White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity (New Concepts in Latino American Cultures)

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or "mixing") in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre's sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African "survivals" in decline. Taking Freyre's master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean "mestizo projects."