Brazil Through Elimination or Ethnicity?

Abstract

ceptualized based on comparisons with metropolitan models, in which the positive aspects* are constituted by those models and the local is constructed as the negative aspects, or vice versa. By eliminating the bad, dangerous elements, only a pure and good national essence would remain. Literary critic Roberto Schwarz describes Brazilian thought on national identity as employing a similar process of elimination.1 As citizens of a former colony and underdeveloped country, each intellectual generation was traditionally more interested in the recent theoretical production of the metropoles than in that of the generations that preceded it in its own country. As they became conscious of the inadequacy of imported models, many intellectuals went to the opposite extreme of believing that it was sufficient to not reproduce the metropolitan tendency in order to attain a substantive intellectual life. They saw the recovery of genuine national culture as a reconquest, an expulsion of the invaders, and an elimination of what was not indigenous. The residue in this operation of subtracting would