SPPT3601: 'Race' in Brazil & Latin America

As cultural, national and racial mixings have become the celebrated norm in our society, it is instructive to reflect upon the radically historical, contingent role that the idea of racial mixings has played in the construction of national imaginaries. The idea that Latin America is a continent of mestizos looms large in the US as elsewhere, but generally without the contextual understanding of how that racial category came to be, and as imaginaries of national mestiçagem/mestizaje were consolidated, developed and questioned in the twentieth century and, finally, transplanted to other geographical and epistemological sites, as is the case with Chicanx in the USA. Rather than contributing to the invisibility of Brazil by generalizing from Spanish-speaking Latin America, the present course aims to introduce students to racial thinking in Brazil, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present in a comparative frame with racial thinking elsewhere in Latin America, particularly in Mexico. Aside from understanding how the Spanish “mestizo” construction is not equivalent to that of “mestiço” or “pardo” or “mulato” in Portuguese, nor to contemporary multicultural US-branded notions of racial mixings, the course aims to query how the imaginaries of nationhood that have prevailed in Latin America contribute not only to the social exclusion of black people, even where they are a majority, but also to the systematic racism that is still dominant and difficult to combat. We will go over the social and anthropological concepts, the literary and artistic representations, and the political uses of racial ascriptions with attention to changing historical contexts and locations. The main topics covered are the idea of the mixed-race nation in romanticism; post-emancipation, modern nation-making and whitening; modernism and the ideals of “la raza cósmica” (José Vasconcelos, in Mexico) and racial democracy (Gilberto Freyre, in Brazil); the problem of forging a black consciousness in an officially mixed-race nation; and the appropriation of a modernist, Mexican notion of “mestizaje” to forge a Chicanx identity in the old one-drop rule USA. Classes will be conducted in English, but students have the option to read some of the originals in Portuguese or Spanish; sometimes we will cite the originals in class to have students listen to – and hopefully appreciate – the sounds and nuances of Portuguese and Spanish. Classes will be interactive, with a combination of lecture and discussion; oral presentations, viewing of art, music and film clips and discussion thereof; and group activities. Depending on students’ language abilities, small group discussions in class can be in Spanish, Portuguese or English. All texts are considered a valid object of study and discussion, in whatever language and from whatever disciplinary perspective they are written. I have deliberately mixed literature, anthropology, sociology, art history and so-called mass culture in order to expose students to a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The point is to see how insistent notions of ‘race’ are integrally related to the way that nations are imagined and controlled but also appropriated and potentially questioned.

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