Mixed Race Studies

Interracial Marriage in the Last Portuguese Colonial Empire

Journal of Portuguese History
Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2007
23 pages
ISSN: 1645-6432

Maria Eugénia Mata, Associate Professor of Economic History and History of Economics
University of Lisbon

The paper presents both the institutional background and the government philosophy regarding equality and non-prejudice within all of the territories under Portuguese sovereignty in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as tests carried out to discover if the decision to marry and racial homogamy could be considered independent variables, using annual data from statistical yearbooks relating to the colonies.

The conclusions demonstrate the existence of a social prejudice towards inter-racial marriage. The paper supports the belief that social divisions based on ethnicity must be included as part of the explanation for decolonization and independence.

The Government’s philosophy on cohesion during the last Portuguese Empire

In the last phase of the Portuguese empire (1930s-1974/5), the government’s political philosophy in relation to the colonial territories was based on considerable propaganda about the respectful relationship between the Portuguese and other peoples in their colonies. It is the aim of this study to describe the official Portuguese literature on these issues and check its accuracy for interpreting social interaction through marriage in the Portuguese colonial territories of the period.

In political speeches, Portugal was presented as a vast and great nation. Its domains and sovereignty spread over a vast range of territory and were distributed across all the continents of the planet. This was a supreme achievement, according to J. M. da Silva Cunha, one of Salazar’s Secretaries of State, later appointed Overseas Minister: “Providence led Portugal to the mission of bringing all the peoples of Europe and other continents together, taking to them the Christian message, along with European civilization”. Official speeches usually presented Portugal as an honorable nation that had set sail from Portuguese coasts to discover the whole world. This heritage was still present in the Portuguese empire, made up of a mainland territory in Western Europe, four archipelagoes in the Atlantic (the Madeira Islands, Azores, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe), Angola and Mozambique on the African continent, several territories in India, a special pearl close to China, namely Macau, and the territory of East Timor in the Pacific Ocean. So, Portuguese territory was comprised of several provinces, beginning in the northern mainland province of Minho (near Spanish Galicia) and reaching all the way to the antipodes, in Timor.

Also, according to the language of its government, the Portuguese people were a cohesive nation, speaking the same language (Portuguese), sharing the same faith (Christianity), working under the same political rule (the Portuguese administration), and taking pride in the same flag (the Portuguese flag), which was flown in all of the national territory on every continent. There were no ethnic conflicts: “We arrived where we are now, more than five centuries ago, to spread Christianity and to remain”. School children were taught that all Portuguese were equal. Whatever might be their birth, their geographical origin, or the color of their skin, they were all equal. As Cunha (1964) puts it: “So, from the beginning we considered Africans as our equals, in this way eliminating all racial discrimination”.

The Portuguese culture was a single culture, it was said. Even considering that local conditions might be different, the official ideology always stressed that, although they might differ, there were no superior or inferior cultures. Miscegenation was to be the rule, as nineteenth-century literature accused Portugal of a weakness in terms of colonization, which stemmed from miscegenation: “(…) specialist literature of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (…) accused us of a colonizing disability (as was said at the time), because we could not preserve the purity of our race”.

So, the Portuguese nation, according to the government, was a multi-continental, multi-racial unit based on a Portuguese identity of high moral and political standards: “Portugal will continue to remain integral, with her own features of a State and multi-continental Nation, made up of the most varied ethnicities”.8 Even scholars and academics shared a good deal of this vision. According to Boxer (1961), “It is to the credit of Portugal (…) that she made no distinction of race and color and that all her subjects, once they had become Catholics, were eligible for official posts.” Despite abandoning the thesis of  a shared religious faith, a Portuguese professor of economics at the Technical University of Lisbon was to write in an academic work: “We have created throughout five centuries the most extraordinary multi-racial, national community of all times, in which merit comes from the value of the human being and not from the color of the skin. (…) Historically and currently, the Portuguese nation is, as a consequence, a mosaic of multi-continental, multi-racial populations with religious diversity”.

Sometimes a “civilization-bas” argument was added, and contradictions about the “non-superior character” of some cultures appeared: “While the Portuguese policy for human relationships in the overseas territories is impressive because of the vastness of the territories in which it applies, it is even more impressive because of its purpose of transforming aborigines into Portuguese, as Portuguese as anyone born in mainland Portugal, as it is high moral and social standards that lead them to Lusitanity, and to complete integration in the Nation”.

Did such honorable official aims result in a social cohesion that could be expressed in terms of statistical categories or indicators? Did territorial discontinuities encapsulate different societies, with different literacy levels and prejudice? Was this philosophy confirmed in terms of race relationships, inter-racial marriage and miscegenation? Is it possible to find such a Lusitanity expressed in attitudes towards marriage that lie hidden in the data of registered marriages recording different colored skins throughout the empire? It is a fact that Portugal had one of the most far-reaching colonial empires in world history and that the Portuguese had a reputation for particularly integrative and intimate relations with the indigenous groups that were colonized. In order to unify all of the territories under the same legal rules, to endow them with the same status, and to prove that they were considered as a homogeneous territory, each of the colonies was designated a province, an institutional status that was introduced in the constitutional reform of 1951. In this new institutional framework, overseas provinces and mainland provinces were partners in the same empire. However, did this predominant official discourse reflect the truth? Can we believe in this perspective for the Portuguese colonial empire in the period after the Second World War?

The aim of this paper is to test the accuracy of the language used in official political speeches during these decades, by observing how different kinds of local cultural cleavages led to different social experiences of marriage in the various territories. As far as culture, education and ethnicity are concerned, interracial marriage and miscegenation were two important aspects to be observed in Portuguese colonial territories. This paper observes that social and color differences can help to explain how there was a racial prejudice in the Portuguese Empire that must be recognized as yet one more factor helping to explain the success of the colonial wars for independence.

There is a long bibliography on the period, dating from the creation of the Estado Novo to the independence of the territories that were previously under Portuguese sovereignty (1920s-30s to 1974-75). However, most of the contributions are devoted to imperial, political or economic aspects, and even those studies devoted to analyzing the colonial philosophy, social prejudice and social cleavages do not approach the aspects of inter-racial marriage in a quantitative way.15 A recent work (Matos, 2006) is quite exhaustive in dealing with questions of racial representations and color from the 16th century to the 1970s, although it follows an anthropological approach and does not use any consistency checks.

The independence achieved by the different colonies also makes the study of ethnic and social cleavages much more interesting in so many countries, since they have such different features and geographical locations, while nonetheless sharing a common Portuguese colonial past. This paper seeks to shed some light on the study of all of these colonies today…

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The Creole Elite and the Rise of Angolan Proto-Nationalism, 1870–1920

Cambria Press
2008-09-08
340 pages
ISBN: 9781604975291

Jacopo Corrado

This book is about Angolan literature and culture. It investigates a segment of Angolan history and literature, with which even Portuguese-speaking readers are generally not familiar. Its main purpose is to define the features and the literary production of the so-called ‘creole elite’, as well as its contribution to the early manifestations of dissatisfaction towards colonial rule patent during a period of renewed Portuguese commitment to its African colonies, but also of unrealised ambitions, economic crisis, and socio-political upheaval in Angola and in Portugal itself.

Nineteenth-century Angolan society was characterised by the presence of a semi-urbanised commercial and administrative elite of Portuguese-speaking creole families––white, black, some of mixed race, some Catholic and others Protestant, some old established and others cosmopolitan––who were based in the main coastal towns.

As well as their wealth, derived from the functions performed in the colonial administrative, commercial and customs apparatus, their European-influenced culture and habits clearly distinguished them from the broad native population of black peasants and farm workers. In order to expand its control over the region, Portugal desperately needed the support of this kind of non-coloniser urban elite, which was also used as an assimilating force, or better as a source of dissemination of a relevant model of social behaviour. Thus, until the 1850s great creole merchants and inland chiefs dealt in captive slaves, bound for export to Brazil via Cape Verde and São Tomé: the tribal aristocracy and the creole bourgeoisie thrived on the profits of overseas trade and lived in style, consuming imported alcoholic beverages and wearing European clothes.

After the abolition, however, their social and economic position was eroded by an influx of petty merchants and bureaucrats from Portugal who wished to grasp the commercial and employment opportunities created by a new and modern colonial order, anxious to keep up with other European colonial powers engaged in the partition of the African continent.

This book thus considers the first intellectuals, the early printed publications in the country, and the pioneers of Angolan literature who felt the need to raise their roots to higher dignity. Thus, they wrote grammar, dictionaries, poetry, fiction, and of course, incendiary articles denouncing exploitation, racism, and the different treatment afforded by the colonial authorities to Portuguese expatriates and natives.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Cherished Myths
  • The greatest and most Portuguese overseas possession
  • Lusotropicalism
• Chapter 2: The Intellectual Setting
  • The Luso-Atlantic cultural triangle
  • Brazil
  • Portugal
  • The literary and cultural influences
  • Diffusion
  • Association
• Chapter 3: Luanda
  • The advent of modernity
  • Between journalism and literature
  • The new century: Hope and failure
• Chapter 4: The ‘Creole’ Elite and Early ‘Nationalism’
  • The term ‘Creole’
  • The term ‘Nationalism’
• References
• Index

The Latin American Identity and the African Diaspora: Ethnogenesis in Context

Cambria Press
2010-08-08
360 pages
ISBN: 9781604977042

Antonio Olliz-Boyd, Emeritus Professor of Latin American Literature
Temple University

Just beneath the surface of most scholars’ research on the ethno-racial composition of Spanish-speaking America lies a definitive connection between the African Diaspora and the Latin American identity. Although to a lesser extent, this is also true of Portuguese-speaking Brazil—the existence of African-related people and their role as an integral part of the total Latin ethnicity currently appears to be more readily accepted and discussed in Brazil than in other Latin American countries. Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Venezuelans, Afro-Uruguayans, or Afro-Mexicans—to name just a few—are rarely openly acknowledged in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America. However, one cannot deny that African slavery was a fact of life in all the territories colonized and settled by Spain and Portugal in the Americas, and with this, of course, came widespread miscegenation between the European male and the subjugated African female.

More than likely, because of the diversity of racial features, most non-natives do not see the extent to which Latin America’s genetic amalgam can often mask the phenotypic effects of race-mixing. As a result, many researchers and scholars of the area are reluctant to divulge that someone is a descendant of African forebears because doing so might run the risk of one being considered politically incorrect or having debased that person’s character. Whereas in the United States there is little to no stigma attached to the president’s African ancestry, for any president of a Latin American country, one cannot overtly attribute a genetic link to African heritage.

There is extensive research found both in books and articles on the various topics of Afro Latinism/Afro Hispanism that is directed mainly at the non-native. Nonetheless, one still notices either cultural confusion or political reluctance to accept the identity of Blackness that the Latin American native lives with—for himself or for others—on a daily basis. For the average Cuban, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and so forth, along with their Latin counterparts, Blackness in racial terms surfaces as a matter of degrees of African-relatedness that is then counterbalanced by degrees of European and/or Amerindian genomic components. It is only in non-native cultures that one encounters such disparate comparisons as “statistics for Hispanics versus statistics for Blacks.” But is it not possible to find persons that are ethnoracially Black included in the demographics for Hispanics?

The overarching aim of this book, then, is to determine whether it is possible to perceive a constituency within the Latin American whole who is also an integral part of the African Diaspora. It examines the concept of African-relatedness within the totality of the Latin American sphere—not just in one isolated country or region—through a careful process of literary analysis. By exploring the works of Latin American novelists, poets, and lyricists, this study shows how they creatively expose their most intimate feelings on ethnic Blackness through a semiotic reliance on the inner voice. At the same time, the reader becomes a witness to the writers’ associations with a sense of Africanness as it artistically affects them and their communities in their formulations of self-identity.

Unique to this volume is the scholarly presentation of the presence of a group of people in Ghana, West Africa, who owe their raison d’être as a clan to their ancestral origins in Brazil. Having been accepted and received by an endemic tribe of what was called the Gold Coast at an historical moment in the nineteenth century, a community of escaped slaves and deported ex-slaves from Brazilian bondage regrouped as an ethnic whole. The reality of their existence gives new meaning to the term African Diaspora. To this day, their descendants identify themselves as displaced Latin Americans in Africa. Undoubtedly, both this surprising feature of Latin Americans returning to the African continent and the book as a whole will stimulate further discussion on the issue of who is Black and who is Hispanic as well as generate continued, in-depth research on the relationship between two continents and their shared genotypology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Essay I: Aesthetic Blackness in the Creative Literature of the Latin/Hispanic Reality
• Essay II: The Aesthetics of Language as an Experience of the Afro Latin/Afro Hispanic Reality
• Essay III: An Aesthetic Experience: The Reality of Phenotypes and Racial Awareness in Dominican Literature (Julia Alvarez and Loida Maritza Pérez)
• Introduction to Essay IV
• Essay IV: A Latin Identity, An African Experience: The Tabom Brazilians of Ghana
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index

The right colour

Index on Censorship
Volume 28, Issue 1, 1999
Special Issue: The Last Empire
pages 110-114
DOI: 10.1080/03064229908536514

Daniela Cestarollo

Five hundred years after the arrival of the Portuguese, Brazilians are only Just beginning to address the legacy of slavery

Brazil is at last revealing its other face. After 500 years of seeking to shape itself in the image of a white, western Catholic country, Brazil is having to come to terms with its immense ethnic diversity and the social and economic implications this brings with it. An extensive report published in 1996 by the daily Folha de São Paulo revealed to the nation that almost half its 160 million people are black. This amounts to the realisation that Brazil had the largest black population in the world after Nigeria. The report also presented figures on racial prejudice, illiteracy, unemployment and income distribution among blacks from all over Brazil. The figures shocked a nation that has always believed itself to be the racial democracy of the southern hemisphere.

The myth of racial democracy has since the 1930s marketed Brazil as the sunny country where people of all races mix happily together on the beach, on the football pitch and in the Carnival parade. However, the myth has in reality served as a buttress for one of the most perverse and sophisticated forms of modern racism. By contrast to the apartheid system of South Africa, Brazil reveals a number of examples of disguised discrimination, such as in job advertising or television programming. Job adverts, which often ask for a ‘good appearance, in reality mean that blacks are not expected to apply. Television dramas, meanwhile, typically portray blacks within extremely limited, stereotyped roles, such as domestic servants or thieves. Not surprisingly, a recent poll on racial origins showed that only 5 per cent of Brazilians identified themselves as black. Most preferred to be called brown, bronze or coffee-coloured.

Discrimination based on skin colour was made a criminal offence in 1951, but the law was completely ignored and almost no-one was aware of its existence. During the military dictatorship (1964-1985), any…

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Brazil’s unfinished battle for racial democracy

The Economist
2000-04-20

JOSILENE SALES’S career is typical of Brazil’s emerging middle class. She spent seven years working in a petrochemical plant, while studying for a degree at night classes. Having moved to a better paid job in marketing, she saved enough to start her own telemarketing firm in Salvador, a city in Brazil’s north-east, and now employs two other staff. Less typically, Ms Sales is black, something which sometimes surprises her clients when they meet her. “You just have to overcome this [reaction] with professionalism,” she says.

Ms Sales descends from the 4m or more African slaves imported to Brazil, many of them through Salvador, for two centuries the colonial capital. When the Portuguese first landed on Brazil’s north-east coast, on April 22nd 1500, they thought that the docile Indians they encountered could easily be put to work building a new colony. But the Amerindians were few in number, unwilling workers, and many fell victim to European diseases. The colonists quickly sought African labour for Brazil’s sugar plantations, and later its mines. Brazil would not abolish slavery until 1888.
 
Five centuries of miscegenation have blurred the racial boundaries between Europeans, Africans and Amerindians: today 38% of Brazilians call themselves “brown” (of mixed ancestry). Blacks are only 6% and Amerindians a mere 0.2%. Such racial mixing encouraged Brazil’s largely white elite to nourish a myth that their country had overcome the legacy of slavery and become a “racial democracy”, with no colour prejudice—unlike the strife-torn United States.

Displays of racial hatred are indeed rare in Brazil. Nor do Brazilians live in racially segregated areas. And in contrast to their counterparts in the United States, Brazilians of mixed race are likely to be seen, and see themselves, not as black but as white or brown.

But Brazil’s blacks do face prejudice. And though, or because, as Brazilians say, “money whitens”, the country’s deep social inequalities run broadly along racial lines. Brazil is still largely governed, managed and owned by whites. Blacks and browns are disproportionately poor, and find it harder than similarly qualified whites to get a job….

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Mixed Indians, Caboclos and Curibocas: Historical Analysis of a Process of Miscegenation; Rio Negro (Brazil), 18th and 19th Centuries

Chapter in: Amazon Peasant Societies in a Changing Environment (2009)
Springer
Part I
pages 55-68
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-9283-1_4

Décio de Alencar Guzmán

The author analyses the process of mixing (mestiçagem) in the Rio Negro region during the 18th and 19th Centuries. After presenting the main features of this mestiçagem’s components (the Amerindian, the European and the African), the author concentrates on the inter-racial marriage policies prescribed by the Portuguese Crown, as part of a group of projects geared towards the exploitation of human resources in Portuguese America. Guzmán believes that one of the main hindrances to the advance of the studies about the Amazonian caboclo societies is the belief that they are independent and self-regulated social systems. Such a conception has prevented a more accurate understanding of such societies as a product of historical transformations.

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Colour and Race in Brazil: from whitening to the search for Afrodescent

Paper presented at XVII ISA World Congress of Sociology
Gothenburg, Sweden
July 2010
21 pages

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo

Two paradigmatic cases of the building process of post-slavery societies in the Americas were, without a doubt, Brazil and the United States. While the United States had an exceptional and singular development, the Brazilian case can be generalised, with certain caveats, to other countries of Central and South America and the Caribbean in terms of the incorporation of Afro-descendent and Amerindian populations into the free work regime, the formation of a class society, as well as the development of racial and national ideologies. Whereas in Brazil racial democracy was cultivated, segregation still presents a problem in the United States; whilst the former perpetuates pre-capitalist forms of exploitation and precarious employment, the latter provided for the formation of a modern black society, albeit separate from the rest of the nation; if in Brazil we have turned colour into the basic unit of a complicated symbolic system of status attribution, in the U.S. race was built into a descent status group.

In this article I aim to clarify the way in which Brazil has, since abolition, been developing a system of colour classification with regard to Afro-descendents. Not only do I intend to show how this system has developed through time, but how it is also shaped by the mobilization of the black population around the notion of race—as a group of solidarity and common experiences of subordination and discrimination. My strategy is to trace the terms “colour” and “race” and their meanings through time, as used or systemised into classifications by the state, social movements and social scientists. Certainly, this is a preliminary and incomplete study, but I hope that it can serve as a guide to future and more systematic investigations about specific periods, places and social agents…

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Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917–1945

Duke University Press
2003
312 pages, 41 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3070-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3058-5

Jerry Dávila, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Charlotte

In Brazil, the country with the largest population of African descent in the Americas, the idea of race underwent a dramatic shift in the first half of the twentieth century. Brazilian authorities, who had considered race a biological fact, began to view it as a cultural and environmental condition. Jerry Dávila explores the significance of this transition by looking at the history of the Rio de Janeiro school system between 1917 and 1945. He demonstrates how, in the period between the world wars, the dramatic proliferation of social policy initiatives in Brazil was subtly but powerfully shaped by beliefs that racially mixed and nonwhite Brazilians could be symbolically, if not physically, whitened through changes in culture, habits, and health.

Providing a unique historical perspective on how racial attitudes move from elite discourse into people’s lives, Diploma of Whiteness shows how public schools promoted the idea that whites were inherently fit and those of African or mixed ancestry were necessarily in need of remedial attention. Analyzing primary material—including school system records, teacher journals, photographs, private letters, and unpublished documents—Dávila traces the emergence of racially coded hiring practices and student-tracking policies as well as the development of a social and scientific philosophy of eugenics. He contends that the implementation of the various policies intended to “improve” nonwhites institutionalized subtle barriers to their equitable integration into Brazilian society.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Building the “Brazilian Man”
• 2. Educating Brazil
• 3. What Happened to Rio’s Teachers of Color?
• 4. Elementary Education
• 5. Escola Nova no Estado Novo: The New School in the New State
• 6. Behaving White: Rio’s Secondary Schools
• Epilogue: The Enduring Brazilian Fascination with Race
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Tent of Miracles: Myth of racial democracy

Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media
Number 21 (November 1979)
pages 20-22

Joan R. Dassin

Tent of Miracles (Tenda dos Milagres), says its director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a clear direct film that confronts a human question—that of racial discrimination—with great frankness and humor.

Completed in December 1975 and first shown in Brazil in October 1977, Tent of Miracles, based on Jorge Amada’s novel, is indeed a richly-peopled, plain-speaking, and even light-hearted picture about the persecution and survival of black African culture in Brazil. With this focus, Nelson Pereira—the patriarch of nationally-minded filmmakers in Brazil for nearly 25 years—has challenged the most widely-held false belief in his society: the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.

…This visual parable of “whitening” reveals the ideology implicit in the film’s defense of racial crossbreeding. It also undercuts the energetic and upbeat presentation of an autonomous Afro-Brazilian culture. Unwittingly, perhaps, Nelson Pereira repeats the error of both his literary source (Bahian novelist Jorge Amado’s 1969 novel, Tent of Miracles) and an earlier classic of Brazilian social history (Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves of 1933). Both works uncritically advocate miscegenation.

Traditionally celebrated in Brazil as the means to ensure the tranquil mingling of the Portuguese, indigenous, and African races, miscegenation has long been glorified as the basis of the “cordial” national character. In contrast, the recognition that in siring the Brazilian race the Portuguese colonizers brutally imposed their will on black female slaves—after largely exterminating or subjugating recalcitrant Indian laborers—has spread very slowly. Indeed, historical truth has only recently made inroads into the national myth that Brazilians are the harmonious products of these three races, and live in an untroubled racial democracy.

As Brazilian culture critic Sergio Augusto has pointed out, miscegenation—both as a practice and as a widely espoused doctrine—has had two pernicious effects. Rather than fostering egalitarianism, miscegenation has promoted “whitening.” Most seriously, it has denied to blacks (Indians being long out of the picture) the opportunity to develop their cultural identity as an independent group. Another Brazilian commentator, Muniz Sodré, seconds this view. Miscegenation’s hidden value of “whitening,” he asserts, is in fact a rejection of black culture in Brazil, a relegation of the Afro-Brazilian inheritance to a “source of sensationalism, a plethora of genital tricks, and an eternal supplier of recipes.”

Lamentably, Tent of Miracles does not explore these negative consequences of miscegenation for black cultural survival in Brazil. On the contrary, the philosophy of “whitening” that lies behind supposedly egalitarian racial crossbreeding is visually and emotionally reinforced by the “success story” of Tadeu Canhoto. The U.S. viewer will probably miss the subtle racist implications of lauding miscegenation, because here the “mixed” population is considered black, and as such, is clearly subject to the will of the white majority. But in Brazil, the color line is not drawn so sharply. Indeed, the “democratic” mixing of races is the cornerstone of the dominant national ideology of race, ironically described by Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes as “the prejudice of having no prejudice.”

Defenders of the doctrine of miscegenation and the myth of racial democracy come from all quarters in Brazil. Gilberto Freyre, who with Jorge Amado is the greatest popularizer of Brazil for North Americans, has proudly noted that Brazil is growing ever “browner.” Freyre sees this trend as “proof” that the Brazilian “meta-race,” supposedly formed in equal parts by blacks, Indians and whites, is at last emerging.  Even some Brazilian blacks have themselves proposed miscegenation so that “the negro will disappear and we will not have racial conflict like they do in the United States.” As the young black Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento recently reflected, the 18th century dictum that “Brazil is a hell for blacks, a purgatory for whites, and a paradise for mulattos” is still the accepted national vision. The vision has only one catch: it is predicated on the “total disappearance” of those who live in “hell.”…

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Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

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