University of California, San Diego
Winter 2010
Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Luso-Brazilian Studies
This course provides an introduction to Brazilian culture through essays, poetry, fiction, music and films that consider the meaning of “being Brazilian” (brasilidade). Our focus will be on texts that construct Brazil as a mixed-race (mestiço) nation. As the two largest post-slavery countries in the Americas, Brazil and the U.S. have long been engaged in comparative evaluations of one another. For this reason, we will also look at U.S. interpretations of Brazil as a Racial Democracy, as an “exotic” relic of the plantation era–replete with carnival, soccer, and enticing women of color advertising the nation’s beaches–or, alternatively, as a “tropical hell” characterized by unending violence, an image that reproduces nineteenth-century ideas about race and criminality. We will investigate Brazilian discourses of hybridization in the context of Latin American mestizo projects, the concept of cultural cannibalism and the human/animal dialectic that sustains postcolonial power. The course will be particularly concerned with how otherness is interpreted, and how specific representations come to be accepted as fact. Who is observing and assessing? How does ethnography produce an unequal relation between the subject who analyzes and the object that is written up as text?