Tropical Germans

This essay deconstructs the ways in which Brazilian patriotic intellectuals transformed the oppressive whiteness of the Portuguese colonial project to what I call "benign whiteness." After providing a brief history of the development of whiteness and hybridity in Latin America, I highlight patriotism and racism in thinkers such as Cuban José Martí, Uruguayan Enrique Rodó, and Brazilian Euclides da Cunha. After World War I, Brazilian cultural elites, along with the bourgeois state, promoted and institutionalized cultural hybridity as a unique trait that bound Brazilians together in a superior way to the United States. The patriotic trope of hybridity masked white privilege while benign whiteness stymied racial solidarity even as it continued to marginalize non-white populations. I show how whites and many almost whites along with foreign intellectuals, helped propagate the idea of Brazilian benign whiteness, an ideology that continues to impact Latin Americans today.

2008

……………………………………………………………………………..… v Declaration …………………………………………………………………………... vi Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………...…… vii Notes on Language and Bibliography ……………………………………………. ix Introduction: Brazil(ianness) ………………………………………………………. 1 The Myth of (Brazilian) Racial Democracy …………………………………...…... 2 The (De)Colonisation of the (Brazilian) Imagination …………………………… 11 (Eurocentric) History and the Writing of (White) Hegemony …………………. 20 The (Re)Invention of the (Brazilian) Nation ……………………………………... 29 Supplements to the Initial Basic Approach ………………………………………. 45 The Indian (Other) …………………………………………………………… 46 The Female (Other) ………………………………………………………….. 46 The Popular (Culture) ……………………………………………………….. 48 (De)Constructing Brazil(ianness) …………………………………………………. 50

Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of …, 2009

Journal of Latin American Studies, 2019

Brazilians are 'positioned for their "slanted eyes" ' (p. 232) and 'continue to struggle to position themselves within the broader construction of racial hegemony' (p. 230).

Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2018

Author(s): Schwartzman, Luisa Farah | Abstract: Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.

Truth' and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific 'truth' and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.

2018

History has been cruel to those born in the tropics, and even more cruel to those who, in addition to tropical condition, were also blacks or Indians. The aim of this paper is to observe how blacks were treated within the travel literature about Brazil, especially in the writings published in Revue des Deux Mondes. From the analysis of French writing, we seek to bring the impressions of the travelers about blacks in Brazil, and how they saw this element from a civilizational and European perspective, in which the white man represents the progress and the black and Indian represent the civilizational backwardness. Thus, we try to show the views and prejudices to the black man in Brazil in the nineteenth-century, due to hypothetical racial issues and theoretical models which condemned the progress in the tropics.