{"id":35267,"date":"2014-01-02T03:53:32","date_gmt":"2014-01-02T03:53:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=35267"},"modified":"2015-03-01T02:51:44","modified_gmt":"2015-03-01T02:51:44","slug":"whiter-shades-of-pale-%e2%80%9ccoloring-in%e2%80%9d-machado-de-assis-and-race-in-contemporary-brazil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=35267","title":{"rendered":"Whiter Shades of Pale: \u201cColoring In\u201d Machado de Assis and Race in Contemporary Brazil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whiter Shades of Pale: \u201cColoring In\u201d Machado de Assis and Race in Contemporary Brazil<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Latin American Research Review<\/a>
\nVolume 48, Number 3<\/a> (2013)
\npages 3-24
\nDOI: 10.1353\/lar.2013.0046<\/a><\/p>\n

Alex Flynn<\/a><\/strong>, Lecturer in Anthropology
\nDurham University, Durham, United Kingdom<\/em><\/p>\n

Elena Calvo-Gonz\u00e1lez<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Anthropology
\nUniversidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil<\/em><\/p>\n

Marcelo Mendes de Souza<\/a><\/strong>
\nDepartment of Comparative Literature
\nUniversity of Auckland<\/em><\/p>\n

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy<\/a> (<\/em>democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be \u201cwhite.\u201d In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking a fresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine <\/em>Machado de Assis<\/em><\/a> and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story \u201cPai contra m\u00e3e,\u201d and indeed comments on the author\u2019s very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fixed. Placing a close reading of Machado\u2019s text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fixed and naturalized given.<\/em><\/p>\n

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial<\/em>) is subjected to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. In a public sphere where certain \u2018\u201ctypes of mixture\u2019 are clearly preferred to the detriment of others\u201d (Pinho 2009), what can be understood as whiteness has an obvious and tangible importance, with various signifiers having varying levels of meaning. The texture of hair, the shape of facial features, even certain embodied notions of interaction can connote discrete positions on a racialized hierarchy. As Pinho (2009, 40) states, following the tradition of 1950s anthropologists such as Oracy Nogueira (1998) or Donald Pierson (1971), skin color is perhaps only the beginning of someone\u2019s subjective judgment: \u201cOne\u2019s \u2018measure of whiteness,\u2019 therefore, is not defined only by skin color; it requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.\u201d<\/p>\n

These judgments take place within a wider historical discourse that has promoted the \u201cwhitening<\/a>\u201d of Brazil as a country and race. D\u00e1vila (2003) describes how from the turn of the nineteenth century, state actors in Brazil implemented policies that had at their heart a belief in whiteness as a naturalized state identified with strength, health, and virtue. This racial category was gradually shaped in opposition to \u201cblackness,\u201d a status that carried an explicit cargo of laziness, primitive and childlike nature, and an inherently antimodern gaze to the past. D\u00e1vila outlines how state actors believed that the nation could be \u201cwhitened\u201d by educating people out of a black identity and leading them toward a white set of behaviors and morals. In this way, race was not a biological fact, it was rather a metaphor for the imagining of Brazil\u2019s modernist trajectory; race was a malleable tool with which to better the future. Thus, the racial mixing of Brazilian society was a deterministic process toward securing a brighter, \u201cwhiter\u201d future, one where blackness and its degeneracy could be cast aside and social ascension would guarantee a more productive population.<\/strong> D\u00e1vila (2003, 6) states that in the 1930s, \u201cwhite Brazilians could safely celebrate race mixture because they saw it as an inevitable step in the nation\u2019s evolution.\u201d But it is important to note here that the supposedly realizable goal at the end of this process was essentially being cast as a naturalized category. There were no searching questions as to exactly what whiteness represented on this hierarchical trajectory; the definition was based upon a certain Europeanness and was whatever blackness or\u00a0 indigenousness was not. As D\u00e1vila (2003, 7) states, \u201cwhiteness\u201d was defined through both \u201cpositive and negative affirmation,\u201d becoming a sedimented and fixed category without any internalized processes of self-reflection.<\/p>\n

Despite this historical lack of analysis, recent state interventions have prompted a more quotidian interest into questions of whiteness in Brazil. Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Vale Silva\u2019s groundbreaking research in the 1970s had already demonstrated the disparities linked to race in socioeconomic indicators between self=-classified \u201cwhites\u201d and \u201cbrowns\/blacks,\u201d with the latter grouped together due to the similarity of results when compared to the \u201cwhite\u201d group. Such work helped to destabilize the myth of racial democracy, as well as the \u201cmulatto escape hatch<\/a>\u201d thesis, the idea that the space ceded to people of mixed race in Brazil allowed some to escape the \u201cdisabilities of blackness\u201d (Degler 1971, 178). However, the recent introduction of racial quotas at federal and state universities has brought into sharp relief how binary manners of self-identification can have a profound influence on one\u2019s social trajectory, or as Vron Ware (2004, 38) describes it, \u201cthe relationship between social and symbolic power.\u201d With an expanding middle class and growing competition for places, university places reserved for those who do not identify as white has brought into the open questions and prejudices that many people might have perhaps preferred to remain opaque. The debates around the implementation of affirmative action policies have brought into sharp focus the serious issues that a bureaucratic reconfiguration of racial categories implies, given that the category \u201cblack\u201d subsumed those that self-declared as mixed race. At the center of these debates is the question of what it is to be black and, discussed much less, what it is to be white, a subject that has acquired all the more significance with the recent publication of census data demonstrating that for the first time since records began, those that self-identify as white are in a minority (47.7 percent) in Brazil (Phillips 2011). In this article we will build upon recent literature on whiteness as well as more classical work on race and race relations to reinforce the idea that, rather than being a fixed category, whiteness is in fact a volatile and nuanced construction continually subject to social reinterpretations as well as state-determined reconfiguration…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whiter Shades of Pale: \u201cColoring In\u201d Machado de Assis and Race in Contemporary Brazil Latin American Research Review Volume 48, Number 3 (2013) pages 3-24 DOI: 10.1353\/lar.2013.0046 Alex Flynn, Lecturer in Anthropology Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom Elena Calvo-Gonz\u00e1lez, Professor of Anthropology Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil Marcelo Mendes de Souza Department of Comparative Literature […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,83,21,1196,8],"tags":[16687,16688,3781,11583,8304,16689],"class_list":["post-35267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-alex-flynn","tag-elena-calvo-gonzalez","tag-joaquim-maria-machado-de-assis","tag-latin-american-research-review","tag-machado-de-assis","tag-marcelo-mendes-de-souza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}