality such as “Tem Gente Com Fome” [People Are Hungry] that addresses the state’s indifference to the plight of impoverished northeasterners. Trindade describes the passage of a train through the impoverished reaches of Recife, disconnected in its speed and progress from the “hungry people.” While it seems for a moment that the train will stop and take note, the “authoritarian” brakes grind it to a state of apathy: Mas o freio de ar todo autoritário

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manda o trem calar Psiuuuuuuuuuuu [But the breaks with an air of authoritarianism tell the train to shut up Shhhhhhhhhhh] (Poemas de Uma Vida Simples, 1944)

How can we situate Trindade’s articulation of the visceral experiences of poverty and racism in a context wherein Jorge de Lima, with his nostalgic, seigniorial reflections on plantation life, is heralded by Gilberto Freyre as the nation’s greatest “black poet”? Trindade indicts race and class inequality at a time when, in the aftermath of Freyre’s publication of Casa-Grande e Senzala, Racial Democracy was fast on its way to becoming the dominant conceptualization of Brazilian culture. He contradicts the pervasive conceptualization of blackness among the social scientists of his era, for whom “recuperable” blackness consists in a series of ahistorical culinary, musical, sexual, and aesthetic properties that were transmitted to whites in the evolution of Brazilian hybridity, and which were diametrically opposed to sociohistorical blackness—black social identity—a trait that had no part in their celebration of Brazil’s black legacy. Trindade collaborated with many of these social scientists in their activities celebrating the African influence in Brazil. In 1950, together with his wife, Margarida Trindade, and sociologist Édison Carneiro, he created the Teatro Popular Brasileiro, which was known for its interpretations of Afro-northeastern dance performances like the maracatu and bumba-meu-boi. He also took part in the First and Second Afro-Brazilian Conferences, in Recife (1934) and Salvador (1937). As discussed in the introduction, the problem of black participation in Afro-Brazilian studies—and, by extension, in the production of Afro-Brazilian poetry—is demonstrated by the conflict between the black majority and the “men of science” during another conference, the Primeiro Congresso do Negro Brasileiro, in 1950, wherein Luis Aguilar Costa Pinto voiced his memorable injunction: “Duvido qua haja biologista que depois de estudar, digamos, um micróbio, tenha visto esse micróbio tomar da pena e vir a público escrever sandices a respeito do estudo do qual ele participou como material de laboratório” [I doubt that there is a biologist who, after

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studying, shall we say, a microbe, has seen that microbe come forth in public and write nonsense about the study in which he participated as laboratory material] (17). Afro-Brazilian studies—the discursive field in which Lima’s “black poems” are produced—is indeed constituted by a scientist versus microbe dialectic. As indicated, it begins with late nineteenth-century criminal ethnographer Nina Rodrigues’ laboratory examinations of cranial formation in relation to African descent and culminates with Gilberto Freyre’s “recuperation” of the African influences on what he casts as a fundamentally European and Catholic society. It is in the ethnographic space inaugurated by AfroBrazilian studies that Lima, and the paradigm of white-authored blackness—blackness that is incorporated and supervised by whites without being genetically touched by it—has evolved as such an effective strategy for containment. Trindade’s difficult intervention in the field of Afro-Brazilian studies is exemplified by the Antologia do Negro Brasileiro, edited by Edison Carneiro (again, Trindade’s collaborator), a collection in which black-authored poems, including Trindade’s “Pregões de Minha Terra” [Street Cries of My Land] and song lyrics are juxtaposed against white-authored social science. The contrast between black-authored “fictions” and white-authored ethnographic explanations of black culture constitutes the ethnographer as he who gives voice to musical, poetic, emotional blackness, containing it and making it knowable to white readers. The single Solano Trindade poem selected for publication in Carneiro’s anthology, “Pregões de Minha Terra” (456–57), produces the naturalized, musical speech of Bahian street vendors: “Ei cocadinha de coco” [Hey coconut sweatmeat] (Antologia do Negro Brasileiro, 456–57). By contrast with the identity politics of most of Trindade’s poetry—as in “Sou Negro” and “Negros:” “Só os negros oprimidos/ escravizados / em luta por liberdade / são meus irmãos” [Only the oppressed blacks / enslaved / in struggle for liberty / are my brothers]12 —the poem selected to be included in Carneiro’s anthology—itself a form of containment—depicts a series of banal, service-like “black articulations.” Hence this poem’s appropriateness as an example of the black cultural influence Edison Carneiro and other Afro-Brazilianists choose to highlight. The stylized dialect in which the vendor announces her wares—“Ei cocadinha de coco / Verdureiro . . . Verdura . . . Miúdo . . . iúdo . . . iú . . . do” (457)—deconstructs black enunciation,

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rendering it as pure sound. The dissolution of the vendor’s words— “Miúdo . . . iúdo . . . iú . . . do”—disengage the medium of her speech from a signified object. Dissected and traveling through the air, her words require solidification—the imposition of an ethnographic structure—to become meaningful. As in “Bicho Encantado,” where Lima’s black speakers are unable to interpret the material world around them, or Palés’ tongue-in-cheek translation of a meaningless black idiom in “Majestad Negra,” this vivisected black voice is the counterpart to the authorial/ethnographic containment to be analyzed in the next chapter. How does the white-authored transcription of black experience accommodate whitening? How is black authorship constituted as evidence of a U.S. racist/segregationist agenda? And how does gender play into the dichotomy between sociohistorical and authorial race in Brazilian literary criticism? These are among the questions I will address through a reading of Gilberto Freyre’s “Preliminary Note” to Lima’s Poemas Negros.

Figure 1

Storefront in Parque da Jaqueira, Recife, Mar. 2004.

Figure 2 Billboard for “Slave Barracks Motel” in Apipucos, Freyre’s hometown, Mar. 2004.

Figure 3 Entrance to “Slave Barracks Motel.” The billboard reads “Slave Barracks Motel: Man Makes Love and Love Remakes Man. Complicity at All Times.”

3 White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre

In his white-authored Poemas Negros (1947), Jorge de Lima eroticizes master/slave relations and projects the young master as the symbolic progeny of enslaved African women. Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-Grande e Senzala (1933) casts this same child-master figure as the emblem of African cultural incorporation during slavery. The pages that follow analyze Freyre’s “Preliminary Note” to the Poemas Negros to unravel his strategies for sustaining Lima’s authority to “write black.” Freyre is invested in Lima because his “black poems” sustain both the premise and the narrative authority of Casa-Grande e Senzala. In addition to emphasizing the mutual erotic impulse that underlies master/slave relations and the young master’s formative childhood interactions with black nursemaids, the northeastern seigniorial perspective of Lima’s “poemas negros” mirrors the point of view of Casa-Grande e Senzala, wherein Freyre not only insists upon but textually performs the masterful arrogation of blackness: he is the white northeastern descendent of plantation masters who consumes and “gives voice” to the experience of African slaves. Freyre defends Lima on the basis of the same model for plantation assimilation he outlines in Casa-Grande e Senzala: he cites Lima’s formative relations with black wet nurses, his sexual encounters with mucamas [female house slaves] and, most importantly, the atmospheric, nongenetic channel through which he absorbs “black reality.” I am not so much interested in proving that Freyre is a racist but in using his “Preliminary Note” to reveal the subtle machinations of his arguments and to show how they have provided an effective medium for presenting racism as an “African celebration.” Long read as a

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redemptive overhauling of Buffon’s theory of “climactic degeneration,” itself cited as evidence for the adaptive “blackening” of Europeans in the tropics, Freyre’s conceptualization of Brazil’s life-giving nature subverts phobias about the destructive impact of the “malarial tropics” but does so by displacing genes as the stuff of Brazilian hybridization. Accommodating eugenic aspirations of obliterating genetic blackness and assuaging fears of climactic degeneration, Freyre’s natural landscape wields a new “race” without admitting the possibility of Europeans “blackening,” whether as an adaptation to the tropical sun or due to miscegenation. Sidesteping genetic modification, he produces a model of figurative mestiçagem that relies upon nature as the conduit for the transmission of an ephemeral form of blackness to whites, seasoning them and acclimating them to Brazil. As with Dom Pedro’s voyeuristic incorporation of the mulato, Freyre replaces the mixed-raced body with a patriarchal narrating subject whose Africanization ensues from the fecund, tropical landscape of the northeastern plantation. In so doing, he sustains a paradigm of whitening national identity wherein a dominant subject articulates the desire of subaltern, nonwriting others and white infantile development near (not in) the slave barracks substitutes black historical experience as the singular standard for authentically black articulation. Like whitening Brazil’s incorporation and displacement of the black body, the white poet’s production of black text rests upon the dismissal of sociohistorically black authorship. Freyre rejects black writing on the grounds that it is imitative and, moreover, that it reflects a racist, U.S. inspired standard for authenticity. As Carlos Guilherme Mota has argued, his erasure of black literary production “elimina a possibilidade de caracterização dos setores dominados, enquanto tais” [eliminates the possibility of characterizing the dominated sectors as such] (1977, 65); embodied by white writers, black reality becomes a facet of seigniorial experience and, as such, the dominated cease to exist as a distinct sociohistorical category. This dual strategy of displacement and embodiment is intrinsic to Freyrean Racial Democracy and, thus, to the popular imaginary of race in Brazil. Freyre’s indictment of black authorship in the “Nota Preliminar” should provide an effective retort to critics who insist upon the ambiguity and democratizating implications of his narrative of master/slave interpenetration. His simultaneous insistence upon Lima’s white genealogy and the genuine quality of his black representations also furnishes a context for unraveling the ambiguities of Brazilian racial nomenclature. Freyre defines Lima’s “whiteness” on

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the basis of his class affiliation, his ancestors’ associations with the royal family and their status as slaveholders. While his use of “white” and “European” is quite consistent, Freyre’s employment of the terms “black” and “African” is more complex. On the one hand, he defines “black people” according to their relation to the means of production; they are slaves or the descendants of slaves. On the other hand, Freyre characterizes “blackness” as a series of commodified traits that, in the course of plantation relations, are passed on to the seigniorial elite. Freyre’s arguments are, of course, political, but the genre in which he articulates them is also charged. Whereas “the classic space of white domination remains that of the black body marked directly by physical violence,” Beth McCoy pursues the practical and theoretical links between paratextuality “and the larger political realm of racialized power” (“Race and the [Para] Textual Condition,” 2006, 158). Considering “how white power might be transacted through such inconsequential spaces” (158), McCoy investigates the struggles of black writers like Frederick Douglass against the whites who preface their work: “Thus are Douglass’ two subsequent autobiographies doubly fugitive, telling the tale of a slave who fled both the brute white supremacy of slavery and the equally effective (if more genteel) paratextual domination exercised by Garrison and Phillips” (160). My subject is, of course, distinct in that Freyre’s fugitives are “underwritten” in the most overdetermined way. Blacks are not “simply” negated by a mechanism for paratextual containment that produces their articulations as evidence of soulfulness or exoticism. Instead, Freyre’s paratext argues for Lima’s “Black Poems” primary blackness because of their white authorship, an erasure that is further complicated by its premise of democratic assimilationism. Indebted to McCoy’s questioning of the purported “subtlety” of paratextual situations, a denomination that “belies their cold efficiency” and shows “how much is at stake in tracing white power transacted through the margins” (158), the close reading of Freyre’s strategies that follows attempts to illuminate some of his most convoluted and misread paratextual calculations.

The Fertile Black Soil In his “Preliminary Note” to the Poemas Negros, Freyre produces Lima as an “acclimated” white man in the tropics, a hybrid who is nativized by his environmental assimilation of an ephemeral form of blackness. As suggested, this environmental assimilation turns on a

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neo-Lamarckian adaptation to the climactic conditions of the fecund Brazilian northeast. Freyre begins his discussion by identifying the northeastern plantation as the epicenter for cultural assimilation. Of “genuinely Brazilian characteristics,” Freyre claims that . . . nenhum mais cheio de substância particularmente brasileira, ao mesmo tempo humana em sua essência, que as tradições amadurecidas, nas terras de massapê do Nordeste à sombra das casas-grandes, das igrejas, dos sobrados, das senzalas, dos mocambos, das palhoças, das mangueiras, dos coqueiros, dos cajueiros dessa região; e resultado do contato de europeus com índios e, principalmente, com africanos. Com malungos, mucamas, babás, cunhãs, columins. [. . . none is more full of particularly Brazilian substance, simultaneously human in its essence, than the traditions that ripened in the fertile black soil of the northeast, in the shadow of the plantation manors, the churches, the mansions, the slave barracks, the shanties of escaped slaves, the thatched huts, the mango trees, the coconut palms, the cashew trees of this region; and resulting from the contact of Europeans with Indians and, principally, with Africans. With milk brothers (or “foster brothers”), female house slaves, wet nurses, Tupi-Guaraní women, Tupi-Guaraní boys.] (157–58)

Freyre collapses master/slave relations with the “natural” juxtaposition of plantation architecture with indigenous fauna. Though the order in which he lists the various sites reflects a continuum from the center of power to its periphery, he effaces that continuum through the enumeration of black dwelling places, conveying an image of plantation life that is not only natural but inclusive. He displaces the “traditions” that ensue from master/slave interaction with those produced by the plantation edifices and trees; though such interaction would seem to infer genetic transmission, with the depiction of traditions that “ripen” in the shadow of buildings and trees, he situates European/African contact as a fruit and conjoins this hybridized “fruit” with the human child. When at last Freyre describes the plantation inhabitants, he emphasizes their domestic, familial interaction. At the center of the plantation family is the “European,” who shares the wet nurse’s breast milk along with his “foster brothers” and emerges as a figurative black brother/son. The young European’s ingestion of black breast milk suggests the consumable, nongenetic quality of mixed-racedness in Freyre’s usage, and demarcates the site for incorporated blackness as the white body.

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Having equated the young master with the “fruit” of European/ African contact, Freyre now fixes Lima in that role. At the same time, he elaborates on the nongenetic blackness Lima acquired on the basis of his plantation upbringing: Experiência brasileira não falta a Jorge de Lima: ele é bem do nordeste. Não lhe falta o contato com a realidade afro-nordestina. E há poemas seus em que os nossos olhos, os nossos ouvidos, o nosso olfato, o nosso paladar se juntam para saborear gostos e cheiros de carne de mulata, de massapê, de resina, de muqueca, de maresia, de sargaço. . . . [Jorge de Lima suffers no lack of Brazilian experience: he is truly from the northeast. He has not lacked contact with Afro-Brazilian reality. And there are poems of his in which our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, our palate join together to savor tastes and scents of mulatta flesh, of fertile black soil, of resin, of fish stew, of the tide, of seaweed . . . ] (158, emphasis mine)

Freyre defines “Afro-Brazilian reality” as picturesque—soil, resin, the tide, seaweed—and as consumable, in the form of clam stew and mulata flesh. In the first case, black “reality” yields an atmospheric influence upon Lima. In the second, he incorporates blackness through the ingestion of food prepared by black women as well as the anthropophagic “consumption” of black women’s bodies. As with the European’s ingestion of black breast milk, Freyre insists upon the white status of the consuming subject. Through the reiteration of “our” eyes, ears, sense of smell, and palate, he identifies with Lima and addresses a community of white, male descendants of the northeastern oligarchy who, together, watch, listen to, smell and devour feminized blackness. Whereas in his “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” Oswald de Andrade describes the “native” consumption of European culture, Freyre not only reinforces the master’s power to speak but constitutes him as a universal figure characterized by the ability to speak for. At the same time, since “realidade” connotes “socioeconomic reality,” Freyre implies that through such atmospheric and gustatory contact (both culinary and sexual), Lima and other seigniorial figures do not simply access an ephemeral form of blackness but the specific set of historical experiences pertaining to Brazilians of African descent. Freyre attributes this interracial synthesis to the phallic penetration of the mulatta’s body, to Lima’s “savoring” of carne de mulata. As in Palés’ sexual cannibalization of the “Mulata-Antilla” and his poetic rebirth from the uterine “bahia de (su) cuerpo,” Lima’s incorporation

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of the mulata, like the Euro-Brazilian consumption of black breast milk, speaks to the pivotal place of black women in Freyre’s discourse. Yet he curtails his discussion of Lima’s seigniorial interactions with women of African descent, replacing the black female source for Africanization with the medium of the atmosphere. This displacement becomes particularly clear with the reference to massapê, a claylike black soil formed by accumulated, decomposed cretaceous matter that is particularly suitable for sugarcane production. Massapê embodies a long history, one that is both decomposed and black. Massapê’s generative capacity displaces the black womb as the medium for transmitting a black legacy, while its clay-like property underscores the potential for transforming decomposed matter into a distinct form. What materializes from the decayed matter of massapê is Lima, the “accumulation” of a disembodied black genealogy. Massapê substitutes the slave as the medium for plantation productivity, yielding not only the sugarcane crop but also that other “fruit” that Freyre has identified as the yield of master/slave interaction: the Africanized white son. Overturning Buffonean “climactic degeneration” and reinterpreting Lamarck’s “spontaneous generation,” Freyre insists upon the “scientific” basis for Lima’s absorption of black socioeconomic “reality” from the northeastern land. He claims that Africans possess an ambulatory quality that “transfuses” to a given setting and is thereupon transmitted to whites. Whereas elsewhere in his “Preliminary Note”— and throughout his work—Freyre dismisses U.S. interpretations of racial identity as segregationist, he now cites James Weldon Johnson’s description of “blackness” as disembodied and “transfusive”: “James Weldon Johnson, a propósito da poesia afro-americana, fala no poder do descendente de africano onde quer que se fixe, em grande ou pequeno número, revelar-se ‘transfusivo’; identificar-se com o que os antigos chamavam ‘gênio do lugar’” [James Weldon Johnson, on the subject of Afro-American poetry, speaks of the power of the African descendent wherever he settles, in great or small number, to reveal himself as “transfusive”; to identify himself with that which in antiquity was called “spirit of the place”] (59). Freyre further insists that in Brazil—and, moreover, in the Brazilian north—the African “transfusion” has been more profound than in any other region of the globe: Em nenhum país, porém, o descendente de africano tornou-se tão da terra como no Brasil. Aqui sangue africano e seiva americana cedo se

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confundiram na transfusão, a ponto de haver observadores argutos— desde Bates e Wallace a Waldo Frank—a quem os descendentes de africanos dão a impressão de mais filhos da terra que os indíginas: de mais harmonizados com a natureza do Norte do Brasil que os próprios caboclos entristecidos pelos grandes dias de sol como se ainda não tivessem acostumado ao calor da terra tropical. [In no other country, however, did the African descendant become so attached to the earth as in Brazil. Here African blood and American sap promptly became confused with one another in the transfusion, so much so that there are astute critics—from Bates and Wallace to Waldo Frank—for whom the descendants of Africans give the impression of being more like sons of the earth than the indigenous: more in harmony with the nature of the North of Brazil than the caboclos themselves,1 saddened by the great sunny days as though they were not yet accustomed to the heat of this tropical land.] (159)

Freyre fixes African descendants in the northern Brazilian terra [land or earth]. Earlier, he grounds Lima in that same earth—Lima “é bem do nordeste” [is truly from the northeast] (158)—and collapses his incorporation of “Afro-Brazilian (socioeconomic) reality” with the consumption of “fertile black soil.” If the African attaches to the northeastern earth and Lima is “truly from it,” then Lima embodies the African. In addition to incorporating and displacing blacks, Lima’s identification with the northeastern earth “nativizes” him. In CasaGrande e Senzala, Freyre insists upon Indians’ maladjustment to the Brazilian climate (93) and claims that Africans are far better adapted to Brazil. As they are both “transfusive” and more “indigenous” than the Indigenous, then Africans serve as the conduit for the transmission not only of black “reality” but also of native identity to Europeans. This nativization is also articulated in Freyre’s characterization of the Africanized white as the “fruit” of the Brazilian land and his reference to the European’s formative contacts with “Indians” and TupiGuaraní cunhãs [women] and columins [boys]. In Consuming the Carribean (2003), Mimi Sheller emphasizes the connection between hybridism and nativization as a subaltern survival strategy: “. . . creolization is not simply about moving and mixing elements, but is more precisely about processes of cultural ‘regrounding’ following experiences of violent uprooting from one’s culture of origin. It is deeply embedded in situations of coerced transport, racial terror and subaltern survival” (189). Likewise, Rex Nettleford describes creolization as “the agonising process of renewal and growth that marks the new order of men and women who came originally

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from different Old World Cultures (whether European, African, Levantine or Oriental) and met in conflict or otherwise on foreign soil” (quoted in Sheller, 189). Freyre’s nativization of Lima is also about regrounding him on foreign soil, but in this case it is the figurative plantation master, not the subjects of “coerced transport, racial terror, and subaltern survival,” who is the privileged hybrid. As in Palés’ “Afro-Antilles,” Freyre’s creolization/indigenization is nationalistic and anticolonial yet grounded in symbolically Africanized, white dominance. Another reference brings the relationship of cultural cannibalism to ambulatory blackness into even bolder relief: “O que há de africano se confunde, se mistura quase fraternalmente, com o que existe de europeu e de indígena” [That which is African confuses itself, mixes itself almost fraternally, with that which is European and Indigenous] (160). The location of blackness within the white poet responds to Eugenicist anxiety: black materiality becomes a misnomer, for it is consumed and replaced by Lima’s white-authored discourse. Freyre’s reference to fraternal mixing reflects the unrepresentable place of black women as the victims of rape and as the bearers of mixed-race children, while his engagement with Eugenics is further borne out in his description of “African blood” and “American sap.” Freyre affirms that “African blood” becomes indistinguishable from “American sap,” but claims that Europeans experience contact only with the vague property he defines as “that which is African.” Collapsing Indian blood with tree sap, Freyre underscores the naturalization afforded by the European absorption of “indigenous” blackness; substituting “genetic contact” with the impact of “that which is African,” he installs a model for national identity that is both assimilationist and genetically “white.” At the same time, Freyre casts this poetic-genetic engineering in a sympathetic light: it is not a coercive form of policing from without but issues from the African himself, who “confuses” himself with others. Freyre’s oblique accommodation of Eugenicism in this narrative of poetic-environmental assimilation becomes even more apparent with his reference to Lima as a medical doctor and, by extension, to “impoverished northeasterners” as patients in need of a cure: Esse poeta alagoano, em que hoje a América inteira se sente um poeta largamente seu pela cordialidade crioula e pelo lirismo cristão, francisciano, fraternal, dispõe de recursos de técnica, dos quais poderia viver vida fácil de glória literária, admirado e festejado por seus feitos e

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talentos de artífice; alheio às raízes regionais de sua experiência de homem por muito tempo menino e às necessidades e aspirações de gente cuja pobreza conheceu pequeno e mesmo depois de grande; médico de província, cuja miséria observou, cujo sofrimento sentiu com o poder da empatia que o anima com relação à sua gente, do mesmo modo que sentiu suas alegrias, suas esperanças, seus deleites doentios de comedores de barro, seus medos das almas de outro mundo. [This Alagoan poet, whom today all of America claims as its own on the basis of his creole cordiality and Christian, Franciscan, fraternal lyricism, possesses technical resources from which he could live a comfortable life of literary glory, admired and celebrated for his artful deeds and talents; superior to the regional roots of his experience as a man who was a long time a little boy and to the necessities and aspirations of people whose poverty he knew as a child and also as an adult; provincial doctor, whose misery he observed, whose suffering he felt with the power of empathy that animated him in relation to his people, in the same way that he felt their joys, their hopes, their depraved delights of mud-eaters, their fears of souls from the other world.] (158)

While Lima’s vocation as medic suggests that he treats the physical ailments of the “northeastern poor,” Freyre suppresses physical sickness, emphasizing instead blacks’ psychological debilitation—their “depraved delights” and superstitious “fears.” Positioning Lima as a doctor, Freyre constitutes his empathetic identification with those hopes and fears as antidotal. Like the African “confusion” to which Lima’s poetry lends order, Lima’s experience of black emotional distress contains it, placing it in check. With the shift of emphasis from physical to psychological management—by producing Lima’s absorption of Africanness as sentimental rather than genetic—Freyre achieves a “whitening” effect while evading the stigma of genetic engineering. Though he describes Lima’s empathetic identification as a source of “power,” he reiterates the noncoercive nature of Lima’s spokesmanship for blacks by depicting his “Christian, Franciscan, fraternal lyricism” as a response to black need, for Lima relinquishes the “comfortable life” to dedicate himself to the service of “his people.”

Black Authorship as Misnomer Freyre justifies Lima’s spokesmanship for Afro-Brazilians on the basis of his plantation upbringing, his absorption of black socioeconomic “reality” from the northeastern terrain, and his empathetic

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identification with black sentiments. The primacy of Lima’s Africanized articulation requires the dismissal of writers of sociohistorically African descent. Freyre’s critique centers on black U.S. authors whose work he identifies as emblematic of segregationism, by contrast with the assimilationist character of white-authored “black” Brazilian text. 2 The opposition he draws between black literature produced by black writers in the U.S. and black literature produced by whites in Brazil reflects Freyre’s argument in CasaGrande e Senzala, as summarized by Celia Azevedo, that “In contrast to American society, where two inimical parts constantly confronted each other—the white and the black, the ex-slaveholder and the ex-slave—Brazil presented two fraternal parts whose distinct values and experiences had been long interacting in a mutually enriching process that required no sacrifice of one element to the other” (Abolitionism, 1995, xii–xiii). Wielding white-authored “black” Brazilian text as a standard for national sovereignty of which the United States falls sadly short, Freyre’s dismissal of black authorship turns on a reference to the “black blooded” Brazilian writer, Gonçalves Dias and the “transfusion” of Dias’ sentiments to whites: No Sul dos Estados Unidos o descendente de Africanos é à parte da literatura como da vida nacional. Mas não no norte do Brasil—embora aqui existam também preconceitos de cor confundidos com os de classe. Existem: mas sem força para distanciar decisivamente os descendentes de africanos dos de europeus, a ponto dos primeiros só se exprimirem em folclores, excluídos sistematicamente do banquete literário. Gonçalves Dias tinha sanque de negro e, entretanto, é pela sua palavra de “Canção de Exílio” que todo brasileiro, mesmo o mais rigorosamente branco e erudito, se exprime e ainda hoje, quando longe do Brasil dói-lhe a saudade das palmeiras tropicais, dos cajueiros caboclos, dos canaviais dos velhos engenhos do Norte. [In the Southern United States the descendant of Africans is separated from literature as from national life. But not in the North of Brazil— although here also there are racial prejudices confused with class prejudices. They exist: but without the power to decisively distance the descendants of Africans from those of Europeans, to the point where the former only express themselves in folklore, systematically excluded from the literary banquet. Gonçalves Dias had black blood and, despite this, it is through his utterance in “Song of Exile” that every Brazilian, even the most rigorously white and erudite, expresses himself and even today, when far from Brazil he is pained by longing for the tropical

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palms, for the Euro-Indigenous cashew trees, for the cane plots of the old sugar mill plantations of the North.] (159)

Freyre distinguishes the location of blackness within Euro-Brazilian text from the United States, where the “descendant of Africans” is “separated from literature as much as from national life.” Again, blackness is “consumed” by white writing, for blacks are an integral element of Brazil’s “literary banquet.” Freyre not only identifies this arrogation as evidence of the comparative absence of racial prejudice in Brazil, but suggests that it gives rise to a more immediate form of black expression, by contrast with distanced, “folkloric” black U.S. writing. Had Africans been included in the United States “literary banquet”—and, implicitly, represented by whites—the United States might also have produced an authentic black literature like that of Brazil. Freyre’s praise for Gonçalves Dias’ “Song of Exile” (1843)—written in Portugal and describing the poet’s recollection of an Edenic Brazil— would seem to subvert his dismissal of black authorship were it not for the fact that he accentuates white writers’ mediation of Dias’ utterance. Even the title of the poem he cites suggests blacks’ displacement from literary activity. Dias’ “exile” resonates with his exclusion from the scene of writing. His “song,” like the reference to his poetic expression as an “utterance,” situates him as preliterate. Freyre suggests that white writers who transcribe his sentiments engage in a higher, more civilized form of representation. With the claim that Dias’ “longing” for the “sugar mill plantations of the north” is felt by even the most “rigorously white and erudite” Brazilian, he justifies Lima’s—and his own—romantic depiction of slavery. By tracing that depiction to the “black-blooded” Dias, he insists that Lima’s nostalgia is not that of the deposed master but, rather, the legacy of the former slave. Whereas Carlos Guilherme Mota theorizes Freyre’s projection of the northeastern oligarchy’s decline as a national dilemma (Ideologia da Cultura Brasileira, 1980, 73), Freyre goes beyond this to depict the source for that universalized nostalgia as the African descendant. With his model of black-infused white writing, Freyre establishes a clear division between black oratory and sentiment, on the one hand, and white writing and cognition, on the other. He carefully attributes Lima’s capacity to inscribe African subjectivity to his European descent: Em Jorge de Lima, o verbo fez-se carne neste sentido: no de sua poesia agro-nordestina ser realmente a expressão carnal mais adoçada pela

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White Negritude influência do africano. Jorge de Lima não nos fala de seus irmãos, descendentes de escravos, com resguardos profiláticos de poeta arrogantemente branco, erudito, acadêmico, a explorar o pitoresco do assunto com olhos distantes de turista ou de curioso. De modo nunhum. Seu verbo se faz carne: carne mestiça. Seu verbo de poeta se torna carnalmente mestiço quando fala de “democracia,” de “comidas,” de “Nosso Senhor do Bonfim,” embora a metade aristocrática desse nordestino total, de corpo colorido por jenipapo3 e marcado por catapora, não esqueça que “a bisavó dançou uma valsa com Dom Pedro II,” nem que “o avô teve banguê.” [In Jorge de Lima, the word became flesh in the following sense: in that his agro-northeastern poetry is really the carnal expression most sweetened by the influence of the African. Jorge de Lima does not tell us of his brothers, the descendants of slaves, behind the protective shield of the arrogantly white, erudite, academic poet, exploiting the picturesque aspect of the subject through the distant eyes of a tourist or a curious onlooker. In no sense does he do this. His expression becomes flesh: mestizo flesh. His poetic word becomes carnally mixedrace when he speaks of “democracy,” of “food,” of “Nosso Senhor do Bonfim,” though the aristocratic half of this absolute Northeasterner, with his body blackened by jenipapo and marked by chicken pox, does not forget that “his grandmother danced a waltz with Dom Pedro II,” nor that “his grandfather had a sugar mill plantation.”] (159)

When Lima speaks of democracy, food, and Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, his “expression becomes carnally mixed-race.” Democracy, in Freyre’s usage, infers Racial Democracy while food denotes the consumable quality of black “reality” and Nosso Senhor do Bonfim is a syncretic figure that collapses Jesus Christ with the Yoruba deity, “Oxalá.”4 The representation of these hybrid themes “mixes” Lima’s white race with black. Though “carnally mixed-race” poetry suggests interracial sex, rather than a biologically mestiço child, Lima’s poems incarnate blackness, substituting persons who, like Dias, have “black blood.” Likening Lima’s writing to the ultimate speech act—“In Jorge de Lima, the word became flesh”—Freyre insists upon the Poemas Negros’ originary incarnation of the mestiço body. Freyre further conflates Lima’s writing with “democracy” and equates this substitution with the absence of segregation in “literature as (in) national life,” a boastful contrast with the United States akin to Alejo Carpentier’s identification of “el bongo” as the “antidote to Wall Street” in ¡Ecue Yamba-O! (1933) or, indeed, Palés Matos’ command in “Plena de Menéalo” that the mulata “menéalo, menéalo / ¡para que

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rabie el Tío Sam!” [shake it, shake it, / to enfuriate Uncle Sam!]. Freyre insists that Lima’s representations are, moreover, more authentic than those of black writers who fraudulently write white—who “tell us of (their) brothers, the descendants of slaves, behind the protective shield” of “arrogantly white, erudite, academic” mannerisms. In addition to being artificial, black authors’ “erudite” pretensions suggest that they approach writing as a means for social ascension and that that approach is intrinsically invalid. In a passage of the “Preliminary Note” to be discussed later in this chapter, Freyre celebrates Lima’s “poetry that is not penned by an individual personally oppressed by the condition of being the descendent of Africans or slaves” (158). As Lima is unencumbered by the compulsion to transcend oppression, his writing is agile, spontaneous. By contrast with Afro-Brazilian authors, who write from a “distant, touristic” point of view, Lima’s seigniorial status affords him an objective, unmotivated vantage point for the interpretation of black “subjects.” Freyre underscores that perspective by referring to Lima’s grandmother’s waltz with Dom Pedro II and his grandfather’s plantation ownership. Reiterating that “black blood” interferes with the unmitigated representation of African “themes,” Freyre further directs his critique against black U.S. writers. Echoing his association of democracy with Lima’s white-authored depictions, he claims that black U.S. writing is emblematic of segregationism: Não há felizmente no Brasil uma “poesia africana” como aquela, nos Estados Unidos, de que falam James Weldon Johnson e outros críticos: poesia crispada quase sempre em atitude de defesa ou de agressão; poesia quase sempre em dialeto meio cômico para os brancos, para os ouvidos dos brancos, mesmo quando mais amargos ou tristes os assuntos. O que há no Brasil é uma zona de poesia mais colorida pela influência do africano: um africano já muito dissolvido em brasileiro. Uma zona a que estão ligados, pela sua formação regional, alguns dos nossos escritores e poetas mais rigorosamente brancos e aristocráticos: os pernambucanos Joaquim Nabuco e Manuel Bandeira, por exemplo. O que mostra que não é o sangue que aguça sozinho nos poetas ou escritores a sensibilidade a assuntos com os quais eles podem identificar-se só pelo poder de empatia, só por transfusão de cultura. Ao contrário: o sangue às vezes faz que os mestiços se afastem dos assuntos africanos com excessos felinos de dissimulação e pudor. O caso de Machado de Assis. [Fortunately, there is no “African poetry” in Brazil like that in the United States, of which James Weldon Johnson and other critics have

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White Negritude spoken: curt poetry almost always in an attitude of defensiveness or aggression; poetry which is almost always in a kind of comic dialect for whites, for the ears of whites, no matter how bitter or sad the themes. What there is in Brazil is a zone of poetry more colored by the influence of the African: an African already greatly dissolved into a Brazilian. A zone to which are connected, by virtue of their regional upbringing, some of our most rigorously white and aristocratic writers and poets: the Pernambucans Joaquim Nabuco and Manuel Bandeira, for example. Which demonstrates that it is not just blood that hones the sensibility of poets or writers to subjects with which they can identify through the power of empathy alone, through cultural transfusion alone. On the contrary: blood sometimes makes mestiços distance themselves from African themes with feline excesses of dissimulation and bashfulness. Which is the case of Machado de Assis.] (160)

Freyre claims that black U.S. writers address the ears of whites; to assault or ingratiate themselves with white readers, they produce work that is alternately aggressive or comical. He distinguishes this racially divisive literary production from Brazil, where there is a “zone of poetry more colored by the influence of the African: an African already greatly dissolved into a Brazilian.” That zone, and the white Brazilian writers who operate within it, verify Brazil’s democratic incorporation of difference. Dissolved into the likes of Joaquim Nabuco and Manuel Bandeira, the African ceases to exist as a distinct entity, much less a potential writing subject. Freyre contrasts the authentically black writing of white aristocrats, Joaquim Nabuco and Manuel Bandeira, with that of Machado de Assis, whose failure to identify with African themes ensues precisely from his condition as sociohistorically mixed-race. Reiterating that the source for Lima’s access to black reality has nothing to do with “black blood,” Freyre emphasizes his metonymic incorporation of blackness as evidence of Brazil’s unique accommodation of difference: Jorge de Lima, um dos maiores poetas brasileiros de todos os tempos, enriquece o brasileiro das áreas menos coloridas pela influência africana, com a sua experiência de nordestino de banguê nascido e criado perto dos últimos “pombais negros” de que falou Nabuco. Ao mesmo tempo ele põe o estrangeiro que se aproxima da poesia brasileira em contato com uma das nossas maiores riquezas: a interpretação de culturas, entre nós tão livre, ao lado de cruzamento de raças. Dois

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processos através do qual o Brasil vai-se adoçando numa das comunidades mais genuinamente democráticas e cristãs do nosso tempo. [Jorge de Lima, one of the greatest Brazilian poets of all times, enriches the Brazilian from areas less colored by the African influence, with his experience as a sugar-cane plantation Northeasterner born and raised close to the last “black shanties” of which Nabuco spoke. At the same time, he puts the foreigner who is drawn toward Brazilian poetry in contact with one of our greatest riches: the interpretation of cultures, among us so free, alongside racial mixing. Two processes as the result of which Brazil sweetens itself into one of the most genuinely democratic and Christian communities of our time.] (160)

Lima’s capacity to produce black poetry derives from his proximity to the pombais negros, from “his experience as a sugar-cane plantation Northeasterner born and raised close to the last ‘black shanties’ of which Nabuco spoke” (emphasis mine). He did not inhabit the black shanties: indeed, to have done so would be to suffer from the “oppressive” black status Freyre describes as a hindrance to the depiction of African themes and, indeed, to self-consciousness itself. Lima’s situation at a brief, anthropological remove from the senzala is not merely the basis for his specific access to black reality, but represents that which Freyre insists is singular and enviable about Brazilian culture. Since Lima’s black poetry confirms Brazil as “one of the most genuinely democratic and Christian communities of our time,” it provides an example for those who have thus far failed to incorporate, and speak for, the African. Given his experience as a child-master on the northeastern engenho—the “most genuinely Brazilian” of locales—his poetry “enriches the Brazilian from areas less colored by the African influence” and brings foreigners “in contact with one of our greatest riches: the interpretation of cultures, among us so free, alongside racial mixing.”5 Casting Lima in the role of interpreter, Freyre produces a Eurocentered model for national character that exceeds Europeanness for its free access to, and mastery of, that which is primitive. The association of cultural interpretation with miscegenation initially appears incongruous: whereas interpretation connotes an opposition between analytic subject and object of analysis, miscegenation infers synthesis. Yet Freyre’s hybridism treats the mestiço as unviable. Such is the case of Machado de Assis (discussed in detail in chapter 5), who fails to depict “African themes” and, given his “dissimulation,” also falls short of passing as an authentic “white.”

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Foreign Interventions Freyre authenticates Lima’s white-authored Poemas Negros by insisting upon his symbolic descent from black women, his empathetic identification with Afro-Brazilians, and his absorption of black “spirit.” He further justifies him by rejecting black writing as artificial and segregationist and by conducting a thorough dismissal of his potential detractors. Classifying Lima’s critics as racists, he aligns them with U.S. segregationism and neutralizes the “alien” quality of Lima’s white authorship. As suggested, Freyre’s dismissal of Lima’s critics sustains his own authority, given the parallels between Lima’s literary perspective and sociohistorical status with Freyre’s own. Moreover, both Lima and Freyre are emblematic figures of regionalismo, a literary movement that, in the 1930s, centered on celebrating and preserving the local, rural, preindustrial cultural traditions of the Brazilian northeast and protecting those traditions from foreign influences, particularly the standardization portended by North Americanization.6 Regionalismo’s self-appointed spokesman, Freyre claims that his “Manifesto Regionalista” anteceded the European-eating cannibal of Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto Antropófago” (1928) by two years, though there is controversy about whether Freyre did not in fact falsify its 1926 publication date as part of his ongoing competition with southeastern modernists. Freyre’s discussion of the regionalist bases for Lima’s impunity from criticism reflects the effort to privilege regionalismo as well as his own authority as its chief interlocutor: Já uma vez me afoitei a sugerir esta idéia: a necessidade de reconhecer-se um movimento distintamente nordestino de renovação das letras, das artes, da cultura brasileira—movimento dos nossos dias que, tendo se confundido com a expansão do muito mais opulento “modernismo” paulista-carioca, teve, entretanto, condições próprias— “ecológicas,” poderia dizer-se com algum pedantismo—de formação, aparecimento e vida. Desse “movimento do nordeste” pode-se acrescentar que foi uma espécie de parente pobre, capaz de dar ao rico valores já quase despercebidos em outras partes do Brasil e necessitados apenas dos novos estímulos vindos do Sul e do estrangeiro para se integrarem no conjunto de riqueza circulante e viva constituida por elementos genuinamente brasileiros, essenciais ao desenvolvimento da nossa cultura em expressão honesta do nosso ethos, da nossa história e da nossa paisagem e em instrumento de nossas aspiracões e tendências sociais como povo tanto quanto possível autónomo e criador.

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[At one point, I ventured to suggest the following idea: the need to recognize a distinctly northeastern movement of the renovation of letters, arts, and Brazilian culture—a contemporary movement that, having been confused with the much more opulent development of São PauloRio “modernism,” nonetheless had distinct conditions—“ecological,” one might say with some ostentation—of development, emergence, and life. Of this “northeastern movement,” one can add that it is a kind of poor cousin, capable of bestowing to the rich values that are already virtually unobservable in the other parts of Brazil and which require only the new stimuli coming from the South and from abroad to become integrated into the ensemble of living, circulating riches comprised of genuinely Brazilian elements, essential to the development of our culture in an honest expression of our ethos, of our history, and of our landscape and in the service of our aspirations and social tendencies as a people that is as autonomous and creative as possible.] (157)

Freyre defines regionalismo both as his idea and as the unmitigated expression of the Brazilian ethos. It expresses values that are “virtually unobservable in the other parts of Brazil,” since in Rio and São Paulo, the region that has been most profoundly impacted by “stimuli from abroad,” these genuinely Brazilian values have already been swept aside by modernization. Freyre not only exalts the northeastern regionalista movement he defines as his own idea, but expresses resentment toward the prosperity of the southeast and its more celebrated literary production with his characterization of regionalismo as a “poor cousin” of oppulent modernismo.7 While he suggests that distinctly northeastern values require “new stimuli from the southeast and from abroad” to become integrated into the national ensemble, the role of the southeast is merely to facilitate the flourishing of “genuinely Brazilian elements” that are proper to the northeast.8 Freyre not only qualifies the southeast as alien, but implies that the foreign stimuli to which it has been exposed come from the United States. As with his characterization of black authorship as emblematic of U.S. segregationism—and the corollary claim that Euro-Brazilian representations of black “reality” verify Racial Democracy—he dismisses critics of white-authored depictions of “that which is African” by inferring that they subscribe to a reductive, implicitly U.S.-inspired standard for authenticity: Há quem fale em “gulodice de pitoresco” para procurar diminuir, com esta geralização de desprezo, aqueles artistas e escritores do

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White Negritude Nordeste que, não sendo de origem rigorosamente popular nem principalmente ameríndia ou africana, têm se dedicado ao estudo, à interpretação e até à expressão dos complexos mais característicos da região, ferindo nessa interpretação a nota de revolta contra os últimos preconceitos de cor confundidos com os de classe que mantêm na miséria tantos descendentes brasileiros de africanos. Entre tais “gulosos de pitoresco” estaria Jorge de Lima: sua poesia afro-nordestina: poesia que não é de um indivíduo pessoalmente oprimido pela condição de descendente de africano ou de escravo: a única que para os inimigos do “pitoresco” justificaria uma poesia, uma literatura, uma música, ou uma pintura brasileira voltada com simpatia para o negro, o índio ou o mestiço. [There are those who speak of the “dainty picturesque” in order to diminish, with this disdainful generalization, those artists and writers from the northeast who, not being of rigorously popular nor principally Amerindian nor African origin, have dedicated themselves to the study, to the interpretation and even to the expression of the most characteristic complexes of the region, striking in this interpretation a note of revolt against the last color prejudices, confused with class prejudices, that detain so many Brazilian descendants of Africans in a situation of misery. Among such ‘dainty picturesque’ writers we would find Jorge de Lima: his Afro-northeastern poetry: poetry that is not penned by an individual personally oppressed by the condition of being the descendent of Africans or slaves: the only condition that, for the enemies of the “picturesque,” would be worthy of Brazilian poetry, literature, music or painting turned with sympathy toward the black, the Indian or the mestizo.] (158)

By targeting northeastern artists and writers of nonpopular, nonAfrican, non-Amerindian descent, Lima’s critics are guilty of racial essentialism. Freyre equates white-authored depictions of “the black, the Indian, the mestiço” with “revolt” against prejudice: to censor these depictions is to perpetuate the race and class prejudices that detain African descendants and the indigenous in “misery.” The fact that Lima has not been “personally oppressed” by the condition of being of African or slave descent does not compromise his work—on the contrary, the combination of his white sociohistorical identity and black literary expression reflects Brazil’s most “genuine” characteristic, the capacity to sympathize with and interpret and express the memory of slavery. By contrast with the bigoted assumption that writers should limit themselves to their own racial and class legacies, Lima’s transcension of his seigniorial status to express black “complexes” is racially democratic.

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Having failed to experience the interracial contact that flourished on the northeastern plantation, Freyre claims that Lima’s critics are incapable of discerning his “empathetic incorporation” and “experience” of black complexes. They are Estetas aos quais tudo que é popular, regional, ou folclórico repugna ou dá a idéia de simples “pitoresco”; de estreito “regionalismo” ou “nacionalismo”; de “folclorismo” ou “africanismo” apenas curioso. Aliás, falar-se com relação ao Brasil, de “africanismo” como expressão à parte da vida brasileira é revelar desconhecimento da simbiose Brasil-África . . . [Aesthetes for whom all that is popular, regional or folkloric is repugnant or suggests the idea of the simple “picturesque”; of narrow “regionalism” or “nationalism”; of “folkloricism” or “Africanism” as a mere curiosity. Besides which, to speak in relation to Brazil of “Africanism” as an expression apart from Brazilian life is to reveal a lack of familiarity with the Brazil-Africa symbiosis . . . ] (158–59)

Lima’s/Freyre’s detractors mistakenly assume that white-authored representations of “that which is African” reflect a distanced vantage point, the approach to “ ‘Africanism’ as a mere curiosity.” Unacquainted with the northeastern plantation economy, they cannot understand that Lima’s/Freyre’s writing expresses “Brasil-Africa symbiosis.” As with contemporary indictments against the influence of identity politics in Brazil, Freyre insists that Lima’s critics apply an alien standard to the study of his black representations: O curioso é que semelhante crítica, sonora mas prejudicada por intenções que não devem ser no caso as principais, vem quase sempre de indivíduos menos autorizados para fazê-la, tal a sua pobreza de experiência genuinamente brasileira; pois são cosmopolitas pouco sensíveis às características mais profundas da vida, do passado e da paisagem das nossas várias regiões; geômetras que desconhecem as intimidades de nossa paisagem humana. [What is curious is that such criticism, resonant but diminished by intentions that should not be, in this case, preeminent, almost always comes from the least authorized individuals, such is their dearth of genuinely Brazilian experience; they are cosmopolitans all but insensitive to the most profound characteristics of the life, the past and the landscape of our various regions; geometricians who don’t know the intimacies of our human landscape.] (58)

Dissociating Lima’s critics from the shared “intimacies” of “our human landscape,” their “dearth of genuinely Brazilian experience”

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means that they are the “least authorized individuals” to censor his “Afro-northeastern poetry.” Their cultural “impoverishment” [pobreza] offsets southeastern economic prosperity while their “cosmopolitanism” conceals the alien quality of Lima’s European, land-owning articulation on behalf of “the descendants of Africans or slaves.”

Freyrean Literary Criticism in Context To demonstrate the endurance of Freyre’s model of climactic assimilation and the application of that model to “white negritude,” I will turn to a second apology for Lima, Jorge de Souza Araújo’s Jorge de Lima e o Idioma Poético Afro-Nordestino, published in 1983.9 Souza Araújo’s discussion exemplifies the common sense about race, authenticity, and authorship in Brazil. Since he begins his apology for Lima by citing Roger Bastide, I too will begin with a discussion of the French sociologist who lived in Brazil from 1938 to 1954 and who, with the publication of O Candomblé da Bahia, Religiões Africanas no Brasil, and As Americas Negras: As Civilizações Africanas no Novo Mundo, became an iconic figure in the evolution of Afro-Brazilian studies. While this field has been marked by an artifact-making strategy of ethnographic “containment,” Bastide’s argument about the relationship between race, authenticity, and authorship actually reflects a far more sophisticated understanding of the constructedness of blackness than that for which Souza Araújo credits him. Bastide’s Poesia Afro-Brasileira (1943) influences not only Souza Araújo’s discussion of black writing but, in all likelihood, Freyre’s as well, predating his preface to the Poemas Negros by several years. In Bastide, Souza Araújo finds a basis for concluding that there is no Afro-Brazilian literature—in the sense of black-authored writing— and that white writers enjoy a more direct relationship to, and are thus better able to represent, “African themes.” While there are aspects of Bastide’s thought that appear to support the common sense, Freyrean model of white-authored black text, his overall argument— misread or strategically omitted from Souza Araújo’s discussion— undermines Freyre’s interpretation of master/slave dialogics. In Poesia Afro-Brasileira, Bastide claims that white Brazilians have represented “African themes” more faithfully than black Brazilians (129), but for Bastide, this does not mean that blacks are nonwriting, nor that their texts fail to express Afro-Brazilian sociohistorical experience. While the literature of black authors “exprima a cultura dos brancos aos quais desejam identificar-se” [expresses the white culture

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with which they desire to identify themselves], such imitation is not inauthentic but illuminates a sociohistorical milieu determined by difference (12) and the psychology of the “man of color” in contact with whites (136). Unlike Freyre, who chastises black writers’ infidelity to “African themes,” Bastide insists that in their imitative texts, the careful reader will discern the legacy of African slavery: “Apenas a África não é o assunto aparente. Ela está, como a filigrana, inscrita na transparência do papel, na textura, na trama da obra escrita” [Africa is simply not the apparent subject. Like the watermark, it is inscribed in the transparency of the paper, in the texture, in the trauma of the written work] (129). For Bastide, the tension between black authorship and white content and form that emerges in the “trauma of the written word” is dynamic rather than artificial. It is the natural condition of discourse produced in a mutable, heterogeneous society. While Freyre and Souza Araújo claim that black writers’ desire to overcome oppression is an impediment to genuine representation, Bastide identifies literature as the natural arena for social transformation: A literatura é um desses meios de ascensão, sobretudo numa sociedade mista, cosmopolita como é criada pela imigração européia, sobretudo nas grandes cidades, nas capitais onde todas as raças se acotovelavam, onde não se conhece senão a situação atual de cada um, enquanto se esquece a origem das pessoas que se encontra, se jamais chegar a saber dela, em que a mobilidade é extrema, em que o “bluff”, a aparência, têm mais valor que a realidade, em que o verniz literário abre todas as portas, mesmo as dos salões aristocráticos. [Literature is one of those means for ascension, particularly in a mixed, cosmopolitan society such as is created by European immigration, particularly in the big cities, in the capitals where all the races rubbed elbows, where all that is known is the present situation of each individual, while one forgets the origins of the people one encounters, if indeed one ever knew them, in which mobility is extreme, in which the “bluff,” the appearance, has more value than reality, in which literary polish opens all doors, even those of the aristocratic salons.] (131)

Bastide perceives identity in Brazil as performative rather than historically inscribed: the bluff not only surpasses but constitutes the real. Bastide does not seek out or privilege a literary “original,” nor is he concerned with “authentic” African thematics. His reading is much more subtle than that, for he interprets literary artifice as a medium

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for the production of social truth. Unlike Freyre, who finds fault with what he calls the derivative quality of black-authored text, Bastide emphasizes that black writers’ mimicry of white discourse yields something new that, while not “African,” is indeed Afro-Brazilian. Bastide’s engagement with imitative literature reflects his privaleging of the “present situation” over the past. The “African themes” to which white Brazilian writers have been more attentive belong to national prehistory. On the other hand, “derivative” black authorship reflects a reality that is contemporary and directed toward the future. Bastide claims that while assimilation has been an impediment to black cultural production, with time, black Brazilian authors will overcome the barrier of “white form” and develop an authentic and original literature (19) that will be Brazilian rather than black (130). Though this claim resonates with Freyre’s insistence that the absence of a black Brazilian literature derives from the “dissolution” of “that which is African” into “that which is Brazilian,” the value judgment is quite distinct. Unlike Freyre, who favors “African and slave themes” associated with the latifundio [large landed estate]—themes that recall a time preceding the decline of the northeastern oligarchy—and who rejects the possibility of an evolving definition of that which is Afro-Brazilian, Bastide does not want literature to reconstitute the past but rather, with its bluff, to reflect and inform a dynamic present in which “the doors of the aristocratic salons” will yield to previously unwelcome guests. Souza Araújo ignores Bastide’s insistence that black writers reflect an Afro-Brazilian present that is distinct from Africa as past or artifact. Instead, he concentrates only on Bastide’s claim that white writers have represented African “motifs” more faithfully than blacks: Roger Bastide analisa as obras dos mais representativos poetas negros de nossa literatura, do ponto de vista de sua participação social, particularmente no que tange aos problemas da escravidão. Conclui o analista que a maioria desses artistas não realizou uma poesia de afirmação dos valores negros e que essa conquista do espaço só veio a efetivar-se com a ação do branco. E que, em virtude da necessidade de ascender socialmente e utilizando-se mesmo da poesia para assegurar essa ascensão, algumas das mais cultuadas estrelas da poesia brasileira não tocaram nos motivos negros-escravos em sua obra ou, quando o fizeram, deixaram impressos preconceitos eivados da insegurança de sua margem na sociedade. [Roger Bastide analyzes the work of the most representative black poets of our literature, from the point of view of their social participation, in particular that which relates to the problems of

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slavery. The analyst concludes that the majority of these artists did not produce poetry that affirmed black values and that the conquest of that field was achieved only through the actions of whites. And that, by virtue of the necessity to ascend socially and using the poetry itself to ensure such ascension, some of the most cherished celebrities of Brazilian poetry did not touch upon black-slave motifs in their work or, when they did so, they communicated prejudices infected by the insecurity of their societal marginalization.] (61)

Bastide does not in fact perceive black writers’ desire for socioeconomic ascendance as diminishing their work, nor does he conceive of black subjects as fixed or unchanging. Nonetheless, in Bastide, Souza Araújo finds confirmation for the failure of black authors to affirm “black values.” Like Freyre, he attributes that failure to the “insecure, marginal” position black writers endeavor to overcome. Because they write to improve their status, their representations of “black-slave motifs” are biased, unnatural. Black people should neither write nor— one and the same thing—attempt to modify their standing, as in Solano Trindade’s poetry discussed in chapter 2, which Souza Araújo would surely have mocked. Souza Araújo censures Bastide’s discussion of the manner in which black writers’ marginal status emerges in the “trauma” of writing to conclude that only those who already enjoy a secure, dominant social position are qualified to identify with and represent the “problems of slavery.” For Souza Araújo, white writers alone have “conquered” the “marginal field” of “black-slave motifs.” Associating “social participation” with inauthentic discourse, Souza Araújo invalidates black efforts to transcend the “insecurity” of the “margin.” Souza Araújo claims that by engaging in the activity of writing, black authors loose touch with their African ancestry. The single exception is Luís Gama, the Afro-Brazilian poet, journalist, abolitionist, and lawyer who won freedom for more than one thousand slave clients during trials in São Paulo in the 1860s and 1870s, whom Souza Araújo finds to be “consciente dos valores intrínsicos do elemento negro” [conscious of the intrinsic values of the black element] (63). On the other hand, since “elemento negro” signifies both the black population and the “criminal sphere,” Souza Araújo qualifies Gama’s writing as transgressive even as he proclaims its merit. He proceeds from this disingenuous expression of approval to assert that black Brazilian writers have, throughout history, failed to meaningfully depict “black-slave motifs”: O primeiro poeta negro reconhecido no plano geral da literatura brasileira foi Domingos Caldas Barbosa, improvisador de modinhas

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Like Freyre, Souza Araújo indicts black ambitions to transcend socioeconomic hardship and rejects black writing as the mechanism for such dynamism. He ascribes Caldas’, Barbosa’s, and Alvarenga’s failures to their use of “poesia como instrumento de promoção social, como meio de penetração na ‘grande família branca’” [poetry as an instrument for social promotion, as a means for penetrating the “great white family”] (63). As in Freyre’s denunciation of Macahdo, the artificiality of the white screen they adopt suggests that, having forgotten “blackness,” they also fail to convincingly pass as white. Souza Araújo enumerates the subsequent failures of black writing, flawed from its inception: Machado de Assis “esqueceu-se da questão dos negros” [forgot the question of blacks] (65); Bernardino Lopes, Cruz e Sousa, Gonçalves Dias, Silva Alvarenga, and Tobias Barreto were “opportunists” who took up the pen in order to ingratiate themselves into white society (64). In their identification with European Brazilians—Araújo emphasizes their “mockery” of white speech—they were deafened to the “lamentos das senzalas” [slave barrack lamentations] (61). Of Gonçalves Dias, Souza Araújo claims that while some of his poetry addressed “slave themes,” it did so “de forma pouco viril” [in a not very virile manner] (64). In addition to the distinction between sociohistorical and “textual” identity required for legitimating Lima’s white black voice, Souza-Araújo’s assault on Dias’ masculinity further recalls Freyre’s twofold projection of white authorial and erotic control; his equation of the master’s sexual access to black bodies with his capacity to mediate “black-slave motifs.” Describing the thematic and stylistic qualities that poetry by blacks should ideally embody, Souza Araújo nonetheless conceptualizes blacks as nonwriting: Sem embargo da valiosa contribuição de Luís Gama, o ideal seria que os poetas fizessem erguer-se até à poesia os cânticos religiosos dos negros, as cantigas de ninar das mucamas, os cantos e histórias do

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trabalho, rural ou urbano, com a inclusão de palavras semi-africanas, ao invés de aportuguesamento delas no vocabulário poético. [Notwithstanding the valuable contribution of Luís Gama, the ideal would be for poets to elevate to the level of poetry the religious hymns of blacks, the mucama’s lullabies, the work songs and stories, rural or urban, with the inclusion of semi-African words, instead of their portuguesization in the poetic vocabulary.] (64)

Souza Araújo once again dismisses the poet and abolitionist lawyer, Luís Gama, since “ideally,” black poetry should not challenge the status quo. Rather, genuine black genres—hymns, lullabies, work songs, and stories—pertain to field and domestic labor in the slavery economy and are resolutely oral. Since writing is antithetical to the manual labor and orality to which Africans are naturally predisposed, any attempt to represent black “motifs” distances black authors from the activities that confer their authenticity. In addition to this thematic double-bind, black writing cannot help but fail on a stylistic level. “Portuguesization” suggests mimicry. “Semi-African” vocabulary denotes the partial remainder of a now inaccessible original. Even if black writers were to employ “semi-African” words, such usage would never signify formal linguistic mastery, but only the command of a seemingly African discourse. Like Freyre, Souza Araujo attributes the impossibility of black selfconsciousness to socioeconomic degradation and the intrinsic invalidity of approaching writing as a means for sociopolitical ascension. The counterpart to blacks’ radical exclusion from writing is the elevated white vantage point that affords mastery of all subject positions at once. Dismissing the black male writers who “esqueceram-se dos motivos poéticos existentes no seio do elemento escravo entre nós” [forgot the poetic intentions that exist in the breast of the slave element in all of us] (65), Souza Araújo situates a lineage of white male northeasterners in their place: Para Renato Mendonça, arrimando-se na opinião de Sílvio Romero, Trajano Galvão é que seria precursor, juntamente com Castro Alves, Celso de Magalhães e Melo Morais Filho, da poesia do negro no Brasil . . . . Daí vem a confirmação de que o branco deu tratamento mais autêntico à questão do negro que o próprio elemento negro, em vista da necessidade que este tinha de ascender socialmente. [For Renato Mendonça, echoing the opinion of Sílvio Romero, Trajano Galvão would be the precursor, together with Castro Alves, Celso de Magalhães and Melo Morais Filho, of the poetry of the black in Brazil . . . .

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White Negritude From this we can confirm that the white has more authentically represented the black question than the black element itself, given the necessity of the latter to ascend socially.] (65)

As in his earlier reference to Luís Gama, with the “black question” and the “black element,” Souza Araújo qualifies blackness as a social problem and equates black writing with transgressive, criminal behavior. Substituting transgressive, duplicitous black writers with white writers—a kind of word police—Souza Araújo’s defensive enumeration of literary authorities, together with the leap of faith required by his unconvincing deduction, “from this we can confirm. . . . ,” reflects and compensates for the instability of this displacement. Having established a literary genealogy for the white mediation of “black-slave motifs,” Souza Araújo proclaims the impeccable integrity of Lima’s black verse: Os poemas de JL se assentam, sobretudo, na rica sonoridade dos vocábulos afro-nordestinos, no toque de sugestão dos versos, na ampla sinestesia e no ritmo. Um ritmo febril que transporta o leitor às situações descritas ou evocadas—do cheiro das comidas, aos mistérios dos cultos e à força primitiva dos cantos, danças e histórias do elemento africano. Essa qualificação poética em Jorge de Lima consagra um amplo idioma afro-nordestino, seja nos cânticos religiosos, nas cantigas de ninar, nos contos e adivinhas, nos lundus e dengos das mucamas, nos cantos à natureza, com que logrou incorporar à porre da poesia dita superior todo o gênio poético dos sofreres, alegrias, sentimentos e emoções contidos no negro-escravo. [The poems of JL are based, above all, in the rich sonority of Afronortheastern words, in the suggestive tone of the verses, in their ample synaesthesia and rhythm. A febrile rhythm that transports the reader to the situations described or evoked—from the scent of the foods to the mysteries of the cults and the primitive power of the chants, dances and stories of the African element. This poetic qualification in Jorge de Lima consecrates an ample Afro-notheastern idiom, whether in the religious hymns, the lullabies, the stories and riddles, the African dances and coquetry of the mucamas, the incantations to nature, through which he achieved the incorporation into superior poetry of all the poetic spirit of the sufferings, joys, sentiments, and emotions contained in the black-slave.] (68)

Souza Araújo’s remark that Jorge de Lima’s poetry “transports” the reader to the slavery economy recalls Freyre’s characterization of Lima as a conduit for the transmission of plantation traditions to

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Brazilians and foreigners who have not enjoyed access to this most substantively Brazilian site. Also like Freyre, Souza Araújo grounds Lima’s arrogation of a black authorial subject position in the poet’s cannibalistic ingestion of black food, his incorporation of black spirituality and rhythm, and his attachment to the “natural” world. Free of the interference of “black identity”—and the concomitant drive to transcend oppression—Lima is able to mediate black sentiments fluidly: he transforms the latent poetic spirit embedded in “black-slave” suffering and joy into written verse.

Marilene Felinto’s “Vision of the Black” A more recent justification for the seigniorial mediation of black “reality” further demonstrates the perseverance of Freyre’s model. This time the context is an article defending Freyre himself, one that unearths a number of rich nuances that in fact upset Freyre’s narrative at the same time that it seeks to defend him. This apology for Freyre reflects not only the ubiquitous quality of his symbolically Africanized senhor as leit motif for Brazilian cultural identity, but articulates the importance of homosocial and homosexual exchange in Freyre’s sociology, a dimension of his work that will be important for situating him in the context of Afro-Antilleanism, particulary Guillén’s “Balada de los dos Abuelos” (discussed in chapter 2) and Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un Cimarrón (1996). Freyre’s representations of plantation-era homosexuality in relation to miscegenation have been taken up by Jossiana Arroyo (“Brazilian Homoerotics,” 2002) and by César Braga-Pinto (2005), who argues that Freyre conceptualizes homosexuality as a step to “normative” heterosexuality much as mestiçagem ultimately leads to whitening. If not entirely taboo, queer readings of Freyre, much like critiques of Racial Democracy, have been frequently dismissed as interventions of U.S.-style identity politics or, to quote Freyre, of cosmopolitans who “don’t know the intimacies of our human landscape.” In March, 1995, the Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo showcased a debate on the merit of Freyre’s analysis of slavery and race in Brazil. In an article that appeared in the course of this debate, the well-known—and admittedly polemical—novelist and literary critic Marilene Felinto10 defends Freyre by employing a logic that almost, but not quite, duplicates Freyre’s justification for Lima’s black verse.

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In “Visões do Negro” [Visions of the Black], Felinto dismisses Freyre’s detractors on the basis of their U.S.-inspired standards for evaluating Brazilian race relations. She then attributes Freyre’s authentic “vision of the black” to his seigniorial consumption of African identity. Her justification for Freyre takes on added significance because she herself is a figure for contested definitions of race. Felinto has dismissed critics—both Brazilian and U.S.—who have identified her as a black writer. Again, she has rejected this classification on the grounds that it is inappropriate for Brazil’s unique sociohistorical context. Though her apology for Freyre resonates with Freyre’s own model for cultural incorporation, it is quite possibly due to her own contested racial and authorial identity that her argument is somewhat more nuanced than those of her precursors. While Felinto legitimates Freyre’s vision of black historical experience on the basis of his childhood, seigniorial contact with slaves, she inscribes a more fluid model for the transmission of identity—one that suggests the potential for the slave’s incorporation of seigniorial status and, by extension, for black “vision” and the masterful transcription of whiteness. Though, like Freyre, Felinto equates master/slave sexual relations with the legitimate mediation of “black-slave motifs,” her reference to the mutual penetration between young masters and whipping boys upsets Freyre’s insistence upon the socioeconomically white containment of black “reality”: Freyre viu por dentro a introdução e a penetração da raça negra no estofo social do nosso povo. Por dentro . . . talvez literalmente por dentro: como quem foi se misturando “gostosamente” com mulheres de cor, segundo ele próprio diz dos colonizadores portugueses que se multiplicaram em filhos mestiços numerosos. Viu com conhecimento de causa—como quem, sinhozinho branco, fez troca-troca com negrinhos escravos, companheiros de brinquedo, nos esconderijos dos quintais do solar de Apipucos, em Recife. [Freyre saw from within the introduction and penetration of the black race in the social stuff of our people. From within . . . maybe literally from within: as one who mixed “deliciously” with women of color, as he himself said of the Portuguese colonizers who multiplied themselves in numerous mestiço babies. He saw with personal knowledge—as one who, the little white master, exchanged favors with little black slave boys, whipping boys, in hiding places in the back yards of the mansion in Apipucos, in Recife.]

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As in Freyre’s justification for Lima, Felinto attributes Freyre’s authority to depict blackness to his sexual experiences with women of color. Also like Freyre, she substitutes the white penetrator for the mulato child as the hybridized product of European/African contact. “Mixing deliciously” with black women, he is enabled to see blackness “from within”: situated inside the black body, his perspective replaces the annulled black gaze. At the same time, Felinto’s reference to the “introduction and penetration of the black race in the social stuff of our people” seems to subvert Freyre’s status as he who penetrates or consumes blackness, though the black race’s “penetration” can also be read, in a Freyrean sense, as the permeation of blackness in Brazil. In other words, Felinto’s reference to black penetration could connote the “gênio de lugar” [spirit of the place] that affords the “transfusion” of black identity to the Brazilian terrain and, thereupon, to white Brazilians. This second reading gains leverage with Felinto’s distinction between “our people” and the “black race.” Through the use of “our,” she identifies with that which is sociohistorically nonblack. Situated as a collectivity, she casts “our people” as the dominant anthropophagic receptacle for consumed alterity. Felinto’s description of the “exchange of favors” between the young master and the whipping boy can similarly be read two ways. While this relation seems to undermine Freyre’s paradigm for the unilateral, seigniorial incorporation of black identity—and, by extension, for the unilateral capacity for the white to perceive and represent the black— the question is the extent to which Felinto’s depiction of the “sinhozinho branco” [little white master] as penetrated as well as penetrating suggests a meaningful potential for the black consumption of whiteness. Though she appears to install a reciprocal model for the transmission of identity, the protagonist of Felinto’s narrative is nonetheless the “little master.” Despite the potentially disruptive absorption figured by the whipping boy, it is ultimately Freyre who, as an authorial subject, consumes “black-slave motifs” and renders them as text. While her reference to the whipping boy who penetrates, or “eats,” the young master suggests the possibility for the reverse transmission of identity, Felinto, like Freyre, fixes the historical status of the consumer as that of the “sinhozinho branco.” Nonetheless, there is a sense in which the textual presence of the whipping boy approximates Felinto’s discussion to Oswald de Andrade’s more fluid model for cultural assimilation. I have already indicated how, unlike Freyre, Oswald’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto”

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cannibalizes African and Indigenous culture, but does so by identifying with the figure of the “man-eating” tupi. In this way, Oswald describes both the dominant, European mimicry or incorporation of otherness and also, potentially, the subaltern mimicry or incorporation of that which is dominant and European. Felinto’s representation of “troca troca” [mutual penetration] as a symbol for the transmission of identity reflects an instability Freyre compensates for by insisting upon the inability of socioeconomically identified “African descendants” to imitate or absorb whiteness. Felinto at least represents the potential for subaltern insurgency, though the context in which she does so— defending Freyre’s authorial “vision” of blacks—in addition to her identification of the “sinhozinho branco” as the primary figure for cultural incorporation, situates the subaltern in a latent, albeit potentially subversive, role. There is a further way in which Felinto’s publication of this article upsets Freyre’s paradigm. Acting as his apologist, Felinto emerges as an authority on Freyre: it is she who sees, interprets, and renders him as text. In her role as Freyre’s mediator, she disrupts Freyre’s dismissal of black-authored enunciation. Writing about a white, male writer who is the author of a hegemonic narrative of slavery and the African influence on “our people,” she captures not only blackness but also the “master” of blackness. It is precisely this type of subversion that Freyre, through the projection of the young plantation master as the embodiment not only of an effaced black body but also of a distinctly black “socioeconomic reality,” seeks to contain.

Gilberto Freyre in a Caribbean Context At the same time that Freyre has informed generations of Brazilian critics, his model also resonates horizontally with other postplantation theorizations of race and authenticity. His depiction of the northeastern sugar cane plantation as the epicenter for the transmission of black identity to seigniorial figures—with his claim that “nosso olfato” and “nosso paladar” inhale and ingest blackness—recalls not only the “molasses-slow” waters of Palés’ “Mulatta-Antilla” but Afro-Antilleanist conflations of sugar production with black female sexuality from the early nineteenth-century onward (Kutzinski, 7). As indicated in chapter 2, both Afro-Antilleanism and Freyrean hybridity are engaged in a geopolitical struggle between communities of whites, with U.S. whites claiming that they have remained genetically pure, and Latin American elites insisting that they possess

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something the yankees do not, that their sexual claim to black bodies enables them to linguistically and spiritually incorporate black attributes that nativize them and make them more representative, legitimate authorities. The ideological connotations of slavery symbolics in constructions of postplantation identity are by no means uniform. Che Guevara’s famous entreaty to “become black, mulatto, a worker, a peasant”11 could not be more disparate from Souza Araujo’s insistance upon the “poetic intentions that exist in the breast of the slave element in all of us.” But how does one gauge the potential for even the best-intentioned interventions to become aggressive arrogations? The case of Haitian noirisme poses a fascinating point of reference for testing the boundaries of identifying with the dispossessed, and for understanding how and at what point the iconization of folk origins becomes repressive and exclusionary. In “Race, Nation and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme” (2005), Valerie Kaussen shows how Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and Lorimer Denis produce the noiriste state as the incarnation of the slave’s rebellious energy while at the same time insisting upon the essentially violent nature of the black race and its need for order, hierarchy, and preventive punishment (67–87). Like Freyre’s seigniorial figure who assimilates the slave’s “hopes and fears,” the noiriste dictatorship makes the fascinating gesture of casting itself as slave and master in one, the embodiment of both the slave’s desire for liberty and revenge and the administrative body of the controlling master the slave desperately requires. It is also pertinent that noirisme emerged in response to the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, just as for Afro-Cubanists, the mythic black “underworld” was a rebuke against yankee imperialism, “the antidote to Wall Street”—for Kutzinski, “the only Cuban space seemingly beyond the reach of the United States” (145)—and Freyre’s celebration of Brazilian assimilationism proposes an alternative to North Americanization. I have discussed Freyre’s ridicule of the inauthenticity of black U.S. authors and outlined the resonance of this gesture with AfroAntilleanism’s indictment of U.S. materialism. To further consider the rich cultural clashes that manifest in transnational readings of race and authorship in American literatures, I return to Freyre’s citation of James Weldon Johnson. Whereas Freyre uses Johnson’s discussion of black adaptability and “unfixedness” to confirm black identity as antagonic to the production of “authentic” black text, Johnson’s discussion of the relationship of race to authorship in The Book of American Negro

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Poetry (1922) tells a very different story. He describes the African “transfusion” to which Freyre refers, but this transfusive quality is intrinsically conjoined to the condition of African descent. Johnson articulates this while musing on the title of his book, so named because it is “more concise—even if less expository—than the expression, ‘poetry by American negroes’ ” (7), and when he argues that blacks themselves are the creators of the only original U.S. art forms, the Uncle Remus stories, the “spirituals” or slave songs, and the cakewalk and ragtime: “the Negro . . . [is] the creator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products” (10, emphasis mine). When Johnson turns to blacks’ transfusiveness, it is to describe their capacity for literary and artistic productivity in diverse settings: This power of the Negro to suck up the national spirit from the soil and create something artistic and original, which, at the same time, possesses the note of universal appeal, is due to a remarkable racial gift of adaptability; it is more than adaptability, it is a transfusive quality. And the Negro has exercised this transfusive quality not only here in America, where the race lives in large numbers, but in European countries, where the number has been almost infinitesimal. Is it not curious to know that the greatest poet of Russia is Alexander Pushkin, a man of African descent; that the greatest romancer of France is Alexandre Dumas, a man of African descent; and that one of the greatest musicians of England is Coleridge-Taylor, a man of African descent? (20)

For Johnson, transfusiveness and adaptability do not allow for whites’ metonymic incorporation of blackness from the “soil.” Instead, he identifies these qualities as the source for blacks’ ability to nativize themselves, to “suck up the national spirit” wherever they find themselves and create original art. Johnson explicitly conjoins this quality to black sociohistorical identity and, moreover, to “blood.” Whereas Freyre presents white-authored negritude as a more palatable form of assimilation that accommodates eugenics and assuages fears of Buffonean “blackening,” Johnson turns one-dropism on its head, arguing that a single drop is all it takes to produce the highest form of literature and art. While Freyre insists upon Lima’s great grandmother’s waltz with Dom Pedro and his great grandfather’s seigniorial status, Johnson goes on at length to demonstrate that Dumas’ father was “a Negro of the French West Indies,” Coleridge-Taylor’s

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father was a “native-born African,” and Pushkin’s great-grandfather was a “full-blooded Negro” (21). Johnson’s concern with establishing a lineage of “black-blooded” writers—beginning with Phyllis Wheatley, the enslaved African poet who was the first American to produce a volume of poetry—is as intense as Freyre’s and Souza Araújo’s determination to construct genealogies of white-authored black text. Johnson’s homage to Wheatley redresses the test to which she was submitted to verify that her poems were indeed her own—what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls “the primal scene of African-American letters” (“Phyllis Wheatley on Trial,” 2003)—which in turn recalls Freyre’s indictment of the impossibility of black literature or, indeed, Costa Pinto’s disbelief that a black person would “come forth in public to write sottishly about the study in which he participated as laboratory material.” The criticism aimed at Wheatley by Amiri Baraka and others who dismiss her as a race traitor also calls to mind Freyre’s assessment that blacks should concern themselves with appropriately “black subjects” and Souza Araújo’s insistence that they should address “slave problems.” For Baraka, Wheatley’s “pleasant imitations of eighteenth-century English poetry are far and, finally, ludicrous departures from the huge black voices that splintered southern nights with their hollers, chants, arwhoolies, and ballits” (quoted in Gates). In the words of Gates, “Too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century, Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics in the twentieth.” Another thread in Johnson’s text is convoluted in Freyre’s and Souza Araújo’s claims that blacks’ socioeconomic hardship is an impediment to high-quality literature. Like Freyre and Souza Araujo, Johnson argues that race and class struggle thwarts literary and artistic production, but he insists that the effort to maintain white privilege is equally stultifying: The Negro in America is consuming all of his intellectual energy in this gruelling race struggle. And the same statement may be made in a general way about the white South. Why does not the white South produce literature and art? The white South, too, is consuming all of its intellectual energy in this lamentable conflict. Nearly all of the mental efforts of the white South run through one narrow channel. The life of every Southern white man and all of his activities are impassibly limited by the ever present Negro problem And that is why, as Mr. H.L. Mencken puts it, in all that vast region, with its thirty or forty million people and its territory as large as a half dozen Frances or Germanys,

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Johnson calls attention to the paratextual encounter between two prefaces to editions of black poetry—one adamantly white-authored and the other, firmly grounded in a shared drop of black blood—and back to the rich misreadings embedded in comparative discussions of American literatures across north/south lines. His evaluation of black writing in Latin America and the United States is ironic in light of the arguments explored in this chapter. Constructing a genealogy of black writing that encompasses not only the U.S. poet Paul Lauerence Dunbar but also Cuba’s Plácido and Juan Francisco Manzano, Haiti’s Damoclès Vieux and Oswald Durand, Jamaica’s Claude McKay and Brazil’s Machado de Assis (37–44), Johnson concludes that black writers of “greater universality” have come from Latin America. Blacks in the United States are subjected to suffocating conditions whereas, “On the other hand, the colored poet of Latin America can voice the national spirit without any reservations. And he will be rewarded without any reservations, whether it be to place him among the great or declare him the greatest” (39–40). Emilio Ballagas’ Mapa de la Poesia Negra Hispanoamericana (1946) provides another example of the problems associated with north/south comparisons. Like other collections of poesía negra/mulata published in the 1920s and 1930s that situate themselves as circumventing the “ ‘deterministic tyranny’ of racial ancestry” (Kutzinski, 155), Ballagas claims that, in addition to black and mulatto writers, white writers are occasionally able to “(throw) off the historicist and sociological burden” of their race to identify with and express the “sensibility of the person of color” (156). Ballagas places James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes alongside Whitman and Longfellow (155), and argues that poets should refrain from engaging in politics. Anticipating Felinto’s “vision of the black” that rejects the interference of U.S. identity politics, Ballagas pits “Africanist tourism” against looking at blackness “from the inside” (158). On the other hand, unlike Freyre’s insistence that blacks misrepresent black “reality” and whites alone are able to accurately depict it, Ballagas does not not exclude blacks from his anthology of authentic black poetry. Contemporary literary and cultural critics articulate equally potent (mis)readings, especially when confronted with the disparate gauges for racial authenticity in Latin America and the United States. In chapter 2, I described how Edimilson de Almeida Perreira addresses

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his uncertainty about evaluating the racial authenticity of the authors considered for inclusion in his bilingually edited “Panorama da Literatura Afro-Brasileira”/“Survey of African-Brazilian Literature” (Callaloo, 1995) and how he essentially apologizes for the decision to publish Brazilian writers who, because of their Euro-American looks, would not have been included in U.S. anthologies of black writing. In a similar vein, and rather than account for the rich paradox of whiteauthored Afro-Hispanic text, Timothy Cox expresses disappointment that there are few written records of slavery—slave narratives— in Latin America, making it difficult to do comparative work (Postmodern Tales of Slavery in the Americas, 2001, xviii) and suggests that the absence of an Afro-Hispanic movement like the Harlem Renaissance or Negritude hinders an understanding of how AfroHispanic aesthetics incorporate slavery. Like Perreira, he apologetically concedes that “Two of the three novels written in Spanish that are discussed in this study, oddly enough, were composed by white males” (xiv). In considering further parallels with Souza Araújo’s Freyrean concept of the “slave element in all of us,” we can situate the spiritualcriminal connotations of Freyre’s racialism in relation to Fernando Ortiz’s theorization of blackness as metaphysical and subversive in La Hampa Afrocubana: Los Negros Brujos: Apuntos Para un Estudio de Etnologia Criminal (1906), itself an important source of inspiration for poesia negra/mulata (Kutzinski, 145). Duvalier and Denis’ identification of Vaudun as “the supreme factor for Haitian unity” is another reminder of the potential conflation of black metaphysics with criminality (Kaussen, 2005), exemplifying Barbara Browning’s warning that the emphasis upon “soul” allows for the “characterization of diasporic culture as a chaotic or uncontrolled force which can only be countered by military or police violence” (Infectious Rhythm, 1998, 7). Alejo Carpentier’s El Reino de Este Mundo (1949), widely celebrated for promoting “Afro-Caribbean culture as the true, magical heartland of the Caribbean imagination” (Dash, 88), articulates this paradigm of unwieldy, metaphysical blackness, while echoing Freyre’s reading of blackness in relation to nature, authenticity and socioeconomic mobility. In El Reino, Carpentier depicts the black rulers of the Haitian state as mimics of their former masters; estranged from their African roots, the quadroon establishment is doubly illegitimate because their power derives from their artificial whiteness. Like Freyre, Carpentier constitutes the sociopolitical aspirations of Afro-descendants—especially mixed-race Afro-descendants—as indicative of false blackness whereas authentic black power is

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metaphysical and, paradoxically, grounded in nature. In El Reino, vaudun, communion with flora and fauna and the adoption of animal forms link blacks to the natural world—as animals to be consumed and domesticated—and to the other world, where they exercise their legitimate powers. Likewise, in ¡Ecue Yamba-O! (1993), Carpentier “features ñáñigo dances and religious ceremonies as ‘therapeutic’ alternatives to the culture sugar created during the tumultuous first decades of the twentieth century, when sugar production was so closely tied to United States economic, political, and cultural imperialism” (Kutzinski, 141). But unlike Freyre’s model for the felicitous transfusion of blackness to nature—where it replaces genetic contact as the stuff of Brazil’s Africanization—Carpentier identifies a malevolent, vindictive black spirit in the Haitian atmosphere that condemns it to a history of violence, a concept that remains current in representations of Haiti as black sign par excellance (Kaussen). Carpentier’s critique of Haitian master/slave relations tips its hat to Cuba’s official ideology of mestizaje, articulating a favorable comparison with Cuban whites’ assimilation of blackness in the creation of a syncretic community that would preclude violent insurrection. Like Freyre’s model for the white incorporation of black discourse and, indeed, Palés’ jitanjáfora, Carpentier’s mimicry of patois in ¡Ecue Yamba-O! provides evidence of this incorporation, whereas the farce of black writing as the counterpart to empowerment is linked to inaccessibility to language, as in Ti Noel’s misuse of his former master’s Encyclopedias as a makeshift throne in El Reino de Este Mundo. How can we read the emphasis upon black soul in Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, or Haiti alongside the evolution of this concept in the United States, beginning with abolitionists’ insistence that, unlike animals, slaves had souls, and that this was evidence of the immorality of forced labor? Whereas Paul Gilroy characterizes soul as that which escapes the commodification and exploitation of the slave’s body (Green and Guillory, “The Question of a ‘Soulful Style’: Interview with Paul Gilroy,” 1998, 251), what of the aesthetic commodification of “soul” in popular music from Elvis to Eminem, or cinematic and TV representations of the black and brown sidekicks that act as “insurance policies on humanness” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, 129), adding dimension and depth to white protagonists? Or, indeed, in contemporary political discourse where southern, plantation-evoking origins are drawn upon as evidence of

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humility and authenticity? The relationship of this humanizing blackness to white political clout will be explored in the next chapter through a discussion of slavery’s abolition in Brazil, the historical moment when whites first take up black spirit in the name of an emerging nationalism based on master/slave fusion.

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4 Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism, Erasure, and the Slave’s Narrative

In his album, “Noites do Norte” (Northern Nights, 2000), Caetano Veloso pays homage to the Brazilian abolitionist, Joaquim Nabuco, in a manner that reflects numerous problems associated with the memory and marketing of slavery and abolition in Brazil. “Noites do Norte” is a reference taken from a famous passage of Nabuco’s memoir, Minha Formação [My Formation] (1900), which Caetano sets to music in a song of the same title (track 2): A escravidão permanecerá por muito tempo como a característica nacional do Brasil. Ela espalhou por nossas vastas solidões uma grande suavidade; seu contato foi a primeira forma que recebeu a natureza virgem do país, e foi a que ele guardou; ela povoou-o como se fosse uma religião natural e viva, com os seus mitos, suas legendas, seus encantamentos; insuflou-lhe sua alma infantil, suas tristezas sem pesar, suas lágrimas sem amargor, seu silêncio sem concentração, suas alegrias sem causa, sua felicidade sem dia seguinte . . . É ela o suspiro indefinível que exalam ao luar as nossas noites do norte. [Slavery will remain for a long time the national characteristic of Brazil. It disseminated a great suaveness into our vast wilderness; its contact was the first form that took in the virgin nature of the country, and was that which the country retained; slavery populated it as though it were a natural, living religion, with its myths, its legends, its enchantments; it breathed into it its infantile soul, its sadnesses without weight, its tears without bitterness, its silence without concentration, its joys without cause, its happiness without day after . . . . Slavery is the undefinable sigh that our northern nights exhale to the moonlight.]

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Nabuco’s description of slavery neatly fits Gilberto Freyre’s nostalgic invocation of the Brazilian northeast discussed in the preceding chapter, though one might be surprised to find this libidinous invocation of slavery’s “enchantments”—with its repurcussion-free pleasures, its weightless sadness, its tears without bitterness—articulated by Caetano, known not only for his political engagement since the resistance to Brazil’s military regime (1964–85) but for his identification with black cultural production, particularly that of his home state, Bahia, Brazil’s black epicenter. Caetano’s tribute to Nabuco articulates the “dissemination” of a particular understanding of slavery as the “national characteristic of Brazil,” a Freyrean celebration of master/ slave relations and white patriarchal beneficence vis-à-vis blacks that informs even “progressive,” problack artists and writers like Caetano. The visual imagery that accompanies Caetano’s album elaborates on this Freyrean conceptualization. The cover of the album portrays a headless black man’s torso seated in front of a colonial-style building and framed against the night sky. He is nude from the waist up save for a half dozen gold chains around his neck, one with a heavy cross hanging from it, and another series of gold chains around his wrists. The pamphlet inside contains song lyrics and more photographs.1 On its cover, a head shot of a smiling Caetano serves as a counterpoint to the black man’s torso in a cannibalistic juxtaposition that recalls Jorge de Lima’s bust of Dom Pedro II, observing and absorbing the mulatto performer’s frenetic corporeality. Opening this cover, we find two pages preceding the song lyrics, situated as an “opening” or inspiration for the whole album. The above-cited passage from Nabuco is printed on the left-hand side (page two) and, opposite this, the same image from “Noites do Norte’s” jacket, only now the man’s head is included, shrouded in a black ski cap that covers his eyes and rests on the middle of his nose. In addition to the gold chains around his neck and wrists, another chain is draped between a piercing in his left nostril and a second one in his left ear. This image evokes eroticized bondage, decapitation, hooding, and Christian martyrdom, but also criminality and a tribal-cum-gangsta aesthetic with the distinction that the masked man is curved forward in a gentle repose illustrative of the bitter-free “weightless sadness” and “silence without concentration” described by Nabuco. Nabuco situates slavery as Brazil’s national characteristic, for it breathed its “infantile soul” into Brazilian nature. Caetano then grasps this articulation as the inspiration for a lyrical-musical

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evocation of sultry “northern nights.” Just as the abolitionist’s discourse requires the commodification of the black body and the slave’s silence and “indefinable sigh,” so does Caetano’s syncretic, Bahian musical articulation require the cannibalization of the black body, including that of the mythic marrooon leader, Zumbi, to whom he dedicates a song on this same album. Juxtaposed next to “Zumbi’s” lyrics, written by Jorge Ben, the same black man who graces the jacket of Caetano’s album is now posed reclining in a pool of water that comes up to his lips and ears, faintly smiling behind large reflecting sunglasses in a gesture clearly redolent of drowning. In “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory” (2002), Barnor Hesse argues that “Any sense of value in remembering racial slavery since the dislocation of its institutional forms has been largely ejected from representative Western cultures of remembrance. Its history has been rendered less than peripheral to the postcolonial meaning of our contemporary political lives” (144). Hesse’s observations about the erasure of racial slavery are crucial to my interpretation of Brazilian abolitionism, with the critical difference that slavery takes center stage in Brazil’s representative—visual, textual, musical—cultures. Whereas Hesse is presumably addressing only the United States, where slavery may in fact have been forgotten “like a bad dream,” in Brazil, as in most of the Caribbean, the iconization of the plantation era is intrinsic to slavery’s forgetting, not like a “bad dream” but through its recollection as “enchanted” national origin. 2 I am using Caetano’s visual-musical-written evocation of slavery, with his debt to Nabuco’s articulation that simultaneously destroys the black body and finds inspiration in its breath, as a point of departure for exploring the dominant discourse about abolition that lends itself to slavery’s mass marketing, verified not simply by Caetano’s album but, to name a few other examples, by the television production, “Zumbi” (1996), the popular telenovelas “Xica da Silva” (the story of an enslaved woman’s liason with her master that enables her to attain fame and fortune, 1996–97), “A Escrava Isaura” (the story of the eroticized violence to which a mulata slave is subjected by her cruel master, 1976; 2004) and “Sinha Moça” (the story of a slaveholder’s daughter who struggles to maintain her white feminine sensibilities in the brutal plantation environment on the eve of abolition, 1986; 2006) as well as by a national campaign connecting worker’s rights (or lack thereof) to the condition of African slavery. 3 Long before Spielberg’s “Amistad” (1997), slavery was the focus of mainstream

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Brazilian films such as “Ganga Zumba” (1963), “Xica” (1976), and “O Quilombo” (1984). As in other Latin American and Caribbean nations, abolition day is a national holiday in Brazil, where it centers on the Lei Aúrea [Golden Law], the emancipation declaration signed on 13 May 1888 by Princess Isabel. Abolition is thus mis-remembered as a gift bequeathed to the slaves by the white princess, regent at the time, while her father, Emperor Pedro II, was in Europe, a gesture whose romantic symbolism is deepened by its acknowledgment by Pope Leo XIII with a “Golden Rose.” Hesse’s observations about the United States speak further to Brazil’s remembering and forgetting of slavery and abolition. He reflects that when slavery is finally taken up in popular visual representation in the United States with Spielberg’s “Amistad,” rather than indict the institution of slavery, the film celebrates the American justice system that works out the “kink” that enabled the kidnapping of the specific Africans aboard the Amistad, and the interventions of whites who speak on behalf of these African “fugitives” who cannot represent themselves. Notwithstanding the enormous disparity between the hyperdetermined visibility of slavery in Brazilian popular culture and its relative absence in the United States, Hesse’s observation that “Amistad” “scarcely remembers slavery at all” (144) describes the empathetic princess’ “gift” of freedom. For Hesse, “So clearly framed against the foreknowledge of abolition, the ultimately feel good quality of (Amistad) reinforces Western culture’s proprietorial memory of slavery as the memory of its abolition” (149). So too is the memory of slavery in Brazil constituted in redemptive terms, centering on the European incorporation of the African both as a corporeal and discursive project wherein white authorities—the Crown, the abolitionists, even Caetano—assimilate the slave. This incorporation could be considered an extreme form of the AngloU.S. slave narrative, wherein white abolitionist amanuenses frequently transcribed blacks’ accounts of enslavement, themselves adhering to strict formulae of bondage at the hands of cruel masters followed by redemptive release by northern, Christian white women. As in Brazil, U.S. racial hegemony relies upon black “contributions” that substantiate its claim to inclusive representation. William L. Andrews describes the black enunciation that supplements white abolitionist discourse in the prebellum United States: “The ex-slave narrators and their sponsors had learned that certain kinds of facts plotted in certain kinds of story structures moved white readers to conviction and to support of the antislavery cause.”4 Andrews reports

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that early in Frederick Douglass’ oratory career, his “Garrisonian friends reminded him of the importance of maintaining a voice that would sound authentic to his hearers: ‘Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not; ‘tis not best that you seemed too learned.’”5 But whereas U.S. abolitionists elicited slaves’ narratives to prove that African descendents had souls—and, indeed, that they were human, since “writing in its more exalted or ‘literary’ forms . . . . was the visible sign of reason” (Gates, “From Wheatley to Douglass,” 1991, 52)—for Nabuco, the infantile “soul” of slavery becomes Brazil’s distinguishing characteristic, an essence that is shared by blacks and whites alike. My reading of Nabuco’s abolitionism locates this strategy for universalizing the experience of slavery in the evolution of a hegemonic conceptualization of plantation society as the origin for Brazil’s exceptional “Racial Democracy.” While U.S. abolitionism has been richly problematized by scholars including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William L. Andrews, Katherine Bassard, Judith Jackson Fossett and Barnor Hesse, Brazilian abolitionism has not been the object of careful discursive investigation. As suggested, inquiries into the complex role of amanuenses and white editors and readers in the production of U.S. slaves’ narratives—as well as the formulae that guide these narratives and frequently provided the gauge for determining whether the enslaved writer in question would be freed—are particularly relevant to the memory of abolition in Brazil, crystallized by Freyre’s postabolition claim that white writers enjoy a more direct link to Africa than people of African descent. A passage from Nabuco’s memoir, Minha Formação (1900), calls attention to the resonance of paternalism and sentimentality in abolitionisms north and south. Nabuco recalls that it is in the role of young master that he experiences his first identification with a runaway slave, an event that was second only to the impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52) in producing his empathy with blacks: . . . mil vezes li A Cabana do Pai Tomás, no original da dor vivida e sangrando; no entanto a escravidão para mim cabe toda em um quadro inesquecido da infância, em uma primeira impressão, que decidiu, estou certo, do emprego ulterior da minha vida. Eu estava uma tarde sentado no patamar da escada exterior da casa, quando vejo precipitar-se para mim um jovem negro desconhecido, de cerca de dezoito anos, o qual se abraça aos meus pés suplicando-me pelo amor de Deus que o fizesse comprar por minha madrinha para me servir. Ele vinha

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Common to the two narratives to which Nabuco attributes the origin of his political calling—Stowe’s novel and the escaped slave’s utterance—is the slave’s requirement of a caring master and his impassioned, “soulful” entreaty. But whereas Stowe’s novel suggests that following slaves’ deliverance by Christian mistresses they will be returned to Africa, for Nabuco, slavery’s “soul” is “breathed” into Brazilian nature to become its “national characteristic.” It is also the origin for his personal acquisition of feeling since nothing, he writes, “mostra melhor do que a própria escravidão o poder das primeiras vibrações de sentimento” [demonstrates better than slavery itself the power of the first vibrations of sentiment] such that “a vontade e a reflexão não poderiam mais tarde subtrair-se à sua ação . . . ” [desire and reflection could not later subtract themselves from its effects...] (184). Slavery is the empowering source both of Nabuco’s sentimental education and his career in politics. The black anima that propells him into a position of recognition reflects his admission, also in Minha Formação, that Brazilian history is “escrita com o sangue do escravo” [written with the slave’s blood] (122) and that the unhappy Brazilian land, plowed with slaves’ blood, is nevertheless blessed by their love (192). Though his godmother did in fact purchase the slave as a gift for Nabuco (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 17), he makes no mention of his response to the slave’s request, for they are not involved in a dialogue. Nabuco’s incorporation of the slave’s subject position coincides with the disappearance of physical blackness—in this case, the omitted narration of the bodily outcome of the slave. In chapter 2, I show how Gilberto Freyre produces Jorge de Lima as the legitimate purveyor of black discourse on the basis of his plantation absorption of black “reality.” The chapter that follows situates

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Freyre’s model for the seigniorial articulation of black sentiment in the context of Nabuco’s O Abolicionismo [Abolitionism] (1883), his “greatest single piece of propaganda” (Conrad, 42).6 Nabuco was a statesman, intellectual, and descendent of the northeastern oligarchy who is widely considered Brazil’s most eminent abolitionist (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 42).7 Despite the contrast between Freyre’s celebration of the plantation economy and Nabuco’s bleak portrait of its socially and genetically degenerative impact, Nabuco’s entreaty for “whitening” and the state’s incorporation of slaves’ interests anticipates and informs the accommodation of scientific racism in Freyre’s narrative of master/slave assimilation. Scholars have declined to explore the resonance of eugenicism with Brazilian abolitionists’ condemnation of slavery or the implications of their identification with the master class beyond attributing it to the fact that so many of them were from the slaveholding classes and were addressing their own communities. A more critical inquiry into Brazil’s slaveholding abolitionism is essential. This respectful, selective reading of abolitionism is particularly marked in the case of Nabuco. In addition to the most frequently cited studies of his work—a biography by Nabuco’s daughter, Carolina Nabuco, A Vida de Joaquim Nabuco [The Life of Joaquim Nabuco] (1928) and Graça Aranha’s Machado de Assis e Joaquim Nabuco [Machado de Assis and Joaquim Nabuco, 1923], an annotated exposition of the correspondence between Nabuco and Brazil’s preeminent nineteenth-century novelist and short story writer8 —even Marxian analyses of Brazilian abolitionism cast him in an heroic light. In As Desventuras do Liberalismo [The Misadventures of Liberalism] (1984), Marco Aurélio Nogueira describes Nabuco as the Brazilian “slave’s advocate” (67). Likewise, Alfredo Bosi refers to O Abolicionismo as a “dense and beautiful militant treatise” on behalf of slaves (Dialética da Colonização [The Dialectics of Colonization] (1992, 234) and Richard Graham distinguishes the conservative historiography of Nabuco’s later years from the “radical fulminations” of his earlier abolitionism (“Joaquim Nabuco, Conservative Historian,” 1980). In Lilia Schwarcz’s intellectual history of the evolution of race discourse between 1870 and 1930 (O Espetáculo das Raças [The Spectacle of the Races] (1993), she claims that, whereas in turn of the century Brazil, scientific racism was the normative paradigm, Nabuco’s discourse was as an exception to that rule (254).9 While Celia Azevedo is certainly right that, for Nabuco, “the destiny of the slaves was also the destiny of the Brazilian people” (Abolitionism, 1995, 108), why

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has noone explored the fact that Brazil’s most prominent abolitionist perceived slaves as a menace to society? Or that this slave’s advocate’s “clients” were the sons of former masters? The present chapter proposes a close reading of O Abolicionismo to elucidate the exclusionary implications of Nabuco’s thought. I am particularly concerned with tracing an Orwellian kind of doublespeak in which slavery signifies the inordinate freedom of people of African descent and abolition constitutes a method for containing their “transgressive” energies. Nabuco conceptualizes a type of citizenship wherein the ex-master incorporates the ex-slave, a model constituted, as in Lima and Caetano, by a white head, or rational faculty of the body politic, that takes control of an incognizant, cannibalized black body. His preoccupation with the debilitation of Brazil’s white community reflects late-nineteenth-century anxiety about miscegenation and the corrupting impact of slavery on white character.10 It also responds to Brazil’s stigmatization as the last slaveholding country in the Western hemisphere and to the assimilation of European and U.S. perceptions of the nation as a “model of lack and backwardness by virtue of its ethnic and racial composition” (Schwarcz, 36). But rather than dismiss Nabuco’s racism and conservatism on the grounds that, like all of us, he was a “man of his time,” I want to suggest that there there is much more at stake. As emblefied by the title of a chapter of O Abolicionismo, “O Mandato da Raça Negra” [The Mandate of the Black Race], he seamlessly combines the slave’s containment with the gesture of speaking empathetically on his behalf. For Nabuco, the promise of freedom is an anthropophagic measure that would enable the state to incorporate, and obliterate, blackness. My reading of this gesture not only complicates the memory of Nabuco but addresses a broader practice in Brazilian letters that is characterized by the intersection between eugenics and discursive appropriation.

Slavery and the Debilitated Master The first section of this chapter addresses Nabuco’s reading of slavery’s effects. Rather than slaves’ subjugation, it is the breakdown of power differentials that troubles him. Nabuco’s critique of what he perceives as blacks’ inordinate impact reflects the demographics of a country wherein, by the 1880s, people of African descent far outnumbered white Brazilians.11 His preoccupation with this “racial disorder” is further informed by the fact that he wrote O Abolicionismo during a prolonged stay in London, following his defeat in an election for

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deputy of Pernambuco in 1881 (Nogueira, Joaquim Nabuco, 1987, 46). Nabuco’s Anglophilia, together with his Anglo-Saxon location and, indeed, European perceptions of Brazil, would have contributed to his anxiety about the increasing difficulty of distinguishing Brazilian blacks from whites, a Hegelian impasse wherein the master class finds itself with a dwindling community of peers from whom to receive recognition. In a chapter of O Abolicionismo entitled “Influências Sociais e Políticas da Escravidão” [The Social and Political Impact of Slavery], Nabuco laments the facility with which slaves are enabled to gain free status. His condemnation of the liberal provision of manumission contracts reflects the incorporation of a principal concern of his generation—that, by contrast with the United States, Brazil had been socially and genetically debilitated as the result of ill-defined racial and class divisions: Não há assim, entre nós, castas sociais perpétuas, não há mesmo divisão fixa de classes. O escravo, que, como tal, praticamente não existe para a sociedade, porque o senhor pode não o ter matriculado e, se o matriculou, pode substituí-lo, e a matrícula mesmo nada significa, desde que não há inspeção do Estado nas fazendas, nem os senhores são obrigados a dar contas dos seus escravos às autoridades. Esse ente, assim equiparado, quanto à proteção social, a qualquer outra coisa de domínio particular é, no dia seguinte à sua alforria, um cidadão como outro qualquer, com todos os direitos políticos, e o mesmo grau de elegibilidade. Pode mesmo, ainda na penumbra do cativeiro, comprar escravos, talvez, quem sabe?—algum filho do seu antigo senhor. Isso prova a confusão de classes e indivíduos, e a extensão ilimitada dos cruzamentos sociais entre escravos e livres, que fazem da maioria dos cidadãos brasileiros, se se pode assim dizer, mestiços políticos, nos quais se combatem duas naturezas opostas: a do senhor de nascimento e a do escravo domesticado. [Among us, there are no perpetual social castes, nor even fixed class divisions. The slave, as such, practically does not exist in society, because the master may not have registered him and, if he did register him, he may reverse the registration, such that it signifies nothing, given that there is no State inspection in the plantations, nor are the masters obliged to account for their slaves to the authorities. This being, thus equalized, in terms of social protection, to any other entity in the private domain is, on the day following his manumission, a citizen like any other, with all the same political rights, and the same degree of eligibility. He can even, while still in the half-light of captivity, purchase slaves, maybe, who knows?—a son of his former master. This proves the

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Nabuco situates both the ex-slave and the ex-master as subjects in whom racial and class identities have become unstable. The exslave’s condition “in the half-light of captivity” means not only that he inhabits the murky area between disparate class ranks but also that his race is indistinguishable. The ex-master’s son is also a composite of racial and class identities: both his relation to the means of production and his race are ambiguous. But whereas the ex-slave’s “half-light” denotes his illegitimate ascension to the rank of master, the ex-master’s son’s hybridity signifies a transgression of a different sort: the introduction of black genes that allows for the reduction of his seigniorial half to the status of chattel.12 When Nabuco claims that the subjugation of the ex-master’s son is directly proportionate to the slave’s acquisition of “eligibility,” “political rights,” and “social protection,” he equals the would-be heir’s enslavement with the disenfranchisement of the “authentic”—white, seigniorial—Brazilian citizen. Just as ill-defined boundaries proscribing the slave’s social mobility result in the slave’s “nonexistence” in society, the citizen, “if one can call him that,” cannot accurately be called by that name. Nabuco’s disparaging evaluation of citizenship brings to mind the contemporary use in Brazil of “cidadão” to denote subjugation to rather than protection by the law. It also reflects Celia Azevedo’s observation that, for Nabuco, “the destiny of the slaves was also the destiny of the Brazilian people” (108), with the distinction that his equation of slaves with “the Brazilian people” is more remorseful outcry than proud show of solidarity. With his description of the “master by birth” and the sacrilegious “right” of the ex-slave to purchase his ex-master’s offspring, Nabuco clearly condemns the “interbreeding” that results in the national subject’s degradation to the rank of “political mestiços.” Alfredo Bosi’s analysis of the “citizen-proprietor” speaks to Nabuco’s equations of citizenship with the master’s “birthright” and of inverted master/slave relations with the conflictive interplay of “two opposite natures” within the national subject.13 Bosi’s reading also reveals the reverential manner in which critics have commonly treated Nabuco. In Dialética da Colonização, he employs the

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term “citizen-proprietor” to describe the elites whose socioeconomic freedoms were guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 at the same time that the majority continued to be enslaved (203). Bosi situates the citizen-proprietor in the context of Brazilian liberalism, arguing that whereas in England and France, liberal discourse slowly gave rise to a project of “amplified citizenship” (199), in Brazil, it justified “emancipation” from colonial domination without expanding the notion of citizenship within Brazilian society: “Its evolution conserved the privileges obtained in the initial, anti-Lusitanian phase of the process, but never intended to extend or share them generously with subaltern groups” (199). On the one hand, Bosi’s analysis of this exclusionary liberalism resonates with Nabuco’s privileging of the master class and his opposition to blacks’ socioeconomic mobility. However, Bosi goes on to distinguish this ideology from Nabuco’s expansion of the perimeters of citizenship to include blacks (234). He substantiates this claim on the basis of Nabuco’s support for agrarian reform and for “the participation of workers in a system of free competition and access to opportunity” (234). While Nabuco’s advocacy of workers’ rights and the redistribution of land seem to imply the augmentation of blacks’ privileges, his lamentation of the senhor’s violated birth-right and the citizen’s compromised sovereignty as the result of slaves’ “eligibility and rights” undermine Bosi’s critique. Nabuco by no means suggests that the perimeters of citizenship should be expanded. On the contrary, he strives to more rigorously proscribe blacks’ influence and mobility as a means for enhancing the status of the citizen-proprietor and saving him from deteriorating into a “political mestiços.” Nabuco’s commitment to reinvigorating white authority by diminishing the rights of blacks becomes even clearer in the context of his comparative analysis of slavery in Brazil and the United States. He first reiterates that Brazilian caste and class divisions are practically nonexistent and then claims that, whereas “Entre nós, não há linha alguma divisória” [Among us, there is no dividing line], the United States’ “linha divisória de cor” [dividing line of color] (157) effectively delimited slaves’ mobility and prevented them from participating in society. Nabuco is informed by the language of the body politic and, more specifically, by orthodox positivist conceptualizations of the state power as brain. He portrays Brazil as an organism whose mental faculties have been debilitated by the effects of Africanization. By contrast, U.S. segregationism saved it from this fate: “ . . . enquanto durou a escravidão, nem os escravos nem os seus descendentes livres concorreram, de forma

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alguma, para a vida mental ou ativa dessa sociedade parasita que eles tinham o privilégio de sustentar com o seu sangue” [ . . . while slavery endured, neither the slaves nor their descendants competed, in any sense, for access to the mental or active life of the parasitic society which they had the privilege of sustaining with their blood] (157). Out of context, U.S. slaves’ “privileged bloodletting” might sound like a condemnation of slaveholders’ physical abuses. Likewise, Nabuco’s characterization of “parasitic” white U.S. society could appear to indict slave labor exploitation. But he does not take pride in the comparative flexibility of Brazilian racial stratification. On the contrary, whereas the introduction of “black blood” allowed for the enslavement of the seigniorial half of the Brazilian citizen, the U.S. “dividing line of color” prevented the national subject from becoming an unstable composite of “master by birth” and “domesticated slave.” Rather than permeate the “mental and active life” of society, in the United States blacks’ “bloodletting” was confined to the exercise of forced physical labor that enhanced white power. Nabuco attributes the slave’s corrosive impact on white society to slavery’s proliferation throughout Brazil, again disfavorably comparing this with the United States, where power differentials were maintained through the division between the “free” north and the slaveholding south, thereby limiting the spread of blacks’ influence to a single region of the body politic’s overall “constitution”: O que aconteceu—a rebelião na qual o Sul foi salvo pelo braço do Norte do suicídio que ia cometer, separando-se da União para formar uma potência escravagista, e o modo pelo qual ela foi esmagada— prova que nos Estados Unidos a escravidão não afetara a constituição social toda, como entre nós; mas deixara a parte superior do organismo intata, e forte ainda bastante para curvar a parte até então dirigente à sua vontade, apeasar de toda sua cumplicidade com essa. [What occurred—the rebellion in which the South was saved by the arm of the North from the suicide that it was going to commit, separating itself from the Union to form a slavocratic polity, and the manner in which it was crushed—proves that in the United States slavery had not affected the entire social constitution as it had among us; rather, it had left the superior part of the organism intact, and strong enough to bend the previously authoritative portion to its will, in spite of all its complicity with it.] (156)

Employing the U.S. “arm” as a metaphor for a region of the national body that remained free of the African influence, he describes a community of undiminished, northern whites who were able to

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intervene and “rescue” the south from enslavement. Nabuco paradoxically attributes the north’s commitment to abolition to its uncompromised whiteness, while he suggests that it was southern slaveholders’ blackness that compelled them to defend slavery: by virtue of the “black blood” coursing in their veins, southerners were unable to perceive that, by seceding from the union to form a slavocratic polity, they would be committing “suicide,” relinquishing the last vestiges of their authority to blacks.14 The logic of this attribution of proslavery sentiment to southerners’ black portion and, by extension, to blacks themselves, is explained by Nabuco’s interpretation of slavery as an institution that facilitates blacks’ mobility and whose victim is the slaveholder. In the final chapter of O Abolicionismo, “Receios e Consequências. Conclusão” [Fears and Consequences. Conclusion], Nabuco proposes a strategy for redeeming the white community, so regrettably entrenched in the slavery economy and so compromised by the effects of miscegenation that it is unable to act in its own interests. He distinguishes the disasterous collision of “master by birth” and “domesticated slave” within the national subject from a more felicitous mode of interracial contact, one that reflects his admiration for the United States’ system of class and caste stratification. Nabuco offers a parable of two boys born on 27 September 1871, one “[o] senhor do outro” [(the) master of the other]. With this date, he refers to the passage of the Rio Branco or “Ventre Livre” [Free Womb] Law, conferring free status to all children born thereafter (Conrad, 26). While Nabuco insists that the two figures will undoubtedly “confuse themselves,” his description of the manner in which they ought to evolve reflects the effort to racially and socioeconomically disentangle the nation’s “legitimate” heirs from the slaves whose social mobility have encroached upon their freedoms: Quem negará que essas duas crianças . . . se encaminham para um ponto dado em nossa história na qual devem forçosamente confundir-se? Pois bem, o Abolicionismo o que pretende é que essas duas correntes não se movam uma para outra mecanicamente, por causa do declive que encontram; mas espontaneamente, em virtude de uma afinidade nacional consciente. Queremos que se ilumine e se esclareça toda aquela parte do espírito do senhor, que está na sombra: o sentimento de que esse, que ele chama escravo, é um ente tão livre como ele pelo direito do nosso século . . . [Who will deny that these two children . . . move toward a given point in our history in which they will inevitably confuse themselves? What Abolitionism proposes is that these two currents should not move in

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Nabuco admits that ex-masters and ex-slaves will inevitably become “confused” with one another, then insists that their approximation should not progress “mechanically” or result from the “declivity” upon which they are situated but should occur “spontaneously” and ensue from a “conscious national affinity.” He declares that the goal of abolition is to “illuminate” and “clarify” the master’s spirit, advocating that his perception that the slave is his equal should be brought out of the “shadows.” Whereas “confusion,” “spontaneity,” and “affinity” seem to evoke free movement and the collapse of power differentials, by locating these terms in the contexts in which they were employed in the 1880s, it becomes clear that they signify the opposite. The “declivity” upon which the two figures are situated, together with Nabuco’s admission that the two boys will “confuse themselves,” reflects Social Darwinist claims about the degenerative effects of miscegenation and about hybridization as a tumultuous or disordered condition. When Nabuco proposes that contact between whites and blacks should be “spontaneous,” he evokes a key term employed by Spencerean evolutionists to describe the survival of the fittest,15 a concept that, in Brazil, gave rise to “whitening.” The “spontaneous” process of increased proximity Nabuco argues for denotes the elimination of black “genes” through European immigration and as the gradual but “inevitable” result of miscegenation. Rather than enhance the master’s perception of kinship with the slave, the “illumination and clarification” of the master’s spirit will lead him to recognize that the ex-slave is by no means his equal and to identify with and defend the welfare of his own racial and socioeconomic group.16 Nabuco’s description of the “conscious national affinity” that should guide the postabolition interaction between blacks and whites is as deceptive as his references to “confusion,” “spontaneity,” and the “illumination and clarification” of the master’s perception of equality with the slave. He employs “affinity” to describe a mode of social interaction on the basis of which the races will become isolated from one another. By characterizing this strategy as a “national” enterprise, Nabuco universalizes the aims of abolition, dissociating

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the effort to delimit blacks’ mobility from the white elite and suggesting that it represents the welfare of both “master by birth” and “domesticated slave.”

Abolition and the Restoration of White Power I will now turn to Nabuco’s conceptualization of abolition as a means for enhancing power differentials and remedying the nation’s racial “confusion.” On the one hand, like the majority of his generation, he endorses European immigration as a strategy for whitening Brazil. While this aspect of his appeal is important, it has already received a great deal of attention and is less directly related to his discursive strategies for containing blacks’ influence. I will focus instead on Nabuco’s proposal to induce blacks’ identification with the state and, therein, his monarchism.17 As Jeffrey Needell observes, Nabuco felt that only Monarchism could prepare blacks for Brazil’s future, whereas the Republicans could not accomplish this task (“A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 1991, 169). On the one hand, Nabuco hopes that the emperor might remedy the white community’s debilitated cognition and redirect Brazil on the path to Europeanization. On a more personal note, Nabuco’s support for Pedro II is reinforced by his mourning for the death of his father, José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo (1813–78), himself a leading minister of the Second Empire. But even in the midst of his impassioned entreaties for abolition and the perpetuation of monarchism as the dual cures for slavery’s effects, he is not convinced. At the end of this section, I discuss the tenuousness of Nabuco’s conviction and its relation to his anticipation of the emperor’s downfall as well as his perception of the ultimately irrevocable effects of miscegenation and blacks’ sociopolitical privileges on Brazilian society. A striking dimension of the passages of O Abolicionismo in which Nabuco discusses the goals of abolition is his emphasis upon the slave’s passivity, so utterly at odds with his insistence, in the sections in which he elaborates slavery’s debilitating effects, that the slave is transgressive. Nabuco’s characterization of the subordinate slave is partly explained by his endeavor to assuage slaveholders’ fears of uprisings following abolition (Azevedo, Abolitonism, 1995, 26, 55). But this does not mean that he employs this depiction merely as a rhetorical tool. Rather than mask some unstated intent to provide blacks with greater freedoms, the trope of the docile slave reflects

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Nabuco’s hope that abolition will give rise to a system that more effectively delimits their influence. In his chapter entitled “Caráter do Movimento Abolicionista” [Character of the Abolitionist Movement], Nabuco warns that whereas slaves are inherently passive, their continued subordination should not be taken for granted, but should be actively sustained by convincing them that the state represents their welfare. He situates abolition as the means for accomplishing this goal. Addressing fears that abolition would enable blacks to take revenge on their former enslavers, Nabuco argues that such “unnatural” transgression would not result from abolition but from the state’s failure to symbolically intervene on their behalf: Isso, por certo, não é natural, e, se tal porventura acontecesse, a explicação verdadeira seria: não que esses fatos foram o resultado da disseminação das idéias abolicionistas pelo país; mas sim que, fechados nos latifúndios, os escravos nem tinham consciência de que a sua sorte estava preocupando a Nação toda, de que o seu cativeiro tocara por fim o coração do povo, e havia para eles uma esperança, ainda que remota, de liberdade. Quanto mais crescer a obra do Abolicionismo, mais se dissiparão os receios de uma guerra civil, de insurreições e atentados. [This certainly is not natural, and if perchance it occurred, the real explanation would be: not that these events were the result of the dissemination of abolitionist ideas throughout the country; but that, closed off in the plantations, the slaves were not even conscious that their destiny was preoccupying the entire Nation, that their captivity had finally touched the heart of the people, and that there was for them a hope, however remote, of liberty. The more the enterprise of Abolitionism advances, the more fears of a civil war, of insurrections, and assassination attempts will dissipate.] (74)

Nabuco claims that the single factor that would lead slaves to engage in “insurrections” and “assassination attempts” is their “lack of awareness” that their “destiny preoccupie(s) the entire nation.” Such activities would only ensue from the erosion of their belief in the state’s desire to defend them.18 By contrast, “the dissemination of abolitionist ideas throughout the country” will persuade slaves that the state represents them and prevent them from seeking retribution. Nabuco situates abolition as a form of nominal release that will ensure slaves’ subordination. He underscores this when he assures his reader that, as soon as the slave is convinced that his captivity “touches the

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heart of the Nation,” he will be instilled with the hope, “however remote,” of liberty. “Remote” suggests that the slave’s liberation may take a long time, but it also implies inaccessibility and indefinition. It is this latter meaning that most succinctly describes Nabuco’s appeal. He does not propose that the slave should be granted real, material freedoms, but that he should be made to believe that his liberty is plausible. Though Nabuco’s objection to the slave’s being “closed off in the plantations” seems to corroborate the common sense of abolition—the slave’s liberation—this enclosure bears a positive connotation. The “release” he entreats is a form of figurative liberation on the basis of which the slave’s pursuit of tangible socioeconomic and political freedoms will be forestalled. In addition to preventing slaves from engaging in insurrection and assassination attempts, Nabcuo promises that abolition will diminish the potential for “civil war.” On the one hand, since regional antagonism did not pose a threat in late-nineteenth-century Brazil (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, xi; Haberly, Abolitionism, 1972, 30), this reference seems rather outlandish. But Nabuco wants to thoroughly dissociate abolitionism from societal upheaval and to promise that Brazil’s future will be far more harmonious than that of the postabolition United States. Whereas elsewhere in O Abolicionismo, he expresses admiration for the prohibitive measures that guarded against slaves’ “participation in the active or mental life of (U.S.) society” and argues that it was slaves’ participation in abolitionism that led to the U.S. Civil War (72), he now insists upon Brazil’s potential for a smooth transition to a wage labor economy that will sustain blacks’ subordination. Nabuco has situated the slave’s hope that he may be freed, together with the awareness that his “captivity touches the heart of the nation,” as a type of false consciousness that will prevent him from seeking tangible socioeconomic liberties. He now attributes the slave’s failure to interpret his subordinate status to his inability to read and identifies this as a further means for promoting his compliance. Nabuco first insists that, following abolition, the slave will not abandon his master but will continue to serve him. Once again, this assurance reflects not only the effort to assuage slaveholders’ fears that they will incur a loss as the result of abolition but attests to Nabuco’s desire to guarantee blacks’ accommodation to a subservient rank. His description of the slave’s apathy seems intentionally confusing: while Nabuco first asserts that the slave is entirely aware of his “hardship,” he ultimately declares his passionate attachment to his captor. This

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duplicitous expression of sympathy with the slave’s suffering mystifies both his intent to prevent the slave’s awakening and his anxiety about black literacy: Os escravos, em geral, não sabem ler, não precisam, porém, de soletrar a palavra liberdade para sentir a dureza da sua condição. A consciência neles pode estar adormecida, o coração resignado, a esperança morta: eles podem beijar com reconhecimento os ferros que lhes apertam os pulsos; exaltar-se, na sua triste e tocante degradação, com a posição, a fortuna, o luxo do seu senhor; recusar a alforria que este lhes ofereça, para não terem que se separar da casa onde foram crias. . . . [The slaves, in general, do not know how to read, nor do they need to spell the word liberty to feel the hardship of their condition. Their consciousness may be dormant, their hearts resigned, their hope dead: they may kiss with familiarity the chains that bind their wrists; they may become exalted, in their sad and touching degradation, with the status, the fortune, the luxury of their master; they may refuse the manumission that he offers them, in order not to have to separate themselves from the house in which they were raised. . . . ] (73–74)

While the image of the slave “kissing the chains that bind his wrists” seems to suggest that he should be awakened and made aware of his subjugation, the slave’s “dormant consciousness” takes a positive connotation: it facilitates his identification with authority and prevents him from violating his master’s rights. When Nabuco claims that the slave’s attachment to his master and to the house in which he was raised will induce him to refuse the master’s offer of manumission, he situates the master as the agent for emancipating slaves. But since the master’s manumission offer will not be accepted, Nabuco constitutes abolition as an act of generosity that will preclude the slave’s desire for freedom and augment his perception of indebtedness. In addition to Nabuco’s titular concern with the slave’s “hardship” and his critique of the “dormant consciousness” that compels him to identify with his master, his mystifying reference to the slave’s illiteracy disguises the effort to sustain him in a condition of unknowing resignation. Though Nabuco claims that the slave’s inability to read or to “spell the word liberty” does not diminish his awareness of his “sad and touching degradation,” by proceeding to a description of the slave’s love of captivity and his pride in his master’s affluence, Nabuco repudiates his assertions that the slave is self-aware and that illiteracy does not inhibit the recognition of his inferior status. Like his “dormant consciousness,” the slave’s illiteracy is a deterrent to the comprehension of

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his hardship. As long as the slave remains “asleep” and illiterate, he will not only be resigned but will find joy and comfort in his confinement, “kissing” the “familiar” chains that bind him and “exalting himself” with his captor’s luxury. By contrast, should he be awakened and educated, he would become alert to his inequality and seek to rectify it. The inadvisability of the slave’s acquisition of reading and writing skills is underscored by Nabuco’s oblique claim that the “slave does not need to read”—in other words, he should not be encouraged to do so. Whereas Marcos Nogueira emphasizes Nabuco’s advocacy of free, public education as a corollary to abolition (1977, 51–52), his rejection of black reading reflects the effort to contain blacks within the text of white power and, thus, the production of his own narrative authority on the basis of his symbolic incorporation of black discourse. At another moment in O Abolicionismo, Nabuco admonishes that abolitionists should neither address nor rouse the slave to consciousness: “Não é aos escravos que falamos, é aos livres: em relação àqueles fizemos nossa divisa das palavras de Sir Walter Scott: ‘Não acordeis o escravo que dorme, ele sonha talvez que é livre’” [It is not to the slaves that we speak, but to the free; in relation to the latter we made our motto the words of Sir Walter Scott: “Do not wake the sleeping slave; he dreams perhaps that he is free”] (75). Nabuco’s equation of literacy with resistance reflects not only his fear of blacks’ autonomy and acquisition of white privileges in a broad sense but also the specific use of the written word in Brazil’s most formidable slave rebellion, the Muslim-organized “Malê Revolt” in Salvador, Bahia in 1835. João Reis comments that, whereas few of the rebels could read or write Arabic with ease and the conspiracy was planned principally by word of mouth, in the inquisition that followed the uprising, “The police found many pieces of paper with Arabic writing, and these papers made a deep impression at the time. In a society where even the dominant whites were largely illiterate, it was hard to accept that African slaves possessed such sophisticated means of communication” (Slave Rebellion in Brazil, 2003, 100).19 The disparity between whites’ illiteracy and the black rebels’ access to the written word resonates with Nabuco’s lamentation of the citizen’s degradation and his entreaty to elevate and cultivate him. The fact that the Malê Revolt was coordinated through an alliance between slaves and free blacks—numbering approximately one thousand (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 72)—also elucidates his anxiety about the slave’s transgressive slippage outside his predetermined sphere. In addition to the probable impact of the Malê Revolt on Nabuco’s perception of the

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ominous consequences of slaves’ literacy, his dismissal of black writing points to an apparently radical disparity from U.S. abolitionism, which employed black-authored accounts of captivity to establish slaves’ humanity and to induce sympathy with their welfare. On the other hand, Nabuco’s entreaty to nominally incorporate the slave’s desire for freedom reflects a paradigm of containment similar to that of the slave narrative genre.20 In addition to the roles of white editors and amanuenses, in To Tell a Free Story (1986), William L. Andrews calls attention to the more subtle problem of producing narratives that corresponded to white expectations, such that “the most trustworthy of all slave narrators would be the one who effaced himself behind the universally applicable facts of slavery” (6). Nabuco’s combined mediation of slaves’ interests and dismissal of black-writing signals the emergence of a genre that is distinct from, but resonates with, English and U.S. abolitionists’ interventions in black testimonial. Indeed, his rejection of black writing, and the assimilation of “African” expression in white-authored text, constitutes what might ironically be termed the Brazilian “slave’s narrative.” Nabuco’s denunciation of the slave’s writing practice reflects both the effort to compel blacks’ consent with white authority and the symbolic absorption and displacement of black articulation conferred by his entreaty on behalf of slaves. This substitution is underscored by Nabuco’s reference to the master’s manumission contract, a deed that “liberates” the slave while ensuring that he will not abandon his captor. Another example of this nominal textual absorption of black dissent is Nabuco’s reference to Pedro II’s written mandate as a means for guaranteeing blacks’ subordination in a chapter entitled “Ilegalidade da Escravidão” [Illegality of Slavery]. His reference to the retroactive execution of Pedro II’s 1831 injunction against the slave trade21 is, of course, a metaphor for abolition, but it is also at this point that his plea for the slave’s symbolic release from captivity intersects with his commitment to retaining the monarchy. Nabuco emphasizes Pedro II’s injunction to suggest that he was engaged with abolitionism since its inception.22 By situating him as the key figure for absorbing black dissent, Nabuco dissociates him from the outmoded slavery institution and subverts the common perception among abolitionists that slavery and monarchism should simultaneously be overcome in the name of progress (Bosi, Dialética, 1992, 223): Por sua vez, a atual geração, desejosa de romper definitivamente a estreita solidariedade que ainda existe entre o país e o tráfico de

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africanos, pede hoje a execução de uma lei que não podia ser revogada, e não foi, e que todos os africanos ainda em cativeiro, sendo bona piratarum, têm direito de considerar como a sua carta de liberdade rubricada pela Regência em nome do Imperador. [For its part, the present generation, desiring to definitively break the close solidarity that still exists between the country and the African traffic, today requests the implementation of a law that could not be revoked, and was not, and which all the Africans still in captivity, being bona piratarum, have the right to consider as their deed of liberty signed by the Regency in the name of the Emperor.] (119)

Nabuco claims the slave’s desire for freedom as proper to himself and his abolitionist peers, substituting his “generation’s” appeal on slaves’ behalf for the degrading collision of master and slave within the national subject. With his emphasis on slaves’ right to consider the emperor’s mandate as a deed of liberty, he reiterates that the key is their belief in its potential to free them. Like the master’s nominal manumission offer, the emperor’s written mandate will convince slaves that the state represents their interests, containing their potentially transgressive energies. The emperor, with his Crown, is also the “head” that will rule the body politic and cure its malaise, a conceptualization that reflects Nabuco’s admiration for the “distinguished” quality of the head of state in Walter Bagehot’s celebration of the English monarchy in The English Constutition (1867) (Needell, A Liberal Embraces Monarchy, 1991, 166). At the same time, whereas most positivists defended Republican dictatorship (Nogueira, Joaquim Nabuco, 1987, 21) and Alfredo Bosi addresses the impact of orthodox positivism on Republicans who wished to replace the emperor with a “brain-like” new state (Bosi, Dialética, 1992, 237), his invocation of Pedro II’s mandate also reflects a positivist conceptualization of the state as the rational, scientific agent for ensuring progress submitted to order (Nogueira, 21)—an “active cerebrum in charge of the State” (Bosi, Dialética, 1992, 237)—and speaks to his concern with remedying the seigniorial figure’s compromised cognition. As indicated, by the time Nabuco writes O Abolicionismo, the shift to the Republic is already inevitable. 23 He is disappointed with the emperor’s failure to compellingly demonstrate his investment in abolition at an earlier point—a gesture he thinks might have saved him. When he admits that, while Pedro II did not revoke his mandate, he

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also did not seek to execute it, he censures the emperor’s half-hearted commitment to abolition that he believes has foreclosed his chances of remaining in power. Whereas throughout O Abolicionismo, Nabuco alternates between lamenting the breakdown of power differentials and outlining a program for revitalizing white authority, in the final lines of the last chapter of his tract, “Receios e Consequências. Conclusão,” he relates a particularly despondent vision of Brazil’s future. On the one hand, the location of this pessimistic account at the end of O Abolicionismo reflects the particular conclusion about the nation’s destiny to which Nabuco has ultimately arrived. On the other hand, in a passage of this same chapter to which I referred earlier, he appeals somewhat more optimistically for the “disentangling” of the races through abolition. In addition to reflecting Nabuco’s dual tasks of assessing the obstacles to national sovereignty and elucidating a strategy for removing them, his wavering between despair and supplication suggests that he has never been wholly convinced of the feasibility of his project for reestablishing white power. The disorienting proximity of his optimistic appeal and the fatalistic disclosure that follows is due to the simultaneity of his entreaty for abolition with his anticipation of the Republic and his perception of the irreversible impact of miscegenation and blacks’ arrogation of white privilege: “É esse o próprio enigma do destino nacional do Brasil. A escravidão infiltrou-lhe o fanatismo nas veias, e, por isso, ele nada faz para arrancar a direção daquele destino às forças cegas e indiferentes que o estão, silenciosamente, encaminhando” [This is the precise enigma of Brazil’s national destiny. Slavery infiltrated fanaticism into its veins and, for this reason, it does nothing to halt the course of that destiny away from the blind and indifferent forces that are silently leading it] (204). The “blind and indifferent forces” in charge of the nation’s destiny refers both to Republicans’ unwillingness to commit to abolitionism (Needell, A Liberal Embraces Monarchy, 1991, 168) and their efforts to unseat Pedro II, a task that was accomplished on 15 November 1889 when a group of insubordinate army officers organized a coup to overthrow him (Borges, Intellectuals and the Forgetting of Slavery in Brazil, 1996, 40). Since Nabuco perceives the Crown as the sole entity capable of remedying the effects of slavery and resituating Brazil on the path to Europeanization, his portrait of the infiltration of fanaticism in Brazil’s veins, and of the “blind and indifferent forces” in control of Brazil, speaks also to his belief that blacks have overtaken the nation and that it is too

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late to wrest power away from them. Despite the state’s efforts to abolish slavery, Brazil is already a “nation of slaves” (194). Whereas at other moments he proposes to recuperate whites’ sense of entitlement, he now concludes that, unlike U.S. northerners, Brazilian whites will never perceive their superiority or, by extension, act to defend their privileges against the ingressions of their unwieldy slaves. Nabuco reflects on the ultimate failure of his endeavor in a chapter entitled “Influência Sobre o Território e a População do Interior” [Influence on the Territory and Population of the Interior], in which he describes the slave’s suffering as a “curse” that permeates Brazilian nature. In addition to his suggestion that the slave has already had an irrevocably degenerative impact on Brazil—so very different from the passage Caetano quotes about slavery disseminating its “great suaveness” into the Brazilian wilderness—the image of the slave’s uncontained plea for release resonates with his entreaty for the state’s absorption and displacement of black unrest and, once again, reflects his anticipation of the emperor’s downfall: “Dir-se-ia que, assim como a matéria não faz senão transformar-se, os sofrimentos, as maldições, as interrogações mudas a Deus, do escravo, condenado ao nascer a galés perpétuas, criança desfigurada pela ambição do dinheiro, não se extinguem de todo com ele, mas espalham nessse vale de lágrimas da escravidão, em que ele viveu, um fluido pesado, fatal ao homem e à Natureza” [One could say that, just as matter cannot but transform itself, the sufferings, the maledictions, the mute interrogations to God, of the slave, condemned at birth to perpetual forced labor in the galleys, a child disfigured by the ambition for money, are not entirely extinguished with him, but spread out in this valley of the tears of slavery in which he lived, a heavy fluid, fatal to mankind and to Nature] (155). Where Caetano would remember Nabuco describing slavery breathing its infantile soul, weightless sadness, unembittered tears, silence without concentration, causeless joys and happiness without day after into Brazilian nature, Nabuco now presents a radically different view. He laments that the slave’s suffering, maledictions, and mute interrogations to God will be transformed into a “heavy fluid” that will have a fatal effect on mankind and on nature. As with the “infiltration of fanaticism” in Brazil’s veins, the fluid character of slavery’s legacy reflects the nation’s absorption of “black blood.” The unrestricted dissemination of the slave’s utterances suggests that, whereas Nabuco has endeavored to compel blacks’ identification with

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whites, their grievances and transgressive energies remain ominously unchecked. In light of the emperor’s impending return to Europe, the slave’s “mute interrogations to God” denote the absence of a tangible patriarchal figure worthy of ensuring blacks’ subordination and of rectifying their debilitating impact on the citizen, more peon than proprietor. Rather than convey concern with the slave’s lack of opportunity, the slave’s condemnation at birth is a metaphor for the nation’s damnation as the result of blacks’ social and genetic impact and the inescapable termination of the emperor’s mandate. “Birth” also resonates with the ex-master’s son’s violated birth-right and, by extension, the degraded “citizen-proprietor.” The slave child’s “disfigurement” by ambition for money further articulates the irremediable effects of slavery on white patriarchy. Whereas it would seem logical that “ambition for money” refers to the master class, in light of Nabuco’s characterizations of the slave’s unwieldy appetite for power, it appears to describe the slave himself: like the ex-slave who, “in the half-light of captivity,” arrogates his master’s rank, the slave’s disfigurement suggests that his relation to the means of production has forever been altered, that the unseemly shape he has acquired is that of the senhor.

Nabuco’s and Brazil’s Formation A return to Nabuco’s memoir, Minha Formação (1900), brings depth to certain of the questions discussed in his abolitionist tract, particularly his comparison of Brazil and the United States, his discussion of race and writing and the resonance of his patriarchism with Freyre’s “redemptive rereading” of the effects of slavery on Brazilian society. Minha Formação—also a parable for Brazil’s “formation” or upbringing—was published twelve years after abolition and eleven years after the overthrow of the emperor, though the majority of it first appeared in the periodical Comércio de São Paulo in 1895. Bereft at what he views as the regrettable republican outcome of abolition, Nabuco has gone into voluntary exile in London. From this site, he elaborates on the connection between societal decline and Brazil’s imprecise European affiliation. The Crown has been overthrown and he must sense his problematic whiteness as a Brazilian nordestino among Anglo-Saxons even more profoundly than when he wrote O Abolicionismo. Whereas in O Abolicionismo, Nabuco suggests that “O povo brasileiro precisa de outro ambiente, de desenvolver-se e crescer em meio inteiramente diverso” [The Brazilian people need

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another atmosphere, to develop and grow in an altogether different habitat] (203), in Minha Formação, he is despondent: “Estamos condenados à mais terrível das instabilidades . . . a atração de afinidades esquecidas . . . De um lado do mar sente-se a ausência do mundo; do outro, a ausência do país. O sentimento em nós é brasileiro, a imaginação européia” [We are condemned to the most terrible of instabilities . . . the attraction of forgotten affinities . . . . From one side of the sea one feels the absence of the world; from the other, the absence of country. The feeling in us is Brazilian, the imagination, European] (40). He calls the post-Independence Brazilian a “squatter” in a gloriously beautiful “jardim infantil” [child’s garden or kindergarten] (40) and claims that he is underdeveloped and undevelopable, for the human spirit, “que é um só e terrivelmente centralista, está do outro lado do Atlântico” [that is unitary and terribly centralized, is on the other side of the Atlantic] (41). Nabuco is, as always, full of contradictions. He discusses the titles of nobility attributed to the twelve families among whom the Brazilian territories were first divided and the false aristocratic descent of latenineteenth-century Brazilian slaveholders that, he claims, led to the fall of the throne. He also attributes postabolition divisiveness in the United States to Lincoln’s “untraceable” genealogy. At certain points in his memoir, Nabuco identifies Brazil as a fraternal extension of the United States, joined through a shared historical and emotional formation. He refers to André Rebouças’ fictional underground railroad, plotted from São Paulo to the North (203) and to Brazilian abolitionists’ use of U.S. pen names—Garrison, Lincoln, Brown—in their correspondence with one another. On the other hand, this fraternal alliance anticipates Nabuco’s description of abolition and republicanism in the language of the primal horde. For Nabuco, the United States and Brazil come ultimately to be linked with one another on the basis of their common dismantling of European control and the paternal uncertainty and unstable identity that follow. His description of Pedro II’s hospitalization in Portugal at the time Independence was pronounced establishes the scope of this filial republican betrayal. Nabuco’s contradictory references to the United States speak not only to his ambivalence about Brazil’s “northern cousin” but also to his entangled preoccupation with paternity. In O Abolicionismo, he argues both that abolition will be achieved more peacefully than in the United States and that the testaments of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass pale by comparison with the horrific

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crimes—incest and torture—committed on Brazilian plantations (79). In Minha Formação, Nabuco invokes The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) both as testament to the less malicious nature of U.S. slavery and also to confirm the “complex bond” between master and slave that ensures Brazil’s unabated potential grandeur. The instability of this reference is articulated by what Helena Holgersson Shorter theorizes as the unheimlich quality of the mulatto in the United States (“Authority’s Shadowy Double: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy,” 2005). Douglass’ defamiliarizing mixed-race—the suggestion that his master is also his father—is clearly at odds with Nabuco’s reference to the relationship between Douglass and his former master as evidence of the felicitous master/slave bond. It recalls his horrified description of the futures of two children born following abolition—one the descendant of slaves and the other the descendent of slaveholders—and the possibility that they will be indistinguishable. Given that Nabuco invokes this moment to celebrate the closeness created between blacks and whites during slavery, it also speaks to a cordial form of racism wherein a superficial bow to the ex-slave blends seamlessly with a commitment to white patriarchy. Nabuco is obsessed with what he perceives as the patricidal outcome of abolition, given his hope that seigniorial authority would be invigorated through abolition and, indeed, the close association of his father with the Second Empire. He compares the ungoverned momentum of the fraternal horde with the ungoverned mixing of the races in his discussion of two of Brazil’s most prominent abolitionists, André Rebouças, a Monarchist and José do Patrocínio, a Republican whose efforts weighed significantly in the military coup that overthrew Pedro II (Salles, 21). Though both were of African/European descent, Nabuco makes no mention of Rebouças’ race, but repeatedly refers to Patrocínio as a mulatto. He connects Patrocínio’s mixed-race to the inadequately governed preabolition epoch (71), writing that his mixture of Spartacus and Camille Demoulins (207) represented “a própria revolução” [the revolution itself] (208). For Nabuco, Patrocínio’s alliances with wealthy landowners against the self-sacrificing Crown emblematized the overeagerness of the emboldened masses following abolition (208). His reference to the landed Paulistas’ “hijacking” of abolition, together with Patrocínio’s mulato “disloyalty” anticipates Freyre’s dual rejection of southeastern and black interpretations of Brazilian society in establishing the preeminence of white northeastern “black authorship.” Also like Freyrean blackness that nourishes white-writing, Nabuco argues that, while Patrocínio’s writing is decidedly “not art,” he was

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nonetheless valuable in the extent to which he “sustained” [alimentou] the abolitionist movement. Of Patrocínio’s “Loira Mãe dos Cativos” [Blond Mother of the Captives]—an elegy to Princess Isabel’s “freeing” of the slaves—Nabuco asserts that “poder-se-ia extrair verdadeira poesia” [one could extract real poetry], just as “com o sopro de sua eloquência de combate se faria um baixo-relêvo para um arco-triunfo: o Chant du Départ da abolição” [with the breath of his war-like eloquence one could produce a bass-relief for an arc of triumph: the Chant du Départ of abolition] (71). There is strength to be derived from Patrocínio’s poetry, a substance that others may profitably extract and employ as a national anthem; ungoverned, his creativity was chaotically chanelled to a horrible, Oedipal finale. For Nabuco, Patrocínio’s writing is not a finished product comparable to that of Renan or Chateaubriend—“. . . não é um estilo. Não tem governo, tem apenas medida; reflete a ação confusa, a agitação perpétua de uma época desequilibrada . . .” [. . . it is not a style. It has no governement, it has only measure; it reflects confused action, the perpetual agitation of a desequilibrated epoch . . .] (71)—but requires submission to European “editing.”24 Nabuco allies himself with André Rebouças, who followed Pedro II into exile (Borges, 41) to the exclusion of the other abolitionist “brothers” he holds accountable for the symbolic patricide. Dissociating himself and Rebouças from the Desmoulines/Spartacus combination embodied by Patrocínio, Nabuco recalls that the emperor was a friend of Rebouças’ father and that in a letter to him he inquired about “the boys” (202). He also states that following the emperor’s death, he turned his attention to his father’s career and wrote his father’s biography, Um Estadista do lmpério (1896) in an effort to recuperate a sense of paternal origin. Nabuco’s inclusion of Rebouças’ letter to the now departed emperor near the end of his memoir—and particularly Rebouças’ admission that “desde 15 de novembro de 1889 perdi a linha divisória entre meu Pai e meu mestre e, Imperador” [since 15 November 1889, I lost (a sense of) the dividing line between my Father and my master, and Emperor] (203)—reiterates the selfconscious link between Nabuco’s Oedipal guilt, toward Pedro II as well as his father to whom he regrets not having recognized his debt at an earlier age, and his alienation from the Republic. It is, of course, in Minha Formação that Nabuco pens the words that would become Caetano’s album’s leitmotif: “A escravidão permanecerá por muito tempo como a característica nacional do Brasil. . . .” [Slavery will remain for a long time the national

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characteristic of Brazil . . . .] (84). In addition to lamenting the extent of Brazil’s Africanization, his description of the perseverance of slavery as a “national characteristic” is also a kind of wish. When Nabuco states that in postabolition, Republican Brazil, he “experiment[a] uma singular nostalgia que muito espantaria um Garrison ou um John Brown: a saudade do escravo” [experience(s) a unique nostalgia that would greatly shock a Garrison or a John Brown: a longing for the slave] (185), the longing he describes conflates with a desire to undo abolition and the Republic and return to a time prior to the dissipation of the emperor’s power. Nabuco describes his plantation upbringing in the twentieth of Minha Formação’s twenty-six chapters entitled “Massangana.” In a lengthy prefatory footnote to this chapter, named for Nabuco’s family’s sugarmill plantation in Pernambuco, he explains that it was his intention to commence with his monarchical education, to follow with his political and literary education, and to conclude with a portrait of his childhood. Nabuco’s placement of the chronicle of his origin so near the end of his memoir reflects a desire for return to the pre-republican period, before Brazil’s breach with Europe. The fact that “Massangana” is extracted from a book written seven years earlier and originally published in French furthers the Eurocentering quality of his return to the plantation plot at the end of the narrative of his, and Brazil’s “formation.” In this chapter, Nabuco describes Massangana as a small queendom presided over by his gentle godmother. Despite her severe appearance, she “não era mais senão a enfermeira dos seus escravos” [was nothing if not the nurse of her slaves] (189). He likens the relationship between himself, his godmother and her servant, Elias, to a nuclear family (188), stating that his godmother entrusted her finances to Elias, her “servo fiel” [faithful serf] (188) and that she was bereft when he died. Nabuco’s father is the always absent referant: like the Crown that signifies dislocation and difference even when situated within Brazil’s perimeters, Nabuco’s progressively more nostalgic recollections of his father coincide with his fixation on the time before Pedro II’s fall, and the moment when he departs Massangana to join the abolitionist struggle whose outcome he now deplores. He recalls that once financial ruin demanded that Massangana be dismantled, the slaves were sold off and he departed for Rio de Janeiro in the company of his black nursemaid. Upon his return to Massangana twelve years later, at age twenty, Nabuco wanders among the slaves’ graves still presided over by his godmother’s portrait on the Chapel’s altar. He comments on slaves’ willing servitude, for they did not “quixaram-se

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de sua senhora, como a tinham até o fim abençoado” [complain about their mistress but, rather, blessed her until the end] (191), and describes the unhappy Massangana land that they “regaram com seu sangue mas abençoaram com seu amor” [irrigated with their blood but blessed with their love] (192). Nabuco recalls that it was during this unhappy retreat that he resolved to dedicate himself to abolitionism, citing his prior encounter with the fugitive slave whose entreaty to be bought ultimately led him to devote himself “ao serviço da raça generosa entre todas que a desigualdade de sua condição enternecia em vez de azedar e que por sua doçura no sofrimento emprestava até mesmo à oppressão de que era vítima um reflexo de bondade . . . ” [to the service of that most generous race of all whose unequal condition made tender rather than bitter and who for their sweetness in suffering lent to the oppression of which they were victims a reflection of goodness . . . ] (192). Paradoxically, his abolitionism originates with his precluded mastery—the plantation has been sold off—and his aquiescence to the slave’s entreaty to serve him, the slave to whose service he claims thereupon to dedicate himself. Nabuco’s eroticized portrait of the slave’s “sweet suffering” is extended with the narrative of his wedding ceremony in the plantation Chapel, where he is united with his bride as with “correntes” [chains] in a “cativeiro” [captivity] he would not wish to escape (182), and his comparison of abolition with the relinquishing of an expired romantic obsession. He underscores the failed romantic significance of abolition with a reference to the golden rose sent by the Pope to Princess Isabel on the day she signed the “Lei Aúrea” and writes that the gift of abolition is one that black Brazilians would readily have relinquished—for slavery created a generosity of spirit unrepeatable in history (185)—had they known of the result of their emancipation for the future of Pedro II. In keeping with this concept of blacks’ selfless spirit and intrinsic dedication to white patriarchy, at another point in his memoir, Nabuco describes the slave who committed suicide on the day he lost an election to deputy (210–11). But ultimately, forlorn expressions about the outcome of abolition outweigh these “sweet” recollections of the slave’s service. Though Nabuco would choose to remain bound in captivity to his “beloved,” it is already too late for the paternal recognition he craves. In keeping with the implicit parallel between his own and Brazil’s “formation,” he conveys the inability to perceive his reflection—his whiteness—as a national problem. In so doing, he articulates both Oedipal guilt and Hegel’s impasse. Nabuco brings his memoir to a close with a discussion

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of optical health versus illness, employing a metaphor that speaks both to his prognostications for Brazil’s possible cure or terminal debilitation following abolition and with his own crisis about where to locate himself following the deposition of Pedro II. He describes his filial relationship to the near-sighted, European political exile, the Barão de Tatphoeus (254), to whom Brazilian nature “lhe dizia o que a nós não diz, e que talvez seja preciso ter tido e renunciado por ela uma primeira encarnação, um outro mundo, para se poder sentir” [said to him what it does not say to us, and for which it is perhaps necessary to have had and renounced a first incarnation, another world, in order to be felt] (252). Though he describes his deepening appreciation for Brazil acquired from the Baron, there is the implicit suggestion that he will not be able to truly absorb that appreciation given the inexact and guilty nature of his Republican citizenship. Notwithstanding Nabuco’s republican nostalgia for “the father” and the slave child’s “disfiguration” into his master’s form, the ingredients of his discussion of slavery’s long-lasting effects provide inspiration for Gilberto Freyre’s celebratory conceptualization of white patriarchy. Nabuco longingly recalls his deceased father extolling the defunct monarchy: “o rei reina e não governa” [the King reigns and doesn’t govern] (164). From this despondent articulation, Freyre constructs a new model of power wherein “A Europa reinando mas sem governar; governando antes a África” [Europe ruled but without governing; governing first was Africa] (Casa-Grande e Senzala, 5). The “spread” of the slave’s utterances to the “valley of the tears of slavery” becomes the stuff of Gilberto Freyre’s paradigm of “gênio de lugar” [spirit of the place]—the process by which Africans “transfuse” an ephemeral black substance to the Brazilian landscape—and, by extension, performances of slavery such as Caetano’s patriarchal assimilation of the slave’s “weightless sadness.” Whereas Nabuco perceives the transmission of the slave’s “fluid” to nature as “fatal,” fifty years later, Freyre employs the metaphor of Africans’ disembodiment to redefine “genetic” blackness as an ethereal property that is absorbed by seigniorial figures. The slave’s foreboding inundation of the Brazilian terrain is thus resolved by Freyre’s optimistic interpretation of the transference of the slave’s lamentation to nature: containing that which Nabuco could not, he employs this disclosure to produce a model of seigniorial subjectivity that speaks on blacks’ behalf. The following section turns to Freyre’s celebratory rereading of blacks’ impact on white authority, a transformation I consider through an analysis of his preface to O Abolicionismo, “Joaquim Nabuco e as

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Reformas Sociais” [Joaquim Nabuco and Social Reform]. 25 By shifting my discussion from Nabuco back to Freyre, I want to reflect on the impact of Nabuco’s tract on Freyre’s conceptualization of slaveholders’ symbolic black inheritance. Because this preface has been widely influential, I also want to elucidate the manner in which Freyre cements Nabuco’s position as the original white advocate of black Brazil.

Abolitionism and White Negritude In chapter 3, I discussed Freyre’s conceptualization of Lima’s “atmospherically” imbued black legacy as the source for his black discourse. While Freyre’s preface to O Abolicionismo relies upon a comparable substitution of symbolic blackness for “African or slave descent,” it is distinguished by his positive reinterpretation of Nabuco’s view of the debilitating impact of blacks on whites, what David Haberly calls Freyre’s transformation of the plantation economy from “cesspool” to “highly efficient and humane melting-pot” (44). Rather than an egalitarian interracial synthesis, the plantation becomes the site for the appropriation of blacks’ identity by the postseigniorial strata. Freyre’s paratextual intervention is also unique because he situates Nabuco’s abolitionism as the heroic antecedent for his own narrative of plantation relations and because he rereads Nabuco’s commitment to revitalizing white patriarchy as a regionalist endeavor. In other words, he connects Nabuco’s privileging of the master figure and of Pedro II with his own endeavor to exalt the northeastern senhor. There are many elements of Freyre’s narrative that resonate with his apology for Lima. In the passage that follows, he celebrates Nabuco’s northeastern plantation upbringing, casting him as the symbolic offspring of the female slaves who cared for him, and as an innocent ioiô who assimilates slaves’ experience of distress. By contrast with Nabuco’s bleak vision of the impact of plantation relations on the master class, Freyre situates Nabuco as a privileged figure whose authority derives from his empowering exchange with subjugated blacks: Formou-o pelo leite de escrava que amamentou o menino branco de Massangana, pelos braços de escravos que primeiro o carregaram, pelosrisos de escravos que lhe afugentaram os primeiros choros e tédios de criança, pelas mãos de escravos que lhe levaram à boca as primeiras comidas, talvez pelos beijos de escrava que primeiro lhe deram sugestões de outro

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amor de mulher além do de mãe e, ainda, pelo gesto daquele escravo adolescente, fugido do outro engenho, que, uma tarde, surgiu diante de Nabuco menino, sentado no patamar da casa-grande de Massangana, para abraçar-se a seus pés, suplicando ao sinhôzinho que pelo amor de Deus o fizesse comprar pela madrinha, senhora de engenho. [What formed him was the slave woman’s milk that nursed the white boy from Massangana, the slaves’ arms that first carried him, the slaves’ laughter that dispelled his first tears and childhood weariness, the slaves’ hands that brought the first foods to his mouth, perhaps the slave woman’s kisses that first gave him the suggestion of another kind of love beyond that of his mother and, further, the gesture of that adolescent slave, escaped from another plantation, who one afternoon appeared before the young Nabuco, seated on the landing of the Massangana plantation manor, to embrace his feet, begging the little master for the love of God to have his godmother, the plantation Mistress, buy him.] (15–16)

As with Lima, Freyre justifies Nabuco’s seigniorial origins on the grounds that he is “formed” by the breast milk, food, and kisses he received from slave women.26 He refers to the passage in Minha Formação where Nabuco identifies the fugitive slave’s entreaty to be purchased and rescued from his cruel master as the origin for his commitment to abolitionism (184). With this trope of the fugitive slave, kneeling and embracing Nabuco’s feet, and begging Nabuco to buy him, he produces Nabuco as a charitable patriarch who acquiesces to the slave’s plea for humane discipline. Freyre also qualifies most of the elements that comprise Nabuco’s formation as orally transmitted. By situating him as the recipient of the slave’s supplication, along with black women’s food, kisses, and breast milk, he suggests that he is not only the symbolic progeny of slaves but, specifically, that he absorbs black discourse. Whereas Lima’s white-authored “black poetry” merely corroborates Freyre’s narrative authority, because Nabuco’s “formative” absorption of black oratory culminates with his dedication to abolition, Freyre uses it to collapse the white arrogation of black voice with the struggle for slaves’ liberation. In the passage that follows, he refers again to Nabuco’s encounter with the fugitive slave, claiming that while such exchanges were common in colonial history, Nabuco’s assimilation of black desire is unparalleled: É certo que milhares de outros escravos fizeram o mesmo com centenas de outros meninos brancos, que poderiam ter sido outros tantos redentores dos africanos no Brasil; é, porém, das Escrituras que a

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semente precisa de cair no terreno certo para frutificar plenamente. Joaquim Nabuco foi mais que qualquer outro, branco ou preto, o redentor dos cativos no Brasil, porque mais do que ninguém absorveu . . . toda a dor, todo o sofrimento, todo o desejo imenso, embora nem sempre claro em todos eles, de liberdade e de redenção, até ele próprio, Nabuco, transbordar dessa dor, desse sofrimento e desse desejo. [Of course thousands of other slaves did the same thing with hundreds of other white boys, who could have become other saviors of the Africans in Brazil; it is, however, clear from the Scriptures that the seed needs to fall on the right ground in order fully flourish. Joaquim Nabuco was more than any other, white or black, the savior of the captives in Brazil, because, more than anyone, he absorbed . . . all the pain, all the suffering, all the immense desire, though not always clear to all of them, for liberty and for redemption, to the point where he himself, Nabuco, overflowed with that pain, that suffering and that desire.] (16)

As in the aforementioned passage, Freyre transforms Nabuco’s bleak vision of the conflictive interplay of master and slave within the national subject into an empowering event: “overflowing” with black feelings, Nabuco’s absorption of slaves’ sentiments effaces his coercive possession of the black body and inaugurates a model of benign seigniorial control. With his emphasis on the primary, even biblically foreordained quality of Nabuco’s boyhood identification with slaves, Freyre claims an heroic antecedent for his own paradigm of assimilationist master/slave relations and, by extension, for his own white scientific objectivity and authority to depict black experience. As with Lima’s black contemporaries, whom he alleges fail to identify with their own experience, he insists that Nabuco incorporates the “pain, suffering and desire” that is “not always clear” to blacks themselves. Freyre thus establishes Nabuco’s authority not only on the basis of his formative interaction with black nursemaids and his acquiescence to the slave’s entreaty for a humane master, but also on the grounds that blacks are unable to articulate their sentiments. Even more shocking than Freyre’s dismissal of twentieth-century black poets, his negation of black articulation is now highlighted by the fact that he dissociates blacks from the desire to end slavery and confers that desire as proper to white authorities. Like Nabuco’s slave “kissing the chains that bind his wrists,” in the passage that follows, he does not simply insist upon blacks’ inability to articulate their experience in a general sense but specifically disengages them

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from the struggle against slavery: “E mais de uma vez teve que lamentar que dos próprios homens de cor muitos se encontrassem não entre os abolicionistas mas por um como masoquismo (como se veio a explicar depois), do lado contrário, entre os que queriam a continuação do regime de chicote e de tronco” [And more than once one had to lament that many men of color situated themselves not among the abolitionists but, on the basis of a type of masochism (as later came to be explained) on the opposite side, among those who desired the continuation of the regime of the whip and the stake] (18). At other moments in his preface, Freyre situates Nabuco’s unnamed black contemporaries as “traidores dos próprios irmãos africanos” [traitors to their own African brothers] (17) and identifies black writers as “partidários do escravismo” [proslavery advocates] (18). Freyre situates slaves’ identification with their masters and their opposition to abolition as evidence of their failure to articulate their own socioeconomic interests. He makes this claim to portray Nabuco as the legitimate spokesman for black desire and to situate his abolitionist intervention as the origin for the white arrogation of black discourse. At the same time, Freyre attributes blacks’ support for “the continuation of the regime of the whip and the stake” to their masochism: not only do whites give voice to sentiments that blacks themselves are unable to express but also, in the act of speaking for them, they comply with blacks’ desire to relinquish power to a seigniorial subject. Freyre thus justifies his own narrative authority on the dual grounds of blacks’ alienation from their interests and his compliance with their masochism. Indeed, when he claims that blacks’ masochism “later came to be explained,” he implicitly refers to his own analysis of Brazil’s slack balance of “antagonisms in equilibrium,” mitigated by plantation-era sexuality. Freyre rectifies Nabuco’s despondent vision of the slavery economy, identifying his plantation contact with slaves as the source for his masterful articulation on their behalf. He situates Nabuco’s abolitionism as the heroic antecedent for his own narrative of master/slave relations and equates the white articulation of black sentiment with the master figure’s acquiescence to the slave’s inherent submissiveness. Freyre also devotes significant energies to the question of Nabuco’s monarchism. On the one hand, because of its dissonance with twentieth-century nationalism, Freyre censures Nabuco’s resistance to republican governance. On the other hand, even in the midst of critiquing Nabuco’s “outmoded” allegiance to the crown, he conveys approval for his

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loyalty to Pedro II. Indeed, in Novo Mundo nos Trópicos [New World in the Tropics] (1971), Freyre also calls attention to the emperor’s role in achieving abolition (183–86). Though he certainly does not identify as a monarchist, his accommodation of Nabuco’s support for Pedro II speaks to the simultaneity of the Second Empire with the plantation economy Freyre is dedicated to vindicating. Freyre refers to the lapse in Nabuco’s political education that led him to support the monarchy and to resist the transition to the Republic: “Dos que tanto lhe devem ter ensinado da ciência ou da arte da contemporização não apreendera o bastante para deixar de repente a Monarquia pela República” [From the English who must have taught him so much about science or the art of temporization, he did not learn enough to suddenly abandon the Monarchy in favor of the Republic] (26). While he seems to censure Nabuco’s disinclination to “suddenly abandon” the Crown, his emphasis on Nabuco’s non-opportunistic loyalty to Pedro II reflects approval for his dedication to Brazil’s “original” patriarchy. Likewise, when Freyre claims that “surgindo de repente a República, deu-lhe também de repente o título de homem do passado ou de ancien régime” [The Republic suddenly emerging, he was also suddenly ascribed the title of man of the past or of the ancien régime] (25), the dated quality of Nabuco’s monarchism is misleading. Given his idealization of Brazil’s preabolition aristocracy, the title of “man of the past or of the ancien régime” is ennobling. Freyre’s investment in Nabuco also has a regionalist component. In addition to the simultaneity of the monarchy with slavery, the transition to the Republic consolidated the authority of the southeastern planters. 27 Even the abolition bill of 13 May 1888 was the work of a conservative cabinet led by the planter elite (primarily from São Paulo) that had previously fought to preserve slavery. 28 The Second Empire (1840–89) also constituted a period of national sovereignty that has not since been repeated (Salles, 35), since the transition from monarchy to the Republic coincided with the subordination of Brazil’s interests to an exterior power (33): first to England; then, by the turn of the century, to the United States (Burns, 196). As indicated in chapter 3, Freyre’s work is motivated largely by the effort to defend the northeastern oligarchy against the cultural and socioeconomic hegemony of the southeast and, by extension, the United States. His references to the Second Empire thus intertwine with nostalgia for the climax of northeastern grandeur (Mota, 151). In addition to empathizing with Nabuco’s loyalty to Pedro II—which, as suggested, he aligns with preabolition, pre-republican patriarchy in the broadest sense—when he

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discusses Nabuco’s exit from politics following the shift to the Republic, he articulates intense disdain for the regime that came to replace the emperor: Mas muito deixara de fazer pelo Brasil nos dias dedicados a uma autobiografia prematura por um precoce morto político. Vira-se então obrigado a viver parasiticamente da contemplação do próprio passado, quando seu entusiasmo, seus impulsos, seus pendores ainda eram todos no sentido da luta viril e da ação criadora. Da ação de federalista que continuasse a de abolicionista. Da ação de socialista que continuasse dentro da Monarquia paternal ou maternal, mas não paternalesca ou caudilhesca, o esforço do pioneiro do trabalhismo no nosso País. Da ação de renovador de tradições da Monarquia que tornasse inútil ou supérflua a República dos positivistas e dos estadualistas, ao seu ver, salva dos excessos dos sectários pela ação do Exército Nacional, por ele consagrado por essa sua intervenção superpartidária na vida brasileira em momento crítico, substituto da própria Monarquia. [But there was much that he failed to do for Brazil in the days dedicated to a premature autobiography by a precociously dead politician. He perceived himself as obligated to live parasitically on the contemplation of his own past, when his enthusiasm, his impulses, his inclinations were still all characterized by virile struggle and creative action. By the federalist action that continued that of the abolitionist. By the socialist action that continued within the paternal or maternal Monarchy, but not paternalistic or autocratic, the power of the pioneer of workers’ rights in our Country. By the action of renovator of Monarchic traditions that would have rendered useless or superfluous the Republic of positivists and statists, in his view, free of the sectarian excesses implemented through the action of the National Army, consecrated by its partisan intervention in Brazilian life at a critical moment, a substitute for the Monarchy itself.] (25–26)

Like Nabuco’s indisposition to “suddenly abandon the crown,” Freyre’s reference to his “premature” departure from politics is counterbalanced by tacit approval for his loyalty to the ancien régime. Though Freyre calls Nabuco’s contemplation of his past “parasitic,” it resonates with his own backward glance in Casa-Grande e Senzala, where he identifies the northeastern plantation economy as the origin of Brazil’s unique Racial Democracy. Freyre’s insistence that the monarchy to which Nabuco remained loyal was not “paternalistic or autocratic” but “paternal or maternal” and “socialist” authenticates his own portrait of the northeastern plantation as a kingdom-like site in which people perform their duties at varying levels of a harmonious

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hierarchy. The “renovation” of monarchic traditions that would have made the Republic “useless or superfluous” reflects his own reinvention of the northeastern plantation master as a benevolent patriarch. Whereas in O Abolicionismo as well as in Minha Formação, Nabuco situates this effort in the context of sustaining blacks’ identification with a white patriarchal figure, for Freyre, the regional dimension of this authority’s identity is paramount. With his claim that had such renovations been realized, the Republic would not have become necessary, and his description of the “sectarian” excesses brought to bear through military intervention, Freyre denounces the consolidation of southeastern socioeconomic control of the nation. When Freyre claims that “there was much that (Nabuco) failed to do for Brazil,” he situates his own work as taking up where Nabuco left off. While he does not dismantle southeastern hegemony, with the publication of Casa-Grande e Senzala, he does produce a model of “Racially Democratic” northeastern plantation history that becomes canonical. Constituting the northeastern senhor as a figure who is symbolically “Africanized” by his contact with slaves and whose authority to articulate black sentiments derives from blacks’ desire to relinquish control, he not only inverts Nabuco’s bleak view of the plantation economy but constitutes the northeastern descendants of slaveholders as the inheritors of a symbolically mixed-race, superlatively Brazilian legacy that is theirs alone. In this way, he makes an important gesture toward rectifying what he situates as Nabuco’s failed attempt to sanctify and universalize northeastern seigniorial authority. Indeed, Ricardo Salles describes Freyre’s model of master/ slave relations as most closely approximating the nineteenth-century “foundational myth” of benevolent patriarchy during the Second Empire (33–34) and Carlos Guilherme Mota situates it as the “crystallization of an ideology which, until today, to a greater or lesser extent, continues to inform the notion of Brazilian Culture” (57). 29 Nabuco’s pessimistic analysis of the impact of master/slave relations anticipates and informs this foundational myth. Whereas abolitionism seems to connote the expansion of black’s mobility and influence, Nabuco’s tract proposes a means for more effectively containing the slave by purporting to articulate his desire. Freyre seizes this duplicitous strategy for mobilizing black consent and casts it as the origin for a representational practice—and, by extension, an affirmation of cultural superiority—that remains current to this day. Ignoring Nabuco’s expressions of admiration for the U.S. “dividing line of color,” Freyre directs attention to his occasionally favorable

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evaluations of Brazilian master/slave relations by contrast with their northern counterpart: “A escravidão, por felicidade nossa, nunca azedou a alma do escravo contra o senhor . . . nem criou entre as duas raças o ódio recíproco que existe naturalmente entre opressores e oprimidos” [Slavery, thankfully for us, never embittered the soul of the slave against the master . . . nor did it create between the two races the reciprocal hatred that naturally exists between oppressors and oppressed] (70). Though he does not cite Nabuco, Gilberto Freyre reproduces this passage verbatim in his preface to Jorge de Lima’s “Poemas Negros” to justify Lima’s lyrical portrait of plantation life as well as his own representation of Brazilian slavery as a uniquely harmonious economy in Casa-Grande e Senzala. While Freyre identifies Jorge de Lima’s “Poemas Negros” as an example of this representational practice, and situates Nabuco’s abolitionism as its origin, Freyre himself is, of course, the culmination of this Africanized seigniorial sensibility. The chapter that follows turns to Freyre’s discussion of his own writing practice in relation to Brazil’s leading nineteenth-century novelists, José de Alencar and Machado de Assis, and to his dismissal of Machado’s mixed-race in favor of his own figuratively mestiço sensibility.

5 From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

In Casa-Grande e Senzala, Gilberto Freyre casts the intimate contact between masters and slaves as the origin for Brazilian “hybridity.” Because he emphasizes the cultural and atmospheric transmission of identity, his analysis has been widely perceived as a progressive departure from eugenic interpretations of national character. The chapter which follows shows how Freyrean hybridity constitutes the plantation master, or the figure who emblemetizes that identity, as the amalgamation of both terms of the dialectic of Brazilian culture. Whereas in chapters 2 and 3, I discuss Freyre’s model of universalized seigniorial subjectivity in the context of his apologies for Jorge de Lima and Joaquim Nabuco, the present chapter investigates his use of the terms “culture,” “nature,” and the “atmosphere” to more thoroughly demonstrate their entanglement with biology and heredity. I do not simply want to show that Freyre’s fusionism is connected to race, for the fact that race—and eugenic “knowledge”— informs discourses of hybridization comes as no surprise. What I want to explicate is how Freyre employs culture, nature, and the atmosphere to exclude sociohistorical mestiços from Brazil’s nonbiological African/European synthesis. As indicated in the introduction, Casa-Grande e Senzala continues to be the dominant narrative of Brazilian culture, despite the interventions of Marxist critics who, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, have problematized Freyre’s benign portrait of colonialization and enslavement. Even many of the scholars who challenge aspects of

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Freyre’s analysis corroborate the mainstream view that he redirected the discussion of Brazilian national identity from genetics to culture and that this shift represented a progressive departure from eugenic theorizations. Premised on this misreading, they identify the perseverance of racist ideas in Brazil as evidence of an outmoded eugenicism they say Freyre sought to reject. For instance, Lilia Schwarcz argues that from the 1930s onward racist models of social analysis continued to circulate in the realm of “common sense and popular representation” in spite of Freyre (247). Another prevalent observation is that the perpetuation of biologism in Freyre’s narrative is discordant with the core of his analysis. David Haberly claims that “even Freyre could not wholly overcome the pull of the past. His obsession with African sexuality ignored his own ground rules, confusing character and situation as completely as the arguments of most Abolitionists” (Haberly, Abolitionism, 1972, 44). Like Schwarcz and Haberly, Ricardo Benzaquen de Araújo stresses the anomalous persistence of biological theories both within Freyre and in mainstream culture (1994). He also insists upon recuperating the “progressive” Freyre of the 1930s from the “reactionary” Freyre of the 1950s and 1960s, the period associated with Freyre’s defense of Salazar and the perpetuation of colonial rule in Africa.1 It was during this time that Freyre developed his theory of “Lusotropicalism,” a “hymn of praise to the Portuguese ability to assimilate extraneous elements into its own culture in a foreign, tropical environment” (Brookshaw, 278). Benzaquen argues that attention to Freyre’s later writing diminished appreciation for Casa-Grande e Senzala, a text whose perspective he praises for its polyphony and its egalitarian interpretation of the impact of European and African cultures in the evolution of Brazilian society. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss a recent intellectual biography that brings new understanding to the antecedents for Freyre’s enigmatic use of the terms “culture,” “nature,” and the “atmosphere” while also enlightening Freyre’s “perspectivism,” or project of assimilating diverse points of view. In addition to providing a brilliantly researched map for interpreting Freyre, I use Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke’s Gilberto Freyre: Um Vitoriano dos Trópicos [Gilberto Freyre: A Victorian from the Tropics] (2005) to illustrate critics’ resistance to reading the coherence of Racial Democracy with lusotropical dictatorship—in this case, even when the evidence is provided by the author herself. Following a discussion of Pallares-Burke, I turn to two essays by Freyre to investigate the relation of his hybridism to writing. In “Como e Porque Escrevi

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Casa-Grande e Senzala” [How and Why I Wrote Casa-Grande e Senzala, 1968], Freyre lays claim to seigniorial and subaltern sites to demonstrate his authentic interpretation of Brazilian society, and constitutes black culture as a life force that fuels his authorial production. In “Reinterpretando José de Alencar” (Vida, Forma e Côr, 1962), Freyre compares Brazil’s two most important nineteenth-century novelists, Machado de Assis and José de Alencar. He attributes Alencar’s assimilation of the dialectic of Brazilian culture to his “atmospheric” incorporation of non-European “values” and distinguishes him from Machado, whose African/European ancestry Freyre insists disables him from inhabiting either the plantation manor or the subaltern periphery and, by extension, from capturing the essence of Brazilian heterogeneity.2 While in chapters 2 and 3, I draw parallels between Freyre’s apologies for Lima and Nabuco and Casa-Grande e Senzala, I now bring greater emphasis to the resonance of these essays with his master work. This is because both of the essays under consideration were written in the 1960s, known as Freyre’s “conservative” period. Throughout my discussion, I make connections with Casa-Grande e Senzala to challenge the distinction between the “progressive, multiculturalist” Freyre of the 1930s and 1940s and the later, pro-Salazar author of New World in the Tropics. Does Freyre’s defense of Portuguese hegemony in Africa really represent a rupture with his earlier celebration of the northeastern slavocracy? Might not Lusotropicalism be the culmination of his analysis of the open, flexible nature of Portuguese colonialism and slavery in Casa-Grande e Senzala?

Racial Democracy or White Democracy? In Gilberto Freyre: Um Vitoriano dos Trópicos, Maria Lúcia PallaresBurke explores the diverse ideological influences on Freyre’s emerging theory of Brazilian culture, allowing for a richer deconstruction of the periodization of the early and late Freyres than had ever before been possible. Through readings of an array of sources including letters, journals, notes in book margins and articles published in the newspaper, Diário de Pernambuco, she emphasizes Freyre’s formative years spent studying in the United States and England, first at Baylor College, in Waco Texas (1918–20), then at Columbia University (1920–22), and finally at Oxford University (1922–23). By documenting his youthful enthusiasm for white supremacism and exposing the ways that this ideology is woven into the fabric of Freyre’s celebration

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of the African influence in Casa-Grande e Senzala, Pallares-Burke complicates the opposition between his early, “progressive” stage, and his latter defense for Salazar. At the same time, her hesitation to name the consistency between the two periods reflects a widespread reticence to problematize Freyre’s debt to scientific race theory—customarily qualified as a lapse or flirtation—or his seigniorial perspective, rationalized as befitting his sociohistorical station and thus unworthy of analytic scrutiny. A synopsis of Pallares-Burke’s inquiry into Freyre’s intellectual coming of age illuminates not only the complexity of his racially informed “culturalism” but also his carefully guarded status as the interpreter of brasilidade. Freyre studied at Baylor College, in Waco, Texas, from 1918 to 1920, a decision based largely on the college’s affiliation with the Baptist Church, which facilitated his transfer from the Colégio Americano Batista do Recife (Pallares-Burke, 55). Whereas Freyre’s exposure to racial violence in Waco is usually thought to have influenced his favorable account of Brazilian race relations by contrast with the U.S. South, Pallares-Burke shows that it was during this time that he first became attracted to what he would call the center of “mística etnocêntrica anglo-saxônica” [anglo-saxonic ethnocentric mystique] (273). She cites his book review of Na Argentina [In Argentina], wherein he states that his white pride had increased in the Old South, and that he had needed to learn the southern etiquette, including dealing with blacks “‘as the member of a superior race in regard to an inferior one’. . . . e jamais chamá-los de ‘Mister’ [and never call them ‘Mister’]” (272). In Freyre’s articles for the Diário de Pernambuco written in Waco, he expresses admiration for the eugenic selection of immigrants to the United States (276) and laments the fall of the Brazilian “gentry” and the passing of an era in which the “africanos fiéis” [faithful Africans] knew their place (273). Freyre came to see the Old South and the Brazilian northeast as allies in a shared struggle against industrialization. Pallares-Burke relates that even his exposure to lynchings did not cause him to question his ideas about southern “humanism,” but only to become critical of Protestantism and to reawaken his lapsed Catholicism, a faith he thereupon credited with the more humane treatment of blacks in Brazil (275). It was also at Baylor that Freyre became acquainted with scientific race tracts including Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History (1916) and Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy (1920), both of which employ Latin America, and Brazil in particular,

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as a cautionary example of the results of racial mixing. In The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard claims that, with the exception of Argentina, Uruguay and the south of Brazil—“arianized” by “valuable Nordic elements”—Latin America is the land of Indians, both pure and mixed, as well as “many millions of blacks and mulattos, the majority in Brazil” (Pallares-Burke, 285). He accentuates the racial crisis in Brazil, stating that while the southern states are the land of white men, the north is saturated with Indian and African “stock” and whites are disappearing in a “universal mongrelization” that would produce calamitous political effects (285). Stoddard compares Latin America’s hybridization with the “chaos of miscegenation” of the Roman Empire in decline, conjoining mixed-racedness with warishness and arguing that the tendency toward revolution in Latin America is proof of this (286): “these unfortunate beings, since every cell in their bodies is a battle field of dissonant heredities, express their souls in feverish, unstable acts of violence without objective” (286). How would Freyre negotiate his admiration for the “anglo saxon ethnocentric mystique” with Stoddard’s demonization of Brazil’s unstable, “mongrelized” people? In a 1926 review of Francis Simkins’ biography of Benjamin Tillman (1847–1918), an ex-governor of South Carolina who defended lynching, intimidation, and fraud as legitimate means to disable black leadership, and whom Simkins treats as one of the most important figures in the evolution of “white democracy” in the south (311), Freyre characterizes Tillman as a model for northeastern Brazilian slaveholders, themselves as disorganized and in need of strong leadership as the South Carolina plantation owners during Tillman’s mandate (Diário de Pernambuco, in Pallares-Burke, 312). Freyre’s identification with southern white supremacism is reflected in another article for the Diário de Pernambuco in which he explicitly defends the Ku Klux Klan.3 Written shortly after returning to Recife in 1923, he associates the Klan with the “páginas muito românticas da história americana” [very romantic pages of American history] (314) and in contradistinction to the unfeeling industrialism and “improvised” hierarchy that replaced the natural order of the slave labor economy. Freyre explains how the Klan emerged once the north—motivated more by industrial interests than humanitarian concern for blacks—had trampled the aristocratic southerners, and recently freed slaves were attaining powerful ranks with alarming speed: “Escravos de ontem foram, de repente, sem preparo nenhum, elevados a juízes, chefes de polícia e outros ofícios importantes. Aconteceu, então, o que era natural que acontecesse. Diante dos

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abusos dos chefes, assim improvisados, organizaram-se os antigos senhores numa sociedade de resistência” [Yesterday’s slaves were suddenly, without any preparation, elevated to the position of judges, chiefs of police, and other important posts. What happened, then, was natural. In the face of these improvised bosses’ abuses, the former masters organized themselves into a society of resistance] (314). Pallares-Burke’s unearthing of Freyre’s college-era enthusiasm for scientific race theories means that we are faced with both an early and a late conservatism. Moreover, the period we would now have to call Freyre’s “middle” period, during which he was purportedly marked dramatically by the theories of anthropologist Franz Boas, reflects a further conceit. Whereas there is a virtually uncontested premise in Freyre studies that he pioneered a shift in emphasis on culture over race as the principal determinant of Brazilian identity, and that this revolutionary transformation resulted from his brief tutelage with Boas at Columbia University (1920–22), Pallares-Burke reveals that Boas did not wield such a dramatic impact on his young student. Freyre’s 1925 version of his master’s thesis refers to the detrimental effects of the African influence, describing the sugar mill plantation sites of Brazil as the “mais contaminada pelo sangue negro” [most contaminated by black blood], where “o mataborrão ariano dificilmente chupa, apenas atenua, o colorido das muitas manchas escuras” [the arian blotting paper barely absorbs, only attenuates, the coloring of the many dark stains] (268). The only time that Freyre invokes Boas’ arguments about the impact of the atmosphere, it is not to redeem miscegenation but, on the contrary, to assert that the presence of “a sobriedade e elegância moral” [sobriety and moral elegance] in people of “mixed-race” is due to “circunstâncias exteriores” [exterior circumstances] (268–69) rather than to their innate potential for civility and refinement. It is only years later that Freyre incorporates certain of Boas’ ideas and even then he does so in ambivalent and opportunistic ways. In revising his 1922 thesis into Casa-Grande e Senzala, Freyre softens many of the passages that reflect admiration for eugenic theories. He edits his praise for Argentina’s whitening practices and balances his reverent remarks about plantation relations with discussions of slaveholders’ violent abuses (266). Freyre employs Boas to render his discussion of Nina Rodrigues’ thesis of black pathology more palatable. When he refers to Rodrigues’ “very interesting” studies about the pathology of miscegenation, he adds that Rodrigues confused this social pathology with biological pathology (269). Freyre also

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edits his language to distance himself from many of the concepts he explicitly espouses in his thesis. Whereas in this original manuscript he accepts black female hypersexuality as a given, writing that “sabe-se que a mulata é uma superexcitada sexual” [it is known that the mulatta is sexually overexcited], he later qualifies this assertion: “alguns proclamam a mulata uma superexcitada sexual” [some proclaim that the mulatta is sexually overexcited] (269–70). Freyre also alters his descriptions of just punishments of “indocile” slaves to “castigos às vezes julgados necessários” [punishments sometimes deemed necessary] (270). He modifies his descriptions of sugar plantation regions from “a mais contaminada pelo sangue negro” [the most contaminated by black blood] to “a mais cheia de sangue negro” [the most full of black blood] (270). Referring to sexual relations between plantation masters’ sons and enslaved women, Freyre first calls this “contaminating” contact and later amends it to “intercurso sexual do filho com as negras” [sexual intercourse of the son with black women] (270), though two such references to “contaminating” sexual contact escape this censorship (270). Freyre’s efforts to camouflage the eugenic bent of his original thesis demonstrate that Boas was as much a “flirtation” for him as the KKK or the theories of Stoddard and Grant. In other words, Freyre is not a Boasian thinker in whom elements of eugenicism persevered; rather, he is a writer struggling to reconcile white supremacism with the inevitability of the African influence in Brazil. How to conjoin his veneration of figures like Benjamin Tillman with the blunt fact that the “chaotic” mestiços about whom he was warned were his “own” people? Despite this extraordinary exposition of Freyre’s self-censorship—a task more indicative of the embarrassed effort to dissociate himself from scientific racism than an intellectual awakening to the centrality of “culture”—Pallares-Burke shies away from exploring the implications of how eugenics is woven into the framework of his theories, disowning the rich paradox she has laid out. She is apologetic about discussing Freyre’s attraction to white supremacism, insisting that he was ultimately disappointed with the U.S. “racial solution” (270) and reminding her reader that he was a man of his time and that his early adherence to eugenics does not diminish the “revolutionary” quality of Casa-Grande e Senzala (270). When in 1926 Freyre publishes an article celebrating African dance, food preparation, and sexuality—“sinceramente, nós temos de reconhecer em nós o africano. E é tempo de corajosamente o fazermos. De o fazermos na vida, no amor, na arte” and in the kitchen

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[sincerely, we have to recognize the African in us. And it is time to do so courageously. To do so in life, in love, in art] and in the kitchen (319)—Pallares-Burke attributes his nascent appreciation of black culture, itself reduced to forced labor productivity and other slaveryera “contributions,” to his earlier experimentation with the opposite extreme. She describes Freyre’s praise for Tillman and the Klan as a racist “lapse” from which he ultimately recovers, and the “troubled, sinuous path” that leads him, finally, to accept Boas’ ideas (318). Pallares-Burke even characterizes Freyre’s attraction to white supremacism as an obligatory step to his celebration of the African influence: “É como se o jovem Freyre tivesse de reconhecer e admirar o racismo numa de suas formas mais extremadas para que, finalmente, pudesse se livrar dele” [It was as though Freyre had to recognize and admire racism in one of its most extreme forms so that, finally, he could free himself of it] (279). But Freyre’s appreciation for black dance, sex and food is on a continuum with his sentimental evocation of the slavocratic complex—with its patriarchal gentry and its singing, dancing, cooking, sexually “available” slaves—as well as with Lusotropicalism. What occurs is not a shift in thinking from one extreme to another but, as Pallares-Burke has already shown us, the careful editing out of race science and weaving in of stronger links to Boas’ culturalism. In addition to this creative “rereading” of Boas, I want to linger on two other concepts that are central to Freyre’s deceptively inclusive sociology. The first, the “equilibrium of antagonisms,” describes a system wherein power differentials are held in check by a degree of slippage between opposing parties.4 Connected to the “equilibrium of antagonisms” is perspectivism, the theory that truth is constituted through the compilation of diverse points of view. Pallares-Burke traces Freyre’s perspectivism to Primo Levi’s idea that each individual encompasses various subjectivities in the course of a lifetime (90), to Walter Pater’s discussion of the individual’s accumulation of the influences of other people (100), to Victor Giraud’s conceptualization of the plasticity and indefinition of the young mind in which literary influences and life experiences do battle with one another to conquer the as yet undefined consciousness (103) and to Spencer, where the synthesis of opposite perceptions interfaces with a narrative of stable relations of power (365, 366). Even more than these, Freyre was compelled by Neitzschean perspectivism, or the need to engage with ideas both in favor and against one’s own interpretations (Human, All Too Human, 1878, in Pallares-Burke, 108). While Pallares-Burke discusses the influence of perspectivism on Freyre’s approach to reading—and

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his hunger for different points of view—this concept demands a more comprehensive interrogation. How does incorporating antagonic viewpoints relate to Freyre’s inversion of systems of domination? To his neolamarckeanism? Or to his mystification of seigniorial patrol? In fleshing out these questions, we should turn to another writer who influenced Freyre, Lafcadio Hearn, whose invocation of the “atmospheric” conditions of slavery and argument that master/slave traits are hereditary bring new light both to Freyre’s inversion of power relations and to his incorporation of disparate view points. In Two Years in the French West Indies (1890), Hearn refutes blacks’ innate physical inferiority and susceptibility to disease, but argues that the condition of slavery—with its discomforts and inadequate medical care—made blacks weaker than whites and insists that this weakness is genetically transmitted and will persevere even after abolition (Pallares-Burke, 350). He also argues that, whereas the mixed-race male poses a threat to the integrity of the colony, the appeal of mixedrace women increases with each generation. If black women charmed the early colonizers and slaveholders, their mulatta daughters had even more power over white men such that, “bewitched,” the masters would eventually become “slaves of their slaves” (348). Who is master? Who is slave? Who is black or white? As per Hearn’s theory, mirrored in Lima’s “Negra Fulô” (discussed in chapter 2), that enslaved women are really their masters’ masters, Freyre isolates these oppositions, but softens—or equilibrates—the antagonism between them. In addition to mediating his neolamarckian compromise with eugenics, Hearn provides Freyre with a perspective from which to analyze Brazilian society. An Englishman who spent several years in Martinique, Hearn devoted the remainder of his life to mourning this adopted homeland. Possibly still at Baylor, Freyre read Hearns’ Two Years in the French West Indies, an account of his experiences in Martinique, as well as a biography of Hearn and a collection of his lectures. PallaresBurke reports that Freyre was impressed by the Englishman’s rupture with everything Nordic and “civilized” in favor of the tropics. The passages he underlines and his notes in the margins of Hearne’s biography indicate that he is particularly taken with his celebration of the tropical landscape, blacks’ musicality, the sensuality of black women, and his distaste for all that is Anglo-Saxon (196). Freyre is struck by Hearne’s estimate that the tropics are destined for “supremacy” and by his idea that the slaves of the past may become the masters of the future (199) as well as—tragically for Hearn—by his contention about the primacy of one’s essence and “meio de origem” [place or atmosphere of origin]

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and the impossibility of self-reinvention in a new locale (200). Challenged by an idealized England, where Freyre describes becoming enamored of both English culture and its young men, but which he initially perceives as the opposite of Brazil, he assumes the gaze of the ex-pat—praising the virtues of the tropics, and especially its mixed-race women—in his interpretation of Brazilian culture.5 But Freyre’s propensity for capturing other vantage points has more problematic implications than his incorporation of this neocolonialiast gaze. On the one hand, Pallares-Burke points to a tangential but scintilliating example of plagiarism. She discusses the work of a classmate of Freyre’s at Columbia, Rudiger Bilden, whose unpublished analysis of the impact of slavery on Brazil was the catalyst for CasaGrande e Senzala (404). Bilden’s account, divulged by Freyre in an article in the Diário de Pernambuco in January, 1926, not only redeems miscegenation but argues that it is the source for Brazil’s unique Racial Democracy. For Bilden, Brazil’s legacy of slavery is not an impediment to progress; on the contrary, in addition to its characteristic “antagonisms in equilibrium,” Bilden identifies Brazil’s history of slave labor as a precondition for the advancement of civilization (403).6 Freyre took this original, unpublished thesis and ran with it, an act Bilden acknowledges in a letter to Freyre upon the publication of Casa-Grande e Senzala: “é claro que você, até um certo ponto, esvaziou o meu tema e tornou mais difícil para mim escrever o meu livro” [it’s clear that you, to a certain point, depleted my topic and thus made it more difficult for me to write my book], having borrowed so “amply” from a “point of view” with which Freyre had previously not been in agreement and had even criticized as “mechanical” (Pallares-Burke, 403). Even more significant than this cannibalization of Bilden, Freyre’s perspectivism mediates his conceptualization of “transfused” and incorporated blackness. It obscures his paen to colonial-slavocratic patriarchy, enabling him to produce a narrative for which he has not only been heralded as an exemplarily progressive—indeed, postmodern—thinker but which also lends itself to selective, uncritical readings of his work, a debt he himself recognizes when he extols Spencer among others he admires for their anti-extremism, “flutuantes, indecisos e esquivos às conclusões enfáticas” [fluctuating, indecisive, and scornful of emphatic conclusions] (Pallares-Burke, 366). Bilden’s accusation that Freyre “esvaziou [o] tema” [depleted (the) topic] is entirely apropos. In exploring his “depletion” of black and mestiço sociohistoricity, it is helpful to return to Freyre’s nascent appreciation

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for southern patriarchism at Baylor. In addition to Simkins, Stoddard, and Grant, Pallares-Burke notes that Freyre read Yeats’ Reveries over Childhood and Youth (1915) and that he was impressed not only by the importance Yeats attributes to the patriarchal family of his grandparents but also his method of recording the stories, fairy tales, and legends recounted to him by the house servants and fishermen of Sligo to gain “folk” information about Ireland (211). Whereas Freyre’s emphasis on the oral contributions of the lower classes has been interpreted as democratizing and inclusive, it is enmeshed with his awakened passion for the traditions of the Old South and a rejection of the modernist ideas he had been drawn to earlier in his education (232). Freyre’s stress upon the influence of the illiterate underclasses is not the antithesis of a “great men” school of historiography. Rather, the contributions of subaltern objects sustain the casa-grande as the epicenter for the emergence and dissemination of Brazilian cultural production. The conservatism of Freyre’s “celebration” of the illiterate lower classes is also connected to his condemnation of the socioeconomically aspiring middle classes and “half-castes” who sought to improve their status through education. Indeed, his paean to the apex of Brazil’s plantation era in Casa-Grande e Senzala is followed by a grim lamentation of the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century ascent of the bourgeoisie and, in particular, the mulatto bourgeoisie, due specifically to increased opportunities for education, in Sobrados e Mucambos [The Mansion and the Shanties, 1936].7 But this complaint is not an afterthought; it is woven into his celebration of the slaveholding gentry. Pallares-Burke observes that in his articles in the Diário de Pernambuco as early as the 1920s, one of Freyre’s refrains was an attack against what he called the “messianismo da alfabeltização” [messianism of literacy] (238). She notes one such article in which he employs a signature technique of couching his conservatism in a cloud of antielitist rhetoric, writing that the illiterate have much more to contribute to the culture of a nation than the “half-cultivated” and “half-literate” men of Brazil and Portugal, characterized by superficiality and their “mania” for that which is foreign (238–39). How can we more deeply investigate the confluence of perspectivism with Freyre’s thesis of antagonisms in equilibrium? Pallares-Burke reveals the groundwork for delineating this relationship, but she does not take the final step. As discussed in the introduction, part of this resistance lies in legitimate opposition to the universalization of identity politics and to the accusation that Brazil’s resolution of difference

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is not only “mythical” but illustrative of a less democratic—indeed, more patriarchal—order than that of the United States. But there is more to critics’ wariness than anti-Americanism. Part of the problem lies in Freyre’s carefully camouflaged biologism and his complex use of the terms culture and nature in relation to the coloniality of power. In the next section, I show that the scene of writing is key to unraveling these terms, not only because Freyre’s written discourse is itself fraught with ambiguity but because it is in the discussion of his authorial perspective that the conundrum of his unfixed subjectivity and his ambulatory conceptualization of blackness becomes transparent.

Disappearing Acts As its title indicates, in “Como e Porque Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala,” Freyre describes the reasons for and circumstances under which he composed his master work. In his description of this process, he locates himself in the interior of a “half-abandoned” house he links to the de Mello Freyre’s original plantation household and, by extension, to the site he identifies in Casa-Grande e Senzala as the epicenter for the assimilation of European and African cultures. Repeating a familiar mythology of “field work,” he is seated at his desk, where a black servant provides him with “oral” information that fuels his text: Foi trabalho que realizei em condições dificéis—comendo uma vez por dia e morando só e isolado numa casa—que ainda existe—à Estrada do Encanamento, então de propriedade de meu irmão Ulysses, onde ele e eu, solteiros, residíramos durante alguns anos. Em 1932 ele já era homem casado. Cedeu-me aquela casa meio abandonada e a família concordou que durante o dia ficasse a meu serviço o velho Manuel Santana, preto nascido ainda no tempo da escravidão e durante longo tempo membro, por assim dizer, da nossa família; e de certo modo meu colaborador, através de informações orais, na elaboração do livro Casa-Grande e Senzala. Muito aprendi desse como de outros Manuéis, como ele pretos e senão ex-escravos, descendentes de escravos, nascidos em senzalas ou à sombra de casas-grandes, no tempo, ainda, de escravidão. [It was work that I accomplished under difficult conditions—eating once a day and living alone and isolated in a house—which still exists—on Encanamento Road, at that time the property of my brother Ulysses, where he and I, as bachelors, had lived during some years. In 1932 he was already a married man. He provided the half-abandoned

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house to me and my family agreed that during the day I would be served by the old Manuel Santana, a black born in the time of slavery and for a long time a member, so to speak, of our family; and in a certain way my collaborator, through oral information, in the elaboration of Casa-Grande e Senzala. I learned much from this as from other Manuels, like him black and if not ex-slaves, the descendants of slaves, born in senzalas or in the shadow of the plantation manors, during the slavery epoch.] (132)

Though Freyre calls Santana a collaborator in the elaboration of his manuscript, his emergence as the interpreter of black experience is premised upon the disintegration of his servant’s subjectivity. He marks this disintegration by referring to Santana not as an individual but as one of many “Manuels” and by insisting that, notwithstanding Santana’s frequent visits, he is “alone and isolated,” the single enduring subject in their interracial exchange.8 In addition to announcing Santana’s erasure in the fulfillment of Freyre’s hybridization, Freyre’s description of Santana as a “member, so to speak, of our family” reflects the eugenic undertones of his substitution of culture for biology as the medium for incorporating difference. Naming Santana as a figurative rather than literal member of his family, Freyre displaces sociohistorical blackness as an element of the de Mello Freyre household and, by extension, of the Brazilian polity. David Goldberg’s Fanon-inspired theorization of “mastering surveillance” elucidates Freyre’s invocation of Santana in order to conceal him: “Recognized as black, black people at once are made visible to be rendered invisible, to be ‘denegrified’” (87); “The prevailing logic of whiteness, then—white mythology, as Derrida puts it—is to make invisible the visible and visibly threatening” (89–90). Subsumed by Freyre’s text, the Manuels of Brazil are accorded the role of contributors to an overarching, white-authored metatext that “denegrifies” them and neutralizes their discursive/genetic threat. To fully understand the implications of Freyre’s incorporation of black “oral information” in his authorship of Casa-Grande e Senzala, it is necessary to look at his discussion of slaveholders’ assimilation of cultural practices from the senzala in this master text. In Chapters 4 and 5 of Casa-Grande e Senzala, “O Escravo Negro na Vida Sexual e de Família do Brasileiro” [The Black Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian] and “O Escravo Negro na Vida Sexual e de Família do Brasileiro-Continuação” [The Black Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian-Continuation], Freyre describes the transference of elements of slave barracks’ culture to the plantation

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manor. As in his totalizing interaction with Santana, Freyre emphasizes the collaborative impact of the slave barracks on the casa-grande to situate this site as the epicenter of Brazilian culture: “A casa-grande, completada pela senzala, representa todo um sistema econômico, social, político. . . . ” [The plantation manor, completed by the slave barracks, represents an entire economic, social, political system. . . .] (xiii, emphasis mine). Fueled by the incorporation of senzala “practices and institutions,” the slaveholder’s power is limitless: “A casa-grande venceu no Brasil a Igreja, nos impulsos que esta a princípio manifestou para ser a dona da terra. Vencido o jesuíta, o senhor de engenho ficou dominando a colônia quase sozinho” [The plantation manor triumphed over the church in Brazil, over its initial efforts to be the ruler of the land. Surpassing the Jesuit, the plantation master came to dominate the colony almost single-handedly] (lxvii). Freyre further insists that “A história social da casa-grande é a história íntima de quase todo brasileiro” [The social history of the plantation manor is the intimate history of almost every Brazilian] (lxxv) and that “Nas casas-grandes foi até hoje onde melhor se exprimiu o caráter brasileiro” [The plantation manors are, to this day, the place where Brazilian character has been best expressed] (lxxv). Critics’ refusal to read this totalizing gesture has everything to do with Freyre’s seemingly inclusive acknowledgment of the influence of blacks, both in the narrative of his writing process and in his narrative of Brazilian societal formation. Pallares-Burke ignores this “disappearing act,” calling Freyre’s insistence that we “reconhecer em nós o africano” [recognize the African in us] a problack declaration that signals his renunciation of white supremacism. Likewise, in his influential apology for Freyre, Guerra e Paz em Casa-Grande e Senzala [War and Peace in Casa-Grande e Senzala], Ricardo Benzaquen argues that Freyre works with a series of antagonistic pairs, approximating them without diminishing their autonomy: Para (Freyre), o que importa é o estabelecimento de uma ampla troca de experiências, na qual, aliás, a participação da senzala é tão ou mais ativa quanto a da casa-grande, não só espalhando-se pela comida, pela língua, pelo folclore, pela higiene, pelo sexo e por inúmeras outras práticas e instituições, como também dando origem a uma experiência social marcadamente aberta, capaz de aproximar antagônicas influências culturais sem, contudo, procurar fundi-las em uma síntese mais totalizante. [For (Freyre), what is important is the establishment of an ample exchange of experiences in which, moreover, the participation of the

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senzala is equal or greater than that of the casa-grande, not only disseminating itself through food, language, folklore, hygiene, sex, and innumerable other practices and institutions, but also giving rise to a markedly open social experience, capable of approximating antagonistic influences without, however, attempting to meld them into a more totalizing synthesis.] (56)

Claiming that the “dissemination” of black food, language, folklore, hygiene, and sex to the plantation manor represents an “ample exchange” and an “open social experience,” Benzaquen ignores the way that Freyre privileges black influences over black people, “oral information” over Manuel. He argues, moreover, that the plantation manor’s assimilation of black “practices and institutions” produces an image of Brazil’s “extremely hybrid, syncretic and almost polyphonic” society (44), attributing equal or greater importance to the impact of the senzala without fusing distinct “practices and institutions” into a homogeneous composite (56). Whereas Benzaquen argues that Freyre does not sublimate either term of the dialectic of Brazilian culture to the other, in Casa-grande e Senzala as in the representation of his “collaboration” with Santana, blacks only exist inside the plantation manor as a source of information that enhances seigniorial authority. Indeed, though Freyre insists upon Santana’s impact on this site, he makes it clear that his proper place is in the senzala and “in the shadow of the plantation manor.” At the same time that Freyre collapses his assimilation of black culture with the “original” transmission of black identity to whites by situating himself in a casa-grande-like edifice and by referring to Santana’s birth as a slave, he mitigates and compliments his privileged status by insisting that the house is “half-abandoned,” that he works under “difficult conditions” and suffers from hunger and other physical discomforts.9 To further demonstrate this embodiment of master/ slave, black/white dialectics, Freyre emphasizes his “genuine” subaltern experience with the description of his forays in the black margins. Freyre again invokes Brazil’s “original,” seigniorial “Africanization” by characterizing his participation in carnaval and in Afro-Brazilian religious practices, themselves connected to the “rural patriarchal Brazilian complex,” as a process of “resuming” previous contact: Ao mesmo tempo retomei, no Recife, contactos os mais íntimos—de cama e de mesa, posso dizer—com sobrevivências folclóricas ligadas

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ao complexo patriarcal-rural brasileiro: os pastoris e bumbas-meu-boi, por exemplo. Também voltei a conviver com os xangôs, depois de, no Rio de Janeiro, ter me iniciado em candomblés de Niteroi e em danças, músicas e exibições de Carnaval do então esplêndido laboratório, para o estudo de sobrevivências negras na cultura brasileira, que era a Praça Onze. No Rio, passara noites inteiras em excursões aparentemente só boêmias, mas, na verdade, também de estudo, através do qual se aprofundou meu conhecimento de assuntos afro-brasileiros. Excursões em companhia de Prudente de Morães Neto, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Heitor Villas-Lobos, Jaime Ovale—com este até pelo Mangue— Dunga, Patrício, Pixinguinha. Outras, em companhia de Gilberto Amado. E, na Bahia, portas de segredos afro-brasileiros se abriram para mim, desde que me apresentara ao babalorixá Martiniano do Bonfim seu amigo, o também babalorixá Pai Adão, de Recife. [At the same time, I resumed, in Recife, the most intimate contacts—at bed and table, I could say—with folkloric survivals connected to the rural-patriarchal Brazilian complex: the pastoris and bumbas-meu-boi,10 for example. I also returned to socializing with the xangôs after, in Rio de Janeiro, having initiated myself in the candomblés of Niterói and in Carnaval dances, songs, and exhibitions of the then splendid laboratory, for the study of African survivals in Brazilian culture, which was the Praça Onze. In Rio, I had spent entire nights in apparently merely bohemian excursions but, in truth, also study excursions, through which my knowledge of AfroBrazilian subjects became more profound. Excursions in the company of Prudente de Morães Neto, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Heitor Villas-Lobos, Jaime Ovale—with the latter even through the Mangue—Dunga, Patrício, Pixinguinha. Others, in the company of Gilberto Amado. And in Bahia, the doors of Afro-Brazilian secrets opened themselves to me, from the moment when I was introduced to the babalorixá Martiniano do Bonfim by his friend the babalorixá Pai Adão, from Recife.] (133)

Freyre establishes his incorporation of antagonistic pairs on a number of levels. He first announces his unmitigated domain in terms of a spatial opposition (the casa-grande/senzala and the seigniorial interior/black, public cityscape). To this synthesized spatial opposition he then conjoins a demographic opposition. With his reference to Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Heitor Villas-Lobos and Gilberto Amado, he aligns himself with some of the most renowned early-twentieth-century Brazilian social scientists and icons of elite cultural production. On the other hand, he emphasizes his authenticating fraternization with the prominent choro and samba

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composers Dunga (Valdemar de Abreu, 1907–91), Patrício Teixeira (1893–1972) and Pixinguinha (Alfredo da Rocha Vianna Filho, 1897–1973). Freyre’s “apparently bohemian” study excursions in the public plazas and streets, his contact with blacks at “table and bed,” and his domain in the hybridizing site of the plantation manor, constitute his expertise on “Afro-Brazilian subjects.” Moreover, as with the transcription of Santana’s implicitly impermanent “oral information,” the premodern connotation of “folklore” and expired original suggested by “survivals” situate Freyre’s narrative as the embodiment of African cultural traditions in decline. Nestor Garcia Canclini’s discussion of Mexican museums’ cataloguing and containment of indigenous culture illuminates Freyre’s simultaneous incorporation and erasure of blackness: Although they contribute to conceiving a solidary beauty above geographical and cultural differences, (the museums) also engender a uniformity that hides the social contradictions present in the birth of those works. The statues are no longer invoked, and in those museums it is impossible to know how and why they used to be invoked. It seems as if the pots had never been used to cook with, nor the masks for dancing. Everything is there to be looked at. (Hybrid Cultures, 120)

Like Canclini’s indigenous artifacts, Freyre’s textual embodiment of blackness requires that “African survivals” be dissociated from the sociohistorical contexts and contradictions in which they originate and, indeed, from the people who produce, mediate, and implement them. With his reference to the black supernatural—to xangôs, candomblé, and babalorixás—Freyre situates those “survivals” as above or distinct from that which is materially or physically present. The eugenic resonance of Freyre’s forays into the “splendid laboratory” of the public plazas and streets underscores the exclusion of African descent that ensues from his “supernatural” embodiment of dehistoricized blackness. Like so many Carribbean “celebrations” of black culture that center on metaphysics—from santería to vaudun—Freyre constitutes blackness as a subaltern force that needs to be contained—within the plantation manor and within his textual inscription. In addition to dissociating African “survivals” from sociohistorical black subjects, the supernatural quality of blackness effaces his totalizing incorporation. Indeed, Freyre’s contact with xangôs, candomblé, and babalorixás suggests that his assimilation of African culture is a spell cast by blacks, like the initiation into candomblé through which the “doors of Afro-Brazilian secrets”

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open to him. But though this metaphor of aperture and inclusion conveys his welcome reception in the public plazas and streets and dismisses resistance to his observation and interpretation of these sites, his acknowledgment of such barriers confirms opposition and explains his compensatory insistence upon his unmitigated access to the subaltern realm. Freyre’s defensiveness becomes even more pronounced when he describes his narrative as giving voice to all strata of Brazilian society. As indicated in my discussion of Pallares-Burke’s biography, this perspectivism, or professed inclusion of diverse points of view, goes a long way to explaining claims about the democratizing quality of Freyre’s narrative, the most influential of which is Benzaquen’s Guerra e Paz. Perspectivism manifests itself in Freyre’s unorthodox blend of historicism, social science, and literary discourse, as well as in his incorporation of undocumented, unpublished observations by friends, colleagues, and unknown persons alongside citations from published “authorities.” It is also connected to his apparent blurring of master/slave, black/white oppositions even, as I argue, in the process of rigidly demarcating them. In other words, as with the incorporation of blacks’ “oral information” and subaltern “secrets” that constitutes his authorial/genetic displacment of black sociohistoricity, the problem with Freyre’s perspectivism is that it mystifies both the conservatism of his narrative of Brazilian society and the seigniorial point of view from which he constructs it. As indicated, in CasaGrande e Senzala, Freyre argues that the plantation manor is a microcosm of society and that the plantation master is a god-like figure who “ficou dominando a colônia quase sozinho” [dominated the colony almost single-handedly] (lxvii), all the while praising black influences in the evolution of Brazil’s hybrid polity. Likewise, in his description of the production of his narrative, he clearly names the casa-grande as his epicenter, but simultaneously pontificates about his unfixed subjectivity to camouflage that sociohistorically determined site of enunciation. The evasiveness of Freyre’s perspectivism comes to the foreground when he comments on the disintegration of his personality in the course of writing Casa-Grande e Senzala. Freyre first describes the task of the writer “desdobrar-se em perspectivas complementares da sua . . . . que a auxiliassem na percepção de uma realidade múltipla e complexa” [to unfold himself into perspectives that are complementary to his own . . . . which aid him in the perception of a multiple, complex reality] (117). Emphasizing the nonunitary subjectivity that

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ensues from this “unfolding,” Freyre refers to himself in the third person, proclaiming that “the author of Casa-Grande e Senzala” levou esse desdobramento de personalidade ao extremo arriscado, perigoso mesmo, de, desdobrando sua personalidade de origem étnico-cultural e de formação sócio-cultural, além de principalmente européias, principalmente senhorís, procurar sentir-se também, em seus antecedentes e no seu próprio ethos, não só senhoril como servil; não só europeu como não-europeu; ou especificamente indígena, mouro, judeu, negro, africano, e, mais do que isto: mulher, menino, escravo, oprimido, explorado, abusado, no seu ethos e no seu status, por patriarcas e por senhores. Daí ser Casa-Grande e Senzala um livro múltiplo em suas perspectivas; contraditório até, no seu perspectivismo; passível de acusação de negrófilo. Mas realizado de modo a tais diferenças de perspectivas e tais contradições de perspectivas por vezes se complementarem, como corretivo, de alguma maneira, ao que pudesse ser apenas senhoril ou pretender conservar-se monolítico na personalidade do autor; a qual se desdobra em torno de certos assuntos a ponto de o autor ser antes um conjunto meio pirandeliano de autores que um autor único, tal a empatia através da qual procura aperceber-se da mesma realidade contornando-a e considerando-a de diferentes pontos de vista. Diferentes e complementares: o do homem, o do adulto, o do branco mas também o do menino, o da mulher, o do indígena, o do negro, o do efeminado, o do escravo. Pontos de vista, alguns destes, talvez nunca dantes admitidos a uma interpretação, ao mesmo tempo em profundidade e em conjunto, da experiência brasileira. [took this disintegration of personality to the truly risky, dangerous extreme of disintegrating his personality of ethnic-cultural origin and of sociocultural formation, beyond their principally European, principally seigniorial character, to try to feel also, in his antecedents and in his own ethos, not only seigniorial but also servile; not only European but also non-European; or specifically indigenous, Moor, Jewish, black, African and, more than this: woman, boy, slave, oppressed, exploited, abused, in his ethos and in his status, by patriarchs and slaveholders. Thus Casa-Grande e Senzala is a book that is multiple in its perspectives; even contradictory, in its perspectivism; vulnerable to the accusation of negrophile. But realized in such a manner that these differences in perspective and these contradictions in perspective frequently complement each other as a corrective, in some sense, to what could be only seigniorial or attempt to conserve itself as monolithic in the personality of its author; a personality which disintegrates in relation to certain subjects to the point where the author is more a somewhat Pirandelian composite of authors than a single author, for such is

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the empathy through which he attempts to perceive a single reality, contorting it and considering it from different points of view. Different and complementary: that of the man, the adult, the white but also of the boy, the woman, the indigenous, the black, the effeminate, the slave. Points of view, some of them perhaps never before admitted into an interpretation, at once profound and in conjunction with one another, of Brazilian experience.] (117)

With the claim that he feels the sentiments of those who are oppressed, exploited, and abused by patriarchs and slaveholders, Freyre establishes his direct experience of subalternity. As with the inclusion of Santana’s “oral information” and his textual preservation of African folklore and “survivals,” he ennobles his depiction of oppression, exploitation, and abuse by insisting upon the danger involved in “disintegrating his personality.” Freyre accentuates the selflessness of this gesture by stressing that Casa-Grande e Senzala gives voice to segments of the population thus far barred from representation: to children, women, the indigenous, blacks, effeminates, and slaves.11 At the same time, the subject who assimilates and articulates those voices is, as Freyre himself asserts, “principally European” and “principally seigniorial.” Indeed, it is this ubiquitous identity that enables Freyre to feel and incorporate the other’s experience. When Freyre refers to his “antecedents” as the source for his capacity for self-transformation, he once again casts himself as the descendant of colonizers and slaveholders who assimilated the servile experience of the indigenous and enslaved. Likewise, with “ethos,” he names what he claims in Casa-Grande e Senzala—and, indeed, in New World in the Tropics—is the originary, constitutive element of lusotropical character: the Portuguese capacity for incorporating that which is non-European. Freyre’s “Pirandelian assimilation” of contradictory perspectives is enlightened by locating it in relation to Casa-Grande e Senzala, where he emphasizes slaveholders’ adoption of black imperative constructions such as “me dê” [give me] and “me diga” [tell me]. Freyre identifies this usage—in which oblique pronouns are placed before rather than after verbs—as the basis for a more intimate form of address that mitigates the severity of their commands (335). At the same time, he at no point mentions the impact of whites’ language on blacks. The absence of reverse linguistic acculturation means that whites represent all members of the national community but blacks can never speak for or about Brazil. Whereas Benzaquen insists that in CasaGrande e Senzala Freyre produces “uma imagem da sociedade

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extremamente híbrida, sincrética e quase polifônica” [an image of extremely hybrid, syncretic, and almost polyphonic society] (44), as much in this early work as in “Como e Porque Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala” it is the seigniorial figure alone who emerges as the embodiment of African “survivals” and European “character.” “Negrophilia,” as Freyre confirms, is indeed a “corrective” to what would otherwise be “only seigniorial” and “only European,” as in the “doublethink” of Bhabha’s colonial functionary who claims to be hybrid and, thus, to authentically represent his subjects, but whose radical difference is the basis for his power (Bhabha, 111): “The ‘part’ (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the ‘whole’ (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical difference” (111).

The Spectacles of the Races In Reinterpretando José de Alencar, Freyre also characterizes the plantation manor as the epicenter for assimilating and interpreting the dialectic of Brazilian culture, but now takes pains to bar Brazil’s biologically conceptualized hybrid from “talking b(l)ack,” identifying Machado de Assis’ mixed-race ancestry as excluding him from the casa-grande and, by extension, from the practice of writing. There are a number of parallels between Freyre’s apologies for Lima and Nabuco and his comparative discussion of Alencar, Brazil’s foremost Indianist, Romantic novelist, and Machado, the outspoken critic of late-nineteenth-century social customs and politics. Since Alencar is a descendent of the northeastern oligarchy and Machado is from Rio de Janeiro, his celebration of Alencar reflects the effort to vindicate the interests of his own class against the accession of the southeastern bourgeoisie.12 Moreover, as with Nabuco, Freyre seeks a seigniorial antecedent for his own literary authority. At one point in “Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” he declares that “(Alencar) foi para alguns de nós como uma espécie de avô distante” [(Alencar) was for some of us a type of distant grandfather] (133).13 On the other hand, while Freyre dismisses Lima’s and Nabuco’s black contemporaries, he now employs his critique of Machado to dissociate mixed-racedness from the cultural and atmospheric assimilationism he situates as the crux of Brazilian national identity. Whereas Freyre wields Jorge de Lima as proof of the “fruit” of African/European contact, Machado provides evidence of the unviability of biological mestiçagem. Indeed, it is in “Reinterpretando Alencar” that the convoluted interplay

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between cultural, natural, and atmospheric mediums for hybridization comes to the foreground. By contrast with Alencar, whose incorporation of non-European cultures Freyre establishes on the basis of his celebration of the natural environs, he conjoins Machado’s alienation from the interior of the casa-grande with his lack of engagement with nature. Freyre brandishes this disconnect as further confirmation of Machado’s failure to equilibrate antagonisms and, therein, as evidence of his authorial illegitimacy and sterility. While Santana enters the de Mello Freyre household as a source of information that fuels his creative endeavor, Freyre now displaces Machado from the casa-grande to establish his inability to incorporate and represent Brazilian heterogeneity. He also does so to invalidate his critical observations of the slaveholding aristocracy. To demonstrate Machado’s exclusion from the seigniorial realm, Freyre first describes the pervasive influence of the plantation economy on Brazilian literary production. He then argues that, whereas master/ slave relations have had the effect of broadening the narrative range of white authors, they have had a confounding effect on writers of mixedrace origin, whose work is marked above all by the effort to efface their African descent and gain entry to the plantation manor. Citing Machado’s work as an example of this literary subterfuge, Freyre claims that the impact of the “patriarchal, slavocratic complex” (Esclarece) o antimelanismo abertamente insatisfeito de um Lima Barreto, por um lado, e o “arianismo” aristocraticamente superior a questões de raça em seu esforço de descoloração—descoloração protetora e mistificadora da própria pele—de um Machado, por outro lado: um Machado a fingir-se o tempo inteiro de branco fino; o tempo inteiro a bater janelas e a fechar portas contra toda espécie de paisagem mais cruamente brasileira, fluminense ou carioca em suas cores vivas e em suas formas rudes; contra todo arvoredo mais indiscretamente tropical que lhe recordasse sua meninice de rua e de morro, sua condição de filho de gente de cor, de filho de família plebéia, de descendente de escravo negro. Nada de paisagem, nada de cor, nada de árvore, nada de sol. É dentro de casa—e casa, geralmente, grande, sobrado, geralmente, nobre—que Machado, nos seus romances, procura se resguardar das cruezas da rua e da vista também crua dos morros plebeus. Dentro de casa, aristocratizado em personagens de que ele é quase sempre a eminência cinzenta, para não dizer parda, ficticamente afidalgado por bigodes e barbas de ioiô branco, por lunetas de doutor de sobrado, por títulos de conselheiro do Império, é que ele se defende da memória de ter nascido mulato e quase em mucambo e de ter crescido menino de rua e quase moleque.

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[(Illuminates) the openly unsatisfied antimelanism of a Lima Barreto, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the “arianism” that is aristocratically superior to questions of race in its effort at discoloration— protective, mystifying discoloration of his own skin—of a Machado: a Machado constantly pretending to be an elite white; constantly closing windows and closing doors against all aspects of the cruder Brazilian landscape, of the state or city of Rio de Janeiro, in its vivid colors and rude forms; against every tree grove that is more indiscreetly tropical that would remind him of his childhood on the street and on the hill, of his condition as the son of people of color, the son of a plebeian family, the descendant of a black slave. No landscape, no color, no trees, no sun. It is inside the house—and a house that is generally large, a generally noble mansion—that Machado, in his novels, tries to protect himself from the cruelty of the street and from the also cruel view of the plebeian hills. Within the house, aristocratized in characters of whom he is almost always the grayish eminency, to not say mulatto, fictitiously ennobled by the mustaches and beards of the young white master, by the spectacles of the learned gentleman who resides in a mansion, by titles of Imperial counselor, it is thus that he defends himself from the memory of having been born mulatto and almost in a shanty and as having grown up as a child of the street and almost as an urchin.] (122)

Whereas Freyre attributes his natural, unmitigated domain in elite and subaltern realms to his seigniorial status, he characterizes Machado’s focus on the “noble mansion” as a transgression. Moreover, he equates it with the effort to transform himself into an “elite white.”14 But despite his camouflage of spectacles and imperial titles, Machado is unable to “discolor” his skin and to adopt the perspective of the “young white master,” for he is only a “grayish eminency,” a shadowy effigy of the aristocrat. By situating Machado’s concentration on the noble mansion as an ill-realized attempt to whiten himself, Freyre not only opposes sociohistorical “mulatto” identity to the assimilation of diverse points of view but identifies Machado’s partial African descent as precisely that which disables him from incorporating and interpreting difference. Freyre’s indictment of Machado’s aberrant use of “lunetas de doutor” [gentleman’s spectacles] echoes his review of René Maran’s Batoula (1921) in the Diário de Pernambuco in 1922 (cited in Pallares-Burke). On the one hand, Freyre suggests that the Martinican’s talent is a victory over his physiological mal adaptation to literacy, characterizing him as a “negro puro—um negro de nariz tão chato que a gente se espanta de ver nele fixado, como por milagre, um

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pince-nez respeitável” [pure black—a black with a nose so flat that one is shocked to see balanced upon it, as though by miracle, a respectable pince-nez] (305). On the other hand, this review also reflects Freyre’s opportunistic incorporation of Boas, for he insists that Maran’s literary abilities are “incisive, triumphal” proof of Boas’ theories (308), a reference to Boas’ recent article, “The Problem of the American Negro” (1921), in which he repudiates blacks’ hereditary inferiority (Pallares-Burke, 308). In addition to Freyre’s underhanded praise for Maran, in this same article he cites Alexandre Dumas, Machado de Assis, Aleijadinho, and Rubén Darío as examples of “mixed-race” literary genius that debunk racist expectations. This tribute to mestiço authorship is undermined by Freyre’s condescending description of Maran’s “miraculous” use of a pince-nez and his denunciation of black and mulatto writers in “Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” as in the essays discussed in chapters 3 and 4. How can we map the boundary between Freyre’s idealization of African/European synthesis and his depictions of African descent as an obstacle to literacy? Once again, the paradox of Freyre’s simultaneous celebration and disavowal of miscegenation becomes clearer by looking at his treatment of race and racial mixing in Casa-Grande e Senzala. In this work, Freyre claims that the Portuguese are “Afro-Europeans” due to their absorption of black “blood” during four centuries of Moorish domination. He refers to the “sangue mouro ou negro correndo por uma grande população brancarana” [Moorish or black blood running through a great, light-skinned mulatto population] (5) and insists that this “Afro-Europeanness” diminished the conflict and coersion of Portuguese colonization. On the other hand, he emphasizes slaveholders’ nongenetic—cultural and atmospheric—Africanization on Brazilian plantations. While in this more recent context he effaces “blood contact,” Freyre employs slaveholders’ assimilation of African culture for the same purpose, arguing that it is the basis for their empathetic identification with their subjects: “Era como se os sentisse intimamente seus por afinidades remotas apenas empalecidas” [It was as though they felt they were intimately their own kind on the basis of distant, merely lightened affinities] (5). In an even more dramatic reversal of systems of domination, Freyre argues that the “influência africana fervendo sob a européia” [the African influence boiling beneath that of the European] produced a colonial situation in which Africa, rather than Europe, was dominant: “A Europa reinando mas sem governar; governando antes a África” [Europe ruled but without governing; governing first was Africa] (5).

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Despite his indictments of black and mestiço authorship, and notwithstanding the disconnect between his admission of “blood contact” in Brazil’s prehistory by contrast with his disavowal of genetic metiçagem on Brazilian plantations or, moreover, the relation of his narrative of oscillating systems of domination in Moorish Portugal to his mystification of master/slave dialectics, critics continue to read Freyre’s narrative of the Moorish Empire as racially democratizing rather than Eurocentric or resonant with the rhetoric Freyre later employed to defend colonial rule in Africa. In his analysis of the Iberian antecedents for slavocratic power relations in Casa-Grande e Senzala, Benzaquen stresses a racial and hierarchical “opening”: Assim, lembremo-nos, tanto a geografia quanto a história, pela própria situação de fronteira—movediça e transitória—da sociedade portuguesa, eram responsabilizadas pelo caráter indefinido e instável dos seus habitantes. Cabe repetir, a propósito, que essa indefinição se acentuava a ponto de converter o português em um tipo singular de mestiço, capaz de aceitar as mais diversas influências, inclusive de ordem física, sem dissolvê-las e fundi-las em um esforço de síntese, conservando-as lado a lado, como água e azeite, no que foi a primeira aparição da idéia de um “equilíbrio de antagonismos” neste estudo: “Homens de barba loura e cabelo escuro. Homens morenos de cabelo louro [ . . . Ou seja:] mestiços com duas cores de pêlos.”15 [Thus, let us remember, as much the geography as the history, given its frontier situation—moveable and transitory—of Portuguese society, were made responsible for the undefined, unstable character of its inhabitants. It is worth repeating, in this regard, that this indefinition was accentuated to the point of converting the Portuguese into a unique type of mestiço, capable of accepting the most diverse influences, including those of a physical order, without dissolving them in an effort at synthesis, conserving them side by side, like water and oil, in that which was the first appearance of the idea of an “equilibrium of antagonisms” in this study: “Men with blond beards and dark hair. Brown-skinned men with blond hair [ . . . Or rather:] mestiços with two colors of hair.”] (154–55)

When Benzaquen identifies the “moveable, transitory” frontier of the Portuguese Empire as the origin for its inhabitants’ “indefinition” and “instability,” he refers to Freyre’s description of the impact of Moorish rule and of Portugal’s colonial explorations in Africa and Asia. Benzaquen insists that Freyre situates Portugal’s fluctuating

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colonial relations with non-Europeans as the basis for their assimilation of diverse influences, “including those of a physical order,” without “dissolving them in an effort at synthesis.” He ignores Freyre’s contempt for the assimilation of diverse influences, including those of a “physical order” in the context of the plantation economy and disavows the Empire-building function of this historiographic script. Though Benzaquen insists upon the discontinuity between Casa-Grande e Senzala and Freyre’s “lusotropicalist” period, it is this same totalizing model of assimilation that informs his defense of Portuguese hegemony in Africa on the basis of the uniquely Portuguese capacity for assimilating and identifying with non-Europeans. For Freyre, there is no third term, no place to locate Machado in his hybrid matrix. His mestiço is the “Afro-European” colonizer and, chanelling that figure’s legacy, the Africanized master whose dominance is effaced by his incorporation of subalternity. David Goldberg’s theorization of the gaze speaks to Freyre’s insistence upon Machado’s “pretentious” depiction of the culture of the “noble mansion.” Goldberg reads the dialectic of visibility and invisibility in relation to Lewis Gordon’s discussion of “The sadist [as the] one who ‘takes advantage of the invisible dimension of himself as seer to deny the fact of his being seen.’ The sadist is a subject, before whom all others are objects” (82–3). Indeed, in addition to privileging his own nonbiological hybridization over Machado’s mixed-race ancestry, Freyre insists upon Machado’s inability to assimilate the gaze of the “young white master” to invalidate his interpretations of the slaveholding elite. Whereas he claims that Machado closes himself off to “racial questions,” nothing could be less true. The problem, for Freyre, is that Machado focuses on the white aristocracy. In novels such as Quincas Borba (1891), Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), Esaú e Jacó (1904), and Memorial de Aires (1908), he parodies the elite’s mimicry of liberal ideology in light of their acquisition of power and wealth through slavery. Machado’s critique of the upper classes’ duplicitous assimilation of progressive ideas is particularly stringent in Qunicas Borba, where he satirizes the narrator’s elaboration of “humanitismo” [humanitism], a doctrinaire philosophy that unites evolutionist theory and liberal doctrine with social darwinism. Like Goldberg’s sadist, the plantation master is meant to see but never to be watched, named, or otherwise located. Insisting that Machado’s social analysis constitutes an endeavor to “discolor” himself and mystify his “skin,” Freyre effaces his disparaging interpretation of the elite’s hypocrisy by attributing that quality to Machado himself. Aggravated by Machado’s

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assimilation of the gaze of the “young white master,” Freyre insists upon his origins in the shanty and “almost as a child of the street.” In addition to his trespass into the seigniorial realm, Freyre identifies Machado’s detachment from “nature” as further evidence of his illegitimacy. On the one hand, Freyre’s claim that Machado closes himself off to the “vivid colors” and “rude forms” of the “indiscreetly tropical” landscape reflects nationalistic criticism that situates attention to nature as a standard for authentic Brazilian literature.16 More importantly, this further condemnation of Machado speaks to Freyre’s neo-Lamarckian conceptualization of heredity, and to the confusion of culture with climate in his peculiar paradigm of nonbiological hybridization. Whereas Benzaquen argues that Freyre employs atmospheric assimilation to demonstrate the universal capacity for adaptation, Freyre’s totalizing interpretation of “nature” is demonstrated when he equates Alencar with the first “civilized, sophisticated Europeans” to arrive in Brazil: Sua atitude tendo sido, de início, a de homens que nessas coisas e nessas gentes descobriram ou enxergaram valores a ser aproveitados e assimilados por europeus, e não desprezados ou esmagados por ele como expressões de culturas em tudo inferiores às européias ou produtos de uma natureza escandalosamente cheio de sol e de cores vivas e com a qual fosse inconciliável o branco civilizado e sofisticado da Europa, explica que em escritores como, no Brasil, José de Alencar, empenhados em contribuírem para o desenvolvimento de uma literatura brasileira independente da academicamente portuguesa, tenha se conservado o mesmo espírito, a mesma atitude, quase o mesmo sentido das relações de valores europeus com os tropicais: o sentido que se pode hoje afirmar ser característico de todo uma vasta, embora dispersa, cultura lusotropical. [His attitude having been, from the beginning, that of men who in these things and in these peoples discovered or perceived values to be taken advantage of and assimilated by Europeans, and not disdained or crushed by him as expressions of cultures wholly inferior to European ones or products of a nature which is scandalously full of sun and vivid colors and with which the civilized, sophisticated European white would be incompatible, explains that Brazilian writers such as José de Alencar, engaged with contributing to the development of a Brazilian literature independent from academically Portuguese literature, have conserved the same spirit, the same attitude, almost the same sense of the relations between European and tropical values: the sense that one can today affirm is characteristic of a vast, though disperse, lusotropical culture.] (139)

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Freyre employs cultural assimilation and climactic adaptation in a perplexing manner. He first likens Alencar to Europeans who did not disdain Brazilian “values” as “expressions of cultures wholly inferior to European ones or (as) products of a nature which is scandalously full of sun and vivid colors.” He then claims that Europeans’ assimilation of these “values” is the foundation for a “reconciliation” between Europe and America. Finally, Freyre identifies this reconciliation as the origin for a national literature, exemplified by Alencar’s writing. By situating this passage in the context of Casa-Grande e Senzala, Freyre’s conceptualization of cultural and atmospheric identity transmission will become more comprehensible, as will the relation of these terms to his paradigm of hybrid authorship. First, with his reference to Europeans’ incorporation of local “values” that were advantageous to them, Freyre reproduces the idea, developed extensively in Casa-Grande e Senzala, that the Portuguese thrived in Brazil by assimilating indigenous and African cultural practices that were suited to life in the tropics. At the same time, he naturalizes this mode of assimilation. As in Casa-Grande e Senzala, where he identifies the direct impact of the climate on physiological mutations—the “uniformização” [uniformization] of “indivíduos de várias procedências reunidos sob as mesmas condições de ‘meio físico’” [individuals of various origins reunited under the same “atmospheric” conditions] (lxii)—by qualifying those “values” both as “cultural expressions” and as the products of nature, Freyre employs natural generation to constitute a nonbiological mode of “interracial” synthesis. He stresses the fecundity of the Brazilian environs—so “scandalously full of sun and vivid colors”—to underscore the impact of the tropical climate on the emergence of this new “breed” of human being. The reconciliation between European and non-Europeans “values” that displaces genetic mestiçagem and gives rise to Alencar’s distinctly lusotropical authorial perspective is further untangled by looking at Freyre’s enigmatic conceptualization of miscegenation in Casa-Grande e Senzala: “A miscigenação que largamente se praticou aqui corregiu a distância social que doutro modo se teria conservado enorme entre a casa-grande e a mata tropical; entre a casa-grande e a senzala” [The miscegenation that was widely practiced here corrected the social distance that would otherwise have continued to be enormous between the plantation manor and the tropical jungle, between the plantation manor and the slave barracks] (lx). By emphasizing the ways in which sexual relations between masters and slaves diminished the “social” distance

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“between the plantation manor and the slave barracks” and “between the plantation manor and the tropical jungle,” Freyre identifies miscegenation with the cultural and climatic, rather than biological, approximation of antagonistic pairs. Moreover, he invokes natural reproduction to describe this nongenetic synthesis. As in his defense of Alencar’s white hybridity, Freyre interjects the tropical atmosphere to produce the amalgamation of European and African cultures as the “natural” effect of miscegenation.17 By situating Alencar’s synthesis of European and non-European “values” as the origin for a Brazilian literature, Freyre displaces mixed-race authorship and establishes a model of representation wherein the symbolically subalternized, biologically white gaze is not only the privileged perspective from which to depict Brazilian culture but itself constitutes hybridization. This subterfuge, or trick, becomes even more glaring when Freyre insists that, by contrast with Alencar, Machado is unable to represent interracial sex. Freyre first claims that plantation sexuality is the key to national character. He then articulates his unique interpretation of plantation sexual relations. As in Casa-Grande e Senzala, Freyre emphasizes their noncoercive quality. At the same time, whereas they would seem to connote the production of mixed-race children, he emphasizes their social rather than biological impact: E nenhuma história mais natural do homem—ou de uma sociedade— que a de sua vida de família; e esta, em termos crus, é a história de seu sexo. O sexo do indivíduo não apenas biológico mas social. Sexo mais do que psicanaliticamente compreendido como força ou solicitação espalhada no corpo inteiro desse indivíduo social: da raiz de seus cabelos, sensível ao cafuné ou o trinco volutuoso por mão de mulata em cabeça de ioiô ou de iaiá, às pontas dos dedos dos pés aristocráticos, por sua vez vibráteis às comichões provocadas pela extração, às vezes doce como uma carícia sexual, de bichos aí encravados; e não força ou solicitação limitada aos órgãos genitais e desejosa apenas de coito ou de cópula. [And there is no more natural history of man—or of a society—than that of the life of its family; and this, in crude terms, is the history of its sex. The not merely biological but also the social sex of the individual. Sex more than psychoanalytically comprehended as a drive or a solicitation spread out through the entire body of this social individual: from the roots of his hair, sensitive to the scalp massage or the voluptuous click of the mulatta’s hand on the young master’s or young mistress’ head, on the tips of aristocratic feet, for their part quivering to the tickles provoked by the extraction, at times sweet like a sexual caress, of

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vermin embedded in them; and not a drive or solicitation limited to the genital organs and desirous only of coitus or copulation.] (121)

Freyre employs a number of gestures to efface plantation sexual abuse. By equating the young master with the young mistress on the basis of their shared “sensitivity” to the mulata’s touch, as well as by claiming that it is the individual’s social rather than biological sexuality which is of paramount import, Freyre feminizes the master. He reiterates the nonviolent character of plantation sexual relations when he claims that they cannot be reduced to the master’s solicitation for “coitus or copulation.” Even more importantly, Freyre emphasizes nonprocreative sexuality to disavow the emergence of a sociohistorically mixed-race polity. This does not mean, however, that he constitutes plantation sexual relations as sterile. On the contrary, he identifies the mulata’s “sexual caress” of the senhor’s scalp and “aristocratic feet” as the “natural” history of the Brazilian “family.” By emphasizing the nonprocreative sexuality that gave rise to that family, he dissociates natural reproduction from interracial sex and suggests that these relations produced a symbolic rather than biological progeny: the seigniorial figure who assimilates African identity on the basis of his noncoercive domination of the slave’s body. Freyre connects this assimilation with white authorship when he celebrates Alencar’s depictions of love. In addition to casting Alencar’s engagement with this subject as evidence of his authentic Brazilianness—a trait he has already defined as the nonbiological “synthesis” of European and non-European “values”—his discussion speaks to the quality of Alencar’s representations of interracial couples. Joshua Lund’s observations in The Impure Imagination (2006) are enlightening in this regard. Lund reflects that in Freyre and Alencar, the conquered are feminized and infantilized though, he continues, “‘feminize’ is not the precise rhetorical move here” since Freyre is “consistently laudatory about the productive role of the feminine within the normative discourse of national family” (180–81). On the one hand, Lund rightly notes that the Indian male is desexualized and nonprocreative in both Freyre and Alencar and, as per the usual colonialist formulation, that white men save indigenous women from indigenous men (181). On the other hand, he overlooks the fact that for neither writer the interracial couple is really procreative, at least not in the “laudatory, productive” way he describes above. In Alencar’s O Guaraní (1857), none of the interracial couples bear children. And what kind of future is held for Iracema’s (1865) Moacyr,

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the “child of suffering” who, as Doris Sommer notes, literally sucks the life from his indigenous mother (Foundational Fictions, 1991, 144)? Indeed, in Iracema, it is Martim the conqueror who is the “fruit” of European/indigenous synthesis, a process of naturalization on the basis of which he departs to “recruit new settlers for the spot where he buried Iracema” (Sommer, 144). In Freyre, the mestiço child is equally unviable; just as Alencar’s interracial sexual unions produce nativized whites, Freyre’s master/slave liaisons produce Africanized masters. Lund directs our attention to another fascinating dimension of Freyrean naturalization that he calls the “Iracema effect” (161–88). For Lund, Casa-Grande e Senzala is a sociological “reaffirmation of Alencar’s simultaneous nationalization and naturalization of colonial relations,” though Freyre inverts the dialectic of civilization and barbarism, casting the Portuguese as the real barbarians (181). For Lund, this reversal sustains the coloniality of power, for the effect is that Portuguese domination and violence are instinctive, natural. Likewise, when Freyre condemns the coercion and violence of slavery, he constitutes it as inevitable: “this racialized and gendered hierarchy, in CasaGrande e Senzala, is not the work of men, but of nature, or better, an evil genius that puts into motion a cruel tropical theater in which the actors simply play a prescribed part” (187). Lund goes a good way toward describing the enigma of Freyre’s hybridism, but alongside his observation of the naturalization of slaveholders’ “cruel tropical theater,” he reiterates the popular view that critical readings of Freyre need to take a more balanced approach, acknowledging that Freyre made the African the protagonist of Brazilian history, “that the slaves were the ‘real colonizers’ of Brazil” and that Freyre “ranked the senzala alongside, and sometimes above, the casa-grande as exerting the greatest influence on Brazilian culture, effectively decentering the colonial project in a way that was ahead of his time” (151–52). Freyre certainly privileges the African influence, but the problem is just that; whereas black and mestiço subjects are read out of the national script, and barred from inscribing that script, they exert influences that enhance—indeed naturalize—the authority of lusotropically indigenized/Africanized colonizers and plantation masters. How are heredity and biology implicated in Freyre’s disavowal of the sociohistorical mestiço’s “right of representation”? The relation of Freyre’s interpretation of interracial sexual relations to the negation of mixed-race authorship becomes more tangible when he discusses Machado’s failure to depict love relationships between blacks and

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whites. He places Alencar’s productive interpretation of interracial sex in place of Machado’s contrastingly sterile treatment of the topic: Para Machado, quem dissesse amor, dizia—principalmente numa sociedade como a patriarcal e escravocrática do Brasil, na sua fase de transição da família patriarcal para a família romântica: deve-se acrescentar ao romancista meio filósofo—“complicação.” Complicação do natural com o social de que a causa às vezes era a cor do homem apaixonado por moça branca; ou a condição do filho natural desse apaixonado— causas evitadas pelo escritor inconformado com a sua condição de mulato e quase sempre sôfrego por esconder essa condicão. [For Machado, whoever spoke the word love—principally in a society like that of patriarchal, slavocratic Brazil, in its transition from the patriarchal family to the romantic family: one should add this nuance when referring to the rather philosophical novelist—said “complication.” A complication of the natural with the social the cause of which was at times the color of the man in love with a white girl; or the condition of the natural offspring of this enamored man—causes avoided by the writer who was not resigned to his mulatto condition and almost always avid to hide this condition.] (124)

Since interracial love is key to the representation of Brazilian culture, Machado’s avoidance of this topic excludes him from the Brazilian canon. Even more importantly, by attributing Machado’s failure to represent interracial sex to his “condition as a mulatto,” Freyre substitutes the representation of assimilation—mimetic mestiçagem— for sociohistorical mixed-race identity.18 Freyre’s description of the context in which Machado interprets love as a “complication”—the transition “from the patriarchal family to the romantic family”—gains additional depth when read in relation to his treatment of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century urbanization and industrialization in Sobrados e Mucambos [The Mansions and the Shanties]. As indicated, in his discussion of the substitution of the northeastern patriarchal complex with bourgeois, “romantic,” or nuclear family units, Freyre identifies the mulato and the bacharel [college graduate] as the two forces that had a profound impact on Brazil as the result of urbanization and industrialization. Machado’s status as both a mulato and a distinguished intellectual explains why Freyre equates his emergence with the transition from the patriarchal to the romantic family. It also speaks to the desire to vindicate his seigniorial heritage by casting him aside as both an inauthentic Brazilian, and as an inauthentic Brazilian writer.

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Notwithstanding Freyre’s personal investment in defending the northeastern oligarchy, there is a second, more important implication of Freyre’s reference to Machado’s view of love as a “complication” of the “natural” with the “social.” In addition to reiterating that his biologically mixed-race ancestry confounds his effort to locate himself in any single social rank, by attributing this complication to Machado, Freyre displaces his own “complication” of the natural with the social. As I have shown, Freyre substitutes social, atmospheric—and, added to this, “textual”—assimilation for biological “mixture” as the source of hybridization. Ultimately, it is for this substitution of terms that he has been celebrated for redeeming the African influence and for depathologizing the effects of miscegenation, despite the fact that his conceptualizations of culture and the atmosphere are markedly informed by anxiety about miscegenation and the socioeconomic ascendancy of people of African descent. As much in Casa-Grande e Senzala as in his later work, Freyre employs nonbiological identity formation to produce African descent as an intangible enhancement to Brazilian multiculturalism, a quality that is ultimately embodied by the northeastern plantation master. For Lund, Freyre’s narrative is marked by ambivalence: “Between Iracema and anthropology, Freyre’s hybridity at once rests on and reinforces the coloniality of power, exhibiting all of the ambivalence of colonial discourse. While enabling a sharp and sustained critique of Eurocentric race science by confronting it with its own tools of analysis …. those same tools are appropriated in the naturalization of the racial contract—and neutralization of racialized protest—that governs Brazil’s tolerance and cordiality” (187–88). Remembering Freyre’s task of softening his observations of the “contaminating” African influence in Brazil, his “sustained critique” of Eurocentric race science seems like an overstatement. Lund is precise when he observes that Freyre rereads race science in ways that sustain the coloniality of power, but to his observations that Freyre’s rereading naturalizes systems of domination and neutralizes resistance to power, one must add that he invokes the term of nature to produce the Africanized senhor as the prototype for interracial synthesis, displacing blacks and mestiços from the interpretation and inscription of Brazilian culture and echoing what Guillermo Gomez-Peña calls “multiculturalism without people of color” (Dangerous Border Crossers, 2000). Freyre’s revision of the terms of nature and culture has, ultimately, to do with authorship. The ambivalence to which Lund refers speaks

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to colonial discourse but more specifically describes the task of the autodenominated spokesperson for Brazil’s “hybrid” polity, struggling to eclipse white democracy with Racial Democracy and to keep sociohistorical Afro-descendents from speaking for or about Brazilian difference. It speaks to the condition of gatekeeper of Africana, desirous both of demonstrating his “principally European, principally seigniorial” character and bringing Brazil’s unique “hybridism” to the world, torn between the “Anglo Saxon ethnocentric mystique” and an investment in Portugal’s own “mystique”—the lusotropical capacity to assimilate non-European “traits” that made it a softer, gentler version of the present empire. As noted, this contrast with the United States is not only a reason for critics’ unwillingness to deconstruct Freyre but is also central to Freyre’s idealization of Brazil’s slavocratic past vis-à-vis the crass industrialization and Americanization that would replace it. The problem, of course, is that against the alienation of the sugarcane industry, Freyre pits the “filial bond” between master and slave; against the cult of the machine, the body of the slave. The cannibalized black subject fuels not only his seigniorial-cum-sociological authority but also Brazil’s international reputation as a preeminently hybrid, racially democratic polity. This is the irony of both Casa-Grande e Senzala and Lusotropicalism. As Omar Ribeiro Thomaz articulates it, “Curioso paradoxo: a intelectualidade brasileira, sempre acossada pelo malestar da cópia, passava a exportar uma teoria e um modelo de relações raciais que viria a alimentar um império agonizante, um regime autoritário e uma guerra cruel” [A curious paradox: Brazilian intellectualism, always tormented by the uneasiness of being a copy, ended up exporting a theory and a model of race relations that would come to nourish an agonizing Empire, an authoritarian regime and a cruel war].19

Notes

1 Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction 1. The prologue to Leopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Nègre et Malgache de Langue Française, 1948. 2. Black Sikn, White Masks (1967) was originally published as Peau Noire, Masques Blancs in 1952. 3. In addition to the Estauto de Igualdade Racial (PL 3.198/200), the Lei de Cotas (PL 73/1999) reserves spaces in federal institutions of higher learning for blacks, indigenous and students from public schools. 4. Sérgio Costa, “A Construção Sociológica da Raça no Brasil,” Estudos AfroAsiáticos, 24 (1) (2002): 45. 5. Civil Rights discourse has also been invoked by antiaffirmative action activists. Elio Gaspari quotes the authors of the manifesto against the Lei de Cotas and the Estatuto de Igualdade Racial, who takes Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, original statement that he drempt of living in a country where children would be judged by their character and not the color of their skin out of context (1963): “Our dream is that of Martin Luther King, who struggled to live in a nation where people are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Elio Gaspari, Observatório Latino Americano de Políticas Educacionais, 16 Jul. 2006 (http://www./pp-uerj. net/olped). 6. Richard Fausett and Jeremy Jarvie, “Obama, Clinton Bring Their Stories to Selma,” Los Angeles Times, 5 Mar. 2007. 7. Samuel Putnam translated this work into English as The Masters and the Slaves in 1946. 8. Sorkin states that “One thing the movie suggests is that the only way for us to overcome on this debilitating thing is simply—forgive the crudeness of language—for everybody to fuck everybody else. . . . Warren spent many, many hours trying to convince me that that’s what was actually happening, even showing me census data about it” (63). 9. Leopold Senghor, “Ce que l’homme noir aporte,” Claude Nordey, L’Homme de Couleur (1939), quoted in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1967, 123). 10. According to Armand de Quatrefages, whose work nineteenth-century Brazilian intellectuals followed closely, European man was inclined to seek

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11.

12.

13. 14.

Notes out the inferior races, “carrying them from one country to another” and mingling with them such that they “would be largely renovated with an infusion of white blood.” A. Quatrefages, “The Formation of the Mixed Human Races” (quoted in Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 106). Bourdieu and Wacquant accuse Michael Hanchard’s study of Brazil’s movimento negro of failing to deconstruct Freyrean Racial Democracy according to its own logic, replacing this national myth with the equally mythic idea that all societies are as “racist” as the United States (44). In “Política Transnacional Negra, Antiimperialismo e Etnocentrismo Para Pierre Bourdieu e Loïc Wacquant: Exemplos de Interpretação Equivocada” [Estudos AfroAsiáticos, 24 (1) 2002: 63–96], Hanchard counters Bourdieu and Wacquant with the argument that “black Brazilian ideas about identity and diaspora” are already in conflict with the “Freyrean and neo-Freyrean imaginary, as with the colonial and neocolonial imaginary of Lusotropicalism” (EAA, 81). In an interview with Gilberto Gil aptly entitled “E Gil Falou (O que o Outro) Gilberto Já Havia Falado Há Muito Tempo)” [And Gil Spoke (What the Other Gilberto Already Said a Long Time Ago)] Gil corroborates his long-time friend and colleague, Caetano Veloso, while reiterating Freyrean common sense, with his observation that “E a possibilidade de que se diminuam as diferenças no Brasil se dá pelo convivio que as diferencas tem hoje” [And the possibility that differences diminish in Brazil is due to the conviviality that differences have today]. In Romero’s preface to Nina Rodrigues’ Africanos no Brasil, written between 1890 and 1905 and published posthumously in 1932. Freyre’s work instigated a series of Unesco studies in the early 1950s, but whereas Unesco’s researchers expected to encounter a paradigm for the resolution of racial conflict in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide, they found instead that race remained hotly contested in Brazil and that racial inequality had hardly been overcome. See Marcos Chor Maio, “Tempo Controverso: Gilberto Freyre e o Projeto Unesco,” Tempo Social, 11 (1) (1999): 111–36; “O Projeto Unesco e a Agenda das Ciências Sociais dos anos 40 e 50,” Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais, 14 (41) (1999): 141–58 and Thomas Skidmore, “Raizes de Gilberto Freyre,” Gilberto Freyre em Quatro Tempos, 2003, 62.

2 Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima’s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective 1. Lima’s early work, published in the 1910s and 1920s, is influenced by Parnassianism and symbolism. His Modernist phase, commencing with the publication of Poemas, in 1927, is divided into two principal genres: his northeastern regionalist poetry, centering on plantation themes, and his religious poetry, published following his conversion to Catholicism, in 1935. Lima is also the author of numerous novels, essays, and collections of children’s poetry. See Antonio Candido, Presença da Literatura Brasileira, and Carlos Povina Cavalcanti, Vida e Obra de Jorge de Lima. 2. Luis Carbonell, “Las Voces del Siglo: Estampas Luis Carbonell, el Acuarelista de la Poesia Antillana” (2006).

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3. For a discussion of authorial race in Francophone Negritude, see Belinda Jack, Negritude and Literary Criticism (1996), especially chapter 2. See also Vera Kutzinski’s study of Hispanophone Carribbean poesía negra and poesía mulata in Sugar’s Secrets: Race and Eroticism in Cuban Poetics (1993). 4. While the rest of the poems I discuss belong to Lima’s Poemas Negros (1947), “Essa Negra Fulô” is collected with Novos Poemas (1929) and was first published in 1928. 5. See Hilda Llorens, “Fugitive Blackness,” 2005. 6. Julio Marzan, “The Poetry and Anitpoetry of Luis Palés Matos: From Canciones to Tuntunes.” Callaloo, 18 (2) (Spring 1995): 506–523. 7. This is a translation from the original Portuguese version of Perreira’s text, since the English version, also published in 18 (4) of Callaloo, does not contain the entire quotation. 8. Guillén also spent time in São Paulo with José Correia Leite, a founding member of the Frente Negra Brasileira, the first black political party, formed in São Paulo in 1931. See Hanchard, “Política Transnacional Negra” (2002): 79. 9. This poem was originally published in the Saturday Review of Literature, 29 Jan. 1927, 547. 10. In Orde Combs, Is Massa Day Dead? (1974). 11. Palmares (1600–95) had over 20,000 inhabitants at its height (15 percent of the Brazilian population at the time). 12. In Brookshaw, Race and Color in Brazilian Literature (1986), 19.

3 White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre 1. People of European and Indigenous descent or “Europeanized” Indian. 2. While in his preface to the Poemas Negros, Freyre centers his critique on United States’ black writers, in an article published in the magazine, “Cultura” (“Aspectos da Influência Africana no Brasil”) (Oct./Dec. 1976), he derides Leopold Senghor’s Negritude on similar grounds of inauthentic black authorship. For a discussion of this article, see Brookshaw, Race and Color in Brazilian Literature, 1986, 280. 3. The Novo Michaelis Dictionary defines jenipapo as (1) a fruit used by Indigenous Brazilians to blacken their faces and (2) the dark spot on the lower back of children, taken as the sign of “mixed blood.” 4. The mass of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim is connected to the traditions of Benin, and practiced principally in Salvador da Bahia. 5. In Vida, Forma e Cor (1962) Freyre describes Lima’s poetic articulations in comparably messianic terms. Not only does he situate Lima as the author of the “democratizing” plot of “Essa Negra Fulô,” but claims that his paradigm of northeastern plantation relations proffers a solution for “o futuro . . . da América . . . (e) das relações entre os povos” [the future . . . of America . . . (and) relations between peoples] (344). 6. For further discussion, see Gomes de Almeida, A Tradição Regionalista no Romance Brasileiro (1999).

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7. The decline of the northeast dates from the final decades of the seventeenth century, with the emergence of the Antilles as the world’s primary sugar producer. That decline is exacerbated by the transference of human and material resources to the Central-West of Brazil in the eighteenth century, first for the exploration of gold and minerals and then, by the late nineteenth century, for coffee production in the Paraíba Valley region. The northeastern recession is cultural as well as economic: while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the northeast is the epicenter for intellectual and artistic production, by the eighteenth century, it is replaced by the Brazilian Center-South. For a discussion of the trajectory of the northeastern sugar economy and its relation to regionalismo, see Gomes de Almeida, A Tradição Regionalista no Romance Brasileiro, 161–263. 8. Freyre defends Lima’s Poemas Negros according to the same rationale he employs in the “Manifesto Regionalista” [Regionalist Manifesto] (1952), where he claims that “Talvez não haja região no Brasil que exceda o nordeste em riqueza de tradições ilustres e em nitidez de caráter” [There is perhaps no region in Brazil that exceeds the northeast in the richness of illustrious traditions or clarity of character] (52) and that those traditions should be defended against the “novidades estrangeiras” [foreign novelties] that “o Rio ou São Paulo consagram como ‘elegante’ e como ‘moderno’” [Rio or São Paulo consecrate as “elegant” or “modern”] (51). 9. Jorge de Souza Araújo is Professor of Literature at the Universidade Estadual de Feira de Santana. In addition to Jorge de Lima e o Idioma Poético AfroNordestino, he is the author of Os Becos do Homem (1982) and Perfil do Leitor Colonial (1999). 10. Felinto is the author of As Mulheres de Tijucopapo (1982), O Lago Encantado de Grongonzo (1987), Postcard (1991), and Imagens de América (1994). She was also a staff writer for the literary and cultural supplements of the “Folha de São Paulo” until 2003. In addition to reflecting a mainstream inclination to defend Freyre from foreign criticism, it is interesting to consider the connection between Felinto’s investment in Freyre and the fact that she began her career as a neoregionalist writer with strong ties to the northeastern writer, Graciliano Ramos. 11. Upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Las Villas in 1959, this is Che’s entreaty to the “proprietors of the University” (and implicitly the Cuban national community itself) (Retamar, 45).

4 Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism, Erasure, and the Slave’s Narrative 1. In the context of this chapter, it is unfortunately not possible to undertake a full reading of all the photographs, much less the song lyrics, contained in this fascinating pamphlet, many of which feature blacks in chains in various poses set against a seascape. 2. See Dain Borges for a discussion of slavery’s memory in Brazil in relation to late nineteenth-century social history (“Intellectuals and the Forgetting of Slavery in Brazil,” Annals of Scholarship, 1996).

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3. Beginning in 2003, the Brazilian government has promoted a campaign to abolish “slave labor,” utilizing images of chained black hands and black hands behind bars, and text referring to the perpetuation of slavocratic labor relations “more than 115 years after the ratification of the Lei Aúrea.” 4. William L. Andrews, “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative,” 23–24. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. An earlier version of this analysis of O Abolicionismo appeared in Hispania, 85(3) (2002): 466–75. 7. Nabuco served intermittently as deputy of the state of Pernambuco during much of the 1880s (Nogueira, Joaquim Nabuco, 1987, 84) and founded the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society in 1880 (Conrad, 151). He also worked as a foreign correspondent and held a number of diplomatic positions, most significantly that of ambassador to the United States in 1905. 8. While a discussion of the correspondence between Nabuco and Machado de Assis is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is interesting to consider the disparate “profiles” of these two figures. Whereas Nabuco, a descendent of the northeastern landowning elite, is heralded for his charitable identification with blacks, Machado’s mixed African/ European ancestry has elicited a heated and ongoing debate about the authenticity of his “black representations.” As demonstrated in chapter 5, Freyre insists upon Machado’s alienation from the interests of his “brothers in captivity” (“Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” 1962, 115). In The Three Sad Races (1983), David Haberly cites Joaquim Nabuco’s characterization of Machado as “a classical Greek statesman” (89). In Race and Color in Brazilian Literature (1986), David Brookshaw also refers to Nabuco’s characterization of Machado as “Greek rather than . . . mulatto” (57). Ultimately, it is Nabuco’s characterization of Machado—as an “exemplary black”—which typifies interpretations of his character. For further discussion of representations of Machado’s racial identity in the context of the Brazilian canon, see Zila Bernd, Introdução à Literatura Negra [Introduction to Black Literature] (1988) and Kabengele Mununga, Negritude: Usos e Sentidos [Negritude: Uses and Meanings] (1986). 9. I have only named a few of the scholars who heroize Nabuco. For further examples, see Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (1972) and World of Sorrow (1986) and Thomas Skidmore, Black into White (1974). Though in David Haberly’s “Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti-Slave” (1972), he does not mention O Abolicionismo, his discussion of the stereotypes of violent and immoral slaves in abolitionist novels is an exception to the usual reluctance to acknowledge racism in Brazilian abolitionist discourse. 10. For a discussion of Brazilian abolitionists’ anxiety about miscegenation, see Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 106. For an analysis of the perceived correlation between miscegenation and the debilitation of white character, see Haberly, “Abolitionism in Brazil: Anti-Slavery and Anti-Slave,” 1972, 32. 11. Though the scarcity of statistics makes it difficult to ascertain Brazil’s racial demography in 1883, Celia Azevedo contends that by 1888 Brazil’s population was comprised of more than 2,500,00 people of African descent by

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

Notes comparison with slightly more than 1,000,000 people of European descent (Abolitionism, 1995, 63). For further discussion, see Ricardo Salles, Nostalgia Imperial [Imperial Nostalgia] (35). Nabuco’s anxiety about the effects of miscegenation is further illuminated by his disclaimer, at another moment in O Abolicionismo, that if blacks were permitted to engage in sexual relations with whites, it was only “em escala muito pequena” [on a very small scale] (157). He also dismisses “rumors” of white, or partially white, enslavement, contending that even if such occurrences were verified, “não tiram à escravidão brasileira o caráter de puramente africana. Os escravos são os próprios africanos importados, ou os seus descendentes” [they do not negate the purely African character of Brazilian slavery. The slaves are the Africans themselves or their descendants] (108). At yet another moment, Nabuco laments that in Brazil, unlike the United States south, the “privilege” of slave ownership was extended “indiscriminately” to both whites and blacks (158). This figure of speech was common in abolitionist imaginings of Brazil as a single master/ slave body from which the free worker must be extracted, as in the following description which appeared in “Cidade do Rio,” 57 (25 Nov. 1887): “The servant issue has reached this point: to save everything, or to loose everything. To save everything means to colonize the freedman, that is, to gradually extract the free worker from the enslaved one by means of discipline and wages; to lose everything means to let the slave learn the path to freedom by means of the irresistible effects of propoganda” (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, 15). Nabuco’s regretful account of Brazilans’ debilitating Africanization by contrast with whites in the northern United States reinterprets a common perception among Brazilian slaveholders that slavery degraded Brazilian whites more than it did U.S. southerners, for whom “The ubiquitous presence of the blacks equalized. . . . whites, drawing them into a common space, which opposed them, as a group, to the subordinated race” (Bosi, Dialética, 1992, 211). See Bosi, Dialética, 1992, 197, 237. While Celia Azevedo, observes that Brazilian abolitionists perceived heterogeneous classes of masters and slaves as wielding an imbalanced society (Abolitionism, 1995, 9), she concludes that abolitionism sought to eliminate the differences between masters and slaves and create a more egalitarian polity. She disavows Nabuco’s appeal to enhance those differences, emphasizing instead his desire to encourage “the continuation of the amalgamation between (the) races without the oppressive relation of master and slave, and the subsequent conflicts between them” (107). In 1808, the Portuguese Crown relocated to Brazil. In 1815, it elevated Brazil to the status of co-kingdom. Following its return from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon in 1821, and a brief period during which Brazil was the seat of the Portuguese Empire, it became an Independent Monarchy in 1822 (See EulSoo Pang, In Pursuit of Honor and Power, 1988). At another moment in O Abolicionismo, Nabuco stresses that abolitionists do not invite the slaves to join in the struggle for abolition (71) and claims that such an invitation would be tantamount to inciting them to riot (72). At

Notes

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

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the same time, many of Brazil’s prominent abolitionists were of African descent, including André Rebouças and José do Patrocínio. Reis’ study is theoretically engaged with a body of revisionist historicism which emphasizes slaves’ autonomous upheavals in the last decades of slavery and their impact on abolition. This emphasis departs from canonical historiography, which insists that slaves played little or no part in abolition and that it resulted from inevitable societal changes like industrialization (Azevedo, Abolitionism, 1995, xxiv). The containment constituted by Nabuco’s tract resonates with a further type of obliteration—the periodic state-ordered burning of official documents pertaining to slavery and the slave trade, most notably two years after abolition, in 1890. For a discussion of this unexecuted mandate, see Conrad, 22. Though Celia Azevedo insists upon Brazilian abolitionism’s secular rather than Christian tradition (Abolitionism, 45–46), there is a sense in which Nabuco’s characterization of Pedro II’s mandate as an “originary” decree situates him as a quasi divine figure. Indeed, many of Nabuco’s references to the emperor are prophetic and reflect positivists’ “mystical” characterization of progress as “implemented thanks to the manifestation of certain ‘inevitable laws’” (Nogueira, Desventuras, 1984, 21). On 13 May 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. As in most of Latin America, abolition was quickly followed by the transition to Republican rule (16 Nov. 1889). Brazil is unique in that it shifted from Independent monarchy, rather than colony, to Republic. These comments echo those of the later, “conservative” phase of his Um Estadista do Império (1896), a history of the Second Empire emphasizing the role played by his father. As Richard Graham notes, “When he praised a mulatto politician it was because he belonged to the white race ‘pela inteligência, pela conciência moral, pela intuição juridical’ ” [for his intelligence, moral consciousness and juridical intuition] (77). In contrast, Nabuco writes that Francisco Solano Lopez, dictator of Paraguay, had the moral qualities “de um déspota de nascença, de um semicivilizado em quem o instinto do índio a miúdo fazia explosão” [of a despot by birth, of a semicivilized being in whom the Indian’s instict often produced an explosion] (446) (“Joaquim Nabuco, Conservative Historian,” 1980, 8). An earlier version of this essay was published in Freyre’s Joaquim Nabuco (1948). Also like his apology for Lima, Freyre’s emphasis upon Nabuco’s seigniorial status confers his black inheritance as symbolic rather than genetic. Freyre further establishes his unblemished genealogy on the basis of his descent from the Pais Barretos and Andradas (15, 24). While not a member of the original aristocracy, Francisco Pais Barreto was appointed Marquês of Recife by Pedro I in 1824 (Pang, 77). The Andradas brothers—José Bonifácio, Martim Francisco, and Antônio Carlos—were a political family from Santos, São Paulo to whom Pedro I and Pedro II repeatedly offered titles of nobility (Pang, 55–56).

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27. Whereas it justified the interests of the old oligarchical elite under the guise of “reformation” (Salles, 36), it was specifically southeasterners whose authority was sustained by that transition (35). 28. Though São Paulo had been the stronghold of proslavery sentiment (Borges, 45), the Paulistas ultimately perceived that the transition to “free labor” was inevitable and that their management of the final step of abolition would leave them in control of the government (Skidmore, 16–17). 29. In addition to Freyre’s, there are two other prefaces to O Abolicionismo, one by Graça Aranha, the author of Canaã (1902) and a principal participant in the “Semana de Arte Moderna” (Modern Art Week, 1922), and another by Gilberto Amado, an important Modernist poet, essayist and novelist. Amado’s preface briefly describes the impact of a speech delivered by Nabuco when Amado was a University student. Whereas a discussion of Aranha’s preface (1928) is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to note that it reflects many of the motifs of Freyre’s: he justifies Nabuco on the basis of his experience as a boy-master, describing his absorption of black spirit as “. . . magia posta no berço da criança pela resignação e doçura dos escravos!” [ . . . magic placed in the child’s crib by the resignation and sweetness of the slaves!] (32). Aranha’s division of Nabuco’s black sentimental “formation” and white intellectual education also reflects Brazilian intellectuals’ “developmental” interpretation of arianism: for Aranha, Nabuco’s abolitionist spirit is a seed planted in his “inconsciente infantil” [infantile unconscious] that took years to bear fruit, until its “magnifica revelação” [magnificent revelation] (32). He also claims that his maturation culminates with his ten year diplomatic sojourn in Europe and the United States, following which he returns to assume his due function as the “inspirador e o maravilhoso intérprete” [inspirer and the marvelous interpreter] (35) of black Brazilians.

5 From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing 1. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) was dictator of the Portuguese Republic from 1932 to 1968, and founder and leader of the Estado Novo, the authoritarian right-wing regime that controlled Portugal from 1933 to 1974. For Salazar, Portugal’s international relevance depended on its colonies. In addition to Brazil, the Portuguese Empire consisted, in Africa, of Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, Ceuta, Cabinda, Mozambique, and Portuguese Guinea; in India, of Goa, Damão, and Diu; in China, of Macau; and in southeast Asia, of Portuguese Timor. In 1961, the Indian Army forcibly annexed the Indian territories and from the 1960s on, Portugal responded to struggles for independence in Africa, leading to the independence of the African colonies beginning with Guinea in 1961 and ending with Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique in 1975. For Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Lusotropicalismo begins to emerge in Freyre’s thought in the late 1930s. It is anticipated in his lamentation of

Notes

2.

3.

4.

5.

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socieconomic and racial changes in Brazilian society in Sobrados e Mocambos (1951–52), and evolves in the course of his travels to Portugal and its colonies in 1951 and 1952. As the result of these voyages, Freyre concludes that, in Africa, there are many “little Brazils” in gestation. He identifies the same qualities—most importantly, the cordiality of white/black relations—which prove the constancy of Portuguese character. Freyre’s remarks about colonial relations in Africa gave confidene to Salazar and his supporters, who proceeded to request four hundred more years to give completion to their project, which they termed the construction of “new Brazils.” Thomaz describes the propoganda that was inspired by Freyre’s observations: “From the 1950s on, official Portuguese publications began to print photographs showing whites and blacks fraternizing in schools, restaurants and hospitals. The exoticism of the African costumes was transformed into a regional folklore that would only further aggrandize Portuguese society. They were, after all, authentic Portuguese. Freyre’s lusotropicalism attempted, ultimately, to overcome dilemmas and contradictions that accompanied the formation of the great colonial empires.” (http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fol/ brasil500/zumbi_34 htm). An earlier version of this analysis of “Como e Porqve Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala” and “Reinterpretando José de Alencar” appears in IsfahaniHammond, The Masters and the Slaves, 2005, 35–49. Pallares-Burke suggests that Freyre’s sympathy with the KKK derives also from its resistance to the “Jewish cosmopolitanism” Freyre despised (316). In his notebook in 1921, he writes that “tradições literárias e consciência nacional” [literary traditions and national conscience] were running the risk of disappearing and that the KKK responded to this threat, now attributed to Jewish cosmopolitism, the “enemy of good literature, of healthy art” (317). As Pallares-Burke demonstrates, Freyre extrapolated this theory from Alfred Zimmern, who argued that, unlike modern slavery, which functioned solely through coercion, in the Greek system slaves were able to accumulate wealth and buy their freedom, rights that served as a counterbalance to conflict and exploitation (The Greek Commonwealth, 1914). Though Zimmern theorized master/slave equilibrium in ancient Greece in contradistinction to plantation slavery in the Americas, Freyre took Zimmern out of context, applying his theories about the Greek system to Brazil (Pallares-Burke, 358). As Pallares-Burke notes, the intensity of Freyre’s experience in Oxford is partly related to his sexual awakening. He is struck by the openness of homosexual relationships and writes in detail about the attractive men he observes (120– 126). In “Identity, Race, Gender and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyre’s Oeuvre” (1995), Jeffrey Needell comments that “identifying with seigniorial heterosexuality toward women of color . . . allowed him to resolve ambiguities in his own sexual orientation.” Later in his career, Freyre identifies quintessentially English qualities in Brazil. In the preface to the second edition of Inglêses no Brasil (1977), first published in 1948, Freyre writes that the equilibrium of antagonisms is an originally British trait that is taken to new heights in Brazil (424). In Ordem e Progresso (1959), he compares the Brazilian monarchy to its British counterpart, likening Dom Pedro II to “uma Rainha Vitória

164

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

Notes de barbas brancas e de calças pretas” [a queen Victoria with a white beard and black pants] a phrase he had used previously in 1922 (Pallares-Burke, 427). Bilden’s ideas were published in “Brazil, Laboratory of Civilization,” The Nation, New York, 128 (3315) (1929): 71–74. See Sobrados e Mucambos, especially 132, 168, and 368. For a discussion of the “unfortunate” ramifications of the bourgeois family structure that emerged as the result of abolition and industrialization, see 130–33 and 156. Without naming it as such, Pallares-Burke refers to an element of Boas’ thought that must have informed Freyre’s erasure of his servant/informant. Reacting to prohibitions against “intermarriage” in the United States, Boas advocated interracial unions as the single means to overcoming racism. For Boas, racial discrimination would end only when blackness was diluted to the point that it was no longer recognizable, just as anti-Semitism would only disappear with the disappearance of the last vestige of Jewishness (The Problem of the American Negro, 1921, 325). Freyre’s conceptualization of black “reality” that is disjoined from black sociohistoricity and incorporated by whites perverts Boas’ call for distinguishing hereditary from nonhereditary traits (Anthropology and Modern Life, 1929, 342), rereading his advocacy for blurring the lines between black and white as a call for the disappearance of (physically) recognizable blackness. Freyre describes the hardship he experiences while writing Casa-Grande e Senzala at a number of other points in this essay: he repeats that he suffers from hunger (134), refers to his low salary (131, 132, 134) and to being harassed by the police (134). Freyre also emphasizes his impoverishment in exile in Africa and Europe following the Revolution of 1930 and immediately preceding his return to Brazil to write Casa-Grande e Senzala (131). In addition to underscoring his assimilation of elite and subjugated perspectives, Freyre calls attention to his discomfort during this period to obscure his affiliation with the Pernambucan oligarchy that prompted his exile. Freyre further relates that his family’s house was sacked and burned in the Revolution of 1930 (130). Pastoris and bumbas-meu-boi are popular northeastern folkloric dramatizations performed out-of-doors. Freyre’s claim that his text incorporates female and “effeminate” perspectives resonates with his description of Portuguese bisexuality in CasaGrande e Senzala. In addition to racial indeterminacy, he identifies this trait as further grounds for the “flexibility” of the Portuguese and, by extension, for their capacity for cultural assimilation (5–6). Feminizing the Portuguese as penetrated and well as penetrating, Freyre obscures the sexual exploitation of colonized and enslaved peoples. By feminizing his authorial perspective, he effaces his seigniorial point of view. Still, as in his depiction of Portuguese bisexuality, Freyre insists that his text’s inclusion of feminine and effeminate points of view does not undermine its essential masculinity. He claims that, whereas his writing is tempered by forays into “feminine literature” that could be called “pequenos amores dos chamados

Notes

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

165

contra a natureza” [small love affairs of the so-called unnatural variety] (141–42), his perspective is like that of other “bisexual writers” (George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, Gilberto Amado), none of whom “perdeu o sexo literário masculino de ensaista-pensador, ao adotar excepcional, mas sempre potentemente, formas convencionalmente consideradas femininas de arte ou de expressão literária” [lost their masculine literary sex as essayist-thinkers upon adopting exceptional, but always potent, forms of artistic or literary expression which are conventionally considered feminine] (142). José Martiniano de Alencar (1829–77) was born into a wealthy and politically influential family from the northeastern state of Ceará. His father was a prominent politician who played a key role in bringing Emperor Dom Pedro II to the throne in 1840. In addition to his status as Brazil’s foremost romanticist writer, Alencar also had an active role both in politics and in the court life of Dom Pedro II. Though Freyre does not discuss Alencar in “Como e Porque . . . ,” its title is an adaptation of Alencar’s autobiography, Como e Porque Sou Romancista [How and Why I am a Novelist] (1893). In addition to Lima Barreto and Machado, Freyre claims that Aluísio Azevedo attempts to “discolor” himself through writing (125). Barreto and Azevedo are nineteenth-century novelists of African/European ancestry who, like Machado, satirize the ideological idiosyncrasies of the Brazilian elite. Barreto’s best known work is O Triste Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1911). Azevedo’s most important works are O Cortiço (1890) and O Mulato (1881). Benzaquem refers to p. 218 of the 1933 edition of Casa-Grande e Senzala (Rio de Janeiro: Maia & Shmidt). In the late nineteenth century, Brazilian literary critics began to identify thematic and stylistic characteristics that differentiated Brazilian literature from its European counterparts. These characteristics were first articulated in Silvio Romero’s História da Literatura Brasileira (1888). For Romero, attention to the tropical landscape was a principal standard for the production of authentic national literature. In addition to the tropical landscape, Romero identifies the representation of “the diverse races and their process of miscegenation” as a distinguishing characteristic of authentic national literary production” (See Bosi, História Concisa da Literatura Brasileira, 1994, 249). Despite the resonance of Freyre’s discussion with Romero’s insistance upon the centrality of nature, Romero insisted that romanticism and Indianism were outmoded literary genres. For a discussion of Romero’s influence on Freyre, see Ventura, 60–68. For more on his analysis of Machado, see Ventura, 96 and 98–100. In “Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” Freyre insists that Alencar’s concentration on the landscape does not connote a lack of belonging in, or avoidance of, the casa-grande, for it is precisely his legitimate claim to this site that confers his ability to represent the external atmosphere and, by extension, to assimilate subaltern identity (123).

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Notes

18. This exclusion resonates with Silvio Romero’s claim that the proof of Machado’s literary failure is that he had no disciples: “The most obvious proof of the negativity of his oeuvre is that it had no followers, it did not nor could it have disciples; since he did not invent anything nor reproduce a single idea” (Ventura, 98). Machado’s inability to wield an impact on future writers reflects theorizations of mestiço sterility applied to literary productivity. Romero identifies Machado not only as part of a dying “breed” but situates his mixed-race descent as disabling him from articulating ideas that would be remembered in the future. Though Romero argues that the representation of “the races and their process of miscegenation” is key to authentically Brazilian literature, he insists that Machado, due to his mixed-race descent, is unable to depict them (Machado de Assis. Estudo Comparativo de Literatura Brasileira, 1897). 19. “Um Viajante Tropicalista pelas Terras d’Além Mar” [A Tropicalist Voyager Overseas], Folha Online, http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fol/brasil500/ zumbi_34.htm.

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Index

“A Escrava Isaura,” 85 abolition Nabuco’s fears about, 99, 108–109 and restoration of white power, 97–106 slaves’ subordination and, 98–99 abolition bill of 13 May 1888, 117 abolition day, celebrations of, 86 abolitionism Brazilian, 85: eugenics and, 89; Republican noncommitment to, 104; secular versus Christian influences, 161n22 Nabuco and, 83–120 U. S.: emphasis on black soul, 80–81; investigations of, 87; slave narratives and, 102 white negritude and, 113–120 abolitionists Brazilian: of African descent, 160–161n18; Azevedo’s perspective, 160n16; U. S. abolitionism and, 107–108 fears of miscegenation, 159n10 and transcriptions of slave narratives, 86–87 Abreu, Valdemar de, 137 affirmative action, 2–3 debate about, 5 Afonso Arinos law, 10 African transfusion, 13

Africanization debilitating effects of, 160n14 Freyre’s attitude toward, 126 Nabuco on, 93–94 of slaveholders, 144 of white master, 150, 151 Africanos no Brasil, 8 Afro-Antillean poetry positive elements of, 30 women in, 31 Afro-Antilleanism, 27–28, 74 erasure of rape in, 28–29 Freyre’s place in, 71 Afro-Brazilian cultural influences, 7 Afro-Brazilian studies proprietary stance of, 7–8 Trindade and, 42 Afro-Caribbean woman, Guillén’s displacement of, 34–35 afrocentrism, interface with race science, 2 Aguilar Costa Pinto, Luis, 9, 41–42 Alencar, José Martiniano de; see Martiniano de Alencar, José Alexander, Jacqui, 33 alma negra, 11 Almeida Perreira, Édimilson de, 13, 37, 78–79 Alvarenga, Silva, 68 Alves, Castro, 69 Amado, Gilberto, 136, 162n29, 164–165n11

180

Index

Americanization; see globalization; North Americanization “Amistad,” 85–86 “Ancila Negra,” 23–25, 27 Andradas family, 161n26 Andrade, Oswald de, 49, 60, 73–74 man-eating metaphor of, 17 Andrews, William L., 86–87, 102 “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” 49, 73–74 Antillean negrismo, 22–23 Antologia do Negro Brasileiro, 7–9, 42 Aranha, Graça, 89, 162n29 Arroyo, Jossiana, 71 As Americas Negras: As Civilizações Africanas no Novo Mundo, 64 assimilationism; see cultural assimilation Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de; see Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria atmosphere Freyre’s perception of, 122 in transmission of cultural identity, 121, 148 Aurélio Nogueira, Marco, 89 authenticity Bastide on, 64–67 non-Freyrean theories of, 74–75 racial/authorial, 13 authorship; see also black authorship; white authorship Bastide on, 64–67 and Freyre’s revision of nature and culture, 153–154 mixed-race, Freyre’s negation of, 151–152 Azevedo, Aluísio, 165n14 Azevedo, Celia, 92, 159–160n11, 160n16, 161n22

Bagehot, Walter, 103 Baker, Houston, 33 “Balada de los dos Abuelos,” 35–36, 71 Ballagas, Emilio, 13, 78 Bandeira, Manuel, 58 Baraka, Amiri, 77 Barnet, Miguel, 71 Barreto, Lima, 142–143, 165n14 Bassard, Katherine, 87 Bastide, Roger, 64–67 Batoula, 143–144 Beattie, Warren, 4 Ben, Jorge, 85 Benzaquen de Araújo, Ricardo, 134–135, 140–141 on Freyre’s biological theories, 122 on Freyre’s view of Portuguese colonial relations, 145–146 Berry, Halle, 4 Bhabha, Homi, 1, 33, 141 “Bicho Encantado,” 27, 43 Bilden, Rudiger, 130 Biografía de un Cimarrón, 71 bisexuality, Portuguese, 164–165n11 black authorship seigniorial claims to, 53–59 (see also Freyre, Geraldo; Lima, Jorge de; Nabuco, Joaquim; white authorship): SouzaAraújo’s discussion of, 64–71 sociohistorical: and alienation from African ancestry, 67–68; Bastide on, 66–68; as “derivative,” 66; displacement of, 5, 102, 115–116; Freyre’s denunciation of, 46, 57, 60, 116, 140–141; as imitative of white culture, 64–65; Johnson’s concern with, 76–77; Lima’s dismissal of,

Index 54; Nabuco’s exclusion of, 14; neglect of black values in, 67; Souza Araújo and, 68–70; and transcendence of socioeconomic hardship, 68; white-authored apologies for, 1 U. S., 54, 156n2: as folkloric, 55; Freyre and, 57–58, 75–76 U. S. segregationism and, 12, 61–62 black autonomy, fear of, 99–102 black body commodifcation of, 85 consumption of, 49 as space of white domination, 47 and subalternity, 20 black culture dissociation from sociohistorical context, 137 Freyre’s appropriation of, 128, 132–141 white ethnographies of, 42–43 black dialect, in “Essa Negra Fulô,” 21 black historicity, 40 black identity, appropriation of, 113–115 black inheritance, as cultural versus genetic, 161n26 black literacy, Nabuco and, 99–101 black machismo, Hooks’ inquiry into, 34 black men, white projections of, 34 black poetry hybridized scripts and, 12 Lima’s, 26–27, 114 white-authored, 18 black poets, Freyre’s dismissal of, 115–116 black power, Carpentier’s concept of, 79–80 black religion, emphasis on, 10

181

black soul Nabuco’s treatment of, 88 U. S. abolitionists and, 80–81 black speech in Brazilian culture, 21 deconstruction of, 42–43 in “Essa Negra Fulô,” 32 Palés’ treatment of, 31–32 white claims about, 24–25, 27 black subjectivity, and Freyre’s role as interpreter of black experience, 133–144 black supernatural, 137–138 black texts; see also black authorship Freyre’s requirements for, 19 white-authored: Lima’s, 26 black women characterization of, 33–34 and male appropriation of generative productivity, 28 objectification of, 28–29 purported hypersexuality of, 127 seductiveness of, 21 young masters’ relations with, 49–50 blackness celebrations of, Fanon’s reading of, 2 constructedness of, 64 Freyre’s consumption of, 72 Johnson’s description of, 50 Lima’s incorporation of, 58–59 need for containment, 137–138 as picturesque, 10 Ramos/Rodrigues’ production of, 7 redemptive potential of, 4 as rhythmic aesthetic, 1–2 sociohistorical, elimination of, 7 subalternality and, 137 white’s consumption of, 22 blacks anthropological stance toward, 10

182

Index

blacks—continued ethnographic hijacking and, 9–10 perceived commitment to white patriarchy, 111 rights of, Nabuco’s position on, 92–94 subordination of, Freyre and, 131–132 Boas, Franz, 164n8 Freyre and, 126 Borges, Dain, 159 Bosi, Alfredo, 89, 92–93, 103 Bourdieu, Pierre, 5, 12 bourgeoisie, Freyre’s attitudes toward, 131, 164n7 Braga-Pinto, César, 35, 71 branqueamento, intersection with Racial Democracy, 4–5 brasilidade, Freyre as interpreter of, 124 Brazil African “transfusion” in, 50–51 as co-kingdom with Portugal, 160n17 northeastern-southeastern tensions in, 61–64 Racial Democracy as civil religion of, 2 (see also Racial Democracy) Brazil-Africa symbiosis, in Lima’s/ Freyre’s writing, 63 Brazilian blackness, linguisticgenetic containment of, 18 Brazilian blacks; see blacks Brazilian cultural identity as assimilationist/genetically “white,” 52 black speech and, 21 cannibal as leitmotif of, 17 Casa-Grande e Senzala as dominant narrative of, 121–122 (see also Casa-Grande e Senzala)

Freyre’s Eurocentered model for, 59 Freyre’s theory of, 123–124 Freyre’s whitening of, 46 as multiculturalism without people of culture, 153 as performative versus historical, 65–66 slavery and, 83–85 Brazilian race relations Freyre’s paradigm of, 3–4 literary analysis of, 4 U. S.-sponsored studies of, 3 versus U. S. race relations, 5, 13, 20 Brazilian racialism, Degler’s U. S. sociology of, 20 Brazilian slavery; see slavery Browning, Barbara, 79 Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio, 136 Buffon’s theory of climactic degeneration, 46, 50 cachaça, 18 Caldas Barbosa, Domingos, 68 cannibal, as leitmotif of Brazilian cultural identity, 17 cannibalization, 2, 154 of Africa, 4 ambulatory blackness and, 52 in “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” 73–74 of black body, Caetano and, 85 Bleek’s, 12 in Palés’ poetry, 32 sexual, Palés on, 49–50 Cantares ao Meu Povo, 39 Carbonell, Luis, 18 Carneiro, Édison, 7–9, 41–42 Carpentier, Alejo, 8, 56 on authentic black power, 79–80 casa-grande, as epicenter of Brazilian culture, 134 Casa-Grande e Senzala, 3–4, 7, 14, 21, 41, 45, 51, 118–119, 121–154

Index Brazilian hybridity in, 121 composition of, 132–141 as dominant narrative of Brazilian culture, 121–122 race and racial mixing in, 144 softening of racist passages in, 126–127 and supposed distinction between Freyre’s ideological perspectives, 123 Cesaire, Aimé, 38 citizenship, 92 and Bosi’s concept of citizen-proprietor, 92–93 Nabuco’s evaluation of, 92–94 civil rights commodification of, 3 U. S.: Brazilian “Negritude” and, 11–12; hegemony and, 8; Nascimento and, 10 Clifford, James, 6 Clinton, Hillary, 3 Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel, 76–77 colonialism; see also Portuguese colonialism legacy of, 38 mixed-race polities and, 30 colonized object, relationship with colonial authority, 1 “Como e Porque Escrevi Casa-Grande e Senzala,” 132–141 Conrad, Robert, 159n9 Consuming the Caribbean, 51 Corretjer, Juan Antonio, 30 Costa, Sérgio, 2 Costa Pinto, Luis de Aguilar, 77 Cox, Timothy, 79 creolism, 2 creolization, definitions of, 51–52 criminality, conflation with black metaphysics, 79 Cruz e Sousa, 68 Cuba mestizaje ideology in, 80

183

rejection of yankee imperialism, 75 Cuban literature, 28 Cuban writers, 78 Cullen, Countee, 78 cultural assimilation Brazilian, 18 Freyre’s model of, 48, 52, 64, 148–149 plantation as center of, 48 cultural identity, Brazilian; see Brazilian cultural identity Dario, Ruben, 144 Degler, Carl, 20 demography, Brazilian, 159–160n11 Denis, Lorimer, 75, 79 Derrida, Jacques, 133 on obliterating the proper, 7 Díaz Quiñones, Arcádio, 30 Diegues, Carlos, 18 domination systems; see also power relations sexualized representation of, in “Essa Negra Fulô,” 19–20 double speak, in O Abolicionismo, 90 Douglass, Frederick, 14, 33, 107–108 abolitionists and, 87 and white preface writers, 47 du Bois, W.E.B., 1, 33 Dumas, Alexandre, 76–77, 144 Dunbar, Paul Lauerence, 78 Durand, Oswald, 78 Duvalier, Francois “Papa Doc,” 75, 79 ¡Ecu Yamba-O!, 8, 56, 80 empowerment, identity politics and, 2–3 equilibrium of antagonisms, 128–129, 163n4 perspectivism and, 131–132

184

Index

“Essa Negra Fulô,” 18, 19, 27, 32 ethnicity, as measure of authorial legitimacy, 37 ethnographic hijacking, 9–10 ethnography Ortiz’, 27 ‘salvage,’ 6–7 eugenics Brazilian abolitionism and, 89 Brazilian compromise with, 5 Brazilian race relations and, 6 Freyre and, 52–53, 121, 122, 127, 137 Nabuco on, 96 neolamarckian compromise with, 129 in U. S. immigration policy, Freyre’s admiration of, 124 Europeanization, Nabuco’s commitment to, 104–105 ex-masters, unstable identity of, 92 ex-slaves, unstable identity of, 92 Fanon, Frantz, 1–2 Felinto, Marilene, 13, 71–74, 158n10 Fiedler, Leslie, 35 folklore, 10, 55 “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream: Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Postcolonial Memory,” 85 Fossett, Judith Jackson, 87 freedom, slave’s latent desire for, 14 Freyre, Gilberto, 21, 42, 43, 45–81 apologies for, 13 apology for Lima, 13, 45 and black impact on white patriarchy, 112–113 Brasil-Africa symbiosis and, 63 Brazilian hybridity and, 121–154 career phases, 14 in Caribbean context, 74–81

claim of subalternity, 140, 164n9 class attitudes of, 131–132 “conservative” period of, 123 deconstruction of, critics’ aversion to, 154 defense of Lima, 88–89 eugenics and, 52–53, 121, 122, 127, 137 Felinto’s apology for, 71–74 as greatest black poet, 41 on indigenous maladjustment, 51 influence on Portuguese colonial rule in Africa, 4 as interpreter of black experience, black subjectivity and, 133–144 legitimation of his black authorship, 123 marxist critics of, 121–122 neolamarckeanism of, 47–48, 50, 129, 147 nonunitary subjectivity of, 138–139 nostalgia for slavery, 55, 62, 84 perspectivism of, 122–123 plagiarism by, 130 Portuguese colonialism and, 123 and privileging of African influences over African people, 135, 151 (see also Santana, Manuel) and Racial Democracy versus white democracy, 123–132 racial nomenclature of, 46–47 relations with women of color, 73 Souza Araújo’s apology for, 64–71 student years in U. S., 123–124 use of terms culture, nature, atmosphere, 122 white supremacism and, 123–125

Index Galvão, Trajano, 69 Gama, Luís, 67 Souza Araújo’s dismissal of, 68–70 Garcia Canclini, Nestor, 137 Gaspari, Elio, 155n5 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 4, 77, 87 gaze, Goldberg’s theory of, 146 Gil, Gilberto, 156n12 Gilberto Freyre: Um Vitoriano dos Trópicos, 14, 122, 123–124 Gilroy, Paul, 80–81 Giraud, Victor, 128 globalization, 6; see also North Americanization Racial Democracy and, 14 Goldberg, David, 133, 146 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 153 Gonçalves Dias, 54–55, 68 González, Eduardo, 32 González Pérez, Aníbal, 30 Graham, Richard, 89, 161n24 Grant, Madison, 124–125, 131 Guerreiro Ramos, Alberto, 9–10, 10 Guevara, Che, 75 Guillén, Nicolás, 13, 27, 71, 157n8 Afro-Antilleanism and, 71 black women in poetry of, 33–37 on masculine empowerment, 34 mestizaje/mulatez and, 35–38 mulatas of, 22 use of African language, 32 Haberly, David, 113, 122, 159n9 Haiti malevolent spirit in, 79–80 mimicry of former masters in, 79 noiriste dictatorship of, 75 U. S. occupation of, 75 Haitian writers, 78 Hanchard, Michael, 156n11 identity politics of, 12 Harlem Renaissance, 13, 79

185

Hearn, Lafcadio, 129 Hemmings, Sally, 38 Henrique, Waldemar, 18 heredity, Freyre’s neolamarckean conceptualizqation of, 147 Hesse, Barnor, 85, 87 homosexuality Freyre and, 71–73, 163n5 mestiçagem and, 35 Hooks, Bell, 34 Hughes, Langston, 13, 36, 78 friendship with Guillén, 37 on mixed-race, 37–39 hybridity Alencar’s, 149 Brazilian, 154 Cuba’s, 36 Exclusionary: in Lima and Palés’ poetry, 34; in Palés’ poetry, 28; in “Retreta do Vinte,” 26 Freyre’s, 13, 14, 59, 74–75, 151: and colonial power, 153 Freyre’s analysis of, 153 master/slave relations and, 121 nativization and, 51–52 Puerto Rican, 29 relationship to writing, 122–123 and white assumption of subalternality, 149 of white authorship, 148 identity cultural/atmospheric transmission of, 121, 148 neolamarckean reading of, 14 (see also neolamarckeanism) reciprocal model for transmission of, 73 identity politics, 2–3 across north/south lines, 36–37 Hanchard’s, 12 Nascimento’s, 10–11 U. S., 71

186

Index

immigration policies, 5 Imperial Eyes, 22 Impure Imagination, The, 150 “Indians,” Freyre’s depiction of, 51 Invenção de Orfeu, 18 ioiô, relationship with mãe preta, 23–25, 38, 113, 149 Iracema, 150–153 “Iracema Effect,” 151 Jamaican writers, 78 Jefferson, Thomas, 38 jitanjáfora, Palés’ use of, 32–33 Johnson, James Weldon on blackness, 50 Freye and, 13, 57–58 one-dropism and, 76 on relation of race to authorship, 75–76 Jorge de Lima e o Idioma Poética Afro-Nordestino, 64 Kaussen, Valerie, 75 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 10, 155n5 Ku Klux Klan, Freyre’s defense of, 125–126, 128, 163n3 Kutzinski, Vera, 27–28, 28 on Guillén’s poems, 32–33 Lauretis, Terese de, 28 Lee, Spike, 1 Lei Aúrea, 86, 111 Lei de Cotas, 155n3 Levi, Primo, 128 Lewis, Huey, 4 liberalism, exclusionary, 93 Lima, Jorge de, 17–44, 43, 129 access to black reality, 58–59 as “acclimated” white man, 47–48 Brasil-Africa symbiosis and, 63 early work of, 156n1 Freyre’s apologies for, 47–49, 56–64, 88–89, 113, 120,

121, 123, 141, 157n5, 158n8 inversion of power relations in, 20 nongenetic blackness of, 49 nostalgia for slavery, 39–40, 41, 55 Poemas Negros of, 12–13, 19–27, 56–64, 120 racial identity in U. S., 36 regionalismo and, 60–61 relations with black women, 45 rhetorical strategies of, 19 socioeconomic status of, 18–19 Souza Araújo’s defense of, 70–71 literacy black, Nabuco and, 99–100 messianism of, 131 resistance associated with, 101–102 literary analysis, of Brazilian race relations, 4 literature Brazilian, versus European, 165n16 in production of social truth, 65–66 socioeconomic hardship as barrier to, 77 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 78 Lopes, Bernardino, 68 Lorenzo Fernandez, Oscar, 18 Lund, Joshua, 150–151, 153 lusotropicalism, 128, 140, 147 Alencar and, 148–149 Benzaquen’s commentary, 146 in Freyre’s thought, 122, 162–163n1 versus U. S. segregationism, 154 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 58, 59, 78, 120, 144, 165n14 correspondence with Nabuco, 159n8 critique of upper classes, 146–147

Index Freyre and, 123 Freyre’s exclusion of, 14, 68, 141, 151–152 interpretation of interracial sex, 152 “pretensions” of, 142–143, 146 racial identity of, 159n7 mãe preta, 10; see also black women, mucama master’s relationship with, 23 story-telling as primitive discourse, 23–25 young master’s relationship with, 23–25, 38, 113, 149 Magalhães, Celso de, 69 Mailer, Norman, 4 “Majestad Negra,” 31–33, 43 Malê Revolt, 40, 101 Malick, Terrence, 19 Mañach, Jorge, 27 man-eating; see cannibal; cannibalization Manifesto Antropófago, 17, 60 Manzano, Juan Francisco, 78 Maran, René, 143–144 maroon communities, 40 Martínez Estrada, Ezeguiel, 27 Martiniano de Alencar, José, 120, 165n12, n17 Freyre and, 123, 141–142, 147–151 interpretation of interracial sex, 152 marxist critics of Freyre, 121–122 Marzan, Julio, 28 “Massangana,” 110–111 massapé, 50 master; see also senhor homosexual relations of, 71–73 identification with slaves, 4 oedipal identification with, 33 “seduction” by mucama, 27 unstable identity of, postabolition, 92

187

Masters and the Slaves, The, 75 master/slave relations Douglass and, 108 effect on white authors, 142–143 erotization of, 18, 21, 45 Freye and, Souza Araújo’s response to, 64 Freyre’s model of, 119 Lima’s erotization of, 45 Nabuco’s perspective, 99–101 sexual, 127, 133–134, 148–149 master/slave synthesis, Freyre’s paradigm of, 3–4 Mattos, Guiomar de, 9–10 McCoy, Beth, 47 McKay, Claude, 78 Mencken, H.L., 77 Mendonça, Renato, 69–70 messianism of literacy, 131 mestiçagem, 1; see also mestizaje Freyre’s model of, 46 genetic, Freyre’s disavowal of, 145 homosexuality and, 35–36 linguistic, 21–22 Vianna’s defense of, 6 whitening and, 71 mestiços, sociohistorical Freyre’s exclusion of, 121, 151–152 mestizaje, 29; see also mestiçagem biological, unviability of, 141–142 Cuba’s ideology of, 80 González’s description of, 32 Lima’s substantiation of, 27 as male achievement, 28 U. S. nonparticipation in, 37 Minha Formação, 83, 87, 106–113 as parable for Brazil’s formation, 106 miscegenation black genes eliminated by, 5

188

Index

miscegenation—continued as cultural/climatic versus biological, 149 Freyre and, 3–4, 144, 153 homosexuality and, 71 Nabuco and, 104, 160n12 Puerto Rican, whitening process and, 31 Racial Democracy and, 130 misogyny, in Palés’ poetry, 30 mixed-racedness Freyre and, 141–142, 144, 151–152 U. S. versus Latin/Caribbean concepts, 37–38 modernismo, cannibal as motif of, 17 monarchy, Nabuco and, 102–105, 112, 116–117 Morais Filho, Melo, 69 Mota, Carlos Guilherme, 4, 55, 119 on Freyre, 46 Motta Mauês, Maria Angélica da, 11 movimento negro, 156n11 mucama and cultural assimilation, 48, 68, 70 in Lima’s poetry, 20–22, 27, 45 master’s relationship with, 27 mulata, Cuban iconization of, 28 mulatez González’s description of, 32 Guillén’s construction of, 35 “Mulatta-Antilla,” 49, 74 Afro-Antillian woman in, 29–31 “Mulatto,” 37–38 Nabuco, Carolina, 89 Nabuco, Joaquim, 14, 58–59, 83–120 abolition and, 87, 96, 108–109 on abolition and restoration of white power, 97–106 black literacy and, 99–101

Caetano’s tribute to, 84 commitment to Europeanization, 104–105 concerns about ill-defined racial/ class divisions, 91–92 and continuation of black subservience, 99–102 correspondence with Machado de Assis, 159n8 encounter with fugitive slave, 111, 114, 115 eugenics and, 96 on ex-slave’s citizenship, 92–94 exit from politics, 118 fears of miscegenation, 160n12 Freyre’s apologies for, 113–115, 123, 141 and Freyre’s perspective on slavery’s impact, 106 heroizing of, 159n9 incorporation of black identity, 115–116 monarchy and, 102–105, 112, 116–117 positions held by, 159n7 power relations and, 90–91 Republic and, 103–104 and rights of blacks, 92–94 and slavery as Brazil’s national characteristic, 83–84, 90 U. S. segregation and, 93–94, 119–120 voluntary exile of, 106–107 white privilege/patriarchy and, 93–94, 104, 108 Nabuco de Araújo, José Tomás, 97 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, The, 14, 108 Nascimento, Abdias do, 7, 9–12, 40 nature, Freyre’s perception of, 122 Needell, Jeffrey, 97 “Negra Fulô,” 129 negrismo, Antillean, 22–23

Index Negritude/Negritud, white authorship and, 18–19 negrophilia, as corrective, 141 Neitzsche, Friedrich, 128 neolamarckeanism, 129, 147 Freyre’s, 47–48, 50, 129, 147 Nettleford, Rex, 51–52 New World in the Tropics, 123 Nogueira, Marcos, 101 noirisme, 75 “Noites do Norte,” 83 North Americanization; see also globalization forced, 12 Freyre’s alternative to, 75 regionalismo and, 60 northeastern oligarchy; see also plantation decline of, 158n7 Freyre’s defense of, 117–119, 141–142, 153 U. S. Old South and, 124 Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, 56, 157n4 O Abolicionismo, 14, 89; see also Nabuco, Joaquim Freyre’s preface to, 113 Orwellian double speak in, 90 prefaces to, 162n29 O Animismo Fetichista dos Negros Baianos, 7 O Candomblé da Bahia, Religiões Africanas no Brasil, 64 O Guarani, 150–151 “O Medo da Raca,” 8 “O Negro em São Paulo Durante o Século XX,” 8–9 O Negro Revoltado, 7, 9, 10–12 Obama, Barak, 3 Oliveira Salazar, Antonio de, 162–163n1 Freyre’s support of, 123, 124 one-dropism, 3, 37, 76

189

Ortiz, Fernando, 27 Oxalá, 56 Pádua, Ciro de, 8 Pais Barreto, Francisco, 161n26 Palés Matos, Luis, 27, 74 Africanization of, 30 apologies for, 30–31 confrontation with U. S., 29–30 mulatas of, 22 poetry of, 28: (see also poesia negrista), 13 racial identity of, 28 racial identity of in U. S., 36 sexual cannibalization and, 49–50 use of black speech, 31–32 Pallares-Burke, Maria Lucia Garcia, 14, 122, 123–132, 134 paratextuality, 1; see also black writing; white writing racialized power and, McCoy’s exploration of, 47 Pater, Walter, 128 paternalism; see also white patriarchy of northeastern plantation economy, 4 patriarchal model, Lima’s, 25 patriarchy; see white patriarchy Patrocínio, José do, 108–109 Pedreira, Antonio S., 27 Pedro II, 86 coup against, 108 and guarantee of black subordination, 102–103 Nabuco’s support of, 97, 117 as symbol of white authority, 26–27 Perse, Saint-John, 38–39 perspectivism defined, 128 equilibrium of antagonisms and, 131–132

190

Index

perspectivism—continued Freyre’s, 122, 138 plantation; see also northeastern oligarchy cultural assimilation and, 48 as epicenter of Brazilian culture, 141 Freyre’s celebration of, 89 iconization of, 85 as microcosm of society, 138 Nabuco’s portrait of, 89 and transmission of blackness to whites, 12 plantation economy pervasiveness of, 142 as racially democratic, 119 plantation life eroticization of, 6 Freyre’s narrative of, 3–4 (see also Casa-Grande e Senzala) Nabuco’s description of, 110–111 Poemas de Uma Vida Simples, 39 Poemas Negros, 13, 18, 43 Preliminary Note of, 45–81 seigniorial perspective of, 45 Poesia Afro-Brasileira, 64 poesia mulata, 32 poesia negra, 19–27 poesia negrista, 27–34 Portuguese, as Afro-Europeans, 144 Portuguese colonialism in Africa, 4 extent of, 162–163n1 Freyre and, 123, 145–146 positivism, Republican dictatorship and, 103 Powell, Colin, 3 power, racialized, paratextuality and, 47 power relations abolition and, 97–106 Freyre’s reversal of, 144 in Lima’s “Essa Negra Fulô,” 20–21

Nabuco’s analysis of, 90–91 as work of nature, 151 Pratt, Mary, 22 Primeiro Congresso do Negro Brasileiro, 9 primitivism colonialist knowledge about, 11 white expectations of, 33 Princess Isabel, 86 Puerto Rican literature, 28–29; see also Palés Matos, Luis Pushkin, Alexander, 76–77 Quatrefages, Armand de, 155n10 quotas, debate about, 5 race Bastide on, 64–67 in postplantation Americas, 2 postplantation theories of, 74–75 race relations Brazilian (See Brazilian race relations) Brazilian model, in support of Empire, 154 U. S., 5, 13, 20 (see also segregationism) race science Freyre and, 14, 153 interface with afrocentrism, 2 race theory, Spengler’s, 27 racial classification, U. S., 37 Racial Democracy, 61 defense of, 5 as definition of Brazilian culture, 41 empire-building and, 14 Freyrean, 56: deconstruction of, 156n11; displacement and embodiment in, 46–47 intersection with branqueamento, 4–5 literary analysis of, 4 lusotropical dictatorship and, 122

Index Nabuco’s abolitionism and, 87 plantation economy and, 118–119 as speech act, 5 and white attitudes toward blackness, 2 versus white democracy, 123–132 racial essentialism, 62 racial identity, U. S. interpretations of, Freyre’s rejection of, 50 racial nomenclature, Freyrean, 46–47 racialization, of social inequality, 8 racism in Brazil, Freyre’s claims about, 55 interpreted as African celebration, 45–46 Nabuco’s, 90 in Palés’ poetry, 30 Ramos, Arthur, 7 rape erasure in Afro-antilleanism, 28–29 Guillén’s omission of, 36 U. S. versus Caribbean/Brazilian responses to, 38 Rebouças, André, 107 Nabuco’s alignment with, 108 regionalismo Freyre and, 60–64, 117–118 Lima and, 60–64 “Reinterpretando José de Alencar,” 123, 141–142, 144 Reis, João, 101 Republic abolitionism and, 104–105 Nabuco and, 103–104 “Retreta do Vinte,” 26, 27 Ribeiro Thomaz, Omar, 154, 162–163n1 Rice, Condeleeza, 3 Rio Branco Law, 95–96

191

Rocha Vianna Filho, Alfredo da, 137 Rodrigues, Raimundo Nina, 7, 42, 126–127 Romero, Silvio, 7, 69, 165n16, 166n18 Russell, Bertrand, 164–165n11 sadosexual relations, 21 Salazar; see Oliveira Salazar, Antonio de Salles, Ricardo, 119 salvage ethnography, 6–7 Santana, Manuel, 132–134, 137, 140, 142 Santayana, George, 165n10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1 Schwarcz, Lilia, 89, 122 Schwarz, Roberto, 14–15 scientific race theory Freyre and, 124–125, 126 as normative paradigm, 89–90 Scott, Walter, 101 Second Empire, 117, 119 segregationism Brazilian, Freyre’s claims about, 56 U. S., 3: Freyre on, 54–55; versus lusotropicalism, 154; Nabuco and, 93–94, 119–120 U. S. black writing and, 57–58 seigniorial status; see also master; senhor slave’s incorporation of, 72–73 Seis Tempos de Poesia, 39 Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 1, 4, 157n2 senhor, 17, 18, 49; see also master Africanization of, 119, 151, 153 assimilation of African identity, 150 construction of, 21–22 Freye’s attitude toward, 120, 134

192

Index

senhor—continued as god-like, 138 as leitmotif for cultural identity, 71 Nabuco’s attitude toward, 93, 113 passitivity of, 22 power of, 134 racial purity of, 25 seduction of, 20, 150 slave’s arrogation of, 106 slave’s subjugation to, 91, 95, 100 sexual abuse/exploitation, 150 Freyre’s denial of, 164–165n11 sexual relationships interracial, Boas and, 164n8 master/slave, supposed noncoercive nature of, 149–150 white-black, 19th-century representations of, 22 sexuality of black women, 30, 127 in master/slave relations, 22, 127, 133–134, 148–149 Sheller, Mimi, 51 Shorter, Helena Holgersson, 108 Simkins, Francis, 125, 131 “Sinha Moça,” 85 Skidmore, Thomas, 4–5, 159n9 slave and incorporation of seigniorial status, 72–73 Nabuco’s characterization of, 97–98 unstable identity of, post-abolition, 92 “Slave Barracks Motel,” 44 slave narratives Nabuco and, 14, 102 U. S. abolitionism and, 102 white transcriptions of, 86–87 slave revolts, 161n19 slavery

abolition in Brazil, 161n23 Brazilian, versus other slavery economies, 4 Brazilian cultural identity and, 83–85 in Brazilian film, 85–86 Brazilian memory of, 158n2 as Brazil’s national characteristic, 109–110 debilitated master and, 90–97 degenerative impact of, 90, 105–106, 160n14 effects of, Nabuco’s reading of, 90 erotization of, 20 focus on abolition of, 86 Freyre’s analysis of, 71–72 Freyre’s nostalgia for, 62, 84 ideological connotations of, 75 legacies of: in black writing, 65; subversive interpretations of, 13 Lima’s nostalgia for, 39–40, 41 as mutually gratifying economy, 21 Nabuco’s description of, 83–84 negative impact of, 94 romantic depictions of, 55 slaveholder as victim of, 95–96 white nostalgia for, 120 white writers’ privileged perspective on, 67 slavery economy, Nabuco’s vision of, 116–117 slaves, masters’ identification with, 4 Sobrados e Mucambos, 131, 162–163n1, 164n7 Social Darwinism, 96 social transformation, literature as arena for, 65–66 Sommer, Doris, 151 “Song of Exile,” 54–55

Index Sorkin, Aaron, 4, 155n8 Souza Araújo, Jorge de, 13, 77, 79 apology for Lima, 64–71 on Bastide, 67–68 on black writers’ alienation from African ancestry, 67–68 Spencer, Herbert, 128, 130 Spencerean evolution, 96 Spielberg, Stephen, 85–86 spirit of place, Freyre and, 112 Stoddard, Lothrop, 124–125, 131 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 14, 87–88, 107–108 subaltern, survival strategies of, 51 subalternity black bodies and, 20 blackness and, 137–138 citizenship and, 93 dominant subject and, 46, 74, 131, 135, 138, 140, 143, 146, 149, 165n17 Freyre and, 123, 140 hybridism and nativization and, 51–52 Pedro II and, 26 senhor’s incorporation of, 146 in support of casa-grande, 131 survival of the fittest, 96 Teatro Popular Brasileiro, 41 Teixeira, Patrício, 137 Tillman, Benjamin, 125, 127, 128 Trindade, Francisco Solano, 13, 39, 161n26 politics of, 40–41 Trindade, Margarida, 41 Two Years in the French West Indies, 129 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 14, 87–88 UNESCO studies, 9, 12, 156n14 U. S. Empire, conflation with white supremacism, 5 United States

193

black authorship in, 54 black contribution to art forms in, 76 Brazilian regionalismo and, 61–62 Haitian occupation by, 75 identity politics in, 2–3 Nabuco’s comparisons with Brazil, 107–108 Palés’ confrontation with, 29–30 race relations in, 5, 20 racial categories in, 3 segregationism in, 55, 93–94 (see also segregationism) white privilege and, 105 Vasconcelos, José, 27 Veloso, Caetano, 6, 83, 109–110, 156n12 black cultural production and, 84 and cannibalization of black body, 85 debt to Freye, 84 Ventre Livre Law, 95–96 Vianna, Hermano, 5–6 Vieux, Damoclès, 78 Villas-Lobos, Heitor, 136 violence, diasporic culture and, 79 “Visões do Negro,” 72–74 voice, black, appropriation of, 18 Wacquant, Loïc, 5, 12 Walcott, Derek, 13, 38–39, 40 Washington, Booker T., 33 West-Durán, Alan, 30–31 Wheatley, Phyllis, 13, 77 white authority, Nabuco on, 93–94 white authorship African motifs in, 66–67 Bastide on, 64–65 of “black” Brazilian texts, 54 black-infused, Freyre’s model of, 55–56

194

Index

white authorship—continued blackness incorporated by, 5, 17–18, 102, 108–109, 133–134 control through, 68 of ethnographies of black culture, 42–43 hybridity of, 122–123, 148 Lima’s, 13, 17–44 (see also Lima, Jorge de) master/slave relations and, 142–143 Negritude/Negritud and, 18–19 and privileging of black influences over black people, 135 Racial Democracy and, 5 white democracy, versus Racial Democracy, 123–132 white domination, of black bodies, 47 white language, impact on blacks, 140–141 white lynching, 10 white negritude abolitionism and, 113–120 and containment of black articulation, 5 Lima’s poetics and, 18 white patriarchy blacks’ relationship to, 111, 119 Freyre’s celebration of, 112, 130–131 Freyre’s rereading of black impact on, 112–113 Nabuco’s commitment to, 108 white power Nabuco’s commitment to, 104 restoration of, abolition and, 97–106

white privilege blacks’ arrogation of, 104 in U. S. versus Brazil, 105 white society, Nabuco’s redemption of, 95 white supremacism conflation with U. S. Empire, 5 Freyre and, 14, 123–124, 134 U. S., Freyre’s identification with, 125 white women characterization of, 33–34 desexing of, 21 white writing, Nabuco’s, 14 white/Indian liaisons, mythification of, 19–20 whiteness artificial, of Haiti’s rulers, 79–80 black consumption of, 73 Freyre’s Euro-Brazilian prototype of, 6, 124 whitening miscegenation and, 31 Nabuco’s proposal for, 97 Whitman, Walt, 78 women of color; see also black women Freyre’s relations with, 73 writers, bisexual, 164–165n11 writing, scene of, 132 writing process, 1; see also black writing; white writing “Xica da Silva,” 85 Yeats, William Butler, 131 Zimmern, Alfred, 163n3 “Zumbi,” 85