White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity [Hardcover]

This book looks at the relationship of literary criticism to the social construction of race in Brazil. Isfahani-Hammond considers Gilberto Freyre's model of master/slave synthesis and examines what multiculturalism means after the turn of the century.Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction * Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima's White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective * White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre * Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas * From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist's Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

Isfahani-Hammond has made a very significant scholarly contribution to the vast and complex field of comparative racial discourse in the Americas. Riffing on Norman Mailer's notion of the 'White Negro,' she explores the interesting and troubling ways in which white patrician intellectuals have positioned themselves as uniquely endowed to speak about and for black people in post-plantation societies. While her focus is squarely on Brazil and its architects of national identity, like statesman Joaquim Nabuco, sociologist Gilberto Freyre, and poet Jorge de Lima, her scope is resolutely transnational, engaging texts and contexts from the English, French, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and from the southern US.

- Christopher Dunn, Associate Professor and Chair of Brazilian Literary and Cultural Studies, Tulane University

Brazilian literary discourses of mestizaje include a paradoxical and insidious convention: the claim that socially 'white' authors can best speak as 'black' Brazilians, because only they can claim to be disinterested and balanced in their representation of Afro-Brazilian life. White Negritude traces this discourse through its acme in Gilberto Freyre, the fountainhead of Brazilian racial ideology, to its consequences for socially 'black' authors as a bizarre Catch-22 that charges them tlӟ