Mixed Race Studies

CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Northwestern University
Winter 2012

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies

In this seminar we will discuss how and why late 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction often represented a crisis in models of biological reproduction. We will investigate how anxieties regarding miscegenation and degeneration impacted this three-part pattern:

(1) the “family romance” in Latin America (and elsewhere); (2) the  so-called generative crisis in the turn of the century; (3) the homosocial, “horizontal” forms of association or affiliation that were evoked to compensate the crisis in the generative model. We will also consider the meanings of the term “generation” as a form of “affiliation” in multi-racial societies such as Brazil.

Although we will focus primarily on Brazilian fiction, the approach will be comparative (hemispheric and/or transatlantic), and final papers may focus on U.S., Latin American, European, African or other post-colonial literatures (primarily from the period 1850’s-1930’s).

Class Materials:

• José de Alencar (Iracema, 1865)
• Aluísio de Azevedo (O Mulato, 1881)
• Adolfo Caminha (O Bom Crioulo, 1895)
• Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, 1899)
• Lima Barreto (Clara dos Anjos, 1922)
• José Lins do Rego (Doidinho, 1933; Banguê, 1934)
• Graciliano Ramos (São Bernardo, 1934)
• Gilberto Freyre (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933)

ALL WORKS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

Secondary sources may include works by Doris Sommer, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago and Jacques Derrida.

Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Intstitute for Research on Women
IRW Distinguished Lecture Series 2011-12: (De)Generations: Reimagining Communities
Rutgers University
Thursday, 2012-04-12
(16:00 EDT reception; 16:30 EDT lecture)

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies
Northwestern University

Focusing on the cases of Brazil and the U.S., this presentation proposes to articulate the role played by gender representations in debates around miscegenation in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Generation, understood in its vertical, genealogical, reproductive aspect is one of the most contested issues in the late 19th century both in Brazil and the U.S., and it is always haunted by miscegenation and the threat of degeneration. This paper aims to understand how horizontal calls for the formation of a new generation (in the sense of brotherhood, nationality, contemporaneity and intellectual-literary communities) in the beginning of the 20th century struggles to resolve the pessimism associated with mixed-race subjects and communities.

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The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks—César Braga-Pinto
• Writing Brazilian Culture—Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
• Authority’s Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy—Helena Holgersson
• Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme —Valerie Kaussen
• Fanon as ‘Metrocolonial’ Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City—Nalini Natarajan
• From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre—Jossiana Arroyo
• Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity—Ramón Grosfoguel
• Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil—Luiza Franco Moreira
• Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead—Shreerekha Subramanian