Syncretism as a Form of Multicultural Politics: The Interlocation of African-Latin-American Identities in Brazil

Abstract

Starting with Hegel's definition of a ‘struggle for recognition’ in his ‘dialectics of master and slave,’ this article shows that contemporary Anglo-American theories of multiculturalism follow Hegel without realizing that African slavery was his implicit point of departure. Similarly, defenders of multiculturalism in Latin America claim that hybridity, mestizaje, miscegenation, and syncretism are good models for a different kind of multiculturalism, but forget that these terms reflect a long history of assimilatory policies such as ‘racial democracy’ in Brazil. On the basis of a critical reconstruction of syncretic multiculturalism in Brazilian history and the analysis of examples of Afro-Brazilian resistance to assimilation, it is argued that the identification of different locations of the Afro-Brazilian struggle for recognition can help us move beyond syncretic multiculturalism towards a non-reductionist interlocation of plural cultures and identities in the Americas.