HAVING SKETCHED OUT the larger Atlantic seascape as the backdrop to our discussion, we now examine the long-term strands of historical connection between the United States, Brazil, and France as three national zones positioned both similarly and differently toward the race/colonial question. Our trilateral focus is on (1) a “paradigmatic” European nation-state—France—an erstwhile imperial power with a defined territory and a common language, a country historically linked to foundational theorizations of nations and nationalism; and (2) a continent-sized colonial-settler “nation of nations”—the United States—the superpower headquarters of an empire of bases classified with the “First World” and the imperial West; and (3) a continent-sized emerging colonial-settler “nation of nations”—Brazil—associated with the “Third World” and the Global South.
How one aligns the nation-states conceptually depends on the principle of pertinence selected. In geopolitical terms, the United States shares with France its status as a Western or First World or Global North country, while Brazil represents an emerging “second-tier” power from the Global South. The double status of Brazil as at once a colonial-settler state and a Third World country is conveyed by the Brazilian coinage Belindia, which posits Brazil as a North-South amalgam of Belgium and India. In another sense, however, the diverse geopolitical positionings mask a historical substratum shared by all three nation-states, that is, their colonizing relation to the indigenous peoples as part of the Red Atlantic; their common shaping by the triangular slave trade as part of the Black Atlantic; and their shared pattern of racial hegemony in the “White Atlantic.”1 Thus, the three nation-states represent distinct conjunctural formations within intercolonial oceanic configurations.2
All three nation-states partake of a multiculturality forged in the cauldron of the colonial process. The United States and Brazil, the Americas’ two largest “multi-nation-states” (Will Kymlicka), orchestrate at least three major constellations of groups, all internally differentiated: (1) those who were already here in the Americas (indigenous peoples in all their variety and heterogeneity), (2) those who were forced to come (largely enslaved Africans but also indentured Europeans and Asians), and (3) those who chose to come (conquistadores, colonizers, immigrants).3 France, meanwhile, is also multicultural, first, in terms of internal differentiations based on region, ethnicity, or religion (Celts, Franks, Gauls, Basques, Bretons, Huguenots, Jews, Roma); and, second, through its long colonial entanglements in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In this sense, we would distinguish between “colonial multiculturality,” a formulation in which the noun calls attention to the de facto multicultural demographic character of contemporary nation-states, and its converse phrase “multicultural coloniality,” which calls attention to the colonial formations that generated this very diversity. A certain oscillation between these emphases lies in the background of some of the debates about the political valence of multiculturalism, which has, at times, been instrumentalized for Eurocentric or national-exceptionalist ends.
Deeply intermeshed from their very beginnings, the United States, France, and Brazil have been shaped by asymmetrical interactions not simply with one another but also with indigenous America, with Africa, and with the Afro-diaspora. Within a veritable daisy chain of cultural intercourse, the United States is “in” Brazil, which is “in” France, which is “in” the United States. Indeed, the interconnections begin with the speculative “might have beens” of history, including the fact that both Brazil and the United States might have been French. If the Portuguese had not expelled “France Antartique” in the 16th century, Brazilians might be speaking French today. And if France had not ceded land to the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, French might have become the official language of the American Southwest. Although American Francophobes harp on French “ingratitude” for the U.S. liberation of France, the French might remind Americans of the gratitude owed them for having saved the American Revolution itself, when French help prevented George Washington and his men from losing the War of Independence. If France saved the United States in its symbolic infancy, the United States saved France in its adulthood.
While the historical affinities between France and the United States are widely accepted, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are generally known only to specialists. As the two most populous settler states in the Americas, the two histories run on parallel tracks. Both “began” their official histories as European colonies: São Vicente, the first Portuguese settlement, was founded in 1532, and Jamestown was founded almost a century later in 1607. In both countries, the colonizers—called pioneers in the United States and bandeirantes in Brazil—initiated a process that reduced an indigenous population of many millions to hundreds of thousands. Massive extermination, theft of land, and the destruction of communal societies took place in both sites, but the modalities of domination, and their discursive filtration, differed dramatically. The U.S. legal system treated indigenous people as “aliens” and “domestic dependent nations” within a regime of very limited sovereignty, while the Brazilian legal system refused to recognize any indigenous sovereignty and instead adopted the “Indians” as legal “orphans.” Although the discursive, ideological, and political constructions were distinct in the two countries, the result—indigenous dispossessions—was similar.
The United States and Brazil came to form the two largest slave societies of modern times, until slavery was abolished in the United States with the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and in Brazil in 1888 with the “Golden Law.” Both countries received similar waves of immigration from all over the world, ultimately forming multiracial-colonial societies with substantial indigenous, African, Italian, German, Japanese, Slavic, Syro-Lebanese, and Jewish (Ashkenazi and Sephardi) populations and cultures. Despite widely trumpeted cultural contrasts, the two nations constitute “cousins” with similar historical and ethnic formations, but where a hierarchically structured kinship has been obscured by nationalist and imperialist assumptions. All three zones form part of a continuum of Atlantic republicanism. The French and U.S. republics were called “soeurs” (sisters), while the Brazilian Republican Constitution was inspired by both the French and the American models. At this point in history, all three countries are constitutional republics. Unlike the United States, which has retained the same Constitution since 1787, France has lived through five republics and five constitutions. While the American Revolution was a national revolt against one colonial empire and the founding of another, the French Revolution was a social overturning of the ancien régime and the continuation of an empire.
Whereas both France and the United States are products of violent revolutions, Brazil achieved independence without bloodshed, when the son of the Portuguese monarch decided to stay in Brazil. France was not a neutral bystander in these events, however, since it was the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia that triggered the removal of the Portuguese court to Brazil. Brazil’s 1824 Imperial Constitution borrowed and even translated parts of the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen.4 Brazil followed the republican course relatively late, since it was first a colony, then a monarchy and an empire, and finally a republic, founded in 1889 and lasting until 1930. Highly conscious of U.S. and French precedents, the framers of the Brazilian constitution drew on elements of U.S.-style federalism, presidentialism, bicameral legislature, and separation of church and state, while avoiding the express principles of universal equality elaborated in both the French and the American constitutions.
Many of the central conflicts in the histories of all three nation-states revolve around the ambiguous heritage of Enlightenment republicanism. All three stressed the sanctity of the Lockean triad of life, liberty, and property. But the innocent-sounding word “property” had terrible implications for Blacks—for whom it meant their reduction to the status of chattel—and for Reds—for whom it invalidated the notion of communal property. Nothing is more revelatory of these contradictions than the way the three nation-states dealt with slavery. In the United States, some of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention called for abolition but ultimately accepted slavery as part of a compromise favoring a stronger federal government. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888 but did little to compensate or employ the newly freed blacks, preferring to invite European immigrants as the ethnically approved labor force. France, meanwhile, abolished slavery during the Revolution but reestablished it in the colonies, ending it only in 1848.
At the core of our tale of three republics is the contradiction between liberal Enlightenment principles of political democracy and social equality and the illiberal legacies of discrepant citizenship. James Holston usefully schematizes the three-way variations in citizenship: Brazil has been “inclusively inegalitarian” (i.e., everyone belongs to the nation but in an unequal way), the United States has been “restrictively egalitarian” (i.e., the principles are egalitarian, but entire groups were excluded from the benefits of these principles), and France has been “inclusively egalitarian” (i.e., every citizen belongs to the nation, and the principles are egalitarian).5 There were, we would add, exceptions to France’s “inclusive egalitarianism”: Jews were granted citizenship but discriminated against in a “restrictively egalitarian” practice. Meanwhile, people of color in the French colonies, given their status as colonial subjects, belonged to the “inclusively inegalitarian” category.
For Brazil and the United States, colonization, slavery, and racialization were constitutive and “internal” to the newly invented nation; for Hexagonal France, in contrast, they were seen as “external,” not requiring a shift in the conception of the nation. The externalization of “race” delinked Enlightened France from its “overseas” extensions. Yet French history has hardly been free of institutional and ideological racism. Philosopher/political scientist Achille Mbembe speaks of four eras of French racism: (1) the long ancien régime period that includes the slave trade, the Code Noir, and anti-Semitism; (2) the colonial period of the Native Codes and assimilationist “selective inclusion”; (3) the postwar state racism of the laws of exception for African immigrants in France; and (4) the globalized era of the “alien” as phantom enemy and trigger for the ressentiment of the supposedly silent majorities representing la France profonde.6
While contemporary U.S. conservatives dismiss slavery as existing only way “back then,” French conservatives have classically downplayed colonialism and slavery as not only “back then” but also “far away” and “over there.” Yet the 20th-century colonial war in Algeria was not distant in time or space; it was recent and felt intimately in France because Algeria, as an aggregation of three administrative departments, formed an integral part of France. Yet Algerian Muslims were disenfranchised by the “Code Indigene” and, in France itself, were subject to curfews and police brutality and a segregated existence in bidonvilles. In a sense, Algeria formed a French counterpart to the American South. Azouz Begag, France’s first cabinet minister of North African origin, claims that France in Algeria “practiced forms of institutional racism similar in spirit to segregation in the American South.”7
The supposedly race-blind République, despite its professed universalism, did inscribe a normative (white) identity. The French constitution declares itself the product of a specific people: “The French people has adopted …, The French people solemnly proclaims …,” and so forth. French constitutional citizenship implies entry into a primordially unified community, as if “the French people” were a homogeneous ethnic group that collectively decided to adhere to democratic principles.8 The United States, in contrast, despite the overriding reality of colonial/racial hierarchy, did not officially define itself in linguistically or even ethnically specific terms. Thus, a certain theoretical flexibility, along with a high potential for antistate libertarian individualism, was built into the conceptualization of the republic. One result is a different relation to the very concept of the nation-state. In France, the already existing nation—the French people—created the new state, while in the United States, the new state created the nation, as one very heterogeneous people (the Americans) dissolved their formal-legal links to another people (the British).
At the same time, unlike the French constitution, the U.S. Constitution did encode race through specific laws tacitly premised on the enslavement of blacks and the dispossession of Native Americans. The very names of the United States and Brazil, moreover, indirectly betoken ethnicity. “America” gives a European imprimatur to an indigenous continent by paying homage to the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, while “Brazil” replicates the name, by some accounts, of a mythical island (near Ireland) that subsequently became associated with the “Brazil wood” sought after by European colonists. Like the Ivory Coast, Brazil was named after an export product, a prefiguration of its long-term role as provider of raw materials within the racialized/gendered division of labor typical of the world economic system.
All three countries have a special relation to the “universal.” As what Bourdieu calls “the two imperialisms of the Universal,” the French and American republics have historically proposed themselves as models for all peoples. Brazil, meanwhile, has also been seen as a universal model, but in two very different senses of the word “universal.” In the late 1940s and 1950s, in the wake of Nazism and the Shoah, Brazil was seen as a positively universal model of racial tolerance, an alternative to fascist racism and to South African and U.S. apartheid. In subsequent decades, however, Brazil began to be interpreted as a negative universal model, crystallized in the term “Brazilianization” as summoning up associations with economic inequality, social segregation, drug-related violence, and precarious work relations. If in the 1950s Brazil was seen as universal panacea, in the 1990s it began to be seen as the harbinger of a universal threat, the fearsome telos toward which the entire world might be heading. Figures as diverse as the Americans Michael Lind and Mike Davis, the Frenchman Alain Lipietz, the German Ulrich Beck, and the Indian Ravi Sundaram have all spoken of Brazilianization as the imminent condition of the entire world as a “planet of slums” (Davis).9 This quasi-Orientalist singling out of Brazil carried the unfortunate implication that there were no slums in the Global North and that the Global North was not implicated in the immiseration of the Global South. The word “Brazilianization,” in Paulo Arantes’s words, suggests a “contamination” of the organic nucleus of the Global North by the “new barbarians of its own internal peripheries, [so that] who spread the fracture comes to be seen as the separation between those who are capable, or incapable, of controlling their own impulses.”10 In this sense, the Brazilianization trope constitutes an updated deterritorialized version of the colonialist demonization of “tropical climes.” Its negative connotations are especially inappropriate at a time when Brazil is becoming more equal and democratic, while the United States and France are arguably becoming less equal.
Our discussion of the race/coloniality debates takes place against the backdrop of the longstanding intellectual conversations among the three zones. French writers, for example, not only have influenced both the United States and Brazil but also became major theorists of their national character and identity. French intellectuals have found both countries, to coin a phrase, “good to think with.” The French “thinking” of the United States goes back to Crèvecoeur in the 18th century, through to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in the 19th century, on to Jean Baudrillard and Emmanuel Todd in the 20th century. The French “thinking” of Brazil, and especially of indigenous Brazil, meanwhile, goes back even further, to Jean de Léry in the 16th century, and continues through to Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres in the 20th century and Jean-Christophe Rufin in the 21st century, resulting in an extraordinarily rich vein of dialogue between French philosophers and the Brazilian indigene.
It was the early French attempts to colonize Brazil, interestingly, that first catalyzed Brazilian nationalism. Through much of the 16th and 17th centuries, French warships tried to dominate the littoral from Guiana down to the northern side of the Amazon but eventually retreated in the face of what one might call the proto-Brazilian resistance. Yet the French military failure indirectly opened the way for a strong French cultural influence. The relationship was freed of the ressentiment that characterized Brazil’s relationship with Portugal. The fact that Brazil was not a colony of France facilitated a view of France as the revolutionary homeland of liberty rather than as an imperial power. As a voluntary colony, Brazil was not commandeered by the menacing metal of French arms or by economic blackmail; rather, the Euro-Brazilian elite was persuaded by the seductive rayonnement of French culture and ideas.
The strong political/intellectual French influence on the Brazilian elite became evident already in the 18th century and continues to this day. The “Inconfidência Mineira,” the abortive 1789 revolt in Minas Gerais against Portuguese colonialism, was led by Brazilians who had absorbed French Enlightenment ideas in Europe, whether indirectly, through studies in Coimbra, Portugal, or directly, in Montpellier, France. The Brazilian revolutionaries compartmentalized the douce France of literate culture and égalité from French participation in the slave trade, colonialism, and imperialism. It was thus no accident that it was not white Brazilian intellectuals but rather the direct objects of French imperialism—Haitian revolutionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries and black Francophone intellectuals in the 20th century—who demystified French hypocrisies.
In the realm of literature, virtually every French literary trend—realism, naturalism, symbolism, Parnassianism, surrealism—had its Brazilian “translation.” The romantic Indianist movement in Brazil, for example, was partially inspired by Chateaubriand and Ferdinand Denis. Some Brazilian intellectuals even wrote in French. The abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco wrote poems in French (“Amour et Dieu,” 1874) and a play (L’Option) about Alsace-Lorraine. Indianist José de Alencar’s own death was mourned in French verses in Brazilian newspapers: “Avant l’heure frappé par l’aveugle barbare.”11 Even in the modernist period, Manuel Bandeira wrote his first poems in French, and Brazilian elites tended to be fluent in French up through the late 1950s.
Other key moments of French influence in Brazil include (1) the architectural, urbanistic, and painterly impact of the 19th-century French artistic “missions”; (2) the political/philosophical influence of the “positivism” of Auguste Comte; (3) the artistic influence of French avant-garde movements such as surrealism on 1920s Brazilian modernism; (4) the academic impact of the French mission to the University of São Paulo in the 1930s; and (5) the postwar impact of French intellectual trends, from existentialism to poststructuralism. It was precisely the lack of a strong political/economic relationship, and the lack of a major French demographic presence in Brazil, that opened the way for phantasmatic projections on both sides. The Brazilian elite’s fascination with French culture served many purposes. Since the Westernizing elite had traditionally seen itself as a civilizing force enlightening the dark-skinned masses, its relationship to France facilitated a connection to a prestigious (non-Iberian) European cultural tradition. At the same time, the elite adopted a symbolically indigenous identity, within what Pierre Rivas calls “a phantasmagoric … family romance in which the figure of the real father is denied and expanded into a generic concept, more cultural than genetic, which indirectly reveals the figure of the French Father/Mother.”12
Some French writers reciprocated Brazilian Francophilia with Brazilophile exoticism. Victor Hugo exalted Brazil as a Europe in the making: “You are the spring / While I am winter…. / You will be Europe, the day after next.”13 Comte Arthur de Gobineau in his travel accounts described the 19th-century educated Brazilian as “a man who dreams of living in Paris.”14 (A century later, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes evoked this Hamlet-like alienation of Brazilian intellectuals by speaking of the “painful construction of ourselves within the rarefied dialectic of not being and being other.”)15 French commentary on Brazil has been very diverse and in many ways contradictory. In ideological terms, French intellectuals have both advanced and contested racist currents of thought. Gobineau, author of the influential racist tract Essai sur L’inégalité des Races, called for the Europeanizing and whitening of Brazil as an antidote to what he called “the disagreeable elements within [Brazil’s] ethnic constitution.”16 In his personal correspondence, Gobineau expressed aesthetic repulsion toward that racially mixed Brazilian family that made it “very disagreeable to look at.”17 Yet for every racist ideologue such as Gobineau or Gustave le Bon, scholars can cite an antiracist such as Montaigne (in an early period) and Roger Bastide and Pierre Clastres (in a later period).
Much of the doctrinaire racism in Brazilian intellectual history is concentrated in the period of the First Republic, and its sources were not only French but also British, North American, and, derivatively, Brazilian. U.S. Brazilianist Thomas Skidmore discerns three sources of racialist thought in Brazil: (1) the American “polygenic” school, which saw the races as distinct “species”; (2) the historical school of Gobineau, which saw race mixing as a source of “degeneracy”; and (3) Social Darwinism, the survival-of-the-fittest doctrine popularized by such writers as Gustave Le Bon and Lapouge. Part of a much wider and international eugenicist current strongly developed in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany, some French thinkers, like some Brazilian thinkers, condemned the African element in Brazil as the source of the country’s “backwardness.”18
If some French visitors to Brazil never transcended a racially tinted elitism, others transformed their Brazilian experience into a trampoline for a cognitive leap. In the time of France Antartique, as we saw earlier, Montaigne rethought European social hierarchies through a Tupinamba prism, resulting in a profound critique of dominant views of religion, power, and social hierarchy. Centuries later, anthropologists such as Lévi-Strauss and Clastres respectfully absorbed and illuminated indigenous knowledge and disseminated it throughout the world. Brazilians, for their part, returned the compliment of French fascination by endlessly indigenizing, as it were, French ideas. The 1920s “anthropophagic” modernists, for example, devoured French avant-gardism but went beyond it, with Oswald de Andrade whimsically referring to surrealism as the best “preanthropophagic” movement.19
In the 1930s, the founders of the University of São Paulo decided to strengthen that institution’s intellectual quality by inviting prestigious French intellectuals to occupy key positions. The result was a series (in 1934, 1935, and 1938) of French “missions”—the word itself recalls the quasi-religious mission civilisatrice aspect of such projects—aimed at shaping modern education in Brazil. France would thus consolidate its cultural influence, and Brazil would modernize its university. Some of the invited scholars, such as Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Fernand Braudel in history, were then on the cusp of becoming world renowned. In Tristes Tropiques, Lévi-Strauss offered an affectionate picture of the Nambiquara and the Bororos and an ironic portrait of the Europeanized São Paulo elite. A standard boutade among São Paulo academics had it that Lévi-Strauss saw them, and not the Indians, as the real “savages.” As an anti-Eurocentric European, Lévi-Strauss mocked the elite’s passion for the latest Parisian intellectual fashions.20 Despite the long tradition of quasi-official Indianist sentimentality, the French ethnographer was surprised by the aversion of the Brazilian elites toward “os indios.” The Brazilian ambassador in Paris “reassured” Lévi-Strauss that Indians no longer existed, this only a decade or two after a time (1918) when maps of the state of São Paulo indicated that two-thirds of the territory was inhabited only by Indians.
Lévi-Strauss constitutes a clear case of circum-Atlantic connectivities among France, the United States, Brazil, and indigenous America. In the wake of his work in Brazil in the 1930s, Lévi-Strauss spent the World War II years in New York, researching the indigenous cultures of the Americas at the New York Public Library. There he was strongly influenced by the German-Jewish American anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Lévi-Strauss considered a “master builder” of modern anthropology and the originator of the modern critique of racism.21 As a methodological maverick, Lévi-Strauss synthesized French ethnology with American sociology and anthropology, while also learning from Brazilian natives as experts, so to speak, on themselves. At the same time, he brought the outsider perspective of a Jew forced into exile, for whom the gregarious ways of the indigenous Americans offered a humane alternative to what John Murray Cuddihy calls the “ordeals of [European] civility.”22
The anthropologist/sociologist Roger Bastide (1898–1974) constitutes a stellar example of a French intellectual transformed by his Brazilian séjour. As professor of sociology at the University of São Paulo, Bastide ultimately created an impressive corpus of some thirty books on an astonishingly wide variety of topics, including psychoanalysis (A Psicanálise do Cafuné, 1941), literature (A Poesia Afro-Brasileira, 1943), mysticism (Imagems do Nordeste Místico em Branco e Preto, 1945), racial relations (Relações entre Negros e Brancos em São Paulo, 1955), folklore (Sociologia do Folclore Brasileiro, 1959), and Afro-Brazilian religions (As Religiões Africanas no Brasil, 1971). As a liminal figure working on the borders between anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, and history, Bastide transgressed the frontiers not only between disciplines but also between the “high” and “low” arts, between the sacred and the profane, and between the sciences and the humanities. A comparatist, Bastide pointed to the paradoxes of Brazil’s relative tolerance; the very rigidity of the racial/social structure in the United States, he argued, fostered the creation of a black poetry reflective of the “genius of the race,” while the sinuosity of the Brazilian social system encouraged black intellectuals and artists to identify with the white elite, thus undermining specifically black cultural creativity.
Bastide broke with the dominant views of African-derived religions as pathological and irrational. Stressing the intellectual, political, and cultural agency of Afro-diasporic blacks, Bastide saw religious syncretism, for example, not as a naive confusion of incongruous entities but rather as an exercise in spiritual/intellectual agency based on the comparative translation of mystical equivalencies.23 The dominant monotheistic as well as the Euro-secular view, in contrast, had seen such spirit religions as superstitions rather than as legitimate belief systems. A patronizing vocabulary—“animism,” “fetishism,” “ancestor worship,” “cult,” and so forth—embedded a superimposed set of hierarchies—written over oral, monotheistic over polytheistic, science over magic, mind over body—that undermined the legitimacy of African religions. Seen as overly corporeal and ludic (danced) rather than abstractly and austerely theological, African spirit religions were symbolized as wildly gregarious, drowning the bounded individual personality in the collective and transpersonal fusions of trance.24
Bastide’s affirmation of Afro-Brazilian spiritual values formed a clear break with the antecedent views of those French and American visitors inclined to reject West African religions. Writing in the 1950s, French novelist Henri Troyat mingled a whole series of racist tropes in his nauseated description of a Candomblé priestess as a “prehistoric creature, a veritable mountain of black flesh [who] despite her corpulence … glided, jumped, and pirouetted with the lightness of a rubber balloon … [whose] wet skin made me want to vomit.”25 Bastide’s recuperative project, in contrast, was to show that these religions “embraced a cosmology, a psychology, and a theodicy” reflective of an “erudite and deeply cultivated African thought.”26 Candomblé helped Bastide see the limitations of Enlightenment rationalism. Three centuries of Cartesianism, he acknowledged, had blinded him to the complex and subtle philosophy of African religion:
I learned then, when I entered the Candomblé terreiro, that I had to let myself be penetrated by a culture that was not mine. Scientific research required that I myself go through the ritual of initiation. I will be grateful till the day I die to those Candomblé priestesses like Joana de Ogum and Joana de Iemanja who regarded me as their own little white child, who understood my desire for new cultural “food,”—and who sensed, with that superior gift of intuition so typical of them—that my Cartesian thought could not handle these new elements, not in terms of purely scientific relations, which remain at the surface of things, but that they had to metamorphose into vital experiences, the only source of real understanding…. After this, the knowledge of Africa has always had for me a taste of maternal love, the scent of these kneading black hands, this infinite patience in giving the gift of one’s knowledge…. The question is: Have I been faithful to them?27
Bastide’s sense of identification plunged him deep into the Candomblé ethos, to the point of becoming himself initiated as a son of Xango.
Had Bastide not published primarily in Portuguese, he might have become a key figure in the “seismic shift” in scholarship. Long before the advocates of “reflexive anthropology,” Bastide developed an “anti-ethnocentric method” based on “transforming ourselves into that which we are studying…. As in the act of love, we transcend our own personality in order to join ourselves to the soul linked to what is being studied.”28 Here ethnography becomes the trigger for a psychic transformation, a kind of methodological trance, that recalls the exchange of identities literally “at play” in Candomblé, where male can become female, the adult a child, and so forth. In a form of ecstatic cognition, Bastide practiced cultural “immersion,” even while maintaining a certain reflexivity about his own methods and limitations. He believed, as it were, in both identification and exotopy, both in the trance itself and in the distanced analysis performed subsequently.
Every religion arguably opens up a specific aesthetic field favoring some arts and senses over others. The iconoclastic suspicion toward the representational image typical of Judaism, Islam, Protestant Christianity, and neo-Platonism, for example, favors the scriptural and the auditory over sensuous visual representation. “Religions of the book” tend to be theological at their core; the arts come later as illustrations or adumbrations of the sacred word. In the case of an Afro-Brazilian religion such as Candomblé, in contrast, the arts form the energetic matrix of the religion. As a multiart practice, Candomblé engages music, dance, poetry, narrative, costume, and cuisine not as decorative extras but as an integral part of the religion as a synaesthetic system of belief. In a faith in which “soul claps its hands and sings,” the faithful are also performers, the mediums and the priests and priestesses above all but also the community as the addressee for whose benefit the ritual is performed. Since there is little abstract doctrine per se, the religion exercises its power through artistic expression and performance. Without the drums (or at least percussion), the spirits cannot “descend,” and without dance, the orixas cannot be incarnated.
It would be fascinating, in this sense, to juxtapose Bastide’s anthropological study of trance with three contemporaneous artists who combined anticolonial left politics with a deep affection for West African trance religions: first, Maya Deren, the American avant-garde filmmaker who participated in and filmed the rituals of Haitian Vodoun and wrote a classic book (The Divine Horseman) on the subject; second, the French ethnographic surrealist Jean Rouch, who not only filmed African trance religions but also coined the term “cine-trance”; and third, Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, who filmed Candomblé trance in Barravento—the title refers to the stormy vertigo just prior to the onset of possession—but also referenced trance in the very title of his Terra em Transe.29 For Rouch, the trance phenomenon was an essential engine both of spirituality and of artistic creation. Theatrical directors such as Julian Beck, Peter Brook, and Jerzy Grotowski, he pointed out, all used ethnographic information about possession in their training of actors.30 In Les Maîtres Fous, Rouch filmed trance rituals that functioned metaphorically as a coded mockery of the British colonial authorities. At the same time, Rouch’s metaphor of “cine-trance” evoked a sense of danced and kinetic alignment between the camera-carrying filmmaker and the possessed subject of religious ecstasy.31
Like these artists and like James Clifford’s “ethnographic surrealists,” Bastide was extraordinarily sensitive to the aesthetic ramifications of African religion, to its dynamic mise-en-scène and its synesthetic embrace of the various senses, whereby the religion “penetrates through hearing, through the nose and the mouth, touches the stomach, imposing its rhythm on body and mind.”32 Here Bastide was clearly influenced by the Franco-Africanism of ethnographic surrealists Michel Leiris and Marcel Griaule. In his O Candomblé da Bahia: Rito Nagô (1958), Bastide found echoes of what Griaule found with the Dogon: “the duality of the primordial deity, the disorder introduced into the world due to the loss of this duality and the distinction of the sexes, the importance of numbers.”33 At the same time, again like the ethnographic surrealists, Bastide was linked to artistic modernism, in that the Brazilian modernists were his friends and in that he analyzed their work sympathetically in his texts.
Bastide exemplifies a polyperspectival, parallax view that illuminates both French and Brazilian culture. Rather than see himself as a disseminator of French culture in Brazil, Bastide saw himself as a student/scholar learning about and from Brazil. Returning to France in the 1950s, Bastide became a kind of cultural ambassador. In his “Lettres Brésiliennes” column for Mercure de France, Bastide reversed the currents of neocolonial intellectual exchange by keeping French readers abreast of Brazilian literary events. Bastide shows that a “First World” intellectual could identify with Brazil’s subalternized populations, in an “excess seeing” that mingles distance with intimacy, exotopy with empathy. And while Bastide certainly impacted Brazilian intellectual life, that Brazilian life transformed his thinking as well through a reciprocal process of interfecundation.
Since France was never a key political or economic interlocutor of Brazil, its relationship with Brazil has always been less material and more symbolic than Brazil’s relationship with the United States. French influence in Brazil cannot be reduced to an epiphenomenon of cultural neocolonialism, however, first because Brazil was never a colony or even a neocolony of France and second because France became a cultural mentor for much of the world. At the same time, the Brazil-France relationship has also been asymmetrical in its way. “In this love story,” as Leyla Perrone-Moisés puts it, “Brazil was always the more passionately in love of the two partners, often standing in amazed admiration before the undeniable superiority of the beloved object.”34 Along with its rapturous interludes, the Franco-Brazilian love affair also had its moments of coldness and even rejection, within a double movement of attraction and repulsion linked to Brazil’s anxieties about its own identity and the possibilities of alternative alliances and coalitions.
Within a regime of complementary needs and desires, France played the role of the refined intellectual superego for Brazil, while Brazil offered the raw material of the carnivalesque id, a view summed up in de Gaulle’s (perhaps apocryphal) dismissal of Brazil as not a “pays sérieux.” Brazilian intellectual historian Mario Carelli sums up the relationship as follows: “For the French, Brazil retains a bit of dream and Dionysianism; for Brazilians, France remains linked to the principal stages of its own construction as a modern state.”35 While the French image of Brazil was relatively exoticized, the Brazilian view of French influence was that it was seminal and substantive. The Franco-Brazilian relationship defies generalization, however. If writers such as Bastide and Clastres analyzed Brazil in terms that Brazilians themselves found stimulating, other French writers saw Brazil through a paternalistic lens. The relation has often been one of mutual, affectionate consumption, but where the rapports de force have historically favored the more empowered European country. Now that France exercises less global influence, while Brazil is an emerging BRIC power with an international voice, the earlier asymmetries have diminished considerably. (These mutating geopolitical and intellectual dynamics form the background, as we shall see, of many contemporary polemics.)
If the Franco-Brazilian intellectual dialogue dates back to the 16th century, the Brazilian-American connection begins a century later in New Amsterdam, then a multifaith, multiracial, and polyglot island speaking diverse indigenous, African, and European languages. New Amsterdam received Jews, Muslims, and some enslaved Mdumbu and Kongo people who came to North America via Africa and Brazil. The word “Negro” comes to English via Portuguese, as does “pickaninny” (for black child, from Portuguese pequininho). Some of the Africans in New Amsterdam arrived with the Dutch expelled from Recife. The first “Afro-Brazilians,” to adopt an anachronistic term, arrived in the city in chains. Their names—Paulo d’Angola, Simon Congo, Antonio Portugues—indexed their conjoined African and Portuguese origins. Pressed by a food shortage, Governor Willem Kieft liberated the slaves and granted them farmland, situated in an area that would now include Washington Square, Soho, and our own New York University. The site of S.O.B.’s (Sounds of Brazil), where Afro-Brazilian musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben Jor have played, was then the farmland of Simon Congo, suggesting well over four centuries of Afro-Brazilian presence in the city.
A century later, the leaders of the Inconfidência Mineira revolt against Portuguese rule in 1788–1789 were inspired both by the French and American Revolutions. According to historian Kenneth Maxwell, Jefferson sympathized with the Brazilian rebels, and the Monroe Doctrine (1823) was first formulated in conversations between Jefferson and Brazilian representatives in Washington. The doctrine initiated, in principle if clearly not in fact, a hemispheric system in which the two great nations of the Americas would act in concert. In 1817, Henry M. Brackenridge was perhaps the first U.S. writer to suggest the need for a systematic comparison. While recognizing that he was comparing a “young giant” to a “mature dwarf”—Brazil was a colony at the time—Brackenridge emphasized that it was necessary also to imagine what the two countries would become in the future:
The only empires that one can compare to Brazil, in terms of size, are those of China, Russia, and the United States, and even though Brazil is today the smallest in terms of population, the day will come when it will be the largest…. Although it might seem premature at this time to compare Brazil and the United States, the moment will come when such a comparison will seem natural, even inevitable.36
Contrasting the stormy disunity of the Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America with “the unified and indivisible” Brazilian nation, Brackenridge concludes that, “given the vast capacities and resources of Brazil, it is not to be a visionary to foresee that this [Brazilian] empire is destined to rival our own.”37
As a kind of palimpsestic “postcolony,” Brazil has been shaped by diverse national forces, including Portugal as the (ever-declining) colonial progenitor, France as the preeminent intellectual mentor, and Great Britain and later the United States as imperious trading partners. Despite political tensions, deep historical affinities prodded Brazil to perceive itself as parallel, if only in a distant, mediated, and often resentful way, to the United States. Apart from their shared status as breakaway slaveholding settler states, the two countries were positioned, as Thomas Skidmore points out, in similar ways in relation to other powers. First, both countries butted up, on their frontiers, against a common rival: the Spanish. Second, Brazil needed a strong ally to assure its geopolitical advantage in South America, especially against Argentina. Third, despite cultural differences, Brazilians sensed an affinity with the United States in terms of certain shared traits: continental size, abundant resources, and polyethnic and immigrant populations.38 Both countries see themselves as abençoado por Deus (blessed by God) with a unique historical role to play, with their own versions of national exceptionalism, the “armed and dangerous” U.S. variety and the “exceptionalismlite” God-is-Brazilian variety in Brazil.
The question posed in both Brazil and the United States, in the 19th century at least, was how to create a national culture in “adverse” conditions, with and against an often haughty Europe that scorned its own offspring as illegitimate spawn. The question of whether the Americas could produce serious art was itself a symptom of a cultural colonization that saw the Americas as constituted by lacunae: in the United States, the lack of an aristocracy, and in Brazil, the concrete absence of viable cultural institutions and of a literate public. The literary histories of both countries were marked by parallel struggles for cultural independence from Europe. Emerson’s “American Scholar” address in 1836, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence,” came just one year after a similar declaration by Brazilian poet Gonçalves de Magalhães.
Relations between the two countries soured with the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. conquest of Mexico, U.S. meddling in the Amazon, and later Teddy Roosevelt’s “Gunboat Diplomacy,” all part of an imperialist policy that saw Latin America as a despised “backyard” and “sphere of influence.” The Good Neighbor policy in the 1930s and early 1940s tried to undo some of the damage created by this arrogance, preparing the way for what was to become a veritable explosion of cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States in the postwar period. Brazilians generally became more familiar with the United States due to the spread of American popular culture, a process that had begun already in the 19th century. A gradual shift away from the Parisian orientation led some elite Brazilian cultural institutions to model themselves on U.S. institutions. Brazil’s Museum of Modern Art, for example, was modeled on the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It was in the postwar period that many prestigious Brazilian writers/scholars—novelists (Erico Verissimo and Clarice Lispector), anthropologists (Gilberto Freyre), historians (Sérgio Buarque de Holanda), dramatist-activists (Abdias do Nascimento), sociologists (Fernando Henrique Cardoso), film scholars (Ismail Xavier, João Luiz Vieira), and literary intellectuals (Antônio Cândido, Silviano Santiago, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Massaud Moisés, Milton Hatoum, Márcio Souza, Walnice Nogueira Galvão, Roberto Schwarz, and countless others)—came to teach in prestigious American universities. In this same period, U.S. historians began to write about slavery and race in Brazil within a comparative perspective sympathetic to Brazil. Drawing on Gilberto Freyre, Frank Tannenbaum argued in Slave and Citizen (1947) that Latin American slavery, unlike the North American model, recognized the moral and spiritual personality of the slave, regarded as temporarily degraded rather than as essentially and eternally dehumanized. More than a decade later, Stanley Elkins claimed in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life (1959) that Latin American slavery was tempered by religious institutions that prevented the reduction of blacks to mere commodities. Other scholars disputed such theories. Eugene Genovese noted that the supposedly benevolent Catholic model of slavery did not prevent violent revolutions, as in Haiti, or slave insurrections, as in Brazil, while Marvin Harris, in Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964), mocked the “myth of the friendly master.” The Brazilian slaveholding class, he argued, created an intermediate group of mixed-race soldiers and slave drivers only because whites were not available for such services.39
U.S. scholars such as Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Turner, Ruth Landes, Donald Pierson, Charles Wagley, and Carl Degler researched Brazilian race relations, often finding much to admire in Brazilian culture. In an indirect critique of the homophobic and sexophobic attitudes in the North, Landes lauded the sexual freedom of interracial love in Brazil and the lack of phobia about same-sex relations within Afro-Brazilian religions. Sometimes, the scholars seemed more naively enthusiastic (a mental state Brazilians call deslumbrado, or overwhelmingly charmed) about Brazilian social relations than Brazilians themselves were. Although institutional exchanges were largely from North to South, there were occasional gestures toward a more equal exchange, especially in the arts. First of all, as cultural historian Isabel Lustosa points out, the dominant U.S. culture, despite its ethnocentrism, shares with Brazilian culture a porosity that makes it “permeable to what comes from outside … but always changing what comes from outside into something which is theirs, with an American face.”40 The fantastic success in Hollywood of Carmen Miranda, marketed as a caricatural icon of Latinidad, offers a preeminent example of this highly ambiguous process of appropriation. In the early 1960s, meanwhile, bossa nova, itself a mélange of samba and cool jazz, offered an acoustic image of sophistication, ultimately entering the very bloodstream of jazz (Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner, Pat Metheney) and of American popular music generally (Burt Bacharach). Here we find the North American equivalent of Brazil’s anthropophagic indigenization of alien culture, but now in the form of superaltern anthropophagy, or cannibalization from above, yet where both popular cultures were energized by a common Afrodiasporic current.
All three national spaces have been projected as utopian geographies within the Afro-diasporic imaginary. Within these crisscrossing transatlantic gazes, various sites became the object of longing. Within this play of desire, many diasporic intellectuals participated in a search for an ailleurs: Frantz Fanon saw revolutionary Algeria as an alternative to an accommodationist Martinique; African Americans looked to both France and Brazil as spaces of conviviality; and, very occasionally, black Brazilians looked to African Americans as models of pride and activism. According to Patricia Pinho, U.S. abolitionists cited Brazil’s relatively peaceful racial relations as early as the mid-1800s.41 Yet in 1918, the black journal O Alfinete exhorted fellow blacks to “see whether or not we can imitate the North American blacks.”42 In 1933, another black Brazilian writer praised the “confident and self-possessed” African American who “lifts up his head,” arguing that the Brazilian model is more devastating for blacks even than the brutal U.S. model: “The Americans lynch fifty Negroes a year. We kill the entire Brazilian Negro race.”43
African Americans, meanwhile, looked to Brazil as an escape, if only in fantasy, from the horrors of U.S. segregationism. Their reflections are anthologized in David J. Hellwig’s comprehensive collection African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise.44 Hellwig charts a trajectory that moves from hope to disenchantment, schematically registered in the titles of the book’s three major sections: “The Myth of the Racial Paradise (1900–1940),” “The Myth Debated (1940–1965),” and “The Myth Rejected (1965–).” In the first stage, Brazil is largely seen as a color-blind utopia. Prejudice, E. R. James reported in 1920, “is not there. It is not there socially, it is not there economically, it is not there politically. It is not there at all.”45 In Hellwig’s second historical phase, U.S. blacks became more skeptical. Refused entrance in eleven Brazilian hotels, Ollie Stewart, in 1940, concluded that he has traded “U.S. jim crow for the Brazilian run-around.” Meeting a young black Brazilian who longed to study at Tuskegee Institute, Stewart comments, “If it hadn’t been so tragic, I could have laughed.”46 In a kind of specular fantasy, at least one Brazilian black man imagines a racial paradise in an idealized United States. Stewart underlines the irony: “Here he is in Brazil, dying to get to Alabama to escape the awful hell of a color bar, … and nothing would satisfy me [when I was at Tuskegee] but to get to South America where I could be a free man.”47 In Hellwig’s third phase, in the era of “Black Power,” U.S. black observers became somewhat disenchanted. American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, who spent many years in Brazil, where she was often mistaken for a Brazilian mulata, suggested that U.S. blacks are better treated in Brazil because they are seen as Americans.48 Diasporic blackness, in other words, also gets caught up in Global North/South power relations.
In the wake of earlier African American scholars (e.g., Franklin Frazier and much later Michael Turner), a number of African American scholars have addressed race in Brazil, sometimes thematizing their own identity as part of the question of methodology. Sociologist France Winddance Twine offers an African American look at Brazil in her Racism in Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil. Based on extensive field research and many life-history interviews with black and white Brazilians, Twine was surprised by the hostility she encountered as a “black feminist researcher in Brazil” not only from Brazilian whites but also from many blacks: “In a context in which I was subjected to a high degree of racism every day, my adopted family constantly told me that I had ‘misinterpreted’ someone’s statements or actions…. I was also told on numerous occasions that it was inappropriate for me to raise this issue, particularly in the presence of children.”49 The same people so eager to claim that “we are all racially mixed,” Twine notes, rarely claimed actual African ancestry. Twine’s research sheds light on (1) the degree to which some black Brazilians practice a kind of social self-segregation (“I don’t insist on going where I don’t belong”) and (2) the degree to which Brazilian blacks sometimes exercise self-censorship with regard to their own experience of discrimination.50
Kia Lilly Caldwell, meanwhile, focuses in Negras in Brazil not on false consciousness but rather on the resistant subjectivity of black women activists, going back to the early black feminist trailblazers such as Lelia Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and Thereza Santos and culminating in the swelling wave of recent activists. Taking issue with the Bourdieu/Wacquant disqualification of Michael Hanchard on the basis of his African American identity, Caldwell thematizes the role of her own identity within her diasporic research. Where “the impact of local and global racial practices [becomes] further compounded by racialized constructions of gender,”51 the body itself becomes an instrument of knowledge. Since field research involves cultural immersion, the diasporic anthropologist is “subjected to many of the same racialized and gendered discourses and practices that we set out to examine.”52 In Caldwell’s case, immersion meant being interpellated as a prostitute in Copacabana and as a maid in upscale apartment buildings and occasionally being sent to use the service elevator. Thus, she gained “firsthand knowledge of the social indignities experienced by many Afro-Brazilian women on a daily basis.”53 Rather than define Brazil, or the United States, as better or worse, Caldwell argues for the existence of “multiple culturally and historically specific racisms.”54 Her goal, like ours, is to “place the cultural and historical particularities of Brazilian racism in dialogue with global practices of racial domination.”55
Patricia de Santana Pinho, a Brazilian professor at SUNY–Albany, meanwhile, argues that some African American commentators such as Twine confuse black Brazilians’ attempt to realize the inherent promise of “racial democracy” with a failure to confront it.56 In her Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness in Bahia, Pinho highlights the role of Salvador Bahia—celebrated as the “Black Rome” and the “Mecca of Negritude”—as a magnet for African Americans in search of African roots and the culture of Candomblé.57 In an intense cultural exchange mediated by publications, tourist agencies, Candomblé centers, universities, Afro-blocos, and blogs, African American trips to Brazil form part of a broader itinerary that includes not only Africa itself but also the Afro-Caribbean, charting a “map of Africanness” wherein Egypt represents the site of monumental pride, West Africa the place of cultural origin, and Brazil still another point on the Atlantic spectrum, all places where African Americans “might have been born.” Pinho cites rapper M1 of Dead Prez as conveying a common perception among African Americans that “black Brazilians have remained more connected to Africa, [which constitutes] a step in resisting colonial domination, a strategy against the kind of brainwashing which took place in the United States.”58 In a complex analysis, Pinho charts the crossing of looks between Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Americans, with each projecting their desires and utopias and, at times, an ethnocentric U.S.-centered cultural frame.
African Americans have also looked to France as a beacon of hope in a time of despair. Unlike the love of Brazil, the love of France formed part of a widespread Francophilia in the United States, encapsulated in the memory of the two “sister republics” and Jefferson’s maxim that “every man has two countries, his own and France.” Indeed, the France–United States relationship began as a passionate romance. In a reciprocal movement of ideas, French Enlightenment thinkers inspired the American revolutionaries, just as the American Revolution inspired French thinkers. The love affair was consummated, as it were, by the public embrace of Jefferson and Voltaire in a Paris square. Subsequently, Thomas Paine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, and Edith Wharton all penned affectionate travel memoirs about France. For the United States as for Brazil, France provided an alternative cultural model to the more obvious metropolitan father figures—Great Britain and Portugal, respectively.
Despite France’s historical involvement in slavery and imperialism, its relatively good reputation in terms of race is based on certain historical moments: the frequent alliances between the French and native peoples in the Americas, the readiness to mate with Native American women (in contrast with the Puritans’ repugnance for miscegenation), the warm reception for black American soldiers and artists in France, and France’s reputation as a terre d’asile. In France, religious prejudice—against Jews and Protestants—had historically been more virulent than racial prejudice. The first African Americans known to have arrived in France were probably Thomas Jefferson’s slaves, one of whom, Sally Hemmings, became the mother of at least one of his children. While African Americans participated in a general American attraction to France, they also had a distinct perspective based on a perceived lack of racism. Frederick Douglass expressed his surprise during an 1887 visit: “I have everywhere been received in this country … with civility, courtesy, and kindness.”59
It was only decades later that there occurred a substantial movement of African Americans to France. Beginning in 1917, some 160,000 African Americans served in the armed forces in France, generally receiving a warm welcome. Many black musicians went to Paris; Sidney Bechet arrived in 1919, and Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre opened in 1925 to the enraptured applause of the surrealists. African American adoration of Paris, as Tyler Stovall points out, constituted an indirect commentary on the sorry state of “race relations” in the United States: “African Americans shared the surprising realization that French whites could treat them with affection and respect, that a color-blind society just might be possible after all.”60 Euphoric in Paris, James Weldon Johnson felt suddenly free from danger and intolerance:
From the day I set foot in France, I became aware of the working of a miracle within me…. I was suddenly free; free from a sense of impending discomfort, insecurity, danger; free from the conflict within the Man-Negro dualism and the innumerable maneuvers in thought and behavior that it compels; free from special scorn, special tolerance, special condescension, special commiseration; free to be merely a man.61
That African Americans could feel such dramatic relief from the “burden of race” simply by landing in France constitutes a burning indictment of the ambient racism of the United States at that time.
In the wake of 1920s negrophilie, the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s became what Stovall calls the “literary capital of black America,”62 animated by such figures as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Melvin Van Peebles. By the 1950s, the exoticist primitivism of the 1920s had faded from fashion, and African Americans were playing a major role in French erudite and popular cultures. While white French audiences in the 1920s and 1930s sometimes saw African Americans through a primitivist grid as surrogate Africans—incarnated by Josephine Baker playing the “jungle” African on stage or the Maghrebian Bedouin in Princesse Tam Tam—in the 1950s they were more likely to see them as dark-skinned Americans, or as white America’s preeminent victims, or simply as talented artists. Eartha Kitt played Helen of Troy in a 1950s version of Faust directed by Orson Welles, and jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk performed in “les caves” of the Latin Quarter, while composing soundtracks for New Wave films such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Ascenseur pour L’échafaud. Melvin Van Peebles wrote novels in French in the early 1960s and directed the New Wave–ish film Story of a Three-Day Pass, about an African American soldier who encounters American racism (and occasional French paternalism) in France.
For African American intellectuals and artists, it was especially gratifying to be honored in Paris. As Bourdieu-influenced literary scholar Pascale Casanova points out, Paris constituted “the capital of that Republic without frontiers, the universal homeland without any narrow patriotism, … a transnational site whose only imperatives are those of art and literature—the Universal Republic of Letters.”63 In France, African American artists could do an end-run around systemic U.S. racism, garnering praise in a capital of artistic prestige that was respected by white intellectuals as well. African Americans came to mediate the complex relation between black-inflected U.S. popular culture and the Parisian intelligentsia. If in Paris French people could discover black Americans, black Americans in Paris could discover not only France but also French Africa and the West Indies.
The very different reactions of the diverse Afro-diasporic intellectuals to postwar France present a striking anomaly, however, forming a kind of diasporic conundrum. Why would Francophone Caribbean intellectuals such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon find France terribly racist, while African Americans, in the very same period, could find it deliciously nonracist? In the same period that African Americans were experiencing newfound feelings of freedom, Fanon discovered blackness in France, made aware of his “ethnic characteristics … battered down by tom toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave ships.”64 In France, Fanon felt his sense of identity shattered: “dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed…. I am laid bare.”65 Why, then, did African Americans experience an almost opposite sensation of freedom? To begin, the difference was real; the sensation of freedom was not just another word for a collective hallucination, as shown by the many incidents in which everyday French people reprimanded white Americans for bringing racist attitudes into France itself.66 Memoirs and travel accounts by black Americans in France suggest that they experienced France as indeed less racist. Despite widespread ideological racism, everyday encounters did not necessarily involve acts of racism or violent behavior toward black Americans. (The colonies were another story.) Since French-style racism, where it existed, was more likely to take the form of exoticist paternalism and role stereotyping than of virulent hatred, African Americans in Paris, especially in the postwar period, did indeed breathe in relative freedom, liberated from the pernicious folkways of U.S.-style apartheid.
A number of other factors help explain the difference between the African American and the black West Indian reaction. First, it is a testament to the horrors of U.S. segregation in the postwar period, which made almost any other situation seem an improvement. Second, Afro-Caribbean intellectuals such as Césaire and Fanon were moving from a semicolonized yet black-majority country (Martinique), where blackness was the normal condition, to France, where blacks were a minority and blackness a “problem.” Many West Indian blacks, in this sense, “discovered” their blackness only in France or in colonial armies. (For Fanon, according to David Macey, the Free French army was “structured around an ethnic hierarchy, with white Europeans at the top.”)67 African Americans, meanwhile, were moving from one black-minority country (the United States) to another black-minority country (France), one less marked by chattel slavery and white supremacy, where blacks were less scarred by the memory of segregation, and where whites were less guilty and phobic toward black people. African Americans did not have to “discover” their blackness in France; their American experience had already made them painfully aware of it. Third, from the French side, black Americans were often seen first as Americans and only secondly as blacks. As Stovall writes in relation to a later period, “if the best defense against police brutality in Los Angeles is a video camera, in Paris it is an American passport.”68 Fourth, African Americans, like most Americans not necessarily fluent in French, missed some of the nuances of social intercourse. Much of Fanon’s rhetorical fire in Black Skin, White Masks is directed at the subtly paternalistic discourses and intonations of whites claiming “there is no racism here.” Fifth, black artists and intellectuals benefited from the prestige habitually accorded artists and intellectuals in France. Sixth, French problack affirmation was more than a little ambiguous and “overdetermined.” While the warm welcome for African Americans was undoubtedly sincere, the good treatment of American blacks also afforded a narcissistic payoff for French whites, who could simultaneously demonstrate their relative lack of racism while also using blacks as a vehicle for expressing resentment against U.S. power in Europe.
Contemporary scholars Robert Stepto, Michel Fabre, Melvon Dixon, Benetta Jules-Rosette, Petrine Archer-Straw, and Brent Hayes Edwards have all stressed the profoundly transnational character of diasporic black movements in relation to France. Edwards examines the various Afro-diasporic journals in the United States (Negro World, Messenger, Crisis, Voice of the Negro) and in France and Africa (La Voix des Nègres, La Race Nègre, L’Étudiant Noir, La Revue du Monde Noir, Le Périscope Africain, La Voix du Dahomey) to highlight the diverse cross-currents (the Harlem Renaissance, Négritude) moving between France, Africa, Afro-America, and the Caribbean. Black internationalism, as Edwards notes, is not a “supplement” to nation-based black thinking; rather, it exists at the very kernel of a struggle for emancipation against racism, colonialism, and imperialism.69
Afro-diasporic encounters also impacted the concepts developed by the Négritude writers. If for Anglophone blacks Paris was a key site, for Francophone writers New York at times became an extension of Africa. Léopold Senghor’s visit to New York City, according to Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, helped trigger his “Europe is Reason, Africa is Emotion” polarity. Senghor saw New York City as polarized into the white downtown European culture and the uptown black culture of Harlem. As he puts it in “To New York,” white Manhattan knew “no mother’s breast, … no tender word, and no lips, only artificial hearts paid in cold cash,” while Harlem presented “life immemorial, … hips rippling like silk and spearhead breasts, ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks, and mangoes and love rolling from the low houses.” For Senghor, the white mind is detached, analytical, and nonparticipatory, while the black mind is integrative, sympathetic, and participatory. Yet a marriage between the two was possible, if only “black blood” could enter “[American] steel joints” and make flow the “oil of life.”70 Within this essentialist, quasi-metaphysical vision, articulated in transit, Senghor inverted the culture/nature hierarchy, this time to the advantage of Harlem and Africa.
As a key site for exchanges about race, metropolitan France was the place where African Americans encountered white French citizens but also other Afrodiasporic people, some of them soldiers in the service of the French empire. The role of Paris, as Stovall puts it,
was both fascinating and deeply ironic. After all, the city was the seat of one of the world’s great colonial empires, a place where anonymous French officials supervised the subjugation of millions of Black Africans, … [yet] more so than in the United States, even New York, African-Americans found that in Paris the abstract ideal of worldwide black unity and culture became a tangible reality…. French colonialism and primitivism thus paradoxically combined to foster a vision of pan-African unity.71
Paris had been at the epicenter of political discussion for black American exiles ever since 1919 and W. E. B. Du Bois’s first Pan-African Congress. Almost four decades later, in 1956, Richard Wright, along with Césaire and Senghor, organized the Congress of Negro Artists and Writers. The various race-related movements thus all had their local variations while sharing a cross-border dialogical gaze. In a multidirectional movement of identification, African Americans identified with liberation struggles in Africa or looked to Brazil and France as models of nonracist societies, just as Africans identified with freedom struggles in the “internal colonies” of the diaspora.
While not as central as in the United States or Brazil, Afro-diasporic culture has nevertheless often been a catalytic source of artistic vitality and social critique within French popular and erudite culture. A more in-depth analysis, in this sense, might address the black influence in French artistic culture in terms of: the presence of mixed-race French authors such as Alexandre Dumas; black characters in French literature; the denunciations of slavery by poets such as Victor Hugo; the impact of African aesthetics on painters such as Picasso and Braque; negrophile novels such as Philippe Soupault’s Le Nègre; the role of jazz in novels such as Sartre’s La Nausée and in the music of Erik Satie (“Ragtime du Pacquebot”) and Francis Poulenc (“Rapsodie Nègre”); the dialogue with Africa and Africans in the films of Jean Rouch (Les Maîtres Fous); the role of blacks in Genet’s plays (Les Nègres) and films (Un Chant d’Amour); and the intellectual polylogue involving Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre.72
A recently published book by Brazilian Fernando Jorge, with a title that translates as If It Were Not for Brazil, Barack Obama Would Not Have Been Born, offers an insight into the crossed gazes typical of what might be called “transatlantic looking relations.” The book’s thesis is based on Obama’s account (registered in Dreams from My Father) of going to see the 1959 film Black Orpheus with his mother: “The film, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast [treated] the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree birds in colorful plumage.”73 According to Fernando Jorge, it was Ann Dunham’s experience of Black Orpheus, which she called “the most beautiful thing she ever saw,” and the resemblance between the film’s black male star (Breno Mello) and Dunham’s later Kenyan husband that led to her marriage and thus to Obama’s birth.74 The book’s thesis is terribly simplistic; surely a more complex constellation of factors (the Civil Rights Movement, Boas’s antiracist anthropology, the brilliance of Obama’s future father, Dunham’s culturally open personality) could help explain Dunham’s choice of marriage partner. Nevertheless, the book’s claim and Black Orpheus itself serve to open up the question of the relay of racialized gazes that forms the subject of this book.
First, within this transatlantic layering of gazes, Black Orpheus conveys a certain French view of Brazilian Carnival and culture. The film’s French title, Orphée Noir, foregrounds blackness (and echoes Sartre’s preface to Léopold Senghor’s collection of poetry),75 while the Brazilian title of the play on which the film is based, Orfeu da Conceição, emphasizes the film’s location in an imaginary Rio favela. The French director, Marcel Camus, saw Brazil through a preexisting French and Franco-American intertext that included (1) French and American updates of classical texts (O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, Sartre’s Les Mouches); (2) “Orphic” poetry from France and elsewhere; (3) American all-black-performed versions of the classics, such as Orson Welles’s “Voodoo Macbeth” in 1936; (4) the negrophilia of the French avant-garde, triggered by La Revue Nègre and Josephine Baker, the African American who became a French star and heroine; and (5) the Hollywood tradition of all-black musicals such as Hallelujah and Cabin in the Sky, all of which was relayed through the vibrant performativity of Rio’s Carnival.
The Brazilian source play, for its part, conveyed a specifically white elite look of Vinicius de Moraes, poet, diplomat, and later popular singer-composer who referred to himself as the “blackest white man in Brazil,” and who subsequently authored “Afro-sambas” with guitarist Baden Powell, a black musician named after the British founder of the Boy Scouts. A multilingual cosmopolitan, Moraes lived for long periods in Paris and in Los Angeles, where he socialized with Orson Welles and met Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. At the same time, not all black Brazilians endorsed Moraes’s vision of the favelas, nor did Brazilians necessarily adore the French film; many called it an exoticist “macumba for tourists.” Abdias do Nascimento, founder of the Black Theatre group that provided many of the actors for Black Orpheus, was acerbic about the film and similar products:
White actors in blackface, black Christ, Black Orpheus: in the final analysis, all of these conspired in the historic rape of our people. African religious culture is rich and very much alive in our communities spread around Brazil. We do not have to invoke ancient Greece or the Bible to elevate the status of our mythology. Greece and Europe, meanwhile, owe much of what they call “western civilization” to Africa.76
Interestingly, the conception of the play was also shaped by two of Moraes’s American friends who happened to be in Rio when the play was first conceived: first, the pro–Latin American Jewish American literary critic Waldo Frank, who told Moraes that the black Brazilian women “looked like Greeks,” and who according to Moraes himself introduced him to “another Brazilian reality” by asking to be shown the favelas; and second, the equally pro–Latin American Orson Welles, then in Rio making the pan-American and antiracist documentary It’s All True, a fervent celebration of samba, the favelas, and Afro-Brazilian culture. Thus, the perspectives of two Latin Americanized North Americans intersected with the point of view of an Americanized white Brazilian then in the process of immersing himself in Afro-Brazilian culture.77
Black Orpheus, which launched the worldwide popularity of both samba and bossa nova—the triangulated musical genre that itself fuses Afro-Brazilian samba with the cool jazz of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, along with the subtle harmonies of Ravel and Debussy—intermingles these various transnational looks, recapitulated again in Jorge’s recent Brazilian book about Obama. At the same time, the filmic gaze is differentiated: there is no single American or French or Brazilian perspective. In fact, Obama himself contrasts his mother’s look at Black Orpheus with his own. While the mother is transfixed “in a wistful gaze,” the son is ready to leave halfway through the film. While the film transports her to a dreamy elsewhere, it leaves him skeptical about the film’s idealized portrayal, triggering melancholy reflections about the burdens of race: “The emotions between the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves…. The other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”78 Differences of race, gender, age, and generation, then, separate Ann Dunham’s gaze on Black Orpheus from Obama’s. The mother’s enchanted gaze at “the most beautiful thing that [she] ever saw,” formed during the Civil Rights era, differs dramatically from Obama’s much more distanced reaction in the post–Black Power era. In any case, the Jorge book conjures up a number of our themes: the artistic intercourse of French, Brazilian, and American culture; the play of social desire across the Black Atlantic; the multiplicity of differentiated gazes within single national formations; and one Brazilian author’s wish to see Brazil, thanks to Black Orpheus, as saving the United States from its own racism.79
Such an investment in the idea of Brazil’s redemptive role betokens the extent to which the race/coloniality debates in the three zones are always-already haunted by the culturalist divide between the “Latins” and the “Anglo-Saxons,” a binarism every bit as mythic as Lévi-Strauss’s “the raw and the cooked.” As a discursive palimpsest, the Anglo/Latin dichotomy bears the traces of many historical conflicts, from the perennial rivalry between “perfidious Albion” and its “sweet enemy” France, military battles such as the Norman Invasion, the Hundred Years’ War (1328–1453), and the Second Hundred Years’ War (1689–1815), all the way to contemporary tensions over the place of Britain in the European Union, over Anglophone and Francophone spheres of influence in Africa, and recently over the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As part of a larger intercolonial rivalry, the Anglo/Latin dichotomy has impacted the ways that the histories of colonial conquest have been written. Citing Bartolomé de las Casas, English writers spoke of the “black legend” of Spanish massacres against the native peoples. The Spanish, meanwhile, disputed the legend while accusing the English of even greater violence. Yet this early interimperial squabble obscured a shared past of violent practices. In fact, the racialized violence of both groups predated the Conquest of the Americas. The English historian Henry Hallam (1777–1859), for example, drew parallels between the Spanish Reconquista and the English conquest of Ireland, between the massacres of the Moors and the brutalization of the Irish.80
French and Latin American discussions of intellectual exchange often deploy the epithet “Anglo-Saxon” in implied opposition to “French” or “Latin.” In a reified polarity, the factitious solidity of “Anglo-Saxon culture” is “answered” by the equally factitious solidity of “Latinidad.” Yet both terms are misnomers. North America (and Great Britain) are not exclusively Anglo-Saxon, and France and Latin America are not exclusively Latin, especially when imagined “from below.” At a time when “cultural studies” and “postcolonial” studies are transcending narrow ethno-national paradigms, the twinned terms “Latin” and “Anglo-Saxon” resuscitate them. As specular projections of pan-ethno-nationalism, the Anglo/Latin dichotomy blocks a more open and transnational understanding of the intercourse of ideas. The two terms must therefore be thought (and unthought) in relation to each other. As a form of ethno-cultural exceptionalism, “Anglo-Saxonism” is associated with northern Europe and its expansion into the Americas and around the world. Figures such as Hegel, Max Weber, and Samuel Huntington give expression to this exceptionalism. “Latinism,” meanwhile, is associated with France and southern Europe and their expansion into the Americas, serving as a means of lateral differentiation from the “Anglo-Saxons” and vertical differentiation from non-Europeans in the Americas.81 While “Anglo-Saxon” goes back to the 4th century, “Latin” goes even further back to Latin as the language of the Holy Roman Empire (as opposed to the various vernaculars). Only later did “Latin” become a geopolitical and cultural category (Latin America) and an ethnic classification (Latinos) in the U.S. culture wars.
The concept of Latinité was originally conceived, within Europe itself, as a response to other panethnic movements such as pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. In the Americas, it was a response to the swelling ambitions of the “Anglo-Saxons.” French Latinist figures such as Prosper Vallerange and Paul Adam, in this sense, echo the Hegelian and Weberian discourse of European superiority, but in its warm-water Mediterranean variant. The ideal portrait of Latin “idealism,” “culture,” and “spirituality,” as incarnated in the diaphanous figure of Ariel in José Enrique Rodó’s version of The Tempest, was foiled by Anglo-Saxon “mercantilism,” “expansionism,” and “vulgarity.”82 From another perspective, however, both “Latinism” and “Anglo-Saxonism” form variants of that transregional self-love called Eurocentrism. We propose, therefore, to speak not of “Anglo-Saxons” and “Latins” as cohesive ethno-cultural groups but rather of Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism as historically situated discourses.
As an elastic term, “Latinity” has been stretched to fit changing geopolitical conditions. For Prosper Vallerange, the term included the English. For Hegel, France, England, and Germany together formed the “heart of Europe.” The various European empires all narrated themselves within a Roman genealogy, seeing themselves as latter-day versions of the Pax Romana—whence such symptomatic terms as Pax Hispanica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana. The ideologists of the nation-states of the Americas, meanwhile, elaborated the conceit of founding “New Romes,” an idea concretized architecturally in the geometrical monumentality of many capitals in the Americas, including of course Washington, D.C. Even Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, a passionate advocate for indigenous peoples, resorts to this Euro-tropism, or turning toward Europe for legitimacy, when he calls Brazil (in O Povo Brasileiro) a “New Rome.”83 The French, meanwhile, claimed a Roman lineage for French colonial domination in North Africa. Since the Roman presence predated that of the Arabs and Muslims, French colonialism could be narrated not as an invasion but as a “return.”84
Anglo-Saxonism has always been deeply entangled in imperialist xenophobia, making “Anglo-Saxon” a virtual synonym for national chauvinism and imperial racism. In the 19th-century United States, imperialists saw a superior “Anglo-Saxon race” as divinely authorized to take land first from the Native Americans and then from the Mexicans and later to intervene wherever it wished. Echoing Hegel’s words about the vanishing of the native “at the breath of European activity,” Josiah Strong in 1885 lauded “the extinction of inferior races before the advancing Anglo-Saxon,” proudly noting that Anglo-Saxons represented only “one-fifteenth part of mankind” but ruled “more than one-third of its people.”85
The Anglo-Saxonists prefer to forget that most of North America was Spanish before it was Anglo, and it was indigenous before it was Spanish. For the Spanish, the east coast of the continent was called Florida; for the English, it was called Virginia. The conquest of the American West first took place on a South-North axis, as the conquistadores moved northward from the Caribbean into Florida and from Mexico into Texas. Los Angeles began as a multilingual pueblo with a mestizo majority. New Spain was almost a century old when Jamestown, the oldest English settlement in North America, was founded. But what had begun as North American admiration for the superior wealth and power of Spanish America gradually turned into a racialized sense of superiority. A highly gendered sense of muscular potency became linked to a putative special Anglo-Saxon capacity for self-government and, by extension, for the domination of “lesser breeds without the law.” In 1899, the year after the misnamed “Spanish-American War,” journalist William Allen White argued that “only Anglo-Saxons knew how to govern themselves” and that it was their “manifest destiny” to go forth as “world conqueror.”86 (The prestigious journal Foreign Affairs traces its origins to a turn-of-the-century Anglo-Saxonist publication called the Journal of Race Development.)
While the Anglo-Saxonists prattled about their “inevitable” march to the west, the Latinists also marched west while lamenting their victimization by the Yankees. As part of this intra-European family feud, the term “Latin America” was first introduced by the French in the 19th century. Associated with Emperor Napoleon III’s campaign to promote the unity of all Latin peoples, French intellectuals and state officers brandished Latinité as an antidote to the rising power of the “Anglo-Saxons.”87 With the United States distracted by the Civil War, Napoleon III ordered the invasion of Mexico in 1861 as part of a strategic plan to counter U.S. influence. France installed a monarchical regime under Maximilian but was defeated in 1867, an event commemorated annually in the Cinco de Mayo celebration. For centuries, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the British, the Dutch, and the Americans all vied for domination, with all parties convinced that their particular form of colonialism was well intentioned and beneficial. As byproducts of intercolonial rivalry, the current debates often revisit the petty enmities rooted in these interimperial wars and debates. As an instance of Freud’s “narcissism of minor differences,” national chauvinists laud one form of imperialism over another, while attributing the differences to a putatively fixed cultural character.88 These rivalries over race and empire must be seen, then, within the larger frame of a racialized intercoloniality that flatters one set of colonialists over another without seeing the deeper links between them. At the same time, the later “northern” imperialisms have clearly superseded, subalternized, and overtaken the earlier “Latin” colonialisms.
The haughty “Anglo-Saxonists” and the proud “Latinists,” despite their apparent disagreements, do share fundamental axioms: first, that the Anglo/Latin polarity points to a real substantive contrast between peoples; second, that North America is essentially Anglo-Saxon and that Latin America is essentially Latin. The discordance is only in the valence. The two dominant groups also agree, if only tacitly, on a European right to dispossess the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Walter Mignolo has underscored the Janus-faced character of a concept of “Latin America” that served to restore European, Meridional, Catholic, and Latin “civilization” in South America and simultaneously to produce absences (indigenous and Afro-diasporics). “Creole consciousness,” as Mignolo puts it, “was indeed a singular case of double consciousness: the consciousness of not being who they were supposed to be (Europeans).” The critical consciousness of Afro-Creoles and indigenous people, meanwhile, emerged not from not being considered Europeans but from not being considered human.89
The intellectuals who have embraced the Anglo/Latin dichotomy have not necessarily supported their own side, however; they are not like soccer fans who always root for the national team. Many Latin American intellectuals have endorsed Anglo-Saxonism, just as many Anglo-American intellectuals have supported Latinism. A signal example of the latter case was the American historian Richard Morse, whose book Prospero’s Mirror (published in Mexico in 1982) contrasted the warm and gregarious collectivity of Iberian and Latin American culture with the cold and individualistic competiveness of his own Anglo culture.90 More pro-Latin than the Latins themselves, Morse was criticized by some Brazilian intellectuals for glorifying an Iberian influence that in their view had left a sad legacy of authoritarianism.
The Anglo-Saxon/Latin dichotomy becomes especially pernicious, in our view, when used to ethnicize questions that are fundamentally political. Although often used en toute innocence as a synonym for Anglo-American, as when French bookstore rubrics alert us to “La Littérature Anglo-Saxonne” as a signal for Shakespeare’s plays and Toni Morrison’s novels, in most cases the term is no longer appropriate. It should logically be used only to refer to (1) the two Germanic tribes that moved to England in the 4th century, (2) the written literature (Beowulf, The Seafarer) later produced by the 8th-century descendants of that tribe, and (3) the 19th-century white-supremacist ideology called “Anglo-Saxonism.” Just as one would not call contemporary French people the “Gauls,” or Italians the “Etruscans,” or Portuguese the “Lusitanians,” no present-day people should be called “Anglo-Saxons.” Indeed, there is something paradoxical about denunciations of “Anglo-Saxon communitarianism” in that the charge performs exactly what it denounces. The term itself, that is, “communitarizes” a complex society while blaming it for that which the accusation has itself just performed: reducing a complex and differentiated society to a single ethnos.
At this point in history, “Anglo-Saxon” is sometimes extended to refer to political and economic systems and ideologies. Building on the classical contrast between an economically liberal Britain and a statist “social” France, some French analysts speak of “Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism,” as though an economic policy with broad European/global roots could be tethered to a single ethnos. As should become clear through the remainder of the book, we are skeptical about ethnic/religious/culturalist explanations for social systems. The imperialistic policies of the United States do not derive from the “Anglo-Saxon” nature of the American populace—in fact there are more people of African descent in the United States than of English descent, and even more predominantly Anglo countries such as Canada are not necessarily imperialist—but from the ways power has been historically constituted in the United States to favor the white and the wealthy.
Today “Anglo-Saxon” and “Latin” are deployed asymmetrically. First, Latin American intellectuals are more likely to claim “Latin” than Americans or British intellectuals are likely to claim “Anglo-Saxon.” Second, those deploying “Anglo-Saxon” with pride almost always occupy the extreme right end of the political spectrum, while those wielding the same term as an accusation are usually on the left, as when Latin Americans denounce “Anglo-Saxon imperialism.” Given this political asymmetry, the word “Latin” is more likely to designate progressive projects, such as the political/economic solidarity of Latin America as a counterweight to imperialism or the empowerment of Latinos in the United States, for whom the Anglo/Latino distinction names a hegemony premised both on color and language. Anglo-Saxonness, in contrast, would never today be associated with any progressive project, which is why qualifying any political project as “Anglo-Saxon” is to disqualify it in the eyes of the left. The term itself, whether used positively or negatively, is inextricably linked to racial essentialism and national exceptionalism.
Today Anglo-Saxonism has mutated into new forms, such as the genteel Anglo-Protestantism of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or the clash-of-cultures essentialism of a Samuel Huntington, the world-renowned “expert” on world civilizations whose Americo-Eurocentrism has been variously articulated on both an East/West and a North/South axis. Anglo-Saxonist xenophobia is currently expressed in the “English Only” movement, in the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, and in the harassment of “illegal aliens,” that is, undocumented workers. Anglo-Saxonism has reared its head again in the form of the Tea Party’s expert on the Constitution, W. Cleon Skousen. In his 1981 book The Five Thousand Year Leap, Skousen argued that the Founding Fathers rejected European “collectivism” in favor of the limited government typical of 5th-century Anglo-Saxon chieftains. For Skousen, the enshrinement of Christian free-market principles in the Constitution enabled the leap that placed the Anglo-Saxons at the head of humanity. Thus, a slightly sublimated form of white-supremacist Anglo-Saxonism grounds the historical vision of at least some in the Tea Party.91
While the old Anglo-Saxonists proudly proclaimed their white supremacism, the new Anglo-Saxonists claim that they are not racist. They even claim, ludicrously, to be the victims of (black and Latino) racism. Currently, a nativist right wing in the United States has been demonizing Latinos, Chicanos, Mexicans, and Latin American immigrants as a threat to the body politic, exploiting the minoritized body as a distraction from the failures of a corrupt system dominated by finance capital. A demagogic campaign cultivates the fears of engulfment on the part of the empowered majority. A sense of a precarious legitimacy haunts the nativists, however, in that their xenophobic hysteria reflects a political unconscious haunted by their own tenuous claim on the land. From an indigenous perspective, after all, the first illegal aliens were the conquistadores (coming from the South) and the pioneers (coming from the East).
Yet at the same time, the Latinization of the United States through “magical urbanism” (Mike Davis) also proceeds apace, as more and more American cities are becoming nonwhite-majority cities with large Latino populations, thus undercutting the Anglo-Saxon/Latin divide itself.92 Major populational transfers, meanwhile, drain Latin America of its human substance: 11 percent of the Mexican population, 18 percent of the Ecuadorean population, and 25 percent of the Salvadorean population now reside in the United States, scrambling the Anglo/Latin divide.93 Yet even while border artists such as Guillermo Gómez-Peña and border theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga have torn down symbolic walls, the U.S. state has constructed a grotesque wall between the United States and Mexico, a monument to hatred for nuestra America and the Global South. The United States is not alone in this exclusion, however. Just as thousands of Central Americans die trying to cross the border where, in Anzaldúa’s words, the “Third World grates against the first and bleeds,”94 so thousands of African would-be immigrants drown in the currents of the “moat” that separates Africa from “Latin” Spain and from “fortress Europe.
The challenge for critical intellectuals, we would argue, is to support Latinidad against anti-immigrant hysteria, while also favoring the political/economic unity of “Latin America” as a counterweight to the neoimperial unilateralism of the United States, but to do so without falling into the obfuscations typical of some forms of Latinidad. Our project, in this sense, hopes to dismantle the ethno-nationalist binarisms that have obscured the interconnectedness of race and coloniality in the colonial-settler states of the Americas. In this sense, the dichotomy itself has become too intertwined with national and panethnic exceptionalisms and has stood in the way of transregional and transnational analysis of the intercourse of ideas.
The movement of ideas across borders inevitably brings up the question of language, whether marshaled for culturalist purposes or to articulate the in-between fluidities of culture. In the case of traveling debates, translation is not merely a trope; it is entangled in the concrete arena of language conflict and dissonance. The French language, for example, has been crucial both to national pride and to the civilizing mission. “What is not clear,” in Rivarol’s famous formulation, “is not French.” Official Jacobin ideology has generally favored a unitary conception of language and an educational system hostile to linguistic diversity. Within the Hexagon, Bretons and Corsicans were expected to assimilate into standard French, just as the colonized were expected to abandon their indigenous languages and creolized patois. At home and abroad, only the normative version of French could carry the Cartesian light of “clear and distinct ideas.”
At the same time, French too is a creolized language, marked not only by English and German but also by Brazilian indigenous words such as Tupi-Guarani toucan (parrot, from tucano) and by Arabic words such as bled (village) and tbib (doctor). English, meanwhile, is already half French in vocabulary. Some French expressions in English are barely recognizable as French: the “dozy-dooh” of Cajun-influenced American square dance, from French dos-à-dos (back-to-back), like “promenade” and “aleman” (à la main). Here one could also mention patois such as petit nègre, a legacy of World War I, defined as a “simplified, deformed version of French that the military codified and deliberately taught to African soldiers … as a means both to infantilize them and to control their modes of interaction with their mainly white French commanding officers.”95
Language crosses borders and refracts the traffic of ideas; terminological clashes lurk in the background of the culture wars. National languages in post-colonial spaces are especially syncretic and polyvocal. The same words, due to different histories, carry very different connotations and intonations. One foundational clash has to do with the naming of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The very word “America,” as a synonym for the United States, for example, has provoked objections from indigenous people, since it gives a European name (Amerigo Vespucci) to an aboriginal continent, and from non-indigenous Latin Americans, for whom “America” designates the entire hemisphere. The designation of indigenous peoples as “Indians,” meanwhile, relays Columbus’s bedazzled belief that he had arrived in Asia. The question is whether indigenous peoples should be called “first peoples,” “fourth-world peoples,” or “native peoples” or be named according to their specific self-designations such as “Dineh” or “Ikpeng.” Should we speak of the “Indians of Brazil”—using a genitive of nation-state belonging—or the “Indians in Brazil,” signifying only location and not affiliation? In Manifest Manners, “postindian warrior” Gerald Vizenor objects to the word “Indian” as hopelessly tainted. Yet many indigenous activists have boomeranged the term as an empowering vehicle for pan-Indigenous movements.96
Racial perception is also filtered through language. The French language features varied terms for blacks, ranging from the pseudo-descriptive noir to the more frankly pejorative nègre (a term of abuse recoded as praise by the Négritude movement), the borrowed-from-English “black,” and the more inclusive personnes de couleur (persons of color). Poet-statesman Léopold Senghor pointed out that technically everyone in the world is a “person of color.”97 In Brazil, preto (black) originally referred to African blacks, while crioulo referred to blacks born in Brazil. But now negro has become a term of pride. In the United States, in contrast, “Negro” evokes the putative Uncle Tom–style passivity of the pre–Civil Rights era, while “black” and “African American” connote racial pride. The Brazilian term Afrodescendente (Afro-descended) emphasizes both African ancestry and a shared diasporic experience. Many Brazilians use nego (slang for black man) and nega (black woman) as terms of affection for people of any race. Although Brazilians often claim that “we are all mestizo,” the meaning of the sentence varies with the speaker and the circumstances of interlocution, sometimes communicating the idea that “we are mestizo, not black,” and sometimes that “we are all part black.” Given hegemonic grids of understanding, similar ethnic groups define themselves differently in North and South America: descendants of Sicilian immigrants in Brazil might call themselves “mestizo”; it is hard to imagine Sicilian Americans describing themselves in the same way.
Brazil has a vast catalogue of racially descriptive terms that highlight a miscegenated heterogeneity in which color forms part of a nuanced spectrum, whence such terms as mameluco (white and red), caboclo (black and red), and pardo (dark). Cognate words bring distinct tones and evaluations. “Miscegenation” has historically carried a negative odor in the United States, redolent of anti-race-mixing laws, while métissage in French and miscigenação in Portuguese, as the products of assimilationist societies, have gained positive connotations. The same racial hybridity once demonized by many 19th-century Brazilian philosophers is now lauded as a source of national pride. (Antonio Risério distinguishes between Portuguese miscigenação as simple biological mixture and mestiçagem as a mix of biology and culture, a discursivization of mixture.)98 One might also contrast the “top-down miscegenation” carried out by the bandeirantes and mamelucos as part of a demographic imperative of territorial domination with the lateral miscegenation between enslaved Africans, Indians, and poor whites as practiced in Palmares in the 17th century and that continues in new forms to the present day. The dominant discourse of Brazilian miscegenation often conflates these very different phenomena.
The word “immigration” also resonates differently in the various sites. In the United States, it conjures up Ellis Island and the “American dream” as part of an official discourse of a self-defined “immigrant society.” A frequent Brazilian formulation describes Brazil as a nation that “receives immigrants well,” which presupposes a preexisting mixed core prior to immigration. The U.S. nation was defined from the beginning as an amalgam of different migratory waves of European settlers, from which would emerge “America” as a space of pan-European fusion. The critique of this discourse, meanwhile, casts a critical light on the exclusionary practices on which the “immigrant nation” is premised. While contemporary France too is shaped by immigration, its official discourse has minimized this history, partly because French foundational myths were already well established before mass immigration began.99 Whereas official U.S. discourse has always seen immigration as “of the essence” of the nation (while relegating people of color to the polity’s outer limits), France has seen immigration as a latter-day graft on a preexisting white-European core. At the same time, American and French conservatives like to distinguish between authentic nationals (“real Americans,” “Français de souche”) and the ersatz newcomers.
The transformations generated by the linguistic encounter of European and indigene in the “contact zone” (Mary Louise Pratt) of conquest are also at the kernel of historical tensions that pass through language. During the “rosy dawn” of colonialism, both sides were fumbling, as it were, in linguistic darkness. Since translation was often transcosmological, there were zones of “opacity” (Édouard Glissant) and “untranslatability” (Emily Apter).100 Colonialism generated intercultural equivocation, or what we have called “a collision of partly incommensurable vocabularies.”101 Catholic priests in Brazil diabolized indigenous religion by translating the deity Tupa (or the Yoruban orixá Exu) as “devil.” Colonial hermeneutics thus interpreted cultural phenomena through a fundamentally Christian matrix. The power dynamics of coloniality thus inevitably inflected translation, with each side invested in certain understandings. European conquerors and settlers sometimes “heard” only what they wanted to hear: that the natives were eager to convert, that gold was to be found on the other side of the nearest hill, that Europeans were regarded as gods, and so forth.
Yet we have only begun to scratch the surface of the complexities of “racing” translation. The discussion is not simply one of matching vocabularies and concepts between Portuguese, English, and French. Postcolonial and diasporic writers have troubled established linguistic hierarchies. Glissant has lauded “creolity” and “Antillanite” as creatively decentering official, Hexagonal French. Glissant defines “creolization” as “the meeting, interference, shock, harmonies and disharmonies between the cultures of the world…. [It] has the following characteristics: the lightning speed of interaction among its elements; the ‘awareness of awareness’ thus provoked in us; the reevaluation of the various elements brought into contact … with unforeseeable results.”102 Building on Deleuze/Guattari, Glissant imagines a poetics of relation in which Third Worldism is replaced by the “All Worldism” of a dialogical and reciprocal planetary consciousness.103 As a site of cultural (mis)encounter, translation, both within and between languages, in sum, is key to our discussion. To focus on the ramifying differences of language exchange as opposed to furthering petrified conceptions of national character is one way to avoid the fetishizing of the ethno-cultural essences of what might be called “ontologi-nations.”