IN THIS CHAPTER, we theorize the multidirectional traffic of ideas concerning race/coloniality across the three zones through an analysis of a quadrille of readings whereby intellectuals from one country engage with intellectuals from a second country who make claims about a third country. We also sketch out the history of U.S. and French academic studies of Brazil, while intervening in the debates about the dissemination of French theory in the Americas. As part of our transnational and translational approach, we analyze Bourdieu/Wacquant’s critique of Michael Hanchard’s work on the black consciousness movement in Brazil, including a discussion of that critique’s reception in Brazil, in order to explore the literal and metaphorical translation of ideas around the Atlantic.
A thoroughgoing analysis of the triangular traffic of ideas requires contextualization regarding the history of academic writing on Brazil by both France-based and U.S.-based scholars. Whereas in the French case this writing traces its long-term origins to the 16th-century beginnings of the Franco-Brazilian relationship, in the U.S. case such writing is much more recent. In the postwar period, a number of factors—the surge of area studies in the United States, the Brazilian dictatorship’s desire to improve higher education, and the Gaullist desire for alliances with the Third World—all led to a major expansion of scholarly exchange between the three countries. In Brazil, the military regime created scholarships for study abroad, with the United States being the most popular destination, followed by France.
Historian Edward A. Riedinger notes in his overview of Brazil-related research in France that from the time of the first doctoral dissertation on Brazil in 1823 up until 1999, 1,344 theses or dissertations about Brazil had been written in French universities, over 98 percent of them in the postwar period.1 A cursory overview of the dissertations reveals certain patterns: First, the majority are by Brazilians working under French professors (such as Raymond Cantel and Guy Martinière) knowledgeable about Brazil or with Brazilian scholars based in France (such as Katia de Queirós Mattoso) or with celebrated scholars (such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Godelier, Pierre Bourdieu, and Alain Touraine) known more for their innovative social theories than for their knowledge of Brazil. Second, a prestigious gallery of Brazilian scholars on African, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous culture and history—Luiz Felipe de Alencastro (the South Atlantic slave trade); Juana Elbein dos Santos (Afro-Brazilian religion); Renato Ortiz (Umbanda and popular culture), and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (indigenous philosophy)—did their graduate work in France. Third, the relatively rare comparative and cross-national dissertations tend to concern Brazil-Africa (Jean-Paul Coleyn on possession cults in Mali, Brazil, and Haiti) or France-Brazil (Gabriel Colo on French versus Brazilian images of the Brazilian; Claudia Andrade dos Santos on French travelers and the Brazilian slavery debates). Many dissertations treat Afro-Brazilian religion, and one treats black Brazilian activism (Luiz Alberto Oliveira Gonçalves’s 1994 thesis “The Black Movement in Brazil”). While the theme of comparative race has been ubiquitous in scholarship by Brazilians and North Americans, little comparative race work has been done by French scholars, partly because the category of “race” is itself suspect.2
Riedinger notes in his comparison that (1) the French scholarship is largely in the sciences or the social sciences, while the U.S. work is in both the sciences and the humanities; (2) the French work is more inflected by Marxism; (3) the Annales School wields considerable influence, partially because of its focus on a Franco-Mediterranean sharing of certain cultural features with Brazil; (4) in geopolitical terms, French studies envision Brazil as a regional power in alliance with France and in opposition to the United States, while American studies see Brazil as complementary to the United States; and (5) in the United States, Brazilian studies research has been conducted largely by North Americans linked to Brazil, while Brazilian scholars in the United States tend to work with American experts for whom Brazil, or at least the “Third World,” is an area of expertise.3 (Some of this is changing as “Brazilian Brazilianists” enter the U.S. academy in greater numbers.)4
In any case, Brazilian studies has been a growing field in North America. BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association), founded in 1992, today has over a thousand members. At this point in history, we must speak of multiple generations of Brazilianists, going back to the founders, such as Ruth Landes, Donald Pierson, and Charles Wagley, on up to the hundreds of scholars working today. Some scholars express discomfort with the label “Brazilianist,” feeling that the word distances scholars who in fact identify with a Brazilian perspective. While some prefer to call themselves abrasileirados (Brazilianized) rather than “Brazilianists,” others emphasize a broad disciplinary affiliation, such as comparative literature, where the label “Brazilianist” seem overly restrictive. Others stress their special identity or their specific angle of approach, as when Ghanaian Anani Dzidzienyo calls himself an “Afro-Brazilianist.”
A basic nonreciprocity has often marred the intellectual relationship between Brazil and its non-Brazilian interlocutors.5 According to the regnant division of intellectual labor, the “periphery” is not supposed to study the “center”; rather, it is supposed to learn from the center how to study itself. While Brazilian students migrated to France and the United States in order to study Brazil or Brazil-related topics, French and American students did not flock to Brazil to study their own societies. Yet as a consequence of these asymmetries, the periphery also has less need to study the center; the periphery is already familiar with the center, which is why the center is called the center. At the same time, the center/periphery dichotomy can become an impediment in charting the more multidirectional exchanges that we address here. Despite the generally asymmetrical flows of information, Brazilian intellectual and artistic movements have often impacted cultural and political life in the United States and France, as occurred with dependency theory in economics (where future president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso played a major role), social geography (Josué de Castro’s “geography of hunger”); education theory (Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed”), radical theater (Augusto Boal’s “theater of the oppressed”), cinema (Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger”), anthropology (Viveiros de Castro’s indigenous “perspectivism”), and music (bossa nova, Tropicália).
In the background of the discussion of the trilateral exchange of ideas across France, Brazil, and the United States lie issues of center and periphery. In an essay titled “Post-structuralism and Deconstruction in the Americas,” Leyla Perrone-Moisés laments the fact that the U.S. academy has popularized French poststructuralist thinkers to the point that Brazilian intellectuals now absorb French ideas “through” the United States. The main targets of her critique are “cultural studies,” “multiculturalism,” and the “politically correct,” all seen as the deformed offspring of French philosophical parent trends. She correctly points to the strong French poststructuralist presence within cultural studies, which absorbed Althusser’s antihumanist rereading of Marx, Lacan’s rereading of Freud, Barthes’s critique of “mythologies,” Foucault’s “genealogical critique of power,” Deleuze’s immersion in “difference and flux,” Derrida’s critique of “logocentrism,” Lyotard’s “end of metanarratives,” Cixous’s defense of écriture féminine, and so forth. (She leaves out Lefebvre, Certeau, and Bourdieu, but that is not germane here.)6
Perrone-Moisés contrasts what she calls the “unquestionably progressive” political causes defended by “cultural studies” with what she sees as its reductive method of reading. For her, French Theory has been dragooned into the service of the “politically correct,” at great cost to literary and philosophical studies. In the barren soil of the U.S. academy, fertile French ideational seeds could only produce strange and grotesque hybrids. Our echo here of the language of 18th-century European “naturalists” is quite deliberate, for Perrone-Moisés inadvertently relays and updates the European naturalists’ ideas about the Americas in general as a place of putrefaction and decay, where “dogs don’t bark” and “plants don’t grow.” In her rejection of “American cultural studies,” Perrone-Moisés draws on the same naturalist trope of infantilization that disqualified the Americas generally as culturally young and undeveloped. This perennial trope of New World youth underlies the following passage: “The most caricatural forms of cultural studies occur in countries of recent culture, lacking in a strong philosophical tradition and in the specific formation of diverse disciplines that such studies demand. In the Americas, there is a tendency to ‘deconstruct’ what has not yet been ‘constructed.’”7 Here Perrone-Moisés reproduces the venerable contrast of “old Europe” and the “young Americas,” which have to “catch up” with a Europe that is both young in being at the cutting-edge of progressive thought and creativity yet also “old” in its philosophical maturity. That some of the nation-states of the Americas are technically “older” than some nation-states in Europe, and that Europe’s progress culminated in World War II and the Holocaust, certainly casts doubt on any special claim to “maturity,” just as the imperialistic practices of the United States cast doubt on exceptionalist claims of youthful innocence. In any case, the Americas generally are not “young” but palimpsestically “old,” in that they inherit, by their very composition as nations, the millennial traditions of indigenous America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. What Melville wrote in Red-burn applies to the Americas generally: “We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future that shall see all the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearth-stone in Eden…. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come.”8
For Perrone-Moisés, North Americans impoverished Derrida’s thought by turning “deconstruction” into a slogan. “Deconstruction became a prestigious label within American universities,” she speculates, “because Americans were amazed at the vast philosophical and literate culture of Derrida, something not so frequent in the United States.”9 The observation mistakenly implies that Derrida’s vast erudition is common in France—when it is his exceptional erudition that makes him a maître—and that such erudition is unknown in American (and Brazilian) universities. Derrida himself, ironically, saw the United States as an especially favorable terrain for the reception of his ideas, famously remarking that “America is deconstruction.” In defending the “philosopher of difference” from his supposed vulgarizers, Perrone-Moisés denies the inevitability of “difference” when it comes to the transtextual extrapolations of Derrida’s ideas into other idioms and locations, where they inevitably assume a local accent and coloration.
Behind Perrone-Moisés’s polemical claims, one glimpses again the contours of the unproductive Latin/Anglo-Saxon binary:
Some among us are faithfully adopting approaches which have to do with the Anglo-Saxon world, without taking into consideration the differences from our Latin American histories and cultures…. Multiculturalism, which has been criticized within the United States itself, favors the maintenance of separate ghettoes…. People speak of a Latin American postcolonialism. But Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism refers only to the use of English by recently decolonized writers, while our postcolonialism is already two centuries old, and our appropriation of metropolitan languages goes back a long way, as it does in the United States. Who would ever treat North American literature as postcolonial?10
On one level, Perrone-Moisés is right: some forms of postcolonial writing, as we ourselves have argued, have indeed been Anglocentric, downplaying the innovative Latin American discussions of hybridity, syncretism, and colony-metropole relations, along with the indigenous critique of coloniality/modernity. But the term “Anglo-Saxon” ethnicizes the political and essentializes the antiessentialist. The contradiction becomes flagrant in the last two sentences, where she notes that both the United States and Brazil appropriated metropolitan languages but then ridicules the idea that North American literature could also be called “postcolonial.” But in fact all of the Americas are postcolonial in the sense of having achieved independence from European colonialism, even if Britain and the United States exercised hegemonic power in Latin America. But either all the colonial-settler states are postcolonial or none of them are. More precisely, they all form a palimpsestic mélange of temporalities and chronotopes, mingling the colonial (in relation to indigenous peoples), the postcolonial (in the sense of postindependence), the neocolonial (in the political economy of North-South domination), and the paracolonial (in that colonialism does not explain everything). The more crucial issue is the discrepant manner in which the diverse nations, and diverse groups within nations, live this same postcolonial moment.
Perrone-Moisés wraps her critique in the mantle of anticolonialism: “Brazil, in adopting North American proposals, celebrates the end of our cultural colonialism in relation to France, without noticing that at the origin of these proposals, are French theorists. The only difference, for us, is that in the past we sought theoretical inspiration within the French matrix, and now we do it through the United States.”11 This highly ambivalent critique seems almost to exhort Brazilians to imitate the French themselves, rather than “imitate the imitators,” that is, the Americans. Perrone-Moisés views the “post-” movements as mere epiphenomena of “French Theory,” when the more germane issue is not “fidelity” to a European “original” but rather the fascinating “infidelities,” the translational twists and turns and transformations of the theories. The more productive question would have to do with the ways that Jameson politicizes Greimas or Spivak subalternizes Derrida or Stoller racializes Foucault or Bhabha postcolonializes Lacan and so forth. In the same vein, the issue is how Brazilian intellectuals and artists indigenize “out-of-place ideas,” the ways that Roberto Schwarz indigenizes Adorno, that Glauber Rocha Africanizes Brecht, that Haroldo de Campos Brazilianizes Faust, that Ismail Xavier national-allegorizes Walter Benjamin, that Sérgio Costa samples Stuart Hall, and that Jessé Souza peripheralizes Bourdieu. Or, to move to another sphere, it is how rappers such as Racionais MC’s Brazilianize the African American group Public Enemy or Carlinhos Brown Bahianizes James Brown or Gilberto Gil tropicalizes the Beatles.
Perrone-Moisés is hardly alone in pointing to the crucial U.S. role in disseminating French Theory. In French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, François Cusset offers a nuanced account of these disseminational processes. He describes the giddy heyday of French Theory, when French authors “reached a level of official notoriety and underground influence in the United States that they never achieved in their own country.”12 In what Cusset calls a “perfect chiasm” or “symmetrically reversed situation,”13 the heights of French Theory in the United States coincided with its erasure in France itself. At the very same moment that Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida were being eclipsed in France, they were becoming ubiquitous names in the American university. At that time, the French media were promoting the telegenic nouveaux philosophes eager to sweep away leftist, radical, multicultural, and postcolonial ideas. Yet the same “French Theory” demonized by the nouveaux philosophes, for Cusset, was becoming a powerful force not only in the U.S. academy but also even in “the most unexpected recesses” of the culture, “from pop art to the cyberpunk novel.”14
The influence of French Theory abroad was mediated not only by French cultural institutions such as the Maison Française but also by a gallery of prestigious American universities, notably the “golden triangle” of Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Yale, along with New York University, Columbia, and the University of California, in tandem with journals such as Diacritics, Enclitic, Substance, Semiotexte, and so forth. Using Bourdieu-style language, Cusset speaks of the “processes of selection, labeling and classification” through which American academics fashioned the intellectual trends of the 1980s.15 Through a dépaysement des idées, French concepts were unmoored from their origins and made to drift into contact not only with concepts more common in the United States but also with concepts from other French thinkers. But for Cusset, this unmooring generated political use-value by reinventing French texts that in France had “become trapped in their editorial and publishing straitjackets.”16 Cusset sees a virtue, then, in what Bourdieu calls the “denationalization” of texts. As a result, French Theory, as what Cusset calls the “new transdisciplinary object fashioned by literary scholars from French poststructuralism,” penetrated into the interstices of American intellectual life.17
One of the uses to which the “posts” were put, in the United States, was to theorize race, multiculturality, and the postcolonial. Postcolonial studies and cultural studies, in this sense, form transnational amalgams of diverse currents—French, certainly, but also British, African, Native American, Latin American, South Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and so forth. That U.S.-based academics, in contrast with the Francophobic U.S. right wing, have embraced these French thinkers might have been interpreted as an index of a salutary receptiveness to ideas from elsewhere or a sign that American and Brazilian intellectuals (like intellectuals around the world) all share a French-inflected intertext, even if absorbed, assimilated, and transmogrified in discrepant ways in the various locations. Perrone-Moisés censures only one of the “terminals” in a broadly global transtextual process. While invoking poststructuralism in a positive way, she conducts the argument within pre-poststructuralist paradigms. For Derrida, intellectual exchange involves an endless process of dissemination and intertextuality, entailing reaccentuations without “origins,” where the “copy” can be as valid as the “original,” indeed where it is the copy that produces the prestige and even the originality of the original. The defense of Derrida against betrayal implies an abandonment, paradoxically, of his critique of origins.
Bourdieu/Wacquant’s essay “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason” also addresses the intellectual relations between France, the United States and Brazil. A polemic against African American political theorist Michael Hanchard’s analysis of “black consciousness” movements in Brazil in his 1994 book Orpheus and Power,18 the essay singles out Hanchard as an avatar of the “cunning” of imperial reason that now enlists people of color to promulgate the “Macdonaldization” of thought: “Cultural imperialism (American or otherwise) never imposes itself better than when it is served by progressive intellectuals (or by ‘intellectuals of colour’ in the case of racial inequality) who would appear to be above suspicion of promoting the hegemonic interests of a country against which they wield the weapons of social criticism.”19 In hyperbolic language, Bourdieu/Wacquant portray Hanchard as a pawn of imperialism who injects “ethnocentric poison” into the debate about race by imposing a binary North American grid on a Brazilian society substantially without racism.
Like many critics of “identity politics,” the authors are not above using identity to their own ends. Hanchard’s identity as an “Afro-American political scientist” forms a key piece in their argument; it cues the Hegelian “cunning” in the title that makes Hanchard part of an imperialist ruse. The identity that actually remains “above suspicion,” meanwhile, is that of the authors’ whiteness and Frenchness. Their identity is so far above suspicion that it is not even named as an identity. While it is true that the U.S. rightist power structure has “cunningly” used some rare black conservatives to support neoliberalism and imperialist interventions and even to attack Affirmative Action, Hanchard is hardly a black conservative. Indeed, few social theorists are less susceptible than Hanchard to the charge against U.S. social thought in general as depoliticized and blind to class and domination. Written from a densely theoretical/historical perspective, and informed by the conceptual categories of Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, and other left theorists, Orpheus and Power is defiantly political, class-conscious, and very much concerned with social domination. Yet for Bourdieu/Wacquant, Hanchard unilaterally exports the dichotomous American “folk concept of race” into a flexible and open Brazilian society.20
Bourdieu/Wacquant enter into contradiction by denouncing both multiculturalism and “American dichotomous thinking on race.” The multicultural project, whatever its faults, generally eschewed racially dichotomous thinking in favor of discourses of cultural mixing and rainbow alliances. Indeed, many analysts discern a kind of “Brazilianization” of the United States, not only in terms of heightened class differences and disparities in wealth but also in terms of novel ways of thinking about the modes of intersection of class, race, and ethnicity, as some whites become impoverished (like many blacks), as some people of color claim a “multiracial” status, and as intermediate groups such as Latinos, Arab Americans, and Asian Americans scramble customary dichotomous schemas. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva predicts a burgeoning Latin Americanization of the North American spectrum due to a number of factors: (1) changing demographics (population projects predict a minority-majority United States by 2050); (2) the advent of a “kinder and gentler” white supremacy; (3) the emergence of a Latin American–style “color-blind racism”; (4) the absorption of darker “others” by global capitalism; (5) the increase in interracial marriage, slight in black-white terms but massive in terms of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, only 33 percent of whom marry other Native Americans.21
The Bourdieu/Wacquant charge of a “brutal intrusion” into a Brazilian society without racism flies in the face of most of the serious research on Brazil, most authored by Brazilians, over the past half century or more. A gendered language positions Bourdieu/Wacquant as the protectors of a feminized Brazil violated by a brutal intruder, in this case a black male American scholar. The essay’s reductionist notions of intercultural exchange break with the more complex drift of Bourdieu’s own concept of “cultural fields.” While Bourdieu’s work in general discerns the interaction of structure and agency, these essays see only active U.S.-white domination and passive Third World victimization. In quasi-conspiratorial fashion, the authors speak of the “symbolic dominion and influence exercised by the United States over every kind of scholarly and, especially, semischolarly production, notably through the power of consecration they possess and through the material and symbolic profits that researchers in the dominated countries reap from a more or less assumed or ashamed adherence to the model derived from the United States.”22 These one-way formulations recall unproblematized Frankfurt School “hypodermic needle” cultural theories, whereby the culture industry “injects” passive consumers, as well as “media imperialism” theses that have imperialism “penetrating” Third World psyches, theses that have been revised even by their erstwhile proponents such as Ariel Dorfmann and Armand Mattelart. Bourdieu/Wacquant portray “researchers in the dominated countries” as either naive dupes enthralled by imperialist cultural products or as cynical opportunists lusting after “material and symbolic profits.”23 The denial of agency could not be more totalizing, a point reinforced by the fact that the bibliography of the “Cunning” essay includes no Brazilian scholars. At the same time, ironically, the bibliography cites favorably five American experts on Brazil (Charles Wagley, Anthony Marx, George Reid Andrews, Edward Telles, and Howard Winant), precisely those whom the theory would normally denounce as imposing their ethnocentric vision on Brazil!
Although stemming from an anti-imperial logic, the anxiety about African American “ethnic intrusions” finds an ironic precedent in the wariness of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985) toward any collaborations between black Brazilian and black American activists, seen by the regime as a menace to “national security.” An official questionnaire exhorted censors to be vigilant about any direct or veiled allusions to the “Black Power movement.” The junta’s censors even forbade journalists to use the word “black” in a racial sense.24 All-black musical groups such as Abolição were ordered to integrate. The “National Security” state banned as subversive any discussion of racial discrimination, including in the form of race-related census statistics. According to historian Thomas Skid-more, the forced exile of scholars such as Abdias do Nascimento, Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Octávio Ianni was largely due to their questioning the nationalist consensus on Brazil as a racial democracy.25
We will not try here to undo all the folded misrepresentations in the second Bourdieu/Wacquant essay. Indeed, Brazilianist John French, in an essay titled “The Missteps of Anti-imperialist Reason,” has already written a carefully calibrated but devastating critique.26 After summarizing their argument fairly, French points to the innumerable errors of evaluation in their text: the broad and undifferentiated caricature of American and Brazilian intellectual trends, the clueless misstatements about the current state of scholarship on race in Brazil, the misrepresentations of the positions of specific scholars, the agenda-driven idealization of the Brazilian racial situation, and the concomitantly schematic oversimplification of the U.S. situation. The authors, French argues, “clearly hold to a double standard when they compare the U.S. versus Brazil. They offer an excessively harsh and negative depiction of the racial situation in the U.S. and are intolerant of its national mythology; by contrast, they offer an excessively tolerant and positive depiction of the racial situation in Brazil while embracing its national mythology without criticism.”27 French then speculates as to why the two French sociologists would be so “unforgiving of U.S. illusions yet so accommodating of Brazilian ones.”28 He finds a clue in a footnote about what the authors call a “scientifically scandalous” book: Wieviorka’s Racist France. “How long will it be,” Bourdieu/Wacquant ask in a tone of ridicule, “before we get a book entitled Racist Brazil patterned after the scientifically scandalous Racist France of a French sociologist more attentive to the expectations of the field of journalism than to the complexities of social reality?”29
Apart from the fact that Bourdieu/Wacquant misrepresent Wieviorka’s rich and varied work much as they caricature Hanchard’s work, one is bewildered by such an apoplectic reaction to the idea of a French book about French racism or a Brazilian book about Brazilian racism. The authors’ reaction reflects a surprising amnesia concerning French and Francophone intellectual history. Césaire did not require a “brutal ethnocentric intrusion” to find France racist when he wrote Discourse on Colonialism, nor did Fanon when he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, nor did Memmi when he wrote Portrait of the Colonized and Dominated Man. In fact, all of these authors found both France and the United States racist. John French speculates that the two authors might be making “opportunistic use of Brazil” in order to “attack intellectuals … who might undermine their cherished sense of Frenchness.” If racism is by definition something that only North Americans do, French adds, “then neither France nor Brazil can be called racist.”30
A white narcissism of national distinction thus leads some analysts to defend specific Black Atlantic societies as somehow exempt from racism, despite a shared history of conquest, colonialism, and slavery. A covertly national pathos, in this case, compromises the authors’ methodology and lures them away from their own theoretical axioms. The view purveyed in French’s essay and throughout our own text, in contrast, is of a historical and social continuum of racist ideologies and practices extending around the postcolonial Atlantic. In this context, books critical of “Racist America,” “Racist France,” and “Racist Brazil” hardly seem scandalous; rather, they seem inevitable, even salutary; the scandal would be if such books did not exist. The rendering innocent of France and Brazil only occurs, revealingly, in the context of cross-national comparisons. The comparative framework itself seems to trigger what might be called a “family protection” or “dirty laundry” syndrome, analogous to the ways that quarreling families suddenly unite in the face of outside criticism.
The facile dismissal of the possibility of a book about “Racist Brazil,” furthermore, bespeaks a lack of engagement with the history of scholarship in Brazil. As we have seen with Ali Kamel, the authors write as if criticisms of Brazilian racism come exclusively from North Americans. Yet countless Brazilian books bear titles that, if they do not say precisely “racist Brazil,” carry a similar charge. A quick look through our bookshelves garners the following titles (translated from Portuguese): Racism and Anti-racism in Brazil (1999), Racism in Brazil (2002), The Genocide of Brazilian Blacks (1978), and Racism Explained to My Children (2007). The title of a 2007 Brazilian book—Racism: The Truth Hurts. Face It—might be addressed to the racism deniers—of Brazil (and of the world generally). Even the mainstream newspaper Folha de São Paulo recognized a generalized Brazilian racism in a 1995 special investigative report entitled “Cordial Racism,” in a verbal play on historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s celebrated description of the Brazilian as “cordial man.” In any case, the dialogue between black Brazilians and African Americans and the critique of racism in Brazil did not begin with Hanchard. Whatever legitimate criticisms might be made of Hanchard’s book—and some Brazilians have criticized it for privileging the African American Civil Rights model of activism as norm and for a certain smugness in its implication that Brazilian blacks are victims of false consciousness—the view of Hanchard as a race-obsessed imperialist bringing “ethnocentric poison” into a paradisal Brazil is clearly off the mark.
Bourdieu/Wacquant’s tacitly idyllic portrait of Brazil is out of step with decades of critical scholarship. As we have seen, benign Freyrean myths of “racial democracy” had been deconstructed by Abdias do Nascimento and Guerreiro Ramos already in the 1940s and by the São Paulo school (Florestan Fernandes, Octávio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso) in the 1950s.31 Bourdieu/Wacquant reverse the historical movement of scholarship; rather than cite the later critical work to discredit the earlier celebratory work, they draw on the idealizing fictions of the earlier work to discredit the more disenchanted conclusions of the later generations. The two authors belatedly enter a vast intertextual field whose contours they only dimly discern. While we have stressed the linked yet differentiated analogies between all the variegated racisms of the Atlantic, Bourdieu/Wacquant draw a line of absolute difference between Brazil and the United States and between France and the United States, denying similarities, parallelisms, continuities, and relationalities.
On one level, Bourdieu/Wacquant are not completely wrong to note that racial relations are less “tense and hostile” in Brazil, a trait noted by countless observers. A number of features of Brazilian social life do indeed lend a more humane face to what is in structural terms a racially and economically hierarchical society. Many factors play a role in this relative lack of tension: a history that has favored conciliation over confrontation, a miscegenation that undercuts racial binarism, and the elaborately choreographed pas de deux between a top-down populism that plays down tensions and a bottom-up civility that slyly and ambivalently collaborates.32 Many elements in Brazilian popular culture—the role playing of Carnival and the open-ended identifications of Candomblé—favor an extraordinary suppleness of code-switching and jogo de cintura (social adaptability). James Holston speaks of “ideologies of inclusion that … give personal relations of gender, racial, and economic difference a gloss of complicit accommodation, a sense of intimacy that obscures but maintains fundamental inequalities … [produced through] the (untranslatable) artifices of jeitinho, malicia, malandragem, jinga, jogo de cintura, and mineirice.”33 Despite the diminished racial tension, the material inequalities between the white elite and racialized subalterns have historically been greater than in the United States. Yet the “which is worse?” question is still the wrong question. More precisely, it is not wrong to point to better or worse situations; it is wrong to use a worse situation elsewhere to deny injustice at home. The two societies offer distinct modalities of white- and Euro-domination, one rooted in segregationist racism in a very rich country, the other in assimilationist paternalism in a relatively poor country, but with regional variations and many mixed forms in both sites. At this point in history, the various “racial formations” around the Black Atlantic conjoin social segregation, assimilation, and economic disempowerment. Ultimately, the point is to discern the relative coefficient of each element in the general mix and, more important, to discern what activists/scholars can learn from one another in terms of analyses and solutions.
Bourdieu/Wacquant purvey the impression that the United States is essentially racist, while Brazil is only conjuncturally oppressive, constrained by imperialism and corrupted by American influence. Notice the following formulation: “Carried out by Americans and Brazilians trained in the United States, most of the recent research on racial inequality in Brazil strives to prove that, contrary to the image that Brazilians have of their own nation, the country of the ‘three sad races’ … is no less racist than others.”34 This passage raises a number of questions. First, why would critical intellectuals normally skeptical about nationalist doxa be so respectful of “the image that a nation has of itself”? Second, the locational determinism of the phrase “Americans and Brazilians trained in the United States” falsely conveys the image of a monolithic group of researchers advancing a single political position. Third, the authors speak as if Brazilians have a single image of their own nation, when in fact Brazil shelters a lively debate about competing images of the various Brasis (Brazils, in the plural). Fourth, the authors speak as if Brazil’s self-image were static and transhistorical, when in fact it is in perpetual mutation. In sum, the formulation embeds a simplistic dichotomy between the vast totality of normal “Brazilians” holding a positive image of their country, on the one hand, and two outlier microfactions, on the other, that is, American scholars and Brazilians trained in the United States. All potential critics of the Brazilian racial formation are exiled, as it were, to join the American side.
In trying to discredit Hanchard, Bourdieu/Wacquant resuscitate myths long dismantled by critical Brazilian scholars, even if these myths retain some residual purchase in the hegemonic discourse. In defending Brazil, and implicitly France, against potential charges of racism, Bourdieu/Wacquant inadvertently revisit the old interimperial rivalries and the Anglo/Latin dichotomy. And while it would be simplistic to say that “all societies are racist” or even that any single society is simply and essentially and only racist, we can affirm, more prudently, that all those countries that participated, whether actively or passively, in colonialism and slavery are likely to exhibit not only the institutional traces of these systems of oppression but also the ongoing struggles against them.35
Some of the hostility to race-based scholarship derives, it would seem, from a historically problematic assumption that such work is allied to hegemonic power in the United States itself. It is in this context that Bourdieu/Wacquant criticize the role of U.S.-based foundations in supporting race-related research in Brazil:
One would obviously need to invoke here also the driving role played by the major American philanthropic and research foundations in the diffusion of the U.S. racial doxa within the Brazilian academic field at the level of both representations and practices. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation and similar organizations fund a programme on “Race and Ethnicity” at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro as well as the Centre for Afro-Asiatic Studies of the Candido Mendes University (and its journal Estudos Afro-Asiáticos) so as to encourage exchanges of researchers and students. But the intellectual current flows in one direction only. And, as a condition for its aid, the Rockefeller Foundation requires that research teams meet U.S. criteria of “affirmative action,” which poses insuperable problems since, as we have seen, the application of the white/black dichotomy in Brazilian society is, to say the least, hazardous.36
While right to critique the unidirectionality of exchange, Bourdieu/Wacquant also seem to project their own assumptions about a state-dependent and centralized French cultural field onto very different contexts. In France, a highly centralized system is seen as incarnating the “general will,” and both left and right have tried to harness the power and prestige of culture for political ends. In the United States, in contrast, foundations step into the vacuum left by a neoliberal system that minimizes government support for the arts and for education.
In political terms, American foundations have had a long and often shady history. In the realm of economics, the Ford Foundation played a very pernicious role in funding the University of Chicago’s economics program, a hotbed of neoliberal thinking led by Milton Friedman. Ford came to be associated with the shock-doctrine agenda of the neoliberal “Chicago Boys” in Chile and the “Berkeley Mafia” in Indonesia. In the mid-1970s, however, Ford did an about-face and became a leading funder of human rights activism. After severing its links to the Ford Motor Corporation in 1974, the Ford Foundation helped persuade the U.S. Congress to cut off military support to Argentina and Chile. As Naomi Klein points out, it was as if Ford were doing penance for its earlier sins: “After the left in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape, it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held by those same regimes.”37
Foundations play a highly contested role both in the United States itself and in the Global South, at times spreading neoliberal doctrine and at times compensating for the depredations of transnational capitalism. Although the Ford Foundation developed initiatives to promote social justice and to combat racism though legal, mediatic, judicial, and research activities,38 it would nonetheless be difficult to discern any theoretical or political uniformity in the foundation-supported research on race, much less any orthodoxy imposed by U.S. institutions and scholars. Nor is it clear (1) that Affirmative Action is premised on the white/black dichotomy or (2) that foundations are dedicated to spreading U.S. racial doxa. In the end, the point is not to unequivocally defend or defame foundation-sponsored work but only to highlight the contradictions for leftist academics working in diverse locations who try to produce adversary scholarship partially funded by foundations or, for that matter, governments. A truly democratic society would not depend on the whims of philanthropic foundations to provide private Band-Aid solutions for deeply rooted public social problems. The challenge is to avoid reductionism: to recognize the weight, inertia, and shaping power of governmentality and to acknowledge the ways that myriad institutions and interests work over social projects, but without falling into a “vulgar institutionalism,” whereby individuals, artists, and academics are seen as completely determined and ideologically reducible to their institutional locations and affiliations.
In the Bourdieu/Wacquant view, ideology spreads like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Hanchard passively absorbs U.S.-style dichotomous thinking on race (even though, as an African American, he is himself its victim) and then passes it on to equally passive Brazilian intellectuals whose weak immune systems leave them prey to the contagion. Brazilians studying in the United States, equally powerless to resist, catch the virus and bring it back to Brazil. Rather than an “out-of-place” idea, race-inflected analysis is envisioned as an “out-of-place” ideological virus. Within the viral view, entire countries such as Great Britain—in an echo of perennial Anglo-Saxon/Latin quarrels—become passeurs for imperialism. Thus, a footnote to the essay posits England as “structurally predisposed to act as the Trojan horse by which notions of American scholarly common sense penetrate the European intellectual field.”39 This reductionist view, expressed again in a masculinist language of “penetration,” forms the cultural correlative to the geopolitical analysis that sees Britain as facilitating the infiltration of neoliberal Anglo-American ideology into the European Union. Our problem is not with the critique of neoliberal ideology or even with the role of specific nation-states but rather with the conflation between critical intellectuals and their governments. To put it crudely, although Tony Blair may have been Bush’s poodle, Stuart Hall was not. Nor was Edward Said the servant of the U.S. State Department, nor is Michael Hanchard the academic equivalent of Colin Powell. Bourdieu/Wacquant’s self-narration as the saviors of a feminized Brazil is a little too reminiscent of a neocolonial rescue narrative, especially since the essay does not engage with Brazilian intellectuals at all. Progressive Brazilian intellectuals deserve allies and interlocutors, not “saviors,” of any nationality.
In the same “Cunning of Imperial Reason” essay, Bourdieu/Wacquant also express disdain for “cultural studies”:
Thus it is that decisions of pure book marketing orient research and university teaching in the direction of homogenization and submission to fashions coming from America, when they do not fabricate wholesale “disciplines” such as Cultural Studies, this mongrel domain, born in England in the 1970s, which owes its international dissemination (which is the whole of its existence) to a successful publishing policy.40
Despite this acerbic dismissal of a complex field, it is precisely cultural studies—and more broadly multicultural, postcolonial, and transnational studies—that is methodologically equipped to deal with contemporary cultural syncretism in the Red, Black, and White Atlantic. While Bourdieu, in books such as Distinction, performed incisive critiques of social, educational, and cultural privilege, the coauthored polemical essays undermine possible cross-border alliances with those elsewhere who challenge elitist/racist conceptualizations of culture. In condemning cultural studies en bloc, the two authors, to pick up on Wacquant’s formulation in another context, “judge [cultural studies] through the very categories of thought that [those fields] aim at transcending.”41 Their mockery of a “mongrel” domain, for example, forgets the colonialist tint of the “mongrel” trope in racist thinkers such as Gobineau, for whom hybridity and miscegenation signaled “degeneracy.” The metaphor forms part of a set of binary pairs—mongrel versus pedigree, pure versus impure—historically deployed to reinforce elitist hierarchies. By reinstating the high/low hierarchy that “cultural studies” aims to transcend, the metaphor undercuts Bourdieu’s own critique of the elitism of “the heirs” in education.
Bourdieu/Wacquant’s casual dismissal of a multifaceted project called “cultural studies” exemplifies vulgar institutionalism at its most egregious. All the work of the Birmingham School and its innumerable heirs is portrayed as “nothing but” the effect of a marketing gimmick. Bourdieu’s own work on sport, museumgoing, and the media, in a further ironic wrinkle, might elsewhere qualify as “cultural studies.” Indeed, Bourdieu is an oft-cited figure within cultural studies, the transdisciplinary formation that mingled, as Bourdieu’s own work did, the methods of the social sciences and the humanities. Even though the authors deride “French cultural studies,” some of that field’s practitioners, such as Marie-Pierre Le Hir, speak of the “longstanding historical ties between the Birmingham Center and the Bourdieu group” and posit Bourdieu’s “reflexive sociology” as a methodological model.42
Bourdieu/Wacquant mockingly predict the kind of work that European cultural studies is already doing: “And one may forecast that, by virtue of the principle of ethnicoeditorial parthenogenesis in fashion today, we shall soon find in bookstores a handbook of French-Arab Cultural Studies to match its cross-channel cousin, Black British Cultural Studies, which appeared in 1997 (but bets remain open as to whether Routledge will dare German-Turkish Cultural Studies).”43 One is struck at the tone of derision toward even the hypothesis of scholarship addressing racialized minorities in Europe. The underlying assumption, perhaps, is that “minorities” are by definition particular and not universal and, moreover, might be an American invention alien to Europe, and especially to France. But why not endorse, rather than ridicule, the prospect of “French-Arab cultural studies” and” German-Turkish cultural studies”? Given ethnic tensions in present-day France, it would seem that French-Arab cultural studies are exactly what the doctor ordered. And given recurrent waves of Islamophobia in Germany, what could be more vital than German-Turkish studies? Nor are European minority scholars merely “mimic men” imitating American doxa; they are intellectuals trying to formulate their own ambiguous social status within a situation of racialized minoritization.
French intellectuals such as Bourdieu/Wacquant have not yet “assimilated” the relevance of (multi)cultural and postcolonial studies to an irreversibly pluralized European culture. As François Cusset put it (prior to the recent efflorescence of postcolonial studies in France),
Among the major American intellectual currents of the last quarter century, virtually none have been received to any significant degree in France, neither analytic philosophy, nor the convergences of pragmatism and Continental philosophy, nor radical multiculturalism, nor deconstructionist readings of literature, nor postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, nor even the new theories of gender identity—despite a timid, recent emergence, “slowly but surely,” of the queer question. Indeed, France changes only slowly, or under duress.44
Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro makes a cognate point about the reluctance of French intellectuals to pick up on the more radical implications of poststructuralism, underlining the paradox that the “Anglophone academy has been more open to Continental philosophy than French anthropology itself.” The principal source of the rapprochement between philosophy and anthropology, he adds, “has taken place in English-speaking countries (not without provoking violent reactions on the part of the local [French] academic cardinals).”45
The lack of engagement with these transnational currents has resulted in a gap between academic scholarship and the irrevocably hybrid cultural life of contemporary France. Little of the cultural syncretisms typical not only of Parisian streets but also of popular French culture makes its way into the theorizations by French maîtres à penser. In Bourdieu’s case, this oversight was perhaps correlated with the assumption that the “hard” social sciences need not deal with “soft” popular culture or perhaps linked to the Frankfurt School equation of mass culture with false consciousness. In many countries, “cultural studies” names the attempt to close the gap between popular culture and academic theory, as well as between the social sciences and the humanities. The failure of cultural studies to take hold in the French academy is especially ironic in that French thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Michel de Certeau, along with Césaire, Fanon, and even Sartre and Beauvoir, were all precursors of “cultural studies.” Here again we find the same paradox we encountered earlier with postcolonial studies, where a movement that is partially the intellectual “offspring” of French thought has been shunned, at least until recently, by the metropolitan “parents.”46
Bourdieu/Wacquant’s curt dismissal of “British cultural studies” and “American multiculturalism”—two complex projects falsely equated with single national origins—reveals a kind of specular repulsion. The two authors seem to be lashing out at alter egos, at cultural theorists who, apart from their national location, in some ways “look like them.” They denounce British cultural studies, even though Stuart Hall’s role and stature in Britain as an incisive critic of dominant media and elitist institutions parallels that of Bourdieu in France. Anglo-American radical pedagogy aims to undermine entrenched privilege in the school system, much as Bourdieu’s work purports to do in France. It is this flailing out at phantasmatic doubles that raises warning flags about a hidden national and perhaps disciplinary narcissism at work.
As a post-Marxist field, cultural studies has questioned the base/super-structure model and detected resistance in sites previously dismissed as the loci of alienation and false consciousness. Although cultural studies has at times inflated, in a kind of Madonna syndrome, the quantum of resistance in mass culture, it has also detected utopian moments that go beyond prescriptive blueprints for social change. It has shown us that contemporary political struggle necessarily passes through popular culture. An encounter between Bourdieu and German writer Günter Grass, filmed by the television channel Arte (December 5, 1999), around the time of Bourdieu/Wacquant’s two polemical essays, is very revealing in terms of contrasting conceptualizations of culture. Grass praises Bourdieu’s project in La Misère du Monde as a critique of social oppression but notes a missing element: humor. Bourdieu responds that suffering is not a laughing matter, to which Grass responds that works such as Voltaire’s Candide show that satire and parody can expose frightful social conditions. Intellectuals, he adds, must describe suffering but also insist on the capacity of people to resist, including through humor. Bourdieu responds, “Globalization does not inspire laughter; our era is not amusing.” Grass responds that he is not saying that globalization is funny but only that the “infernal laughter” triggered by art can also be an indispensable arm in social struggle.
We agree with Grass that unamusing eras, especially, need the subversive tonic of laughter. For Brecht, a sense of humor was indispensable in comprehending dialectical materialism, and in this sense, Bourdieu’s dismissal of humor as a form of social agency is undialectical. It reflects what literary critics would call a “genre mistake” or a “mimetic fallacy” in that it suggests that suffering-laden eras—and what era has not been suffering-laden?—cannot be treated in comic or satirical genres. Only science, in the austerely superegoish Bourdieu conception, can accurately register, analyze, and combat social oppression. French media sociologist Éric Maigret sees in the Grass-Bourdieu exchange an opposition between two visions: one (Bourdieu’s) associates the mass of people with suffering, symbolic passivity, and dispossession while positing the intellectual as the designated spokesperson for the inexpressive masses; the other (Grass’s) discerns both suffering and popular resistance.47 Although Bourdieu gives lip service to “agency,” he ultimately portrays common people (and Brazilian intellectuals) as “cultural dupes” beset by symbolic privation. His project, in this sense, could benefit from a more dialogical and nonfinalizing vision of culture and agency.
Bourdieu’s work, through all its various moments—from the anthropological work in Algeria, through the Marx-, Weber-, and Durkheim-inflected sociology of education, to the work on symbolic violence in art and consumption, on to the polemical writings on television—conveys a thoroughgoing skepticism about popular culture. Bourdieu argues in On Television that television hinders serious thought since it is produced under the sign of simultaneity and velocity of direct transmission.48 Such a view fails to explain why totalitarian regimes invariably try to eliminate live television and direct transmission. (One wonders what Bourdieu would have made of the role of social media in the “Twitter revolutions” in the Middle East, where “simultaneity and velocity” were crucial to revolutionary activism.) Within what Arlindo Machado calls Bourdieu’s “Platonic and aristocratic” conception, the mass media signify the end of free thought and intelligence thanks to the reign of spectacularization and mercantilization.49 The only real solution, for Bourdieu, lies in the “distinction” of the scientific expert.
Thus, although Bourdieu tries to mark off his difference from the elitist determinism of the Frankfurt School, he ends up by reaffirming the Adornonian equation of popular alienation and the dominant cultural industries. As Maigret puts it,
Reading Bourdieu’s writings can at first have a liberatory effect, engender a feeling of revolt, because they unveil the unknown corridors of privilege, the daily fabrication of power. But then they provoke a comedown when they reveal a metaphysical conception of closure within the social game, justified or rationalized through the Spinozist philosophy: awareness of determinism helps one become free. For most people, however, who lack access to this form of knowledge, there is no solution to the problem of symbolic violence since those who experience it fail to make sense out of their world and those who perpetrate it are also its victims.50
Thus, within Bourdieu-style analysis, everyone is trapped within a cruel and unequal social game, except those enjoying access to the truths of social science, who escape the shipwreck of capitalist modernity to tell the story of the disaster. Bourdieu displays no faith in what Maigret calls “the individual negotiation of meaning, or the collective management of social stakeholding.”51 For Bourdieu, people are doubly dominated, first by social and economic domination itself and then by their own naive belief in the legitimacy of this domination. But without a theory of popular agency, the dominated possess neither a valid culture nor a capacity to react. Bourdieu thus falls back into what Maigret calls an “astonishingly conservative discourse” inherent in the “old bourgeois rhetoric of culture.”52
For conservatives, social life is a competition for status and power, wherein capitalism is perfectly matched to the actually existing human beings whose “nature” makes them winners or losers in that combat. Like the conservatives, Bourdieu’s work also figures social life, including academic life, as a perpetual struggle for status, distinction, and autonomy via the accumulation of economic, academic, social, and symbolic power, even if his goal—and this difference is crucial—was to rearrange that system to end social oppression. In Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, Tom Moylan distinguishes between scientistic “blueprint utopias,” which form part of a totalizing metanarrative of progress, and “critical utopias,” which seek “seditious expression of social change” carried on in a “permanently open process of envisioning what is not yet.”53 Critical utopias, in this view, are generated by the concrete dissatisfactions of everyday life under capitalism and aim at reimagining the possible, while retaining awareness of the structural obstacles that make utopias difficult to realize. It is hard to find in Bourdieu a “critical utopia” consonant with that found not only in Moylan but also in Marx (“the sigh of the oppressed creature”) and in such writers as Bakhtin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, Paul Gilroy, and many others. In the Bourdieuvian dialectic of structure and agency, the second term is downplayed, with little but science and a redemptive “reflexivity” as consolation.
Although Bourdieu expresses a quasi-Bakhtinian enthusiasm, in Distinction, for the satires and carnivalesque parodies that “satisfy the taste for and sense of revelry, the plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social world head over heels, overturning conventions and priorities,”54 he ultimately flattens Bakhtin’s carnival by suggesting in the “Postscript” that for Bakhtin the “popular imagination can only invert the relationship which is the basis of the aesthetic sociodicy” (emphasis ours).55 If Bakhtin errs on the side of euphoric utopianism, Bourdieu errs on the side of bleak dystopianism. The left needs both what Ernst Bloch calls Marxism’s “cold current”—the disabused analysis of economic stratification and social alienation—and its “warm current” (the intoxicating glimpses of collective freedom).56 Which is why the left needs the warm current of Bakhtin and Bloch—not to replace Bourdieu but to complement the cold current of his thought.
After the publication of two special issues of the journal Theory and Culture and one special issue of Black Renaissance Noire, the two Bourdieu/Wacquant essays are by now among the most thoroughly dissected and “rebutted” essays in recent intellectual history, including within Brazil, where a special issue of Estudos Afro-Asiáticos (January–April 2000) was dedicated to the Michael Hanchard polemic.57 Our spiraling focus here is on Brazilian intellectuals reading back to French intellectuals reading an African American reading Brazil.
The best-received aspect of the “Cunning of Imperial Reason” essay in Brazil was its denunciation of imperialism; Brazilian intellectuals were happy to see prestigious French intellectuals validate a longstanding Brazilian anti-imperial critique. But the Brazilian participants in the Estudos Afro-Asiáticos issue express surprise at seeing themselves portrayed as sheeplike followers of U.S. intellectual fashions, without acknowledgment of the long line of Brazilian historians, anthropologists, sociologists, activists, and cultural critics who have addressed race in Brazil. The French sociologists, for these Brazilian scholars, were inattentive both to the variety of the actual work and to the complexity of U.S.-Brazilian scholarly relations. For Bourdieu/Wacquant, American scholars of Brazil impose an alien bipolar American prism on their Brazilian “followers,” yet ironically they only cite scholarship by North Americans, exactly those who according to their theory would favor an “American bipolar point of view.” But we would argue that there is no single American (or Brazilian or French) point of view on race but only an unending battle over rival analyses of race, which explains why some U.S. analysts prefer Brazilian approaches to race and why some black Brazilians admire the African American model of activism.
Like other contributors, Jocélio Teles dos Santos scolds Bourdieu/Wacquant for speaking as if Brazilian intellectuals exercise no agency in the debate, while boomeranging Bourdieu’s own terminology against his argument: “[Brazilian intellectuals] are not mere tabula rasa victims of the cunning of imperial reason and its hegemonic racial model. A serious in-depth reading of the existing bibliography—something one expects from serious intellectuals—would reveal all the resignifications one finds in the struggle over this ‘field’ of power.”58 Santos’s usage of “resignification” conjures up a paradigmatic strategy whereby Brazilian intellectuals have indigenized and transformed ideas from elsewhere. Brazilian intellectual life, as Osmundo de Araújo Pinho and Ângela Figueiredo argue, has always been impacted by “foreign” models, especially French and North American ones.59 While censuring one (North American) strand of influence, the Bourdieu/Wacquant account normalizes (while rendering invisible) the multicentury European, and especially French, influence in Brazil. The price of internal colonization, for Pinho and Figueiredo, was the “permanent malaise of the thinking and administrative stratum facing a nation composed of what to them were aliens, virtual foreigners in the country,” resulting in elitist admonitions against “African barbarism” or the “illiteracy of the masses.”60 Entire disciplines, such as sociology, were imported whole cloth from abroad. Sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos had spoken of the “canned” character of the social sciences in Brazil, where forms of anthropology were “literally transplanted from European countries or from the United States,” constituting little more than “a rationalization or a distraction from colonial exploitation.”61 It was not Hanchard, therefore, who “first introduced alien ideas into the national intellectual panorama.” Bourdieu/Wacquant seem seduced, as Pinho and Figueiredo put it, “by a vision of Brazil and its racial relations that for many of us seems completely unacceptable.”62
Michael Hanchard, responding to his critics, stresses the transnational character of Afro-diasporic movements as drawing inspiration from a wide variety of Black Atlantic sources: the Haitian Revolution, Palmares and the quilombos, the Frente Negra, the Harlem Renaissance, the Francophone Négritude poets, African decolonization, and the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements. A nationalist-essentialist approach, for Hanchard, blinds us to the diasporic conditions that complicate superficial distinctions between imperialist and non-imperialist nation-states. The Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis leaves little room for ideological or political divisions within countries or points of convergence across national borders. The authors do not imagine the possibility of internal antistate movements, as exemplified by the black American activists who resisted both state-mandated social apartheid within the country and the imperialism carried out beyond its borders. Both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X condemned racism at home and imperialism abroad; indeed, they insisted on the intimate connection between the two phenomena. Bourdieu/Wacquant simplistically equate black American transnationalism with the foreign policy of the United States, apparently viewing multinational corporations, the U.S. government, liberal foundations, and the country’s dominated populations as virtually interchangeable. Their formulations, for Hanchard, assume stable and internally coherent self-contained national units, presided over by a state whose policies determine the national ideological disposition of all citizens. American intellectuals and activists simply encode the dominant imperial DNA of the United States, a view as absurd, Hanchard suggests, as claiming that Gobineau, Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Chirac, and Henri Lefebvre all instantiate a “French” mode of thinking. If nation-state affiliations determine ideology, Hanchard wonders, how did Bourdieu and Wacquant themselves escape from the prison-house of ideological domination?
Sociologist Sérgio Costa, meanwhile, questions the pertinence of “imperialism” to describe relations between intellectuals from the Global North and the Global South, since all societies feature a “postnational” aspect that “imperialism,” with its connotation of unilateral domination, fails to capture. The debate, Costa points out, has at times degenerated into a fight between the supposed defenders of “racial democracy” and those who call attention to racialized oppression. This discursive reduction, Costa writes, “transforms the academic debate into a (false) moral quarrel around the monopoly on the protection of the victims of social oppression, whether it is a matter of Brazilian racism or of American imperialism, and is useless in terms of buttressing the theoretical reflection about existing social problems and the political means for solving them.”63 Costa thus points to the tensions within and between the competing national vanities of white elites, when the goal, in his view, should not be to exalt any single country as model but rather to forge the analytical tools, and the political and institutional mechanisms, needed to fashion societies where epidermic appearances no longer wield the same horrific power that they have historically exercised.
In sum, the reception of the Bourdieu/Wacquant essay in Brazil points to a general problem in narrating intellectual exchange according to a unilateral cultural imperialism thesis. Historically, Brazilian intellectuals have not only exercised agency in these transnational exchanges; they have also been in the vanguard of those theorizing the asymmetries of cultural production and dissemination. The appropriation of French ideas by the Brazilian modernists, for example, was selective rather than servile. Some French ideas were tasted and then spit out, while others were chewed, transformed, and digested so as to nourish Brazilian multiculture. More than a provocative trope, “anthropophagy” was a theory of cultural exchange. Brazilian literary theory and literary history have developed innovative theories of dependency, translation, and transtextuality as seen within the context of postcolonial domination. For literary critic Antônio Cândido, a kind of obligatory cosmopolitanism makes Brazilian literary analysts fundamentally comparatist, aware of the congenital connection of Brazilian literature to other literary traditions such as the Portuguese, the French, and the Anglo-American, existing always in relation to cultural currents from outside that shaped a literature at once dependent on and distinct from the dominant outside literary currents.64
Bourdieu/Wacquant rightly foreground the asymmetries in the global distribution of intellectual labor but fail to historicize them, seeing the process only in its latest American imperialist incarnation. Within the “crossings” of literary production and ideas, Brazil, for example, has operated at a severe disadvantage. Within the colonial imaginary, Europe represented culture, and Brazil agriculture; Europe “refinement,” and Brazil sugar cane. In the international division of intellectual labor, Brazil was seen as a consumer, not a producer, of ideas, just as Brazil was a consumer of economic goods manufactured elsewhere. Brazil’s relatively disadvantaged geopolitical position, and in the colonial period the concrete lack of academic institutions and publishing houses, moreover, led not only to scant academic production but also to diminished power to disseminate existing production. But these imposed limitations did not mean that Brazil did not produce culture. Brazil was from the beginning staggeringly creative in generating new forms of popular and erudite culture, ranging from Africanized cuisine and Islamicized architecture to urbane literature and richly syncretic music. For centuries, the slaveholding elite’s aversion to work meant that most of the artisans, artists, and musicians in Brazil—for example, the baroque composers and sculptors in 18th-century Minas Gerais—were black or mestizo. Yet the dominant discourses stigmatized the black population—the only population that actually worked—as the cause of Brazil’s “backwardness.”
Modernist writer Mário de Andrade reflected on the processes of cultural discrimination that devalued the work of Brazilian artists, a question that came to the fore later in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of the “cultural dependency” debate. While “very optimistic about the creativity of our literature and other contemporary arts,” Andrade suggested that Brazilian texts would never win the applause they deserved due to factors having nothing to do with artistic merit. Some countries, he wrote, “weigh in with great force in the universal scale; their currency is valuable or pretends to be valuable, and their armies have the power to decide in the wars of the future…. The permanence of the arts of any given country in terms of the world’s attention exist in direct proportion to the political and economic power of the country in question.”65 Just as the prices of Brazil’s raw materials were once set in Europe or North America, whether in Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, or New York, so the value of Brazil’s cultural goods tended to be calibrated outside of Brazil, again in those very same world capitals.
The Bourdieu/Wacquant formulations about intellectual relations between France, Brazil, and the United States fail to take into account the fact that French and American intellectuals are jointly privileged vis-à-vis intellectuals in the Global South. Latin American academics in the humanities are likely to be familiar with both French and American scholarship, while French and American academics are much less likely to know the work of the Latin Americans. Brazilian intellectuals tend to read both the French (Deleuze, Rancière) and the Anglo-Americans (Jameson, Hall), while neither the Americans nor the French—with the exception of American and French “Brazilianists”—are likely to read Brazilians such as Antônio Cândido, Walnice Galvão, Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, Roberto Schwarz, Ismail Xavier, Sérgio Costa, and so forth. Bourdieu/Wacquant thus ignore the relatively empowered institutional status of French intellectuals vis-à-vis “the South.” The French language, while having lost its earlier powerful position, still enjoys a global prestige rooted in a network that supports the dissemination of French ideas. Our point is not that São Paulo or Buenos Aires should become the new capitals of the Republic of Letters. Rather than replace one metropolitan capital with another, the point is to decenter the production and dissemination of artistic/intellectual work, generating more egalitarian flows of cultural work including currents moving South-South and South-North.
Nation-state-based analyses, in sum, are inadequate to the multidirectional traffic of ideas. Loïc Wacquant’s essay concerning the reception of Bourdieu’s work in the United States, in this sense, can serve as a trampoline for our discussion of transnational intellectual interlocution.66 For Wacquant, the reception of any “foreign” oeuvre is mediated “by the structures of the national intellectual field,” resulting in “interferences” and “disjunctures” between the objective position of “the imported work in its native intellectual space” and the position of its international “consumers in the receiving academic space.” Wacquant speaks of “sending” and “receiving” intellectual universes and of the “schemata” and “prisms” that shape the reception of foreign intellectual products. Bourdieu’s theories, he laments, have been “judged through the very categories of thought that his theories aim at transcending.” The hegemonic status of American social sciences, he further argues, makes them less attentive and open to foreign intellectual currents than foreigners are to American ones. Ethnocentric U.S. social theorists, in sum, have gotten Bourdieu wrong due to ethnocentric “misinterpretations,” “misconstruals,” and “uncontrolled projections,” “splintered” and “fragmented” readings that miss the “main thrust” of Bourdieu’s endeavor.
Wacquant may be correct to point out that many U.S. social scientists have gotten Bourdieu wrong, and he is undoubtedly right to score the reactionary drift of dominant social theory in the United States. (Ever since C. Wright Mills, American leftists have criticized the exceptionalist “sociology of celebration.”) But if one looks at the broader academic spectrum of the humanities and the social sciences, the picture alters. There, American scholars are more likely to be reading the French writers than the reverse. The humanities, especially, form a bastion of Francophilia. American Ph.D. dissertations in the humanities proliferate in quasi-ritualistic homages to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Irigaray, and more recently Badiou and Rancière, or to French-inflected U.S.-located thinkers such as Spivak, Butler, and Bhabha, whereas the converse is hardly true in the humanities as taught in France. Laments about French victimization in this area therefore seem rather overstated.
Many of Wacquant’s claims about the misapprehension of Bourdieu in the United States boomerang so as to apply with equal force to his own projections about the decolonizing projects we have been addressing. Like Bourdieu’s “misinterpreters,” Bourdieu/Wacquant themselves judge those projects, to paraphrase Wacquant, through the very categories of thought these projects aim at transcending. Our purpose here, in any case, is to question Wacquant’s methodological choice of idiom and metaphors for treating the movement of ideas. Wacquant’s language of “senders” and “receivers” not only evokes archaic, precybernetic forms of technology but also the psychologistic premises of a Saussurean linguistics dismantled by Bakhtin already in the late 1920s and by Derrida in the mid-1960s. A Bakhtinian/Voloshinovian “translinguistic” approach would see such transnational intellectual encounters as historically shaped and socially situated forms of interlocution. In a back-and-forth process, both speaker and listener shape, and are shaped by, partially shared and partially differentiated fields of discourse, while being constrained by the “social tact” (Bakhtin) of power relations. The national utterance, to paraphrase Bakhtin, takes place on transnational territory. The process is also to some extent reciprocal, especially in situations of relative equality—for example, that obtaining between French and American intellectuals—in which both speaker and listener impact each other. (The process in relation to the mass media, in contrast, is extremely unequal, whence the calls for the French “cultural exception.”)
Wacquant’s dichotomous terms—sender/receiver, export/import, native/foreign, producer/consumer—draw overly bold lines between points of origin and points of reception within strongly demarcated national spaces. Yet it has been the implicit argument of this book that the globalized era of asymmetrical interdependencies requires a heightened sense of the (partially regulated) flow of ideas, of crisscrossing messages and multidirectional but still power-inflected channels of exchange, where nations and states are not necessarily coterminous. Wacquant’s economistic “import-export” language implies a trade with national winners and losers, and negative or positive “balances of trade.” But in the trade of ideas, one can “win” by “losing,” as when an “imported” theory turns out to be useful for the “importing” nation. Brazilian modernism did not lose by borrowing (and resignifying) the European avant-garde, just as United States and Brazilian academics do not “lose” by “importing” the various “post-” thinkers or, for that matter, by importing Bourdieu. In short, the flow of ideas, despite a material, even commercial, dimension, is not reducible to the logic of the ledger book.
Wacquant’s veristic and originary language, furthermore, sees only misinterpretations, mistranslations, and misconstruals rather than translinguistic reaccentuations and misprisions. Although translations can be accurate or inaccurate, they can also be seen as productive or unproductive, fecund or sterile. Wacquant writes as if the structuralist and poststructuralist move from verism and origin to intertextuality had never taken place. In his analysis, ideas are simply good or bad at their point of origin and then preserved or damaged during their transatlantic passage; they are never changed for the better during the journey. Reception in the United States, for him, is a veritable festival of misapprehensions; ideas sent from European ports are destined to a sad itinerary of degradation. French intellectuals “ship” off top-notch ideas at their point of departure, but this fragile cargo is mishandled when it arrives on American docks. Like ill-refrigerated cheeses, perfectly good French ideas “spoil” in other national climes. Europe alone, it seems, generates ideas; intellectuals in the Americas simply transcribe those ideas badly, in crooked lines. American intellectuals, in contrast, do not generate good ideas that then “go bad” on arrival in France. Rather, their ideas are already bad at their point of departure and therefore can only be barred at the border through intellectual protectionism. What Bourdieu/Wacquant implicitly call for, therefore, is not engagement with those ideas but rather a protective quarantine.
Within the Wacquant narrative, intellectuals such as Bourdieu “produce” knowledge, while Americans and Brazilians passively “consume” it. Ironically, Brazilian intellectuals and artists have been in the forefront of those dismantling this passive conception by demonstrating, in theory as well as practice, that dominated cultures can indigenize, transform, expropriate, cannibalize, and resignify “out-of-place ideas.” Within the processes of indigenization, even misapprehensions can be fecund, as is suggested by Oswald de Andrade’s ode to the “millionaire contribution of mistakes” or by Silviano Santiago’s praise of “fecund errors” and Caetano Veloso’s call for an “aesthetic of mistakes.”
An economic dependency model, in this sense, fails to grasp the complexity of the cultural field. In “On Anthropophagic Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture,” poet/critic Haroldo de Campos envisions modernist anthropophagy as a brilliant strategic move for thinking the national within a dialogical relation to the universal. Picking up on Oswald’s anthropophagic cues, Campos affirms the values of “appropriation, expropriation, dehierarchization, and deconstruction.”67 Brazilian culture, for Campos, adapts art to local times and places through a provocative transvalorization. Metropolitan ideas become “spiritual food” for renovation. Devoured, chewed, and digested, the texts from the center become a sustenance for what Eneida Maria de Souza calls a “multicultural feast” on the periphery.68 Roberto Schwarz remind us in his essay “The National by Subtraction” that in an era when virtually everyone claims to be marginal, the Derridean recuperation of the copy offers narcissistic satisfaction, since it makes the periphery not only equal but even superior in that it has always recognized itself as peripheral. Unlike the First World, the more modest Third World easily accepts the rejection of origins and is therefore better prepared for modernity and postmodernity. But while a salve for the anxieties of Third World intellectuals, this recuperation of the copy, for Schwarz, is not a sufficient defense for national culture.69
In an example of what Althusserian Marxists called “uneven development,” Bourdieu/Wacquant, who are incisive critics of neoliberal globalization, remain epistemologically Eurocentric in that they fail to make connections between Enlightenment philosophy and colonial practices in an earlier period and between coloniality and globalization in a later. In Acts of Resistance, Bourdieu argues eloquently for the preservation of welfare-state social entitlements, the results of “several centuries of intellectual and political battles for the dignity of workers.” Bourdieu then slides into a revealing analogy. Rightly mocking the neoliberals who call the protection of social entitlements “conservative,” he asks rhetorically, “Would anyone condemn as conservative the defense of the cultural achievements of humanity [such as] Kant or Hegel?”70 In fact, many critical intellectuals would indeed find Hegel and Kant conservative and even colonialist and racist. Oblivious to the more unseemly aspects of European philosophical traditions, Bourdieu does not take into account how Hegel might be perceived from the vantage point of the native peoples whose “expiration” Hegel celebrated as a triumph of “Spirit.” Denouncing false universalism while lauding one of its philosophical progenitors, Bourdieu scores the false universalism of globalizing doxa. (Bourdieu/Wacquant give as an example the “End of History” thesis of Fukuyama yet fail to note Fukuyama’s self-declared Hegelianism.)
While Kant’s and Hegel’s work does indeed represent a brilliant cultural achievement of humanity, there is little “humanity” in their portrayal of non-European peoples. Bourdieu slides easily, then, from defending hard-won social “entitlements” within Europe to endorsing philosophers who felt “entitled” to condemn most of humanity to irrelevance in the name of a self-evident European superiority. We are not of course suggesting that the work of such philosophers is reducible to racism or that there are no progressive dimensions to their work. Yet the less savory aspects of their work should not be cleaned up in the usual whitewashing operation. A more “relational” method, to adopt a word favored by both Bourdieu and ourselves, would see a connection between “entitlements” within Europe and the lack of such “entitlements” in the colonies and neocolonies of the West. A relational method would discern not only an intimate connection between the wealth of Europe (lato sensu) and the poverty of the colonized world but also that linking (1) the philosophers’ sense of “entitlement” to belittle non-European civilizations, (2) the historical entitlement of colonizers who appropriated non-European communal land in colonial times, and (3) the entitlement of the transnational corporations who patent indigenous knowledge under the pretext that the indigenous inhabitants hold no “title” to the land or its products.
Bourdieu’s critique of social privilege within the French educational system is clearly pertinent to other similarly stratified educational systems. For Bourdieu, cultural capital is the accumulation of prestige through education, class standing, family status, and ritualized initiations into the privileged standing by which value is socially produced. Disadvantaged through his social origins in the rural south of France; Bourdieu suffered the French version of what Richard Sennett has called the “hidden injuries of class.”71 In Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu speaks movingly of the ways that his “undistinguished” social background led to a “flagrant empathy for the [Algerian] natives.”72 Deploying analogy as a cognitive-affective instrument helped Bourdieu understand oppressive situations elsewhere. He perceives an analogy between his memories of the prestigious high school “leaders”—a kind of provincial micronobility—and the historical memory of the French nobility itself. Bourdieu evokes a variant of what we have called the “epistemological advantages” of those who observe the social scene from the “bottom”: “Perhaps in this case the fact of coming from ‘classes’ which some like to call ‘modest’ offers virtues which are not taught in manuals of methodology: a lack of any scorn for empirical minutia, the attention paid to humble objects, the refusal of thunderous ruptures and spectacular breaks.”73 If the social wounds of Bourdieu’s rural origins prodded him to see the hidden injuries of class, could not this same analogical capacity help expose the hidden (and not so hidden) injuries of race and gender? On a global scale, colonialist racism has produced a situation in which cultural and symbolic capital has unfairly accrued to one group and been unfairly subtracted from another group. Colonialism, slavery, racism, and neocolonialism, and their discursive corollary Eurocentrism, have deeply impacted the contemporary production and dissemination of knowledge. While addressing many different forms of capital—economic, social, cultural, and so forth—Bourdieu ignores the white “racial capital” inherited and passed on from generation to generation over the past centuries. A group of people has inherited advantages simply by, to paraphrase Beaumarchais, taking the trouble to be born—in this case to be born white.
In Race in Translation, we have conceptualized the circulation of the race/colonial debates in term of multiple chromatic Atlantics. We have tried to forge mutually haunting connections between three divergent yet historically linked colonial/national zones, in order to demonstrate the potentialities of cross-border illumination. At the same time, our tale reveals a partly phantasmatic encounter buffeted by various nationalisms, narcissisms, and exceptionalisms. The aversion to multicultural/critical race/postcolonial studies, we have argued, is sometimes premised on national paradigms, so that the rejection is triggered more by projective anxieties than by any in-depth engagement with the decolonizing corpus. What is forgotten is that ethno-national identity, as a partly imaginary construct, forms a case of shifting identifications rather than an ontological essence or fixed list of traits (the ontologi-nation); France is not eternally Cartesian, Brazil is not perpetually carnivalesque, and the United States is not unfailingly puritanical. Although nation-states exercise unequal political and economic power, intellectual work is still not reducible to a single ethos or to state-dictated ideology. A passport does not stamp a determinate national character on a person, a text, or a discourse. Nor do culture and knowledge production conform to tidy political boundaries or obey the mandates even of the most authoritarian regimes.
Monolithic conceptualizations of nationhood muffle the intellectual heteroglossia of cultural zones characterized by a multiplicity of social dialects, jargons, and ideologies. Since nation-states are defined not by single political models but rather by endless internal struggles over rival models, the intellectual arena is necessarily dissensual and internally differentiated. Nation-states are polyperspectival and multichronotopic, forming dissonant polyphonies of partially discordant voices. Instead of a “Clash of Civilizations,” we find, in Arjun Appadurai’s inversion, a “Civilization of Clashes.”74 Our argument with some leftist intellectuals has ultimately revolved not around anti-imperialist geopolitics, on which we are in agreement, but rather around the reductionist representation of complex intellectual fields.
Attempting to move beyond national-exceptionalist accounts and binary comparisons, our book has registered certain historical and discursive convergences. Much as comparatists have discerned a convergence between racial dynamics in the United States and Brazil, Tyler Stovall now speaks of a “convergence” between black life in France and in the United States.75 In the wake of the 2005 rebellions, it has become more difficult to deny the parallels and linkages between the racialized tensions in the diverse sites across the postcolonial Atlantic. Indeed, French, American, and Brazilian cities all display social fractures shaped by interwoven histories of coloniality and race. Fanon’s colonial “two cities” have morphed into the postcolonial divide between banlieue and city center in France, between ghetto and white suburb in the United States, and between favela and bairro nobre (elegant neighborhoods) in Brazil. Thus, the three zones, and the discourses about them, have increasingly come to echo each other in ways not reducible to “globalization” and “Americanization.” It is not a question of merely juxtaposing colonial/national histories within an additive approach, then, but rather of exploring their connectivities within a global system of intercolonial hegemonies and struggles. We have thus addressed national locations, but only in order to perform an analytical dislocation by constructing and deconstructing, threading and unraveling, the tangled webs of ideas and practices that constitute coimplicated national and regional formations.
We have proceeded from the assumption that all nations are, on one level, transnations, existing in a translational relationality of uneven interlocution. Rather than discuss intellectual works in terms of clear nation-state boundaries, we have highlighted the transnational interconnectedness of ideas. As intellectual work proliferates in borrowings, indigenizations, and adaptations, the coimplication of histories and geographies blurs the lines between “inside” and “outside.” A translinguistic view of “translation,” in this sense, challenges any idiom of “fidelity” and “betrayal” that would assume a one-to-one correspondence between an ethno-national culture and an intellectual field. Rather than conceive of adequate or inadequate copies of “original ideas,” translinguistics stresses dialogism, inter-locution, reinvoicing, and mediation. At the same time, these mediations do not escape the gravitational pull of history; they are produced and reshaped within specific geographies and political contexts. Each act of translation is situated, inevitably shadowed by the architectonics of inequality.
The movement of ideas, as we have seen, is multidirectional, with diverse points of entry and exit. As a plurilogue across multiple locations, the diverse critical race/coloniality projects have drawn on a range of discourses not reducible to a national origin, especially given the postcolonial dislocations of many of the intellectuals themselves. We have tried to track ideas in transit, pointing to their reaccentuation as they circulate through various zones in a back-and-forth that transcends an idiom of origin/copy, native/foreign, and export/import, within a narrative that foreground the in-between of languages and discourses.