coldhearted scientist وداد

(Honestly, I should just keep writing things up and stop over-censoring myself. I said that Louisiana participates in both U.S. and Latin American constructions of race and racial meaning.)

I said historical work on individual Creole women is important because literary representations are often a-historical. In Latin America the woman of mixed race has been used to symbolize national unity and cohesion; this apparently honorific use of the image of the woman of color in fact works to efface the actual histories of these women.

Spain colonized by homogenizing. As Piedra points out, you can look different if you join Spanishness; difference was not equal, though, and there are some 128 terms in Spanish ande Portuguese to describe different shades of brown and different types of racial mixtures.

At Independence and later, countries needed to unify and modernize; modern was white, but to unify you had to include the non-white, and whiteness somehow had to pass through blackness both to be white (think about this, does Ferreira da Silva explain this?) and to be Latin American.

I talked about Freyre and Vasconcelos, saying they claimed to resolve the problem but anything but the most cursory glance at their work, and about the mixed-race women they talk ab out, is that what they symbolize is not a [happy] “resolution of the race issue” but rather, deep ambivalences and fears about racial mixture and racial difference itself.

The idealized mixture is a whitening one that disappears Blackness. NOTE: that was what shocked me in Brazil, the idea people seemed to have that you had to be whitened in order to be modern and educated. This was starkly different from the civil rights discourse I was used to, where you could be Black and educated.

On mixed race people, A. de Azevedo said they were crafty and not to be trusted (see discussion in Gilliam’s piece); see Antonio Romano de Sant’Anna, also discussed in Gilliam, on the mulata as a “creature outside the realm of the marriageable, but nonetheless to be consumed/eaten.” This figure of the mulata is “the recurrent site of the pro-slavery, imaginary desire.”

See Sant’Anna on canibalismo amoroso: https://www.livros1.com.br/pdf-read/livar/CANIBALISMO-AMOROSO.pdf! I want to read this right now, today! See also R. Parker on how the mulata emerges as a representation of Brazil itself, embodying an entire ideology. Get this book: https://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/9780826516756/bodies-pleasures-and-passions/

So the man of color is scary, but the woman of color can be consumed and nationalized. This makes sense since it is through her body that whitening takes place; importantly, this whitening, considered so essential to “progress,” has to take place in illegitimate spaces. It needs to take place but not to be seen! The evidence needs to be destroyed, and attention needs to be diverted from the knowledge that behind each mulata stands a darker mother.

Latin America likes to say its “race situation” is not like that of the US, and US scholars often accept this. I and some other scholars, say the difference is not so great; as Monteleone points out, it’s not a set of differences by country but by area: plantation societies, countries with large Native American populations, etc., not a north/south division. The claim of a north/south division actually functions, furthermore, to hide realities: Latin America gets to say it is not racist, and the US gets to ignore the variety that exists in its non-European cultures. And as Monteleone also shows, there are a number of direct historical connections among constructions of race, as well as similarities among creolization processes, within the western hemisphere.

Mestizaje as “solution” is more of a myth than a reality, and to the extent that it is a reality it is an unstable one, since mestizaje is something you have to keep striving for and since it’s based on rape and whitening. Nunes (and some others) say it threatens fixed identity, so the “cosmic race” is not one. Also, “acceptable” miscegenation is based on whitening: it is tolerated if whiteness is one of the elements, and if it moves toward the erasure of darkness (and note that eugenics was important in Latin America).

Axé.