An introduction: the predicament of Brazilian culture

Abstract

‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth‐century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio‐historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil.