XXVI Encontro Anual Da Associação Nacional De Pós-Graduação E Pesquisa Em Ciências Sociais

XXVI Encontro Anual da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais. O Encontro (Pós-) Colonial: A Construção da "Raça", Nação e História no Brasil, África do Sul e Caribe Fernando Rosa Ribeiro GT Relações Raciais e Etnicidade Sessão: Perspectivas Comparativas: Transnacionalizando as Relações Raciais Caxambu, 2002 The (Post-) Colonial Encounter: the Construction of ‘Race’, History and Nation in Brazil, the Caribbean and South Africa Fernando Rosa-Ribeiro As a Brazilian anthropologist and historian who has worked in Brazil, South Africa and parts of the Caribbean, I have always been struck both by the similarities and differences between all those places (Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a, 1998, 2000, 2002a, 2002b). The master narratives of history, the social sciences and even fiction in those places often seemed to dwell on fairly similar experiences. Foremost among these were colonialism, slavery, economic exploitation, diversity, and long and complex struggles for liberation of self and nation both in the colonial and postcolonial era. Also, nationalist discourse of various kinds was also part and parcel of history in all three regions. Besides, all three regions have important black populations, and also a colonial encounter that brought together Europeans, indigenous peoples and black slaves, not to mention various Asian immigrants. Moreover, all three regions have known racism. However, having grown up in Brazil, I have often looked at both South Africa and the Caribbean with a sense of wonder and even puzzlement (neither region figures prominently in our local Brazilian imagination, much less in academia). Also, a lot of the relevant literature, though certainly rich, varied and powerful, was unhelpful when it came to contrasting the different historiographical and narrative traditions rooted in different languages (Portuguese, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Papiamentu, and French). Whether I was faced with history-writing, accounts derived from my own fieldwork interviews, social sciences interpretations, or fiction, the same sense of wonder arose again and again. In fact, it has run like a thread in my work since the days of writing my doctor’s dissertation contrasting certain aspects of apartheid thinking and practice in Cape Town and the Brazilian narrative of ‘racial democracy’, through my fieldwork in the Dutch and French Caribbean to a project (as yet unfulfilled) to carry out fieldwork in Indonesia (Ribeiro 2001b). I have learned that ‘colonialism’, ‘slavery’, ‘racism’, ‘nationalism’, and the like could not easily be used as heuristic devices, particularly not across different academic and narrative traditions and different language domains. Not only have they been differently constructed in different cases, and at different times, each concept carrying a somewhat different weight and import, but also they may be misleading in some important and difficult to define ways. Take ‘race’ and ‘racism’, for instance. My doctor’s dissertation was an attempt at defining in a contrastive way how both were constructed in Brazil and South Africa (Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a). I soon realised that, stating that Brazil and South Africa have been racist countries and that ‘race’ has been an important construct in both was little more than a truism. As soon as I got entangled into the finer details of meaning, history and social practices in both countries, it proved almost fiendishly difficult to delineate just how (‘racial’, cultural) difference was constructed in both cases. This has been so particularly because both countries have developed powerful narratives about themselves – their identity, their history – that intertwine with different strains of counter-narratives in a complex, multilayered process. As Young-Bruehl has cogently pointed out, it is only by engaging racism in the plural – that is, in all its localness – that we can properly see its specificity (Young-Bruehl 1996). Besides, as Young-Bruehl shows in detail, the intersection between historically specific constructs of ‘race’ and gender can create an enormous variety of different situations. It has been part and parcel of Brazilian thought that, even though a true ‘racial democracy’ has never developed in the country, ‘race relations’ in the country do have a ‘softer’, different feel than race relations in the United States and South Africa (Banton 1967, Degler 1971, Skidmore 1974, 1993, Souza 1997). Namely, not being South Africa nor the United States, not having been colonised by the (supposedly more racist) British and Dutch is an important element of Brazilian self-image (Rosa-Ribeiro 2000, Freyre 1958, Araújo 1994, Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a). As I delved into apartheid thinking in the work of a few Afrikaans apartheid ideologues, I also noticed that there was a powerful narrative claim to excellence in race relations as compared to British ‘liberalism’ (Coertze 1943, Cronjé 1945, 1946, 1948, Rhoodie 1969, Coetzee 1991, Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a, 1998). That is, though very differently constituted, some Brazilian and Afrikaans narratives seemed to be talking to each other not directly but through a third British or American other (this was, again, differently perceived in each instance, the British being much more enmeshed, or perhaps closer, in South African discourse than in Brazilian narratives). Finally, though different in some important regards, both Afrikaans and Brazilian narratives did share another important aspect, as both kinds of narrative are related to Europe-derived discourses that pay little attention to other kinds of discourse. This similarity was not clear to me in the beginning. Besides, a thorny issue also came up: namely, though South Africa figures fairly prominently in Brazilian narratives (as a racist ‘Other’ that is supposedly not ‘us’), Brazil does not really figure in South African discourse. Brazilian narratives refer to ‘race’ mainly through the agency of constructed others – foremost among which are the United States and South Africa (both seem to play fairly interchangeable roles). However, South African discourse, though it mentions the British, for instance, refers not to an Other but to South Africa proper. It is clearly a ‘racial’ discourse related – as in apartheid – to a ‘racial’ policy. The same cannot be said of Brazilian narratives on ‘race’: instead of a discourse on ‘race’ per se, these seem to be only talking about ‘race’ in mythic terms. Namely, they do not constitute an articulated discourse on ‘race’ as such. Thinking of this difference in theoretical terms is a complicated problem. While I was growing up in Brazil, the idea had been inculcated in me that Brazil had been much more open to African or black influences than a country like South Africa.(to the point that being black was part of an all-encompassing Brazilian ‘we’). This has been a powerful and enduring cornerstone of Brazilian thought (DaMatta 1981, Freyre 1984, Skidmore 1974, Rosa-Ribeiro 1993). The country is full of (partly or wholly) African- derived customs, rituals, festivals, and religions. Brazil has arguably kept a much richer and more varied black-related culture than, for instance, the United States. Also, contrary to what happened in South Africa, whole areas of society suffered little (successful) state interference: body-related practices and sexuality are a case in point, and so is (to a much lesser degree) religion (Fernandes 1988). Though Gilberto Freyre and many others after him have either postulated or at least intimated that this relative tolerance is either due to the supposedly suppler character of Portuguese colonisation (in comparison to British colonisation), or to a greater degree of tolerance in Brazilian society (Freyre 1984, 1958, Araújo 1994, Bosma and Rosa-Ribeiro 2002), some recent historiography has suggested that the origin of that attitude is at least in part to be found in the post-abolition period: namely, it was non-whites themselves who have created or cultivated narratives and a social practice rejecting ‘race’ or, more exactly, colour as a defining category (Mattos 1994). Gilberto Freyre would construct much later his own narrative of ‘racial democracy’ (Freyre 1984, Araújo 1994, Rosa-Ribeiro 1993). Contrary to what happened in South Africa, ‘whiteness’ could never be taken literally (Ortiz 1986, Schwarcz 1993, Dubow 1995, Marks and Trapido 1987). Historians such as Luiz Felipe de Alencastro have shown that colonial Brazil was already very much a mestiço nation (Alencastro 2000, Degler 1971). Though Brazilian thinkers were aware of ‘race’ theories in Europe and the United States, they were also aware of Brazil’s different reality (Ortiz 1986, Ventura 1991, Schwarcz 1993, Skidmore 1974, 1994). That is, ‘whiteness’ could never be – except fleetingly – as powerful a construct as it would become in South Africa. The free population of colour was far too numerous for that. Highly placed imperial Luso-Brazilian policy-makers such as José Bonifácio understood the importance of the free population of colour in Brazilian nation-building already in the early nineteenth century (Silva 1999). It was not that ‘whiteness’ as such was not valued; on the contrary, all the evidence points to the fact that it was (Azevedo 1987). Only, even with European immigration, it turned out to be an impossible dream (at least in its European version) (Torres 1982 [1914]). Though the dream was never really relinquished (not even in Gilberto Freyre’s imaginings of the nation – Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a), it was sublimated, so to speak, into the figure and trope of the mestiço: through mestiçagem (cultural, ‘racial’) Brazil would eventually become a (hopefully white-looking) homogeneous nation (Skidmore 1974, DaMatta 1981, Ventura 1991, Munanga 1999, Rosa-Ribeiro 1993, 1996a). Strange and quaint as the idea may seem from a South African point of view, it has had a powerful grip on the social imagination. As DaMatta has famously suggested, in comparison to the United States (or, I should add, South Africa) contact, not segregation, has been the norm (or, at least, that is what we who have been brought up in Brazil are taught to believe) (DaMatta 1981, 1988, 1997, Souza 1997, Rosa-Ribeiro 1996a, 2000).

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