Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies.A Review Essay

Abstract

Social scientists usually agree that it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive of the United States without invoking race. The same is often assumed of the Americas' second most populous nation, Brazil, albeit for different reasons. Throughout much of the twentieth century, debates about Brazil's apparent exceptionalism turned on claims about an ostensibly ambiguous blackwhite color line and assertions that its ideologies are somehow more mutable, more multifaceted, and hence less riven by descent-based and legallysanctioned distinctions than North American variants. In fact, the twentiethcentury construction of the Brazilian nation has drawn in critical ways on such idealized, often contradictory, engagements with mixtures that supposedly gird a hybrid brownness known as racial democracy. This seductive yet problematic story of a nation made modem through miscegenation has been popularized by a number of influential thinkers, most notably Gilberto Freyre, a Franz Boas-trained public intellectual and scion of a planter family. Freyre, as part of an elite response to European and North American denigrations of Brazil's mixed-race populace, argued famously in his