[In the following essay, Nunes contends that most Brazilian literature is deeply concerned with the definition of a national identity.]

                    Pouca saúde e muita saúva
                    Os males do Brasil sao.

With fewer ants and better health Brazil will lead the world in wealth.

(Mario de Andrade, Macunaíma)¹

The question, ‘What is Brazil(ian)?’, has informed much of Brazilian writing, be it political, sociological or historical. For literary critics and theorists, however, defining this identity has become, according to the critic Angel Rama, a patriotic mission, making out of literature the appropriate instrument for forging a national identity (Rama 1982, p. 13). Literature, then, is central not only to the reflection but also to the formation of a national identity. Most nationalisms base themselves on a return to a pure, homogeneous origin involving the repression of all that troubles the integrity and purity of that origin. This logic, which informed Brazil's discourse on race up to the beginning of the twentieth century and which also inhered in the quest to come up with a fixed identity, was threatened by the reality of miscegenation. I maintain that much of Brazilian literature relating to the question of national identity is an attempt to resolve the ‘problem’ of miscegenation.

During the course of the slave trade, Brazil received 37 per cent of the total number of Africans brought by force to the Americas (as compared to North America's 5 per cent (Curtin 1969). By the mid nineteenth century, according to Emilia Viotti da Costa, the population of Brazil consisted of 1,347,000 whites and 3,993,000 blacks and mulattos (da Costa 1989). Throughout the nineteenth century, debate centred on the necessity of creating the conditions which would allow Brazil to emerge not only as a nation but also as a participant in the movement of modernisation, progress and development taking place in Europe and the United States (see Barman 1988). After the abolition of slavery in 1888 did away with an institution that many abolitionists argued was an impediment to integration with the west, the increasing popularity of theories of biological and social determinism appeared to confirm the elite's anxiety about the inherent inferiority of the nation's largely black and mulatto population. The question became one of citizenship and the creation of a national myth. Any notion of a universal (white) subject became difficult to sustain; blacks, no longer Africans but subjects of the republic of Brazil (established in 1889), were perceived to be threats to stability of the ‘self’, the family and the nation (as for example in de Alencar's play, O demónio familiar) by an elite anxious to reproduce itself as ‘Brazilian’.

Euclides da Cunha expressed this anxiety very clearly in Os sertoes, a book widely acknowledged to be one of the masterpieces of Brazilian letters. Early in the book, which chronicles the battle between government troops and followers of a charismatic leader in the interior of the north-east of Brazil, da Cunha inserts a chapter entitled ‘An irritating parenthesis’. The mixture of races is harmful, he claims, because the resulting brief individual existence undermines centuries of natural selection and consolidation of a race. Mestizos are by nature unstable and incapable of reproducing themselves as they are, but only as approximations of one or the other of the component races. In da Cunha's conception, Brazil cannot claim a unity of race and, therefore, violates what he calls natural laws—instead of the nation originating from a race (as in the guiding myths of Europe), the nation must be constructed as a unity in order to allow the formation of what da Cunha calls a historic race (da Cunha 1966, pp. 166-8; Leite 1983). In this formulation the nation is a narrative of becoming fraught with ambivalence, and race a construct always in danger of coming undone (see Bhabha, ed. 1990). As will become clear, there is conflict between the elite's desire to reproduce itself within a context of a modern notion of the nation based on citizenship (where whites could continue to dominate) and the necessity of creating a unity based on a concept of mixture. The conflict was addressed through the elaboration of a myth of racial democracy.

It has become almost a cliché to call attention to the possibility of separating ‘race’ from ‘biology’ structured into Brazilian thinking on this issue. I am referring here to a Brazilian habit of claiming that race is not defined solely, if at all, in terms of biology. This tenet of racial democracy could appear to lend support to recent theoretical debates which rightly reveal race as a construct (see Degler 1971). Many have been misled, however, into thinking that Brazil has achieved a deconstruction of race; the irony is that race is being disavowed in the interest of protecting and ensuring the continuation of a highly racialised system. Paul Gilroy reminds us that while races ‘are not simple expressions of … biological and cultural sameness’, ‘the brain-teasing perplexities of theorising about race cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that the play of difference in which racial taxonomy appears has extra-discursive referents’ (Gilroy 1990, p. 264). In Brazil the very appearance of a deconstruction of race has permitted the obscuring of the fact that the statistical gap between whites and ‘browns’ (pardos) in terms of infant mortality, life expectancy and household income is consistently wide, while the statistical gap between ‘browns’ and blacks is consistently narrow (see Wood and de Carvalho 1988).

The issues which occupied the attention of politicians and intellectuals during the early decades of the republic continue to engage Brazilians. This is clear from debates that took place in 1989 during the campaign preceding the first direct presidential election in three decades. Soon after the election of Fernando Collor, the Folha de São Paulo one of Brazil's most prestigious newspapers, published a response by a widely known journalist to a complaint of racism received from a reader. In an earlier article, the journalist had described the new president as ‘tall, handsome, white—white in the western mould’. The journalist defended himself against the charge of racism by claiming that in attaching a value to Collor's whiteness, he does nothing different from the vast majority of Brazilians² and that if this is sick, there are not enough doctors in Brazil to provide treatment. He writes that people of colour are as ‘palatable’ to him as any other but to consider Brazil a Third World country and to seek to forge links with Africa (as the other candidate, Luis Ignacio da Silva, had proposed) would require that ‘we [Brazilians] turn away from our cultural heritage which is the West … [and] the United States’ (Francis 1990, p. E-10).

In addition to demonstrating the continuity of a concern with defining a Brazilian identity particularly in relation to the rest of the world and with defining the representative Brazilian, this chapter calls attention to a metaphorics of the body which is a constant in discussions of race in Brazil and which has its roots in the modernist movement of the 1920s.

It would be impossible to overstate the impact of the modernist movement or its importance as a point of reference for subsequent generations. The Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) of 1922 is generally acknowledged to be the inaugural event of the modernist movement, an event that one of the organisers called ‘o primeiro sintoma espiritual da transmutaçao de nossa consciência’ (‘the first intellectual symptom of the transformation of our consciousness’) (Menotti del Picchia, cited in Pécault 1990, p. 27). Of the many events leading up to the Semana de Arte Moderna, one of the most important was a 1917 exhibition of art by the Brazilian painter, Anita Malfatti, who had just returned from a trip to Europe and the United States where she had been influenced by cubist and expressionist aesthetics and techniques. The exhibition drew together the writers, artists, journalists and scholars who would organise the Semana de Arte Moderna.

From 11 to 18 February 1922, the Municipal Theatre in São Paulo was the site of art exhibitions, dance and music performances, lectures and readings which explored or staged various aspects of modernism. The event launched a movement which proclaimed a rupture or a break with the past in order to subvert what were considered bourgeois methods of artistic expression. The modernists allied themselves with European vanguard movements such as surrealism and futurism. The writers published newspapers, journals and manifestos in addition to works of fiction, poetry and ethnography.

Although the speakers and performers were roundly jeered and heckled by the crowd that filled the theatre, a contemporary observer of the events noted that the Semana de Arte Moderna had been financed by many of São Paulo's most established business and social figures and supported by the Correio Paulistano, an organ of the governing PRP (Partido Republicano Paulista—Republican Party of São Paulo) party with the consent of Washington Luis, the republic's president (da Silva Brito 1970, p. 455).³

The decade of the 1920s in Brazil was marked by intense cultural and political unrest. The prevailing view is that during this decade the new generation of Brazilian artists who formed the modernist movement caused a profound intellectual upheaval by giving national values and themes precedence over foreign values and themes. One of the most prominent ideas to draw the fire of the modernists was that concerning the role and contribution of blacks to Brazilian society. By the 1930s a parallel socio-anthropological literature had appeared which emphasised (in ways that were paradoxical) that blacks were an integral element in Brazilian society as a result of their significant contributions to Brazil's history and development.

The most vibrant personality associated with this new school was Gilberto Freyre, who had returned to Brazil in 1925 after studying at Columbia with the anthropologist Franz Boas. Many Brazilians, as well as Americans and Europeans, have accepted as valid Freyre's luso-tropical assertions of racial tolerance.⁴ Many scholars, however, have criticised Gilberto Freyre for dwelling on inter-racial liaisons while masking the basic economic and political realities of racial exploitation and oppression.

In an introduction to The masters and the slaves (Casa grande e senzala), a book that has greatly influenced the question of race and identity in Brazil, Freyre states that he based the method for his sociological—anthropological work on methods developed by Pablo Picasso in the realm of art, an approach which linked him (despite avowed differences) to the modernists in São Paulo. In addition, Freyre, like the paulista modernists, takes up the issues which had preoccupied Euclides da Cunha, particularly those related to perceived threats to Brazil's modernity.

In Casa grande e senzala, Freyre writes that there existed in the north-east a superstition that the blood of blacks (rather than the usual whale oil) mixed into the mortar would increase the strength of the foundation. It was rumoured that a plantation owner, anxious to guarantee the perpetuity of his domain, ordered that two blacks be killed and buried in the foundation of the Big House.

The irony, however, is that for lack of human potential this arrogant solidity of form and material was often useless: by the third or fourth generation, huge houses built to last centuries began to crumble, decayed by abandonment and lack of conservation [and] the inability of the great-grandchildren to save the ancestral heritage.

After recounting this anecdote which demonstrates how Brazil's foundation degenerates when the blood of Africans is (literally) mixed in, Freyre addresses the ‘problem’ of miscegenation. He states in the introduction that:

It was as if everything was dependent upon me and those of my generation, upon the manner in which we succeeded in solving age-old questions. And of all the problems confronting Brazil, there was none that gave me so much anxiety as that of miscegenation.

(1946, p. xx)

Freyre continues:

Once upon a time, after three straight years of absence from my country, I caught sight of a group of Brazilian seamen—mulattoes and cafusos—crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. I no longer remember if they were from São Paulo or from Minas, but they impressed me as being caricatures of men, and there came to mind a phrase from a book on Brazil by an American traveller: ‘The fearful mongrel aspect of most of the population.’ That was the sort of thing to which miscegenation led. I ought to have had someone to tell me then what Roquette-Pinto had told the Aryanizers of the Brazilian Eugenics Congress in 1929: that these individuals whom I looked upon as representatives of Brazil were not simply mulattoes or cafusos but sickly ones.

(pp. xx-xxi)

The discourse on race and miscegenation in Brazil is tied to a metaphorics of the body and an economy of eating, incorporation and sickness. The body politic has a sickness that it must rid itself of. The ‘problem’ with miscegenation is not miscegenation in and of itself, but with miscegenation as the perpetuation of a sickness. In this assessment blacks maintain the status of a foreign body. A healthy body is one which overcomes the weakening effects of an offending organism. Freyre's project of defining the relation of race to identity is grounded in this discourse:

Having considered these points [the ethnic groups to which Africans belong, physical characteristics, relative intelligence, etc.] which appear to me to be of basic importance in studying the African influence on Brazilian culture, character and eugenics, I now feel more inclined to undertake the task of discovering the more intimate aspects of this contagious influence.

(p. 321)

The strategy for overcoming the contagious influence was so widely disseminated that even Roosevelt could summarise it: ‘In Brazil … the idea looked forward to is the disappearance of the Negro question through the disappearance of the Negro himself—that is through his gradual absorption into the white race’ (cited in Skidmore 1974, p. 68). Faced with the threat of miscegenation to the superiority of whites, Freyre transforms miscegenation into a narrative of assimilation. Of course, the absurdity of this formulation cannot be overemphasised given Brazil's population.

Freyre was certainly not the only scholar to link the notions of race, health and nation. Wilson Martins discusses at length how the athletics and robust health so important to writers such as Graca Aranha and Marinetti ‘were themes directly and consciously connected with a concern for hygiene, public and private, and the problems of national defense’ (Martins 1970, p. 90). Others who discussed the ‘disadvantages’ of miscegenation in these terms were Silvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha and Paulo Prado, whom Wilson Martins calls ‘a physician or a surgeon who wishes to effect a cure’ (p. 90). In Retrato do Brasil, Prado writes:

The Brazilian mulatto has undoubtedly furnished notable examples of intelligence, breeding and moral value to the community. On the other hand, this population shows such physical weakness, such organisms which cannot defend against disease and vices, that it is natural to ask if this state of things isn't the result of the intense crossing of races and subraces … In Brazil, if there is harm in this, it has been done, irremediably. We wait in the slowness of the cosmic process for the uncoding of this enigma with the patience of laboratory researchers.

(1931, pp. 196-7)

Prado adds in a footnote to this passage that already in the fifteenth century the mixing of European, American and African races had produced new sicknesses which proved to be veritable enigmas to doctors.

It is to Paulo Prado that Mario de Andrade, folklorist, poet and theorist of the modernist movement dedicates Macunaíma (1928), widely regarded as one of the comic masterpieces of Brazilian literature. Mario de Andrade said that one of his interests in Macunaíma was to deregionalise his creation while trying to ‘conceive Brazil literarily as a homogeneous entity’ (cited by de Hollanda 1978, p. 100). The modernists searched for a way to ‘Brazilianise’ Brazil. For them, however, this ‘Brazilianising’ was to be accomplished through artistic and literary efforts of which the aesthetics and techniques were almost entirely drawn from those of contemporary Europe. Let us remember that the cubists had already discovered the value of incorporating Africa.

The modernists' method was outlined by Oswald be Andrade in O manifesto pau Brasil (The brazilwood manifesto) and O manifesto antropófago (The cannibalist manifesto). This method consists of swallowing and absorbing what is useful in a culture and excreting what is not useful. The supposed cannibalism of the indigenous population served as a model for a different cultural relationship between Brazil and the outside world (defined largely as Europe)—a relationship where foreign influences would not be copied but digested and absorbed as a precondition to the creation of a new, more independent national civilisation. Macunaíma is one practice of the modernist project which has been upheld as a celebration of Brazil's ‘indigenous past’. In fact, as we shall see, the indigenous past is merely a repository of possible paradigms and Macunaíma is localised in a metaphorics of the body where eating, incorporation and disease are foregrounded.

The story or ‘rapsódia’, to use Mario de Andrade's term, traces Macunaíma's origins in the Amazonian forest, his trip to São Paulo, and his return to the forest before ascending into the heavens to become the Big Dipper. In his letters and in the introductions to Macunaíma, Mario de Andrade describes how Macunaíma was composed mainly of found texts which he then exaggerated. In the Epilogue we learn how Macunaíma's story comes to be told:

There in the foliage the man discovered a green parrot with a golden beak looking at him. He said, ‘Come down, parrot, come down!’

The parrot came down and perched on the man's head, and the two went along together. The parrot started to talk in a gentle tongue, something new, completely new! Some of it was song, some like cassiri sweetened with honey, some of it had the lovely fickle flavor of unknown forest fruits.

The vanished tribe, the family turned into ghosts, the tumbledown hut undermined by termites, Macunaíma's ascent to heaven, how the parrots and macaws formed a canopy in the far-off times when the hero was the Great Emperor, Macunaíma: in the silence of Uraricoera only the parrot had rescued from oblivion those happenings and the language which had disappeared. Only the parrot had preserved in that vast silence the words and deeds of the hero.

All this he related to the man, then spread his wings and set his course for Lisbon. And that man, dear reader, was myself, and I stayed on to tell you this story.

(de Andrade 1984, p. 168)

Interestingly enough, this parrot is not a Brazilian parrot but a German one. Mario de Andrade came to his story of ‘Brazil's indigenous past’ and Brazil's hero via Europe.

He is very clear about his debt to Koch-Grunberg, a German anthropologist who travelled throughout Brazil between 1911 and 1913. Andrade relied particularly on volume II of Von Roroima zum Orinoco which contained the myths and legends of the Taulipang and Arekuna people. According to Mario de Andrade, the debt was not only one of inspiration but also of whole passages: ‘I confess that I copied, sometimes word for word’ (cited in Filho 1986, Introduction).

The name Macunaíma (Makunaima) was taken from Koch-Grunberg. According to Koch-Grunberg, Makunaima's name is made up of two words which join to mean the ‘Great Evil’ (maku = evil, ima = great) (1981). In the collection of myths and legends related to Koch-Grunberg, Makunaima is the hero of the tribe and the creator of the Taulipang people. He is the youngest of five brothers, two of whom, Ma'nape and Zigue, appear most often with Makunaima but not at the same time.

The birth of Makunaima is not described in Koch-Grunberg's collection. In Mario de Andrade's book, Macunaíma is born in the middle of the forest to an old woman of the Tapanhuma tribe. In the text it is claimed that the name of the tribe signifies ‘black’. It is significant that Mario did not take the name of Makunaima's people offered by Koch-Grunberg, preferring instead to find the name of another tribe which, correctly or incorrectly, signifies black. Macunaíma, unlike Koch-Grunberg's Makunaima, ‘was an oddity, his skin black as calcined ivory’ (de Andrade 1984, p. 3). As a result of an encounter with an animal/spirit in the forest, Macunaíma grows a man's body but keeps his head of a child. Other important manipulations of the sources are, then, that Makunaima becomes black, ugly, lazy and an adult with a child's head.

After the death of their mother, the three brothers travel through the forest. They meet Ci, Mae do Mato, whom Macunaíma rapes with the help of his brothers. Macunaima and Ci have a child, the only child of the interracial relations of the book. Ci has one shrivelled breast, a sign that she belongs to the tribe of the mulheres sozinhas (solitary women). A Cobra Preta (the Black Snake) bites Ci's other breast, and her child is poisoned while nursing. In a letter to Manuel Bandeira, Mario claims that he chose the colour black for the snake by chance as he very easily could have closen the colour green. The choice hardly seems a coincidence given that Mario adheres closely to superstitions associated with the colour black. Manaape and Jiguê, for example, become sick with leprosy and die. Under their contagious influence, Macunaíma becomes sick but overcomes the disease by passing it to a mosquito, the seventh creature he bit. This is linked to a folk belief that a leper can be cured after biting seven children (Proença 1987, p. 224).

I began this paper with an epigram from Macunaíma. The sickness described in this couplet was associated with miscegenation at the time of the publication of Macunaíma (1928). Macunaíma's and Ci's child, Macunaíma's two brothers, Jiguê and Manaape, become sick and die. By the last third of the book, every black person, person of mixed race and indigenous person has become sick and/or died. Their illnesses must be seen in the context of the couplet that Macunaíma repeats throughout the book: ‘Pouca saúde e muita saúva, os males do Brazil sao.’

For all the celebration of racial mixing that the cannibalist approach to writing implies, and contrary to the usual readings of Macunaíma, there is no racial mixture in this book. The three brothers are of three separate races.

The heat of the Sun had covered the three brothers with a scum of sweat, and Macunaíma was thinking of taking a bath … Just then Macunaíma caught sight of an islet right in the middle of the stream in which there was a hollow the shape of a giant's footprint, full of water. They landed there. The hero, squealing because the water was so cold, washed himself all over. But this water was magic water, for the hollow was St Thomas' footprint, a relic from the time when he went around preaching and bringing the teachings of Jesus to the Indians of Brazil. When the hero had finished his bath he was white-skinned, blue-eyed and fair-haired; the holy water had washed away all his blackness; there was nothing left to show in any way that he was a son of the black tribe of Tapanhumas.

As soon as Jiguê saw this miracle he sprang into St Thomas' footprint. But by this time the water was very dirty from the hero's ivory blackness, so although Jiguê mopped himself like mad, splashing the water in all directions, he was left the color of freshly minted bronze. Macunaíma was bothered by this and to comfort him said, ‘Look, brother Jiguê, you didn't become white, but at least the blackness has gone away. Half a loaf is better than no bread!’

Then Manaape went to wash, but Jiguê had splashed all the water out of the pool. There was only a cupful left at the bottom, so that Maanape could wet only the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. That's why he remained black like a good son of the Tapanhuma tribe with only the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet pink after their washing in holy water. This grieved Macunaíma, who consoled him by saying, ‘Don't be vexed, brother Manaape, don't let it get you down! Worse things happen at sea!’

The three brothers made a superb picture standing erect and naked on the rock in the sun; one fair, one red-skinned, one black …

(pp. 31-2)

In Legend 5, Koch-Grunberg relates how Makunaima created human beings but makes no allusion to race. Boddam-Whetham, however, records the following origin of races myth:

The Caribs in their account of creation say that the Great Spirit sat on a mora tree, and picking off pieces of the bark threw them in a stream and they became different animals. Then the Great Spirit—Makanaima—made a large mold and out of this fresh clean clay, the white man stepped. After it got a little dirty the Indian was formed, and the Spirit being called away on business for a long period the mold became black and unclean, and out of it walked the negro.

(Boddam-Whetham 1879, p. 172)

J. R. Swanton records two other variants which follow the same pattern (white, Indian, black). He records a third variant where the hierarchy is Indian, white, black (Swanton 1929, p. 75). All of the Indian tales begin with white people who are transformed into people of other races. In Mario's version, however, all the brothers are black before the bath. Once again Mario turned away from his Indianist sources on a point having to do with race in order to produce an account consistent with Brazilian thinking.

Also important is the fact that Mario makes Macunaíma's enemy, the giant cannibal Piama, an Italian immigrant. During the period in which Macunaíma was written, the Brazilian government had a policy of encouraging immigration from European countries in order to speed up the process of embranqueamento (whitening). In 1921, the statesmen Fidelis Reis and Cincinato Braga drafted legislation to halt the immigation of non-whites in order to protect the ethnic (read racial) formation of the nation which had already suffered from the introduction of blacks. This project had the support of the National Academy of Medicine. (Reis 1931; the document from the Academia Nacional de Medicina is appended to the book).

In her book Macunaíma: Ruptura e tradiçao Suzana Camargo maintains that Rabelais' Gargantua is an intertext of Macunaíma. Using Bakhtin as a theoretical base, she analyses the relationship of Gargantua and Macunaíma to each other and to the body (Camargo 1977).

One aspect that Macunaíma and Gargantua share is that the grotesque body and eating are inscribed in both narratives. According to Bakhtin, ‘the most distinctive character of the [grotesque] body is its open, unfinished nature, most fully revealed in the act of eating where the body transgresses its limits’.

The encounter of the man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes world, introduces it into his own body, makes it part of himself. … Man's encounter with the world in the act of eating is joyful, triumphant; he triumphs over the world, devours it without being devoured himself. The limits between man and the world are erased, to man's advantage.

(Bakhtin 1968, p. 281)

If this incorporation works to man's advantage, it does not work to the advantage of all men—or women. What is seen as liberatory or subversive in Bakhtin becomes suspect, even oppressive, when race or indeed gender are factored in. The question becomes: ‘Quem come quem’ (‘who eats whom’)? It is important to note that the mulata plays a very significant role in the linking of race and nation, for it is through her body that embranqueamento takes place. In other words, ‘o branco comeu a mulata’ (‘the white man ate the mulata’—in Brazilian slang comer (eat) means to have sexual intercourse); the couple is rarely a white woman and a black man. One implication of this is that the patrimony is European. Much is made in sociological literature of the father giving his name, education, historical and genealogical continuity to his children. This is in contrast with blacks in general and mulatas in particular who are identified with nature, sensuality and lack of family ties. The following citation from an essay by Gilberto Freyre is only one example among many of this:

in the Orient, in Africa, in America, his [the Portugese] vigorous male body is multiplied in red, yellow and brown bodies; in new colors and new shapes of the human form, and these bodies communicate the qualities of the Portuguese or the Christian soul … The African, Asian and Amerindian mothers also are rendered Portuguese [aportuguesadas] by him most often in their souls and even, to a certain point, in the way they dress, adorn themselves and care for their bodies. This is reflected in the arts and literature of these people who through the Portuguese are in this way integrated into European civilization.

(Freyre 1987, p. 239)

It should be noted that Macunaíma engages in his anthropophagist activities after having been miraculously transformed into a white man, and that the giant cannibal Piama is white.

According to Suzana Camargo, the theme of anthropophagy and its images of ingestion and absorption that so occupied Rabelais were taken up by Mario de Andrade to support the modernist maxim. Just as Rabelais manipulated Les grandes croniques simply to structure his story, Mario de Andrade manipulated the Indian legend (Camargo 1977, p. 100) Once again the African and the Indian have been incorporated into a (digestive) system. It appears that blacks and indigenous peoples are exploited for their transgressive shock value which derives from the modernists' ideas about the ‘primitivism’ of Africans and indigenous peoples. What is useful is extracted and the rest is excreted.

Although the philosophical trappings of anthropophagism would seem to imply a political vision of a democratic society, this is not the case. In fact, blacks have not been equal participants in a Brazilian ‘mixture’. This is not the result of vulgar or individual prejudice; it lies at the heart of a notion of citizenship and is an enabling condition of a construction of a national identity. In the anthropophagist model, however, we discover that assimilation is unthinkable without the excretion. The law of assimilation is that there must always be a remainder, a residue—something (someone) that has resisted or escaped incorporation, even when the nation produces narratives of racial democracy to mask this tradition of resistance.

Notes

1. A more literal translation would be ‘Little (or poor) health and many ants / are the problems of Brazil.’

2. This is an accurate assertion. When requested as part of an opinion poll to describe the ideal president, 89 per cent of the respondents agreed that he should be white (Atwood 1988).

3. For analysis of the ways in which the modernists contributed to and advanced conservative agendas see Pécault (1990), Holston (1989) and Miceli (1979).

4. ‘The fact should be stressed that among the Portuguese of the continent theological hatreds and violent racial antipathies or prejudices were rarely manifested. The same is true of the relations between whites and blacks: those hatreds due to class or caste extended and at times disguised in the form of race hatred such as marked the history of other slave-holding areas in the Americas, were seldom carried to any such extreme in Brazil. The absence of violent rancours due to race constitutes one of the particularities of the feudal system in the tropics, a system that, in a manner of speaking, had been softened by the hot climate and by the effects of miscegenation that tended to dissolve such prejudices’ (Freyre 1946, pp. xii-xiii).