Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy Author(s): Robert Stam and Ella Shohat Source: New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 3, Comparison (SUMMER 2009), pp. 473-499 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27760272 Accessed: 07-10-2018 20:20 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy Robert Stam and Ella Shohat In this essay, we explore the role of comparison within the race and colonial debates as they play across various national and cultural zones?American, French, and Brazilian. Any discussion of these na tional zones is haunted by a discursive history of comparative dichotomies within situations of assymetrical empowerment: Europe and its others; the West and the rest; Global North and Global South. How should we analyze the rubrics, keywords, and evaluative repertoires in which debates about race and cultural difference are conducted in these diverse sites? What happens in the movement of ideas from one geographical space and cultural semantics to another, and how does that impact the rheto ric of comparison? Here we will deploy a relational and transnational method that seeks to eludicate the insights and blindspots and aporias of diverse comparative approaches and frameworks. Poststructuralist approaches to translation and adaptation figure in our discussion to the degree that they challenge a moralistic and dichoto mous idiom of fidelity versus betrayal, as, for example, in the discussion of filmic adaptations of novels that assumes the possibility of one-to-one adequation between the cultural/textual worlds of original and copy.1 In terms of cross-cultural translation and adaptation, we prefer to speak not of adequate or inadequate copies of cultures seen as originary and normative, but rather of an unending process of reciprocal transtextuality. Our stress, therefore, is on the interactive and recombinant dialogism evoked by terms like revoicing, reaccentuation, indigenization, and me diation. At the same time, these dialogical mediations are shaped and produced within specific cultural contexts that imply a situated "take" on the act of comparison itself. And just as adaptation theory tries to avoid the axiomatic superiority of one medium (for example, literature) over another (for example, cinema), or of the novel as original and the film as a definitionally inadequate copy, so cross-cultural comparison risks surreptitiously inscribing one cultural or national zone as original and the other as copy, one culture as ontological real and the other as phenomenal imitation, one culture as substance and the other as acci dent, one culture as normative and the other as aberrant. Here we will New Literary History, 2009, 40: 473-499 This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 474 NEW LITERARY HISTORY be especially critical of comparisons that operate through colonialist, reductivist, culturalist, or essentialist grids that assume linear and dichoto mous axes of "foreign"/ "native," "export"/"import," "inside"/"outside," "transmitter"/"receiver," "origin" /"copy." Asymmetries of power, meanwhile, impact the discourse and rhetoric of comparison. Thus cross-cultural comparisons can be reciprocal or unilateral, multidirectional or unidirectional, dialogic or monologic. The question, then, becomes: Which ideas transit easily, and which face obstacles at the border? What are the "social conditions" of what Pierre Bourdieu called, in the title of the last article he ever published, "the international circulation of ideas?"2 In what ways do national interests, cultural institutions, and global socioeconomic alignments mark the itineraries of "traveling theories" (Edward Said)? How are comparisons shaped by infranational, national, and supranational exceptionalisms, narcissisms, and disavowals? How is national memory narrated and instru mentalized within cross-national comparison? What anxieties and hopes, what Utopias and dystopias, are provoked by a comparative treatment of such issues as "race," "colonialism," and "multiculturalism" in diverse sites? Why does cross-national comparison provoke defensive objections along the lines of: "But our situation is completely different; it is simply not comparable"? Here we will examine a few examples of the rhetorics of comparison, some embedded in cultural-essentialist assumptions, while others are mobilized in the critique of such assumptions. The operative terms of comparative debates sometimes shift their political and epistemological valence in diverse national zones. What, then, are the blocages symboliques which prevent comparabilities from being recognized and translated, or, conversely, how do certain taken for-granted frames of comparison actually impede transnational analysis? How do key terms crystallize identity in ways that prevent the recognition of commonalities? Why, for example, is the concept of "la Republique" so central to debates in France but not in the United States or Brazil, even though all three are republics? Why is miscegenation a constant theme in Brazil but not in France or the United States, even though all three countries are, in their own way, miscegenated? Why does the term "communitarianism" carry such a powerful negative charge in France yet seldom figure in the debates in Brazil and the United States? In sum, the unpacking of the transatlantic traffic of race/colonial debates requires a relational analysis of knowledge production and dissemination. How, then, have cross-cultural and transnational comparisons been instrumentalized? What does comparison illuminate or fail to illuminate? Is national or ethnic narcissism inevitable, or can it be transcended? By transnationalizing the debates, we hope to scrutinize what might be called cross-border looking relations. What are the grids, prisms, This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 475 tropes, and even fun-house mirrors through which comparisons are established? How does cross-national comparison intersect with other modalities of comparison, such as metaphor, simile, and allegory? Along which vectors does comparison take place? What is the cognitive value of cross-national comparison? Does comparison assume a prior assumption of an illusory coherence on both sides of the comparison? How does comparison change when we move from comparing two entities (with the concomitant danger of reified binaries) to comparing three or more entities (with the danger of a dizzying proliferation)? Or is comparison always in search of a third entity, Aristotle's tertium comparationis, and is it a sideways-glancing utterance that is addressed to a third party, which also implies the transcendance of binarism? Is comparison necessarily premissed on overly neat national and geographical boundaries? Nation as Comparison Nation-states define themselves with and against other nations in a diacritical process of identity formation. The "fictive we" of the nation is forged with, through, and against other nations, often through a rhetoric of (sometimes invidious) comparison, a specular play of self and other. For example, France has historically defined itself against the Muslim world (Charles Martel, the Crusades, El Cid), then against England and Germany, and now, at least in political terms, against the U.S. hyperpower. The United States has defined itself with and against Native Americans internally, and externally against Great Britain (the Revolutionary War), Spain (the Spanish-American War), Germany and Japan (the two World Wars), the Soviet Union (the Cold War), and now Islamic fundamentalism (the "War on Terror"). American neoconser vatives, meanwhile, have tried to define the perennial ally, France, as an enemy. Brazil, too, has defined itself vis-a-vis various colonizing or neocolonizing powers?Portugal, France, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, and the United States. Thus ego-reinforcing national narration is always already engaged with national others. It is not only a question of how a nation projects itself but also how it projects others within these mutu ally shaping projections. Exceptionalist mythologies in the United States, meanwhile, have tended to stress the ways that the United States is not comparable to European nations, for example, that it has never been a colonial or imperial state, even though the United States colonized indigenous America, came to imperialize Latin America, and has indulged in vari ous neoimperial binges and surges. French exceptionalism, by the same token, edits out France's massive participation in the slave trade in the This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 476 NEW LITERARY HISTORY Caribbean. The structure of these amnesiac denials of commonalities recalls that of the "denegations" ("je sais mais quand meme" or "I know, but still . . .") theorized by psychoanalysis. The perpetual temptation, given that nation-state histories always have an element of the sordid and the violent, is to project repressed historical memories onto the screens of other nations and to search for comparisons that flatter rather than those that shame or embarrass. Exceptionalist discourses often go hand in hand with cultural essential ism and national characterologies, whether mobilized to celebrate (or on occasion denounce) one's own nation or denounce (or celebrate) another nation. American exceptionalism promotes the idea of the United States as uniquely democratic and destined to exercise wonder-working benevolent power in the world. Within the American exceptionalist view, the United States accumulates a series of "firsts"?and "firsts" are simply the chronological version of comparison?premissed on U.S. narcissistic advantage. The United States is proclaimed to be the first "new nation," the first modern constitutional democracy, the first immigrant "nation of nations," and the only country based on opportunity for the individual. Blessed by Providence with a unique purpose and fate, the United States, in comparison to others, avoided their petty foibles and thus transcended the gravity and "downers" of history as that which hurts. U.S. exception alism promotes the myth of innocence through tropes of prelapsarian "American Adams"?again, innocent in comparison to postlapsarian European others?wandering in a virgin paradise. Exceptionalism, whether in the American "Beacon-to-the-World" form or in the French mission-civilisatrice form or in the exceptionalism-light of the "we-are-all-mixed-and-tolerant" Brazilian form, is comparison in the superlative mode, with each nation proclaiming itself to be the "greatest" in some respect, whether in terms of political model or cultural expression or popular practices. Exceptionalism forms part of the standard rhetoric of American politicians from both parties who constantly embroider their speeches with ritual references to "this great land of ours," "the greatest nation in history," and the "greatest democracy on the face of the earth." Exceptionalism, in this sense, consists in the refusal to compare, in the tendency to find one's own nation peerless, beyond compare. Yet this exceptionalism is rife with aporias. How can a nation-state that regards itself as exceptional demand that others follow in its tracks, if those tracks have already been defined as exceptional? The discourse is inherently paradoxical: while seeing itself as exceptional, the United States also declares itself as a norm to be diffused and emulated, thus containing its own aporia and potential dissolution as it moves from exception to norm.3 But the United States is not exceptional in its exceptionalism; nationalism, in general, shapes fictions of unsullied virtue and seamless This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 477 unity and coherence, yet the very foundations of modern nation-states forcibly entail the monopolization of violence, the repression of differ ence, and the mandatory forgetfulness of originary crimes. Cross-national comparisons are equally imbued with affect, fears, vani ties, desires, and projections. They can idealize the "home" country or denigrate it, just as they can idealize the "away" country or denigrate it, or they can seek broad relationalities, which deconstruct nation-state thinking by discerning commonalities, thereby bypassing the border police. U.S. pro-American exceptionalism is sometimes countered by the negative exceptionalism of its homegrown American critics who fail to see the embeddedness of the United States within broader historical patterns of pan-European hegemony. French anti-Americanism also rests on a tacit comparison: American imperialism in the present is worse than ours in the past.4 American anti-Americanism, or negative exceptional ism, meanwhile, offers the upside-down narcissism of superlative badness: "Our own imperialism is the absolute worst; no one is as breathtakingly evil as we are." Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons serve myriad purposes. Negotiating constantly between the facile universalism which denies difference ("We're all human beings!") and the bellicose stigmatization of difference (good versus evil; us versus them), comparison at times can trigger, as we shall see, a salutary deprovincialization and mutual illumination. Variously emphasizing contrasts, similarities, or comple mentarities, comparisons can move along a spectrum that goes from a maximalist differentialism ("We have nothing in common with them!"), to a paternalistic top-down "good neighborism" ("We have everything in common but do not forget you're subordinate"), to a quasi-masochistic self-denigration ("We will never be as good as you!"). Nations can project their own worst tendencies onto alter-ego nations, imagining in others their own most ignoble traits. Or they develop a resentful discourse of victimization that remains narcissistic because the aggrieved victim nation retains the psychic capital of its own professed innocence. Or dissident minorities and "internal emigres" can endow other nations with Utopian possibilities, seeing them as the sites of hope in a situation of despair. Sometimes comparisons get mapped onto stagist teleologies, which inscribe countries into larger, global temporalities that project some na tions as comparatively "ahead" or "behind" on an imaginary timeline of progress. Stagist theory within Europe goes back to the Enlightenment as a secularization of the teleologies of Divine Providence. According to the modernizing discourse of a G. W. F. Hegel or a Max Weber, South nations like Brazil were seen as "behind" the North. But recently, we have seen a number of historiographical reversals, whereby Latin Americanists stress that Latin America historically preceded Anglo-America by almost This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 478 NEW LITERARY HISTORY a century, and even that most of North America, as evidenced in state names such as Florida and California, was Latin before it was Anglo. The ethnocentric provincialisms of the West, from the Enlightenment to twentieth-century modernization and even, ironically, to postmodern theory, have tended to cast non-European cultures and regions as "al lochronic" (Johannes Fabian) or "behind" in the race for progress. Comparison as Ethnic Ranking Nationalist and panethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in hand with an especially invidious form of comparison: ranking. We find an ex ample in Hegel's The Philosophy of History where every attribute of Hegel's personal identity becomes associated with supreme rank: Germany is the best country, Europe the best continent, Christianity the best religion (and Protestantism its best incarnation). Eurocentric/racist discourse, meanwhile, classically took the form of ranking the higher and lower forms of civilization and comparing the glorious achievements of the "West" to the allegedly paltry achievements of "the rest." In The Philosophy of History, Hegel contrasts the Northern hemisphere, characterized by republican constitutions, Protestantism, prosperity, and freedom, with a Southern hemisphere characterized by authoritarianism, Catholicism, militarism, and unfreedom. '"While South America was conquered," Hegel wrote, "North America was colonized:"5 In terms of relative prosperity, historians might correct Hegel to say that in the early Iberian stage of colonization, which Karl Marx sarcastically called the "rosy dawn of capitalist accumulation," it was South America that was actually wealthier than the North. The European domination of the Americas, moreover, usually involved both conquest and colonization Despite its problems, Hegel's overdrawn North/South schema became hugely influential. The North was erected as the model for the South, just as the West was inscribed as the model for the East. Both Brazil ian and American commentators stressed that the countries of South America were less prosperous and dynamic than the United States and that this difference was rooted in national character. Many negative views of Latin American character, both from within and from without, also betray the influence of Max Weber, whose work might be described as an exercise in comparative characterology. The narcissistic question that orients ("Occidents?") Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is how to explain something Weber takes to be axiomatic? European superiority. Why did Europe develop industry, science, and liberal institutions, Weber asks, while the "rest of the world" did not? For Weber, European advantages were not the result of massive appropria This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 479 tion of the land, resources, and labor of the Americas, Africa, and Asia but rather the product of a superior cultural personality, a conflation of ethos (character), ethnos (people), and religion whereby Europeans, and especially Protestant Europeans, were seen as uniquely rational, inquisitive, and ethical. There are also internal differentiations within Eurocentric thinking, to wit, the familial quarrel between the Anglos and the Latins. The conven tional wisdom would place two of the three nation-states in our trilateral comparison (that is, France and Brazil) on one "Latin" side of a cultural divide and the third (the United States) on the "Anglo-Saxon" side. Thus our discussion is always already haunted by a perennial binarism that constructs a strong cultural divide between two transnational panethnic groups. What we have observed time and time again, however, is that the twinned terms "Latin" and "Anglo-Saxon," especially when deployed as part of strongly drawn and reified dichotomous comparisons, betray a retreat into tired paradigms, a confusion of levels, which has hindered the thinking of transnational relationalities. The two terms "Latin" and "Anglo-Saxon" have to be thought (and unthought) in relation to each other, especially since the two categories were largely constructed in mutual opposition and antipathy. The two terms give expression, we would argue, to regional variants of that larger form of self-love called Eurocentrism.6 Thus one form of European ethnic/cultural exceptionalism?which we will call Anglo-Saxonism?is associated with Northern Europe and its expansion into the Americas and around the world. As we have noted, figures such as Hegel and Weber gave expression to that form of exceptionalism. The other form, which we will call "Latinism," meanwhile, is associated with France and Southern Europe and its expansion into the Americas. It was formulated as a means of lateral differentiation from the "Anglo-Saxons" and verti cal differentiation from non-Europeans in the Americas. Paul Adam, the French author of a 1910 book about Brazil (Les visages du Bresil), gives expression to this form of narcissism when he speaks of the "miracle" produced by the Latins who accomplished in the New World what the "Mediterraneans" had begun earlier in Europe: "How is it possible to ignore the continuity of this unilateral evolution . . . navigation, steam, electricity, aviation, Hertzian waves, all that is the work of elites of Medi terranean origin."7 Adam's account echoes the Hegelian and Weberian discourse of European superiority, but in its warm-water Mediterranean current. But Adam goes on to lament that Latinity has been historically defeated by a "feudal, iconoclastic, disciplinary" Protestantism opposed to "Catholic, sensual, iconolatrous mores."8 Of course, if one takes a Native American or an Afrodiasporic "view from below," these differences become largely immaterial, mere nuances This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 480 NEW LITERARY HISTORY within European whiteness. Indeed, many of the debates about race, co lonialism, and imperialism revisit, sometimes without acknowledgment, enmities rooted in interimperial wars and debates. For centuries, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, the Dutch, the French, and the Americans all vied for domination and influence around the world in a situation where all parties were convinced that their particular form of imperial domination was well intentioned and beneficial, and that all their defeats were tragic misfortunes. It is a case of what Freud called the "narcissism of minor differences," in this case the differences between various European (and Euro-American) forms of imperialism. The overdrawing of the line between Latin and Anglo imperialisms in the Americas forgets that the two were initially linked through envy and emulation. Spanish and Portuguese colonialism preceded that of the Dutch and British and French. In the early stages of "discovery," the two Iberian powers dominated most of the Americas until challenged (and imitated) by the other powers. The various "latecomers"?such as the British and the Dutch?admired Spain for having transformed itself from a relatively poor country into a major European puissance through the infusion of wealth from its New World possessions. In their own New World endeavors, the British often attempted to emulate the triumphs of the Spanish. Britain's late entry into the sweepstakes meant that it could hope only for the "leftovers" of Spanish conquest, often swept up by English "pirates of the Caribbean." Our research has led us to a vast corpus of texts, which directly or indirectly assert either a "hard" Anglo-Saxonist and imperialist form of superiority or a "soft" Latin, colonial superiority. Countless texts, for example, contrast the racially phobic and segregationist Anglo-Saxons (whether operating in the U.S. South or in British colonies) with the more open, assimilationist, and tolerant Latins. This binarism haunts even contemporary French books that engage sympathetically with post colonial theory. A 2002 book by Jacqueline Bardolph on Etudes postcolo niales et litterature calls for a study of "different colonial imaginaries, for a study of the way in which French history, marked by Catholicism and the spirit of the Enlightenment, might offer a less hierarchical vision of non-European peoples than the British imperial vision."9 Thus old Anglo French rivalries become embroiled in a new rivalry within postcolonial studies about the relative humanity of variant forms of colonialism. Writers end up parroting the ethnonationalist exceptionalist narratives articulated in schools, history books, museums, and colonial expositions, now voiced by progressive intellectuals supposedly speaking on behalf of the colonized subaltern. What we have, then, are latter-day expressions of narcissistic nationalism, which historically generated claims that our conquest was more gentle than yours, our slavery more humane, our imperialism more cultivated. This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 481 The panethnic rivalry between "the Latins" and the "Anglo-Saxons" also had implications for how histories of conquest and slavery were represented through culturalist comparisons. The advocates of Latini dad promoted the myth of a benevolent Catholic conquest and slavery. What especially interests us here is the role of multilateral comparison, as occurs, for example, when a French commentator on Brazil compares race relations in Brazil and in the United States. The Frenchman Joseph Burnichon summarizes the contrast between two forms of colonization from a "Latin" perspective: "The Anglo-Saxon represses the indigenes and ends up annihilating them [while] Spain and Portugal, the Latin colonizers, mix with the so-called inferior race . . . resulting in new pe oples, with their own originality and their own value."10 Such a contrast between Brazilian racial harmony and North American hostility is a frequent leitmotif in French and Brazilian commentary on Brazil. At the same time, the positions on these issues cannot be predictably aligned with ethnicity or nationality. Some "Latins" preferred the "Anglo Saxon" approach, and vice versa. Writing in the 1920s, a French visitor to Brazil, Abel Bonnard, lauds the Anglo-Saxon defense of "racial purity," arguing: "We know how stubbornly North Americans, to this day, have preserved the purity of their blood and for our part we will never stop repeating that in so doing they fulfilled their primary duty and thus rendered an uncommon service to humanity. . . . The foreigner who sees the variety of colors in the pedestrians of Rio or Bahia can have no doubt that the true tragedy of Brazil lies in its mixture of races, in this sinister struggle where the different spirits of humanity get coiled together like serpents."11 The Latinists, interestingly, constructed a different, but in some ways equally arbitrary, hierarchy, which acknowledged the material, technological superiority of the "Anglo-Saxons" but asserted the spiritual/ intellectual superiority of the "Latins." But all of these comparisons take place between elites; they center on "whose slavery is worse" or who has better treated "our" Indians and "our blacks." They have little to do with the placing in relation of subaltern perspectives or with mobilizing comparison to critique colonial formations or discover different modes of resistance to slavery and dispossession. The Ambivalence of Comparative Identity An ill-formulated injunction suggests that we should not compare apples and oranges, but in fact one can pursue comparison in many directions and for different ends. Even apples and oranges, after all, are comparable as fruits, and for that matter, one can compare fruits and vegetable as foods, or compare one's beloved to a summer's day. The point of the "oranges and apples" dictum is that one should not This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 482 NEW LITERARY HISTORY compare objects that are too dissimilar, yet a poetics of improbable comparison (discordia concors) has catalyzed major artistic schools, from John Donne and the metaphysical poets to the paintings of the Surreal ists, to the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Jorge Luis Borges's heterotopic Chinese Encyclopedia might be absurd from the standpoint of logic, but its exploding the ground of commensurability has been productive from the standpoint of aesthetics. One finds a kind of productivity in the vast cross-national corpus of comparative writing that focuses on Brazil and the United States or on France and the United States. The sheer volume of this comparative corpus, which swells with every passing year, is remarkable. For various reasons, intellectuals from these three countries have found the other countries "good to think with." Comparisons usually operate on the basis of what semioticians called "principles of pertinence." The comparative writing treating France and the United States, for example, tends to spotlight the two countries' rival revolutions and discrepant social mores. In Bourdieu's evocative phrase, the United States and France represent "two imperialisms of the universal." One result of this competition over this shared revolutionary heritage is a perennial love-hate relationship between the two countries, accompanied by the emotions associated with sibling rivalry.12 In the case of Brazil and the United States, the comparisons do not have to do with comparative revolutions?since Brazil, unlike other Latin American nations, did not have a revolution leading to independence?but rather with the two countries' shared status as settler states in the Americas whose histories have both been marked by European colonialism (British and Portuguese), by slavery, abolition, and immigration. Henry M. Brackenridge was perhaps the first American writer, in 1817, to intuit the need for a systematic comparison between the two countries. While recognizing that limiting the comparison to the present would be to compare a "young giant" with a "mature dwarf?Brazil, after all, had not even achieved independence at that time?Brackenridge emphasized that it was necessary to imagine what the two nations would become in the future. Contrasting the stormy disunity of the Spanish-speaking na tions in Latin America with "the unified and indivisible" Brazilian nation, Brackenridge concludes that "given the vast capacities and resources of Brazil, it is not to be a visionary to foresee that this [Brazilian] empire is destined to rival our own."13 In the case of Brazil, comparisons with the United States have been unending, forming an integral part of a specular and reciprocal process of self-definition. Although cross-national comparisons are often narcis sistic, in the case of Brazil they have just as often been self-deprecating, whether about Brazil's supposedly derivative culture or about its inad This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 483 equate political institutions. In Brazil, comparison has often been wielded to the detriment of Brazil by Brazilians themselves. Indeed, playwright Nelson Rodrigues famously called Brazilians "upside down Narcissists" who spit on their own mirror image. The process is similar to any situa tion of stratified and unequal power? as instantiated in the internalized male gaze analyzed by feminism, for example?by which one group is prodded to see itself from another perspective deemed to be superior. The dominated, whether among nations or within nations, are those who are obliged to compare themselves to a partly imaginary yet empowered form of normativity. As Brackenridge predicted, both Brazil and the United States consoli dated their territories and grew from strength to strength over the course of the nineteeth century. National identity became crystallized in cliche metaphors. Brazil became known as the "Minotaur of South America," and the United States as the "Colossus of the North." These compari sons are asymmetrical and power laden, of course, since Brazilians make the comparison from a position of relative geopolitical weakness, while Americans have made their comparisons from a privileged position of taken-for-granted empowerment. Sociologist Jesse Souza articulates this comparative obsession with the United States very well, noting: "We do not compare ourselves with Bolivia, Guatemala, or even with Argentina. We compare ourselves obsessively with the United States. In fact, explicit or implicit comparison with the United States is the central thread in practically all of the twentieth-century interpretations of Brazilian singularity?because we perceive that only the United States is as great and influential as we are in the Americas."14 In Brazil, furthermore, such comparisons are made not only in scholarly texts but also in everyday Brazilian discourse, while in the United States the comparisons tend to be limited to specialists or those Americans who happen to come into contact with Brazil. There is both pathos and grandeur in this generally unreciprocated Brazilian penchant for comparison; on the one hand, it represents a desire to see oneself as equal to the most powerful (and an implicit disdain for one's weaker neighbors); on the other, it constitutes a cry of despair and anger. In its rightist version, the cry was, "How can we ever be equal when you are so great?" and in the leftist version, it was, "How can we be equal to this imperialist giant when the game is rigged and you oppress us?" Needless to say, this power dynamic has shifted significantly with the economic crisis in the United States and the rise of Brazil and other powers from the Global South such as India and China. Much of the comparative historical work bears on the role of the fron tier in the two countries. The question of territory and expansion was essential in both Brazil and the United States. While Brazilians spoke of This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 484 NEW LITERARY HISTORY the "Marcha para Oueste" (the march toward the West), the United States spoke in more grandiloquent and messianic terms of "manifest destiny." In the United States, we encounter Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier hypothesis," presented to the American Historical Association in 1893, around the time of the official "closing" of the frontier. At the same time, if Brazil has no "frontier hypothesis" a la Turner, there is nonethe less a pervasive discourse of another frontier, that of the Amazon Basin as a reserve of hope and social mobility and supposedly inexhaustible resources, a discourse which, if not identical to the American frontier, nevertheless serves a similar function. The classic comparative work on the role of the frontier in the two countries, Vianna Moog's Pioneers and Bandeirantes (1954), revolves around what seems like a rather humiliating question: why did the United States become so successful and a leading power in the world, while Brazil re mained so poor and weak? (A more flattering question for Brazil?and some cultural nationalists have come close to this formulation?might reverse the terms: why did the United States become so bellicose, and imperialistic, and Brazil so cordial?) Indeed, the comparison to the United States is never far away whenever Brazilians talk about their own history or national character, as we see in the work of such major theorists of Brazilian identity and character as Gilberto Freyre, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Raimundo Faoro, Roberto Da Matta, and Dante Moreira Leite. What varies is the question of who or what is blamed for Brazil's supposed failure. For Buarque de Holanda, Brazil's comparative disadvantage derives from the negative legacy of Portugal, a backward country where the Enlightenment, the Reformation, the French Revolu tion, and industrial capitalism had little impact, and where authoritar ian personalism reigned. Thus a fatalistic causality, rather like original sin, marks this vision of the history of Brazil. For lawyer, philosopher, and literary critic Raimundo Faoro, in his 1959 book Os donos do poder: formacao do patronato politico brasileiro, the villain is the patrimonial state, again derived from Portugal (although the concept of "patriominalism" is derived from Weber). What Jesse Souza calls the "sociology of inau thenticity" and a "logic of deficit" portrays Brazilian historical becoming as a case of aborted Western development. In a strategic move parallel to that which sees "counter" and "para" Enlightenments as opposed to a single Enlightenment, Souza switches the terms of comparison by see ing Brazil as a case not of failed but rather of selective modernization, existing not in opposition to the United States and Europe but rather as one point on a modernizing spectrum.15 Cross-national comparison is often instrumental in shaping the self perception of nations. In the case of Brazilian thinkers like Freyre, Buarque de Holanda, Moog, and DaMatta, comparisons to the United This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 485 States have often come close to the very heart of debates about Brazilian identity. As intellectual popstar Caetano Veloso put it, "Brazil is the other giant of the Americas, the other melting pot of races and cultures, the other paradise promised to European and Asian immigrants, the other. The double, the shadow, the negative of the great adventure of the New World."16 While in no way identical, then, various Brazilian and American thinkers have seen the two countries as eminently comparable. Within a fraught dialectics of attraction and repulsion, even strong and reiterated statements of difference have historically been addressed to a privileged interlocutor. For many Brazilian intellectuals (as for many American Brazilianists), the "natural" and inevitable historical comparison, for Brazil, has not been to the mother country Portugal, or to a European country like France or even to a Spanish-speaking neighbor like Argen tina, but rather to the United States. The issue is not one of identity but of relationality; similar historical elements exist in both countries, but they are reshuffled. Major chords in one country become minor chords in the other. But this penchant for nation-based comparisons remains power laden and overdetermined. The comparisons themselves depend on who is doing the comparing, in relation to which social groups, along what axes, and to what ends. The Pitfalls of Comparison One of the most influential and widely cited contemporary theorists of Brazilian national identity against a comparative U.S. backdrop is Brazil ian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. Often insightful and entertaining, DaMatta's writing proliferates in brilliant apercus which highlight what he sees as the quotidian cultural contrasts between the two countries. His omnivorous and all encompassing analytical method turns almost any social event?a birthday party, a soccer game, a chance encounter in the street?into material for comparative analysis. One of DaMatta's books engaging the U.S./Brazil comparison bears the title (quite significantly for our trilateral comparative purposes) Toc quevilleanas: noticias da america (Tocquevilliana: News from America). One essay, called "Images of Brazil and the U.S. in Popular Music," compares three songs, which explicitly address the issue of national culture: "The House I Live In [What is America to Me]" by Earl Robinson and Lewis Allan; Ary Barroso's "Watercolor Portrait of Brazil" (popularly known as "Brazil"); and Jorge Ben Jar's "Pais Tropical." The American song, for DaMatta, defines the collectivity as sharing a modern, civic faith, a belief in freedom and equality as values. The Brazilian songs, in contrast, define Brazil not in terms of its universal political creed but according This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 486 NEW LITERARY HISTORY to its generous, paradisal nature and the seductive, rich, beautiful, and inviting culture that goes with it. DaMatta sums up the difference: 'To be American, it is enough to be governed by external rules. But to be Brazilian, one has to samba, wiggle, mix, drink, sleep and sing, in a word, to be, rather than, as in the American case, to belong. Do I exaggerate? Without a doubt, but that is exactly what the songs express."17 DaMatta is not anti-American; indeed, his writing reveals a good deal of affection for U.S. culture?especially popular music?and his generalizing contrasts are often overly generous to the United States, as when he associates it with "equality before the law." At the same time, DaMatta is especially adept at formulating what might be called "the Brazilian difference," that is, particularly sympathetic aspects of Brazilian behavior and attitude. He accounts very well for the different feeling generated by Brazilian versus American styles of life, at least in the dominant mainstream versions of both cultures. However, whether speaking of Brazil or of the United States, DaMatta almost always thinks from an unacknowledgedly white-dominant perspec tive. In this sense, DaMatta offers a slightly revised version of the Anglo/ Latin dichotomy, which contrasts the personalities of two dominant elites?one branco-branco (white-white), the other branco-moreno (white dark). But the idea that some ideal Anglo "type" has persisted unaltered through centuries of U.S. history implies that the non-Anglo elements have not inflected the national character. This view quietly encodes a neo-Hegelian "triumph of the North European spirit" version of the his tory of nations, whereby Protestant whiteness inevitably prevails over its non-Protestant, nonwhite others. (Samuel Huntington is deeply Hegelian in this sense.) This view, problematic even in its own terms, is unduly static. The idea that the Protestant work ethic dominates the United States overprivileges New England as the primordial source of American culture, while also ignoring the substantial part of the population that is not Protestant or even Christian and other differentiations within a complex and heteroglossic society. Although DaMatta's analysis of carnival is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin's, his analyses of the United States bypass Bakhtin's preferential option for alterity and multiplicity (crystallized in such Bakhtinian neologisms as "heteroglossia," "polyglossia," "pluristylism," "double-voiced discourse," "polyphony") in favor of variations on a single number?one. For DaMatta, the United States has one language, one ethos, and one style of life. He writes like an anthropologist who claims to have cracked the code of a tribal society, discerning a system unknown even to the "trib als" themselves. Such an approach, already problematic in relation to a well-defined object of study such as a small group of the same origins in a single location, leads to an analytic aporia when applied to "multitribal" peoples and polyethnic states like Brazil and the United States. This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 487 The problem, then, is a methodological one, to wit, the reciprocal reification of differences, and the erasure of commonalities, between nations. "Ideal type" generalities homogenize very complex and varie gated national formations while denying common features. In a bipolar method of comparison, all individuals line up in conformity with a set of a priori characteristics: on one "Latin" side, openness, sensuousness, syncretism, and hybridity; on the other "Anglo" side, closedness, purita nism, segregationism, and exclusivity. DaMatta's comparisons leave both Brazilians and inhabitants of the United States locked up in a monolithic identity in which there is no room for contradictions and anomalies. His dichotomies make one wish for a comparative anthropology/sociology of exceptions, focusing not on taken-for-granted typicalities but rather on Brazilians who hate soccer and samba, Americans who love carnival, and so forth. Such analyses would at least have the virtue of unpredictability, of not leaving us incarcerated in the prisons of national stereotype. Such binaristic comparisons, in sum, delineate overdrawn dichotomies rather than differentiated commonalities, resulting in the "ontologization" of cultural difference. Race through a Comparative Prism Much of the comparative reflection on Brazil, France, and the United States explores the "touchy" subjects of slavery and race. Cross-national race-related comparisons have been instrumentalized in extremely diverse ways, emphasizing contrasts, similarities, or complementarities.18 Com parison has been deployed by American blacks (or progressive whites) to needle the white-dominated United States, as when American blacks exalted France's relatively benign domestic model, or Brazil's apparent lack of racial tension and prejudice, as a way of shaming a segregated white America. At times we find what Bakhtin calls "double-voiced discourse," as when African Americans praise Brazil's miscegenated cordiality in order to criticize white racism in the United States but confide to fellow blacks that the situation in Brazil is less than ideal. Or comparison can be used in the reverse direction, by Brazilian blacks to needle the white Brazilian elite, as if to say: "Look at those American blacks, unlike we Brazilian blacks, they've gained real status and power! They have generals and mayors and intellectuals and celebrities and they're constantly visible in the media, and now they have a black president!" Or comparisons can be instrumentalized by the white Brazilian elite, as if to remind black Brazilians that they are lucky to be in Brazil and how much worse off they would be over there, in the racist United States. And comparison can be wielded as a conservative warning, as when white Brazilian (or French) This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 488 NEW LITERARY HISTORY opponents of multiculturalism or affirmative action in Brazil or France argue that it will bring U.S.-style tensions and even segregation. African Americans have historically looked both to France and Brazil as models of nonracist societies. Many Brazilian blacks, conversely, have pointed to the African American civil rights movement as a model of ac tivism and pride. Already in 1918, a writer for the black journal 0 Alfinete exhorted fellow blacks to "strive to eradicate our illiteracy and see whether or not we can imitate the North American blacks."19 And in 1933, another black Brazilian writer praised the "confident and self-possessed" African American who "lifts up his head," arguing that the Brazilian model is more devastating for blacks even than the brutal American model: "The Americans lynch fifty Negroes a year. We kill the entire Brazilian Negro race."20 At times, North American comparative commentary conveys an ethnocentric and subalternizing stagism, the idea that Brazilian blacks need to "catch up" with American black achievements. Although intellectuals in all three countries have engaged in com parative scholarship concerning slavery and discrimination, the debate often operates within nationalist boundaries whereby scholars ignore the "family resemblances" to be found in the countries of the Black Atlantic. National narcissism sometimes leads intellectuals from the nation-states of the Black Atlantic to project racism as characteristic only of "other" nations, as if conquest and slavery-spawned oppression were a monopoly of only one country. French commentators sometimes like to forget France's massive participation in the slave trade. Popular mythology in the United States, meanwhile, claims that it, unlike European nations, is not a colonial or imperial nation. Just as narcissism sometimes lies at the core of cross-national com parison, so can it be found at the core of official versions of the history of slavery. Thus some nationalist historians in the Unites States, France, and Brazil offer prettified versions of their country's relation to slavery, downplaying the cruelty or longevity of the institution, or its continuing traces in the present. In the Unites States, slavery, even though it lasted for centuries, is sometimes treated, in school textbooks for example, as an early and temporary glitch in an overarching narrative of progress. It is presented as the exception to the rule of democracy, when in fact slavery and segregation have been more the rule, and freedom and equal rights more the exception. In Brazil, some historians argued for another version of "exceptionality," in the guise of a suave version of slavery in the past, and a cordiality and lack of conflict in the present, a relative benevolence variously explained by the heritage of Portuguese flexibility and racial tolerance or by Catholicism's more inclusive and corporative embrace or by widespread mixing and miscegenation. For many scholars, the two situations offer variations on a theme of racial hierarchy: the differences have to do with the specific modalities This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 489 of domination. One staple contrast in the scholarship is between the virulent and phobic racism typical of the United States, especially in the past, and the more camouflaged, paternalistic, and "cordial" rac ism more typical of Brazil. But another position argues that precisely because racism in the United States was so virulent, blacks were more motivated to struggle against it; African Americans had no illusion of an easy assimilation. Brazil, in contrast, seems at first glance to present a situation of "racism without racists" where there is no Ku Klux Klan, no lynching (except of "marginals" who just "happen" to be black), and where politicians seldom make racist statements, yet where black people are constant victims of informal discrimination and are even more dis empowered politically, in some ways, than they are in the United States. Race, in this sense, is both a kind of salt rubbed into the wounds of class, and a wound in itself. After more than a century of comparative studies of slavery, race, and discrimination in the United States and Brazil, scholars are beginning to pursue comparative analyses of race and racism in France and Brazil. Alexandra Poli, for example, compares the dominant racial mythologies of the two countries, noting that the myth of racial democracy in Brazil seems at first glance to be the polar opposite of the French myth of the Republique. While one common Brazilian line sees the harmonious racial relations created by miscegenation as the key to Brazilian democracy, the French republican myth preaches the refusal of cultural particularism in order to assure equal treatment for all citizens. Meanwhile, the critics of this latter position argue that the impossibility of taking into account differences related to the body, to origin, to ethnicity, or religion?and even the absence of race-based statistics?prevents a realistic assessment of the contours of racial discrimination. Despite the clear differences, the two models share, according to Poli, their denial of the experience of victims oppressed by racism and discrimi nation who are expected to keep quiet in the face of the aggressions they have suffered. Thus "racial democracy" in Brazil and "republican values" in France constitute the ideological background for any discussion of rac ism in the two countries: "The expressions 'country of the rights of man' and 'the country of the mixture of races' serve to reinforce the unity of the people and exclude from the outset any discussion of racism."21 Yet in both France and Brazil, citizens have protested discrimination and asserted their ethnic, cultural, and religious "right" to difference in such a way as to bring the issue of racism and discrimination back to the table, bypassing narcissistic discussions of "who is less racist?" While comparison can become an instrument of placing nations or cultures in a rigid hierarchical paradigm, or for establishing rigid and reified contrasts, it can also serve as a trampoline for epistemological leaps and dialogical interventions. It is in this context that we will draw This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 490 NEW LITERARY HISTORY attention to a specific stream of cross-cultural comparative writing con cerning the European indigenous encounter, to wit, an ongoing intertext of French writing about Brazil, and specifically about the Brazilian Indian and about Afro-Brazilian culture. While cross-cultural comparisons tend to treat the two societies in question in their hegemonic forms, this has not always been the case. French commentary on Brazilian Indians, for example, goes back to the travel writings of the early sixteenth century, beginning with French captain Paulmier de Gonneville's "relation" to the French authorities about his 1503-1505 voyage to Brazil, just three years after Pedro Cabral's "discovery."22 A number of sixteenth-century texts? notably Andre Thevet's Les singularites de la France Antartique (1557) and Cosmographie universelle (1575), Jean de Lery's UHistoire dun voyage a la terre du Bresil (1578), and the German Hans Staden's sensationally titled Brasilien: die wahrhaftige Historie der wilden nacken, grimmigen Menschenfresser Leute (1557)?emerged out of an aborted French attempt to found a colony near present-day Rio de Janeiro, called "France Antartique," which lasted from 1555 until 1560. Sixteenth-century cultural differences not only between Europeans (French versus Portuguese; Protestant versus Catholic; Christian against Jew) but also between Europeans and native Brazilians (the misnamed "Indians") shaped how the various groups conceptualized the Tupi peoples, the native group that the French, in this case Protestant French from Normandy and Brittany, came to know with a greater intimacy than did the conquering Portuguese. This encounter became an exercise in comparative cross-cultural projection between the French Huguenot minority and the indigenous Tupi peoples in Brazil. Just as the native peoples projected their cosmologies and assumptions onto the Euro peans, different European groups projected their ideologies onto the Tupinamba. These differential readings by Christian factions become evident in their treatment of the Tupinamba leader Cunhambebe, the leader of the Federation of the Tamoios, an aggregation of native groups fight ing Portuguese colonization. Although Cunhambebe was a French ally, the Catholic Thevet and the Protestant Lery do not portray him in the same way. The official cosmographer Thevet sees Cunhambebe as com parable to a French King; as Frank Lestringant points out, he royalizes Cunhambebe with exuberant eulogies to the "King of Ubatuba"; he turns the cacique into a French-style monarch.23 The Huguenot Lery, meanwhile, deeply skeptical toward any monarchy reminiscent of the one that practiced such cruelty against his coreligionists in Europe, resents any authority incarnated in a single person. He therefore mocks Thevet's royalization of Cunhambebe and sees him instead as comparable to the leader of a closely knit, ideal Protestant-style communitas. The factual This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 491 attributes of Cunhambebe, in short, are less important than the discur sive and ideological grids through which the comparison is seen. Both Thevet and Lery offer a positive image of Cunhambebe, but Thevet sees him as incarnating a divinely sanctioned hierarchical society, while Lery sees him as the communal avatar of a Protestant leader of an egalitarian community. In L'Histoire dun voyage a la terre du Bresil (1578), Lery described his experience, some two decades earlier, of being captured by Brazilian Indians and welcomed into the Tupinamba community while waiting for his own ritual deglutition. Lery used comparison as a didactic device to explain Tupi culture to French readers. Claude Levi-Strauss hailed Lery's history as "a masterpiece of anthropological literature," while Michel de Certeau called Lery's account seminal for historiography and ethnography, the equivalent of a "primal scene in the construction of ethnological discourse."24 By defending what he sees as the gregarious cultural values and practices of his captors, Lery uses comparison both to explain Tupi customs?for example, by making analogies to French customary practices?but also to point out the relative humanity of the natives when compared to a Europe scarred by wars of religion. Lery contrasts the cruelty of the French Admiral Villegagnon, who denied his companions nourishment, with the open-handed generosity of the Tupinamba. The Indians walk around naked, Lery tells us, but only to avoid having to constantly change clothes in a hot climate.25 Anticipat ing Jean Jacques Rousseau's ideas about child rearing, Lery proposes the practical Tupinamba manner of nursing and caring for children as a superior model for French parents. When Lery explains the European custom of saving up money to leave an inheritance for the children, an elderly Tupinamba ridicules the idea since "the same earth that feeds the parents will feed the children."26 In contrast to the later European Naturalists, who compared the fertility of Europe to the supposed sterility of the Americas as a place of stunted growth and degeneration, Lery described a robust Tupi society where people were stronger, fitter, and less prone to disease than Europeans, and where everything that was planted grew. Lery draws contrasts be tween the two groups?native nudity/European dress; native festivity/ European productive labor?but he avoids ranking the two cultures. One might object that Lery is actually ranking the two cultures and finding the Tupi superior to the Europeans, but this is not exactly the case. First, Lery points out many negative features of Tupi life as well, their penchant for cannibalism, for example, and their perpetual small scale wars. He does not applaud cannibalism, but he points out that it had been seen in Europe as well during the religious wars. Second, he does not "go native"?he remains a believing Protestant Christian, and This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 492 NEW LITERARY HISTORY more precisely a Huguenot. Third, he generally speaks not of morally superior and inferior people but rather of better and worse practices, such as child rearing, that can be adopted by any group. He does not make his comparisons in order to assert superiority but rather in the interest of finding pragmatic benefits in the practices of another culture. After Thevet and Lery, this strain of thought entered the European Renaissance more directly and dramatically with Michel de Montaigne. As an early exponent of what would later be called cultural relativism, Montaigne takes from Lery the emphasis on primitive communalism, the absence of laws of inheritance, and so forth. Montaigne met three Tupinamba Indians in 1562, at the court of King Charles IX, and the memory of the encounter followed him throughout his life. By Mon taigne's account, the Tupinamba engaged in a comparative critique of French society based on their own axiomatic principles of consensus rule and equal sharing; they wondered why tall adults could bow down to a small boy (the regent), why some people ate well and others ate barely at all, and why those who barely ate did not strangle those who were eat ing well. Two centuries before the French revolution, Montaigne relayed and ventriloquized the Indian voice to criticize European civilizational hierarchies. Here, too, it is easy to say that Montaigne was simply turning the usual rankings upside down, but that is again not quite true: rather, he is deploying a comparison in order to question the conventional as sumption of superiority of his own culture. Montaigne practiced a rhetoric of chiasmus or civilizational reversals by arguing that the violence of Tupinamba cannibalism paled in comparison to that triggered by religious wars in Europe, where people were drawn and quartered and tortured in the name of a religion of love. With their irreverent questions and their implied comparisons, the Tupinamba, at least as Montaigne presents them, demolished with a few probing questions the prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. Centuries later, Levi-Strauss went out in search of "Indians," writing consciously in the tradition of Lery and Rousseau, whom he called "the most ethnographic of the philosophers." We discern here a different modality of comparison, in the form of quasi-allegorical identifications and investments operating across time as well as space, with Levi-Strauss stressing his strong sense of identification with Lery and praising the generic traits and formal qualities of the Voyage as a model for an eth nological essay. On some levels, one might argue that Levi-Strauss deploys a technique of reverse ranking, lauding Indian social life as an alternative and even superior social model. While Western culture, as Levi-Strauss put it in The View from Afar, "isolates man from the rest of creation and [defines] too narrowly the boundaries separating him from other living beings," This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 493 native culture sees all of life on a continuum. While the Biblical tradi tion sees human beings as lords of creation, native thought sees them as collaborators rather than dominators of nature.27 Given his insider outside perspective on a Europe about to slaughter its "internal others," Levi-Strauss perhaps found in the gentle ways of the "external others" of Europe an alternative to what John Murray Cuddihy calls the ordeals of European "civility."28 One might accuse Levi-Strauss's praise of the Indians as "Rousseauiste," and a simple reversal of valence, but there are two important differences: 1) Levi-Strauss, unlike Rousseau, had detailed and intimate knowledge of the Nambiquara and the Bororo and made precise observations about them. And 2) given what was happening in the Europe of the Shoah, he had every reason to cast doubt on any pretension to ethical superiority on the part of Europe. But beyond that there is an important difference between a civilizational ranking that merely resembles and consolidates the preexisting hierarchical power arrangements between peoples and a sympathetic view of an alien cul ture, which challenges at the same time those dominant powers and the conceptual models deployed in the conventional ranking. Levi-Strauss deploys comparison as a critique of Eurocentric ranking; his praise of the lifeways of the Nambiquara is not designed to consolidate privilege but rather to undermine it. Comparison as Excess Seeing In the case of the French polymath Roger Bastide (1898-1974), the foreigner's "look from afar" (Levi-Strauss) illuminated Brazil even for Brazilians themselves. The French anthropologist lived in Brazil for six teen years, teaching sociology at the University of Sao Paulo where he took over an academic chair first occupied by Levi-Strauss. In a sense, Bastide prolongs the tradition going back to Jean de Lery, but he iden tified less with indigenous people than with black Brazilians, or more precisely, with Afro-Brazilian culture. While the official representatives of France were glorying in a "Latinite" shared by Brazilian and French white elites, Bastide discerned the cultural agency of a socially despised, declasse, black Brazil.29 Bastide exemplifies a kind of transnational gnosis. Born a French Protestant, he draws variously on African religion, Brazilian literature, French anthropology, North American sociology, and Chicago School anthropology along with many other currents, becoming a transcultural "medium" who spoke through and to these various voices. To borrow a comparison from Afro-Brazilian religions, he was the "horse" who was "mounted" by diverse methodological "spirits." At the same time, he can This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 494 NEW LITERARY HISTORY also be compared to the "ethnographic surrealists" of whom James Clif ford speaks, that is, the French writers who orchestrated an encounter between artistic modernism?in this case, not only French but also Brazil ian modernism?and the socioethnography of African and Afrodiasporic culture. Bastide offers a signal instance of the power of what we have elsewhere called, paraphrasing Raymond Williams, "analogical structures of feeling" as a key to transcultural comprehension.30 In his studies of the possession religions of Bahia, Bastide broke with the dominant views of African-derived religions as pathological or irrational, appreciating them on their own terms and merits. Most visitors, whether French or American, were inclined to see little more than superstition or animism in the West African religions as practiced in Brazil. Bastide's project was to show that these religions were not "superstitious, quasi demonic cults but rather legitimate belief systems which embraced a cosmology, a psychology, and a theodicy; and that they express an African thought that is erudite and deeply cultivated."31 Long before authors such as Clifford and George Marcus spoke of reflexive anthropology, but very much alongside and in dialogue with the ethnographic surrealists, Bastide developed an "anti-ethnocentric method" with quasi-mystical overtones: "It is a matter, for the sociologist, of not placing oneself outside social experience but rather of living it. . . we have to transform ourselves into that which we are studying, into the multitude, the mass, the class, or the caste. ... It is necessary, as in the act of love, to transcend our own personality in order to join ourselves to the soul linked to what is being studied."32 Here, ethnography itself becomes a kind of trance, the trigger for a transformation of identities that recalls the scrambled analogies, the exchange of identities, literally "at play" in candomble, where the medium becomes the saint, where male can become female, the adult a child, and so forth. Bastide suspended the usual ideal of scientific distance and famously declared "Africanus sum" (I am African), a formulation that ironically mingles complete identification with Africa with a Latin language redo lent of cultural capital and quintessential pan-Europeanness. Coming up against the limits of Eurotropic analogies, Bastide acknowledged that three centuries of rationalist Cartesianism had blinded him to the complexity of African religion, speaking of the "subtle philosophy" of candomble. Bastide believed in "immersion" (mergulho) in the culture being studied, while also practicing a certain reflexivity about his own methods and limitations. He practices both identification and exotopy, the trance and the distanced analysis performed subsequent to the trance. He was also careful not to fall into the trap of Negritude-style (and later Afrocentric) esscntialism about Africa, aware of the gap between the "real" Africa and the Africa reinvented in Brazilian terreiros. At the This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 495 same time, his descriptions are marked by a vitalism that runs the risk of reproducing a gendered dichotomy of rationality versus intuition that at times fails to grasp the semiotic complexity of candomble as a living, changing form of religious practice. For Bastide, the recognition of incommensurabilities and even the limits of cross-cultural comparison triggered an epistemological leap beyond the confines of one's own axiomatic culture. Unlike many an thropologists, Bastide recognized the limitations of the a priori systems and discourses and other cultural baggage that he carried to Brazil, not only in anthropology but also sociology. The Brazilian experience, then, sensitized Bastide to the epistemological limitations of Eurotropic modes of comparative analysis. Rather than force those modes and conceptual categories onto an experience that escapes and resists them, and rather than rank religions in an order of superiority and inferiority, Bastide opened himself up to new modes, including poetic modes, of appre hension. But unlike other writers, Bastide does not orientalize Brazil as a place where European categories do not work because of its puta tive irrationality. Rather, he discerns the inadequacies of the categories themselves and pleads for new paradigms worthy of a complex culture that is not inferior but only different. The Misrule of Metaphor In this essay, we have seen comparison deployed as an exercise in ranking and civilisational superiority (Hegel, Weber), as a narcissistic fantasy (the diverse national exceptionalisms), as a binarist essentializing of complex cultures (DaMatta), and finally (in Lery, Levi-Strauss, and Bastide) as an instrument for discerning comparabilities within and be tween in other ways incommensurable societies. While our text explores three national zones, we have also tried to transcend nationalist framing. We address cross-national and transnational comparisons in order to perform an analytical dislocation by constructing and deconstructing, threading and unraveling, the tangled webs of ideas and practices that constitute coimplicated national relationships. It is not a question of merelyjuxtaposing three national histories, then, but rather of exploring their interrelations and linked analogies within a global system of power. Indeed, part of the methodological/theoretical thrust of our project is to stress the interstitial connections and interwoven strands that make up all national formations, which binaristic cross-cultural comparisons have often failed to capture. Much as Paul Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor deems metaphor to be a cognitive instrument, so the more general phenomenon of comparison This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 496 NEW LITERARY HISTORY can also be seen as a perennial model of cognition that seeks out and delineates analogies and disanalogies in the search for cross-cultural precision and comprehension. In this sense, we are also interested in the role of metaphor in actively reshaping conceptualizations of academic disciplines and the relations between them. We are struck, in this sense, by the emergence of certain types of tropes within scholarly trends that seek to go beyond the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis. Manifest in such prefixes as "trans" and "cross" and "inter" and "meta," and in the profusion of terms like "transnational," "diasporic," "transcultural," "exilic," and "globalized," this trend often appeals to oceanic imagery. The phrase "Black Atlantic" (R. F. Thompson, Paul Gilroy) and coinages such as "circum-Atlantic performance" (Joseph Roach) and "planetary cur rents" (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker) and "tidalectics" (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), and even emerging subfields like "oceanic studies" and "island studies," form part of this tendency. Within a poetics of flows and eddies and currents, aquatic imagery is deployed as a dissolvent of borders and binarisms, all part of a search for a more fluid idiom for addressing transnational circuitries of ideas. Transnational studies also deploy tropes of color to speak both of ra cialized societies and of a historicized grid of analysis. While the "Black Atlantic" evokes the Middle Passage and the chronotope of the ship, an ancillary concept like the "Red Atlantic" would conjure up canoes and kayaks, the Conquest, and the Trail of Tears.33 "Red" and "Black" and "White" do not refer to isolatable and unchanging "races"?first, because no one is literally black, white, or red. English colonists, for example, reported that the native peoples of North America were of white complexion, while French and Portuguese colonists said that the native peoples of Brazil were of the same color as the Iberians. Here we intend tropes of color not to refer to distinct races but rather as positions on a spectrum, as an experimental method, a way of casting a certain blackish or reddish light on history to see what becomes visible when we see the history of the "spectral" Atlantic as Black or Red or White or all at the same time. Our assumption, shaped by critical race, intersectional-feminist, and postcolonial cultural studies, is that such demographic/symbolic tropes as blackness and whiteness and redness are overlapping and relational; they take on meaning only in reference to one another, as part of a mobile, ever-changing configuration striated by power and inequality. Our study of the role of comparison in the Red, Black, and White Atlantic in three zones echoes the triangular traffic by which Europe sent manufactured goods to Africa, African slaves to the New World, and raw materials back to Europe in an unending and lucrative cycle of exploitation. The metaphor of "currents" is especially suggestive in This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 497 transnationalizing comparison that the Atlantic Ocean is swept by vast circular "rivers" and "strea a northern circle running in a clockwise direction from its south beginnings, and a southern circle flowing in a counterclockwise dire tion, in a swirling movement evocative of the trade of ideas and go back and forth between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.34 Given th liquid transfers and "trade winds"?an expression that goes back to t slave trade?the issue becomes one of discerning the common curren running through the various zones, the ways that histories and texts discourses mingle and interact within situations of unequal liquidity All national comparison takes place on transnational territory. have proceeded from the assumption that all nations are, on one lev transnations and that all cultures are transcultures, which cannot be as monolithic or as congruent with the boundaries of nation-states. W nation-states exercise political and to some extent economic sovereig and while some regimes have brutally demonstrated the horrific dam wreaked by nation-states?nations are still sites of perpetual contestat not reducible to single ideologies. Culture, furthermore, does not co form to neat political boundaries or obey the mandates even of the m authoritarian regimes. National cultural fields are dynamic, heteroglos impure, dissensual, and internally differentiated. Cultures are not c parable in the form of a stable set of unchanging properties or a st list of traits. France is not eternally Cartesian; Brazil is not perpetu carnivalesque; the United States is not unfailingly puritanical. Altho cross-border comparisons have often conjured up the image of natio as coherent, consistent, and hermetically sealed units, our emphasis been on the contradictions, gaps, and fissures within a transnati perspective. We have called attention, in this sense, to what Edo Glissant calls "transversalities," that is, the comparisons and dialogis taking place across fluid transnational spaces?not between nation-st but rather between "nation-relations." New York University notes Some of this material is drawn from the manuscript of The Culture Wars in (forthcoming). The project of the book was outlined in prelimary form in R and Ella Shohat, 'Traveling Multiculturalism: A Trinational Debate in Tran Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Raul, Matti Bunzel Burton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 293-316. 1 For an extended elaboration of this idea in relation to film adaptations see Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptat Blackwell, 2005). 2 Pierre Bourdieu, 'The Social Conditions of the International Circulation in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford: Blackwell, 19 This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 498 NEW LITERARY HISTORY 3 Some forms of American-style exceptionalism could be called solipsistic ethnocentrism, taking the form not of explicit claims of superiority but rather of a lack of interest in other nations, even those in which the United States is intervening. The U.S. educational system has become more nation centered, with less space for geography and world history, while the U.S. media increasingly limit their foreign coverage to spectacular catastrophes or direct challenges to U.S. interests. U.S. exceptionalism has recently morphed into the idea that the United States makes exceptions for itself when it comes to international law and human rights. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 8-9. 4 In our book Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (New York: Routledge, 2007) we support political anti-Americanism that critiques American social systems and foreign policy but reject culturalist forms of anti-Americanism that based their arguments on supposed ethnic "traits." 5 " G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 84. 6 We explore the subject of national narcissism and exceptionalism at greater length in Flagging Patriotism. 7 Paul Adam, Les visages du Bresil (Paris: P. Laffitte, 1910), 150-51. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from French and Portuguese are our own. 8 Adam, Les visages du Bresil, 165-66. 9 Jacqueline Bardolph, Etudes postcoloniales et litterature (Paris: Champion, 2002), 17-18. 10 Joseph Burnichon, Le Bresil d'aujourdhui (Paris: Perrin, 1910), 77. 11 Abel Bonnard, Ocean et Bresil (Paris: Flammarion, 1929), 76-77. 12 Pierre Bourdieu, "Deux imperialismes de 1'universel," in LAmerique des Francois, ed. Christine Faure and Tom Bishop (Paris: Francis Bourin, 1992), 149-55. 13 See Henry M. Brackenridge, Voyage to South America, Performed by Order of the American government in the years 1817 and 1818, in the Frigate Congress, 2 vols. (London: John Miller, 1820), 1:128-29. Cited in Denis Rolland, ed. Le Bresil et le monde (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1998), 25-26. 14 Jesse Souza, ed., A invisibilidade da desigualdade brasileira (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2006), 100. 15 See Jesse Souza, A modernizacao seletiva: uma reintrpretacao do dilema brasileiro (Brasilia: UnB, 2000). 16 See Caetano Veloso, Verdade tropical (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 14. 17 Veloso, Verdade tropical, 118 18 For an illuminating critique of comparison as a method, see Micol Siegel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2009). 19 A. Oliveira, "Aos nossos leitores," OAlfinete, September 3, 1918; cited in Siegel, Uneven Encounters, 190. 20 Jose Correia Leite, "O grande problema nacional," Evolucao, May 13, 1933; quoted in Siegel, Uneven Encounters, 202. 21 Alexandra Poli, "Faire face au racisme en France et au Bresil: de la condamnation morale a l'aide aux victimes," Cultures and Conflicts 59 (2005): 11-45. 22 See Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Le voyage de Gonneville (1503-1505); et la decouverte de la Normandie par les Indiens du Bresil, with commentary by Leyla Perrone-Moises, trans. Ariane Witkowski (Paris: Chandeigne, 1995). 23 See Frank Lestringant, Le huguenot et le sauvage (Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 26. 24 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 211. 25 Here we find a clear contrast with Robinson Crusoe who, after many years on his tropical island, is obsessed with remaining clothed, even though he is alone. Crusoe's wealth, incidentally, is generated by a sugar mill (engenho) in Bahia, Brazil. This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TRANSNATIONALIZING COMPARISON 499 26 The 1989 documentary Kayapo: Out of the Forest (Granada Television, 1989), which concerns the well-publicized protests of a coalition of indigenous groups against the construction of a hydroelectric, features similar dialogues between the protestors and the representatives of the energy corporation Eletronote. 27 Todorov argues that Levi-Strauss, who claims to be a cultural relativist, ultimately "finds Indian culture superior," thus still falling into the trap of ranking and mere binary reversal. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 60-89. 28 See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeals of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the feivish Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon, 1974). 29 Bastide ultimately wrote thirty books on an astonishingly wide variety of topics, ranging from psychoanalysis (A psicanalise do cafune, 1941), to literature (A poesia Afro-Brasileira, 1943), to mysticism (Imagens do nordeste mistico em branco e preto, 1945), to racial relations (Relacoes entre negros e brancos em Sao Paulo, 1955), to folklore {Sociologia dofolclore brasileiro, 1959), to Afro-Brazilian religions in general (As religibes africanas no Brasil, 1971). His work transgressed diverse frontiers: those between disciplines; those between the "high" and "low" arts; those between class and racially-defined groups; and those between the sacred and the profane. By mingling the social sciences with artistic analysis, Bastide anticipated what would later be called "cultural studies." 30 See our UnthinkingEurocentrism (London: Routledge, 1994), 351. 31 Roger Bastide, O candomble da Bahia (Sao Paulo: Companha Editora Nacional, 1978), 10-11. 32 Roger Bastide, "Macunaima em Paris," in O Estado de Sao Paulo, February 3, 1946; quoted in Fernanda Areas Peixoto, Dialogos Brasileiros (Sao Paulo: Ediora da Universidade de Sao Paulo, 200), 16. 33 The trope of the "Red Atlantic" is explored in Robert Stam's essay "The Red Atlantic: Tupi Theory and the Franco-Brazilian-Indigenous Dialogue," presented at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, April 17, 2009. This concept will also form part of our The Culture Wars in Translation. 34 See Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery of Europe (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007), ch. 2, passim. This content downloaded from 216.165.95.181 on Sun, 07 Oct 2018 20:20:17 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms