Whiter Shades of Pale: “Coloring In” Machado de Assis and Race in Contemporary Brazil

Abstract

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be "white." In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking a fresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine Machado de Assis and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story "Pai contra mãe," and indeed comments on the author's very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fi xed. Placing a close reading of Machado's text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fi xed and naturalized given.

Unoriginal Opinions of an Original Man: Jorge Luis Borges’s Views on Race and Brazilian People in His Conversations with Adolfo Bioy Casares and His Literary Works

“…I have further compared Machado to Borges in relation to their use of irony (Mendes de Souza 2014). For more on Machado and the issue of race, and also on "Pai contra mãe," see Flynn, Calvo-González, and Mendes de Souza (2013).…”

Review of The Alienist and other stories of nineteenth-century Brazil, by John Chasteen

“…In a recent article about this story, scholars Alex Flynn, Elena Calvo-González, 20 Far from erasing race, this story makes race highly visible by putting the slave catcher in the position to have to mediate between an understanding of slavery based on phenotype to one based on something much more difficult to define. Perhaps in a new translation the language with which race is described should become a part of the conversation.…”