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Race in Translation
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Race in Translation
Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic
Robert Stam | Ella Shohat
a
N EW YO R K U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London
www.nyupress.org
2012 by Robert Stam/Ella Shohat
All rights reserved
References to Internet Websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs
that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stam, Robert, 1941Race in translation : culture wars around the postcolonial Atlantic / Robert Stam and
Ella Shohat.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-9837-9 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-9838-6 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-2392-0 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-8147-2525-2 (ebook)
1. Race. 2. Culture. 3. Postcolonialism Atlantic Ocean Region.
4. Multiculturalism Atlantic Ocean Region.
5. Ethnicity Atlantic Ocean Region. I. Shohat, Ella, 1959- II. Title.
CB195.S73 2012
305.8009163 dc23
2011050487
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Jacob
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
ix
xiii
The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Red Atlantic
The Indigene and the Epistemological Crisis
The Black Atlantic and the Aporias of the Universal
Antinomies of the Enlightenment
White Voices against Imperial Reason
1
2
7
13
17
22
A Tale of Three Republics

Franco-Brazilian Liaisons
Brazilo-American Encontros
Diasporic Longings
From Black Orpheus to Barack Obama
Between Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism
Racing Translation
26
31
38
42
49
51
57
The Seismic Shift and the Decolonization of Knowledge

The Protocols of Eurocentrism
The Postwar Rupture
The Radicalization of the Disciplines
Multiculturalism and the Decolonizing Corpus
Situating Postcolonial Studies
61
61
68
75
82
85
Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence

The Politics of Scapegoating
Troubling Diversity
The Bourdieu/Wacquant Polemic
An American Discourse?
iek and the Universal Imaginary
The Ghosting of the Particular
93
96
101
106
113
118
126
France, the United States, and the Culture Wars

Sobbing for the White Man
Minorities and the Specter of Identitarianism
132
134
137
vii
The Anxieties behind an Antagonism

Hip-Hop and the Racialization of the Everyday
Allegorical Crossings: Blacks, Jews, Muslims
From Mao to Moses: Neocons and the Nouveaux Philosophes
Frances Multicultural Turn
142
146
154
162
172
Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars

Racial Democracy and Black Consciousness
The Anatomy of Skepticism
The Uses and Abuses of Comparison
Desire, Denial, and Linked Analogies
Popular Culture, Tropiclia, and the Rainbow Atlantic
Scholarship and the Persistence of Race
175
175
179
183
189
194
206
From Armative Action to Interrogating Whiteness

Remedial Measures and the Legacy of Armative Whiteness
The Quotas Debate in Brazil
The American Foil
The Advent of Whiteness Studies
Debating Whiteness, Blackness, and Mestiagem
The Critique of Normative Frenchness
209
209
216
222
229
233
238
French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial

Ironies of an Aversion
Decolonizing la Rpublique
The Hesitation-Waltz of French Postcolonial Studies
The Quarrel over Genealogy
Genres of Postcolonial criture
244
245
248
255
261
265
The Transnational Trac of Ideas

France, the United States, and Brazil Studies
French Theory In and Out of Place
Allegories of Intrusion
Cultural Studies and Critical Utopias
Triangular Readings
Theorizing Cross-Border Interlocution
Translational Relationalities
270
270
272
276
284
289
293
298
Notes
Index
About the Authors
301
335
363
viii
Contents
Acknowledgments
in the long process of gestation of this bookgoing back to its

rst conceptualization realized in an essay (Travelling Multiculturalism: French
Intellectuals and the U.S. Culture Wars) published in Black Renaissance Noire in
2001we have received the support of many friends, colleagues, and institutions.
We would like to thank the following for oering insightful commentary on earlier drafts or sections or on oral presentations of the project: Christopher Dunn,
Patrick Erouart, Ismail Xavier, Jim Cohen, Manthia Diawara, Ziad Elmarsafy,
Srgio Costa, James Stam, Anne Donadey, Marcelo Fiorini, Randal Johnson,
George Ydice, Diana Taylor, Neil Smith, Michael Hanchard, Yal Bitton, Randy
Martin, Robert Young, and Rajeswari Sunder. Various readers for NYU Press
notably Arturo Escobar, Minoo Moallem, and Dilip Gaonkarmade useful suggestions. We are also grateful for the indispensible assistance we have received at
various stages from Benjamin Minh Ha, Cecilia Sayad, Paulina Suarez-Hesketh,
Karen Wang, Sandra Ruiz, Leili Kashani, Karim Tartoussieh, and Leo Goldsmith, and especially from Jennifer Kelly, who has been wonderfully helpful during the diverse stages of the project, including up through the demanding work of
indexing. We are also grateful to NYU Press editor in chief Eric Zinner for his
support and patience and to managing editor Despina Papazoglou Gimbel and
copyeditor Andrew Katz for their meticulous work.
The intellectual conversations promoted by various centers at NYU have been
an endless source of stimulation and inspiration. Here we would like to cite La
Maison Franaise, the Institute of French Studies, the Center for Latin American
and Caribbean Studies, the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics,
the Juan Carlos of Spain Center, the Center for Media, Culture and History, and
the Center for Art and Public Policy in Tisch School of the Arts, along with various seminars and discussion groups such as the Postcolonial Studies Seminar
and the Comparative Race Studies Group. Our warm appreciation also goes to
the following: Evelyn Alsultany, Awam Amkpa, Vincent Carelli, Ernesto Ignacio
de Carvalho, Moncef Cheikrouhou, Luiz Antonio Coelho, Marc Cohen, Amalia Cordova, Karel Depollo, Ayse Franko, Eti and Selim Franko, Faye Ginsburg,
Inderpal Grewal, Maurice Hazan, Caren Kaplan, Kate Lyra, Ivone Margulies,
Anne McClintock, Rob Nixon, Yigal Nizri, Marcelle Pithon, Mary Louise Pratt,
Yvette Raby, Jolene Ricard, Ilda Santos, Eyal Sivan, Shouleh Vatanabadi, Joo
Luiz Vieira, and Anne Wax.
ix
We would like to thank the following colleagues and institutions for facilitating the presentation of our work (alone or together): Inderpal Grewal and
the Culture and Theory Lecture Series at the University of California, Irvine;
Caroline Cappucin and LInstitut dAmrique Latine in Paris; Yasuko Takezawa
and the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, Japan; Patrick
Wolfe and the University of Melbourne, Australia; Deane Williams and Monash
University, Australia; Manuela Ribeiro Sanchez and the Europe in Black &
White conference at the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas at the University of
Lisbon, Portugal; Arnold H. Itwaru and the University of Toronto; Armida de la
Garza and Nottingham University in Ningpo, China; Manuela Boatc and the
Critical Thought/Transformative Practice Seminar at the Instituto Universitrio de Pesquisas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Diana Accaria and the Seminar on
Postcolonial Theory and the Departments of English, History, and Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico at Ro Piedras; Suvir Kaul and
Ania Loomba and the Postcolonial Studies and Beyond conference, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Vermonja Alston and York University,
Toronto; the Borchers Lecture Series, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Timothy Powell, Eve Troute Powell, and the Multicultural Studies conference at the
University of Georgia; Frederic Viguier and Francine Goldenhar at the Maison
Franaise at New York University; Diana Taylor and NYUs Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and its encuentros in Monterrey, Mexico, and
Lima, Peru; Edward Said, Joseph Massad, and Gil Anidjar and the Comparative
Cultures University Seminar, Columbia University; Dora Baras and the Subversive Film Festival in Zaghreb, Croatia; the Area Studies in the Era of Globalization seminar at the Social Science Research Council, New York; Lucia Nagib
and the World Cinema program at Leeds University, England; Leslie Bethell
and the Center for Brazilian Studies at Oxford University; Srgio Costa and the
Conference on Brazil at the Free University in Berlin; Armida de la Garza and
the Conference on Co-Productions in Puebla, Mexico; Z Gatti, SOCINE, and
the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil; Omar Gonzales and ICAIC,
Havana, Cuba; Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature (ABRALIC),
Federal University of Salvador Bahia; the Alliance Franaise in New York City;
Casa do Saber, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Faye Ginsburg and the Center for Media,
Culture and History, NYU; and Tim Mitchell and ICAS, NYU.
We have also beneted from the opportunities to conduct seminars related
to the issues of the book at the University of So Paulo, Brazil (Shohat, Spring
2010); the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Stam, Spring 2010); the Federal
University of Cuiaba, Brazil (Stam, Spring 2010); the Institute of Postcolonial
Transcultural Studies and at the University of Bremen, Germany, the Inaugural
Lectures/Seminar Series hosted by Sabine Broeck (Shohat and Stam, JuneJuly
Acknowledgments
2009); the NYU in Paris Program and Caroline Montel and Katherine Fleming at the NYU Center for European Studies, as well as Universit Sorbonne
Nouvelle, Paris III, hosted by Jacques Aumont and Philippe Dubois (Shohat and
Stam, Fall 2008); the School of Criticism & Theory, and Dominick LaCapra,
Cornell University, 30th Summer Session (Shohat and Stam 2006), and the
Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory: Present Tense Empires, Race, BioPolitics, and David Goldberg and Lisa Lowe, at the UC Humanities Research
Institute, University of California, Irvine (Shohat 2005).
Several awards and fellowships have advanced our work on this project: a Fulbright Lectureship/Research Award in Brazil (Shohat, Spring 2010); the Shelby
Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Fellowship at Princeton University
(Stam, 2009); the International Center of Advanced Studies Fellowship at New
York University on the theme of The Authority of Knowledge in a Global Age
(Shohat, 20062007); and the fellowship at the Center for Place, Culture and
Politics, CUNY Graduate Center (Shohat, 20002001). We also would like to
thank Asya Berger and Jane Tylus and the Humanities Initiative at NYU for
the Grants-in-Aid to support this project,(Shohat and Stam); to FAS Dean for
the Humanities Lauren Benton for the supplemental fund in conjunction with
the Fulbright award (2010, Shohat); and to dean of the Tisch School of the Arts
Mary Schmidt Campbell for the TSOA Senior Faculty Development Grant
(Shohat, 20032004).
Some earlier versions of sections of the book have been published in the following journals or books: Stam/Shohat, Postcolonial Studies and France, Interventions (forthcoming, Spring 2012); Stam/Shohat, Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy, New Literary History
40, no. 3 (Summer 2009); Shohat/Stam, What Is Eurocentrism?, in Arnold H.
Itwaru, ed., The White Supremacist State: Eurocentrism, Imperialism, Colonialism,
Racism (Toronto: Other Eye, 2009); Shohat, On the Margins of Middle Eastern Studies: Situating Saids Orientalism, in On Orientalism at Thirty, special
section of Review of Middle Eastern Studies (published plenary session lecture,
MESA 2008) 43, no. 1 (Summer 2009); Shohat/Stam, Cultural Debates in
Translation, in Revathi Krishnaswamy and John Hawley, eds., The Postcolonial
and the Global (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Shohat/
Stam, Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy, Rethinking Marxism 19, no.
3 ( July 2007); Shohat, Post-Fanon and the Colonial: A Situational Diagnosis, in
Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Shohat, Black, Jew, Arab: Postscript to The Wretched of the Earth (rst published
in the Hebrew translation of Fanons book in 2006), in Christopher Wise and
Paul James, eds., Being Arab: Arabism and the Politics of Recognition (Melbourne,
Australia: Arena, 2010); Shohat/Stam, Traveling Multiculturalism: A Debate in
xi
Acknowledgments
Translation, in Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzel, Antoinette Burton, and
Jed Esty, eds., Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005); Shohat/Stam, De-Eurocentrizing Cultural Studies: Some Proposals, in
Ackbar Abbas and John Nguyet Erni, eds., Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An
Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005); Stam, Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of Identication, in Shohat/Stam, eds., Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality and Transnational Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2003); Shohat/Stam, Travelling Multiculturalism: French Intellectuals and the
U.S. Culture Wars, Black Renaissance Noir (Fall 2001); Stam, Multiculturalism
and the Neo-Conservatives, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat,
eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Shohat/Stam, From the Imperial
Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds., Global/Local: Cultural
Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996).
Finally, we would like to thank Matthew Cusick for generously allowing us to
use his artwork Fionas Wave, 2005 for the book cover of Race in Translation.
What drew us to the image was its collage conjugation of displaced fragments of
maps and its powerful evocation of oceanic movement. The suggestion of breaking surf, conjuring up tempests and shipwrecks, resonates in the context of the
book with the Middle Passages of the Black (Afro-diasporic) Atlantic, as well as
with the travails of the Red (indigenous) Atlantic. Learning that Fiona in Gaelic
means white or fair, meanwhile, rhymes with our theme of the White Atlantic
and critical Whiteness studies. Our book traces, in a sense, an epic encounter
of perspectivesbetween the view-from-the-ship and the view-from-the-shore,
or between the caravels and the canoesgenerating the turbulent crossings of
epistemologies. The cover image opens up to the various aquatic metaphors that
run through the book and to the oceanic intellectual space charted here. The disorienting dispersal of the maps, meanwhile, reverberates with our emphasis on
the diasporas, passages, dislocations, and interconnections that have shaped the
multidirectional ow of ideas around the post/colonial Atlantic.
Robert Stam/Ella Shohat
New York University
xii
Acknowledgments
Preface
race in trans l ation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial

Atlantic is at once a report from various fronts in the race/colonial debates, a
mapping of the germane literature in several languages, and an argument about
the politics of the cross-border ow of ideas. Against the backdrop of an Atlantic space shaped by the conquest of indigenous people, the enslavement of Africans, and massive colonial and postcolonial dislocations, our book visits key
ports along an oceanic continuum. We follow the transatlantic trac of race
within and between three national zones: the United States (and more broadly
the Anglophone zone), France (and the Francophone zone), and Brazil (and the
Lusophone zone). Our study goes beyond the three zones, however, in that it
continually asserts the cultural presence of multiple geographies, while inscribing
the race/coloniality problematic in the Atlantic generally. The various itineraries
of the race debates, we argue, intersect in some surprising and illuminating ways.
Each chapter of Race in Translation treats a dierent dimension of the issues
while highlighting the interlinked similitudes among the various manifestations
of what we are calling the Atlantic Enlightenment. Most of the chapters chart
the career of a series of ideasEurocentrism, the decolonization of knowledge,
identity politics, multiculturalism, Armative Action, postcolonial theory, and
so onas they unfold in and across the public spheres of distinct spaces. The
early chapters provide the broad historical framework by tracing the overall genealogy of the debates to the Renaissance encounter with indigenous societies, to
the Enlightenments negotiation of the freedom/slavery dialectic, and to modernitys fraught relation to the objects of its imperial civilizing mission.
The later chapters, meanwhile, examine the reeditions of these debates as
encapsulated in the present-day culture wars. While the term culture wars is
usually taken to designate the heated polemics in the English-speaking world
whirling around identity politics, Armative Action, the canon, feminism,
multiculturalism, gay rights, anti-imperialism, and antiglobalization, the verbal
skirmishes triggered by these wars form but the surface ripples of a deeper oceanic struggle to decolonize power structures and epistemologies. If in one sense
the culture wars emerged in the postWorld War II period, in a much longer
view they participate in the ve-century process by which the European powers
reached positions of economic, military, political, and cultural hegemony in much
of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Some of the major corollaries of this colonial
xiii
process were the massive expropriation of territory; the large-scale destruction

of indigenous peoples and cultures; the enslavement of indigenous Americans
and Africans; and racism within the colonized world and within the West itself.
Although resistance to colonialism has existed since the very beginnings of colonization, we focus on the resistance that reached critical mass in the postWorld
War II period, generating what we see as the seismic shift in scholarship that
contested established racial hierarchies, Eurocentric narrativizations of history,
and canonical modes of knowledge production.
Against the grain of nation-state-centered analysis, we set the debates within
what we term an intercolonial frame that addresses the tensions between colonizing nation-states that are at once collaborators and rivals. All nations are, in
the end, transnations, indelibly marked by the presence of the other nations for
and against which they have diacritically dened themselves. The cultural borders between national zones are therefore porous, often confounding inside
and outside. Cultural phenomena imagined to be unique to one nation may in
fact be shared. Intellectual debates deemed irrelevant and untranslatable in one
historical conjuncture turn out to be relevant, even urgent, in another. As the
debates move across national borders, we ask, how are they translated both literally and guratively? Under what rubrics, keywords, and evaluative repertoires
are they conducted? How do the terms themselves shift their valence as they
move from one cultural geography and political semantics into another? How
are ideas displaced, reinvoiced, and recontextualized as they move back and forth
between national elds? What are the grids, prisms, tropes, and even fun-house
mirrors through which the debates are seen? What are the national doxa, the cultural institutions, and the global economic alignments that block, or facilitate, the
transit of ideas about race/coloniality? What is the impact of exceptionalisms,
narcissisms, and disavowals in what one might call, fusing Freud with Bourdieu,
a narcissism of national distinction?
Our concern is with the ways intellectuals have textualized, mediated, and
mobilized ideas. What anxieties and hopes, what utopias and dystopias, are
provoked by words such as race, multiculturalism, and identity politics in
the diverse sites? Why is the concept of la Rpublique central to the debates
in France but not in the United States or Brazil, even though all three nationstates are republics? Why is miscegenation a dominant theme in Brazil but not
in France or the United States, even though all three countries are, each in its
own way, miscegenated? Why does communitarianism carry such a potent
negative charge in France yet rarely gure in Brazil and the United States?
What is the mediating role of language? In this sense, we not only engage the
politics of translation but also cite and literally translate texts from French,
Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages in order to convey the thrust of the
xiv
Preface
arguments, as well as the tone, the grain, and the cultural accents of the voices
through which the arguments are presented.
The various chapters explore the multiple dimensions of these transnational/
translational intersections. The rst three chapters set out the larger conceptual
and historical framework. Chapter 1, The Atlantic Enlightenment, outlines the
intertextual backdrop of the culture wars in the foundational contradictions of
the Enlightenment. How was Enlightenment republicanism, with its professed
values of freedom and equality, to be reconciled with the actual practices of colonialism, slavery, and imperialism? Did colonialism represent a rupture with the
Enlightenment, or its clearest expression? Was the Enlightenment an alternative to racism, or its very source? In what ways do contemporary polemics recapitulate while reconguring Enlightenment debates about the universal and the
particular?
It is in this context that we advance, in conjunction with the well-known work
on the Black Atlantic, the idea of the Red Atlantic and, on a dierent register,
the White Atlantic.1 Although the expression Red Atlantic has been deployed
to refer strictly to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, we conceptualize it in
a broader sense to suggest that the entire Atlantic world is Red and indigenized,
in that it has been impacted not only by the Conquest that enriched Europe
materially but also by indigenous modes of thought and sociability that triggered
a salutary epistemological crisis by provoking European thinkersfrom Montaigne and Diderot to Pierre Clastresto question the dominant social norms.
What we call the discourse of indigenous radicalism has been invoked to support such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, communal property, class, gender, and sexual equality, ecology, collective jouissance,
antiproductivism, and alter-globalization. The concept of a White Atlantic,
meanwhile, conjures up the hegemonic ethnicity and critical whiteness studies
as an integral part of the broader anticolonial project.
Subsequent chapters zoom in to specic currents within the Atlantic continuum. Chapter 2, A Tale of Three Republics, examines Atlantic republicanism
and the transatlantic looking relations or intellectual polylogue between France,
Brazil, and the United States. Transoceanic in their genealogies and repercussions, the colonialism, slavery, and race debates have been profoundly constitutive
of the Brazilian, American, and French social formations. Here we highlight the
longstanding role of France as cultural mentor of Brazil; the cornucopia of comparative race scholarship concerning Brazil and the United States; and the Afrodiasporic search for nonracist utopias, especially in France and Brazil. We also
question the Anglo-Saxon/Latin culturalist dichotomy as an ideological construct that still haunts the race/coloniality debates. We thus shift the focus from
Latins and Anglo-Saxons as putative panethnic groups to what we call Latinism
xv
Preface
and Anglo-Saxonism as discourses. Both North and South, we argue, have

reproduced Eurocentric Hegelian-Weberian theories that naturalize the subordination of the African and indigenous elements in the New World. We call,
nally, for a translational analysis of intellectual exchange as a way of avoiding
petried conceptualizations of national culture.
Chapter 3, The Seismic Shift and the Decolonization of Knowledge, delineates the protocols of Eurocentrism as the discursive precipitate of colonialism
and sketches out the postWorld War attempts to decolonize scholarship within
diverse elds of inquiry. Here we discuss Frantz Fanons work as a metonym
for the broader decolonizing move that led not only to national independence
in the Third World but also to the radicalization of academic disciplines and
ultimately to novel transdisciplinary formations such as ethnic studies, critical
race studies, and postcolonial studies. This seismic shift, we argue, forms the
indispensable backdrop for the post-1960s debates about such fraught issues as
race, identity, and multiculturalism. The critique of Euro-diusionist narratives
of knowledge dissemination and the discussion of the radicalization of the disciplines here lay the groundwork for our critique of some otherwise progressive
thinkers later in the book.
The remaining chapters explore the debates as they have evolved from the
1990s to the present. Chapter 4, Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence, examines a certain lefts hostility, shared with the right, toward identity
politics, as voiced by such writers as Walter Benn Michaels, Pierre Bourdieu/
Loc Wacquant, and Slavoj iek. What explains this bizarre secret sharing
between political adversaries? The leftist arguments against critical race and
multicultural identity politics bear an uncanny resemblance to those advanced
by the right, even if they are articulated in the name of opposed visions. The dismissal sometimes derives, as we shall see, from a fools choice between class and
race, or between economy and culture. The blithe dismissal of an easily criticized
liberal multiculturalism, we argue, distracts attention from the less easily dismissible work on race and coloniality. The problem, we argue, lies not so much
in the arguments themselves as in the uninformed and Eurocentric assumptions
undergirding them.
Chapter 5, France, the United States, and the Culture Wars, traces the shift
in French intellectual life that takes us from the ardent Third Worldism of the
1960s to the backlash against it in the 1970s, on to a certain left-right United
Front against multicultural identity politics in the 1990s. Here we dissect the
attacks on critical race/multicultural thought by prominent French intellectuals
such as Pascal Bruckner, Tzvetan Todorov, and Alain Finkielkraut. What anxieties underlie this defensive stance toward what some have called the specter
of multiculturalism? How can we explain the immense gap between the multi-
xvi
Preface
cultural France of hip-hop and the antimulticultural stance of French intellectuals? Here we also examine the rightward turnsummed up in the catch-phrase
from Mao to Mosestaken by the self-dened pro-American and Zionist
nouveaux philosophes. Against those who see Jews and Muslims, and Jews and
blacks, as necessarily antagonistic, we stress their historical, discursive, and allegorical anities, from the catalytic moment of 1492 up to the present. In the end,
we argue, issues of colonialism, anti-Semitism, Indian-hating, Orientalism, Eurocentrism, Islamophobia, and antiblack racism are all intimately connected, sharing intersecting impulses and logics. Finally, the chapter evokes what could be
called the multicultural turn in French scholarship since the turn of the 20th
century.
Chapter 6, Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars, explores the
South Atlantic version of the seismic shift as expressed in anti-imperialism,
dependency theory, and the black consciousness movement in postwar Brazil.
What explains a certain Brazilian skepticism, at once similar to and distinct from
that found among French intellectuals, toward multicultural identity politics,
at least in the 1990s? We frame these issues against the backdrop of the prolic
comparative scholarship concerning Brazil and the United States. What are the
advantages and disadvantages of the comparative method? In this chapter, we
also foreground the brilliant ways that Brazilian popular musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso have staged debates about race and indigeneity
through lyrics, music, and performance. Deploying multicultural dissonance as
a creative resource, we argue, these musicians give aesthetic form to social desire.
At the same time, we show that Brazilian academics, in tandem with the artists,
have been exploring the race/colonial debates with great depth and precision,
often challenging the racial democracy myth.
Chapter 7, From Armative Action to Interrogating Whiteness, explores
the debates about Armative Action and reparations as new editions of Enlightenment debates about freedom and slavery and the universal and the particular.
Here we anatomize the ricocheting conversations about the long-term consequences of colonialism and slavery in the three zones, especially emphasizing the
cross-referential and transnational character of the conversation. Why do both
the supporters and critics of Armative Action constantly bring up comparisons
to the United States? At the same time, we note the emergence of whiteness
studiesor its functional equivalentsin all three sites, with an eye to potential
zones of reciprocity.
Chapter 8, French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial, further probes the gap
between France as a multiracial postcolonial society and a French academic eld
that has only recently begun to wrestle with race and postcoloniality, despite the
historically seminal role of French and Francophone anticolonial thinkers. What
xvii
Preface
explains the initial aversion to postcolonial theory and the subsequent partial
fading of that aversion? Here we probe some of the ironies of this hesitationwaltz about postcoloniality, while also pointing to the recent writing, especially
since the 2005 rebellions, that traces the continuities between colonial practices
and postcolonial France. The various genres of postcolonial writing, we suggest,
now form part of what has become a lively intervention close to the pulsating
center of French public life.
Chapter 9, The Translational Trac of Ideas, theorizes the axioms operative in multilateral polemics in which scholars from one country (France) engage
scholars from another country (the United States) who write about a third
country (Brazil). We focus especially on the polemic between Bourdieu/Wacquant and political scientist Michael Hanchard concerning the Brazilian black
consciousness movement. In an innite regress of readings, Brazilian intellectuals themselves read back against the Bourdieu/Wacquant reading of an African
American reading of Brazil. We contextualize the polemic against the intertextual setting of the work of the French and American Brazilianists. At the same
time, we explore the impact of the dissemination of poststructuralist French theory in Brazil and the United States. Examining the transregional circulation of
ideas, we criticize narratives of intellectual exchange that posit dichotomous axes
of foreign/native, export/import, and original/copy, proposing instead a more
uid transnational and translational methodology appropriate to cross-border
intellectual interlocution.
Hovering around and in the interstices of our text is the metaquestion of
theories and methodologies that address questions of transnational intellectual
exchange. How do cultural practices such as hip-hop and Tropiclia, in tandem
with academic scholarship, bring their excess seeing (Bakhtin) to the table?
What advantages accompany the view from afar? (Lvi-Strauss), especially
when the view from afar and the view from within become intermingled when
intellectuals such as Claude Lvi-Strauss and Roger Bastide are transformed by
their Brazilian sjour? What is the cognitive function of comparison? What does
it illuminate or fail to illuminate? How can comparison take on board the constitutive unevenness that structures the world in dominance? Are national comparisons always tendentious, narcissistic, prescriptive, hiding what R. Radhkrishnan calls the aggression of a thesis?2 Does comparison assume, or construct,
an illusory coherence on both sides of the comparison? How does comparison
change when we move from the comparison of two entities (with the danger of
reied binaries) to comparing three or more entities (with the danger of a chaotic
proliferation)?
Cross-national comparisons are imbued with aect, fears, vanities, desires,
and projections. Comparatists can idealize or denigrate the home country, just
xviii
Preface
as they can idealize or denigrate the away country. They can also deconstruct
nation-state thinking by discerning commonalities. Comparison is both problematic and inescapable. (Even when one rejects comparison as a method, after
all, one is still comparing comparison to other supposedly superior methodologies.) The epistemological impasse occurs when reied dichotomies based on
nation-state units ontologize a putative national character, now locked into what
might be called an ontologi-nation. The Venn diagrams of comparison focus on
the shared comparable territory, leaving outside the anomalies not susceptible to
comparison, that which is incomparable. We attempt to avoid this bind through
formulations that conjoin identity and dierence, emphasizing shared contradictions, dierentiated commonalities, and family resemblancesdierences that
connect and similarities that separate. We will thus highlight a multidirectional
polylogue within which intellectuals are constantly hybridizing, indigenizing,
translating, and transforming ideas from elsewhere, while still being shaped by
their national contexts and by uneven relations to power.
Comparison often entails generalization, yet any sentence that connects an
entire nationality or ethnicity to the verb to be (The French are...) is inevitably problematic, as suggested by the ancient conundrum All generalizations are
false. But even more circumscribed generalizations concerning all white French
sociologists are equally likely to be false. Comparisons that result in static overdrawn dichotomies make one wish for a comparative analysis of exceptions,
focusing on Brazilians who hate soccer and samba, Americans who despise hot
dogs and baseball, and French people who abhor Beaujolais and Camembert.
Such analyses would at least have the virtue of unpredictability, of not leaving
complex cultures incarcerated in the prisons of national stereotype.
This books title, Race in Translation, signals the dominant thread that runs
through the volume. In a relational frame, we recount how Brazil, France, and
the United States have been historically implicated in the dynamics of race and
coloniality, and how those dynamics still reverberate in the present in the form
of palpably unjust social formations. While the specic demographic ratios and
power hierarchies might vary, the historical interplay between race and coloniality is constitutive in each national case. The evasion, the refusal, and the sheer
denial of this constitutiveness is what triggers and propels the debates. The evasion/denial draws on dierent rhetorics in each case: racial democracy in Brazil,
republicanism in France, and equal opportunity in the United States. The crux
of the debate, in our view, is between those who acknowledge the shaping presence of race and coloniality as against those who deny it.
Race in Translation evokes a multicolored Atlantic seascape. In this sense,
our work forms part of a movement within scholarship toward postcolonial and
transnational frames, a trend manifested linguistically in the proliferation of
xix
Preface
such prexes as trans- cross-, and inter- and in words such as intercultural,
transnational, transcultural, diasporic, exilic, global, and so forth. A stream
of aquatic and oceanic metaphorsBlack Atlantic Civilization (Robert Farris
Thompson), the Black Atlantic (Paul Gilroy), ux and reux (Pierre Verger),
circum-Atlantic performance ( Joe Roach), and tidalectics (Edward Kamau
Brathwaite)gives expression to a poetics of ows and eddies mingling myriad
currents, reecting a search for a more uid language of analysis. At the same
time, uidity is no panacea. Slavery too was transnational, and Atlantic waters
harbor the corpses of the enslaved thrown overboard. Moreover, not all ows are
progressive; Wall Street bankers also speak of liquid assets and capital ows.
Our Atlanticist title, in this sense, clearly echoes the triangular trac by which
Europe, in a lucrative loop of commercial appropriation, sent manufactures to
Africa, African slaves to the colonies, and raw materials back to the metropole.
The metaphor of currents is especially suggestive here in that the Atlantic
Ocean is literally swept by vast circular rivers and streamsa northern circle
running in a clockwise direction from its southern beginnings and a southern circle owing in a counterclockwise direction, in a swirling movement in some ways
evocative of the trade of ideas and goods back and forth between Africa, Europe,
and the Americas.3 Given these liquid transfers and trade windsan expression redolent of the slave tradethe goal becomes one of discerning the common currents running through the various zones, the ways that histories, texts,
and discourses mingle and interact within asymmetrical power situations. We are
interested, in this sense, in what douard Glissant calls transversalities, or the
hierarchical and lateral syncretisms and dialogisms taking place across national
spaces. We hope to shed light on the linked analogies between three colonial/
national zones too often viewed in isolation, in order to provoke a salutary confrontation of perspectives concerning shared and discrepantly lived histories.
xx
Preface
t he ent ire atl an tic world was shaped by 1492 and what is
euphemistically called the encounter, which engendered not only a catastrophe for indigenous peoples but also a crisis in European thinking. The clash
of Europe and indigene provoked a multifaceted reection on utopia (Thomas
More) and dystopia (Bartolom de las Casas). The intertextual backdrop of the
contemporary culture wars lies in the contradictions of an Enlightenment that
was not exclusively European. The phrase Atlantic Enlightenment refers both
to a geography and a concept. Enlightenment thought was a hybrid intellectual
production; it was generated not only in Europe but also in the Americas, by the
Founding Fathers in the United States, by Haitian revolutionaries, and by representatives of indigenous people. The Enlightenment was a debate, conducted in
many sites, about the relation between Europe and its Others, with a left and a
right wing, with proslavery and antislavery, colonialist and anticolonialist factions.
The Atlantic world has been shaped by the intellectual heritage of Enlightenment republicanism, as expressed politically in the American Revolution in 1776,
the French Revolution in 1789, and the Haitian Revolution in 1791, as well as in
the Brazilian independence movements of the 18th century and in the Brazilian
Republic in 1889. A clear historical thread thus leads out from the Enlightenment debates within the American and French Revolutions to the contemporary culture wars, as actualized, recombinant versions of earlier debates. The
culture wars, in this sense, inherit centuries of discursive struggles going back
to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and their antecedents, going back to
the Conquest of the Americas and even to the Crusades. Versions of the debates
were present, in germ and under dierent names, in the intense exchanges about
Conquest, colonialism, and slavery. They were argued in religious/political language in the 16th century when Juan Gins de Seplveda and Bartolom de las
Casas asked whether Indians had souls and as a consequence enjoyed derechos
humanos (human rights). They were present when indigenous people rebelled
against European conquest or resisted Christian proselytization. They were present when enslaved Africans fought and argued against enslavement, or when the
U.S. Founding Fathers took positions for and against the inscription of slavery
into the Constitution. They were present when French Enlightenment philosophers spoke about freedom and natural goodness, and when free men of color
opposed slavery in the French colonies.
1
Contemporary critiques thus lend new names to old quarrels, now rearticulated within altered idioms and paradigms. Throughout its history, colonialism
has always generated its own critique, whether by the dominant cultures own
renegades or by its colonized victims. When Montaigne in the late 16th century
argued in Des Cannibales that civilized Europeans were ultimately more barbarous than cannibals, since cannibals ate the esh of the dead only in order to
appropriate the strength of their enemies, while Europeans tortured and murdered in the name of a religion of love, he might be described as a radical anticolonialist avant la lettre. When Diderot in the 18th century called for African
insurrection against European colonialists, he too might be seen as part of this
same anti-Eurocentric lineage. And when Frantz Fanon in the 20th century
spoke of accepting the reciprocal relativism of dierent cultures, once colonialism is excluded, he gave us a working denition of radical forms of postcolonial
critique.1
When we say that the contemporary culture wars go back to colonialism and
the Enlightenment, we do not mean this claim in a vague everything goes back
to history way. The contemporary debates are quite literally rooted in Enlightenment quarrels. In contemporary France, for example, both right and left invoke
the French Revolution and Enlightenment values to articulate their views of
identity politics, whether seen as a praiseworthy expansion of Enlightenment
equality or as a particularist departure from Enlightenment universality. In the
United States, both left and right invoke the Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence, but in opposite ways; Obama appeals to the more perfect
union of the Preamble, while Tea Party Republicans interpret the Constitution
to defend right-wing libertarianism. The left channels the radical Enlightenment
of Diderot and Toussaint Louverture, while Newt Gingrich channels Adam
Smith. The quarrels about indigenous land rights and intellectual property rights
go back to the Conquest and to John Locke. The various discursive positions for
and against conquest, slavery, racism, and imperialism, in sum, have been available for a long time; contemporary debates thus form reformatted versions of
those earlier debates. Past and present reverberate together; old debates anticipate and haunt the present.
The Red Atlantic

Our invocation of a Red, Black, and White Atlantic is not meant to detract
from the work performed under the rubric of the Black Atlantic, but rather to
place that blackness within a relational spectrum that also embraces the metaphorical redness of indigenous America and, in a very dierent way, the metaphorical whiteness of Europe and Euro-America. Colonialism and slavery
completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in what might be

called the Rainbow Atlantic. Colonial conquest turned an extremely heterogeneous group of indigenous peoplesformerly dened as Tupi, Carib, Arawak,
Mohawk, Peguot, and so forthinto generic Reds and turned an equally heterogeneous group of Africansformerly named Kong, Hausa, Yorubainto
generic blacks, all under the domination of a motley crew of EuropeansSpanish, English, Dutch, Frenchnow turned into generic Whites, thus forging the
constitutive Red/White/Black demographic triad typical of the Americas. The
cultures of the Atlantic are thus not only Black and White; they are also guratively Red. Even slavery was Red in that in the Americas the indigenous peoples
were kidnapped and enslaved before the Africans. In Brazil, both Red and Black
groups were called negros: enslaved natives were Negros da Terra (Blacks from
the Land) as opposed to Negros da Guinee (Blacks from Guinea, Africa). At
times, one enslaved group was used to replace another, as when bandeirantes from
So Paulo enslaved one hundred thousand indios to compensate for the loss of
enslaved Africans during the suspension of the slave trade between 1625 and 1650.
Colonialism, conquest, slavery, and multiculturality are thus inextricably linked.
The Atlantic world became syncretic and hybrid precisely because of these violent transcontinental processes.
As tropes of color, the concepts of a Red, Black, and White Atlantic cast
a prismatic light on a shared history. While Black Atlantic evokes the Middle
Passage and the African diaspora, the notion of a Red Atlantic registers not
only the dispossession of indigenous peoples by Europeans but also the impact of
indigenous ideas on European thinking. The settler colonialism that dispossessed
the Red and the racial slavery that exploited the Black were the twin machines
of racial supremacy. Yet the relations between Red and Black and White were
always unstable. Red and Black could ally against White or collaborate with
White against the Black or the Red. White supremacy, as David Roediger puts it,
situated itself at some times in opposition to a red other and at others to a black
one.2 Stances on imperialism were also conjunctural. A French observer such as
Alexis de Tocqueville could urge French imperialists in Africa to look not to the
U.S. treatment of the Black but rather to U.S. treatment of the Red as a model.
During the Conquest of Mexico, American racists would argue about whether
Mexicans were Black or Red; what was important to the racists was that they not
be White.
We have not forgotten the other colors in the Atlantic rainbow, for example, the metaphorical yellowness and brownness of diasporic Asians, mestizos,
Latinos, and Arabs. At this point in history, conquest, slavery, immigration, and
globalization have thoroughly scrambled, in the manner of an action painting,
an already mixed color palette, in an intermingled spectrum. Switching from a
chromatic to a linguistic register, Eugene Jolas speaks of an Atlantic, Crucible

Language as the verbal precipitate of transracial synthesis.3 Gilles Deleuzes
description of contemporary U.S. English as worked upon by a Black English,
and also a Yellow English, a Red English, a broken English, each of which is like
a language shot through with a spray-gun of colors,4 could be extended to the
Atlantic world generally. By the same token, one might suggestively attach various modiers to the noun Atlantic to speak of a Moorish Atlantic, a Jewish
Atlantic, a Yoruba Atlantic, and so forth.
Here we will focus not on the full rainbow spectrum but rather on the Red,
the Black, and the White. The rainbow metaphor, in any case, risks implying the
facile postracial harmony and transcendence of race. While race has no scientic
substance, race still eectively evokes the persistence of deep inequalities aecting visible minorities. The spectrum is also spectral, haunted and shadowed by
the ghosts of various oppressions. Some colors crowd out or absorb or hide and
spook others. Our goal, then, is to complexify a multileveled chromatic relationality shot through with power-laden inequalities. And as the metaphor of a
spectrum implies, the colors fade and blur into one another; despite hierarchical
regimes, they defy segregated boundaries. The indigenous Red and the diasporic
Black, in both the United States and Brazil, for example, are densely interwoven: demographically through mixture, politically through coalition, academically
through research, and culturally through a miscegenated popular culture. Our
assumption throughout is that colors are situated, overlapping, and relational
utterances that slip and slide in their reference; they take on meaning only as part
of larger systems striated by power and inequity.
The legal foundation for conquest was the Discovery Doctrine that granted
Europeans sovereign claim over Red lands and peoples. That doctrine encoded
ethnocentric assumptions of European superiority over other cultures, religions,
and peoples, so that Europeans, in the words of Robert Miller, immediately and
automatically acquired property rights in native lands and gained governmental,
political, and commercial rights over the inhabitants without ... the consent of
the indigenous peoples.5 Initially developed by the Roman Catholic Church as
part of the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands, the Discovery Doctrine was rst
applied to Muslim-dominated indel lands, declared by various popes to lack
lawful dominion. A 1455 papal bull by Pope Nicholas authorized Portugal to
invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans and to
enslave them in perpetuity, all part of bringing all humankind into the fold of the
one true religion. Subsequent papal bulls extended the right of conquest to the
Americas. England, France, Holland, Sweden, and the United States later cited
these precedents as legitimating their own conquests. Various popes asserted a
worldwide papal jurisdictionan early incarnation of the universalrooted
in the papacys divine mandate to care for the entire world. The Conquest and
Discovery Doctrine ocially became part of U.S. law with the seminal Supreme
Court case Johnson v. MIntosh in 1823, which provides the legal foundations for
the U.S. takeover of Indian lands.
Church and State were mobilized to legitimate the new racial/colonial order.
A key instrument of the Conquest was the Requerimiento (requisition), which
Spanish conquerors read to the natives as a form of legitimation. This document
communicated the idea of a chain of command extending from God to the pope
to the king to the conquistadores themselves, all of whom agreed that the native
territories and peoples belonged to the pope and the Spanish monarch. Some
Hollywood lms devoted to the Conquest (for example the 1949 lm starring
Fredric March) show Columbus reading from the Requerimiento, but they fail to
include the documents warning of massive retaliation for any refusal to collaborate, promising that the Spanish with Gods help will make war against you by
every means available to us, and will submit you to the yoke of obedience of the
Church and His Majesty, will take your women and children and enslave them,
... will take all your goods and do all kinds of ill to you and cause all the damage
which a sovereign can commit against disobedient vassals. The document then
blames the victim by declaring that all the death and damage inicted ... will
be your fault and not that of His Majesty, nor of ourselves.6 (The provocative
2010 lm Even the Rain, about a Spanish director in Bolivia making a lm about
Columbus, does include the nal warnings.)
The Requerimiento was supposed to be read in Spanish to Indians unfamiliar
with that language. It is as if the Spanish wanted to believeor pretended to
believethat the Indians were willingly giving up their land, abandoning their
beliefs, renouncing their leaders, and adopting Spanish rule. Less a contractual
agreement than a fable that the Spanish told themselves, the document absurdly
promises that the natives will not be forced to convertas long as they spontaneously convert on their own. The indigenous people were portrayed as devoid of
any political, legal, or religious system of belief. Spanish and Portuguese ideologists claimed, incorrectly, that the indigenous languages lacked three lettersthe
r for rei, or king; the l for lei, or law; and the f for fe, or faith. While European
kingdoms proclaimed, One King, One Faith, One Law, the natives, through a
logic of decit, were depicted as a tabula rasa awaiting European inscription. The
Conquest also had a linguistic dimension. All over the Americas, rst peoples
had named, mapped, and described the continent through language. As a result,
states in Brazil and the United States bear native names (Ceara and Piaui in Brazil; Idaho and Ohio in the United States). In the present day, indigenous peoples
have proposed an alternative to the word America itself: Abya-Yala, Kuna for
place of life, extrapolated for the continent as a whole.7 Yet historically, many
indigenous groups were denied the right even to name themselves. Thus, the
Navajos in the United States were self-named the Dineh, and the Kayapo of
Brazil are self-named Mebengokre (or people of the eye of the water).
In both Brazil and the United States, early religious gures learned indigenous languages in order to proselytize: John Eliot translated the Bible into native
tongues; Father Jos de Anchieta devised a Tupi grammar. The American Founding Fathers learned Native American languages, and indigenous words came to
enrich English vocabulary. In Brazil, the Tupi-Guarani language, rst used as a
language of communication between the Portuguese and the Tupi coastal peoples, even became the lingua franca, or lngua geral, called Nheengatu, up until
the 18th century, including among non-Tupi natives. Indeed, Portuguese became
dominant only in the 18th century.8 (A 2005 New York Times article reported
that the lngua geral was making a comeback in the interior of Brazil.)9 Presently
indigenous Brazilians speak some 180 languages, with the number of speakers
ranging from more than twenty thousand (Guarani, Tikuna, Macuxi) to a mere
handful. In the United States, meanwhile, Native Americans are resurrecting
native languages, such as Wampanoag, barely spoken for over a century.
The European response to the indigenous civilizations of the Americas reveals
a general pattern of denial of indigenous cultural agency. Although native agricultural practice had sustained indigenous people for millennia, it was not recognized by Europeans as authentic agriculture but only as a kind of animal-like foraging. The fact that a densely populated and culturally remolded land was seen
as virgin reects a kind of mental ethnic cleansing, a discourse of imaginary
removal. The idea of the vanishing Indian had its own colonial productivity,
shaping a widespread impression that Indians had already disappeared or were
about to disappear with the next hot breath of conquest. Yet the enduring presence of indigenous America looms behind many cultural debates, posing questions about the very legitimacy of colonial-settler states.
To think deeply about the Red Atlantic is necessarily to think in ways that
transcend the nation-state: rst, because many indigenous communities came
into existence before the emergence of modern nation-states; second, because the
national identity of colonial-settler states in the Americas was always constituted
in relation to the Indian, whether as the enemy or as a symbol of the national
socius; third, the dispossession of indigenous communities was partially the
product of the colonial expansionism of nation-states; fourth, many native communities have actively rejected the very concept of the nation-state, not because
they could not achieve it but because they did not want it; fth, because the present-day boundaries of many indigenous communities actually exceed the borders
of nation-states (as with the Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela, the Mohawks
in the United States and Canada); and sixth, because many indigenous peoples,
due to multiple dislocations, no longer live only on their ancestral land base but
are dispersed regionally and transnationally. The Quechua, for example, not only
inhabit Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia; they are also dispersed into North America
and Europe.
The Indigene and the Epistemological Crisis

Questions about the status and social systems of the misnamed Indian were
disputed all around the Atlantic countries by Spanish jurists (Seplveda, Francisco de Vitoria), French humanists (Montaigne), British empiricists (Locke),
American statesmen ( Jeerson, Franklin), German philosophers (Hegel), and
Brazilian writers (from Pro Vaz de Caminha to Darcy Ribeiro), as well as by
the indigenous themselves. The gure of the Indian got caught up in controversies about religion, property, sovereignty, and culture. Indeed, no in-depth analysis of modernity can bypass the indigenous peoples of the Americas, whether
negatively, as the victims of progress, or positively, as the catalysts for Western
thinking and artistic production, discernible in the work of Jean de Lery, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Melville, Marx and Engels, Oswald
de Andrade, Gilberto Freyre, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, and countless
others.
The European part of the Atlantic world, in this sense, is also Red in something like the sense that it is Blackthat is, it is impacted both by the conquest
and enslavement of indigenous America and by the transforming ferment of
native modes of thought and sociality. Inspired by sensationalist travel literature,
some philosophers projected the native peoples as barbaric savages, while others saw the small-scale consensus indigenous societies as oering an alternative
social model. The philosopher Michel de Montaigne recalled meeting three Brazilian Tupinamba in 1562, at the court of King Charles IX, where the Tupinamba
asked provocative questions about French society; they wondered why tall adults
could bow down to a small boy (the regent) and why some people ate well and
others ate barely at all and why those who barely ate did not strangle those who
were eating well. Montaignes unnamed Tupi interlocutors shifted his own thinking by posing corrosive questions based on their assumptions about what constituted a good societyin this case their own. In Des Cannibales, Montaigne
subsequently practiced a rhetoric of civilizational reversals by arguing that the
violence of Tupinamba cannibalism paled in comparison to that triggered by
religious wars in Europe. With a few irreverent queries, the Tupinamba demolished the prestige of the hereditary monarchy and the class system. In a sense,
the indigenous Brazilians were theorizing prerevolutionary France as much as
Montaigne was theorizing pre- and post-Conquest America. Although the three
Tupinamba arguably form part of European theory, we do not know their names
but only that of Montaigne. Yet their refusal to be impressed by European social
systems constituted a mode of implicit critique that catalyzed Montaignes own
societal self-criticism.
On innumerable occasions, European and Euro-American thinkers deployed
the Indian as an inspiration for social critique and utopian desire. The emergence into European consciousness of the indigene triggered an epistemological
excitement that generated both the dystopian imagery of the nasty and brutish
savage and the utopian imagery of an egalitarian social system markedly dierent
from that of a rigidly hierarchical Europe. The concept of the free Indian living
in a society without coercion helped spark revolutionary ideas in Europe. JeanJacques Rousseau deployed the notion of the natural goodness of human beings
and societies without coercion as a means of undermining European authoritarianism. Rousseau lent Montaignes ideas political ecacy, thus helping foment
the French (and indirectly the American) Revolution. In the Constitutional
Assembly of 1789, the representatives of the left were avid readers of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, all of whom spoke of the natives of the
Americas.
A more complex narrative of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment thus
would have to take on board the literal and gurative encounter of Europe and
indigene, both in terms of direct inuence and of more diuse transtextual relations, tropologies, and allegories. The motif of the Indian as exemplar of liberty
pervades the discursive atmosphere not only of the French Enlightenment but
also of the American Revolution and of Brazilian anticolonial nationalism. In the
United States, the Founding Fathers were avid readers of the philo-indigenous
French philosophers, but they also read, as it were, the Native Americans themselves. The philosophically inclined Founding Fathers, while entirely capable of
Indianist exoticism and even exterminationism, had a more direct experience
of Native Americans than did the French philosophers. They had diplomatic
exchanges with them, traded with them, learned their languages, and were inuenced by their political thought, even ifand this point is crucialthey ultimately dispossessed them. American revolutionaries brandished the Indian as
an icon of national dierence vis--vis England, whence the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) symbolism of the eagles quiver of arrows (representing the thirteen
states) on the dollar bill, and the Indian statue gracing the Capitol building.
Native American tropes such as the Great Tree and chain of friendship were
absorbed into revolutionary discourse. The revolutionary hero Paul Revere cast a
Native American woman as Americas rst national symbol.10
A recurrent leitmotif in the writings of the Enlightenment philosophers and
in those of the Founding Fathers such as Jeerson was the idea that Indian soci-
eties never submitted themselves to any laws or coercive power. Marx and Engels
later picked up on native themes in their readings of Lewis Henry Morgans
Ancient Society, in which Morgan lauded the profoundly democratic organization
of the Iroquois League. For Marx and Engels, the Iroquois meshed a communal
economic system with a democratic political organization, thus oering a model
of economic equality achieved without state domination, in a society devoid of
nobles, kings, governors, soldiers, and police and where all, including the women,
were free and equal. Although the Marxist term primitive communism evokes
a long-vanished communitas, this utopia was an actually existing 19th-century
society with an actual location in what is now Canada and the United States.
Contemporary Native American scholars have highlighted the indigenous
inuence on American political institutions. Donald A. Grinde, Jr., argued in his
1977 book The Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation that the authors of
the U.S. Constitution partially borrowed the concept of a federal government from
the example of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederation. In 1982, Bruce Johansen
published Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin, the Iroquois, and the Rationale for
the American Revolution. Within a few years, both authors became caught up in
the culture wars. The gatekeepers of the right derided the thesis of such books as
ridiculous on its face, apparently unaware that even President John F. Kennedy
had supported the Iroquois-inuence thesis, writing in 1960 that the League of
the Iroquois inspired Benjamin Franklin to copy it in planning the federation of
States.11 A decade earlier, legal scholar Felix Cohen had argued that universal suffrage for men, federalism, and the view of chiefs as servants rather than masters of
the people were part of the American way of life before Columbus landed.12
The colonizing powers, after enclosing communal land within Europe itself,
enclosed and appropriated communally held indigenous land under the pretext
that the native peoples had no deed or title to the land. Just as rights were
distributed according to a racialized schema in the past, today the question of
copyrights is linked to the corporate appropriation of resources formerly held
by indigenous peoples. Today the very idea of title is wed to conceptions of contracts between individual actors or corporations, an individualist conception of
intellectual property rights completely alien to many indigenous peoples. Unlike
pirates and conquistadores, transnational corporations no longer seize only gold
and silver and diamonds; rather, they declare themselves entitled or empatented to exploit traditional communal forms of knowledge such as rainforest
herbal remedies, for example, which they then market at high cost to the world at
large, including even to the descendants of the people who originally developed
the remedies.
The question of intellectual property rights provides a vivid example of the
historical morphing that takes us from Columbus to the CEOs of contempo-
rary transnational corporations. The word patents referred in 16th-century

Europe to the ocial royal letters (litterae patents) by which sovereigns conferred
privileges, rights, and land titles on various members of the nobility, for example,
the capitanias in Brazil granted by the Portuguese king. In the Age of Discovery, these letters became associated with the literal conquest of territory; ve
hundred years later, they are associated with transnational corporations updated
version of the conquest of economic rights in the Global South, whose biodiversity is very much linked to the cultural knowledges of indigenous peoples. As
Djelal Kadir points out, the letter authorizing Columbuss conquests, conceded
on April 17, 1492, by Fernando and Isabel and ratied by Juan de Colona, was the
literal prototype, the paradigm, the locus classicus of its genre. Columbus possessed, as it were, the patent of patents and the license to appropriate the land
and material wealth of the New World.13
Five centuries after the Conquest, the World Trade Organization rules concerning copyrights constitute reformatted versions of the papal bulls and regal
edicts that legalized the Conquest. For Vandana Shiva, The freedom of action
which transnational corporations demand today is the same freedom of action
that European colonies demanded, after 1492, as a natural right over the territory
and riches of non-European people.14 The earlier religious language has been
replaced by the secular language of market fundamentalism. Rather than control
territory, the new regime controls markets, intellectual property rights, and the
legal parameters of proting from biodiversity. Under the pressure of transnational corporations, all aspects of life are becoming patentable. Since the soil,
the forests, the rivers, and the oceans were all colonized and polluted, as Shiva
puts it, capital has to nd new colonies to invade and exploit in order to continue
the process of accumulation. These new colonies . . . are the interior spaces of
women, plants, and animals.15 Just as European colonizers saw indigenous land
as empty because it had not been made productive of commoditieseven
though it had successfully nourished native peoples for millenniatransnational
corporations do not recognize indigenous peoples title to biodiversity unless it
has been turned into a marketable product.
The Amazon, in this sense, forms the epicenter of the conicts emerging from
the crisis of ve centuries of productivism and the instrumental domination of
nature. The process initiated in 1492 is reaching a nale as globalizing capitalism
strains against the limits of planetary ecology while coming into naked conict
with the indigenous peoples occupying the land. The Amazon has become the
last frontier, at the point where frontiers are at once everywhere and nowhere.
As the planet reaps the bitter fruits of instrumental reason, in an age of the end
of all utopias (including the neoliberal utopia of the end of history), the way
of life of those who were always there, of those who never went away, opens up
10
a new horizon of the politically possible. Biodiversity and sociodiversity, hegemonic biopower and indigenous sovereignty, the local and the global, all become
interlinked, unstable, and interactive.
First contact is still occurring, but this time some of the Indians have computers, digital cameras, and websites. Already in the 1980s, the documentary
Kayapo: Out of the Forest (1989) showed Brazilian Indians, armed with camcorders, protesting a hydroelectric dam that would have ooded their communities. Within the globalized contact zone, indigenous leaders and the corporate
representatives of the rm Eletronorte conduct a lively debate about the nature
of progress, energy, knowledge, and ownership. Corporate rationality, at the
height of its arrogance but also at the end of its rope, meets articulate indigeneity. Appealing to a common humanity, one Kayapo woman tells the Eletronorte
representative, Since you also love your children, you should understand us.
Another Kayapo shows samples of the herbal remedies threatened by the construction of the dam. A woman presses a machete against the company spokesmans face as she scolds him in Kayapo. In a reversal of colonial criture, she tells
the spokesman to write down her name, since she is one of those who will die
if the dam is built. Kayapo Chief Raoni appears with the rock star Sting in a
successful attempt to attract international media attention. It is as if the Tainos
had videotaped their encounters with Columbus and disseminated the images on
YouTube.16
The unending current of indigenous critique continues unabated. Yanomami
leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, whose group was devastated by an induced
epidemic and who subsequently became a community spokesperson, claims that
white people design their words in visible form because their thinking is full of
forgetfulness. In an essay whose titleDiscovering White Peopleinverts the
usual Euro-oriented trope of discovery, Yanomami oers his own version of the
dialectic of Enlightenment. In early times, he writes,
whites lived like us in the forest, ... but once they created tools, machines, cars and
planes, they became euphoric and said: We are the only people to be so ingenious,
only we know how to produce machines and merchandise. That is when they lost
all wisdom. First they damaged their own land, before going o to work in other
lands in order to endlessly create their merchandise. And they never stopped to
ask: If we destroy the earth, will we be able to create another one?17
Another activist from a threatened group, Ailton Krenak, during the discussions
in 1987 about the new Brazilian constitution, painted himself black with jenipapo
paste for a speech before the National Congress as a token of mourning for the
legal blockage of indigenous rights. Krenak insists on the intellectual/historiographic agency of indigenous peoples, who also wrote their history not in the
form of books but rather in the form of sayings, rituals, and narratives. The con-
11
icts initiated by the Conquest continue up to the present and take place every
day. Conrming the views of anthropologist Pierre Clastres, who lived with the
Nhandeva and Mbia, about the active refusal of the nation-state, Krenak adds,
There is no ideology here, we are naturally against the state, we do it the way
the wind follows its path, or the river follows its path, we naturally follow a path
which does not arm state institutions as necessary for our health, education, or
happiness.18
Indigenous critique incarnates a temporal paradox: it is very traditional and
ancient and, at the same time, very radical and new. Not only does it challenge
the logics of colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the nation-state; it also questions
the productivism of Marxism, the nomadism of postmodernism, and the constructivism of poststructuralism. We see this paradox of maximum radicality and
maximum traditionality in the dialogue between the thinkers of indigeneity and
the multicultural left. In Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande, a Quechua professor at
Connecticut College, dialogues with the radical leftist advocates of critical pedagogy. While giving them immense credit, she nds them wanting from an indigenous perspective. The left (and at times the right) speaks of democracy, but forgets that from an indigenous perspective, democracy has often been a weapon of
mass disempowerment. The Marxist left speaks of revolution, but Latin American revolutions have dispossessed Miskitus, Sumus, Ramas, and Quechua. For
Grande, critical pedagogy critiques the colonialist project yet remains informed
by individualism, anthropocentrism, and stagist progressivism, epistemic biases
that worsen the ecological crisis. Students are encouraged to be independent
(implying an individualist suspicion of collaboration), successful (i.e., competitive), and antitraditional. Thus, far-left thought does not go far enough; Marx is
anticapitalist (yet secretly shares many of capitalisms deep cultural assumptions),
and critical pedagogy is transformational (but ignores the value of intergenerational knowledge). Yet Grande seeks to engage with all these currents, while literally indigenizing them.19
The interchange between European and indigenous thought has been both
uneven and unending, lending support to such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, confederation and the separation of powers, class,
gender, and sexual equality, communal property, ecology, jouissance, antiproductivism, and alter-globalization. As a situated utterance, the conversation changes
with historically shaped challenges and ideological needs, as dierent features
of the discourse of Indian radicalism come to the fore in dierent epochs: the
critique of monarchy during the Renaissance (Montaigne), the idea of Indian
freedom during the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Tom Paine), the critique of capitalism and bourgeois property relations in the 19th century (Marx and Engels),
the valorization of societies without coercion in the 20th century (Pierre Clas-
12
tres, Marshall Sahlins), and the protest against ecological devastation and transnational exploitation of biodiversity in the 21st century. In this sense, the two
redred as radical and red as Indianmerge.
Although indigenous people have always reected on their collective life and
their relation to other peoples, now Native intellectuals are becoming visible in
the public sphere. Contemporary indigenous thinkers such as Davi Kopenawa
Yanomami, Luiz Gomes Lana, and Ailton Krenak, for example, maintain an
intense dialogue with nonindigenous scholar-activists such as Arturo Escobar,
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Giuseppe Cocco. While Eurocentric commentators see Indians as vanished and behind the times, others see them as
ahead of the curve. Viveiros de Castro reminds us of the intellectual debts of
anthropologists to the peoples they study. The most interesting concepts, problems, entities and agents introduced by anthropological theory, he suggests, nd
their source in the imaginative power of the societies (or peoples, or collectives)
that the anthropologists propose to explain.20 As theory becomes a hybrid coauthored practice, the anthropologist is inspired by the theoretical imaginary of the
indigene, who in turn responds to the anthropologist. Indigenous activists are
more and more articulating their own political positions, thus relieving nonnatives of the burden of speaking for them. Indigenous people and their nonindigenous interlocutors, in sum, have never stopped posing profound questions about
culture, nature, property, energy, wealth, and equality. Indigenous thought, in its
theoretical and practical manifestations, has thrown up challenges to the nostrums of Marxist, modernist, and postmodernist thought.
The Black Atlantic and the Aporias of the Universal

Just as the partly real, partly imaginary gure of the Indian generated both a critique of European social hierarchies and the utopia of an alternative social order,
so Afro-diasporic resistance to slavery revealed the limitations of white bourgeois revolutions while implicitly proposing a utopia of egalitarian freedom. The
violent diasporization of Africans had the paradoxical consequence of enabling
blacks to play an indispensable economic, political, military, and intellectual role
in the Americas. Apart from their crucial participation in economic production,
and apart from their military service in American, Brazilian, and French wars,
diasporic Africans have also formulated powerful indictments of the dominant
system.
The critical agency of enslaved Africans in the Americas is all the more
remarkable given that slavery as an institution tried to crush all knowledge, and
even the desire for knowledge, on the part of the enslaved. Charles W. Ephraim
describes the process as follows:
13
Africans were eectively deprogrammed as persons; they were depersonalized,

robbed of their identity, with the intention of making them completely subservient
to the white captors. ... They were forbidden to form meaningful group relationships, for fear of the very real possibility of insurgency. ... They were forbidden
to speak their native languages and were allowed to learn only so much of the
rudiments of a perverted version of English as would render them serviceable in
bondage. Strict laws were enacted forbidding anyone to teach black people to read
and writeeectively prohibiting communication and access to any information
that might arouse their curiosity about their peculiar and insupportable condition as bondsmen in a strange land amidst utterly freakish and cruel men. ...
The white obsession with self-aggrandizement necessitated a full-scale program
of dehumanization of the Africans, the wiping away of all traces of their past, an
obliteration of their sense of ever having been somebody.21
Thus, massive amounts of energy were expended to block not only all black political resistance but even the material and cognitive conditions that might make
possible the public articulation of critical thinking.
Not unlike the indigenous peoples, diasporic Africans were well aware of
the vacuity of ocial U.S. proclamations about freedom and equality, of Brazilian ideas about order and progress and racial democracy, and of French
boasts about the mission civilisatrice. The innumerable rebellions against slavery
(beginning already in Africa), meanwhile, put into practice a political vision. The
17th-century maroon republic of Palmares in Brazil set up an alternative social
order while fending o military attack by the Dutch and the Portuguese. Recent
archeological research has conrmed earlier speculations that Palmares included,
along with the African majority, Indians, mestizos, renegade whites, Jews, and
Muslims, ultimately becoming a refuge for the persecuted of Brazilian society.22
Covering an area roughly a third the size of Portugal, Palmares lasted almost a
century in the face of repeated assaults, withstanding on the average one military expedition every fteen months.23 Palmares bears witness not only to the
Afro-Brazilian resistance against slavery but also to the capacity to mobilize an
alternative life.24 Indeed, Brazilian anthropologist Jos Jorge de Carvalho calls for
a present-day political actualization of Palmares as a place where black leaders
created a shelter for the integrated conviviality of Indians, enslaved Africans, and
poor whites, thus shaping a model for a coalition of blacks, Indians, and progressive whites in contemporary Brazil.25
Uruguayan writer Germn Arciniegas points out in his America in Europe
that Reds and Blacks in the Americas were in the vanguard of republican revolution, even if they did not use the word republic: The blacks of Cartagena
became strong in Palenque in 1602, proclaimed a free republic and kept it so for
a hundred years. ... The Indians of Tupac Amaru in their insurrection against
14
Spain were forty years ahead of the whites.26 Indigenous rebels and maroon leaders, in a sense, acted out republican ideas of self-rule and autonomy, sometimes
even before Enlightenment philosophers had articulated them in essayistic form.
Afro-diasporic intellectuals, in this sense, have called attention to the aporias
of the Enlightenments universalistic claims. Exotopically positioned to call the
blu of ocial ideologies and idealizations, Afro-diasporic people can be seen as
proleptic deconstructionists.27 While black Americans exposed the internal contradictions of the master-race democracy (Pierre van den Berghe) installed by
the American Revolution, black critics in the French colonies such as Haiti and
Guadeloupe, and their allies in France itself, exposed the contradictions of colonial republicanism.
Enlightenment thinkers wrestled with dilemmas that resonate with those
of today, and any deeply historicized reection on coloniality and race requires
dealing with this contradictory heritage. The white-dominated racial contract
(Charles Mills) was contested from the outset. Free blacks in the United States
expressed their antislavery views publicly in the early days of the republic. A
good deal of black thought, as Charles Mills put it, has simply revolved around
the insistent demand that whites live up to their own (ostensibly universalist)
principles.28 In 1779, Connecticut slaves petitioned their states general assembly
to assert basic principles of equality, protesting, We are the Creatures of that
God who made of one Blood, and Kindred all the Nations of the Earth; we perceive by our own Reection that we are endowed with the same Faculties as our
masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are
obliged to serve them, than they us.29 The overture editorial in Freedoms Journal,
founded in 1827 as the nations rst black newspaper, pleaded for a basic right
of self-representation: We wish to plead our own cause. Too long others have
spoken for us.30
While some white Enlightenment thinkers tried to calibrate the hierarchical gradations of black and white intelligence, some black thinkers denounced
such theories as cruel and frivolous. Black Americans rebutted Jeersons claims
in Notes on Virginia concerning the intellectual inferiority of blacks. The free
black Benjamin Banneker, a mathematician and astronomer, sent Jeerson a copy
of his own about-to-be published Almanac in 1792, along with a letter rebuking Jeerson for underestimating blacks intelligence. Banneker hoped that Jefferson would embrace every opportunity, to eradicate that train of absurd and
false ideas and opinions, which so generally prevails with respect to us. Your
sentiments, he wrote, are concurrent with mine; which are that one uniform
father hath given being to us all; and that he hath not only made us all of one
esh, but that he hath also, without partiality, aorded us all the same sensations
and endowed us all with the same faculties.31 Jeerson responded cordially but
15
rejected Bannekers argument. In a private letter to Joel Barlow, Jeerson claimed

that Bannekers Almanac proved nothing.32 In 1827, the free black David Walker
published his Walkers Appeal ... to the Colored Citizens of the World, in which
he pointed out the contradiction between the all men are created equal clause
in the Declaration of Independence and the antiegalitarian racism of Jeersons
Notes on Virginia. Confronting Jeerson with the aporias of his own discourse,
Walker exhorted Jeerson, Compare your own language, extracted from your
Declaration of Independence, with your cruelties and murders inicted by your
cruel and unmerciful fathers on ourselves and on our fathers, ... men who have
never given your fathers or you the least provocation.33
Although slavery stood in glaring contradiction to professed Enlightenment
principles, the dominant historiography has traditionally emphasized the ideals
and downplayed the contradictions. Many U.S. school textbooks treat slavery as
a minor glitch within an overarching narrative of inexorable progress. Presented
as the exception to the rule of democracy, slavery and segregation have in fact
been more the rule, while freedom and equal rights have been more the exception. Although some of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787
called for the abolition of slavery, they ultimately accepted it as part of a compromise with the South. The Constitution was thus based on a Faustian bargain
between southern slaveholding interests and northern economic interests. The
founders essentially agreed to disagree about slavery, indirectly legalizing it while
also planting Enlightenment-derived language that would gesture toward (and
concretely enable) its ultimate demise. In so doing, they merely postponed the
Civil War that came seventy years later.34 In the long term, the privileging of the
South led to the southern domination of U.S. politics and to states rights as
a euphemism for racial segregation. The dilemmas of the American Revolution
have long been breathing hot down American necks, from the shamefaced compromises of the founders, through the racist abolitionism of Abraham Lincoln,
up to Nixons southern strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Republican wedgeissues of the 1980s, and the Bush Jr. sham diversity in the 1990s, presently culminating in the anti-Obama birther hysteria in the 21st century.35
Over the course of history, Afro-diasporic intellectual resistance consisted in
pleading for what should have been taken for granted: black humanity and subjecthood. As Charles Mills puts it, The most salient feature of the experience
of those classied subpersons in [the dominant racial system] will be the need,
for their own self-respect, to contest the racial disrespect that they routinely
receive. For if they accept it without protest, they are accepting the ocial denition of themselves as less than human, not really persons.36 Positionality at the
bottom of the social hierarchy sometimes allowed for a dearly bought epistemological advantage, one that enabled African Americans to demystify self-attering
16
nationalistic narratives. Displaying what we have called, amending Raymond

Williams, an analogical structure of feeling, a product of the intersubjective ow
of aect among the marginalized, a number of the black protestations of intellectual and moral equality paraphrase Shylocks Hath not a Jew eyes speech
from Merchant of Venice.37 In 1789 one free black pointed to the limits of Enlightenment universalism by asking, Has not a negro eyes? Has not a negro hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, aections, passions?38
All of U.S. history can be seen as a struggle over the political hermeneutics of
the founding documents, rooted in the tensions between the all men are created
equal of the Declaration of Independence and the slaves-as-property clauses of
the Constitution. The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, at an Anti-Slavery
Society meeting, burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a covenant with
death and an agreement with hell.39 It is as if the United States were haunted
from the beginning by two competing political models, each concretized in a
symbolic edice, one democraticembodied in the town halland the other
tyrannicalembodied in the Big House. The crucial question was which model
would exercise greater power.
Antinomies of the Enlightenment

Many of the central historical conicts and debates in the three countries discussed in this book revolve around this highly ambiguous legacy. How were
Enlightenment values such as freedom and equality before the law to be squared
with the actual practices of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and imperialism? Did
colonialism represent a rupture with Enlightenment ideas, or its clearest expression? Was the Enlightenment the disease or the cure or both at the same time?
Is it the Enlightenment or is it decolonization that is unnished, or are both
unnished in mutually correlated ways? Shying away both from idealization and
demonization, we would reject both the view of the Enlightenment as an unsullied fount of reason, science, freedom, and progress along with the contrary view
that reduces the Enlightenment to the barbarity of instrumental reason and the
annihilation of dierence. (We must free ourselves, Foucault wrote, from the
intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment.)40 As a master
code, to use Jamesonian terms, in which competing ideologies ght it out, the
Enlightenment is a contradictory project, both in terms of the gap between ideals and practices and in terms of its own discursive aporias. Janus-faced, it forms
above all a matrix of dilemmas and conundrums. Rather than provide a single
cohesive view of race and dierence, the Enlightenment implied the necessity of a
debate that continues to this day. It is therefore not a question of a blanket rejectionof throwing out the baby of civil liberties with the bathwater of colonialist
17
racismbut rather of probing the positive as well as the negative dialectics of

Enlightenment.
One aspect of radical critique involves an archeological reading of the racist stratum of some Enlightenment thinking. Intellectual historian Louis SalaMolins, in his 1987 book The Black Code, or The Calvary of Canaan, examines the
Code Noir, the French legal code that regulated treatment of the enslaved in the
colonies.41 Drawn up in 1685 under the monarchy, and only denitively eradicated
in 1848, the Code legalized slavery in general and authorized torture, mutilation,
and even the killing of slaves. The Code provides a template for many of the laws
and practices of exception that have characterized life in racial states: the harassment of blacks, a racially rigged justice system, the exclusion of black witnesses in
trials (thus prevented from recounting their own experience and history before
the law), and the rejection of black economic autonomy. The Codes articles can
also be read in an against-the-grain manner as exposing the inherent diculties
in imposing slavery on a recalcitrant population. Article 33, for example, acknowledges slave resistance by calling for the punishment by death of the slave who
slaps his master, mistress, or the husband of his mistress or their children.42 The
article that makes any theft, whether by a slave or even by a freed black, punishable by death similarly reveals the frequency of theft as a subversive gesture.
Sala-Molins distinguishes between three distinct ideological positions among
the Enlightenment philosophers: (1) the racist advocacy of slavery, (2) the nonracist advocacy of slavery, and (3) racist antislavery. (Denis Diderotantiracist,
antislavery, and anticolonialistoers a fourth position.) Voltaire (not unlike
Abraham Lincoln) was a racist who opposed slavery. Montesquieu, a major inuence on French and U.S. political institutions, can be quoted to look either like a
staunch abolitionist or like an advocate for slavery. His abstractly grand and rhetorical condemnations of slavery in France were undercut by his defense of slavery in certain climes where slavery is less oensive to reason.43 Many Enlightenment thinkers deployed slavery metaphorically, to apply to the domination of
whites by other whites: the slavery of common people by the ancien rgime or
the slavery imposed by the British on colonized Americans. For the revolutionaries, Sala-Molins concludes, they themselves were the slaves.44
Rather than speak only of a single European Enlightenment, we should speak
of multiple transatlantic Enlightenments. It was in Haiti, for example, that the
Enlightenments contradictions became most explosive and intellectually provocative. Thanks to the densest slave population in the New World, 18th-century Haiti, as supplier of half the worlds sugar and coee, provided one of the
keys to French prosperity and power. Colonized Haiti, as historian Laurent
Dubois puts it, was the ground zero of European colonialism in the Americas.45
For Aim Csaire, it was there that the knot of colonialism was rst tied, and
18
then untied.46 And as the rst independent modern state of the so-called Third
World, Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, Haiti experienced early all the trials of postcolonial nation-building.47 Yet the historical and philosophical importance of the Haitian Revolution has been silenced. The textbooks and popular
writings that treat the various world revolutions usually bypass the most radical of them all, a revolution at once national, social, and racial. Since the idea
of a black-led revolution more thoroughgoingly radical than the American and
French Revolutions was more or less unthinkable, the Haitian Revolution was
slowly turned into a nonevent.
It was writers of ction, more than historians, who registered the impact of
the Haitian Revolution, as when Herman Melville in Benito Cereno named the
slave ship, subject to a rebellion, the St. Dominic, the contemporaneous term for
Haiti. Historians neglected Haiti, even though the United States gained a large
part of its territory thanks to the rippling shock eects of the Haitian Revolution,
which triggered French fears and thus the Louisiana Purchase. Eric Hobsbawms
Marxist classic The Age of Revolutions, 17891843, virtually ignores Haiti, even
though both France and England lost more soldiers in Haiti than at Waterloo.
In France, neither the centennial celebrations of emancipation in 1948 nor the
French translation of C.L.R. Jamess The Black Jacobins catalyzed a substantive
debate. In the United States, only the reedition of Jamess book in 1962, the Civil
Rights Movement, and the New Social History began to reignite a discussion
of the monumental legacy of the Haitian Revolution.48
The Haitian Revolution demonstrates how the cultural politics of the Enlightenment have to be mapped across a broad Black Atlantic spectrum. Although
some Enlightenment philosophers condemned slavery in abstract terms, they
seldom engaged its actual brutality. In Haiti, as in much of the Black Atlantic,
whippings and even castrations were performed as a disciplinary spectacle. In
Haiti, hot peppers were rubbed into open wounds as a form of punishment, and
gunpowder was placed in the anus of slaves and then exploded. Master Race
Rule became intertwined with what might be called Master Race War. General
Leclerc called for a war of extermination that would spare only children under
twelve years of age.49 Germaine de Stal describes what she calls a horrible episode: the French, fearful that Haitians might support the rebels, threw 1800 of
them into the sea without any trial.50 When burning, drowning, and asphyxiation proved counterproductive, General Rochambeau purchased fteen hundred
attack dogs, specialized in devouring blacks, making sure that they were famished
and therefore more violent.51 Yet the sadistic practices of a republican government
abroad, and what they suggested about the nonfreedom of the republics noncitizens, were not necessarily the subject of philosophical treatises in the metropole.
In order to synchronize theory with practice, some conservative thinkers devised
19
classicatory rankings that constructed the victimized as representing a dierent order of human being, unworthy of the rights accorded white Europeans.
Although cruelty was common in all forms of colonialism, it became more glaringly anomalous in a situation where French philosophers had articulated principles of equality with uncommon power and scope, thus heightening the contrast
between the ideas in all their glory and the abuses in all their horror.
The negative dialectics of Enlightenment republicanism must be conceptualized on the colonial ground outside of Hexagonal France. Libert, galit, Fraternit were not to be unloaded o the boats. As one planter put it in 1792, We
did not fetch half a million savage slaves o the coast of Africa to bring them to
the colony as French citizens!52 The debate about the intellectual and political
consequences of the Haitian Revolution rippled all around the Atlantic world.
The Creole slaveholding elites of the Americas, for example, were haunted by the
specter of the Haitian precedent. In Brazil, the 18th-century Minas revolutionaries who planned a revolt against Portuguese colonialism contemplated abolishing slavery but also worried that independence might bring a Haitianization of
the situation. (The multiracial Tailors Rebellion in Bahia in 1798, in contrast,
consciously emulated the Haitian revolutionary model). While blacks and some
whites exulted in the success of the Haitian Revolution, white slave owners and
their allies were alarmed by the prospect of similar rebellions in the United
States. The arrival of thousands of white French planters seeking refuge in cities such as Philadelphia and Charleston also dramatized the Haitian specter. Jefferson, branding Haitis leaders Cannibals of the Terrible Republic, sided with
his French partners in crime, the white plantation owners, even though Haitian
Revolution leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines had modeled his draft of the Declaration of Haitian Independence on the U.S. declaration penned by Jeerson. The
fears of the Haitian contagion were conrmed in January 1811 when a small army
of Louisianas enslaved faced up to a much larger army of slaveholders. Those
who worked to build a new Saint Domingue along the Mississippi, as Daniel
Rasmussen put its, did not realize the extent to which they were also creating the
conditions that [created] the Haitian revolution.53
Supremacist thinking kept dominant white America from seeing the Haitian Revolution as a sister revolution like the French one. If a familial metaphor
imaged the French and American Revolutions as sisters, the Haitian Revolution
was seen at best as a bastard child and at worst as not part of the revolutionary family at all. The refusal of Haitis entry into the revolutionary Enlightenment metanarrative was especially ironic in light of the fact that Haitians fought
with the French troops supporting the Americans at the Battle of Savannah. It
was also ironic in light of another debt owed the Haitians. It was their freedom
struggle that had exposed France to losses and perils that necessitated the sale
20
of French Louisiana. Historian Henry Adams wrote in 1889 that prejudice of

race alone blinded the American people to the debt they owed to the desperate
courage of 500,000 Haytian negroes who would not be enslaved.54 The refusal
of diplomatic relations with Haiti was to last until 1862, when the Union victory
made it possible for the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner to open up relations again. The Haitian Revolution brought not only the rst black republic/
former colony but also the rst war of colonial reconquest in the Americas. And
just as we can trace out the lines that connect the Faustian bargains of the U.S.
Constitution to latter-day segregation and discrimination, so we can trace out the
lines that lead from the suppression of Haitian revolutionaries to the neocolonial
violence exercised by France and the United States against Haiti in later periods.
Haiti provided stunning exemplars of revolutionary vision for the black
diaspora. In Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the Haitian example inspired a slave
named Gabriel to plan an insurrection that involved whites as well as blacks.55
In Rio de Janeiro in 1805, soldiers of African descent wore medallions honoring
Haitian Emperor Desssalines.56 The transformation of a humiliated slave such as
Dessalines into a brilliant general whom C.L.R. James called one of the towering gures in the political history of the Atlantic world certainly spoke volumes
about the human potential of the enslaved.57 In response to Napoleon Bonapartes promise of only a qualied and merely local freedom for blacks, Toussaint
Louverture reportedly responded, It is not a circumstantial liberty conceded
only to us that we want. . . . It is the absolute acceptance of the principle that
no man, whether born red, black, or white, can be the property of another.58
Ultimately, the Haitian Revolution sought to dismantle the idea of a racialized
republicanism, including within the metropole itself.
If for many Enlightenment thinkers the Haitian Revolution failed to register
as an event, many diasporic Africans recognized its world-historical importance.
C.L.R. Jamess coinage Black Jacobins fuses Caribbean blackness with the most
radical avatars of the French Revolution. Some insurgents explicitly phrased
their demands in the language of Republican rights.59 William Wells Brown
dreamed that a Toussaint, a Christophe, a Rigaud, a Clervaux, and a Dessalines
may some day appear in the Southern States of this Union, when the revolution
of St. Domingo will be reenacted in Southern Carolina or Louisiana.60 In 1893,
Frederick Douglass, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, declared that the black sons
of Haiti had struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.61 The writing of the period even foreshadowed a kind of Third Worldism usually assumed
to have emerged only a century and a half later. Anticipating Alfred Sauvys Third
World coinage centuries later, the Haitian free colored leader Vincent Og compared the demands of the free people of color to those of the Third Estate within
the French Revolution. The African American writer Martin Delany, long before
21
the Civil War, similarly called for an alliance of all people of color. In Haiti, Henri
Christophes secretary, the Baron de Vastey, conjured up the vision of ve million
black, yellow, and dark-skinned men, spread across the surface of the globe, [laying] claim to the rights and privileges that have been bestowed on them by natural right. J. Michael Dash rightfully calls the statement a remarkably early appeal
to the power of the wretched of the earth.62 The Haitian Revolution, in sum,
reverberated around the Black Atlantic, becoming a nodal point in the genealogy
of what would later be the struggles around colonialism.
White Voices against Imperial Reason

Some white voices were also raised in favor of Haitian revolutionaries and, more
generally, in favor of the intellectual agency of people of color. English writers
such as Wordsworth, French writers such as Lamartine, and American writers
such as the abolitionist John Whittier all wrote tributes to the Haitian Revolution. In France, the Abb Grgoire defended the full intellectual equality of
black people in his De la Littrature des Ngres, ou Recherches sur Leurs Facults
Intellectuelles (1808), for which he was congratulated by none other than King
Christophe of Haitithe prototype for Eugene ONeills The Emperor Jones
who bought fty copies in London and invited the Abb to visit the country he
ruled. Indeed, the case of the Abb Grgoire reminds us that a radically antiracist position was available among whites at the time of the French and Haitian
Revolutions.
For North American revolutionaries, meanwhile, Haiti posed a challenge.
What were to be the relations between the rst white-dominant republic and the
rst black republic in the Americas? It is in this historical context that a white
North American statesman, Timothy Pickering, deserves mention. A leader of
the Salem militia during the Revolutionary War, a general in Washingtons army,
third secretary of state, and a senator, Pickering denounced slavery in the streets
of slave-trading ports as well as in the halls of Congress. In 1783, Pickering drew
up a state constitution that called for the total exclusion of slavery. As a senator
from Massachusetts, Pickering protested the double standard that supported the
French Revolution but condemned the Haitian Revolution, since the same principles that led to support the French Revolution applied with tenfold priority
and force to the rude blacks of Santo Domingo.63
The egalitarian thrust of one wing of the Enlightenment is exemplied not
only by the Black Jacobins but also by some white French philosophers. Denis
Diderot serves as an eminent example of our point that radically egalitarian
thinkers could take clear antiracist and anticolonialist positions and even support
the performative enactment of radicalism in slave revolts and revolutions. Schol-
22
ars in France have been unearthing the anti-imperialist side of Diderot ever since
the publication in 1970 of Yves Bnots Diderot: From Atheism to Anti-colonialism.64 Bnot disinterred Diderots contribution to anticolonial discourse, often
buried because written anonymously or attached to another name in such works
as Abb Raynals LHistoire Philosophique et Politique des tablissements et du Commerce des Europens dans les Deux Indes. Drawing on Diderots contributions to
Raynals Histoire, along with Diderots own Supplment au Voyage de Bougainville,
one is struck by the extremely radical nature of Diderots ideas. Although Diderots highly protean and polyvocal texts stage a plurality of voices and discourses, a
persistently anticolonial theme clearly emerges from the body of his work.
Here we point to some of the salient features of Diderots radicalism that
make him a forerunner of anticolonial theory, critical race theory, and even critical
whiteness studies. First, Diderot sees imperialism as a pan-European phenomenon, refusing to endorse national exceptionalism of any kind, including French.
Second, he focuses on the intrinsic violence of imperialism. Third, he stresses
the ways that imperialism corrupts Europeans themselves. Fourth, he refuses the
Euro-diusionist notion that holds up Europe as a model to be emulated. Fifth,
he critiques the narcissistic epistemologies that misperceive non-Western societies through an ethnocentric grid. Sixth, he refuses the temptation of ranking
societies in a hierarchy. Seventh, he sees imperialism as a mask that drops away
with distance from the metropole and even falls o at the frontier. Finally, and
this is perhaps the most subversive feature of his thought, Diderot believes less in
colonial or humanitarian reforms conducted by the colonizers than in the right of
the colonized to resist by taking arms.
Diderot also engaged colonized subjectivity; in contemporary parlance, he
imagined the other. In passages he contributed to the Supplment au Voyage de
Bougainville, Diderot warned Tahitians against Europeans armed with crucix in
one hand and the dagger in the other, who would force you to accept their customs and opinions.65 Diderot mocked the just show up discovery doctrine by
having a wise old Tahitian address the white colonizer as follows: This country
belongs to you! Why? Just because you landed here? As Sankar Muthu points
out in his Enlightenment against Empire, Diderot does not base his defense of the
natives on exotic noble savage ontologies but rather on a taken-for-granted
cognitive equality between reasoning human beings.66 What is good for the colonizing goose is good for the colonized gander.
Boomeranging the colonialist metonym of beast and savage, Diderot advised
the African Hottentots that the ferocious beasts living in their forests were less
frightening than the monsters of the empire under which you are about to fall.
Diderot also scored the hypocrisy of Europes sentimental moralism in refusing
sympathy to the peoples to whom Europe owed its own material advantages:
23
Europe has been reverberating for a century with the most sublime moral maxims.
The fraternity of all men is established in immortal writings. ... Even imaginary sufferings provoke tears in the silence of our rooms and more especially at the theatre. It
is only the fatal destiny of unfortunate blacks that fails to touch us. They are tyrannized, mutilated, burned, stabbed, and we hear about it coldly and without emotion.
The torments of a people to whom we owe our delights never reach our heart.67
This passage is rich in anticipations of subsequent anticolonial thinking. In

Diderots a people to whom we owe our delights, we nd the germ of Fanons
idea that Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. Diderots denunciation of the hypocrisies inherent in white humanist sentimentality, meanwhile,
provide the seeds of critical whiteness studies. Diderots critique of the blind
spots of Western bourgeois spectatorship not only imagines the other but
also imagines how Europeans might themselves be imagined through colonized
eyes. Diderot thus exemplies the European intellectual who identies with the
colonized against European colonialism, anticipating later renegades such as the
Jean-Paul Sartre of the 1961 preface to Fanons The Wretched of the Earth.68 In a
geopolitics of relationality, Diderot oers what Bnot calls a utopian vision of a
united and fraternal future planet, where violent and unequal relations will give
way to pacic relations between all peoples.69
Diderots critique of the imperialisms of his time, according to Muthu, resonates with contemporary critiques of globalization.70 In book IV (chapter 33) of
LHistoire des Deux Indes, Diderot depicts European imperialism or global commerce as spreading material and ecological ruin everywhere: It seems as if from
one region to another prosperity has been pursued by an evil genius that speaks
our several languages, and which diuses the same disasters in all parts.71 Diderot
denounces the ravages of imperial-fostered monopolies through a transposition
of voice. Transvocalizing, Diderot gives ironic voice to the planetary predators of
global commerce and the homogenized world they strive to create in the name of
their own greed: Let my country perish, let the region I command also perish;
perish the citizen and the foreigner; perish my associates, provided that I can
enrich myself with his spoils. All parts of the universe are alike to me. When
I have laid waste, exhausted, and impoverished one country, I shall always nd
another, to which I can carry my gold.72 Diderots words, which could describe
the operations of Union Carbide in India or of Chevron in Peru or of Haliburton
and Blackwater in Iraq, sound today like anticipatory rumors of later critiques of
globalization, whether made by the victim-outsiders or by disenchanted insiders such as Joseph Stiglitz. Despite euphoric promises of a universal prosperity,
globalization has produced instead a viral inequality. Trickle-down colonialism
morphs into trickle-down imperialism, which morphs into trickle-down globalization, all feeding into a ood of contemporary crisis and pain.
24
Foreshadowing what Chalmers Johnson later called the Sorrows of Empire,

Diderot also utters a still timely warning for the people of North America:
[Let] the example of all the nations which have preceded you, and especially
that of the mother-country, serve as a lesson to you. Dread the inuence of gold,
which with luxury, introduces corruption of manners and contempt of the laws.
Dread too an unequal distribution of wealth, which yields a small number of rich
citizens, and a multitude of citizens plunged in misery. ... Keep yourselves free
from the spirit of conquest. The tranquility of an empire diminishes in proportion
to its extent.73
These words, in a situation where conservatives such as Niall Ferguson have

implored the United States to proudly take on the British imperial mantle, and
where unequal distribution of wealth is at its zenith, are terribly resonant.
25
having s ketc he d ou t the larger Atlantic seascape as the backdrop to our discussion, we now examine the long-term strands of historical connection between the United States, Brazil, and France as three national zones
positioned both similarly and dierently toward the race/colonial question. Our
trilateral focus is on (1) a paradigmatic European nation-stateFrancean erstwhile imperial power with a dened territory and a common language, a country
historically linked to foundational theorizations of nations and nationalism; and
(2) a continent-sized colonial-settler nation of nationsthe United Statesthe
superpower headquarters of an empire of bases classied with the First World
and the imperial West; and (3) a continent-sized emerging colonial-settler nation
of nationsBrazilassociated with the Third World and the Global South.
How one aligns the nation-states conceptually depends on the principle of
pertinence selected. In geopolitical terms, the United States shares with France
its status as a Western or First World or Global North country, while Brazil
represents an emerging second-tier power from the Global South. The double
status of Brazil as at once a colonial-settler state and a Third World country is
conveyed by the Brazilian coinage Belindia, which posits Brazil as a North-South
amalgam of Belgium and India. In another sense, however, the diverse geopolitical positionings mask a historical substratum shared by all three nation-states,
that is, their colonizing relation to the indigenous peoples as part of the Red
Atlantic; their common shaping by the triangular slave trade as part of the Black
Atlantic; and their shared pattern of racial hegemony in the White Atlantic.1
Thus, the three nation-states represent distinct conjunctural formations within
intercolonial oceanic congurations.2
All three nation-states partake of a multiculturality forged in the cauldron
of the colonial process. The United States and Brazil, the Americas two largest
multi-nation-states (Will Kymlicka), orchestrate at least three major constellations of groups, all internally dierentiated: (1) those who were already here in the
Americas (indigenous peoples in all their variety and heterogeneity), (2) those
who were forced to come (largely enslaved Africans but also indentured Europeans and Asians), and (3) those who chose to come (conquistadores, colonizers,
immigrants).3 France, meanwhile, is also multicultural, rst, in terms of internal dierentiations based on region, ethnicity, or religion (Celts, Franks, Gauls,
Basques, Bretons, Huguenots, Jews, Roma); and, second, through its long colo-
26
nial entanglements in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. In this sense, we would
distinguish between colonial multiculturality, a formulation in which the noun
calls attention to the de facto multicultural demographic character of contemporary nation-states, and its converse phrase multicultural coloniality, which calls
attention to the colonial formations that generated this very diversity. A certain
oscillation between these emphases lies in the background of some of the debates
about the political valence of multiculturalism, which has, at times, been instrumentalized for Eurocentric or national-exceptionalist ends.
Deeply intermeshed from their very beginnings, the United States, France,
and Brazil have been shaped by asymmetrical interactions not simply with one
another but also with indigenous America, with Africa, and with the Afro-diaspora. Within a veritable daisy chain of cultural intercourse, the United States is
in Brazil, which is in France, which is in the United States. Indeed, the interconnections begin with the speculative might have beens of history, including
the fact that both Brazil and the United States might have been French. If the
Portuguese had not expelled France Antartique in the 16th century, Brazilians
might be speaking French today. And if France had not ceded land to the United
States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, French might have become the ocial language of the American Southwest. Although American Francophobes harp on
French ingratitude for the U.S. liberation of France, the French might remind
Americans of the gratitude owed them for having saved the American Revolution itself, when French help prevented George Washington and his men from
losing the War of Independence. If France saved the United States in its symbolic
infancy, the United States saved France in its adulthood.
While the historical anities between France and the United States are widely
accepted, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are generally known
only to specialists. As the two most populous settler states in the Americas, the
two histories run on parallel tracks. Both began their ocial histories as European colonies: So Vicente, the rst Portuguese settlement, was founded in 1532,
and Jamestown was founded almost a century later in 1607. In both countries,
the colonizerscalled pioneers in the United States and bandeirantes in Brazil
initiated a process that reduced an indigenous population of many millions to
hundreds of thousands. Massive extermination, theft of land, and the destruction
of communal societies took place in both sites, but the modalities of domination,
and their discursive ltration, diered dramatically. The U.S. legal system treated
indigenous people as aliens and domestic dependent nations within a regime
of very limited sovereignty, while the Brazilian legal system refused to recognize
any indigenous sovereignty and instead adopted the Indians as legal orphans.
Although the discursive, ideological, and political constructions were distinct in
the two countries, the resultindigenous dispossessionswas similar.
27
The United States and Brazil came to form the two largest slave societies of
modern times, until slavery was abolished in the United States with the 1863
Emancipation Proclamation and in Brazil in 1888 with the Golden Law. Both
countries received similar waves of immigration from all over the world, ultimately forming multiracial-colonial societies with substantial indigenous, African, Italian, German, Japanese, Slavic, Syro-Lebanese, and Jewish (Ashkenazi and
Sephardi) populations and cultures. Despite widely trumpeted cultural contrasts,
the two nations constitute cousins with similar historical and ethnic formations,
but where a hierarchically structured kinship has been obscured by nationalist
and imperialist assumptions. All three zones form part of a continuum of Atlantic republicanism. The French and U.S. republics were called soeurs (sisters),
while the Brazilian Republican Constitution was inspired by both the French
and the American models. At this point in history, all three countries are constitutional republics. Unlike the United States, which has retained the same Constitution since 1787, France has lived through ve republics and ve constitutions.
While the American Revolution was a national revolt against one colonial empire
and the founding of another, the French Revolution was a social overturning of
the ancien rgime and the continuation of an empire.
Whereas both France and the United States are products of violent revolutions, Brazil achieved independence without bloodshed, when the son of the Portuguese monarch decided to stay in Brazil. France was not a neutral bystander
in these events, however, since it was the Napoleonic invasion of Iberia that triggered the removal of the Portuguese court to Brazil. Brazils 1824 Imperial Constitution borrowed and even translated parts of the 1789 French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and the Citizen.4 Brazil followed the republican course relatively late, since it was rst a colony, then a monarchy and an empire, and nally
a republic, founded in 1889 and lasting until 1930. Highly conscious of U.S. and
French precedents, the framers of the Brazilian constitution drew on elements
of U.S.-style federalism, presidentialism, bicameral legislature, and separation
of church and state, while avoiding the express principles of universal equality
elaborated in both the French and the American constitutions.
Many of the central conicts in the histories of all three nation-states revolve
around the ambiguous heritage of Enlightenment republicanism. All three
stressed the sanctity of the Lockean triad of life, liberty, and property. But the
innocent-sounding word property had terrible implications for Blacksfor
whom it meant their reduction to the status of chatteland for Redsfor
whom it invalidated the notion of communal property. Nothing is more revelatory of these contradictions than the way the three nation-states dealt with
slavery. In the United States, some of the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional
Convention called for abolition but ultimately accepted slavery as part of a com-
28
promise favoring a stronger federal government. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888

but did little to compensate or employ the newly freed blacks, preferring to invite
European immigrants as the ethnically approved labor force. France, meanwhile,
abolished slavery during the Revolution but reestablished it in the colonies, ending it only in 1848.
At the core of our tale of three republics is the contradiction between liberal
Enlightenment principles of political democracy and social equality and the illiberal legacies of discrepant citizenship. James Holston usefully schematizes the
three-way variations in citizenship: Brazil has been inclusively inegalitarian (i.e.,
everyone belongs to the nation but in an unequal way), the United States has
been restrictively egalitarian (i.e., the principles are egalitarian, but entire groups
were excluded from the benets of these principles), and France has been inclusively egalitarian (i.e., every citizen belongs to the nation, and the principles are
egalitarian).5 There were, we would add, exceptions to Frances inclusive egalitarianism: Jews were granted citizenship but discriminated against in a restrictively egalitarian practice. Meanwhile, people of color in the French colonies,
given their status as colonial subjects, belonged to the inclusively inegalitarian
category.
For Brazil and the United States, colonization, slavery, and racialization were
constitutive and internal to the newly invented nation; for Hexagonal France, in
contrast, they were seen as external, not requiring a shift in the conception of the
nation. The externalization of race delinked Enlightened France from its overseas extensions. Yet French history has hardly been free of institutional and ideological racism. Philosopher/political scientist Achille Mbembe speaks of four
eras of French racism: (1) the long ancien rgime period that includes the slave
trade, the Code Noir, and anti-Semitism; (2) the colonial period of the Native
Codes and assimilationist selective inclusion; (3) the postwar state racism of the
laws of exception for African immigrants in France; and (4) the globalized era of
the alien as phantom enemy and trigger for the ressentiment of the supposedly
silent majorities representing la France profonde.6
While contemporary U.S. conservatives dismiss slavery as existing only way
back then, French conservatives have classically downplayed colonialism and
slavery as not only back then but also far away and over there. Yet the 20thcentury colonial war in Algeria was not distant in time or space; it was recent
and felt intimately in France because Algeria, as an aggregation of three administrative departments, formed an integral part of France. Yet Algerian Muslims
were disenfranchised by the Code Indigene and, in France itself, were subject to
curfews and police brutality and a segregated existence in bidonvilles. In a sense,
Algeria formed a French counterpart to the American South. Azouz Begag,
Frances rst cabinet minister of North African origin, claims that France in
29
Algeria practiced forms of institutional racism similar in spirit to segregation in

the American South.7
The supposedly race-blind Rpublique, despite its professed universalism, did
inscribe a normative (white) identity. The French constitution declares itself the
product of a specic people: The French people has adopted..., The French
people solemnly proclaims..., and so forth. French constitutional citizenship
implies entry into a primordially unied community, as if the French people
were a homogeneous ethnic group that collectively decided to adhere to democratic principles.8 The United States, in contrast, despite the overriding reality
of colonial/racial hierarchy, did not ocially dene itself in linguistically or even
ethnically specic terms. Thus, a certain theoretical exibility, along with a high
potential for antistate libertarian individualism, was built into the conceptualization of the republic. One result is a dierent relation to the very concept of the
nation-state. In France, the already existing nationthe French peoplecreated
the new state, while in the United States, the new state created the nation, as one
very heterogeneous people (the Americans) dissolved their formal-legal links to
another people (the British).
At the same time, unlike the French constitution, the U.S. Constitution did
encode race through specic laws tacitly premised on the enslavement of blacks
and the dispossession of Native Americans. The very names of the United States
and Brazil, moreover, indirectly betoken ethnicity. America gives a European
imprimatur to an indigenous continent by paying homage to the Italian explorer
Amerigo Vespucci, while Brazil replicates the name, by some accounts, of
a mythical island (near Ireland) that subsequently became associated with the
Brazil wood sought after by European colonists. Like the Ivory Coast, Brazil
was named after an export product, a preguration of its long-term role as provider of raw materials within the racialized/gendered division of labor typical of
the world economic system.
All three countries have a special relation to the universal. As what Bourdieu
calls the two imperialisms of the Universal, the French and American republics
have historically proposed themselves as models for all peoples. Brazil, meanwhile, has also been seen as a universal model, but in two very dierent senses
of the word universal. In the late 1940s and 1950s, in the wake of Nazism and
the Shoah, Brazil was seen as a positively universal model of racial tolerance, an
alternative to fascist racism and to South African and U.S. apartheid. In subsequent decades, however, Brazil began to be interpreted as a negative universal
model, crystallized in the term Brazilianization as summoning up associations
with economic inequality, social segregation, drug-related violence, and precarious work relations. If in the 1950s Brazil was seen as universal panacea, in the
1990s it began to be seen as the harbinger of a universal threat, the fearsome telos
30
toward which the entire world might be heading. Figures as diverse as the Americans Michael Lind and Mike Davis, the Frenchman Alain Lipietz, the German
Ulrich Beck, and the Indian Ravi Sundaram have all spoken of Brazilianization
as the imminent condition of the entire world as a planet of slums (Davis).9 This
quasi-Orientalist singling out of Brazil carried the unfortunate implication that
there were no slums in the Global North and that the Global North was not
implicated in the immiseration of the Global South. The word Brazilianization, in Paulo Arantess words, suggests a contamination of the organic nucleus
of the Global North by the new barbarians of its own internal peripheries, [so
that] who spread the fracture comes to be seen as the separation between those
who are capable, or incapable, of controlling their own impulses.10 In this sense,
the Brazilianization trope constitutes an updated deterritorialized version of the
colonialist demonization of tropical climes. Its negative connotations are especially inappropriate at a time when Brazil is becoming more equal and democratic, while the United States and France are arguably becoming less equal.
Franco-Brazilian Liaisons
Our discussion of the race/coloniality debates takes place against the backdrop of
the longstanding intellectual conversations among the three zones. French writers,
for example, not only have inuenced both the United States and Brazil but also
became major theorists of their national character and identity. French intellectuals
have found both countries, to coin a phrase, good to think with. The French thinking of the United States goes back to Crvecoeur in the 18th century, through to
Tocquevilles Democracy in America in the 19th century, on to Jean Baudrillard and
Emmanuel Todd in the 20th century. The French thinking of Brazil, and especially
of indigenous Brazil, meanwhile, goes back even further, to Jean de Lry in the 16th
century, and continues through to Lvi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres in the 20th century and Jean-Christophe Run in the 21st century, resulting in an extraordinarily
rich vein of dialogue between French philosophers and the Brazilian indigene.
It was the early French attempts to colonize Brazil, interestingly, that rst
catalyzed Brazilian nationalism. Through much of the 16th and 17th centuries,
French warships tried to dominate the littoral from Guiana down to the northern side of the Amazon but eventually retreated in the face of what one might call
the proto-Brazilian resistance. Yet the French military failure indirectly opened
the way for a strong French cultural inuence. The relationship was freed of the
ressentiment that characterized Brazils relationship with Portugal. The fact that
Brazil was not a colony of France facilitated a view of France as the revolutionary homeland of liberty rather than as an imperial power. As a voluntary colony,
Brazil was not commandeered by the menacing metal of French arms or by eco-
31
nomic blackmail; rather, the Euro-Brazilian elite was persuaded by the seductive
rayonnement of French culture and ideas.
The strong political/intellectual French inuence on the Brazilian elite became
evident already in the 18th century and continues to this day. The Incondncia
Mineira, the abortive 1789 revolt in Minas Gerais against Portuguese colonialism, was led by Brazilians who had absorbed French Enlightenment ideas in
Europe, whether indirectly, through studies in Coimbra, Portugal, or directly, in
Montpellier, France. The Brazilian revolutionaries compartmentalized the douce
France of literate culture and galit from French participation in the slave trade,
colonialism, and imperialism. It was thus no accident that it was not white Brazilian intellectuals but rather the direct objects of French imperialismHaitian
revolutionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries and black Francophone intellectuals
in the 20th centurywho demystied French hypocrisies.
In the realm of literature, virtually every French literary trendrealism, naturalism, symbolism, Parnassianism, surrealismhad its Brazilian translation.
The romantic Indianist movement in Brazil, for example, was partially inspired
by Chateaubriand and Ferdinand Denis. Some Brazilian intellectuals even wrote
in French. The abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco wrote poems in French (Amour et
Dieu, 1874) and a play (LOption) about Alsace-Lorraine. Indianist Jos de Alencars own death was mourned in French verses in Brazilian newspapers: Avant
lheure frapp par laveugle barbare.11 Even in the modernist period, Manuel Bandeira wrote his rst poems in French, and Brazilian elites tended to be uent in
French up through the late 1950s.
Other key moments of French inuence in Brazil include (1) the architectural,
urbanistic, and painterly impact of the 19th-century French artistic missions;
(2) the political/philosophical inuence of the positivism of Auguste Comte;
(3) the artistic inuence of French avant-garde movements such as surrealism on
1920s Brazilian modernism; (4) the academic impact of the French mission to
the University of So Paulo in the 1930s; and (5) the postwar impact of French
intellectual trends, from existentialism to poststructuralism. It was precisely the
lack of a strong political/economic relationship, and the lack of a major French
demographic presence in Brazil, that opened the way for phantasmatic projections on both sides. The Brazilian elites fascination with French culture served
many purposes. Since the Westernizing elite had traditionally seen itself as a civilizing force enlightening the dark-skinned masses, its relationship to France facilitated a connection to a prestigious (non-Iberian) European cultural tradition. At
the same time, the elite adopted a symbolically indigenous identity, within what
Pierre Rivas calls a phantasmagoric . . . family romance in which the gure of
the real father is denied and expanded into a generic concept, more cultural than
genetic, which indirectly reveals the gure of the French Father/Mother.12
32
Some French writers reciprocated Brazilian Francophilia with Brazilophile

exoticism. Victor Hugo exalted Brazil as a Europe in the making: You are the
spring/ While I am winter..../ You will be Europe, the day after next.13 Comte
Arthur de Gobineau in his travel accounts described the 19th-century educated
Brazilian as a man who dreams of living in Paris.14 (A century later, Paulo Emlio Salles Gomes evoked this Hamlet-like alienation of Brazilian intellectuals by
speaking of the painful construction of ourselves within the rareed dialectic of
not being and being other.)15 French commentary on Brazil has been very diverse
and in many ways contradictory. In ideological terms, French intellectuals have
both advanced and contested racist currents of thought. Gobineau, author of the
inuential racist tract Essai sur Lingalit des Races, called for the Europeanizing
and whitening of Brazil as an antidote to what he called the disagreeable elements within [Brazils] ethnic constitution.16 In his personal correspondence,
Gobineau expressed aesthetic repulsion toward that racially mixed Brazilian family that made it very disagreeable to look at.17 Yet for every racist ideologue such
as Gobineau or Gustave le Bon, scholars can cite an antiracist such as Montaigne
(in an early period) and Roger Bastide and Pierre Clastres (in a later period).
Much of the doctrinaire racism in Brazilian intellectual history is concentrated in the period of the First Republic, and its sources were not only French
but also British, North American, and, derivatively, Brazilian. U.S. Brazilianist
Thomas Skidmore discerns three sources of racialist thought in Brazil: (1) the
American polygenic school, which saw the races as distinct species; (2) the historical school of Gobineau, which saw race mixing as a source of degeneracy;
and (3) Social Darwinism, the survival-of-the-ttest doctrine popularized by
such writers as Gustave Le Bon and Lapouge. Part of a much wider and international eugenicist current strongly developed in Great Britain, the United States,
and Germany, some French thinkers, like some Brazilian thinkers, condemned
the African element in Brazil as the source of the countrys backwardness.18
If some French visitors to Brazil never transcended a racially tinted elitism,
others transformed their Brazilian experience into a trampoline for a cognitive
leap. In the time of France Antartique, as we saw earlier, Montaigne rethought
European social hierarchies through a Tupinamba prism, resulting in a profound
critique of dominant views of religion, power, and social hierarchy. Centuries
later, anthropologists such as Lvi-Strauss and Clastres respectfully absorbed
and illuminated indigenous knowledge and disseminated it throughout the
world. Brazilians, for their part, returned the compliment of French fascination
by endlessly indigenizing, as it were, French ideas. The 1920s anthropophagic
modernists, for example, devoured French avant-gardism but went beyond it,
with Oswald de Andrade whimsically referring to surrealism as the best preanthropophagic movement.19
33
In the 1930s, the founders of the University of So Paulo decided to strengthen

that institutions intellectual quality by inviting prestigious French intellectuals to
occupy key positions. The result was a series (in 1934, 1935, and 1938) of French
missionsthe word itself recalls the quasi-religious mission civilisatrice aspect
of such projectsaimed at shaping modern education in Brazil. France would
thus consolidate its cultural inuence, and Brazil would modernize its university. Some of the invited scholars, such as Lvi-Strauss in anthropology and Fernand Braudel in history, were then on the cusp of becoming world renowned. In
Tristes Tropiques, Lvi-Strauss oered an aectionate picture of the Nambiquara
and the Bororos and an ironic portrait of the Europeanized So Paulo elite. A
standard boutade among So Paulo academics had it that Lvi-Strauss saw them,
and not the Indians, as the real savages. As an anti-Eurocentric European, LviStrauss mocked the elites passion for the latest Parisian intellectual fashions.20
Despite the long tradition of quasi-ocial Indianist sentimentality, the French
ethnographer was surprised by the aversion of the Brazilian elites toward os
indios. The Brazilian ambassador in Paris reassured Lvi-Strauss that Indians
no longer existed, this only a decade or two after a time (1918) when maps of the
state of So Paulo indicated that two-thirds of the territory was inhabited only
by Indians.
Lvi-Strauss constitutes a clear case of circum-Atlantic connectivities among
France, the United States, Brazil, and indigenous America. In the wake of his
work in Brazil in the 1930s, Lvi-Strauss spent the World War II years in New
York, researching the indigenous cultures of the Americas at the New York Public Library. There he was strongly inuenced by the German-Jewish American
anthropologist Franz Boas, whom Lvi-Strauss considered a master builder
of modern anthropology and the originator of the modern critique of racism.21
As a methodological maverick, Lvi-Strauss synthesized French ethnology with
American sociology and anthropology, while also learning from Brazilian natives
as experts, so to speak, on themselves. At the same time, he brought the outsider
perspective of a Jew forced into exile, for whom the gregarious ways of the indigenous Americans oered a humane alternative to what John Murray Cuddihy
calls the ordeals of [European] civility.22
The anthropologist/sociologist Roger Bastide (18981974) constitutes a stellar example of a French intellectual transformed by his Brazilian sjour. As professor of sociology at the University of So Paulo, Bastide ultimately created an
impressive corpus of some thirty books on an astonishingly wide variety of topics, including psychoanalysis (A Psicanlise do Cafun, 1941), literature (A Poesia
Afro-Brasileira, 1943), mysticism (Imagems do Nordeste Mstico em Branco e Preto,
1945), racial relations (Relaes entre Negros e Brancos em So Paulo, 1955), folklore
(Sociologia do Folclore Brasileiro, 1959), and Afro-Brazilian religions (As Religies
34
Africanas no Brasil, 1971). As a liminal gure working on the borders between

anthropology, sociology, psychology, literature, and history, Bastide transgressed
the frontiers not only between disciplines but also between the high and low
arts, between the sacred and the profane, and between the sciences and the
humanities. A comparatist, Bastide pointed to the paradoxes of Brazils relative
tolerance; the very rigidity of the racial/social structure in the United States, he
argued, fostered the creation of a black poetry reective of the genius of the race,
while the sinuosity of the Brazilian social system encouraged black intellectuals
and artists to identify with the white elite, thus undermining specically black
cultural creativity.
Bastide broke with the dominant views of African-derived religions as pathological and irrational. Stressing the intellectual, political, and cultural agency
of Afro-diasporic blacks, Bastide saw religious syncretism, for example, not as
a naive confusion of incongruous entities but rather as an exercise in spiritual/
intellectual agency based on the comparative translation of mystical equivalencies.23 The dominant monotheistic as well as the Euro-secular view, in contrast,
had seen such spirit religions as superstitions rather than as legitimate belief systems. A patronizing vocabularyanimism, fetishism, ancestor worship, cult,
and so forthembedded a superimposed set of hierarchieswritten over oral,
monotheistic over polytheistic, science over magic, mind over bodythat undermined the legitimacy of African religions. Seen as overly corporeal and ludic
(danced) rather than abstractly and austerely theological, African spirit religions
were symbolized as wildly gregarious, drowning the bounded individual personality in the collective and transpersonal fusions of trance.24
Bastides armation of Afro-Brazilian spiritual values formed a clear break
with the antecedent views of those French and American visitors inclined to
reject West African religions. Writing in the 1950s, French novelist Henri Troyat
mingled a whole series of racist tropes in his nauseated description of a Candombl priestess as a prehistoric creature, a veritable mountain of black esh [who]
despite her corpulence ... glided, jumped, and pirouetted with the lightness of a
rubber balloon ... [whose] wet skin made me want to vomit.25 Bastides recuperative project, in contrast, was to show that these religions embraced a cosmology,
a psychology, and a theodicy reective of an erudite and deeply cultivated African thought.26 Candombl helped Bastide see the limitations of Enlightenment
rationalism. Three centuries of Cartesianism, he acknowledged, had blinded him
to the complex and subtle philosophy of African religion:
I learned then, when I entered the Candombl terreiro, that I had to let myself
be penetrated by a culture that was not mine. Scientic research required that
I myself go through the ritual of initiation. I will be grateful till the day I die to
those Candombl priestesses like Joana de Ogum and Joana de Iemanja who
35
regarded me as their own little white child, who understood my desire for new
cultural food,and who sensed, with that superior gift of intuition so typical of
themthat my Cartesian thought could not handle these new elements, not in
terms of purely scientic relations, which remain at the surface of things, but that
they had to metamorphose into vital experiences, the only source of real understanding. ... After this, the knowledge of Africa has always had for me a taste of
maternal love, the scent of these kneading black hands, this innite patience in giving the gift of ones knowledge. ... The question is: Have I been faithful to them?27
Bastides sense of identication plunged him deep into the Candombl ethos, to
the point of becoming himself initiated as a son of Xango.
Had Bastide not published primarily in Portuguese, he might have become
a key gure in the seismic shift in scholarship. Long before the advocates of
reexive anthropology, Bastide developed an anti-ethnocentric method based
on transforming ourselves into that which we are studying. ... As in the act of
love, we transcend our own personality in order to join ourselves to the soul linked
to what is being studied.28 Here ethnography becomes the trigger for a psychic
transformation, a kind of methodological trance, that recalls the exchange of identities literally at play in Candombl, where male can become female, the adult
a child, and so forth. In a form of ecstatic cognition, Bastide practiced cultural
immersion, even while maintaining a certain reexivity about his own methods
and limitations. He believed, as it were, in both identication and exotopy, both in
the trance itself and in the distanced analysis performed subsequently.
Every religion arguably opens up a specic aesthetic eld favoring some arts
and senses over others. The iconoclastic suspicion toward the representational
image typical of Judaism, Islam, Protestant Christianity, and neo-Platonism,
for example, favors the scriptural and the auditory over sensuous visual representation. Religions of the book tend to be theological at their core; the arts
come later as illustrations or adumbrations of the sacred word. In the case of an
Afro-Brazilian religion such as Candombl, in contrast, the arts form the energetic matrix of the religion. As a multiart practice, Candombl engages music,
dance, poetry, narrative, costume, and cuisine not as decorative extras but as an
integral part of the religion as a synaesthetic system of belief. In a faith in which
soul claps its hands and sings, the faithful are also performers, the mediums and
the priests and priestesses above all but also the community as the addressee for
whose benet the ritual is performed. Since there is little abstract doctrine per
se, the religion exercises its power through artistic expression and performance.
Without the drums (or at least percussion), the spirits cannot descend, and
without dance, the orixas cannot be incarnated.
It would be fascinating, in this sense, to juxtapose Bastides anthropological
study of trance with three contemporaneous artists who combined anticolonial
36
left politics with a deep aection for West African trance religions: rst, Maya
Deren, the American avant-garde lmmaker who participated in and lmed
the rituals of Haitian Vodoun and wrote a classic book (The Divine Horseman)
on the subject; second, the French ethnographic surrealist Jean Rouch, who
not only lmed African trance religions but also coined the term cine-trance;
and third, Brazilian lmmaker Glauber Rocha, who lmed Candombl trance
in Barraventothe title refers to the stormy vertigo just prior to the onset of
possessionbut also referenced trance in the very title of his Terra em Transe.29
For Rouch, the trance phenomenon was an essential engine both of spirituality and of artistic creation. Theatrical directors such as Julian Beck, Peter Brook,
and Jerzy Grotowski, he pointed out, all used ethnographic information about
possession in their training of actors.30 In Les Matres Fous, Rouch lmed trance
rituals that functioned metaphorically as a coded mockery of the British colonial
authorities. At the same time, Rouchs metaphor of cine-trance evoked a sense
of danced and kinetic alignment between the camera-carrying lmmaker and the
possessed subject of religious ecstasy.31
Like these artists and like James Cliords ethnographic surrealists, Bastide
was extraordinarily sensitive to the aesthetic ramications of African religion,
to its dynamic mise-en-scne and its synesthetic embrace of the various senses,
whereby the religion penetrates through hearing, through the nose and the
mouth, touches the stomach, imposing its rhythm on body and mind.32 Here
Bastide was clearly inuenced by the Franco-Africanism of ethnographic surrealists Michel Leiris and Marcel Griaule. In his O Candombl da Bahia: Rito Nag
(1958), Bastide found echoes of what Griaule found with the Dogon: the duality
of the primordial deity, the disorder introduced into the world due to the loss of
this duality and the distinction of the sexes, the importance of numbers.33 At the
same time, again like the ethnographic surrealists, Bastide was linked to artistic
modernism, in that the Brazilian modernists were his friends and in that he analyzed their work sympathetically in his texts.
Bastide exemplies a polyperspectival, parallax view that illuminates both
French and Brazilian culture. Rather than see himself as a disseminator of
French culture in Brazil, Bastide saw himself as a student/scholar learning about
and from Brazil. Returning to France in the 1950s, Bastide became a kind of cultural ambassador. In his Lettres Brsiliennes column for Mercure de France, Bastide reversed the currents of neocolonial intellectual exchange by keeping French
readers abreast of Brazilian literary events. Bastide shows that a First World
intellectual could identify with Brazils subalternized populations, in an excess
seeing that mingles distance with intimacy, exotopy with empathy. And while
Bastide certainly impacted Brazilian intellectual life, that Brazilian life transformed his thinking as well through a reciprocal process of interfecundation.
37
Since France was never a key political or economic interlocutor of Brazil, its relationship with Brazil has always been less material and more symbolic than Brazils
relationship with the United States. French inuence in Brazil cannot be reduced
to an epiphenomenon of cultural neocolonialism, however, rst because Brazil was
never a colony or even a neocolony of France and second because France became a
cultural mentor for much of the world. At the same time, the Brazil-France relationship has also been asymmetrical in its way. In this love story, as Leyla Perrone-Moiss puts it, Brazil was always the more passionately in love of the two
partners, often standing in amazed admiration before the undeniable superiority of
the beloved object.34 Along with its rapturous interludes, the Franco-Brazilian love
aair also had its moments of coldness and even rejection, within a double movement of attraction and repulsion linked to Brazils anxieties about its own identity
and the possibilities of alternative alliances and coalitions.
Within a regime of complementary needs and desires, France played the role
of the rened intellectual superego for Brazil, while Brazil oered the raw material of the carnivalesque id, a view summed up in de Gaulles (perhaps apocryphal) dismissal of Brazil as not a pays srieux. Brazilian intellectual historian
Mario Carelli sums up the relationship as follows: For the French, Brazil retains
a bit of dream and Dionysianism; for Brazilians, France remains linked to the
principal stages of its own construction as a modern state.35 While the French
image of Brazil was relatively exoticized, the Brazilian view of French inuence
was that it was seminal and substantive. The Franco-Brazilian relationship dees
generalization, however. If writers such as Bastide and Clastres analyzed Brazil
in terms that Brazilians themselves found stimulating, other French writers saw
Brazil through a paternalistic lens. The relation has often been one of mutual,
aectionate consumption, but where the rapports de force have historically favored
the more empowered European country. Now that France exercises less global
inuence, while Brazil is an emerging BRIC power with an international voice,
the earlier asymmetries have diminished considerably. (These mutating geopolitical and intellectual dynamics form the background, as we shall see, of many
contemporary polemics.)
Brazilo-American Encontros
If the Franco-Brazilian intellectual dialogue dates back to the 16th century, the
Brazilian-American connection begins a century later in New Amsterdam, then a
multifaith, multiracial, and polyglot island speaking diverse indigenous, African,
and European languages. New Amsterdam received Jews, Muslims, and some
enslaved Mdumbu and Kongo people who came to North America via Africa
and Brazil. The word Negro comes to English via Portuguese, as does picka-
38
ninny (for black child, from Portuguese pequininho). Some of the Africans in
New Amsterdam arrived with the Dutch expelled from Recife. The rst AfroBrazilians, to adopt an anachronistic term, arrived in the city in chains. Their
namesPaulo dAngola, Simon Congo, Antonio Portuguesindexed their
conjoined African and Portuguese origins. Pressed by a food shortage, Governor
Willem Kieft liberated the slaves and granted them farmland, situated in an area
that would now include Washington Square, Soho, and our own New York University. The site of S.O.B.s (Sounds of Brazil), where Afro-Brazilian musicians
such as Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben Jor have played, was then the farmland of
Simon Congo, suggesting well over four centuries of Afro-Brazilian presence in
the city.
A century later, the leaders of the Incondncia Mineira revolt against Portuguese rule in 17881789 were inspired both by the French and American Revolutions. According to historian Kenneth Maxwell, Jeerson sympathized with the
Brazilian rebels, and the Monroe Doctrine (1823) was rst formulated in conversations between Jeerson and Brazilian representatives in Washington. The doctrine initiated, in principle if clearly not in fact, a hemispheric system in which
the two great nations of the Americas would act in concert. In 1817, Henry M.
Brackenridge was perhaps the rst U.S. writer to suggest the need for a systematic comparison. While recognizing that he was comparing a young giant to a
mature dwarf Brazil was a colony at the timeBrackenridge emphasized
that it was necessary also to imagine what the two countries would become in
the future:
The only empires that one can compare to Brazil, in terms of size, are those of
China, Russia, and the United States, and even though Brazil is today the smallest
in terms of population, the day will come when it will be the largest. ... Although
it might seem premature at this time to compare Brazil and the United States, the
moment will come when such a comparison will seem natural, even inevitable.36
Contrasting the stormy disunity of the Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America with the unied 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.37
As a kind of palimpsestic postcolony, Brazil has been shaped by diverse
national forces, including Portugal as the (ever-declining) colonial progenitor,
France as the preeminent intellectual mentor, and Great Britain and later the
United States as imperious trading partners. Despite political tensions, deep historical anities prodded Brazil to perceive itself as parallel, if only in a distant,
mediated, and often resentful way, to the United States. Apart from their shared
status as breakaway slaveholding settler states, the two countries were positioned,
as Thomas Skidmore points out, in similar ways in relation to other powers.
39
First, both countries butted up, on their frontiers, against a common rival: the
Spanish. Second, Brazil needed a strong ally to assure its geopolitical advantage
in South America, especially against Argentina. Third, despite cultural dierences, Brazilians sensed an anity with the United States in terms of certain
shared traits: continental size, abundant resources, and polyethnic and immigrant
populations.38 Both countries see themselves as abenoado por Deus (blessed by
God) with a unique historical role to play, with their own versions of national
exceptionalism, the armed and dangerous U.S. variety and the exceptionalismlite God-is-Brazilian variety in Brazil.
The question posed in both Brazil and the United States, in the 19th century
at least, was how to create a national culture in adverse conditions, with and
against an often haughty Europe that scorned its own ospring as illegitimate
spawn. The question of whether the Americas could produce serious art was
itself a symptom of a cultural colonization that saw the Americas as constituted
by lacunae: in the United States, the lack of an aristocracy, and in Brazil, the concrete absence of viable cultural institutions and of a literate public. The literary
histories of both countries were marked by parallel struggles for cultural independence from Europe. Emersons American Scholar address in 1836, which Oliver
Wendell Holmes called our intellectual Declaration of Independence, came just
one year after a similar declaration by Brazilian poet Gonalves de Magalhes.
Relations between the two countries soured with the Monroe Doctrine, the
U.S. conquest of Mexico, U.S. meddling in the Amazon, and later Teddy Roosevelts Gunboat Diplomacy, all part of an imperialist policy that saw Latin
America as a despised backyard and sphere of inuence. The Good Neighbor
policy in the 1930s and early 1940s tried to undo some of the damage created
by this arrogance, preparing the way for what was to become a veritable explosion of cultural exchange between Brazil and the United States in the postwar
period. Brazilians generally became more familiar with the United States due to
the spread of American popular culture, a process that had begun already in the
19th century. A gradual shift away from the Parisian orientation led some elite
Brazilian cultural institutions to model themselves on U.S. institutions. Brazils
Museum of Modern Art, for example, was modeled on the Museum of Modern
Art in New York.
It was in the postwar period that many prestigious Brazilian writers/scholarsnovelists (Erico Verissimo and Clarice Lispector), anthropologists (Gilberto Freyre), historians (Srgio Buarque de Holanda), dramatist-activists
(Abdias do Nascimento), sociologists (Fernando Henrique Cardoso), lm scholars (Ismail Xavier, Joo Luiz Vieira), and literary intellectuals (Antnio Cndido, Silviano Santiago, Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, Massaud
Moiss, Milton Hatoum, Mrcio Souza, Walnice Nogueira Galvo, Roberto
40
Schwarz, and countless others)came to teach in prestigious American universities. In this same period, U.S. historians began to write about slavery and
race in Brazil within a comparative perspective sympathetic to Brazil. Drawing
on Gilberto Freyre, Frank Tannenbaum argued in Slave and Citizen (1947) that
Latin American slavery, unlike the North American model, recognized the moral
and spiritual personality of the slave, regarded as temporarily degraded rather
than as essentially and eternally dehumanized. More than a decade later, Stanley
Elkins claimed in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life (1959) that
Latin American slavery was tempered by religious institutions that prevented the
reduction of blacks to mere commodities. Other scholars disputed such theories.
Eugene Genovese noted that the supposedly benevolent Catholic model of slavery did not prevent violent revolutions, as in Haiti, or slave insurrections, as in
Brazil, while Marvin Harris, in Patterns of Race in the Americas (1964), mocked
the myth of the friendly master. The Brazilian slaveholding class, he argued, created an intermediate group of mixed-race soldiers and slave drivers only because
whites were not available for such services.39
U.S. scholars such as Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Turner, Ruth Landes, Donald Pierson, Charles Wagley, and Carl Degler researched Brazilian race relations,
often nding much to admire in Brazilian culture. In an indirect critique of the
homophobic and sexophobic attitudes in the North, Landes lauded the sexual
freedom of interracial love in Brazil and the lack of phobia about same-sex relations within Afro-Brazilian religions. Sometimes, the scholars seemed more
naively enthusiastic (a mental state Brazilians call deslumbrado, or overwhelmingly charmed) about Brazilian social relations than Brazilians themselves were.
Although institutional exchanges were largely from North to South, there were
occasional gestures toward a more equal exchange, especially in the arts. First of
all, as cultural historian Isabel Lustosa points out, the dominant U.S. culture,
despite its ethnocentrism, shares with Brazilian culture a porosity that makes it
permeable to what comes from outside ... but always changing what comes from
outside into something which is theirs, with an American face.40 The fantastic
success in Hollywood of Carmen Miranda, marketed as a caricatural icon of Latinidad, oers a preeminent example of this highly ambiguous process of appropriation. In the early 1960s, meanwhile, bossa nova, itself a mlange of samba and
cool jazz, oered an acoustic image of sophistication, ultimately entering the very
bloodstream of jazz (Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, McCoy Tyner, Pat Metheney)
and of American popular music generally (Burt Bacharach). Here we nd the
North American equivalent of Brazils anthropophagic indigenization of alien
culture, but now in the form of superaltern anthropophagy, or cannibalization
from above, yet where both popular cultures were energized by a common Afrodiasporic current.
41
Diasporic Longings
All three national spaces have been projected as utopian geographies within the
Afro-diasporic imaginary. Within these crisscrossing transatlantic gazes, various
sites became the object of longing. Within this play of desire, many diasporic intellectuals participated in a search for an ailleurs: Frantz Fanon saw revolutionary
Algeria as an alternative to an accommodationist Martinique; African Americans
looked to both France and Brazil as spaces of conviviality; and, very occasionally,
black Brazilians looked to African Americans as models of pride and activism.
According to Patricia Pinho, U.S. abolitionists cited Brazils relatively peaceful
racial relations as early as the mid-1800s.41 Yet in 1918, the black journal O Alnete
exhorted fellow blacks to see whether or not we can imitate the North American
blacks.42 In 1933, another black Brazilian writer praised the condent and selfpossessed African American who lifts up his head, arguing that the Brazilian
model is more devastating for blacks even than the brutal U.S. model: The Americans lynch fty Negroes a year. We kill the entire Brazilian Negro race.43
African Americans, meanwhile, looked to Brazil as an escape, if only in fantasy, from the horrors of U.S. segregationism. Their reections are anthologized
in David J. Hellwigs comprehensive collection African-American Reections on
Brazils Racial Paradise.44 Hellwig charts a trajectory that moves from hope to
disenchantment, schematically registered in the titles of the books three major
sections: The Myth of the Racial Paradise (19001940), The Myth Debated
(19401965), and The Myth Rejected (1965). In the rst stage, Brazil is largely
seen as a color-blind utopia. Prejudice, E.R. James reported in 1920, is not there.
It is not there socially, it is not there economically, it is not there politically. It is
not there at all.45 In Hellwigs second historical phase, U.S. blacks became more
skeptical. Refused entrance in eleven Brazilian hotels, Ollie Stewart, in 1940, concluded that he has traded U.S. jim crow for the Brazilian run-around. Meeting
a young black Brazilian who longed to study at Tuskegee Institute, Stewart comments, If it hadnt been so tragic, I could have laughed.46 In a kind of specular
fantasy, at least one Brazilian black man imagines a racial paradise in an idealized
United States. Stewart underlines the irony: Here he is in Brazil, dying to get to
Alabama to escape the awful hell of a color bar, ... and nothing would satisfy me
[when I was at Tuskegee] but to get to South America where I could be a free
man.47 In Hellwigs third phase, in the era of Black Power, U.S. black observers
became somewhat disenchanted. American anthropologist Angela Gilliam, who
spent many years in Brazil, where she was often mistaken for a Brazilian mulata,
suggested that U.S. blacks are better treated in Brazil because they are seen as
Americans.48 Diasporic blackness, in other words, also gets caught up in Global
North/South power relations.
42
In the wake of earlier African American scholars (e.g., Franklin Frazier

and much later Michael Turner), a number of African American scholars have
addressed race in Brazil, sometimes thematizing their own identity as part of the
question of methodology. Sociologist France Winddance Twine oers an African American look at Brazil in her Racism in Racial Democracy: The Maintenance
of White Supremacy in Brazil. Based on extensive eld research and many lifehistory interviews with black and white Brazilians, Twine was surprised by the
hostility she encountered as a black feminist researcher in Brazil not only from
Brazilian whites but also from many blacks: In a context in which I was subjected to a high degree of racism every day, my adopted family constantly told me
that I had misinterpreted someones statements or actions. ... I was also told on
numerous occasions that it was inappropriate for me to raise this issue, particularly in the presence of children.49 The same people so eager to claim that we are
all racially mixed, Twine notes, rarely claimed actual African ancestry. Twines
research sheds light on (1) the degree to which some black Brazilians practice a
kind of social self-segregation (I dont insist on going where I dont belong) and
(2) the degree to which Brazilian blacks sometimes exercise self-censorship with
regard to their own experience of discrimination.50
Kia Lilly Caldwell, meanwhile, focuses in Negras in Brazil not on false consciousness but rather on the resistant subjectivity of black women activists,
going back to the early black feminist trailblazers such as Lelia Gonzalez, Sueli
Carneiro, and Thereza Santos and culminating in the swelling wave of recent
activists. Taking issue with the Bourdieu/Wacquant disqualication of Michael
Hanchard on the basis of his African American identity, Caldwell thematizes the
role of her own identity within her diasporic research. Where the impact of local
and global racial practices [becomes] further compounded by racialized constructions of gender,51 the body itself becomes an instrument of knowledge. Since eld
research involves cultural immersion, the diasporic anthropologist is subjected to
many of the same racialized and gendered discourses and practices that we set
out to examine.52 In Caldwells case, immersion meant being interpellated as a
prostitute in Copacabana and as a maid in upscale apartment buildings and occasionally being sent to use the service elevator. Thus, she gained rsthand knowledge of the social indignities experienced by many Afro-Brazilian women on a
daily basis.53 Rather than dene Brazil, or the United States, as better or worse,
Caldwell argues for the existence of multiple culturally and historically specic
racisms.54 Her goal, like ours, is to place the cultural and historical particularities of Brazilian racism in dialogue with global practices of racial domination.55
Patricia de Santana Pinho, a Brazilian professor at SUNYAlbany, meanwhile, argues that some African American commentators such as Twine confuse black Brazilians attempt to realize the inherent promise of racial democ-
43
racy with a failure to confront it.56 In her Mama Africa: Reinventing Blackness
in Bahia, Pinho highlights the role of Salvador Bahiacelebrated as the Black
Rome and the Mecca of Negritudeas a magnet for African Americans in
search of African roots and the culture of Candombl.57 In an intense cultural
exchange mediated by publications, tourist agencies, Candombl centers, universities, Afro-blocos, and blogs, African American trips to Brazil form part of a
broader itinerary that includes not only Africa itself but also the Afro-Caribbean,
charting a map of Africanness wherein Egypt represents the site of monumental pride, West Africa the place of cultural origin, and Brazil still another point
on the Atlantic spectrum, all places where African Americans might have been
born. Pinho cites rapper M1 of Dead Prez as conveying a common perception
among African Americans that black Brazilians have remained more connected
to Africa, [which constitutes] a step in resisting colonial domination, a strategy
against the kind of brainwashing which took place in the United States.58 In a
complex analysis, Pinho charts the crossing of looks between Afro-Brazilians and
Afro-Americans, with each projecting their desires and utopias and, at times, an
ethnocentric U.S.-centered cultural frame.
African Americans have also looked to France as a beacon of hope in a time of
despair. Unlike the love of Brazil, the love of France formed part of a widespread
Francophilia in the United States, encapsulated in the memory of the two sister republics and Jeersons maxim that every man has two countries, his own
and France. Indeed, the FranceUnited States relationship began as a passionate romance. In a reciprocal movement of ideas, French Enlightenment thinkers
inspired the American revolutionaries, just as the American Revolution inspired
French thinkers. The love aair was consummated, as it were, by the public
embrace of Jeerson and Voltaire in a Paris square. Subsequently, Thomas Paine,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Frederick Douglass, Henry Adams, and Edith Wharton all penned aectionate
travel memoirs about France. For the United States as for Brazil, France provided
an alternative cultural model to the more obvious metropolitan father gures
Great Britain and Portugal, respectively.
Despite Frances historical involvement in slavery and imperialism, its relatively good reputation in terms of race is based on certain historical moments:
the frequent alliances between the French and native peoples in the Americas, the
readiness to mate with Native American women (in contrast with the Puritans
repugnance for miscegenation), the warm reception for black American soldiers
and artists in France, and Frances reputation as a terre dasile. In France, religious
prejudiceagainst Jews and Protestantshad historically been more virulent
than racial prejudice. The rst African Americans known to have arrived in
France were probably Thomas Jeersons slaves, one of whom, Sally Hemmings,
44
became the mother of at least one of his children. While African Americans participated in a general American attraction to France, they also had a distinct perspective based on a perceived lack of racism. Frederick Douglass expressed his
surprise during an 1887 visit: I have everywhere been received in this country ...
with civility, courtesy, and kindness.59
It was only decades later that there occurred a substantial movement of African Americans to France. Beginning in 1917, some 160,000 African Americans
served in the armed forces in France, generally receiving a warm welcome. Many
black musicians went to Paris; Sidney Bechet arrived in 1919, and Josephine
Baker and La Revue Ngre opened in 1925 to the enraptured applause of the surrealists. African American adoration of Paris, as Tyler Stovall points out, constituted an indirect commentary on the sorry state of race relations in the United
States: African Americans shared the surprising realization that French whites
could treat them with aection and respect, that a color-blind society just might
be possible after all.60 Euphoric in Paris, James Weldon Johnson felt suddenly
free from danger and intolerance:
From the day I set foot in France, I became aware of the working of a miracle
within me. ... I was suddenly free; free from a sense of impending discomfort,
insecurity, danger; free from the conict within the Man-Negro dualism and the
innumerable maneuvers in thought and behavior that it compels; free from special
scorn, special tolerance, special condescension, special commiseration; free to be
merely a man.61
That African Americans could feel such dramatic relief from the burden of race
simply by landing in France constitutes a burning indictment of the ambient racism of the United States at that time.
In the wake of 1920s negrophilie, the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s became what
Stovall calls the literary capital of black America,62 animated by such gures
as Richard Wright, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Melvin Van Peebles.
By the 1950s, the exoticist primitivism of the 1920s had faded from fashion, and
African Americans were playing a major role in French erudite and popular cultures. While white French audiences in the 1920s and 1930s sometimes saw African Americans through a primitivist grid as surrogate Africansincarnated by
Josephine Baker playing the jungle African on stage or the Maghrebian Bedouin in Princesse Tam Tamin the 1950s they were more likely to see them as
dark-skinned Americans, or as white Americas preeminent victims, or simply
as talented artists. Eartha Kitt played Helen of Troy in a 1950s version of Faust
directed by Orson Welles, and jazz musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles
Davis, and Thelonious Monk performed in les caves of the Latin Quarter, while
composing soundtracks for New Wave lms such as Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and Ascenseur pour Lchafaud. Melvin Van Peebles wrote novels in French in the
45
early 1960s and directed the New Waveish lm Story of a Three-Day Pass, about
an African American soldier who encounters American racism (and occasional
French paternalism) in France.
For African American intellectuals and artists, it was especially gratifying to
be honored in Paris. As Bourdieu-inuenced literary scholar Pascale Casanova
points out, Paris constituted the capital of that Republic without frontiers, the
universal homeland without any narrow patriotism, ... a transnational site whose
only imperatives are those of art and literaturethe Universal Republic of Letters.63 In France, African American artists could do an end-run around systemic
U.S. racism, garnering praise in a capital of artistic prestige that was respected by
white intellectuals as well. African Americans came to mediate the complex relation between black-inected U.S. popular culture and the Parisian intelligentsia.
If in Paris French people could discover black Americans, black Americans in
Paris could discover not only France but also French Africa and the West Indies.
The very dierent reactions of the diverse Afro-diasporic intellectuals to
postwar France present a striking anomaly, however, forming a kind of diasporic
conundrum. Why would Francophone Caribbean intellectuals such as Aim
Csaire and Frantz Fanon nd France terribly racist, while African Americans,
in the very same period, could nd it deliciously nonracist? In the same period
that African Americans were experiencing newfound feelings of freedom, Fanon
discovered blackness in France, made aware of his ethnic characteristics ... battered down by tom toms, cannibalism, intellectual deciency, fetishism, racial
defects, slave ships.64 In France, Fanon felt his sense of identity shattered: dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am xed. ... I am laid bare.65 Why,
then, did African Americans experience an almost opposite sensation of freedom? To begin, the dierence was real; the sensation of freedom was not just
another word for a collective hallucination, as shown by the many incidents in
which everyday French people reprimanded white Americans for bringing racist
attitudes into France itself.66 Memoirs and travel accounts by black Americans in
France suggest that they experienced France as indeed less racist. Despite widespread ideological racism, everyday encounters did not necessarily involve acts of
racism or violent behavior toward black Americans. (The colonies were another
story.) Since French-style racism, where it existed, was more likely to take the
form of exoticist paternalism and role stereotyping than of virulent hatred, African Americans in Paris, especially in the postwar period, did indeed breathe in
relative freedom, liberated from the pernicious folkways of U.S.-style apartheid.
A number of other factors help explain the dierence between the African
American and the black West Indian reaction. First, it is a testament to the horrors of U.S. segregation in the postwar period, which made almost any other
situation seem an improvement. Second, Afro-Caribbean intellectuals such as
46
Csaire and Fanon were moving from a semicolonized yet black-majority country (Martinique), where blackness was the normal condition, to France, where
blacks were a minority and blackness a problem. Many West Indian blacks, in
this sense, discovered their blackness only in France or in colonial armies. (For
Fanon, according to David Macey, the Free French army was structured around
an ethnic hierarchy, with white Europeans at the top.)67 African Americans,
meanwhile, were moving from one black-minority country (the United States)
to another black-minority country (France), one less marked by chattel slavery
and white supremacy, where blacks were less scarred by the memory of segregation, and where whites were less guilty and phobic toward black people. African
Americans did not have to discover their blackness in France; their American
experience had already made them painfully aware of it. Third, from the French
side, black Americans were often seen rst as Americans and only secondly as
blacks. As Stovall writes in relation to a later period, if the best defense against
police brutality in Los Angeles is a video camera, in Paris it is an American passport.68 Fourth, African Americans, like most Americans not necessarily uent
in French, missed some of the nuances of social intercourse. Much of Fanons
rhetorical re in Black Skin, White Masks is directed at the subtly paternalistic
discourses and intonations of whites claiming there is no racism here. Fifth,
black artists and intellectuals beneted from the prestige habitually accorded
artists and intellectuals in France. Sixth, French problack armation was more
than a little ambiguous and overdetermined. While the warm welcome for African Americans was undoubtedly sincere, the good treatment of American blacks
also aorded a narcissistic payo for French whites, who could simultaneously
demonstrate their relative lack of racism while also using blacks as a vehicle for
expressing resentment against U.S. power in Europe.
Contemporary scholars Robert Stepto, Michel Fabre, Melvon Dixon, Benetta
Jules-Rosette, Petrine Archer-Straw, and Brent Hayes Edwards have all stressed
the profoundly transnational character of diasporic black movements in relation
to France. Edwards examines the various Afro-diasporic journals in the United
States (Negro World, Messenger, Crisis, Voice of the Negro) and in France and
Africa (La Voix des Ngres, La Race Ngre, Ltudiant Noir, La Revue du Monde
Noir, Le Priscope Africain, La Voix du Dahomey) to highlight the diverse crosscurrents (the Harlem Renaissance, Ngritude) moving between France, Africa,
Afro-America, and the Caribbean. Black internationalism, as Edwards notes, is
not a supplement to nation-based black thinking; rather, it exists at the very kernel of a struggle for emancipation against racism, colonialism, and imperialism.69
Afro-diasporic encounters also impacted the concepts developed by the Ngritude writers. If for Anglophone blacks Paris was a key site, for Francophone writers New York at times became an extension of Africa. Lopold Senghors visit
47
to New York City, according to Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, helped trigger his
Europe is Reason, Africa is Emotion polarity. Senghor saw New York City
as polarized into the white downtown European culture and the uptown black
culture of Harlem. As he puts it in To New York, white Manhattan knew no
mothers breast, ... no tender word, and no lips, only articial hearts paid in cold
cash, while Harlem presented life immemorial, . . . hips rippling like silk and
spearhead breasts, ballets of water lilies and fabulous masks, and mangoes and
love rolling from the low houses. For Senghor, the white mind is detached, analytical, and nonparticipatory, while the black mind is integrative, sympathetic, and
participatory. Yet a marriage between the two was possible, if only black blood
could enter [American] steel joints and make ow the oil of life.70 Within this
essentialist, quasi-metaphysical vision, articulated in transit, Senghor inverted
the culture/nature hierarchy, this time to the advantage of Harlem and Africa.
As a key site for exchanges about race, metropolitan France was the place
where African Americans encountered white French citizens but also other Afrodiasporic people, some of them soldiers in the service of the French empire. The
role of Paris, as Stovall puts it,
was both fascinating and deeply ironic. After all, the city was the seat of one of
the worlds great colonial empires, a place where anonymous French ocials
supervised the subjugation of millions of Black Africans, ... [yet] more so than
in the United States, even New York, African-Americans found that in Paris the
abstract ideal of worldwide black unity and culture became a tangible reality. ...
French colonialism and primitivism thus paradoxically combined to foster a vision
of pan-African unity.71
Paris had been at the epicenter of political discussion for black American exiles
ever since 1919 and W.E.B. Du Boiss rst Pan-African Congress. Almost four
decades later, in 1956, Richard Wright, along with Csaire and Senghor, organized the Congress of Negro Artists and Writers. The various race-related movements thus all had their local variations while sharing a cross-border dialogical
gaze. In a multidirectional movement of identication, African Americans identied with liberation struggles in Africa or looked to Brazil and France as models
of nonracist societies, just as Africans identied with freedom struggles in the
internal colonies of the diaspora.
While not as central as in the United States or Brazil, Afro-diasporic culture
has nevertheless often been a catalytic source of artistic vitality and social critique within French popular and erudite culture. A more in-depth analysis, in
this sense, might address the black inuence in French artistic culture in terms
of: the presence of mixed-race French authors such as Alexandre Dumas; black
characters in French literature; the denunciations of slavery by poets such as
Victor Hugo; the impact of African aesthetics on painters such as Picasso and
48
Braque; negrophile novels such as Philippe Soupaults Le Ngre; the role of jazz
in novels such as Sartres La Nause and in the music of Erik Satie (Ragtime du
Pacquebot) and Francis Poulenc (Rapsodie Ngre); the dialogue with Africa
and Africans in the lms of Jean Rouch (Les Matres Fous); the role of blacks in
Genets plays (Les Ngres) and lms (Un Chant dAmour); and the intellectual
polylogue involving Frantz Fanon, Richard Wright, Simone de Beauvoir, and
Jean-Paul Sartre.72
From Black Orpheus to Barack Obama

A recently published book by Brazilian Fernando Jorge, with a title that translates as If It Were Not for Brazil, Barack Obama Would Not Have Been Born, oers
an insight into the crossed gazes typical of what might be called transatlantic
looking relations. The books thesis is based on Obamas account (registered in
Dreams from My Father) of going to see the 1959 lm Black Orpheus with his
mother: The lm, a groundbreaker of sorts due to its mostly black, Brazilian cast
[treated] the myth of the ill-fated lovers Orpheus and Eurydice set in the favelas
of Rio during Carnival. In Technicolor splendor, set against scenic green hills, the
black and brown Brazilians sang and danced and strummed guitars like carefree
birds in colorful plumage.73 According to Fernando Jorge, it was Ann Dunhams
experience of Black Orpheus, which she called the most beautiful thing she ever
saw, and the resemblance between the lms black male star (Breno Mello) and
Dunhams later Kenyan husband that led to her marriage and thus to Obamas
birth.74 The books thesis is terribly simplistic; surely a more complex constellation of factors (the Civil Rights Movement, Boass antiracist anthropology, the
brilliance of Obamas future father, Dunhams culturally open personality) could
help explain Dunhams choice of marriage partner. Nevertheless, the books claim
and Black Orpheus itself serve to open up the question of the relay of racialized
gazes that forms the subject of this book.
First, within this transatlantic layering of gazes, Black Orpheus conveys a
certain French view of Brazilian Carnival and culture. The lms French title,
Orphe Noir, foregrounds blackness (and echoes Sartres preface to Lopold Senghors collection of poetry),75 while the Brazilian title of the play on which the
lm is based, Orfeu da Conceio, emphasizes the lms location in an imaginary
Rio favela. The French director, Marcel Camus, saw Brazil through a preexisting French and Franco-American intertext that included (1) French and American updates of classical texts (ONeills Mourning Becomes Electra, Sartres Les
Mouches); (2) Orphic poetry from France and elsewhere; (3) American allblack-performed versions of the classics, such as Orson Welless Voodoo Macbeth in 1936; (4) the negrophilia of the French avant-garde, triggered by La Revue
49
Ngre and Josephine Baker, the African American who became a French star and
heroine; and (5) the Hollywood tradition of all-black musicals such as Hallelujah
and Cabin in the Sky, all of which was relayed through the vibrant performativity
of Rios Carnival.
The Brazilian source play, for its part, conveyed a specically white elite look
of Vinicius de Moraes, poet, diplomat, and later popular singer-composer who
referred to himself as the blackest white man in Brazil, and who subsequently
authored Afro-sambas with guitarist Baden Powell, a black musician named
after the British founder of the Boy Scouts. A multilingual cosmopolitan, Moraes
lived for long periods in Paris and in Los Angeles, where he socialized with Orson
Welles and met Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. At the same time, not all
black Brazilians endorsed Moraess vision of the favelas, nor did Brazilians necessarily adore the French lm; many called it an exoticist macumba for tourists.
Abdias do Nascimento, founder of the Black Theatre group that provided many
of the actors for Black Orpheus, was acerbic about the lm and similar products:
White actors in blackface, black Christ, Black Orpheus: in the nal analysis, all
of these conspired in the historic rape of our people. African religious culture is
rich and very much alive in our communities spread around Brazil. We do not
have to invoke ancient Greece or the Bible to elevate the status of our mythology.
Greece and Europe, meanwhile, owe much of what they call western civilization
to Africa.76
Interestingly, the conception of the play was also shaped by two of Moraess
American friends who happened to be in Rio when the play was rst conceived:
rst, the proLatin American Jewish American literary critic Waldo Frank,
who told Moraes that the black Brazilian women looked like Greeks, and who
according to Moraes himself introduced him to another Brazilian reality by asking to be shown the favelas; and second, the equally proLatin American Orson
Welles, then in Rio making the pan-American and antiracist documentary Its
All True, a fervent celebration of samba, the favelas, and Afro-Brazilian culture.
Thus, the perspectives of two Latin Americanized North Americans intersected
with the point of view of an Americanized white Brazilian then in the process of
immersing himself in Afro-Brazilian culture.77
Black Orpheus, which launched the worldwide popularity of both samba
and bossa novathe triangulated musical genre that itself fuses Afro-Brazilian
samba with the cool jazz of Miles Davis and Chet Baker, along with the subtle harmonies of Ravel and Debussyintermingles these various transnational
looks, recapitulated again in Jorges recent Brazilian book about Obama. At the
same time, the lmic gaze is dierentiated: there is no single American or French
or Brazilian perspective. In fact, Obama himself contrasts his mothers look at
Black Orpheus with his own. While the mother is transxed in a wistful gaze, the
50
son is ready to leave halfway through the lm. While the lm transports her to a
dreamy elsewhere, it leaves him skeptical about the lms idealized portrayal, triggering melancholy reections about the burdens of race: The emotions between
the races could never be pure; even love was tarnished by the desire to nd in
the other some element that was missing in ourselves. ... The other race would
always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.78 Dierences of race, gender,
age, and generation, then, separate Ann Dunhams gaze on Black Orpheus from
Obamas. The mothers enchanted gaze at the most beautiful thing that [she]
ever saw, formed during the Civil Rights era, diers dramatically from Obamas
much more distanced reaction in the postBlack Power era. In any case, the Jorge
book conjures up a number of our themes: the artistic intercourse of French, Brazilian, and American culture; the play of social desire across the Black Atlantic;
the multiplicity of dierentiated gazes within single national formations; and
one Brazilian authors wish to see Brazil, thanks to Black Orpheus, as saving the
United States from its own racism.79
Between Anglo-Saxonism and Latinism

Such an investment in the idea of Brazils redemptive role betokens the extent to
which the race/coloniality debates in the three zones are always-already haunted
by the culturalist divide between the Latins and the Anglo-Saxons, a binarism every bit as mythic as Lvi-Strausss the raw and the cooked. As a discursive palimpsest, the Anglo/Latin dichotomy bears the traces of many historical
conicts, from the perennial rivalry between perdious Albion and its sweet
enemy France, military battles such as the Norman Invasion, the Hundred Years
War (13281453), and the Second Hundred Years War (16891815), all the way
to contemporary tensions over the place of Britain in the European Union, over
Anglophone and Francophone spheres of inuence in Africa, and recently over
the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As part of a larger intercolonial rivalry, the
Anglo/Latin dichotomy has impacted the ways that the histories of colonial conquest have been written. Citing Bartolom de las Casas, English writers spoke of
the black legend of Spanish massacres against the native peoples. The Spanish,
meanwhile, disputed the legend while accusing the English of even greater violence. Yet this early interimperial squabble obscured a shared past of violent practices. In fact, the racialized violence of both groups predated the Conquest of the
Americas. The English historian Henry Hallam (17771859), for example, drew
parallels between the Spanish Reconquista and the English conquest of Ireland,
between the massacres of the Moors and the brutalization of the Irish.80
French and Latin American discussions of intellectual exchange often deploy
the epithet Anglo-Saxon in implied opposition to French or Latin. In a rei-
51
ed polarity, the factitious solidity of Anglo-Saxon culture is answered by the

equally factitious solidity of Latinidad. Yet both terms are misnomers. North
America (and Great Britain) are not exclusively Anglo-Saxon, and France and
Latin America are not exclusively Latin, especially when imagined from below.
At a time when cultural studies and postcolonial studies are transcending narrow ethno-national paradigms, the twinned terms Latin and Anglo-Saxon
resuscitate them. As specular projections of pan-ethno-nationalism, the Anglo/
Latin dichotomy blocks a more open and transnational understanding of the
intercourse of ideas. The two terms must therefore be thought (and unthought)
in relation to each other. As a form of ethno-cultural exceptionalism, Anglo-Saxonism is associated with northern Europe and its expansion into the Americas
and around the world. Figures such as Hegel, Max Weber, and Samuel Huntington give expression to this exceptionalism. Latinism, meanwhile, is associated with France and southern Europe and their expansion into the Americas,
serving as a means of lateral dierentiation from the Anglo-Saxons and vertical
dierentiation from non-Europeans in the Americas.81 While Anglo-Saxon goes
back to the 4th century, Latin goes even further back to Latin as the language
of the Holy Roman Empire (as opposed to the various vernaculars). Only later
did Latin become a geopolitical and cultural category (Latin America) and an
ethnic classication (Latinos) in the U.S. culture wars.
The concept of Latinit was originally conceived, within Europe itself, as a
response to other panethnic movements such as pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism. In the Americas, it was a response to the swelling ambitions of the AngloSaxons. French Latinist gures such as Prosper Vallerange and Paul Adam, in
this sense, echo the Hegelian and Weberian discourse of European superiority,
but in its warm-water Mediterranean variant. The ideal portrait of Latin idealism, culture, and spirituality, as incarnated in the diaphanous gure of Ariel
in Jos Enrique Rods version of The Tempest, was foiled by Anglo-Saxon mercantilism, expansionism, and vulgarity.82 From another perspective, however,
both Latinism and Anglo-Saxonism form variants of that transregional selflove called Eurocentrism. We propose, therefore, to speak not of Anglo-Saxons
and Latins as cohesive ethno-cultural groups but rather of Anglo-Saxonism and
Latinism as historically situated discourses.
As an elastic term, Latinity has been stretched to t changing geopolitical
conditions. For Prosper Vallerange, the term included the English. For Hegel,
France, England, and Germany together formed the heart of Europe. The various European empires all narrated themselves within a Roman genealogy, seeing
themselves as latter-day versions of the Pax Romanawhence such symptomatic
terms as Pax Hispanica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana. The ideologists of
the nation-states of the Americas, meanwhile, elaborated the conceit of founding
52
New Romes, an idea concretized architecturally in the geometrical monumentality of many capitals in the Americas, including of course Washington, D.C.
Even Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, a passionate advocate for indigenous peoples, resorts to this Euro-tropism, or turning toward Europe for legitimacy, when he calls Brazil (in O Povo Brasileiro) a New Rome.83 The French,
meanwhile, claimed a Roman lineage for French colonial domination in North
Africa. Since the Roman presence predated that of the Arabs and Muslims,
French colonialism could be narrated not as an invasion but as a return.84
Anglo-Saxonism has always been deeply entangled in imperialist xenophobia,
making Anglo-Saxon a virtual synonym for national chauvinism and imperial
racism. In the 19th-century United States, imperialists saw a superior AngloSaxon race as divinely authorized to take land rst from the Native Americans
and then from the Mexicans and later to intervene wherever it wished. Echoing Hegels words about the vanishing of the native at the breath of European
activity, Josiah Strong in 1885 lauded the extinction of inferior races before the
advancing Anglo-Saxon, proudly noting that Anglo-Saxons represented only
one-fteenth part of mankind but ruled more than one-third of its people.85
The Anglo-Saxonists prefer to forget that most of North America was Spanish before it was Anglo, and it was indigenous before it was Spanish. For the
Spanish, the east coast of the continent was called Florida; for the English, it
was called Virginia. The conquest of the American West rst took place on a
South-North axis, as the conquistadores moved northward from the Caribbean
into Florida and from Mexico into Texas. Los Angeles began as a multilingual
pueblo with a mestizo majority. New Spain was almost a century old when Jamestown, the oldest English settlement in North America, was founded. But what
had begun as North American admiration for the superior wealth and power of
Spanish America gradually turned into a racialized sense of superiority. A highly
gendered sense of muscular potency became linked to a putative special AngloSaxon capacity for self-government and, by extension, for the domination of
lesser breeds without the law. In 1899, the year after the misnamed SpanishAmerican War, journalist William Allen White argued that only Anglo-Saxons
knew how to govern themselves and that it was their manifest destiny to go
forth as world conqueror.86 (The prestigious journal Foreign Aairs traces its
origins to a turn-of-the-century Anglo-Saxonist publication called the Journal of
Race Development.)
While the Anglo-Saxonists prattled about their inevitable march to the
west, the Latinists also marched west while lamenting their victimization by the
Yankees. As part of this intra-European family feud, the term Latin America
was rst introduced by the French in the 19th century. Associated with Emperor
Napoleon IIIs campaign to promote the unity of all Latin peoples, French intel-
53
lectuals and state ocers brandished Latinit as an antidote to the rising power
of the Anglo-Saxons.87 With the United States distracted by the Civil War,
Napoleon III ordered the invasion of Mexico in 1861 as part of a strategic plan to
counter U.S. inuence. France installed a monarchical regime under Maximilian
but was defeated in 1867, an event commemorated annually in the Cinco de Mayo
celebration. For centuries, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the British,
the Dutch, and the Americans all vied for domination, with all parties convinced
that their particular form of colonialism was well intentioned and benecial. As
byproducts of intercolonial rivalry, the current debates often revisit the petty
enmities rooted in these interimperial wars and debates. As an instance of Freuds
narcissism of minor dierences, national chauvinists laud one form of imperialism over another, while attributing the dierences to a putatively xed cultural
character.88 These rivalries over race and empire must be seen, then, within the
larger frame of a racialized intercoloniality that atters one set of colonialists over
another without seeing the deeper links between them. At the same time, the
later northern imperialisms have clearly superseded, subalternized, and overtaken the earlier Latin colonialisms.
The haughty Anglo-Saxonists and the proud Latinists, despite their apparent disagreements, do share fundamental axioms: rst, that the Anglo/Latin
polarity points to a real substantive contrast between peoples; second, that North
America is essentially Anglo-Saxon and that Latin America is essentially Latin.
The discordance is only in the valence. The two dominant groups also agree,
if only tacitly, on a European right to dispossess the indigenous peoples of the
Americas. Walter Mignolo has underscored the Janus-faced character of a concept of Latin America that served to restore European, Meridional, Catholic, and Latin civilization in South America and simultaneously to produce
absences (indigenous and Afro-diasporics). Creole consciousness, as Mignolo
puts it, was indeed a singular case of double consciousness: the consciousness of
not being who they were supposed to be (Europeans). The critical consciousness
of Afro-Creoles and indigenous people, meanwhile, emerged not from not being
considered Europeans but from not being considered human.89
The intellectuals who have embraced the Anglo/Latin dichotomy have not
necessarily supported their own side, however; they are not like soccer fans
who always root for the national team. Many Latin American intellectuals have
endorsed Anglo-Saxonism, just as many Anglo-American intellectuals have supported Latinism. A signal example of the latter case was the American historian
Richard Morse, whose book Prosperos Mirror (published in Mexico in 1982) contrasted the warm and gregarious collectivity of Iberian and Latin American culture with the cold and individualistic competiveness of his own Anglo culture.90
More pro-Latin than the Latins themselves, Morse was criticized by some Brazil-
54
ian intellectuals for glorifying an Iberian inuence that in their view had left a sad
legacy of authoritarianism.
The Anglo-Saxon/Latin dichotomy becomes especially pernicious, in
our view, when used to ethnicize questions that are fundamentally political.
Although often used en toute innocence as a synonym for Anglo-American, as
when French bookstore rubrics alert us to La Littrature Anglo-Saxonne as a
signal for Shakespeares plays and Toni Morrisons novels, in most cases the term
is no longer appropriate. It should logically be used only to refer to (1) the two
Germanic tribes that moved to England in the 4th century, (2) the written literature (Beowulf, The Seafarer) later produced by the 8th-century descendants
of that tribe, and (3) the 19th-century white-supremacist ideology called AngloSaxonism. Just as one would not call contemporary French people the Gauls, or
Italians the Etruscans, or Portuguese the Lusitanians, no present-day people
should be called Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, there is something paradoxical about
denunciations of Anglo-Saxon communitarianism in that the charge performs
exactly what it denounces. The term itself, that is, communitarizes a complex
society while blaming it for that which the accusation has itself just performed:
reducing a complex and dierentiated society to a single ethnos.
At this point in history, Anglo-Saxon is sometimes extended to refer to
political and economic systems and ideologies. Building on the classical contrast
between an economically liberal Britain and a statist social France, some French
analysts speak of Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism, as though an economic policy
with broad European/global roots could be tethered to a single ethnos. As should
become clear through the remainder of the book, we are skeptical about ethnic/
religious/culturalist explanations for social systems. The imperialistic policies of
the United States do not derive from the Anglo-Saxon nature of the American
populacein fact there are more people of African descent in the United States
than of English descent, and even more predominantly Anglo countries such as
Canada are not necessarily imperialistbut from the ways power has been historically constituted in the United States to favor the white and the wealthy.
Today Anglo-Saxon and Latin are deployed asymmetrically. First, Latin
American intellectuals are more likely to claim Latin than Americans or British
intellectuals are likely to claim Anglo-Saxon. Second, those deploying AngloSaxon with pride almost always occupy the extreme right end of the political
spectrum, while those wielding the same term as an accusation are usually on
the left, as when Latin Americans denounce Anglo-Saxon imperialism. Given
this political asymmetry, the word Latin is more likely to designate progressive
projects, such as the political/economic solidarity of Latin America as a counterweight to imperialism or the empowerment of Latinos in the United States,
for whom the Anglo/Latino distinction names a hegemony premised both on
55
color and language. Anglo-Saxonness, in contrast, would never today be associated with any progressive project, which is why qualifying any political project as
Anglo-Saxon is to disqualify it in the eyes of the left. The term itself, whether
used positively or negatively, is inextricably linked to racial essentialism and
national exceptionalism.
Today Anglo-Saxonism has mutated into new forms, such as the genteel
Anglo-Protestantism of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or the clash-of-cultures essentialism of a Samuel Huntington, the world-renowned expert on world civilizations whose Americo-Eurocentrism has been variously articulated on both an
East/West and a North/South axis. Anglo-Saxonist xenophobia is currently
expressed in the English Only movement, in the militarization of the U.S.Mexico border, and in the harassment of illegal aliens, that is, undocumented
workers. Anglo-Saxonism has reared its head again in the form of the Tea Partys
expert on the Constitution, W. Cleon Skousen. In his 1981 book The Five Thousand Year Leap, Skousen argued that the Founding Fathers rejected European
collectivism in favor of the limited government typical of 5th-century AngloSaxon chieftains. For Skousen, the enshrinement of Christian free-market principles in the Constitution enabled the leap that placed the Anglo-Saxons at the
head of humanity. Thus, a slightly sublimated form of white-supremacist AngloSaxonism grounds the historical vision of at least some in the Tea Party.91
While the old Anglo-Saxonists proudly proclaimed their white supremacism,
the new Anglo-Saxonists claim that they are not racist. They even claim, ludicrously, to be the victims of (black and Latino) racism. Currently, a nativist right
wing in the United States has been demonizing Latinos, Chicanos, Mexicans,
and Latin American immigrants as a threat to the body politic, exploiting the
minoritized body as a distraction from the failures of a corrupt system dominated by nance capital. A demagogic campaign cultivates the fears of engulfment on the part of the empowered majority. A sense of a precarious legitimacy
haunts the nativists, however, in that their xenophobic hysteria reects a political
unconscious haunted by their own tenuous claim on the land. From an indigenous perspective, after all, the rst illegal aliens were the conquistadores (coming
from the South) and the pioneers (coming from the East).
Yet at the same time, the Latinization of the United States through magical
urbanism (Mike Davis) also proceeds apace, as more and more American cities are becoming nonwhite-majority cities with large Latino populations, thus
undercutting the Anglo-Saxon/Latin divide itself.92 Major populational transfers, meanwhile, drain Latin America of its human substance: 11 percent of the
Mexican population, 18 percent of the Ecuadorean population, and 25 percent
of the Salvadorean population now reside in the United States, scrambling the
Anglo/Latin divide.93 Yet even while border artists such as Guillermo Gmez-
56
Pea and border theorists such as Gloria Anzalda and Cherre Moraga have
torn down symbolic walls, the U.S. state has constructed a grotesque wall
between the United States and Mexico, a monument to hatred for nuestra America and the Global South. The United States is not alone in this exclusion, however. Just as thousands of Central Americans die trying to cross the border where,
in Anzaldas words, the Third World grates against the rst and bleeds,94 so
thousands of African would-be immigrants drown in the currents of the moat
that separates Africa from Latin Spain and from fortress Europe.
The challenge for critical intellectuals, we would argue, is to support Latinidad against anti-immigrant hysteria, while also favoring the political/economic
unity of Latin America as a counterweight to the neoimperial unilateralism
of the United States, but to do so without falling into the obfuscations typical
of some forms of Latinidad. Our project, in this sense, hopes to dismantle the
ethno-nationalist binarisms that have obscured the interconnectedness of race
and coloniality in the colonial-settler states of the Americas. In this sense, the
dichotomy itself has become too intertwined with national and panethnic exceptionalisms and has stood in the way of transregional and transnational analysis of
the intercourse of ideas.
Racing Translation
The movement of ideas across borders inevitably brings up the question of language, whether marshaled for culturalist purposes or to articulate the in-between
uidities of culture. In the case of traveling debates, translation is not merely a
trope; it is entangled in the concrete arena of language conict and dissonance.
The French language, for example, has been crucial both to national pride and
to the civilizing mission. What is not clear, in Rivarols famous formulation, is
not French. Ocial Jacobin ideology has generally favored a unitary conception of language and an educational system hostile to linguistic diversity. Within
the Hexagon, Bretons and Corsicans were expected to assimilate into standard
French, just as the colonized were expected to abandon their indigenous languages and creolized patois. At home and abroad, only the normative version of
French could carry the Cartesian light of clear and distinct ideas.
At the same time, French too is a creolized language, marked not only by English and German but also by Brazilian indigenous words such as Tupi-Guarani
toucan (parrot, from tucano) and by Arabic words such as bled (village) and tbib
(doctor). English, meanwhile, is already half French in vocabulary. Some French
expressions in English are barely recognizable as French: the dozy-dooh of
Cajun-inuenced American square dance, from French dos--dos (back-to-back),
like promenade and aleman ( la main). Here one could also mention patois
57
such as petit ngre, a legacy of World War I, dened as a simplied, deformed

version of French that the military codied and deliberately taught to African soldiers ... as a means both to infantilize them and to control their modes of interaction with their mainly white French commanding ocers.95
Language crosses borders and refracts the trac of ideas; terminological
clashes lurk in the background of the culture wars. National languages in postcolonial spaces are especially syncretic and polyvocal. The same words, due to
dierent histories, carry very dierent connotations and intonations. One foundational clash has to do with the naming of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The very word America, as a synonym for the United States, for example,
has provoked objections from indigenous people, since it gives a European name
(Amerigo Vespucci) to an aboriginal continent, and from non-indigenous Latin
Americans, for whom America designates the entire hemisphere. The designation of indigenous peoples as Indians, meanwhile, relays Columbuss bedazzled
belief that he had arrived in Asia. The question is whether indigenous peoples
should be called rst peoples, fourth-world peoples, or native peoples or be
named according to their specic self-designations such as Dineh or Ikpeng.
Should we speak of the Indians of Brazilusing a genitive of nation-state
belongingor the Indians in Brazil, signifying only location and not aliation?
In Manifest Manners, postindian warrior Gerald Vizenor objects to the word
Indian as hopelessly tainted. Yet many indigenous activists have boomeranged
the term as an empowering vehicle for pan-Indigenous movements.96
Racial perception is also ltered through language. The French language features varied terms for blacks, ranging from the pseudo-descriptive noir to the
more frankly pejorative ngre (a term of abuse recoded as praise by the Ngritude
movement), the borrowed-from-English black, and the more inclusive personnes
de couleur (persons of color). Poet-statesman Lopold Senghor pointed out that
technically everyone in the world is a person of color.97 In Brazil, preto (black)
originally referred to African blacks, while crioulo referred to blacks born in Brazil. But now negro has become a term of pride. In the United States, in contrast,
Negro evokes the putative Uncle Tomstyle passivity of the preCivil Rights
era, while black and African American connote racial pride. The Brazilian
term Afrodescendente (Afro-descended) emphasizes both African ancestry and
a shared diasporic experience. Many Brazilians use nego (slang for black man)
and nega (black woman) as terms of aection for people of any race. Although
Brazilians often claim that we are all mestizo, the meaning of the sentence varies with the speaker and the circumstances of interlocution, sometimes communicating the idea that we are mestizo, not black, and sometimes that we are
all part black. Given hegemonic grids of understanding, similar ethnic groups
dene themselves dierently in North and South America: descendants of Sicil-
58
ian immigrants in Brazil might call themselves mestizo; it is hard to imagine

Sicilian Americans describing themselves in the same way.
Brazil has a vast catalogue of racially descriptive terms that highlight a miscegenated heterogeneity in which color forms part of a nuanced spectrum, whence
such terms as mameluco (white and red), caboclo (black and red), and pardo
(dark). Cognate words bring distinct tones and evaluations. Miscegenation has
historically carried a negative odor in the United States, redolent of anti-racemixing laws, while mtissage in French and miscigenao in Portuguese, as the
products of assimilationist societies, have gained positive connotations. The same
racial hybridity once demonized by many 19th-century Brazilian philosophers is
now lauded as a source of national pride. (Antonio Risrio distinguishes between
Portuguese miscigenao as simple biological mixture and mestiagem as a mix of
biology and culture, a discursivization of mixture.)98 One might also contrast the
top-down miscegenation carried out by the bandeirantes and mamelucos as part
of a demographic imperative of territorial domination with the lateral miscegenation between enslaved Africans, Indians, and poor whites as practiced in Palmares in the 17th century and that continues in new forms to the present day. The
dominant discourse of Brazilian miscegenation often conates these very dierent phenomena.
The word immigration also resonates dierently in the various sites. In the
United States, it conjures up Ellis Island and the American dream as part of
an ocial discourse of a self-dened immigrant society. A frequent Brazilian
formulation describes Brazil as a nation that receives immigrants well, which
presupposes a preexisting mixed core prior to immigration. The U.S. nation was
dened from the beginning as an amalgam of dierent migratory waves of European settlers, from which would emerge America as a space of pan-European
fusion. The critique of this discourse, meanwhile, casts a critical light on the
exclusionary practices on which the immigrant nation is premised. While contemporary France too is shaped by immigration, its ocial discourse has minimized this history, partly because French foundational myths were already well
established before mass immigration began.99 Whereas ocial U.S. discourse
has always seen immigration as of the essence of the nation (while relegating
people of color to the politys outer limits), France has seen immigration as a latter-day graft on a preexisting white-European core. At the same time, American
and French conservatives like to distinguish between authentic nationals (real
Americans, Franais de souche) and the ersatz newcomers.
The transformations generated by the linguistic encounter of European and
indigene in the contact zone (Mary Louise Pratt) of conquest are also at the
kernel of historical tensions that pass through language. During the rosy dawn
of colonialism, both sides were fumbling, as it were, in linguistic darkness. Since
59
translation was often transcosmological, there were zones of opacity (douard

Glissant) and untranslatability (Emily Apter).100 Colonialism generated intercultural equivocation, or what we have called a collision of partly incommensurable vocabularies.101 Catholic priests in Brazil diabolized indigenous religion by
translating the deity Tupa (or the Yoruban orix Exu) as devil. Colonial hermeneutics thus interpreted cultural phenomena through a fundamentally Christian
matrix. The power dynamics of coloniality thus inevitably inected translation,
with each side invested in certain understandings. European conquerors and
settlers sometimes heard only what they wanted to hear: that the natives were
eager to convert, that gold was to be found on the other side of the nearest hill,
that Europeans were regarded as gods, and so forth.
Yet we have only begun to scratch the surface of the complexities of racing
translation. The discussion is not simply one of matching vocabularies and concepts between Portuguese, English, and French. Postcolonial and diasporic writers have troubled established linguistic hierarchies. Glissant has lauded creolity
and Antillanite as creatively decentering ocial, Hexagonal French. Glissant
denes creolization as the meeting, interference, shock, harmonies and disharmonies between the cultures of the world. ... [It] has the following characteristics: the lightning speed of interaction among its elements; the awareness of
awareness thus provoked in us; the reevaluation of the various elements brought
into contact . . . with unforeseeable results.102 Building on Deleuze/Guattari,
Glissant imagines a poetics of relation in which Third Worldism is replaced by
the All Worldism of a dialogical and reciprocal planetary consciousness.103 As a
site of cultural (mis)encounter, translation, both within and between languages,
in sum, is key to our discussion. To focus on the ramifying dierences of language
exchange as opposed to furthering petried conceptions of national character is
one way to avoid the fetishizing of the ethno-cultural essences of what might be
called ontologi-nations.
60
The Seismic Shift and the

Decolonization of Knowledge
central 20th-century events world War II, the Jewish Holocaust, and Third World independence strugglesall simultaneously
delegitimized the West as axiomatic center of reference and armed the rights
of non-European peoples emerging from the yoke of colonialism. Although resistance to colonialism has existed since the very beginnings of colonization, this
resistance reached critical mass in the postwar period. In the wake of centuries
of struggles, decolonization achieved climactic expression with Indian independence in 1947, the Chinese revolution in 1949, Algerian independence in 1962, up
through the independence of Mozambique and Angola in the mid-1970s. Thus,
if Nazism, fascism, and the Holocaust revealed in all their horror the internal
sickness of Europe as a site of racism and totalitarianism, the Third World liberation struggles revealed the external revolt against Western domination, provoking a crisis in the taken-for-granted narrative of European-led Progress. What we
call the seismic shift refers to the intellectual/discursive fallout of these events,
seen as catalytic for a broad decolonization of knowledge and academic culture.
But in order to prepare the ground for our critique in later chapters, we must rst
outline what this shift was reacting against.
The Protocols of Eurocentrism

Embedded in our attempt to posit a genealogy for the culture wars is a concept
foundational to our critique: Eurocentrism. As we argued in Unthinking Eurocentrism, Eurocentrism is the discursive-ideological precipitate of colonial domination. Eurocentrism enshrines and naturalizes the hierarchical stratications
inherited from colonialism, rendering them as inevitable and even progressive.
Although forged as part of the colonizing process, Eurocentrisms links to that
process are obscured through a buried epistemology. Eurocentrism does not refer
to Europe in its literal sense as a continent or a geopolitical unit but rather to the
perception of Europe (and its extensions around the world) as normative. In this
sense, it might better be called Euro-hegemonism or the occidental world view
or coloniality (Anibal Quijano) or European planetary consciousness (Mary
Louise Pratt).1 Eurocentrism has little to do with positive feelings about Europe;
it has to do, rather, with assumptions about the relationship between the West
61
and the non-West. It is not Eurocentric to love Shakespeare or Proust, but it

is Eurocentric to wield these cultural gures as proof of an innate European
superiority.
Our coinage Eurotropism, meanwhile, calls attention to an orientation, a
tendency to turn toward the West as an ideal Platonic Sun, much as phototropic
plants turn toward the literal Sun for their sustenance. Indeed, Hegel develops
precisely this solar metaphor in The Philosophy of History: It is in the West that
the inner Sun of self-consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance.2 Tropes
of light (enlightenment, rayonnement) envision democracy, science, and progress
as emanating outward from a luminously radiating European source. Rather
than a systematic philosophy, Eurocentrism consists in an interlocking network
of buried premises, embedded narratives, and submerged tropes that constitute
a broadly shared epistemology. Eurocentrism is not usually a conscious political stance but rather an implicit positioning and a dominant common sense
or monoculture of the mind (Vandana Shiva).3 Far from being a European
monopoly, Eurocentrism is often shared with non-Europeans. Even the creators
of the rst black republic in Haiti, as Michael Dash points out, idealized Europe
and denigrated an Africa they had been taught to despise.4
Some of the basic principles of Euro-hegemonism can be found in remarkably explicit form in the writings of some of the most celebrated Enlightenment
thinkers. Hegel, often regarded as the progressive John the Baptist who prepared
the way for Marx, oers a striking example. On the one hand, the Hegel of the
Phenomenology of Spirit engendered the progressive lineage that leads out to
Marx, Kojve, Sartre, Jameson, and Butler. On the other hand, the Hegel of The
Philosophy of History leads out to Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington.
For that Hegel, world history travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely
the end of History. Asia for Hegel represents the childhood of humanity, while
Jews, Africans, and indigenous Americas are outside of history. At times, Hegels
rendering of human suering becomes chillingly matter-of-fact. Native America,
Hegel tells us, has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and
still shows itself so. For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans in
America, gradually vanished at the breath of European activity.5 In this naturalization of ethnocide, the indigenous peoples simply disappear, not because
of colonial guns, massacres, and microbes but only because of a preternaturally
powerful European breath or spirit.
Hegel baldly states in his Encyclopedia that against the absolute right of that
people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit [i.e., Europeans], the spirit
of other peoples has no other right.6 In a formulation that recalls the Dred Scott
decisions claim that the Negro has no rights that the white man need respect,
Hegel argues in Philosophy of Right that Europe knew that the rights of barbar-
62
ians [were] unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality.7
Declaring blacks incapable of development or culture, Hegel in The Philosophy
of History seems to deny even the existence of black subjectivity:
In Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet
attained to the realization of any substantial objective existenceas for example
God or Lawin which the interest of mans volition is involved and in which he
realizes his own being. ... The Negro ... exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state. ... There is nothing harmonious with humanity to
be found in this type of character.8
Unlike those who discerned black critical capacity, Hegel sees a generic intellectual and moral handicap:
Among the Negroes moral sentiments are quite weak, or more strictly, nonexistent. Parents sell their children, and conversely children their parents, as either
has the opportunity. Through the pervading inuence of slavery all these bonds of
moral regard disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind to expect from
others what we are enabled to claim.9
In a particularly egregious case of what Foucault called the indignity of

speaking for others, Hegel portrays the enslaved, but not the enslavers, as lacking
in moral feeling. Unacquainted with Africans and untraveled on the continent,
presumably basing his judgments on secondary sources such as travel literature,
Hegel grants himself the sovereign right to generalize about the intimate feelings
of millions of Africans. We are not suggesting, of course, that Hegel was nothing
but a racist or that there were no progressive aspects of his work as a theorist of
freedom. The problem is that the freedom he theorized was usually meant only
for Europeans. Hegels provincial prejudices have migrated and settled in diverse
regions of thought. We hear explicit somewhat euphoric echoes of Hegelianism
in Fukuyamas End of History, with the idea of the inevitably planetary victory of
neoliberal democracy.10 And even though George W. Bush has clearly never read
Hegel, his declaration that freedom is Gods gift to the world reveals him to be
an unwitting (and inarticulate) vulgar Hegelian.
Hegels philosophy of history can be understood through philosopher Charles
Millss concept of the racial contract, dened as
that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements (higher level
contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts validity) between
the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) racial
(phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria ... as white, and coextensive (making due allowance for gender dierentiation) with the class of full persons, to
categorize the remaining subset of humans as nonwhite and of a dierent and
inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in
the white or white-ruled polities the whites either already inhabit or establish.11
63
White supremacy, for Mills, is the unnamed political system that has made the
modern world what it is today.12 Although no longer explicitly racial, the color
line still runs through all these forms of domination. Paul Gilroy speaks of a
hemispheric order of racial domination, while Mills speaks of the metaphysical
infrastructure of global white supremacy.13 African and African American philosophers such as Mills have thus called attention not only to the Eurocentric
blind spots inherent in Hegels views on Africa but also to his ethnocentric conception of freedom.
Marxism, meanwhile, although progressive in many respects, mingles Eurocentrism with its critique. While egalitarian in economics and politics, Marxism
still privileges the historical agency of Europe and Europeans. For many Marxists, an intrinsically European capitalism, despite the cruelty so lucidly noted by
Marx himself, opened the way for the global liberation of productive forces. The
subalternization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas ultimately served to advance
human progress. At the same time, Kevin B. Anderson makes a strong case, partly
on the basis of previously untranslated texts, that Marx posited a strong connection between capitalism and slavery. In articles written in French, Marx argued
that slavery was an economic category of paramount importance, since slavery
in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America [are] the pivot
on which our present-day industrialism turns. ... Without slavery there would
be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery
that has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world
trade.14 The veiled slavery of the wage-laborers in Europe, for Marx, formed the
pedestal for the unqualied slave labor of the New World.15 Marx threw himself into the antislavery struggle and saw the ght against racism as crucial in
the creation of a strong labor movement in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois,
C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Angela Davis, Cedric Robinson, and Robin Kelley.
are among the black Marxists who furthered this trend within Marxist thought.
Although Eurocentric historiography invokes classical Athenian democracy
as the unique and originary fount of European democracy, Jack Goody speaks of
parallel forms of democratic representation in Phoenicia and in Carthage, which
voted annually for its magistrates. The desire for some form of representation, he
suggests, is intrinsic to the human situation.16 Amartya Sen, similarly, has spoken of the global as opposed to exclusively European roots of democracy. Rather
than seeing democracy as synonymous with formal elections and representative
government, Sen focuses on cultural pluralism, minority rights, and the variegated forms of public reason. He quotes Nelson Mandelas Long Walk to Freedom on the subject of indigenous African forms of public reason and deliberative
consensus. Mandela describes the local meetings held in the regents house in
Mqhekesini as democracy in its purest form. Despite a hierarchy of importance
64
among the speakers, everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine
man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer. . . . All men were free to
voice their opinions and equal in their value as citizens.17 Venerable traditions
of public reason and pluralism, Sen argues, can be found in India, China, Japan,
Korea, Iran, Turkey, the Arab world, and many parts of Africa.18
In the 20th century, we nd Eurocentric formulations even in the writings of
a philosopher such as Edmund Husserl. Here is a passage from his Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: [In Europe we nd] something unique, which
all other human groups, too, feel with regard to us, something that, apart from
all considerations of expediency, becomes a motivation for them ... constantly
to Europeanize themselves, whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, will
never, for example, Indianize ourselves.19 Husserl here articulates what is often
assumed: that Europeans display a unique mental vitality and purpose, that
Europe is the fundamental source of new ideas, and that both Europeans and
non-Europeans agree that this is the normal and proper order of things. What
Husserl has done, as Emmanuel Eze points out, is to naturalize within the terms
of transcendental philosophy the power eects of colonialism, rendered as a
racial superiority.20 It is precisely the universalization of one provincial set of cultural values that provokes the need to decenter Europe.
Eurocentrism does not designate the consistently expressed beliefs of individuals or of a group of people, however. Nor do all elements in the system appear
at the same time. Rather, Eurocentrism is an analytical construct pointing to a
structured set of protocols or discursive tendencies disseminated around the
globe. The current dimensions of both time and space, as Jack Goody puts it,
were laid down by the west ... because expansion around the world required
time-keeping and maps which provided the frame of history as well as geography.21 At this point in history, with the United States in precipitous decline
and Asia and Latin America in the ascendant, Eurocentrism has a vestigial,
out-of-sync quality, yet it still exercises immense discursive and mediatic power.
Although Eurocentrism is complex, contradictory, and historically specic, its
composite portrayal as a mode of thought might point to a number of mutually
reinforcing operations.
Expanding on our very brief analysis in Unthinking Eurocentrism, an ideal
portrait might posit the following patterns: (1) Eurocentrisms narrative is diusionist; it assumes that Europe generates ideas that then spread around the world
thanks to their inherent power of persuasion. Eurocentrism roots Europes putative superiority in intrinsic traits such as rationality and curiosity, engendering a
ctitious sense of superiority and entitlement. Within the Kantian conception,
the enlightened nations give out the laws that eventually reach the others. (2)
Eurocentric temporal discourse develops an evolutionary narrative within which
65
the West is gured as ahead and its others as behind. In this metanarrative of
progress, a linear (Plato-to-NATO) teleology sees progress as an express train
moving inexorably north-by-northwest from classical Greece to imperial Rome
on to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the United States. A presentist
historiography writes history backward so that Europe is seen as always tending toward the progressive and innovative, while the periphery is always in danger of reverting to the backward and static. (3) Eurocentrism operates through a
gurative substratum of embedded metaphors and allegorical motifs that encode
Western superiority through interlocking binarisms such as center/periphery,
order/chaos, depth/surface, light/darkness, maturity/immaturity, activity/passivity, and self-reexivity/blindness. (4) Eurocentric discourse denies the political, religious, juridical, and cultural agency of colonized peoples, treating the
indigenous peoples of the Americas, for example, as characterized by a primordial lack through a production of nothingness that decrees native land terra nullius and native culture cultura nullius. (5) Eurocentric political discourse attributes
to the West an inherent drive toward democratic institutions. The Inquisition,
King Leopold II, Mussolini, Hitler, Ptain, Franco, Salazar, and other European
despots, within this narrative, are mere aberrations to be edited out within an
amnesiac logic of selective legitimation. The Wests antidemocratic practices
colonialism, slave trading, imperialismare seen as contingent accidents rather
than as evidence of oppressive historical patterns. (6) As a corollary to the
Europe-equals-democracy formula, Eurocentric discourse elides the democratic
traditions of non-Western peoples, while obscuring both the manipulative limits
of Western formal democracy and the Wests not infrequent role in subverting
democracies (often in collaboration with local kleptocrats) in the Global South.
Non-Western social systems are seen as in excess (Oriental despotism) or in decit (societies without states). (7) Eurocentric ethics, meanwhile, is nonreciprocal.
It demands of others what it does not itself perform. It places the West as moral
arbiter, preaching nuclear nonproliferation, ecological stewardship, corruptionfree elections, and other values that the West has practiced only intermittently.
Eurocentric literary discourse (8) emplots literary history as emerging out of
biblical Hebraism and classical Hellenism, all retroactively projected as Western, even though the Bible was rooted in Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, and
ancient Greece was impacted by Semitic, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Ethiopian
cultures. A provincial narrative has the novel beginning in Europewith Don
Quixote and Robinson Crusoe often posited as originsalthough one could just
as easily see the novel, dened as ction in prose, as emerging from outside of
Europe and then spreading to Europe. (9) The Eurocentric narrativization of
artistic modernism, similarly, has the West generating artistic forms such as Cubism and collage, which then spread to the rest of the world. The non-West pro-
66
vides unsigned raw materials to be rened by named Western artists, while Western museums retain the power not only to own non-Western artifacts but also to
dene what qualies as art. (10) A white-supremacist aesthetic corollary grants
whites a monopoly on beauty, while associating people of color with darkness
and moral ugliness. (11) Eurocentric philosophical discourse traces philosophical
thinking to the Greek miracle, with the history of philosophy as working out
the problematics formulated from the pre-Socratics up to the present. It cultivates the myth of self-critical reexivity as a Western monopoly, whence the selfaggrandizing claim that only the West has had the reexive capacity to criticize
its own practices. Eurocentric philosophical discourse inscribes Western thought
as Universal and non-Western thought as Particular. Western thinkers address
universal subjects; non-Western thinkers address only their particular concerns.
(12) Eurocentric religious discourse determines that the entire world lives by the
Christian periodization (BC/AD) and the Christian calendar. The Enlightenment enshrines a secularism that remains subliminally Christian, recoding divine
Providence as Progress and Sin as Unreason. While placing Christianity at the
apex, Eurocentrism also hyphenizes Christianity with Judaism ( Judeo-Christian) while deleting the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, and marginalizing the third
Abrahamic religion of the book (Islam). (13) Eurocentric narrations of nationalism contrast the older, mature, civic, and inclusive forms of Western nationalism
with the young, irresponsible, and exclusivist forms of non-Western nationalism.
Forgetting the nation-states denitional tendency to monopolize legitimate violence (Weber) both toward otherized indigenous peoples and toward internal
minorities, Eurocentrism projects the new nationalisms as unprecedentedly
violent.22 (14) Eurocentric discursive and mediatic practices devalue non-Western and nonwhite life in a media-saturated world where white, Western lives are
taken as more precious than the lives of people of color. Within the algorithms
of human devalorization, people of color have to die en masse for the Western
media to take notice.
(15) Eurocentric economics attributes Europes spectacular success to its
enterprising spirit, forgetting that European advantages derived largely from
the immense wealth that owed to Europe from the Americas and other colonized regions. Eurocentric political economy in its various mutations (freetrade imperialism, modernization take-o theory, and neoliberal globalization
discourse) develops a diusionist trickle-down economics on a global scale.
Just as wealth supposedly trickles down from rich to poor within Western
nation-states, so the wealth of the Global North trickles down to the Global
South. Eurocentrism does not acknowledge that this one-way narrative can be
reversed, that the West became developed thanks to precious metals, fertile
land, and enslaved and indentured labor from the non-West. European prog-
67
ress is seen as self-generated, autonomous, unrelated to the appropriation of

wealth or ideas from colonized regions. The Northern nations, after pursuing protectionist policies in their own interest, discourage such policies in the
Global South. Economic crises in the South are seen as serious only when they
impact the North. In the 2008 nancial crisis, Wall Street exported not prosperity but rather what were oxymoronically called toxic assets.
In sum, a Eurocentric perspective systematically upgrades one side of the civilizational ledger and systematically downgrades the other. As a form of hubris, it
rigs the historical balance sheet by sanitizing Western history while patronizing
and even demonizing the non-West and the nonwhite. It thinks of the non-West
in terms of its deciencies, real or imagined, but thinks of itself in terms of its
noblest achievementsscience, progress, humanismwhile forgetting to add
that science was often racist science, that progress could be genocidal, and that
humanism could be a mask for barbarism. All of which is not to say that Eurocentrism is the only -ism plaguing the world or that generic social ills cannot
be found in other cultural locations or that some other -centrism is not lurking around the corner. We do not believe in the inverted narcissism that posits
Europe as the source of all evil in the world and exempts non-Western patriarchal elites from all responsibility. Our narrativization of the debates does not
emphasize the virtue of non-European peoples but rather their cultural and
intellectual agency in relation to historically congured relations of power. The
point is not to demonize Europe but to relativize and relationalize Europe (lato
sensu) as a (multi)culture alongside and interacting with other (multi)cultures.
The point is not to disqualify Western perspectives per se but rather to multiply looks and to analyze the power relations that inform them. (These issues lie
in the background of our later critique of gures such as Bourdieu/Wacquant,
Slavoj iek, and Walter Benn Michaels).
The Postwar Rupture

What we are calling the postwar seismic shift shook to their foundations many
of the Eurocentric axioms just outlined, yet they persist, on the right and sometimes, as we shall see, on the left. While anticolonial movements began to transform relations between nations, minority liberation movements began to transform relations within nations. Just as newly independent Third World nations
tried to free themselves from colonial subordination, so First World minorities
challenged the white-supremacist protocols of their own societies.
The seismic shift brought to the surface the tensions inherent in centuries of
literal and discursive struggle. Hundreds if not thousands of writers and activists
in the early postwar period participated in this shift. Indeed, philosopher Simone
68
Weil anticipated the shift even during World War II. Writing in 1943, shortly
before she died, she foresaw the coming storm, warning with a terrible prescience
that France would have to choose between attachment to its empire and the
need once more to have a soul. ... If it chooses badly, ... it will have neither one
nor the other, but simply the most terrible aiction, ... and all those capable of
speaking or wielding a pen will be eternally responsible for a crime.23 Another
early warning of the shift came in 1948 with Sartres Orphe Noir incendiary
preface to Senghors Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Ngre et Malgache de Langue
Franaise: What would you expect to nd, when the muzzle that has silenced
the voices of black men is removed? That they would thunder your praise? ...
Do you expect to read adoration in their eyes?24 Here the collective self-image
of Europeans was being challenged by the changing self-image of the colonized,
leaving both a severe narcissistic wound and, at times, new openness to the nonEuropean other. Jean-Franois Lyotard, in his account of the eects of decolonization, in tandem with Sartres account of the return of the colonial gaze, speaks
of the psychic fallout of decolonization: One cannot understand the Europeans
anguish in the face of Algerian resistance without placing it within the context
of a self-placating paternalism in which colonials tried to live. ... Can you imagine the stupefaction of well-heeled Frenchmen! It was not even any longer their
world in question, it wasexactlytheir world reversed.25
According to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, three antiracist public discourses
predominated in the immediate postwar period: (1) the critical analysis of antiSemitism; (2) the discussions of the oppression of colonized peoples and racism
against African Americans; and (3) the critique of sexism.26 The latter critique
goes back to Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex (1949) and to the Womens
Liberation movement. At times, a discursive crossover transpired, as when Beauvoir spoke of the:
deep similarities between the situation of woman and that of the Negro. Both
are being emancipated today from a like paternalism, and the former master class
wishes to keep them in their place. ... The former masters lavish more or less sincere eulogies, either on the virtues of the good Negro with his dormant, childish,
merry soulthe submissive Negroor on the merits of the woman who is truly
femininethat is, frivolous, infantile, irresponsiblethe submissive woman. In
both cases the dominant class bases its argument on a state of aairs that it has
itself created.27
These polemics inevitably revisit the Enlightenment debates. Were human rights
universal or reserved for a privileged few? Was slavery, or its latter-day correlatives such as discrimination, legitimate in certain climes or to be everywhere
condemned? Were women truly the equal of men? Did sorority coexist with fraternity? Was the Social Contract also racial and sexual?
69
While building on the progressive wing of the Enlightenment, and on the

anticolonial thinkers and activists who preceded them, gures such as Ho Chi
Minh, Che Guevara, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Skou Tour, Amlcar Cabral, Malcolm X, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Aim
Csaire began to dismantle taken-for-granted racial hierarchies and the colonial
architecture of the world. Csaires Discourse on Colonialism, rst published in
1950, for example, challenged the racist currents within dominant discourse in
France, drawing examples from a wide spectrum of politicians, geographers,
theologians, psychologists, and novelists.28
In the background of the U.S. culture wars, meanwhile, were the rst Civil
Rights marches and massive antiwar demonstrations. After having helped defeat
Nazism in Europe, African American veterans confronted apartheid-style racism
in the United States itself. In 1954, the Supreme Court struck down the law dictating separate but equal schools on the grounds that separate could never be
equal. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, freedom riders turned
Greyhound buses into vehicles for protest, and many blacks (and a few white
supporters) were murdered by white racists. In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963,
thousands of protesters faced police clubs, dogs, and high-powered water hoses.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his struggle against segregation, drew on the taproot
of two foundational American rhetoricsrst the biblical language of justice,
exodus, and the promised land and second the Enlightenment language of the
Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independencein order to move the larger
public toward the Preambles more perfect union.
As the postwar years witnessed the waning of a French empire second only
to Britains, France too became a key site in the postwar shift in thinking about
race and colonialism. At rst, the French government maintained an intransigent colonial posture in the immediate postwar period, rst in Southeast Asia,
where the French suppressed Vietnamese independence until the 1954 French
army defeat at Dien Bien Phuwhen it was replaced by U.S. advisersand
then in Algeria, where colonialism ended in 1962 after bitter political battles in
France itself. Much of the French contribution to the intellectual shift formed
part of these battles, as anticolonial writers such as the Martinicans Csaire and
Fanon, Algerians such as Gisle Halimi, and the Tunisian Albert Memmi, alongside African American expatriates such as Richard Wright, found white French
allies in gures such as Henri Alleg, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Edgar
Morin, Francis Jeanson, and Franois Maspero. At the same time, the postwar
economic expansion of France itself led to the recruiting of colonial subjects as
workers. First seen as temporary guests by the majority population, the immigrants were expected to return home after a brief stint of factory work. But the
attraction of the postwar prosperity of Les Trente Glorieuses, combined with
70
postindependence instability in Algeria, resulted in massive dislocations. At the

end of the 1960s there were 600,000 Algerians, 140,000 Moroccans, and 90,000
Tunisians in France, along with thousands of West Indian French people and
French West Africans.
France, Brazil, and the United States all had their anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, antiracist, antisexist, antihomophobic, and antiauthoritarian movements.
Such projects were not only allied metaphorically but also concretely linked in
transnational networks of activism. The movements varied in their emphases,
however, depending on whether they took place in the formerly imperial and
now authoritarian France of de Gaulle or in a neocolonized Brazil oppressed
by a U.S.-supported dictatorship or in what Jos Mart called the Belly of the
Beast (the United States). In France, the vociferously Third Worldist May 68
movement oered its support to revolutions (in China, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria,
Cuba) and minority U.S. internal colony movements (the Black Panthers, the
American Indian Movement, the Young Lords), seeing them as partial models
for First World revolutionaries. A tricontinental united front combined a lefttinged revolutionism with an ardent anticolonialism.
The postwar shift in Brazil, meanwhile, took forms both similar to and different from those in France and the United States. Since Brazil, unlike the
United States and France, was not an imperialist power, there was no need for
a movement against Brazilian imperialism, only one against U.S. imperialism.
And since Brazil was not a legally segregated country, there was no need for massive Civil Rights marches against de jure segregation. In Brazil, unlike in France,
issues of racial dierence had always been part of the debate about national identity, whether in the form of romantic Indianist discourses or of racist theories
of degeneracy or of racial democracy discourses. In political terms, the post
World War II period was a time of relative democratization after the demise of
Getlio Vargass authoritarian New State. Right-wing Integralism was on the
defensive, and democratic movements were on the upswing. Many left Brazilian
intellectuals sympathized with anticolonial movements, including in the Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and So Tom). It was
also in this postwar period that Brazilian intellectuals, inuenced by dependency
theory, began to speak of Brazils status as a dependent, peripheral, and neocolonized nation.
Here we briey focus on Frantz Fanon as an exemplary gure who embodies the seismic shift and who deeply impacted intellectual life and activism in all
three zones. Fanon serves here as both metonym and metaphor for a paradigmatic shift generated by many thinkers. Fanon, whose work built on Csaires
call for Copernican revolution in thought, became best known as an eloquent
critic of colonial oppression and as an astute diagnostician of the twinned pathol-
71
ogies of whiteness and blackness. Forging a link between colonialism and racism, Fanon called attention to metropolitan racial tensions, in Black Skin, White
Masks, and to Third World revolutions, in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon
inspired black liberation thinking around the diaspora, even while he himself was
inspired by the Algerian revolution.
A kind of posthumous wrestling over Fanons legacy has triggered a resurgent
interest in his work, with lively debates about the gendered politics of the veil, about
Fanons therapeutic theory of violence, and about the relative merits of the psychoanalytically oriented Black Skin, White Masks versus the revolutionary socialism of
The Wretched of the Earth.29 Contemporary scholars have been disentangling what
now seems archaic and retrograde in Fanons work from what seems anticipatory
and prescient. A postnationalist era has become more aware of Fanons limitations: his occasional romanticization of violence, his idealization of the peasantry,
his slender knowledge of Arab/Muslim culture, his blind spots concerning forms
of oppression rooted in gender and sexuality. At the same time, an anti-Fanon
backlash has sometimes caricatured him (1) as an advocate of violence for its own
sake, (2) as a crypto-totalitarian accomplice of the Third World gulag, and (3) as
the Manichean partisan of simplistic colonizer/colonized dichotomies. Fanons
denunciation of the binarist character of the colonial situationfor example, of
an Algeria ripped in two by checkpoints and ghettoizationhas occasionally been
exploited to charge Fanon himself with binarism. Still another trend turns Fanon
into a proto-poststructuralist analyst of sinuous postcolonial hybridities.
Yet a contemporary rereading of Fanon also reveals his extraordinary farsightedness as a precursor for a number of intellectual movements. In his lapidary
phrases, we nd the germ of many radical theoretical developments in various
elds of relevance. Fanons anticolonialist decentering of Europe in The Wretched
of the Earth (1961) can now be seen to have both provoked and foreshadowed
Derridas claim (in Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, 1966) that European culture has been dislocated, forced to stop casting
itself as the exclusive culture of reference.30 What Fanon called socialtherapy,
similarly, clearly anticipated the antipsychiatry of such gures as David Cooper,
R.D. Laing, and Felix Guattari. With his questions, Fanon pushed the Eurocentric envelope of psychoanalysis. How can Freuds talking cure facilitate a transition to ordinary unhappiness, he asked, in a situation where social oppression
itself generates extraordinary unhappiness? How can psychoanalysis help the
patient adjust when colonialism provokes unending maladjustment? How can
patients feel at home in their environment when colonialism turns the colonized
into strangers in their own land?31
It was in this same spirit that Fanon criticized psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, who argued in his Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization that
72
colonized peoples suered from a dependency complex that induced them to

identify with the father-like colonizer. But for Fanon, the colonized did not identify with Shakespeares colonizing Prospero but rather with the angry and rebellious Caliban. Indeed, Fanons fellow Martinican and mentor Csaire pursued
this same identicatory logic in his revisionist version of The Tempest, in which
Caliban becomes Caliban X, the black militant who denounces Prospero for
teaching him to jabber his language well enough to follow orders but not enough
to study science. A profound complementarity, in this sense, links the antiracist
psychology of Black Skin, White Masks and the revolutionary sociology of The
Wretched of the Earth. Although Fanon occasionally cited Lacan, as David Macey
points out, he was not a Lacanian. While Lacan opposed ego-psychology, Fanon
stressed the need to strengthen the ego of the colonized.32 At the same time,
Fanon himself did help shape a discourse very much inected by psychoanalysis,
to wit, the academic eld of postcolonial discourse, both through his analysis of
metropolitan racism and in his trenchant critique of nationalism in the Pitfalls
of National Consciousness chapter in The Wretched of the Earth.33
Although Fanon never spoke of Orientalist discourse, his critiques of colonialist imagery provided proleptic examples of what would later be called antiOrientalist critique la Edward Said. When Fanon argued that the colonizer
could not speak of the colonized without invoking the bestiary, he was calling
attention to the animalizing trope by which the colonizing imaginary rendered
the colonized as beast-like and animalic. Fanons foiling of the dynamic settler
who makes history against the background of torpid creatures mired in tradition
anticipated Johannes Fabians critique of classical anthropologys projection of the
colonized as allochronically mired in a putatively inert tradition seen as modernitys antithesis.34 For Fanon, as for Fabian, the colonizer and the colonized are
contemporaneous and coeval. Rejecting the progressive, Eurocentric two-speed
paradigm of progress, Fanon insists that the colonized do not want to catch up
with anyone.
Fanon can also be seen as a precursor of cultural studies, critical race studies,
and even whiteness studies. Although cultural studies had not yet been formulated as a project, Fanon certainly practiced a version of what later went by that
name. Already in the 1950s, he took all aspects of cultural lifethe veil, dance,
language, trance, radio, and lmas legitimate objects of study and overdetermined sites of social and cultural contestation. Although Fanon has often been
caricatured as a racial hardliner, he in fact anticipated the antiessentialist critique
of race. Lumping all Negroes together under the designation of Negro people,
Fanon writes in Toward the African Revolution, is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression.35 In Fanons relational view in Black Skin, White
Masks, the black man not only is obliged to be black, but he must be black in rela-
73
tion to the white man.36 The black man, as Fanon puts it, is comparison.37 Nor
was race a preeminent category; colonialism, he argues, was only accidentally
white.38 Race was an imposed artifact, not a matter of intrinsic traits. Perceptions
of race and of color were inected even by language; the black, he wrote in Black
Skin, White Masks, will be the proportionately whiter ... in direct relation to his
mastery of the French language.39 Like the later poststructuralists, Fanon saw
identity as languaged, situated, constructed, projected. When the West Indian
goes to France, he writes, his phenotype undergoes a mutation.40 ( Jean Genet
evoked this instability in The Blacks when he asks, What then is a black, and rst
of all, what is the blacks color?)41 As someone who became acutely aware of his
own blackness only in France and who was regarded by some Algerians as culturally European, Fanon inevitably had an acute sense of the conjunctural, malleable
character both of racial categorizations and of communitarian self-denition.
Fanons work also foreshadowed what is variously called dependency theory,
systems theory, and center/periphery theory. His claim in The Wretched of the
Earth that Europe is literally the creation of the Third World,42that is, that the
wealth and prosperity of an overstued Europe were extracted from the misery and
impoverishment of the Third Worldanticipated in stereographic form the arguments of later theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank and James Petras (for Latin
America), Walter Rodney (for Africa), Manning Marable (for Afro-America), and
Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein (for the world in general). Fanons remark
that for the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him,43 similarly,
provides a historically precocious example of the anti-imperialist and anticapitalist
media critique that became so pervasive during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.
Fanons work was subsequently disseminated not only in France and the Francophone world but also in the Arab and Muslim world and throughout much of
the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In Brazil, Fanon became a key reference for the
black movement, as represented by such gures as Abdias do Nascimento, Clvis
Moura, Lelia Gonzalez, Amauri Mendes Pereira, and Yedo Ferreira.44 Fanons work
helped inspire the pedagogy of the oppressed developed by Paulo Freire, the theatre of the oppressed staged and theorized by Augusto Boal, and anticolonialist
artistic manifestoes such as lmmaker Glauber Rochas Aesthetics of Hunger. In
the United States, Fanons work became exceedingly well known both among black
activists and among academics, who regularly assigned his work in a wide array of
elds. Speaking more generally, Fanon provided a formative text for Latin American
intellectuals articulating the neocolonial dimension of their histories. In intellectual-academic terms, Fanons key anticolonial concepts radiated outward, impacting
feminism (which gendered Fanons three-stage theory of disalienation), situationism (which denounced the metaphorical colonization of everyday life), and sociological radicalism (which saw French peasants as the wretched of the earth).
74
The Radicalization of the Disciplines

Continuing the legacy of the anticolonial thinkers, countless intellectuals in all
three sites have worked to decolonize knowledge production. The earlier Third
Worldist and the later critical race, multicultural, ethnic studies, and postcolonial
projects can be seen as forming the scholarly wing of the seismic shift, serving
both to support and to theorize social movements. In the U.S. academy, a number of institutional and demographic changes favored this decolonizing move.
The end of de jure segregation and the rise of a black middle class led to greater
black access to education. Changes in immigration laws (especially the 1965
Hart-Cellar Immigration Act), meanwhile, facilitated the granting of citizenship to Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans, resulting in community pressures
on the academy to include these populations both as students and as professors.
Native American, black, Chicano/a, Asian American, and Euro-American radicals assumed roles as teachers, leading to new programs and courses incorporating the histories, theories, and perspectives of people who had been traditionally marginalized by patriarchal Eurocentric elites. Professors began to integrate
issues of race, class, gender, nation, sexuality, and empire into their pedagogy and
scholarship, leading to an ideological battle royal both on and o campuses.
Many scholars also began to rethink their disciplines in terms of the global
changes triggered by decolonization and by minority struggles. Disciplines in
which the West was assumed to be both the speaking subject and the object of
study were subjected to critique. The challenges to the protocols of Eurocentrism
clearly impacted most of the academic disciplines, but at dierent times and in
diverse ways. Critical and even insurgent proposals were expressed in recombinatory coinages such as revisionist history, critical law, radical philosophy,
reexive anthropology, and critical pedagogywhere the qualiers suggested a
reconceptualization of a canonical discipline from the periphery and from below.
The thrust was doubly critical, rst of the presence of Eurocentric perspectives
and second of the absence of non-European and nonwhite faculty, students, and
cultural topics. Decolonizing projects called for more inclusionary educational
systems, more culturally diverse political representation, more racially equitable
justice systems, and greater indigenous, immigrant, gay, and womens rights. The
goal was to create egalitarian social formations, where the state was not dominated by a single ethnicity but rather represented the totality of its citizens, all
with an equal claim to both recognition and redistribution. This meant, inevitably, taking into account the historical practices that had generated the structural
inequalities in the rst place.
Here we sketch out a few examples of direct challenges to the protocols of
Eurocentric knowledge production, as they emerge both from within disciplines
75
and through the formation of interdisciplines. A decolonizing economics discipline, for example, moved away from the standard modernization and freemarket-based development theories that saw Western nancial investments as
fueling prosperity in the Third World. Dependency theory rejected the development discourse that conceived a Promethean West as catalyzing an economic
takeo that would recapitulate the historical sequencing of Western development. Such a view, for dependency theorists, falsely assumed that the worlds
resources were available to the Third World as they had been available to the
colonizing powers during what Marx called the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.45 An amalgam of the radical ideas of an international group
of thinkers such as Ral Prebisch, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Celso Furtado,
Andre Gunder Frank, James Petras, and Paulo Singer, dependency theory saw
world poverty and wealth as dialectically intertwined. The same hierarchical
world system controlled by metropolitan capitalist countries and corporations
simultaneously generated both the wealth of the First World and the poverty of
the Third World, as opposite faces of the same coin. Wealth implies poverty, just
as a North implies a South.
Dependency theory both critiqued and extended Marxism by transposing the
analysis of class within nations to the economic relationships between classes of
nations, ranked as subordinate and superordinate. Thus, it moved beyond class
struggle as exclusive focus to envision subordinated nations as protagonists of
world-historical progressive change. Initially associated with Latin America,
dependency theory was extrapolated for Africa in Walter Rodneys How Africa
Underdeveloped Africa and for Afro-America in Manning Marables How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America. The theory was also popularized in a widely
disseminated book by Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano, whose titleThe
Open Veins of Latin Americametaphorically sums up the drift of dependency
theory as a narrative of vampiric exploitation and Christ-like suering, within
which Center and Periphery are locked in mortal struggle.
Dependency theory was subsequently criticized for its metrocentrism, for
its incapacity to conceptualize the interplay of the local and the global, and for
its blindness to the modernizing power even of reactionary regimes. Although
the drift of the movement was clearly anti-imperialist, dependency theory sometimes purveyed an unconscious Prometheanism that still saw the Third World
as the passive victim of an all-powerful First World. Future Brazilian President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso therefore called for a more nuanced theory allowing
for the very varied situations of dependency.46 In any case, any thoroughgoing
analysis of North-South relations requires at least partial recourse to an updated
dependency theory, refashioned as world systems theory (Wallerstein) and
delinking and center/periphery theory (Samir Amin). While rendering the
76
dependency thesis more subtle and exible, the new incarnations of the theory
still saw colonialism and neocolonialism as constitutive factors in present-day
economic inequalities.47
The decolonizing project also challenged the protocols of historiography.
Instead of one-track, single-rhythm narratives of modernization, revisionist
historians began to see parallel yet dierentiated narratives of multiple modernities. In the United States, revisionist historians focused on the underside of
American history by calling attention to the foundational dispossession on which
the U.S. nation-state was built. Scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, and Francis Jennings rewrote the Conquest of the West as an exemplum
of colonial expansionism. Rejecting cheerleading versions of U.S. history, the
practitioners of social history, radical history, and bottom-up history called
attention to genocide, antiblack racism, and imperialism as well as to black and
indigenous rebellions. African American scholars such as John Hope Franklin,
Darlene Clark Hine, Cedric Robinson, Manning Marable, Thelma Wills Foote,
Angela Davis, and Robin D.G. Kelley, meanwhile, foregrounded the central role
of racism in American history and the black struggle for freedom and justice. At
the same time, scholars adopted new research methods for rendering audible
the subaltern voices of history, for example, by reading court records against the
grain to unearth the secret histories of resistance. (Some of this radical work
took the form of best-seller popular histories such as Howard Zinns Peoples History of the United States and James Loewens Lies My Teacher Told Me).
Revisionist history questioned U.S. exceptionalist ideologies concerning the
frontier, a euphemism for the indigenous land being occupied by European
intruders. Richard Drinnon traced the process by which white hostility toward
savages has been recycled throughout American history. The process began with
the proto-victims, the Pequots massacred in 1637, when the Puritans made some
four hundred of them as a ery oven in their village near the Mystic River and
later nished o three hundred more in the mud of Faireld Swamp, in an early
example of the righteous massacres that have constituted one very violent strain
within American history.48 This aggressivity subsequently expanded through
Manifest Destiny to the Conquest of the West. With the Monroe Doctrine,
the U.S. power elite established Latin America as its sphere of inuence, a concept later extended during the imperialist binge at the turn of the century to the
Philippines, where many of the commanding generals had previously fought in the
Plains and Apache Wars.49 Indeed, the model of frontier conquest provided a paradigm for the relations between the United States and much of the world. With
the neoconservative Project for a New American Century, the frontier became
the world itself, bringing to an exhausted climax a territorial and capitalist expansionism whose origins trace back to the formative years of the U.S. nation-state.
77
Within the legal eld, meanwhile, critical law, critical race, and feminist legal
scholarship questioned the universality of the dominant masculinist forms of
Western legal theory and practice. As represented by scholars such as Derrick
Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, Regina Austin, Roberto Unger Mangabeira, Paulette Caldwell, Randall Kennedy, and Kimberl Crenshaw, among others, the elds of Critical Law and especially critical race theory disinterred the
class, gender, and racial protocols underlying a U.S. legal system rigged against
the poor, the black, and the female, while assuming capitalist regimes of ownership as normative. Writing with passionate precision and literary power, critical
race theorists demonstrated that racism in U.S. law and society was not aberrant
but rather normal and hegemonic.
Philosophy, long one of the whitest, most masculinist, and most Eurocentric of disciplines, also did not escape critique. Rather than assume that Europe
always generates ideas, critical philosophers such as Lewis Gordon, Anibal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Adrian Piper, Lucas Outlaw, Charles Mills, and Emmanuel
Eze discerned reverse currents in the non-European critiques of Western philosophy. Rather than accept the myth of the uniqueness of Western self-reexivity,
critical philosophers suggested that the West itself should be more reexive, as
it were, about its own reexivity. Rather than inscribe the West as universal and
the non-West as particular, critical philosophers suggested that the universal can
be thought and addressed from any location. Afro-diasporic philosophers called
attention to the racist and colonialist dimension of Enlightenment thought. The
clearly racist ethnological writings of a Kant or a Hegel, they argued, could no
longer be neatly cordoned o from their philosophy. Critical philosophers began
to speak of counter-Enlightenments and para-Enlightenments. Black and Chicana feminists, meanwhile, stressed a politics of location, while feminist-inected
standpoint theory suggested that race and gender inescapably impacted the supposedly neutral philosophical and scientic gaze.
In the eld of education, the proponents of radical pedagogy, some inuenced by Brazilian philosopher-pedagogue Paulo Freires theories of conscientizao (consciousness raising), challenged the ideological conservatism of the
educational systems of the Americas. In the hands of such gures as Ivan Illich,
Chandra T. Mohanty, Peter Maclaren, and Henry Giroux, pedagogy became a
subversive project. In many elds, scholars began to question the positivist, objectivist, and scientistic assumptions regnant in their elds, for example the notion
of an objective and dispassionate history, supposedly unperturbed by the identity and experience of the historian or by the political and ideological currents
of the moment. The eld of anthropology, similarly, once a locus of the colonial
nexus of power and knowledge, meanwhile, was critiqued by gures such as Talal
Assad, Johannes Fabian, Renato Rosaldo, Angela Gilliam, Mick Taussig, Ann
78
Laura Stoler, Terence Turner, and Faye Ginsburg. Going against the grain of the
colonialist tradition, anthropologists in all three zones came to speak of shared
anthropology, reexive anthropology, symmetrical anthropology, reverse
anthropology, and dialogical anthropology. Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro, within this spirit, redened the mission of anthropology as
the permanent and unending decolonization of thought. In tandem with similar
moves elsewhere (e.g., provincializing Europe and Third Worldizing at home),
Viveiros de Castro speaks of anthropologizing the Center, in a situation where
the anthropologist merely relationalizes interpretations and where the goal is
not objectication but subjectication.50
Apart from engendering a salutary crisis within traditional disciplines, the
seismic shift also generated new interdisciplines and transdisciplines. In North
America, these transdisciplinary trends took institutionalized form in ethnic
studies, an umbrella term that came to embrace programs and departments in
Native American studies, African American studies, Asian American studies,
Latino Studies, e.g. Chicano studies (in the Southwest), and Puerto Rican studies (in the East). According to Manning Marable, by 1996 there were nearly one
hundred ethnic studies departments in the United States, with roughly forty-ve
black studies departments, seventeen Chicano/Puerto Rican studies departments, and eight Asian studies departments.51 Ethnic studies created new institutional spaces for decolonized forms of knowledge, opening the way for new
courses, texts, and canons.
The political/academic transformations linked to the various social identities were products of bottom-up and top-down forces, with varying coecients
of hegemony and resistance. Ethnic studies programs/departments emerged as
responses to community activism, yet they were helped along by philanthropic
foundations. Partly as a response to the 1960s urban rebellions, the Ford Foundation, beginning in 1968, funneled money into African American studies programs/departments. Between the founding of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the strident demands for black studies, as
Noliwe Rooks puts it, the country lurched reluctantly toward a semblance of
racial equality in an atmosphere of assassinations, lynchings, war, urban rebellions, campus upheavals, and police riots.52 Black studies became a site of contestation between radical community activism and those who would manage
that activism. While Black Power advocates saw black studies as a revolutionary groundswell capable of overturning the existing order, liberals usually saw
it as a means of racial integration and access to increased opportunity.53 Those
who speak derisively of self-indulgent campus quarrels often forget the politically consequential clashes at the origin of these debates. The institutional challenge for ethnic studies has been that it become a synergistic coalition rather than
79
a competitive cockght in which hyphenated Americans ght for the leftovers

from the masters table. The intellectual challenge has been to produce a lateral
conversation between the marginalized, rather than a pageant of subalterns of
color revolving around a white center within the boundaries of the United States.
While ethnic studies was formed institutionally as part of the 1960s and
1970s battles, in the 1980s and 1990s the more established disciplines came under
multicultural and Armative Action pressures. The canon debate in literature
departments, on one level, continued and extended the ethnic studies eort to
embrace minoritarian perspectives, but now within the canonical disciplines
themselves. In parallel moves, academic umbrella organizations such as the MLA
(Modern Language Association) and SCS (Society for Cinema Studies) began
to multiculturalize the canon and diversify their membership, leading to signicant quarrels not only between the multicultural left and the monocultural right
but also within the left concerning the relative importance of class, race, gender,
and sexuality and the shifting relations between the various theoretical grids such
as Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism.
Impacted by ethnic studies, American studies took a multicultural turn in the
late 1980s. Scholars questioned the American exceptionalist Anglo-normativity
that had informed the eld, calling attention to U.S.-based literature written
in languages other than English and exposing the imperialist undercurrents in
canonical literature. At the same time, the multicultural turn highlighted the antiimperial thrust of writing by gures such as Melville, Thoreau, Twain, and Du
Bois. In a subsequent transnational turn, impacted by the transnational feminist
studies represented by scholars such as Caren Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, Chandra
Mohanty, Minoo Moallem, and Jacqui Alexander, the eld has emphasized crossborder ows of people and cultural information across all the Americas, while
still acknowledging the hierarchical channels of these ows. As scholars in other
elds began to cite and incorporate the insights of ethnic studies scholars, issues
of race, colonialism, and multiculturality came to be seen as relevant to all elds
of inquiry and to all communities, even if the issues were experienced in uneven
ways.
Another set of interdisciplinary formations, based on geographical regions,
was designated area studies, composed of Latin American/Caribbean studies,
Asian/Pacic studies, African studies, and Middle East studies. (Western Europe
and the United States, symptomatically, did not constitute an area; rather, they
formed the quietly normative headquarters from which all the other areas were
strategically mapped.) Although the origins of area studies trace back to 19thcentury imperial mappings of the disciplines, the eld took o with the advent of
the Cold War. A clear thematic complementarity operated between ethnic studies and area studies. U.S. minorities back here were clearly linked to majorities
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over there: African Americans to Africa, Latinos to Latin America, and so forth.
But if the themes of the two elds were complementary, their genealogies and
political drift were clearly divergent. While ethnic studies emerged out of the
activism of racialized communities, area studies was decreed from above by the
U.S. government, reecting a hunger for expertise in the various regions where
U.S. hegemony was being challenged by nationalist and communist insurgencies.
Various ironic turnabouts in this process, however, led to a partial convergence between progressive scholars from the two interdisciplines. If Latin American studies began as a government-supported eort, many of the academic beneciaries of government grants, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, were not at all
inclined to get with the program; many became outspoken critics of U.S. government policy. Historian Warren Dean noted that the U.S. government reduced
its grants to Latin Americanists because 95 of the recipients of the grants were
against the dictatorships.54 Brazilianist Robert Levine describes the situation in
the 1970s as follows:
The younger academics [in the United States], many of whom had struggled in
the Civil Rights Movement or served in the Peace Corps or demonstrated against
the Vietnam War, were sympathetic to the aims of the Cuban revolution and critical of the foreign policy of the United States. ... With the increased repression in
Brazil after 1968, most of the young foreign scholars in Brazil showed solidarity
with the opponents of the regime.55
Historian James Green traces this process in telling detail in his We Cannot
Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship in the United
States.56 In a 2001 talk, historian Barbara Weinstein recalled the feelings of the
period:
At that time, I fervently believed that a worldwide socialist transformation was a
historical possibility. And I felt that Latin America would be in the vanguard of
this global revolutionary process. I regarded as elitist or hidebound my peers who
opted to study US political history or European intellectual history. In contrast,
my choice of Latin America highlighted my political identication with the Third
World over the First.57
Weinsteins recollections foreground a built-in asymmetry between North and

South in the political roles of left intellectuals pressured by nation-state governmentality. The very meaning of left changes its valence and aect. For Latin
Americans, coming from the Global South, to be left is to be nationalist and
anti-imperialist, a participant in a struggle to arm ones nations rightful place
in the concert of nations. Adversary scholarship becomes part of a national allegory ( Jameson, Xavier), in which the scholar writes the nation within a narrative of resistance. For North Americans, coming from an imperializing country,
in contrast, to be left is to be a dissident, to be in a sense anti-U.S. nationalist
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and anti-imperialist, a participant in the struggle to combat Americano-centrism

and restrain American power abroad.58
Multiculturalism and the Decolonizing Corpus

What often gets lost in the culture war polemics is the actual scholarly work
what might be awkwardly called the decolonizing corpusgenerated by the
seismic shift. The broader corpus includes work practiced under diverse names
and rubrics and performed by hundreds of scholars in many countries. At this
point, the corpus includes such diverse currents of thought as Third Worldism,
the modernity/coloniality project, anti-imperialist media studies, critical race
theory, critical whiteness studies, Latin American subaltern studies, (multi)cultural studies, transnational feminism, minor and feminist Francophone studies,
Latino studies, Asian studies, visual culture, social-movement analysis, crossracial and cross-national literary history, race-conscious queer theory, critical
science theory, radical pedagogy, reexive and experimental anthropology, postmodern urbanism and geography, counter-Enlightenment philosophy, border
theory, alter-globalization theory, and postcolonial studies, to name just a few of
the many adversarial currents and formations. Indeed, each of these categories
opens up onto others, and we could easily swell the list with more subelds.59
Although our rubrics are schematic, and although there are tensions between
and even within the diverse modes of critique, what all these heterogeneous elds
have in common is a critical engagement with the historical legacies of colonial
and racial oppression.
In the 1980s and the 1990s, two keywordsmulticulturalism and identity politicscame to crystallize these trends. Just as the American right had
opposed Third Worldism and Civil Rights in the 1960s, it opposed multiculturalism and identity politics in the 1980s. What provoked the rights howls of execration in this period was not the indisputable fact of the dappled variety of the
worlds cultureswhat we call multiculturalitybut rather the larger decolonizing project. As one academic face of the late 20th-century decolonizing project,
multiculturalism became a kind of shorthand to designate a vast array of initiatives. For those leftists who invested the term with hope, what one might call
the desire called multiculturalism aimed to restructure the ways knowledge was
produced and cultural resources were distributed. Emerging out of the eclipse
of the somewhat euphoric Third Worldist discourse that imagined an imminent
tricontinental revolution lying in wait around the next bend of the dialectic, radical versions of the multicultural project challenged power relations in a less direct
way. The germ of radicalism in some versions of multiculturalism, in the United
States at least, trace back to the long tradition of anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-
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capitalist movements among leftists of color and their white allies, jointly forming a coalition that Cynthia A. Young calls the U.S. Third World Left.60
Although multiculturality denes any situation where various ethnic cultures
interact within the same nation-state, multiculturalism celebrated precisely those
cultures and perspectives that had been suppressed and stigmatized by the dominant culture. In this sense, it provided an umbrella for diverse projects and constituencies, translating the seismic shift into a language deemed more appropriate
during the ebb tide of Third Worldism. Multicultural discourse was above all
protean, plural, conjunctural, existing in shifting relation to various institutions,
discourses, disciplines, communities, and nation-states. Despite rejection by the
right as well as by some on the left, it is useful to recall the terms advantages at
the time: (1) its very inclusiveness favored a broad progressive coalition, something lacking in terms such as Latino liberation that applied to only one band
on the radical spectrum; (2) its strategic vagueness equipped it to prod cultural
institutions such as museums and universities into hiring more minorities and
diversifying programming and curricula; (3) the polysemy of its constituent
terms embraced the multi- that evoked a fundamental heterogeneity based on
multiple axes of identication, and a culture that addressed a silent rebuke to
reductionist Marxists blind to the centrality of culture and race alongside class,
as well as to feminists blind to the importance of race alongside gender. The term
contained within itself the move from an undeniable demographic reality to a
break with the institutional status quo.
The culture in multiculturalism opened the way to the celebration of the
many vibrant cultural expressions emerging from the interstices of oppression,
a dimension often missing from economistic accounts that saw culture as merely
superstructural. Orchestrating critique and celebration, words such as colonialism and race evoke a dystopia of oppression, while words such as multiculturalism, interculturalism alter-globalization, multitude, and the commons
evoke utopias of justice and conviviality. While history, as that which hurts
( Jameson) is undeniably painful, art and popular culture sometimes manage to
transgure historical pain through the incomparable creativity of, for example,
Afro-diasporic music.61 Furthermore, the term multiculturalism embedded
the memory of two historically interrelated source movements: the decolonizing independence movements in the Third World and the minority struggles
in the First World. The linguistic performative of putting multi- and cultural
together, meanwhile, verbally enacted a coalitionary strategy transcending the
binarism of race relations discourse.
Over time, the concept of multiculturalism became a dissensual matrix or
code, to use Jamesonian language, within which dierent discourses competed
for hegemony. Since the word culture, as Raymond Williams had long before
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pointed out in Keywords, already embraced a multitude of signicationsranging from the elite Arnoldian sense of the best that has been thought and written to the anthropological sense of shared ways of lifethe multi- could only
further amplify that initial polysemy into a veritable cacophony of meanings.62
As a term designating a social and intellectual project produced at the intersection of critical knowledges, multiculturalism was open to various interpretations
and subject to various political force elds; it became a slippery term onto which
diverse groups projected their hopes and fears. Intrinsically polysemic, the word
simply pointed to a debate. Its very open-endedness made it susceptible, as we
shall see, to both idealization and demonization by both the left and the right.
As a transnationally situated utterance, multiculturalism altered its drift and
valence in diverse situations.63 In the United States, it emerged against the backdrop of minority struggles, Civil Rights, and U.S. neoimperialism; in Canada,
against the backdrop of Anglo-French biculturalism and native Canadian rights;
in Australia, against the backdrop of aboriginal dispossession and immigration
from Asia and the Mediterranean; in Mexico, against the ideological backdrop of
la raza csmica and mestizaje and the demographic reality of quasi-autonomous
indigenous groups such as the Maya and the Zapotec. In Brazil, it entered a discursive eld where the keywords had been miscegenation, racial democracy,
and social exclusion. The English word multiculturalism, meanwhile, migrated
to Holland and Germany, where Multi-Kulti struggled against Leitkultur normativity. Unlike France, where tensions revolved around postcolonial immigration, German tensions had to do with a Gastarbeiter Turkish/Kurdish minority
unconnected to any prior German colonization yet marginalized by blood-andsoil denitions of national identity. In the international arena, meanwhile, a 2003
UN report on cultural liberty in todays diverse world posited multicultural
democracy as an alternative to two mistaken options: (1) ethnic separatism and
(2) assimilation.64 The UN formulation was striking because critics had often
rejected multiculturalism in contradictory ways as either separatist or assimilationist, while the UN report dened it as rejecting both, suggesting that there
was no consensus even about the core meaning of the term itself.65
If multiculturalism became quasi-ocial policy in Australia and Canada, in
the United States it was part of a coalitionary opposition politics. Nonetheless,
some African Americans saw it as drowning black specicity in a bland minestrone rather than serving up a spicy Afro-diasporic gumbo. Some Native Americans, meanwhile, were reluctant to be seen as just one more oppressed minority
rather than as the heirs of sovereign nations belonging to a preexisting panindigenous continental majority. In this sense, Native American and African American
intellectuals have formulated slightly dierent critiques. For African Americans,
the fear was of a loss of specicity of oppression that would undermine the ratio-
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nale for compensatory measures for slavery and discrimination. Native Americans, meanwhile, feared the loss of the specicity grounded in being the only
aboriginal (but displaced) sovereigns of the land.
The more radical versions of these projects provoked rightist ire because they
called for seeing world history and contemporary social life from a decolonizing
perspective. But these projects also provoked anxiety on the left, as more co-optive
versions, or multiculturalism light, came to evoke corporate-managed (united
colors of Benetton) pluralism whereby established power marketed dierence for
commercial purposes. A submerged ethnocentrism sometimes resulted in what
we have called star-striped multiculturalism, or nationalism with a tan. Educational institutions sometimes envisioned the issues through an exceptionalist
lens that celebrated dierence without deconstructing either class hierarchies or
nationalist paradigms. The celebration of multicultural diversity became meaningless when not articulated together with a critique of the political economy of
racism and imperialism and when not conjoined with political projects of justice,
empowerment, and redistribution. Without such articulations, multiculturalism
risked becoming the feel-good diversity pabulum derided by some leftists.
Situating Postcolonial Studies

Over the past two decades, much of the decolonizing work has been performed
under the rubric of postcolonial studies, dened as an interdisciplinary domain
of inquiryembracing and synthesizing such disciplines as literature, geography,
history, and media studies, among otherswhich explores the colonial archive
and postcolonial identity, often in work inected by poststructuralism. The postcolonial eld, in Brett Christopherss succinct summary, oers a wide-ranging
critique of the political-economic conditions and the ways of thinking, seeing and
representing that empire instilled, and which ... continue to persist to one degree
or another after the formal dismantling of empire.66 If the key axes of discussion
during decolonization had been empire and nation, postcolonialism multiplied
the axes to include race, gender, class, region, religion, sexuality, and ethnicity,
without nation and empire ever disappearing from view. The rise of postcolonialism coincided with the partial eclipse of the Third World revolutionary
paradigm. The genealogy of the eld traces back to the anticolonial struggles
themselves and to the accompanying debates about postindependence policies
and theories. The postcolonial existed in germ in the anticolonial. The Pitfalls
of National Consciousness chapter in Fanons The Wretched of the Earth (1961),
written during the twilight of French colonialism in Algeria, was an anticipatory
gesture toward the postcolonial eld. And while Fanon mobilized the theoretical
idioms available in his dayphenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and so
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forthpostcolonialism mobilizes the theoretical (largely poststructuralist) idioms available in its period. Within the academy, the founding text of postcolonial
studies is usually thought to be Edward Saids Orientalism (1978), with its deployment of Gramscis idea of hegemony and Foucauldian notions of discourse and
the power-knowledge nexus to examine the ways that Western imperial power,
in aliation with colonizing institutions, constructed a stereotypical Orient.67
Although anticipated by Fanon and Anouar Abdul Malek, Saids method highlighted questions of representation in a poststructuralist manner. Postcolonialism thus brings on board a new idiom in which discourse, the knowledge-power
nexus, and hegemony gure prominently.
While multiculturalism and critical race can conceivably (but not ideally)
apply to single nation-states, postcoloniality is necessarily inscribed in a relationality between at least two national geographies: the colonizing metropolis and
the colonized nation. At the same time, the race/coloniality debates are linked
to larger global patterns and thus exceed even binational analytical categories.
Indeed, postcolonial studies often addresses much larger relationalities that go
beyond a single metropole and colony, to wit, those broadly obtaining between
the diverse metropolitan countries in general (the Global North) vis--vis the colonized or formerly colonized or peripheralized countries in general (the Global
South). While critical race studies and (multi)cultural studies have a mediated
relation to anticolonial struggles, postcolonialism references them directly, even
when urging a move beyond anticolonial politics and discourse.
Postcolonial theoretical discourse often practices a rhetoric of destabilization. Within this discursive mutation, tropes of roots mutate into metaphors
of routes and passages and rhizomes. A rhetoric of unsullied purity gives way
to tropes of mixing, whether religious (syncretism), genetic (miscegenation), linguistic (creolization), botanical (hybridity), or culinary (masala, bouillabaisse,
gumbo, feijoada). The visible checkpoints of The Battle of Algiers become the
invisible barriers between banlieue and city center in the France of La Haine.
Rather than the presumably binary oppositions of anticolonialism, postcolonial
theory focuses on continuous spectra. Notions of ontologically referential identity metamorphose into a multifaceted play of identications. Rigid paradigms
collapse into sliding metonymies. Erect, militant postures give way to a supple
play of mutually invaginated positionalities. Revolution with a capital R transmutes into a lower-case resistance. Teleological narratives of linear progress are
replaced by zigzagging interrogations of change. Notions of progressive, stagist
development give way to tropes of simultaneity and counterpoint. The nation,
losing its unitary form, is now seen as palimpsestic, as embodying multiple times,
rhythms, and perspectives. The idea of the originary nationexpressed in bio-
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logical metaphors of growth and evolutionis replaced by the nation as imagined, narrated, gured, constructed, troped.
The owering of postcolonial studies in the late 1980s partly derives from the
entry of intellectuals from the formerly colonized countries into the Anglophone
academy as well as from the increased visibility of immigrant-descended populations in the United States and Europe. Although Francophone thinkers such as
Csaire and Fanon were seminal thinkers for postcolonial thought, many French
intellectuals, for reasons that we explore in a later chapter, have until recently been
reticent about the project. Latin American intellectuals, meanwhile, have been
somewhat ambivalent, saying in eect that postcolonialism is old news. If Latin
America was in some ways behind Europefor example, in technology or industrializationin other ways it was culturally ahead of European thinking, having
the advantages of their disadvantages, that is, the double, parallax vision that comes
with knowing both center and periphery. The Anglo-AmericanIndian orientation
of much of postcolonial studies, meanwhile, too often relegated Latin American
intellectuals to the theoretical sidelines. At the same time, Latin American and
Latino scholars (Enrique Dussel, Fernando Coronil, Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Anibal Quijano, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Ramn Grosfoguel, among
others) have been formulating the colonial/modernity project, which takes the critiques developed by indigenous peoples, and by Latin American anti-imperialists,
as fundamental to any thoroughgoing postcolonial project.68
Postcolonial theory has been critiqued for (1) an elision of class (sometimes
linked ad hominem to the elite status of some of the key theorists themselves);
(2) a tendency to subjectivize large-scale political struggles by reducing them to
intrapsychic tensions; (3) an avoidance of political economy in a globalized age
when neoliberal economics drives many of the cultural changes registered by the
theory; (4) an obsessive antibinarism that ignores the intractable binarism of the
colonial situation itself; (5) a supercilious attitude toward ethnic studies, projected as lacking the aura of theory but which often constituted a more direct
challenge to established power through its links to potentially insurgent communities; (6) a tendency to focus on faded European empires and to forget actually existing American neoimperialism; (7) a kind of Commonwealth centrism
that privileges the British-Indian relation as paradigm for colonialism in general;
(8) an insucient theorization of postcolonial theorys own conditions of emergence; (9) the adoption of a highly theoretical idiom that projects the reader into
a rareed atmosphere of vertiginous slippage, allowing little sense of precise time
or place except when the theoretical helicopter lands on a random historical
example or literary citation; and (10) the overprivileging of themes of hybridity,
diaspora, and cosmopolitanism, to the detriment of the power dynamics inherent
87
in colonial and neocolonial violence. Some theorists linked to Latin America prefer a decolonial and colonial dierence approach that stresses manifold colonial
and postcolonial contexts in an attempt to foreground an epistemic diversality
of world decolonial interventions.69 Needless to say, many of the criticisms of
postcolonial theory do not apply to all versions of postcolonial studies, and the
criticisms themselves arguably form an integral part of the larger eld. Indeed,
the postcolonial eld is the site of incessant self-questioning and ramifying autocritique, where every new book or essay seems to correct some sin of omission
or commission by earlier scholars. The point now, as formulated in the call for
papers for a 2010 conference at York University titled What Postcolonial Theory
Doesnt Say, is not to denounce postcolonialism for its inevitable oversights but
rather to dynamize the elds enormous cultural and institutional capital for progressive ends.
The postcolonial privileging of hybridity has particular implications for
indigenous communities. Indeed, the indigenous issue throws into question some
of the favored topoi of postcolonial discourse and cultural studies. First, indigenous thinkers often see their situation as colonial rather than postcolonial, or
as both at the same time. While a certain postcolonial theory celebrates cosmopolitanism, indigenous discourse often valorizes a rooted existence rather than a
cosmopolitan one. While postcolonial and cultural studies revels in the blurring
of borders, indigenous communities often seek to arm borders by demarcating land against encroaching squatters, miners, corporations, and nation-states.
While the poststructuralism that helped shaped postcolonialism emphasizes the
inventedness of nations and denaturalizes the natural, within an idiom that surrounds nature with protective scare quotes, indigenous thinkers have insisted
on love of a land regarded as sacred, another word hardly valued in the post- discourses. What Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls indigenous multinaturalism70
challenges not only the rhetorical antinaturalism of the posts but also what
might be called the primordial Orientalism that separated nature from culture,
animals from human beings.
Hybridity is also often associated with the peregrinations of diasporic elites,
with little space for the more hazardous itineraries of desperate refugees, including those exiled on their own land in trails of tears. For indigenous peoples,
hybridity is especially double-edged. On the one hand, indigenous nations were
borrowing from one another long before Columbus, as objects, ideas, and populations traveled around the Americas, a process only intensied by the Conquest.
The post-Columbian indigenous appropriation of European technique began as
early as 1503, when the French captain Paulmier de Gonneville brought the young
Carij Indian Essmoricq from Brazil to France to study munitions technology to
help his tribe in their struggles back home.71 On the other hand, hybridity has
88
just as often been used as a weapon against indigenous peoples of mixed heritage,
sometimes dismissed, in both Brazil and the United States, as not real Indians
deserving of rights.
The British Empire/Commonwealth focus of postcolonial theory, meanwhile,
has resulted in the overlooking of the long-term antecedents of hybridity discourse in the work of Latin America and Caribbean intellectuals. A 1971 essay
by Brazilian novelist/literary critic Silviano Santiago calling attention to the
in-between of Latin American culture, for example, clearly anticipated Homi
Bhabhas formulations concerning the interstitial, the in-between and the
third space of negotiation.72 While the wide circulation of race/postcolonial
work is partly due to the global reach of the English language and the power of
the Anglo-American academy, it would be misleading to chart a linear trajectory
whereby these movements originated in Anglo-America and then traveled elsewhere. Conquest, colonialism, slavery, U.S. imperialist policies, military interventions, expulsions, immigration, and the brain drain brought a translocated
and hybridized mix of peoples and ideas, helping to shape the various progressive projects. In discursive terms, these projects were impacted by anticolonialist discourse, by the poststructural theory associated with France but also with
the North African Jacques Derrida, by the black British cultural studies associated with the United Kingdom, by the subaltern studies associated not only with
India but also with postcolonial diasporas, by the hegemony theory associated
with Gramsci and Italy, by the dependency theory associated with Latin America, and by the center/periphery and world systems theory associated with many
dierent sites.
Walter Mignolo and others have usefully summarized the underlying philosophical/historical drift of postcolonial projects as the critical thinking together
of coloniality and modernity, seen as inseparable and mutually shaping concepts. Insisting, as we do, on the intellectual agency of the victims of colonialism, Mignolo borrows Valentin Mudimbes coinage border gnosis to refer to
knowledge from a subaltern perspective, . . . conceived from the exterior borders of the modern/colonial world system, and uses border gnoseology to
refer to discourse about colonialism conceived at the conictive intersection of
the knowledge produced from the perspective of modern colonialisms.73 These
forms of knowledge are often not recognized by academic institutions, whether
out of sheer ignorance or because they are associated with stigmatized peoples
assumed to be disappeared or as lacking in cultural agency.
Parallel to work performed under other rubrics, the modernity/coloniality
group, largely formed by Latin American and Latino scholars, highlights the
interconnectedness of modernity and coloniality, postmodernity and postcoloniality. Arturo Escobar highlights the following axioms that guide the modernity/
89
coloniality research project: (1) there is no modernity without coloniality; coloniality is constitutive of modernity; (2) the modern/colonial world and the colonial matrix of power originates in the 16th century and has two almost opposite
faces: on the one hand, the dispossession of native peoples and the enslavement
of Africans and, on the other, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment; (3) the
Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution are derivative movements that further transform this colonial matrix; (4) coloniality, as the dark side of modernity,
is simply another name for Europes progress toward world hegemony; (5) capitalism is essential to both progress and coloniality; and (6) coloniality/modernity
underwent a further transformation when the United States took over the leadership of global imperial processes.74
As a mutation in global capitalism, globalization both shuts down and opens
up political possibilities. The World Social Forum, the activist congress on alternatives to globalization, was at rst a Franco-Brazilian project, conceived by the
Parisian editors of Le Monde Diplomatique but rst carried out in Porto Alegre,
Brazil. Designed to counter Davos as the conference of the nancial elites, the
Social Forum became the discursive mediator for the massive antiglobalization movement of movements that generated huge protests in Seattle, Genoa,
Davos, New York, Cancun, Miami, and elsewhere. Although radical scholarship
is not a specic focus in the Forum documents, the Forum oers many parallels
to the scholarly work. The Charter of Principles (quoted by Cassen) declares that
the Forum is open to the plurality of genders, ethnicities, cultures, [and] generations [and] seeks a truly democratic and participatory practice, characterized
by egalitarian and pacic relations of solidarity between persons, races, sexes,
and peoples. Race, colonialism, and slavery are also concerns. In the Appeal for
Future Mobilizations ( January 2001), the authors denounce the role of neoliberalism in worsening racism, in continuity with the genocide caused by centuries
of slavery and colonialism, which have destroyed the foundations of the black
civilizations and societies of Africa. Indigeneity as well makes its mark, as the
document calls for solidarity with indigenous peoples in their historic combat
against genocide and ethnicide, in defense of their rights, their natural resources,
their culture, their autonomy, their land and their territory.75
With an alert eye to the possibilities of dialectical jiujitsu within a situation
of globalized domination, Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos, an
intellectual deeply familiar with the Portuguese, French, Brazilian, and AngloAmerican academic scenes, points to ve elds in which counterhegemonic
globalization creates viable opportunities: (1) participatory democracy, (2) alternative systems of production, (3) multicultural justice and citizenship, (4) biodiversity and communitarian knowledge versus corporatized intellectual property
rights, and (5) new working-class transnationalism. While provoking new forms
90
of transnational racism, globalization can also create new conditions for the
emergence of transnational resistance. Globalization can therefore be oppressive
or resistant, conservative or emancipatory. To our minds, all of these issues are
imbricated in race/multicultural/coloniality issues: participatory democracy is
an answer to master race democracy, biodiversity is linked to the cultural diversity and intellectual agency of indigenous peoples, a transnational working-class
solidarity depends on transcending racism and xenophobia, and so forth.76
A good deal of energy has been expended in the search for terminological
panaceas, as if nding the right label would in itself provide a solution. Concepts
such as multiculturalism and postcoloniality, in our view, cannot stand alone;
they must be articulated together with companion concepts such as Eurocentrism, white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, master race democracy,
border gnosis, and modernity/coloniality. Each term highlights a dierent
aspect of the issues: colonialism refers to the actual historical practices of domination; modernity/ coloniality refers to the mutually imbricated processes of
Western hegemony and non-Western otherization; white supremacy highlights
the color-line aspects of this domination; capitalism refers to the system rst
spread around the world by colonialism and later by neocolonialism and globalization; border gnosis and the Nahuatl word neplanta refer to the liminal
state in between worlds, in between realities, in between systems of knowledge;77
master race democracy emphasizes the racialized oppression that plagues sometimes even apparently democratic political and social institutions and practices;
and Eurocentrism highlights the unstated, taken-for-granted doxa of occidental
entitlement. Other termspolycentrism, para-Enlightenment, alter-globalizationpoint to alternative discourses and utopias.
No single term can simultaneously evoke such diverse elds as revisionist
history, critical race studies, whiteness studies, postcolonial discourse theory,
subaltern studies, border theory, transnational feminism, and the coloniality/modernity project. Most terms bring both advantages and disadvantages. In
the 1990s, some scholars constructed a kind of adjectival cordon sanitaire around
multiculturalism and identity politics through prophylactic qualiers such as
critical, radical, counterhegemonic, and polycentric as antidotes to potential
co-optation. (Prophylaxis also works in reverse when critics predene multiculturalism a priori as neoliberal.) Manuela Boatc and Srgio Costa propose
interculturality as an option, especially as dened and implemented by indigenous movements in Latin America, seen as entailing a deeper questioning and
transformation of hegemonic models of power.78
Contrarian words such as antiracist and anticolonialist, meanwhile, sum up
the drift of much of the work but remain too reactively locked into the paradigms being contested. Postcolonial studies designates an important eld of
91
research but remains too exclusively academic, with all the problems of a post-
that is not really yet post-. Critical race theory references an extremely innovative and consequential eld but one very much tied up with the legal discipline
in a single national context. Transnational studies is useful and suggestive but
politically tainted through its association with transnational corporations, and
it risks eliding national and infranational forms of oppression. A kind of battle
of the prexes also forms part of this discussionthe conventional sequencing
being from multi- and inter- and post- to trans-and of the suxes, with
the programmatic ideological thrust of -ism giving way to a more distanced
and abstract -ity. The -ism in multiculturalism, meanwhile, claims too much
by inserting itself in the same paradigm as other -isms referring to systematic
explanatory grids (Marxism), historical epochs (postmodernism), systems of
production (capitalism), and ideologies (socialism).
All these proliferating revisionist (inter)disciplines, whatever their precise
character, share a strong anticolonial and egalitarian thrust. They unpack hegemonic discourses of racism, colonialism, Orientalism, and Eurocentrism while
simultaneously engaging the mantra of race, nation, gender, class, and sexuality.
What matters, in the end, is not the specic label but rather the decolonizing
thrust of the work itself, not the exact rubric but the depth of the engagement
with questions of coloniality. In any case, no term is pure or unproblematic; each
gets bueted about by the winds of history, which is why analysts distinguish
between co-optive top-down and radical bottom-up versions of the multicultural, the postcolonial, or the transnational. All the terms, while problematic, cast
some light on a very complex subject. It is crucial to examine their relationality,
their syntagmatic deployment, and their social/historical positionality, deploying
them in a dierential, contingent, and relational manner. It is not that one term
is wrong and the other right but, rather, that each term only partially illuminates the issues. Rather than simply correct or incorrect, the terms can be seen as
productive or unproductive, as generating or not generating liberatory energies
and concepts in specic historical conjunctures. In the end, no single term can
possibly represent such variegated work, and it is misleading to use single terms
such as multiculturalism or identity politicsas critics such as Bourdieu/
Wacquant and iek doto designate a wide array of elds. We can use all the
terms, but under partial erasure, as part of a more mobile set of grids, a more exible set of disciplinary and cross-cultural lenses adequate to the complex politics
of contemporary location, while maintaining openings for agency and resistance.
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predictably, conservatives in many countries were not

enthusiastic about the seismic shift manifested in these decolonizing projects.
In the United States, the right accused multicultural identity politics of causing racial balkanization and ethnic separatism. In a faux populist attack stagemanaged by elite circles in the Republican Party, the right ridiculed these projects
as a new politically correct version of the communist menace. Right-wing polemicists mocked what they saw as oversensitive do-gooders stiing free speech in
the name of touchy-feely sympathy for minorities. In an analogy that aligned the
tumultuous 1960s with the French Revolution and the politically correct 1990s
with the Reign of Terror, journalist Richard Bernstein accused multicultural leftists of wanting to install a dictatorship of virtue.1 Recycling Cold War rhetoric,
conservative gures such as Allan Bloom, William Bennett, Dinesh DSouza, and
Lynne Cheney, in tandem with liberals such as historian Arthur M. Schlesinger,
Jr., denounced any identity-based critique of inequality as un-American. Thus,
George H.W. Bush in May 1991 publicly denounced the political extremists ...
setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race. In a sense,
the right was retrotting its old class warfare rhetoricthat is, the notion that
to call attention to class inequality was to wage class warfareto the issue of
race. To speak of racial inequality, by analogy, was to wage race warfare, just as to
speak of gender inequality was to wage gender warfare.
The virulence of these attacks manifested a fear not only of greater racial,
economic, and political equality but also of nonexceptionalist narrativizations
of history. Thus, Schlesinger ridiculed underdog, compensatory, and theresalways-a-black-man-at-the-bottom-of-it approaches to historiography, whose
sole function was to provide social and psychological therapy and raise the selfesteem of children from minority groups.2 But if minorities have indeed been
traumatized by their experience in dominant educational institutions, therapy
is clearly preferable to trauma. Why should only the dominant Euro-American
group have its narcissism massaged by ocial histories, while others suer the
body blows of stereotype and marginalization? In any case, the call to decolonize
historical pedagogy was not ultimately a question of self-esteem. Nor was it a
question of a bland Im OK, youre OK history or of telling both sides. Apart
from the fact that historical debates have innumerable sides, a polycentric anticolonial history by denition would benet the dissenting voices that have been
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excluded from ocial history. Nor is it a question of randomly adding voices but
rather of taking on board voices that challenge the dominant, top-down version
of history. Nor was it a matter of lowering standards but rather of raising them
by requiring knowledge of more cultures, more languages, more perspectives.
In a literary corollary, the partisans of multicultural politics were portrayed
by the right as wanting to eject all the great writersthe notorious dead white
malesfrom the literary canon. For William Phillips, politically correct teachers were denouncing the traditions and values of the West ... [and substituting]
African and Asian traditions and values.3 The race-conscious left was depicted
as eager to replace the great writers, in a literary/pedagogic coup dtat, with
mediocre authors whose only qualication was their gender or their color. Alice
Walker was replacing Shakespeare! But the goal was never to eliminate Shakespeare but rather to expand the canon, and even to explore the multiculturality
of Shakespeares capacious Globe, which embraces not only European culture in
all its exuberant diversity but also the ethnic relationality of Moor and Venetian in Othello, of Egyptian and Roman in Antony and Cleopatra, of European
and African/indigenous American in The Tempest, and of Jew and gentile in The
Merchant of Venice. Indeed, The Tempests confrontation between Prospero and
Caliban has generated a vast anticolonial posttext. It is this multiculturality that
makes it possible to reread The Tempest, as Aim Csaire, Roberto Fernndez
Retamar, and Jean Franco have done, as anticolonialist or to see The Merchant of
Venice as sympathetic to Shylock or to relocate Romeo and Juliet in the barrios of
New York (West Side Story) or in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Mar).
But the most frequently reiterated charge was that of separatism, as evidenced in the constant recourse to metaphors of balkanization, Lebanonization, and tribalism. For Charles Krauthammer, multicultural identity politics
poses a threat that no outside agent in this post-Soviet world can matchthe
setting of one ethnic group against another, the fracturing not just of American
society but of the American idea.4 The most extreme accusation was to speak
of ethnic cleansing as a logical end product of multiculturalism, as when P. J.
ORourke dened multiculturalism as that which is practiced today in the former Yugoslavia.5 Thus, the right gave the impression that the Serbs, the Bosnians, and the Croatians, fresh from reading Cornel West and bell hooks, were
rushing into fratricidal slaughter brandishing the banner of identity politics.
Arthur Schlesinger was the most vocal proponent of the disuniting perspective and, not by coincidence, a vociferous opponent of the rainbow curriculum
designed for New York schools. Formulations such as Schlesingers that portray
a common culture threatened by ethnic dierence come close to blaming the
victim by implying that cultural dierence itself causes social strife, when in fact
it has always been the inequitable distribution of power that generates divisive-
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ness and tension. The critics were generally unable to cite any actual multicultural writers or activists calling for separatism, for the simple reason that the
separatists did not exist; rather, they were imaginary creatures, ideological ogres
invented to frighten the uninformed. In fact, many of the multiculturalists were
shaped directly or indirectly by the struggle against segregation. Yet the separatist
charge has been repeated so often that it has become part of the received wisdom,
even, as we shall see, for some on the left.
The right also portrayed left identity politics, in an oxymoronic characterization, as at once puritanical and hedonistic. One of the rights public relations
coups was to associate the left with negative personal attributes such as self-righteousness, as a diversion from what was really an argument about social change
and political power. Thus, the label of political correctness was axed only to
those who were calling for more egalitarian relations between races, genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. In a new twist on Cold War imagery, the multicultural
left was portrayed as lugubrious, dour, and drab, in short, as neo-Stalinist. In a
historical inversion of letters, the CP (Communist Party) became PC (political
correctness). Amplifying the preexisting association of communism with austere
rigidity, the right portrayed all politicized critique as the neurotic euvium of an
uptight subculture of morbid guilt-tripping.6 At the same time, paradoxically, the
right depicted the cultural left as the heirs of the permissive 1960s. An incoherent portrait presented the same people as at once uptight puritans and as selfindulgent do-your-own-thingers. The contradiction arose from the melding of
the negative portrayals of two very dierent historical lefts: (1) the Stalinist Communist Party left of the 1930s through the 1950s and (2) the more ludic New
Left of the 1960s and 1970s.
In any case, the PC rubric generated its own ontology, ultimately taking on a
life of its own and spreading, due to the reach of U.S. media to other regions such
as Europe and Latin America. The various decolonizing projects unleashed erce
polemics not because they were separatist but because they called for a decisive
transformation in the ways history would be written, literature would be taught,
art would be curated, lms programmed, cultural resources distributed, and political representation shaped. They challenged the regnant doxa prevalent in education and the media up until the 1960s. While the left wanted to wrest control of
the political from elites, the right wanted to place the political back in elite hands.
What was left unsaid by the right was the assumed desirability of the status quo
ante. At least by implication, the right was calling for a return to the pre-1960s
default position of white male heteronormative hegemony, a time when there were
virtually no students of color and relatively few women on campuses, when history
texts were blandly noncommittal about slavery and segregation, and when Native
Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities, along with women,
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gays, lesbians, and transsexuals, had very little voice. What was for the right an
object of nostalgia was for minorities a searing memory of trauma.
The Politics of Scapegoating

If the right was hostile to identity politics, liberals and some on the left were
critical as well. Some feminists, such as Susan Moller Okin, called multiculturalism bad for women.7 Some liberals lamented the assault on the Western canon.
Some Marxists, meanwhile, saw identity politics as dividing the left through a
cultural detour that distracted from real struggles over class and power. Those
who would press critical race issues were caught between the dividing-America
arguments from the right, the dividing the left arguments from the left, and the
dividing the feminist movement from (usually white) liberal feminists. While
some leftists rejected multicultural identity politics as mere liberalism, rightists
conated it with Afrocentrism, ethnic separatism, Marxism, and Islamo-fascism.
We nd a recent illustration of the partial convergence of left and right on these
issues in two February 2011 denunciations of multiculturalism, one by the conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron, the other by radical leftist
Slavoj iek. The former asserted in a speech that multiculturalism had failed,
that tolerance had led to Islamic radicalism, and that what was needed was a
robust liberalism and a return to Western values and pride in British identity.
For Cameron (and other conservative leaders such as Sarkozy and Merkel), it
is multiculturalismand not discriminationthat creates separate communities; thus, they blame the proponents of a solution to a problem for the problem
itself. iek, meanwhile, in an interview on Al Jazeera (February 1, 2011) about
the democratic movement in Egypt, also denounced the multiculturalists who
supposedly believed that Egypt has a separate culture and does not need democracy. While Cameron sees liberalism as the answer to radicalism, iek has long
argued that multiculturalism is not the opposite of neoliberalism but rather its
ideal form. Both Cameron and iek were speaking up for Western Enlightenment values, although Cameron was channeling Adam Smith, while iek was
channeling Hegel and Marx.8 In the interview, iek mixed valid political critiquesin this case of U.S. and Israeli policies in the Middle Eastwith a rant
against an imaginary bogeyman, that is, multiculturalists rejecting freedom and
democracy in the name of culturalist separatism. (We have no idea where iek
nds multiculturalists who claim that Egypt does not need freedom because it
has a separate culture. There are of course people who say such things; we call
them colonialists, racists, Orientalists, and Samuel Huntington.)
At this point in history, some of the keywords have become exhausted. Multiculturalism, for example, has suered a fate reminiscent of that suered earlier
96
by socialism, whereby a call to fuse political democracy with economic equality

was dismissed by some on the left as too soft and co-optive and denounced by the
right as merely another form of totalitarian communism. In the next three chapters, we frequently refer to multiculturalism and identity politics not because
they form our ideal rubrics for the variegated critical work already referenced but
rather because those keywords came to encapsulate favored targets for right and for
some left critics, becoming synecdoches for a whole set of complexly aliated elds.
The deeper race/coloniality issues got lost in supercial polemics. Through much
of the 1990s, gures representing antipodal points in the political spectrum heaped
opprobrium on something they called multiculturalism. Lynne Cheney and Slavoj
iek, Samuel Huntington and Pierre Bourdieu, Dinesh DSouza and Tzvetan
Todorov, strangely, have all been hostile to multiculturalism. This chapter explores
what might lie behind this partial convergence between ideological adversaries.
What is surprising, then, is not the rights hostility to identity politics but
rather that of some on the left. After mapping the general direction of the left
arguments, we will address specic interventions by Walter Benn Michaels,
Pierre Bourdieu/Loc Wacquant, and Slavoj iek. Some left critics expressed
apprehension about what they saw as the supervalorization of culture over political economy. This critique was less about the multi- than about the culture,
seen as an inconsequential distraction from the economy as the determinative
instance shaping all other spheres. Yet while political economy is absolutely essential to any substantive left critique, it is also important to articulate culture and
economy together, to conceive of them as existing in and through each other. In
the post-Fordist era of globalization, culture has become a privileged site for the
articulation (and sometimes the disarticulation) of the reproduction of capitalist
social relations. For Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, culture gains political ecacy
when it enters into contradiction with political or economic logics of exploitation
and domination.9 The point is not to look for a utopia of pure resistance outside
of capitalism but rather to discern what elements emerge historically in dierence with and in relation to capitalism. Here many people have questioned forms
of Marxism that exalt class struggle while belittling struggles revolving around
other modalities of social inequality. Feminist theory, postcolonial theory, subaltern studies, queer theory, coloniality/modernity theory, critical whiteness studies, and indigeneity theory all oer conceptual instruments relevant to multiple,
historically sedimented forms of inequality. Rather than replace class struggle,
these projects complicate it, seeing multiaxial forms of oppression as engendering
similarly multiaxial forms of resistance and struggle, shaping new social actors,
new vocabularies, and new strategies.
Another leftist critique claims that multicultural identity politics itself is ethnocentric, custom designed only for a prosperous and liberal Global North that
97
imposes its concepts on a reluctant South. According to this view, Northern or

First World multicultural ideas end up providing a new, apparently progressive,
veneer for Western cultural domination. Yet we would argue that multicultural
left politics partly emerged from the Global South and from racialized communities in the Global North with links to the Global South, forging a critique relevant
to all the settler-colonial states in the Americas and to the Black and Red Atlantic.10 As we shall see in the case of Brazil, most of the Americas congure similar
racialized stratications forged by colonial history, including not only indigenous
genocide (true of the Americas), slavery (likewise), and discrimination but also
immigration (from Europe and beyond), along with cultural syncretisms of all
kinds. Historical dynamics generate dierentiated yet in some ways analogous
congurations in the various settler states, resulting in social patterns that are
not so much identical as eminently comparable and relationalizable. The demographics might vary, yet issues of indigenous sovereignty, multicultural pedagogy,
Armative Action, and reparations are pertinent to the entire hemisphere. The
Global South and the Global North, Center and Periphery, are co-implicated,
linked in multifarious but uneven ways. The 2001 Durban Conference on Racism
and Xenophobia brought representatives not only from the Black and Red Atlantic worldAfricans, indigenous peoples, African Americans, and black Braziliansbut also from the world at large (for example, Dalit from India) to accuse
the dominant powers (including some nation-states in the South) of complicity
with colonialist racism, making them the object of demands for compensatory
measures. These issues, in sum, are not relevant only to the prosperous North.
The notion of a unilateral Northern imposition on the South, furthermore,
assumes that the South exercises no intellectual agency, when in fact such projects partially come from there. North and South are intellectually commingled
in a transnational discursive space. Many of the source theoriesanticolonialism, dependency theory, the critique of Enlightenment humanismhave been
associated as much with the South as with the North. The objection about
Northern imposition often has less to do with the work itself than with the institutional location of the production and dissemination of some work that seems
to privilege certain national sites (the United States and the United Kingdom),
certain languages (especially English), certain Anglo-American institutions,
and a largely European and Euro-American corpus of writing and theory. But
the North/South divide, while heuristically and politically useful as pointing to
deeply entrenched power dierentials, is premised on overly stark lines of separation; the lines in fact are much more porous.
Todd Gitlin, in his 1995 book The Twilight of Common Dreams, blames the
decline of the American left on identity politics as expressed by groups overly
concerned with protecting and purifying what they imagine to be their identi-
98
ties. The left, in Gitlins view, abandoned what he sees as the real struggle in favor
of a narcissistic quest for a chimerical identity.11 Neglected in his account are the
diverse causes of left decline: the right-wing attack on the 60s legacy, the murderous repression of the Black Panthers, the conservative agitprop of well-funded
think tanks, a rigged two-party system, winner-take-all politics, laissez-faire economics, a Constitution favoring conservative rural states, the corporate corruption
of Congress, the wedge-issue tactics of the Republican Party, and the ideological
vacillations of an ever more corporate-dominated Democratic Party. An analysis
that scapegoats multicultural identity-politics for left decline oers a attened version of a complex historical narrative, forgetting the global and local factors that
have undermined the left generally as an overarching progressive project: globally,
the end of actually existing socialism, the embourgeoisement of Third World liberation movements, and the weakening of unions and the workers movement.
The scapegoating analysis forgets that (1) the left has historically often been
fragmented for reasons having little to do with identity politicsone need only
recall the lefts self-cannibalizing due to the Stalinist/Trotskyist/Marxist/Leninist/Anarchist/Socialist/Spartakist schisms that plagued the left during much of
the 20th century; (2) the Old Left versus New Left debate had more to do with
ideological vision, generational tensions, and political tactics than with identity
politics; (3) the Marxist left has declined in much of the world due to the collapse
of actually existing socialism, often in situations where identity politics played little role; (4) anxieties around race, class, gender, and sexuality were present in U.S.
left politics long before the advent of identity politics (evident, for example, in
black intellectual disenchantment with the CP in the 1930s); (5) participation in
race-inected left politics in no way precludes participation in other forms of left
politics; and (6) the major exceptions to left decline in the worldLatin America and now the Arab Springhave often embraced cultural identity and social
movements as an integral part of coalitionary politics. If it is true that the multicultural left has been more eective in defending the right to dierence than in
guaranteeing political-economic equality, that does not mean that the left has not
achieved political-economic equality because of the multicultural achievements.
Quite apart from identity politics, divisions based on race, class, and gender
have shaped American history from the very beginning. Propertied, slave-holding
white men have classically used race to hide class by conferring the cultural capital of whiteness on nonpropertied whites. The color line also subtly marked even
left organizations, from the Communist Party to labor unions, which privileged
whites over working-class people of color despite ideologies of equality. Blaming
identity politics for left division is thus a form of sideways scapegoating. Gitlins
derisive reference to groups overly concerned with protecting and purifying what
they imagine to be their identities is an especially low blow. It betokens a privi-
99
leged, pseudo-objective standpoint that deems itself in a position to judge which

identities are authentic and which imaginary, as if Gitlin knows the real identities of people of color better than people of color themselves do. Social identities
are neither a luxury nor imaginary; they are historically shaped and have consequences for who gets jobs, who owns homes, who gets racially proled, and
so forth. Rather than an investment in a phantasmatic aliation, identities have
to do with a dierential relation to power as lived in the world, with discrepant
experiences of the judicial system, the medical system, the economy, and everyday
social interchange. Social identities are not pre-xed essences; they emerge from a
uid set of diverse experiences, within overlapping circles of belonging. It is these
overlapping circles of identity and identication that make possible transcommunal coalitions based on historically shaped anities. Anxieties about identity are
asymmetrical. While the disempowered seek to arm a precariously established
right, the traditionally empowered feel relativized by having to compete with previously unheard voices. What is missed in the dividing-the-left argument is that
each division can also be an addition within a coalitionary space. Disaggregation and rearticulation can go hand in hand.
The debates over identity have featured a complex range of positions, ranging
from essentialism to social constructivism. If the rights attack on identity politics
was framed in nationalist terms, the lefts critique was framed either in political
terms or in philosophical poststructuralist or skeptical postmodernist terms. For
many scholars, the goal was therefore to avoid both essentialist and anti-essentialist traps, whence strategic essentialism (Spivak).12 That identities are socially constructed does not mean that they do not exist and have real-life consequences. In
this vein, the postpositivist realist approach advanced by such scholars as Linda
Martin Alco, Satya P. Mohanty, and Chandra Mohanty oers an alternative conceptualization to the postmodern skeptical view of identities as merely ctional
constructs.13 For advocates of this approach, identities are markers of history, social
location, and positionality, lenses through which to view the world. Rather than
ethno-characterological essences, identities are chronotopic positionings within
social space and historical time, the place from which one speaks and experiences
the world. The class-based argument against identity politics ignores the dierence that race makes and the ways that the refusal of cross-racial coalitions have
hurt the left itself. One axis of analysis (class) is applauded, while others (race,
gender, sexuality) are derided. Opposition to the special claims of racial minorities, as George Lipsitz has suggested, often masks the hidden identity politics of
the dominant groups possessive investment in white Europeanness.14 Although a
certain kind of salami-slicing identity politics can turn identity into a form of cultural capital in a competitive ght for status, the denunciation of identity politics
itself can also subtly normativize the dominant identity.
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Troubling Diversity
The various left critiques of multicultural identity politics share certain motifs
but also touch on distinct notes. A class-over-race hierarchy dominates Walter Benn Michaelss The Trouble with Diversity.15 His argument, in its simplest
form, is that we love race and identity because we dont love class.16 Most of the
book consists of formulaic permutations of the same basic structural grammar
of mutually exclusive paradigms, along the manner of We love to talk about A
(race, diversity) because we refuse to talk about B (class, economics, capitalism).
In a zero-sum approach, each and every invocation of race implies a denial of
class. Within a grammar familiar with only two conjunctionseither/orwe
are exhorted to choose between a vision of our society as divided into races or as
divided into economic classes.17 Sentence after sentence is premised on a rhetoric of stark dichotomyWe would much rather get rid of racism than get rid
of poverty18or of invidious comparison: We like the idea of cultural equality
better than we like the idea of economic equality.19
We cannot emphasize enough that we applaud Michaelss critique of the erasure of class, especially in the United States. Unfortunately, he merely replaces
one erasure (of class) with other erasures (of race, culture, identity). Although
Michaelss vaguely socialist politics dier sharply from those of a Dinesh
DSouza, he shares with DSouza the fantasy that racism was basically outlawed
and eliminated in the 1960s. Deploying a tacitly white liberal we, Michaels
writes that we like programs such as armative action because they tell us that
racism is the problem we need to solve and that solving it requires us to give up
our prejudices.20 The formulation is unfortunate, however, since (1) Armative
Action today is under constant attack, including by the Supreme Court, (2) even
its supporters are not defending it very vigorously (Obama seems to prefer a William Julius Wilsonstyle class-over-race approach), and (3) Armative Action
was about concrete legal/practical issues such as hiring minorities and correcting
past injustice, not about a mushy and unrealizable giving up prejudices.
Michaelss sunny portrait of an America in love with diversity, moreover,
ignores many ominous clouds. Although university brochures prominently
feature the word diversity and proudly display photographs of chromatically diverse students and faculty, that is hardly the same as achieving substantive social equality. There seems to be a race-informed dierence of perception
here. While Michaels describes campuses as in love with diversity, many black,
Latino, and Middle Eastern students call American campuses, including even
diversity-friendly campuses such as UC Berkeley, hostile environments. A 2004
survey at the University of Virginia, for example, found that 40 percent of the
black students had been the target of a direct racial slur, while 91 percent had
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either experienced or witnessed an act of racial discrimination or intolerance.21

Meanwhile, black students are vanishing from U.S. campuses as the race and
class divides worsen under the onslaught of the nancial crisis, trickle-up economics, high-priced education, and the assault on Armative Action.
As evidence of the American love of diversity, Michaels cites the absence of
pro-hate rallies.22 But this sets a terribly low bar. The KKK and the white militias do not call their demonstrations hate rallies, but that is what they are. Even
Hitler, after all, did not call the Nuremberg rallies hate rallies, but one suspects
that Jews and Bolsheviks, gays and gypsies got the drift. Building on a long tradition of paranoid, nativist political speech, venomous celebrities such as Ann
Coulter and Glenn Beck stage the mediatic equivalents of hate rallies, with TV
audiences larger than those of any Nuremberg spectacle. The galling experience
of watching TV shows such as Lou Dobbs Tonight and The OReilly Factor or of
listening to the hate radio of Michael Savage or Rush Limbaugh reveals at the
very least a deep ambivalence about diversity. And while the election of Obama
oered evidence of another America that does indeed love diversity, right-wing
voices that do not love diversity have become even more strident since his election. Rather than demonstrate that Americans have become postracial, the irrational hostility to Obama has shown just how many Americans still adhere to
the racial contract. The doubt cast on Obamas Americanness is allegorically
addressed, and received, as an insult to all Americans of color.
Race as an analytical category is crucial because racism structures social
advantage. Every economic crisis that aicts whitesfor example, the subprime
lending crisisimpacts racialized communities even more dramatically. When
white America sneezes, black America gets inuenza. The Great Depression, as
a bitter black joke has it, was a time when white Americans got to live the way
blacks had always been living. The wealth divide, meanwhile, is even larger than
the income divide. For every dollar owned by the average white family in the
U.S., the average family of color has less than one dime.23 For blacks, as Mel King
puts it, white men of means often coincide with mean white men.24 Thus race
and class must be seen as interarticulated, since they are so completely imbricated in the consciousness of working-class Americans, as David Roediger puts
it, that we do not get class if we do not get race. Indeed the refusal to engage
the complexities of race can result in the retreat from class just as surely as can
a reductive obsession with race as an ahistorical essentialist category.25 A certain left wants to move beyond race, but in fact a retreat from race, as Roediger
points out, will not solve the problem of the denial of class and will ultimately
get us closer to addressing neither.26 Although Michaels thinks we are overly
eager to centralize race, in fact race and class (and gender and sexuality) are at
the burning core of American politics. Underscoring the symbiotic interconnec-
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tion of race and class, Marx saw chattel slavery as the pedestal on which wage
slavery was based. Du Bois spoke of the wages of whiteness.27 Later, Martin
Luther King, Jr., asked, What does it prot a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesnt earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a
cup of coee?28 Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., noted that the black job ceiling has been
the oor of white opportunity.29 Black Marxism told us that race and class were
interarticulated, while black feminism reminded us that race, class, and gender all
intersect.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the black liberation movement has
been engaged in a complex debate about the strengths and weaknesses of Marxism in terms of explaining and remedying black oppression. Critical race theory,
for example, points to the political limitations of both liberalism and Marxism.
While liberalism reduces racism to attitudinal bigotry, Marxism reduces racism to an epiphenomenon of class. Although Marxism has provided a powerful
theory of the dialectic of social oppression, the historical forces that produced
Marxism as a theory, as Charles Mills points out, have now thrown up other
perspectives, other visions, illuminating aspects of the structured darknesses of
society that Marx failed to see.30 Although Michaels claims to shift our attention from individual prejudice to the social system, he sets up a false dichotomy
between individual and society when he asserts that even when we as individuals are racist, the society to which we are committed is not.31 Bypassing all the
critical race scholarship on institutional, systemic, and even epistemic racism, this
claim of societal innocence is ultimately rooted in a U.S.-American exceptionalist
discourse.
An emerging left consensus assumes that (1) race is not a biological reality
human beings share 99.9 percent identical DNA, and all humanity shares a common ancestor in Africa; (2) the issue is not race but racism and racialization; and
(3) race as a social construct and racism as a social practice shape the contemporary world by skewing the distribution of power and resources. Rather than move
from race to discrimination, it is in some ways more useful to move in the opposite direction, from the discrimination revealed by statistics (e.g., the disproportionate incarceration of black people) to the categories that explain the discrimination, whether having to do with race, color, national origin, religion, accent, or
some other visible or audible dierence. The very concept of race, moreover, has
been historically transgured. Nowadays, Du Boiss color line has been retraced
and blurred. Some prominent American blacks such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice can be deracialized to join the white side. Islamophobia and the
War on Terror, meanwhile, have racialized a religion (Islam) embracing people
of many colors, rendering its followers subject to suspicion and proling.32 Today
the color line involves not only what is visiblecolorbut also less visible social
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demarcations involving religion, clothing, body language, speech, etiquette, cultural capital, and Europeanness. Yet race and racism still serve to designate the
persistence of strong inequalities linked to race, despite the lack of scientic substance to the notion of race itself.
Michaels mocks the politics that consists of disapproving of bad things that
happened a long time ago. Here he forgets (1) that such radically reconstructive
historiography is aimed at countering a dominant historiography that ignores
those bad things or even paints them as good things and (2) that those bad
things still shape and help explain the present. Michaels echoes the conservative
caricature of identity politics as invested in preserving the dierences between
blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whoever.33 But the issue
is not one of preserving dierence for dierences sakea notion redolent of
salvage anthropology rescuing tribes on the verge of extinctionbut rather of
recognizing discrepancies in historical experience. Like French intellectuals such
as Alain Finkielkraut, Michaels belittles accounts of the victimization of racialized communities as a form of narrative envy in relation to Jews, an accusation
already mounted against Saids articulation of a Palestinian counternarrative in
the late 1980s. Citing Leslie Marmon Silkos mention of the sixty million Native
Americans eliminated by Europeans, Michaels responds, They arent just engaging in a kind of victimization one-upsmanship. They arent trying to replace the
Jews; theyre trying to join them.34 In this account of competition over ethical
and narratological capital, it is as if Native Americans, who have been lamenting
(and ghting) genocide since 1492, were trying to hitchhike on the prestige of the
Holocaust.
The ethnocentric limits of Michaelss dichotomization of class-versus-race
and culture-versus-economy become manifest in his analysis of Latin American
activism. Theres a big dierence, he writes, between dealing with indigenous
peoples who want to protect their culture and socialists who want to nationalize
their industry. ... When Evo Morales talks about nationalizing industry, he is
speaking as a socialist; when he talks about fullling the dreams of our ancestors,
he is speaking as an Indian.35 In his embrace of the socialist Morales as against the
Indian Morales, Michaels overlooks not only Moraless self-characterization as
both socialist and Indian (and specically Aymara) but also the mutual imbrication of culture and political economy in present-day Bolivia. By lauding Morales
only as a socialist, Michaels ignores the public perception of Morales as indio,
as well as the cultural politics that got him elected. The victory of Morales and
MAS (Movement for Socialism), conrmed again in the elections of December
2008, forms a historic landmark for a country shaped by the oligarchys racism
toward the Quechua and Aymara majority. The new constitution recognizes the
multinational character of the nation. For much of Bolivias history, as Morales
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himself has frequently pointed out, Indians were not allowed to share the sidewalks with the criollos. Moraless enemies, for their part, are dened not only as
capitalists but also as Bolivian whites. Thus, it was in great part by speaking
as Indians that the indigenous movement managed to coalesce into a powerful
force able to challenge transnational corporations and the Bolivian oligarchy.
Any analysis like Michaelss that is based on the stigmatization of an abstract
identity per se is likely to create a number of theoretical problems. First, the
stigmatization of identity is usually asymmetrical; it rejects certain identities but
not usually the identity of the analyst, which is assumed but silenced. Second,
the very abstraction of the term makes it easy to practice guilt by association
between the various identitarians. Michaels, for example, compares the Aymara
in Bolivia to Samuel Huntington, on the basis that both Huntington and the
Aymara want to preserve identities. Such a formulation completely overlooks the
question of power, rather like equating the politics of David Duke and Cornel
West since both want to preserve their (respectively, Aryan and Black) identities.
Michaels amalgamates the situations of a well-connected geopolitical strategist
(Huntington) speaking a dominant language, with an Aymara people victimized
by a ve-century siege. Renewing the linguistic spirit of the Conquest, Michaels
calls the disappearance of languages such as Aymara a victimless crime.36 As
anyone knows who has lived situations without having a language available for
communication, language is a form of power; to lose ones language is to be disempowered. It is passing strange to hear someone whose identity and livelihood
derive from mastery of a hegemonic language be so cavalier about language, but
that is perhaps why Michaels can be so cavalier; he knows his language is not
about to disappear.
There is increasing recognition on the left that the social movements in Latin
America, from Zapatismo to the indigenous movements in Bolivia, Peru, and
Ecuador, are now at the cutting edge of social change. In the wake of indigenous
activism and the UN declaration of indigenous rights, Ecuador and Bolivia
have begun to inscribe indigenous rights and even the right of Nature not to be
harmed into their constitutions, and Bolivia now has a Ministry of Decolonization. The era of neoliberalism and the weakened nation-state has brought more
and more direct confrontations pitting transnational corporations against indigenous groups defending their rights, in a new contact zone (Pratt) where land,
biodiversity, and intellectual copyright are all at stake.
While classical Marxism is anticapitalist yet ultimately productivist, the
Andean movements are often more radically anticapitalist in their assertion that
mother earth should not be commodied. This culturally instilled refusal of
commodication was one force-idea that helped energize the Bolivian movement
and enabled it to prevent the corporated privatization of water and even the rain.
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Activists speak of communal forms of politics and of what Arturo Escobar calls
the political activation of relational ontologies. In Escobars account, the activists call for (1) substantive rather than merely formal democracy, (2) biocentric
sustainable development, and (3) interculturality in polyethnic societies. The goal
is to move beyond capitalism, liberalism, statism, monoculturalism, productivism, Puritanism, and the ideology of growth.37
For many indigenous people and societies, culture implies a norm of egalitarian economic arrangements, ecological balance, and consensus governance. Thus,
indigenous culture and economic globalization confront each other in the form
of very real battles fought in the name of biodiversity, communal intellectual
property rights, and the noncommodication of nature.38 Culture and economics, in sum, are deeply enmeshed in the Andes, with some ancestral traditions
of communal property and collective decision-making combined with a rejection
of instrumental/productivist attitudes toward nature. Indigenous resistance thus
passes through culture. The Bolivian left won victories against the transnational
corporations by mobilizing the cultural memory of the ayllus, or the chronotopic space-time of indigenous sovereignty. They won by not choosing between
socialism and culture and instead constructing a socialist culture and a culturally
inected socialism.
The Bourdieu/Wacquant Polemic

Two of the most widely disseminated left attacks on multicultural identity politics took the form of two essays coauthored by Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant, the rst on neoliberalism and what they call American multiculturalism,
and the second on globalization, race, and Brazil. The essays suit our purposes
here because, rst, they exhibit the political passions, even in the early 21st century, invested in the culture wars and, second, as a French commentary on these
issues, they reveal the transnational/translational dimension of the debates. In
this chapter, we focus on the rst essay, reserving the second for a later chapter.
Hailed in some quarters as a landmark refutation, Bourdieu/Wacquants
rst essay commingles a completely legitimate critique of the mystifying doxa of
neoliberal globalization with a misred attack on multicultural identity politics.
To our minds, their very brief commentary forms a remarkable condensation of
how not to articulate issues of race, nation, multiculture, and transnational intellectual exchange. Their static and monolithic theoretical model will hopefully
serve here as a productive foil for the more dynamic, polycentric, and multidirectional approach that we are proposing. In fact, the arguments in both essays
seemed to conict even with Bourdieus method in general, as if his usually subtle
argumentation becomes shrill when misinformation and a submerged national
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agenda inect the analysis. While hardly major interventions in the culture war
debates, the two essays achieved high visibility and thus serve as samples of an
unproductive approach undergirded by nation-state-based and class-over-race
assumptions.
Although some readers might wonder why we bother to refute an ill-informed
diatribe by intellectuals with whom we would normally be politically aligned, a
response strikes us as important for a number of reasons. First, the strong and
contradictory responses to the rst essay are a sure sign that something major
was at stake. Broadcast by a prestigious name from a powerful platform (Le
Monde Diplomatique), widely translated and disseminated, the essay was taken
as authoritative by many readers around the world. At the same time, a critique
of the critique can help us clarify other larger theoretical, methodological, and
political problems inherent in their approach, bringing to the surface larger anxieties that go far beyond this specic polemic.
Our goal is not to criticize Bourdieus work in general, which has had the
salutary eect of repoliticizing the social sciences and even the humanities. We
applaud Bourdieus critique of neoliberalism and his highlighting of the role of
symbolic domination in hiding and reinforcing social inequality. Nor do we have
any sympathy for the positivistic American sociology rejected by Bourdieu. As
Robert Blauner puts it in Racial Oppression in America, virtually all the new
insights about racism and the experience of the oppressed have been provided
by writers whose lives and minds were uncluttered by [American] sociological
theory.39 Furthermore, we are vastly more sympathetic to leftists such as Bourdieu/Wacquant than we are to pro-American French intellectuals such as JeanClaude Milner, Alain Finkielkraut, and Pascal Bruckner. Not only do we favorably cite and deploy Bourdieus concepts and those of many Bourdieu-inuenced
scholars such as Franois Cusset and Pascale Casanova, but we also support many
aspects of his life and work: his early solidarity with the Algerian independence
struggle; his critique of colonialism in his collaborations with Abdelmalek Sayad;
his dissection, in Reproduction and The Inheritors (with Jean-Claude Passeron),
of the structures of privilege in the French educational system; his analysis of the
social stratications of taste in Distinction; and his activism on behalf of marginalized social groups in France (the homeless, the unemployed, striking workers,
illegal immigrants, gays and lesbians), as well as his 1995 intervention in support
of striking students and workers. Bourdieus critique of neoliberal globalization
and of the incursion of market values into the intellectual eld, as well as his new
internationalist campaign against the catastrophic eects of neoliberal economic
policies, have been indispensible contributions to progressive politics.
Furthermore, we concur with the authors critiques of the U.S. social, political,
judicial, and prison systems and of U.S. policy abroad. Bourdieus concepts of
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habitus, eld, and cultural capital, moreover, can illuminate processes of cultural domination. Bourdieus conceptual categories, to put it paradoxically, can
be productive even in deconstructing some of Bourdieus (and Wacquants) own
assessments. Indeed, a number of scholars have extended Bourdieus concepts
by racing them through such ideas as racial capital, racial habitus, and racial
doxa. Wacquant, for his part, has done valuable work on prisons in the United
States and France and has popularized Bourdieus work. In sum, our argument is
not with their work as a whole but rather with their narrow views of a complex
intellectual eld.
Although Bourdieu/Wacquant devoted only a few short paragraphs in the
rst essay to multicultural identity politics, those paragraphs managed to distill
a remarkably dense concentration of historical elisions and methodological blind
spots. To avoid caricature, we present most of what Bourdieu/Wacquant say
about these issues in this essay:
In all the advanced countries, international c.e.o.s and administrators, media
intellectuals and high-ying journalists are beginning to speak a strange new
language: ... globalization, exibility, governance, employability, underclass
and exclusion, new economy and zero tolerance, communitarianism, multiculturalism, and their cousins postmodernity, ethnicity, minority, identity....
American multiculturalism is not a concept, nor a theory, nor a social or political movement, while pretending to be all those things at the same time. It is a
screen-discourse whose intellectual status results from a gigantic eort of national
and international allodoxia [the act of confusing one thing with another] which
deludes those who are part of it as it deludes those who are not part of it. It is an
American discourse, even though it presents itself as universal, in that it expresses
the specic contradictions of academics who, cut o from all access to the public
sphere and submitted to a strong compartmentalization in their professional
milieu, have no other place to invest their political libido than in campus quarrels
disguised as conceptual epics.40
Here Bourdieu/Wacquant extrapolate a few valid insights into a broad-brush

caricature. The insights have to do, rst, with the disastrous impact of capitalist globalization and the dissemination of neoliberal doxa around the world,
second with the fact that American exceptionalist discourses do falsely present
themselves as universal, and third with the fact that many U.S. academics are
indeed cut o from the public spherealthough usually not of their own choosingand are subjected to careerist pressures and a strong compartmentalization. Thus, there is a disconnect between campus radicalism and the steady drift
toward the right of the American polity as a whole. In this sense, the American
homo academicus shares some of the traits of homo academicus universalis generally, along with some local peculiarities.41
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The arguments made by Walter Benn Michaels and those made by Bourdieu/Wacquant are only partially congruent. While they all share class-over-race
assumptions, Bourdieu/Wacquant are more concerned with American imperialism and global capitalism. Yet like the Michaels book, the Bourdieu/Wacquant
essay is riddled with false dichotomies: academics must either do real politics
or do multiculturalism, the oppression of blacks in the United States is either
about access or about recognition, and so forth. Although the essay portrays
multicultural identity politics as completely detached from the public sphere, the
American rights hostile reaction bespoke precisely the opposite fear: that such
projects were having too much impact on the public sphere. Where Bourdieu/
Wacquant discern a wall between academe and public sphere, moreover, we see
a permeable membrane. Ironically, the U.S. right, especially in the Bush-Cheney
era, did not see academic multiculturalism as apolitical but rather as politicizing
the university. Right-wing foundations such as the John M. Olin Foundation,
the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute,
and the Scaife Foundation all spent millions of dollars to combat such projects.
Lynne Cheney, wife of the former vice president, during her tenure as head of
the National Endowment for the Humanities systematically blocked all projects
having to do with revisionist history, racism, multiculturalism, imperialism, and
genocide. Was it the hallucinatory force of multiculturalism, with its power to
delude those who are part of it and those who are not part of it that made Lynne
Cheney misrecognize as anti-American and subversive what the two sociologists
see as neoliberal and pro-American?
Bourdieu/Wacquant conate a partial insightthe relative isolation of campus quarrelswith a false conclusion that these quarrels are inconsequential.
Bourdieu-inuenced intellectual historian Franois Cusset oers a more complex
account in his French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed
the Intellectual Life of the United States:
Despite [its] isolation ... the university is a focus of national concern in the
United States, and is often the sounding box, or the dramatic relay point, for some
of the most pressing questions of American society. To use Gramscis distinction,
one could even say that, although it is separated from civil society, the university
nonetheless maintains a close link with American political society, because of its
role as an ideological crossroads and in the formation of elites. Hence the farreaching echoes, resounding well beyond the bucolic campuses, of the polemics set
o there.42
Critical projects in the United States, furthermore, have often focused attention
on the socially crucial areas of pedagogy and the teaching of history. The sulfurous mid-1990s debate about National History Standards, for example, pitted
the advocates of a critical, multivocal history from below against the advocates
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of the American exceptionalist account.43 Since the educational arena, as Bourdieus own work demonstrates, is crucial in both reproducing and demystifying
dominant ideologies, the teaching of history has immense social signicance in
forming citizens and shaping debates. The more radical versions of the multicultural project have questioned American myths of innocence. Radical pedagogy,
for example, disputes the dominant racist and imperialist narratives. It seems
spurious to lament American provinciality and at the same time to oppose the
challenges from within to American exceptionalist discourse.
Like Bourdieu/Wacquant, we too would prefer that critical intellectuals enjoy
more access to the so-called public sphere, but where does the public sphere
begin and end? Do the contours of all public spheres necessarily resemble one
another? Since the Enlightenment, and more specically since the Dreyfus aair,
French intellectuals have enjoyed a special status. When asked to arrest Sartre in
the 1960s, de Gaulle famously objected that one does not arrest Voltaire. Figures such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, and later Bourdieu have been regarded in
France (and elsewhere) as designated spokespersons for the universal, even when
they themselves call for more modest specic intellectuals. Bourdieu was widely
seen as having occupied the space left empty by Foucaults death. But whose
interests are served by a hierarchical matre penser model with a single magisterial gure at its apex, even when the scholar in question is politically progressive? Bourdieu/Wacquant measure the ecacity of intellectuals according to a
French standard, despite the fact that the French model of the universal intellectual brings with it the problems highlighted by Foucault concerning speaking for
others. The Bourdieu/Wacquant formulations also risk reproducing a gendered
splitting between hard masculine public politics and soft feminine private culture, when in fact both spheres are intimately linked and reciprocally inect each
other in a complex interchange.
In an unwittingly paradoxical account, Bourdieu/Wacquant describe multiculturalists as powerless domestically yet all-powerful globally. Restricted to
campus quarrels and thus impotent in national terms, they become omnipotent
in international terms due to their shadowy alliance with corporate globalizers.
Isolated from the public sphere, multiculturalists yet form part of the overpowering hegemony that cunningly dominates the globe. Like U.S. right-wingers,
Bourdieu/Wacquant see multiculturalism as allied with powerful forces. But the
U.S. right attributes this power to a cunning communism, while Bourdieu/Wacquant attribute it to a cunning imperialism. For U.S. right-wingers such as Paul
Weyrich, multiculturalism has a death grip on the body politic, on the Church,
the academic community, and the entertainment industry, threatening to control
every aspect of our lives.44 (Weyrich made this claim, ironically, in a historical
conjuncture in which the right dominated all three branches of government,
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much of the media, and even parts of the Democratic Party).45 While Bourdieu/
Wacquant mock derisory campus quarrels, Weyrich sees multiculturalism as a
powerful form of Cultural Marxism dominated by an alien ideology ... bitterly
hostile to Western culture.46 Both accounts, we would suggest, are partial and
even paranoid, although the paranoia springs from opposite political sources.
The paranoid anticommunism of the U.S. right has a long historical pedigree,
going back to the Red Scare persecution of anarcho-syndicalist immigrants in
the 1920s, the repression of the black-leftist alliance in the 1930s, and the FBI targeting of communist outside agitators supposedly stirring up Civil Rights protests in the 1950s and 1960s. In a belated version of the old rights misrecognition
of the Civil Rights Movement as communist, Frank Ellis sees todays political
correctness as the direct descendant of communist brainwashing. And if the
war of attrition against multiculturalism fails, he warns ominously, the insanity
of multiculturalism is something white Americans will have to live with.47 What
is missed in the Bourdieu/Wacquant account is the fact that both France and the
United States have seen similarly orchestrated assaults on the radical heritage of
1968, whether led by politicians such as George W. Bush and Sarkozy or by intellectuals such as David Horowitz and Alain Finkielkraut. Elliss arguments, in this
sense, recall the French nouveaux philosophes equations of Third Worldism with
totalitarianism.
For Bourdieu/Wacquant, multiculturalism hides social crisis by depoliticizing a struggle that is not really ethnic or racial but has to do with access to the
instruments of production and reproduction. This formulation creates a false
dichotomy, since race partially determines who has access to the instruments of
production and reproduction. If the struggle is on one level about access, it is not
only about access. Rather than have a xed preordained status, moreover, class is
an arena of negotiation mediated and reshaped through race, gender, and sexuality, which is precisely what necessitates discourses of relationality and intersectionality. In the Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis, one cannot think race and chew
class gum at the same time, while gender and sexuality are not there to chew at
all. In the United States, for historical reasons, the struggle for justicethe ght
for entitlements, the broadening of the left into the various antiwar, green, proimmigrant, and antiglobalization movementsall invariably pass through both
race and class. Nor can we separate culture and economy in an age when the two
are becoming more and more confounded. Jack Langs famous slogan Economics
and culturethe same struggle is not relevant only to France.
Only a dichotomous form of thinking, in any case, would ask us to choose
between analyzing structures and the mechanisms of domination and celebrating the culture of the dominated and their point of view. It is precisely the structures of domination, after all, that make it necessary to celebrate the culture of the
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dominated, since one of the mechanisms of domination is to devalue the culture

of the dominated while normativizing the culture of the dominant. Only those
whose point of view is customarily empowered could be so dismissive of the
culture of the dominated and so scornful about struggles to crack open spaces
for the dominated point of view. This myopically solipsistic, objective view fails
to see its own vantage point as interested and aliated, as merely one perspective among others. For those working on critical race and coloniality, moreover, a
point of view is not a merely subjective issue of psychology; it is a social/epistemological vantage point within social space and historical time.
Interestingly, Bourdieu himself has oered keen and very personal insights
into the social dimension of point of view. In Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu
explains how he was shaped intellectually by the social hierarchies of his rural
milieu of origin, in ways that allowed him to see the classed nature of prestige in
the Parisian center.48 He evokes, in other words, the epistemological advantage
facilitated by a subordinated social positionality, in this case one inected by class
and region. Gendered and racialized people, in this sense, potentially exercise a
similar epistemological advantage due to a multifocal perspective linked to an
intimate acquaintance with the quotidian workings of oppressive systems and the
concrete need to code-switch to survive. Gloria Anzalda, the Chicana exponent
of border theory, speaks of la facultad, or the coping capacities developed by
people confronting various forms of oppression in the neoimperial borderlands.49
Structures of oppression and point of view are thus completely imbricated. For
Fanon. the psychoanalysis of the colonized point of view in Black Skin, White
Masks was intimately linked to the socio-analysis of the structures of colonial
domination in The Wretched of the Earth. Bourdieu/Wacquant thus fail to engage
with a major intervention performed by critical race and postcolonial studies: the
historicized articulations of subaltern subjectivity.
Bourdieu/Wacquant eloquently denounce the doxa of neoliberalism, rejecting
a model of modernization and globalization that would undo the social welfare
state in the name of the market. They make a metonymic (allodoxic?) slide, however, from the legitimate critique of neoliberalism into an uninformed critique of
multicultural identity politics. They do not separate out specic co-optable forms
from more progressive forms; rather, they condemn the entire set of projects en
bloc. The authors manage this conation of globalization and multiculturalism
not only by ignoring the kaleidoscopic variety of the actual work but also through
a series of abstractly rhetorical links between the ecacy of the market and the
recognition of identities. The new planetary doxa, for the two authors, include
terms such as globalization, racial minorities, and multiculturalism, which
impose on all societies specically American concerns and viewpoints, naturalizing one particular historical experience as a model for humanity in general. An
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update of Borgess Chinese Encyclopedia, this lexicon of the new vulgate forces
into the same discursive sack very contradictory terms, with very distinct genealogies and histories of deployment, presenting them as forming part of a coherent and unied reactionary discourse. Globalization, markets, and exibility
clearly emerge from the ideological world of the Washington Consensus; multiculturalism, identity, and minority just as clearly do not emerge from that
world.
An American Discourse?
While Bourdieu/Wacquant see multicultural identity politics as quintessentially
American, the U.S. right sees the very same project as anti-American and sometimes, ironically, as too French. In this sense, the Bourdieu/Wacquant essay
exhibits the pitfalls of nation-state framing. Since the authors see American
multiculturalism as a politically compromised tool of global capitalism from the
outset, they do not use the word co-optability or engage even the possibility of
a more complex narrative that would see a generally progressive project subsequently co-opted. Yet even co-optive multiculturalism was co-opting something,
in this case what began as the political/cultural mobilization of racialized communities within the United States in tandem with decolonizing movements in
the Third World. Only later, in the 1990s, was the multicultural theme (but not
the project) appropriated through the merely epidermic diversity of corporate
advertising. Transnational corporations have sometimes multiethnicized their
image to sell products through a skin-deep display of chromatic exoticism, while
simultaneously abusing the marginalized laborers (largely women of color) who
helped generate their prot margins. But corporations have never invoked multiculturalism as a sociopolitical project, preferring blander terms such as diversity
and cultural sensitivity, terms more easily instrumentalizable for doing business
in a global market. Bourdieu/Wacquant do not distinguish between bottom-up
movements and discourses and the top-down instrumentalization of those discourses. And if the dangers of nationalism are very real, nationalism can also be
encoded in the rejection of multiculturalism as well.
To dene multiculturalism as always-already complicitous with corporate
neoliberalism places all the burden of left purity on just one project within
a broad spectrum of progressive movements. Blaming that project for the collapse of left unity is simplistic. In the United States, the multicultural left projects entered into a world already shaped by the fait accompli of the violent FBI
crushing of the radical Black Power, Young Lords, and American Indian movements, in tandem with the harassment of the white radical left. Moreover, the
charge of a general depoliticization could easily be extended to academic life in
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the many countries that have witnessed massive retreats from historical materialism, Third Worldist revolution, and radical politics. This worldwide retreat from
radicalismand here indigenous, Latin American, Middle-Eastern, and alterglobalization activism form luminous exceptions to the rulehas variously been
named postmodernism, the eclipse of utopias, and the end of metanarratives.
From a neoliberal point of view, it was a return to capitalist normalcy, a state of
homeostatic complacency revealed to be factitious with the bursting of the various nancial bubbles in 2008. The capitalist euphoria that followed the fall of the
Berlin Wall gave way to the anxieties about cracks in another wall: Wall Street.
Even if the hegemonic United States has been the leading reactionary Western
power ever since the dissolution of the European empires, and even if the dominant political debates in the United States are in many ways pitched far to the
right of cognate debates in Europe and in Latin America, one cannot attribute a
general depoliticization to a single national site or to a single project.
Bourdieu/Wacquant, subtle analysts of their own national elds, commit
an act of symbolic violence by denying any conceptual or theoretical validity to
what they mislabel American multiculturalism. For them, multiculturalism is a
particular American discourse that presents itself as universal. The right-wing
polemicists in the United States, paradoxically, usually score multiculturalism for
a cultural relativist refusal to invoke universal values. And in what sense do multicultural writings claim universality? Here the two sociologists miss the radical
situatedness of such work. Surely Bourdieu/Wacquant are not suggesting that
revisionist American historians believe that their site-specic critique of exceptionalist U.S.-American historiography can be borrowed wholesale to apply to
Poland and Thailand or that critical race theorists deconstructive reading of the
U.S. Constitution is meant to apply literally to the legal documents of France,
Senegal, and China?50 Since radical versions of the multicultural project critiqued the false universalism of Enlightenment modernity, it is not clear why the
authors would not see that critique as allied with their own.
We can only applaud Bourdieus denunciation, in Acts of Resistance, of the
false universalism of the West [and] . . . the imperialism of the universal.51
Indeed, many multicultural, feminist, and postcolonial scholars have questioned
the false universalism of both the American and the French Revolutions, whose
liberatory discourse did not prevent them from enslaving blacks or disempowering women. The critique of false universalizations does not go far enough,
however, for the question is not one of critiquing only one national form of false
universalism but rather of interrogating the very premises by which the West
in general has constructed and been constructed by the universal. Who gets to
speak on behalf of the universal? Who are its caretakers and regulators? Who
gets relegated to the merely particular? What are the articulations between
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the particular and the universal, the local and the global? It was colonialism as
a global enterprise, after all, that projected onto a world scale the very notion of
the universal. To detach U.S.-style false universalisms from this broader colonial
genealogy is myopic, ethnocentric, and covertly nationalist.
It is questionable, furthermore, whether multiculturalism can be reduced to
an American discourse. Self-declared liberal multiculturalist Canadian scholar
Will Kymlicka argues that the specic models of multiculturalism and minority rights being advanced by IOs [international organizations] ... are not drawn
primarily from the American experience. . . . Similarly, international debates
about the rights of indigenous peoples are not dominated by American models
or scholars.52 At a historical moment when critical scholars have troubled homogeneous conceptions of national belonging, Bourdieu/Wacquant never clarify the
meaning of the term American. Within their essay, it carries a strong odor of
negativity. While the United States richly deserves its unsavory reputation as a
criminal violator of human rights and international law, in Bourdieu/Wacquants
prose, American becomes part of a xed, essentialist mode of dismissal. Resistant scholarship is tainted, as it were, by virtue of its provenance. Even an imperialistic nation, after all, can serve as a scapegoat or a decoy. The scapegoating
function does not depend on the innocence of the scapegoat but rather on the
phantasmatic uses to which the scapegoat is put.
The meaning of American, then, slides from nation-state location to inferences about intellectual substance. Some of the critical work produced in North
Americamuch generated by scholars who are not Americans by birth or
ancestrymight better be called adversary or counterhegemonic scholarship
that questions the reigning nationalist doxa embedded in the myth of America
itself. This scholarship at times questions the very legal/moral foundations of the
United States as a settler-colonial state rooted in genocide and slavery. When a
revisionist historian such as Francis Jennings dismantles American founding ctions such as the right of discovery and manifest destiny, his work is deeply
demysticatory of American exceptionalism. When Native American critics
such as Oren Lyons, John Mohawk, Jack Forbes, Annette Jaimes Guerrero, Ward
Churchill, and Andrea Smith deconstruct the shared antiecological and productivist substratum of both capitalist and Marxist philosophies, or when critical
race theorists preform between-the-lines critical readings of the U.S. Constitution to expose the class/racial/gender ghosts lurking in the interstices of the law,
their discourse is not reducible to a nation-state qualier.
Bourdieu/Wacquant share with many left critics a basic lack of familiarity with the decolonizing corpus. The bibliography of their later imperial cunning essay references only two neoconservative critics of multiculturalism (Allan
Bloom and Dinesh DSouza). One looks in vain for any reference to the many
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left intellectuals who address race and class, economy and culture.53 In the French
context, sociologist Michel Wieviorka speaks of the rigged aspect of a certain
leftist anti-Americanism: The U.S. is criticized for its racism, for example, but
also for its attempts to combat racism. Rather than a complex society characterized by competing modes of thinking, the United States is imaged as a monolith that must be kept at a safe distance, lest France run the danger of losing
its identity, its soul, its cultural personality. Anti-Americanism becomes an ideology, Wieviorka argues, when it is the premise and not the conclusion of an
argument.54
The Bourdieu/Wacquant argument seems to be founded on an unarticulated
syllogism: The United States is imperialist; American discourse is imperialist;
multiculturalism is an American discourse; ergo, multiculturalism is imperialist.
But a strictly national framing provides only a very blunt instrument for reecting
on transnational intellectual ows. The multicultural project emerged, within a
number of nation-states, due to concrete historical conditions, notably the formation and dissolution of colonial empire and the overlays of multiply diasporized
cultures existing in relations of subordination and domination within nationstates, all combined with the copresence of academics knowledgeable about those
cultures operating in institutional spaces where it became possible to articulate
those issues. For complex historical reasons, including the Civil Rights Movement, minority activism, changes in immigration laws, the South-North brain
drain and other migratory cross-currents, and the Thatcherization of the United
Kingdom, the U.S. academy has played host to a mlange of diasporic postcolonial intellectuals, becoming a magnet for what George Ydice calls centripetal and
centrifugal academic desires, resulting in the deterritorialization and denationalization of academic debates.55 Postcolonial theory, for example, partially gained
strength in the U.S. academy because a number of diasporic intellectuals moved
to the United States, but it would not have succeeded had not ethnic studies, area
studies, and Third World studies already created a hospitable space for such theory. At the same time, U.S. geopolitical interventions and neoliberal globalization
provoked the movement of political refugees and economic immigrants toward
the United Statesa process summed up in the postcolonial maxim We are here,
because you were there. An in some ways racist, imperialist, and often xenophobic
nation, paradoxically, became a refuge for antiracist and anti-imperialist thought,
much as France in the 1930sto evoke a partial parallelwas simultaneously the
seat of a racist empire and a shelter for anticolonial thought.
In describing multicultural identity politics as symptomatic of three vices of
American national thinkingnotably groupism, populism, and moralism
Bourdieu/Wacquant resort to a Volkish vocabulary alien to both Marxism and
to French republicanism. A discourse of national traits is distinctly unhelpful
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in the realm of transnational intellectual exchange. Redolent of 19th-century

pseudosciences such as phrenology and mesmerism, talk of national vices seems
incongruous in the writing of leftist social scientists. In line with postnationalist theories of imagined communities (Anderson) and invented traditions
(Hobsbawm), we would question analyses premised on cultural-essentialist
systems of explanation.56 Although nation-states have characteristic interests
and policies, and peoples might have a dominant cultural style, there is no single
national spirit or ethos regulating the national thought of any nation, much less
the variegated multinations of the Black Atlantic. Virtually any nation, furthermore, will have its groupists, its populists, and its moralists. The word vices
itself, ironically, exemplies the very moralism being attributed to others.
The label American monoculturalizes a complex set of projects by seeing
them through a homogenizing grid that stabilizes what the more radical work
had tried to destabilize. Who, then, are the real identitarians: the very varied
participants in a transnational project, or those who reduce that movement, in a
kind of repli identitaire, to a kernel of alien nationality? Identitarian thinking, after
all, does not operate only in relation to ones own group; it also operates in relation to the projected identities of other groups. Moreover, Bourdieu/Wacquant
overlook the French and Francophone dimensions of this supposedly American discourse. When a text written by a non-French scholar bears the traces
of French or Francophone discourses, that text, in its criture at least, becomes
hybrid, transnational, in-between. Far from depoliticizing French theory, it could
be argued that U.S.-based race/coloniality scholars pushed French theory into a
more politically engaged direction by bringing Derridean ideals onto what Franois Cusset calls the battleground of identitarian discourses, thus becoming
champions of subversion.57
The dismissal of multiculturalism as not a theory, nally, is a red herring.
Rather than a grand Theory with a capital T, it is one of many umbrella terms
sheltering a constellation of critical discourses. Yet on another level, multicultural
discourse at its most radical did inherit, and transform, a specic set of theoretical
frameworks, to wit, the diverse theories, methods, and perspectives forming part
of the decolonization of knowledge, including Marxism, feminism, dependency
theory, poststructuralism, standpoint theory, the coloniality/modernity project,
and so forth. To claim that multiculturalism is not a social movement, similarly, is
a genre mistake, since it is not an organized political movement per se but rather
a discursive formation potentially allied to a number of social movements as part
of a loose coalition for justice and equality. That coalition, moreover, has had realworld eects in changing the demographic makeup of institutions, in diversifying
faculty and students in higher education, and in de-Eurocentrizing the canon.
Like any complex critical formation, such projects do not deploy a single dis-
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course but rather constitute a heteroglossic arena of competing and sometimes

contradictory currents, which cannot be reduced simply to any one national banner. The United States is just one terminal in a transnational network of ideas,
not a point of origin or nal destination.
iek and the Universal Imaginary

Another vigorous voice raised against multicultural identity politics has been
that of theorist Slavoj iek. Here again, we would distinguish between the
op-ed iek of political pronouncements, with whom we are usually in agreement, and the Eurocentric iek analyzing race and coloniality, with whom we
are not. iek is a tremendously agile and engaging writer and in many ways a
progressive theorist. We applaud not only his provocative lm criticism but also
his critiques of global capitalism, of right-wing populism, and of nationalistic
ideologies. His critiques of liberalism, published in Le Monde Diplomatique, are
incisive and on point. His ideas are compelling in part, as his exegete Jodi Dean
puts it, because they open up and enliven what has become xed and stale.58 The
problem occurs when iek ponticates on issues about which he is ill-informed.
In Multiculturalism, or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,
iek calls multiculturalism the ideal ideological form of global capitalism.
Transferring the Marxist critique of the merely formal democracy of interestgroup liberalism as a mask for bourgeois domination, iek usefully questions
the liberal view of the American state as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of ethnic, religious, or life-style communities.59 But two slippages operate in ieks writing. One moves from the United States as a multicultural
society to multiculturalism as a project. Another moves from multiculturality
to global capitalism, a conation that elides those numerous multicultural voices
that decry the role of global capitalism as rooted in colonialism and imperialism.
Contemporary transnational corporations inherit the unequal structures and
tendentious ideologies bequeathed by centuries of colonial/imperial domination.
While some liberal forms of multiculturalism might be compatible with certain
forms of global capitalism, it is not clear why multiculturalism would be its ideal
ideological form, given that the neoliberal ideology of market fundamentalism
which hardly references race or multiculturalism at allwas serving quite well,
at least until the world economic meltdown, as the ideal form of global capitalist
ideology.
We of course applaud ieks critique of global capitalism. Matt Taibbis
description of the Wall Street investment company Goldman Sachs as a great
vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its
blood funnel into anything that smells like money could easily be extended to
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global capitalism generally.60 To say that the real struggle is against global capitalism has an immediate appeal. Most of what is wrong with the contemporary
world can be traced to global capitalisms privatization of virtually everything
land, natural resources, public utilities, health care, and even war. There is scarcely
any American social problemmilitarism, gun control, health carethat does
not have corporate greed as its trademark. If we could defeat global capitalism,
one might argue, it would seem that we would not even have to worry about trivialities such as race. If the United States were truly socialist, would not race be
irrelevant? Perhaps so, but the case of Cuba suggests that even socialist societies
still struggle with racism. A perspective more attentive to race, gender, and coloniality, moreover, would oer a fuller account of the genealogy of global capitalism itself as rooted in racialized conquest, slavery, and the oppression of women.
The vampire squid, in this sense, has been largely white and male and spawned
in the Global North, while the face of humanity has been largely brown and
female and located in the Global South. And while capitalism still reigns, what
antidote do we oer against existing racism, discrimination, and Islamophobia?
Brandishing universality and Saint Paul will simply not do.
At times, iek equates multiculturalism with tolerance as an apolitical
category that leaves power relations untouched. But the concept of tolerance,
which goes back at least as far as the Jewish ve-ahavata le-rekha kamokha (Love
Your Friend/Neighbor as yourself ) or to Jesuss cast not the rst stone or to
Ahel al-Kitab (People of the Book) in the Islamic world, is in no way central to
many multicultural projects. Indeed, the more radical wings of those projects
have rejected the paternalism inherent in tolerance and, more generally, have
criticized psychologistic and moralistic approaches to racism. Tolerance is premised on a prior normativity, an assumption of major and minor elements in a
society. Even the tolerance within the Abrahamic religions of the book marginalizes those who adhere to other nonmonotheistic religions or to nonscriptural
religions or to those who prefer no religion at all. Tolerance also encodes class
superiority by forgetting that the powerless can also practice tolerance without
learning it from their betters.
ieks critique of multiculturalism mingles the class-over-race rhetoric of
Walter Benn Michaels with the multiculturalism-equals-globalization arguments
of Bourdieu/Wacquant. His portrayal of multiculturalism as ideal ideological
form implies that economic neoliberalism has no problem accommodating race,
gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism and that only a socioeconomic analysis
poses a meaningful challenge to global capitalism. It is indeed true that transnational capitalism and its ideological forms inevitably pressure and work over all
contemporary political projects. Global capitalism has been highly creative in its
capacity to absorb and contain opposition movements and discourses. However,
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the struggle against neoliberal globalization, like that against colonialism and
neocolonialism earlier, inevitably also involves struggles against the racialized and
gendered international division of labor, if only because global capitalism especially exploits women of color.
Left critics such as iek fail to distinguish between co-optive forms of multiculturalism and more counterhegemonic formations such as the coloniality/
modernity project, black radicalism, indigenous activism, transnational feminism, and so forth. Such critics deploy a caricatural version of multiculturalism
as a metonym for the entire range of race-related anticolonial adversary projects,
which are then subsumed under the category of the hegemonic forces evoked by
phrases such as global capital that give a Marxist veneer to a supercial critique.
In his frequent denunciations of multiculturalism, iek gathers his examples
randomly from a show seen on television, a joke heard in a bar, a comment at a
party, ignoring the intellectual labor that went into the projects that he caricatures. Symptomatically, iek rarely refers to work performed under the postcolonial banner, where many of the theoretical coordinates are much closer to his
own. For iek, multiculturalist becomes an adjective to be randomly attached
to words such as late capitalism, tolerance, and postmodernism, in a discursive conjuncture where the adjective discredits the noun or, conversely, the noun
the adjective. The very levity with which iek treats such issues signals the lack
of a deep engagement.
iek deploys colonialism not as a fundamental category of analysis but only as
a rhetorical stick to beat multiculturalism with, as in his claim that multiculturalism
treats local cultures in the way the colonizer treated colonized people, as natives
whose customs should be studied and respected.61 But it is precisely this colonial
paternalism that has been the object of critique in much of the decolonizing corpus,
including in its multicultural variant. ieks critique thus involves a series of low
blows. In a case of poaching masquerading as critique, iek echoes multicultural
and critical race arguments, as if they were his own, only to discredit such projects.
Indeed, his critique seems persuasive only to the extent that such projects have prepared the ground for its acceptance. In other words, the very eld that iek rejects
has shaped the discursive environment that makes his argument seem compelling.
For iek, multiculturalism operates from an invisible vantage point presumed to be universal from which it can appreciate or depreciate other cultures:
The multiculturalist respect for the Others specicity is the very form of asserting ones own superiority.62 Here again iek draws virtually every term and
argument from the decolonizing corpus itself. It is as if someone were to borrow Marxist concepts to accuse Marx himself of commodity fetishism, without
acknowledging Marx as the originator of the concept. The critique of the arrogant
yet unmarked Western vantage point has long been a part of the larger race/colo-
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nial eld. The analysis of normative whiteness as unmarked, for example, can be
found in the work of Toni Morrison, David Roediger, Vron Ware, Ruth Frankenberg, Caren Kaplan, George Lipsitz, and other scholars. Mary Louise Pratt speaks
in Imperial Eyes of the monarch-of-all-I-survey topos within colonialist travel literature,63 and we have analyzed in Unthinking Eurocentrism the ways that network
news sutures spectatorial identication with imperial militarism.64 Indeed, such
notions as writing back, the imperial gaze, and returning the gaze are by now
taken-for-granted concepts within multicultural and postcolonial critique.65 Nor
is such work a cute endorsement of folkloric customs, as iek suggests; rather, it
deconstructs the binarism that produces folklore as an allochronic residue of the
past rather than as a form of cultural productivity in the present.
In a strategy of simultaneous externalization and incorporation, iek attributes to the multicultural project the very terms and procedures that radical versions of that project have rejected. ieks spatialized social schema positions
multiculturalism as instantiating a panoptical vantage point from the observing
tower of privilege. The entire project is assumed to come from the heights of
power, when in fact multicultural identity politics emerged from very dierent
contexts in dierent locations, usually in collaboration with minoritized communities. This coalitionary project won for the socially marginalized an institutional
looking space from which to view the hegemonic social order. Thus, ieks text
performs a double legerdemain: it does not acknowledge that the multicultural
left has advanced many of the same ideas that he himself is advancing, while it
attributes to multiculturalists ideas that they do not claim.
In a rather clumsy class analysis, iek assumes throughout that multiculturalism, or what he, like the right, calls the politically correct, represents a narrow
elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common
people.66 It is hard to know on what statistical information or sociological analyses he has based this judgment, but he has clearly missed the crisscrossing bottom-up and top-down currents operative in multicultural activism as the product of a coalition of diverse communities of color, and progressive whites. In what
sense were intellectual multicultural heroines such as Audre Lorde and Gloria
Anzalda upper middle class? Are the working-class black activists in Brazil
calling for multicultural pedagogy or indigenist anticorporate activists calling
for a multicultural Bolivia all upper middle class? Only a class-reductionist view,
furthermore, would deny that people on the top can work together with people
at the bottom to undermine social/racial hierarchies. Those at the social bottom, furthermore, produce theoretical and practical knowledge that feeds into
pedagogical projects.
The fact that multicultural identity politics tended to be strong on U.S. campuses did not mean that the movement was only academic or, for that matter,
121
only American. That Native Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans,

and Latinos now have even a limited voice in the academy was the result of struggles that took place in the streets, neighborhoods, and campuses. Although iek
paints multiculturalists as elitist, in fact it was the radical movements of the
1960s that made the university less elitist by facilitating the entry of marginalized
groups. ieks antielitism here risks aligning itself with the right-wing populism that focuses its hostility not on the corporate-military-political elite but only
on the tenured radicals of the campus left. The performative act of academics
trashing other academics for being academicsas in Woody Allens joke that
intellectuals, like maosi, only kill their ownwould suggest a need for a greater
measure of critical self-reexivity. The actual connections between progressives in
the universities and resistant communities require a more complex articulation.
The parallel struggles to decolonize knowledge production and to transform the
demographics of the university cannot be narrated as beginning with conversations only at the high tables of elite universities. iek papers over the struggle
to reconstitute the university, thus denying intellectual agency to people of color
who have formed a quintessential part of a larger coalition.
This same class-over-race prism becomes manifest in ieks casual dismissal
elsewhere of black demands for reparations. Gleaning his information not from
reparations advocates but rather from the mediain this case from a press report
on an August 17, 2002, Rally for Slave Reparationsiek sarcastically asks if
the working class should get compensation for the surplus value appropriated by
capitalists over the course of history. Here iek misses the nuances that (1)
the white working class was not violently kidnapped from another continent and
(2) working-class labor, unlike slave labor, is in principle voluntary and paid! For
Marx, a metaphoric wage slavery was built on the pedestal of literal chattel slavery. iek then moves to a reductio ad absurdum comparison meant to discredit
the whole reparations project, wondering if we should not demand from God
himself a payment for botching up the job of creation.67 ieks tone and argument are reminiscent of the conservatives who lament the culture of complaint
in the United States or the cult of repentance in France.
Behind ieks derisive attitude lies a failure of the historical imagination,
an inability even to imagine why oppressed communities might feel the urgency
and justice of reparations. While the true task is indeed not to get compensation from those responsible, but to deprive them of the position which makes
them responsible,68 it strikes us that massive transfers of wealth from exploiters
to their victims might actually help restructure power relations and thus deprive
those responsible ... of the position which makes them responsible. Here the
bestthe goal of overturning global capitalismhas become the enemy of
the good. At one point, iek claims that he is not opposed to multicultural-
122
ism as such but only to the idea that it constitutes the fundamental struggle of
today.69 But this is a straw-man argument, since most multiculturalists make no
such claim. We would argue, more cautiously, that anticolonial and radical race
critiques form a legitimate and even indispensible part of the larger struggle for
equality and justice in a globalized world.
iek recycles the diusionist clich that European ideas alone inspired the
revolt against colonialism. The Congress Party in India, he reminds us, was
founded by Indians educated at Eton, Cambridge, and Oxford; their collective
endeavor to end English colonialism was therefore in fact strictly a product of
English colonialism.70 Here we nd a demonstration of William David Harts
point that in ieks writing, the West is dynamic, historical, revolutionary and
universal while the East is not.71 Behind such denials of the intellectual agency
of non-Western people lies all the dead weight of a certain Enlightenment:
Hobbess view of savages living in a nasty and brutal state of nature, Humes
and Kants dismissal of the possibility of black intelligence, Hegels view of the
primitive world as a dcor for the unfolding of the Weltgeist. In this sense, iek
oers the leftist version of the conservative historiography of a gure like Hugh
Trevor-Roper, who in 1965 (!) reduced non-European history to the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque irrelevant corners of the world.
ieks view of decolonization bears a familiar resemblence to Trevor-Ropers
claim that it is European techniques, European examples, European ideas which
have shaken the non-European world out of its pastout of barbarism in Africa,
out of a far older, slower, more majestic civilization in Asia; and the history of the
world, for the last ve centuries, in so far as it has signicance, has been European
history. I do not think that we need to make any apology if our study of history
is European-centric.72
While it is true that many anticolonial intellectuals were indeed partially educated in the West and conversant with Western political idioms, they were not
mimic men (Bhabha) aping metropolitan trends.73 Rather than simply learn
about democracy, Third World revolutionaries in the metropole came to discern
the hypocrisy of Europes democratic claims. Like Caliban, they learned Prosperos language in order to curse. It is absurd to suggest that the colonized learned
their anticolonialism in Europe, if only because anticolonialism was such a weak
and dominated current in Europe. The Colonial Exposition of 1931, for example,
was seen by some thirty million people; the surrealists were virtually alone in
condemning it. Critics such as iek speak as if anticolonialists always came into
radical consciousness in Europe, when in fact they were often anticolonialist prior
to their arrival. The anticolonialists needed the dominant European languages
and discourses, as Chinua Achebe puts it, to transact our business, including
the business of overthrowing colonialism itself.74 In Europe, the Third Worlders
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came to see the racially dened limits of European humanism. Conversely, the
behavior of French abroad sometimes discredited metropolitan ideals. France, as
Ho Chi Minh put it, hosts admirable ideas but, when the French travel, they do
not bring those ideas with them.75 When the French state oered scholarships
in order to assimilate colonial intellectuals, their invitation backred, as African
scholars formed anticolonial organizations and journals such as Lgitime Dfense.
Fanons disillusionment, in The Wretched of the Earth, with the false humanism of the European left and his call for a truly universal humanism must be
seen in this same context. Anticolonialist thinkers did not simply absorb European ideas; they changed those ideas. Thus, Fanon adopts, and criticizes, a whole
series of intellectual trends: Sartrean phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis,
and Western Marxism. Moreover, a Jarryesque element of without Poland there
would be no Poles tautology characterizes this familiar argument. It amounts to
saying that without British colonialism there would have been no anticolonialism, a claim not so dierent from neocon David Horowitzs claim that without
slavery there would have been no abolitionism. One must admire the retrospective Panglossian optimism that nds a silver lining in every oppressive cloud:
colonialism generates anticolonialism, slavery generates abolitionism, and so
forthall is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
We are not suggesting that anticolonialists learned nothing from the West
but only that the movement of ideas was ambivalent and multidirectional. As we
argued earlier, European thinkers themselves partially learned of freedom and
egalitarianism from the indigenous Americans or from the writers, such as Montaigne, Diderot, Tom Paine, and Engels and Marx, inuenced by native political
thought. The indigenous peoples of the Americas, furthermore, resisted European
invasion from the very beginning, without the benet of a European education.
Indigenous leaders in the Spanish Americas did not have to study in Salamanca to
oppose Spanish conquest, just as natives in North America did not have to study
at Oxford or the Sorbonne to oppose the French or the British. The 16th-century
Tupinamba leader Cunhambebe, head of the Confederation of the Tamoios in
what is now Brazil, similarly, did not learn how to ght the Portuguese in Lisbon.
Enslaved Africans did not have to read Hegel on the Master-Slave Dialectic before
striking their masters or planning ight. The best school for the indigene was the
Conquest itself, just as the best school for Ho Chi Minh, Lumumba, and Mongo
Beti was the rsthand experience of colonial oppression. ieks diusionist narrative has liberatory ideas always-already originating in the West, when in fact the
sources of egalitarian social philosophies are not exclusively Western, while the
West itself has been impacted by non-Western forms of social practice and theory.
iek has been explicit about his turn toward what he himself calls radical Eurocentrism. His work reelaborates many well-worn Eurocentric leitmotifs: the Ger-
124
man romantic and Heideggerian idea of the Greek breakthrough, the dismissal of
the valorization of indigenous culture as a form of romanticism, and a preference for
a paradoxically atheist form of Christianity. Invoking Saint Pauls claim that within
Christianity there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks, iek condemns identity politics as the site of disharmonious dierences. Yet Saint Pauls injunction did
not prevent the subordination within Christendom of women to men, of Jews to
Christians, and of blacks to whites. Most Christian societies advanced anti-Semitic
ideas, whether in the crude Catholic form of the Christ killer charge or in the more
sublimated form of Old/New Testament Protestant supersessionism. In ieks
prose, Saint Paul is canonized alongside secular saints such as Hegel, Marx, and
Lacan. (In fact most of ieks saints are either explicitly Christian, like Hegel, or
covertly so, as with Lacans doctrine of psychic fall into the Symbolic.) In The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (2000), iek places
Marxism, as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, on the same side as Christianity against the neo-pagan multicultural multitude.76 In reintroducing pagan as
a put-down, iek resurrects the very Christian-versus-pagan dichotomy that was
mobilized by Christian Europe to dispossess indigenous and African peoples.
We need not linger on ieks leftist plea for Eurocentrism (in Critical
Inquiry, 1998), except to point out a fundamental misapprehension that becomes
obvious already in the rst paragraph: When one says Eurocentrism, every
self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph
Goebbels had to cultureto reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, it is possible to imagine a leftist
appropriation of the European political legacy.77 Apart from the whimsical equation of anti-Eurocentrists with a genocidal Nazi propagandist, the passage displays a twofold confusion. First, the term Eurocentric does not refer to Europe
as a geographical location, identity, or culture but rather to a hegemonic epistemology that universalizes the West as paradigm. The critique is not directed at
the people and cultures originating in Europe but rather at the economic/political/discursive power of Euro-hegemony. Within this perspective, Europe is a
geographical trope and turning toward, hence our coinage Eurotropism. In this
sense, nothing could be more logical than what iek calls a leftist appropriation
of the European political legacy. It is not even a question of imagining such an
appropriation, since that appropriation has been unending, which is why critical
race, multicultural, and postcolonial scholars such as ourselves constantly invoke
European and Euro-American thinkers and critics. That iek thinks it is even
a question of whether we can take advantage of the European political legacy
reveals a fundamental misconstrual of what is at stake.
Although iek nds anti-Eurocentrism to be a taken-for-granted concept
among postmodern leftist intellectuals, publications by writers of color unfold
125
a dierent story of a frustrating encounter between critical race scholars and

their diverse progressive colleagues who react as if all of Western civilization and
Marxism with it were being cast overboard. Anti-Eurocentric critique sometimes
triggers a kind of rushing-to-defend-the-ramparts syndrome, manifested in such
questions as By attacking Eurocentrism, arent you still being Eurocentric?a
question as fatuous as asking By attacking fascism, arent you being fascistic?
This syndrome is also manifested in the frequent charges of romanticization,
idealization, and utopianism as all-purpose put-downs to challenge any claim
that democratic or egalitarian ideas might also have emerged from non-European sources. Any positive mention of indigenous societies, for example, instantaneously elicits the romanticization charge, usually wielded by those who are
utterly clueless about indigenous thinking and its impact on European thought.
Perhaps it is you, one is tempted to respond, who romanticizes Europe, modernity, progress, and the Enlightenment.
The Ghosting of the Particular

Many of the critics of identity politics get hung up on one horn of the Enlightenment antinomy of the universal and the particular, by choosing to opt only for
the universal rather than seeing the mutual imbrication of the two categories. In
our view, a philosopher such as Diderot defended a rational universality but also
saw that many peopleshe mentions Tahitians, Hottentots, and Indianswere
oppressed as groups. For iek, true politics is predicated on universality, in its
eminently political dimension, as opposed to identifying the specic problems of
each group and subgroup, not only homosexuals but African American lesbians,
African American lesbian mothers, African American single unemployed lesbian
mothers, and so on.78 But what makes certain struggles particular and others universal? Referring to political movements in the former Yugoslavia, iek applauds
their appeal to specic demands that at the same time invoked a notion of universality. Yet other activist specicities, which happen to be those of people of color,
get immediately beaten down with the police truncheon of the universal. An isomorphism operates between the hierarchy of real-world social domination and the
hierarchy of the universal/particular asserted in ieks writing. Unemployed black
lesbian single mothers, one of the most abused segments of any population, also
happen to be the most abused in ieks prose. Their travails simply do not register
within ieks view of political/emotional economythey are the butt of his joke.
In this sense, iek incarnates what Adrienne Rich called white solipsism,
that is, the tunnel vision which simply does not see nonwhite experience or existence as precious or signicant.79 His blindness resembles that of the Republican
U.S. senators who applauded future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alitos claim
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that his Italian-immigrant background had a positive impact on his role as an

appellate judge but who quickly condemned as racist Justice Sonia Sotomayors
parallel claim that being Latina would make her a better judge. One expects the
mockery of socially induced human pain from the Social Darwinist right but not
from a leftist such as iek. Indeed, the situation of unemployed black lesbian
single mothers can be seen as condensing a series of socioeconomic disadvantages: those of African Americans, those of women, those of the unemployed,
of lesbians, and of single mothers lacking the nancial security provided by an
employed (male) partner. Subjects dwelling on multiple margins, as victims of
multiple prejudicesof sexism, racism, and homophobiaone would think,
might possess the epistemological advantage of being aware of the oppressive
aspects of many borders. Multiple subalternizations in terms of class (as being
unemployed), race (as blacks), sexuality (as lesbians), and marital status (as
single), one might think, would grant this social category more, rather than less,
claim on the universal, once the universal is conceived not as an abstract neo-Platonic ideal but rather as a mottled profusion of intersecting particularities. And
it is not merely an issue of superimposed oppressions; it is also a matter of the
social creativity of resistant knowledges and code-switching survival strategies.
iek revisits the Enlightenment debates by echoing Hegelfor whom
Africa lacked the dimension of universalityby accusing multicultural identity
politics of exactly the same thing. He advances a more sophisticated version of the
accusation advanced by the liberal Schlesinger in Disuniting America. Although
Schlesinger and iek have almost nothing in common, they do share (1) a failure
to acknowledge the decolonizing corpus; (2) a false certainty that multiculturalism, as implied by ieks comic-surrealist enumeration of proliferating social
identity dierences, is divisive and separatist; and (3) a Eurocentric epistemology that allots universality to a blessed few. For iek, the idea that unemployed
black lesbian single mothers might make intellectual claims or political demands
with a universal dimension is simply ridiculous on its face. Union activists, meanwhile, are something else entirely. But why assume that such women are not also
activists in unions or critics of global capitalism? Thus, iek reproduces not
only the classic Marxist class-over-race paradigm but also the class-over-gender/
sexuality paradigm, along with the hierarchies of white over black, heterosexual
males over lesbian females, and the West over the non-West.
iek echoes the right-wing charge that identity politics calls for separate
identities, but he adds a leftist touch. The postmodern identity politics of particular (ethnic, sexual, and so forth) lifestyles, he writes, ts perfectly the depoliticized notion of society, one in which every particular group is accounted for
and has its specic status (of victimhood) acknowledged through armative
action or other measures.80 As arbiter of political legitimacy, iek depoliticizes
127
movements based on gender and ethnicity by calling them mere lifestyles and
then blames the movements themselves for depoliticization. iek dismisses
feminism, multiculturalism, and Armative Action as mere diversions from real
politics into the dead end of identity, yet all these projects could be seen as an
integral part of a progressive left coalitionary politics. Perhaps lurking behind
this dismissal are the vestiges of a base/superstructure model, combined with
reminiscences of a gendered tropology that favors real, hard politics over soft cultural matters, where a post-Marxist cultural politics does not enter the picture.
Nor does iek see that gender and sexuality also have an economic dimension
in terms of glass ceilings, unequal pay, and tax code discrimination against gay
couples. Extrapolating the same dismissive logic to working-class activism, one
might just as easily condemn workers for practicing the politics of the particular
by complaining about their loss of pensions and health benets.
iek productively denes the political struggle proper as the struggle for
ones voice to be heard and recognized as a legitimate partner. When those who
are excluded protest against the ruling elite, he points out, the true stakes [are]
not only their explicit demands but their very right to be heard and recognized
as an equal participant in the debate.81 ieks formulations echo myriad similar
formulations from advocates of the various projects that he so breezily dismisses.
His insight that universal claims can be inferentially embedded within concrete
local demands, furthermore, can easily be extended to all those groups concerned
with social and cultural justice and equity. Alert to the overtones of the universal
in some protests, iek becomes deaf to the universal in the cries of unemployed
black lesbian single mothers, relegated to an amusing particularity. Some identities remain locked up in the solitary cells of their specicity, while others open
up toward the bright skies of the universal. Indirectly relaying the venerable
Hegelian binarism of historical and nonhistorical peoples, of European universal and non-European local, ieks universalizing formulation is paradoxically
nonuniversal, in that it refuses to extend its circle of reference.
iek frankly privileges class over all other axes of social domination: I disagree with the postmodern mantra: gender, ethnic struggle, whatever, and then
class. Class is not just one of the series. (The adolescent shrug of whatever here
downgrades gender and ethnic struggle.) In a move reminiscent of Althussers
the economy in the last instance, iek accords the economy a prototranscendental status.82 And while political economy is absolutely essential, that does not
mean that we can simply return to exclusively class-based analyses. An understanding of capitalism, moreover, must pass through colonialism, empire, slavery, and race. In an intersectional perspective, all of the axes of stratication work
in concert and mutually inect one another. It is not clear why Angela Daviss
work on class, race, gender, and sexuality, within an overall Marxist and femi-
128
nist grid, should be any less universal than ieks own work. One could easily
argue precisely the opposite, that her multiply intersectional prisms engender a
more inclusive universal, one rich in conictual particularities, a universal in the
Shakespearean concrete universal sense, rather than an abstract Racinian universal, cleansed of the vulgar materialities of existence.83
ieks 2009 book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, meanwhile, explores the
aftermath of two 21st-century calamities: 9/11 and the 2008 nancial meltdown.
We agree with ieks argument, a partial echo of Thomas Frank, that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode.84 For iek, populism screams, I
dont know whats going on, but Im mad as hell and Ive had enough! But even
here iek neglects the key role of racism as an integral part of class war and
populist outrage. A clear expression of the right-wing deployment of race to
obscure and displace class is found in the right-wing mantra that equates any
redistribution of wealth with reparations for blacks. The strategy is to confuse
whites, the major victims of trickle-up economics, by nurturing their hostility to
blacks, Latinos, and people of color generally. Slogans such as health reform is
reparations on steroids are designed to catalyze white hostility toward universal health careor more accurately toward its pathetically inadequate simulacrumby suggesting that universal health care is actually a favor to blacks. In
other words, racial resentment is used to trump class interest in aordable health
care. In the context of Europe, iek rightly calls attention to the material force
of ideology. But his analysis elides the fact that the scapegoating of minorities, an
expression of what Appadurai calls the fear of small numbers, has been the key
to many rightist victories in Europe, in that at least some of the vote was motivated by white petits blancs ressentiment against aliens arriving from the Global
South.85 (To his credit, iek does condemn the European social-democratic
lefts endorsement of a reasonable racism toward immigrants.)
The new iek of First as Tragedy does link a critique of global capitalism to
a critique of postcolonial dependence. His Eurocentric perspective, however,
blocks a materialist conceptualization of colonial history in relation to contemporary globalization. iek delineates four major points of antagonism in the present: (1) the threat of an ecological catastrophe, (2) the inappropriate transfer of the
notion of private property so as to apply to intellectual property, (3) the ethical
implications of biogenetics, and (4) the creation of new forms of apartheid. What
is missed, however, is that race, colonialism, multiculturality, and indigeneity intersect with all these points of antagonism, because (1) the peoples of the Global
South are the major victims of the kinds of environmental catastrophes generated by Union Carbide in India or Chevron in Peru, (2) indigenous people are the
primary victims of intellectual copyright when transnational corporations patent
indigenous knowledge and turn communal biodiversity into a commodity, (3) it is
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indigenous people who have gone the furthest in rejecting privatization in favor of
communal ownership of land and water and so forth, (4) indigenous peoples are
in the forefront of the struggle against transnational corporations, and (5) people
of color, whether Latinos in the United States, Algerians in France, or Moroccans
in Spain, are the primary objects of the new forms of apartheid.
iek belatedly discovers the political virtues of indigenous movements in the
Global South. The new iek acknowledges that the politics of the Evo Morales
government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive
struggle.86 He hails radical populist Hugo Chvez for following a policy not of
including the excluded but rather of taking the excluded slum dwellers as his
base and then reorganizing political space and political forms of organization so
that the latter will t the excluded, thus moving from bourgeois democracy to
the dictatorship of the proletariat.87 While we do not endorse ieks phraseology as describing either Chvezs policies or the slum dwellers of Caracas, we
do appreciate his invocation of the commons, a term increasingly used on the
left to evoke shared noncommodied access to nature, open-source collaboration,
and practices such as copyleft and creative commons. Dened as the theory that
vests all property in the community and organizes labor for the common benet
of all88the idea of the commons animates the work of such diverse gures as
Peter Linebaugh, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, Giuseppe Cocco, Vandana Shiva,
Arturo Escobar, David Graeber, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Coming
full circle, we would assert a further connection between the commons as conceived by the indigenous cultures of the Red Atlantic (including Evo Morales)
and the theory and praxis of the commons within the West itself (going back
to the Charter of the Forest section of the Magna Carta), all part of a multipronged struggle against all forms of enclosure, including that of the intellectual
commons.
While the new iek also discovers the Haitian Revolution, that revolution
scans for him, symptomatically, not thanks to C.R.L. James or Trouillot but
rather through Susan Buck-Morsss essay Hegel and Haiti, which calls attention to the Haitian Revolution as the silentand for that reason all the more
eectivepoint of reference (or the absent Cause) of Hegels dialectic of Master
and Slave.89 In this rather generous recuperation of Hegels workone wonders why Hegel had to keep the reference silent and why that would be more
eective and for whomthe Haitian Slaves actually overturning the Masters
power seems to pale in signicance next to the fact that their actions inspired
a sly between-the-lines reference in the great philosophers work.90 While giving credit to the Haitian revolutionaries, iek portrays them as more French
than the French, implementing revolutionary ideology better than the French
themselves did. This account prolongs ieks earlier portrayal of Third World
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revolutionaries as conceptual mimic men.91 The unasked question is why it was

black Haitians in particular who were able (1) to discern the limits of the mise
en pratique of the revolutionary ideologies and (2) to act decisively on that discernment. The intellectual agency, again, remains with Europe. The West, iek
reminds us, supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its
own criminal past.92 Yet from another perspective one wonders exactly why we
need Hegel, the philosopher who thought that blacks had neither moral sentiments nor intellectual reexivity, to appreciate Haitian revolutionaries? Were not
such revolutionaries implicitly rejecting the racial hierarchies constructed in The
Philosophy of History, in which blacks lacked all critical consciousness and were
placed, along with the indigenous peoples of the Americas (who gave Haiti its
very name), in the bottom ranks of the civilizational hierarchies? Must all revolutions pass through the West?
First as Tragedy also bears telltale traces of the old iek as the enemy of
identity politics. In the paragraph immediately following his praise of Haitian
revolutionaries, iek endorses Pascal Bruckners mockerywhich we ourselves
mock in the next chapterof European self-agellation over colonialism and
slavery. iek then resurrects the old Eurocentric axiom of critical reexivity as
European monopoly: The true reason some in the Third World hate and reject
the West lies not with the colonizing past and its continuing eects but with the
self-critical spirit which the West has displayed in renouncing this past, with its
implicit calls to others to practice the same self-critical approach.93 ieks claim
here is virtually identical to conservative Allan Blooms claim in The Closing of the
American Mind that only in the Western nations, i.e., those inuenced by Greek
philosophy, is there some willingness to doubt the identication of the good with
ones own way.94 This provincial claim of nonprovinciality and this uncritical
claim of a unique self-critical capacity substitutes for the rights They hate us for
our freedom the Hegelian-iekian They hate us for our reexivity.
The contradictory critiques of race/coloniality discourse from left and right
bring us back to the domain of the blind men and the elephant. The very same project is described variously as falsely universalist (the iek and Bourdieu/Wacquant
charge) or as particularist and antiFrench republican (as we shall see with Alain
Finkielkraut) or as simultaneously dogmatic and relativist (the U.S. right wings
contradictory charge) or as relativist and patriarchal (a white feminist charge) or as
dogmatically revolutionary (the right-wing charge) or as neoliberal (iek again)
or as divisive of the left (the Todd Gitlin charge) or as divisive of the nation (the
Schlesinger charge) or as pro-American (as many French intellectuals assume)
or anti-American (the U.S. right-wing charge, echoed by French allies such as
Finkielkraut). In the next chapter, we examine how these debates get reinvoiced in
the travel back and forth between the French and the American intellectual zones.
131
as we note d in chapter 3, France and the Francophone zones

formed key sites in the postwar paradigm shift in thinking about race and colonialism, with May 1968 forming the high-water mark of Third Worldism. While
de Gaulle pursued his independent path between the United States and the
Soviet Union, the left mounted massive demonstrations, along with an immense
intellectual production in support of Third World revolutions and resistance
movements in the United States. The postwar period also witnessed the emergence of an embryonic black movement ensuant to the arrival in France of a new
generation of African and West Indian students, thanks to a system of scholarships, leading to a substantial intellectual community. This group reached critical
mass in the formation in 1950 of FESNF (Federation of Students from Black
Africa in France), along with its ocial journal, Ltudiant dAfrique Noire, bringing continuity to the decolonization struggles theorized by writers such as Csaire, Memmi, and Fanon.
France, and especially Paris, served as a key node in the network of Third
Worldist thought, contributing to the postwar critique of dominant trends in the
human and social sciences as reecting the economic and cultural imperialism
of the European colonial powers. In the 1970s, the Laboratory for Third World
and African Studies, at University of Paris VII, for example, combined African,
Asian, and Latin American studies. That postcolonial studies at rst found little
purchase on the French intellectual scene was thus partly due to the fact that the
postcolonial eld was seen as already occupied by anticolonial and anti-imperialist writing and therefore seemed, despite the new theoretical wrinkles, a case of
dj vu all over again. Present-day postcolonial studies in France, in this sense,
cannot be seen as merely as an epigonic or belated copy of work performed outside of France; rather, it must be situated intertextually, in relation to the anticolonial corpus fashioned by these earlier writers.
What could be called proto-postcolonial work was also performed by Arab
intellectuals in France, in what might seem like a surprising place: French Oriental studies. French-speaking Arab intellectuals formed part of a linguistic,
cultural, and scholarly continuum. As insiders/outsiders, they resembled the
British-educated white but not quite colonial elites or the English-speaking
Arab scholars in Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Beginning in the
1950s, Oriental academic institutions in France began to recognize the indepen-
132
dence struggles in the Arab world, while also absorbing a few Arab intellectuals into their ranks.1 In 1963, a decade and a half before Edward Said, Anouar
Abdel-Malek published Orientalism in Crisis in the journal Diogenes (vol. 44,
Winter 1963). For Abdel-Malek, Third World independence struggles inevitably
impacted Oriental studies by turning those who had been objects of study into
sovereign subjects. The hegemonism of possessing minorities, unveiled by Marx
and Engels, and the anthropocentrism dismantled by Freud [had been] accompanied by Europocentrism in the area of human and social sciences, and more particularly in those in direct relationship with non-European peoples.2 A decade
later, Abdallah Larouis La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes (1974) denounced the
Orientalist penchant for speaking for [Arab] others and attacked the Orientalists as a bureaucratic caste.3
French leftists saw themselves as allied with minority and leftist movements in
the United States, just as American (and Brazilian) leftists were inspired by May
68. The situationists saw the 1964 Berkeley protests as inspiration for their own
campus movements. Jean-Luc Godards Vladimir et Rosa ctionalized the Chicago 8 trial, while Agns Varda lauded the black liberation movement in her lm
The Black Panthers. The Black Power movement was especially inuential for the
Prison Information Group formed in 1971 by Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert.
Foucault had read the Black Panther political writings in the late 1960s, and they
perhaps inuenced his subsequent theories of the racial state. Writer Jean Genet
toured the United States in 1970 in support of the Panthers as advocates for a
red ideology in a Black skin.4 According to Richard Wolin, it was Genets support for the Panthers that led Huey Newton to support gay liberation.5
After the lefts defeat in 1968, the 1970s in France formed a period of conict
between the Third Worldist revolutionary paradigm and the more conservative
position that was emerging. Defeatism set in on the left, and Third Worldism
gave way to the anticommunism of the nouveaux philosophes. In the post-68
hangover period, in the wake of Solzhenitsyns denunciations of the Soviet Gulag,
anticommunism came to the center of the discussion, while Camus replaced Sartre as intellectual model. The simultaneous discrediting of Marxism and Third
Worldism left the eld open, later, for neoliberalism and ethno-national chauvinism. AntiThird Worldism crystallized with a 1978 polemic in the pages of Le
Nouvel Observateur, published later as Le Tiers Monde et la Gauche. In Kristin
Rosss account, some former 68 leftists rewrote history, including their own, as
that of leftists deluded into seeing the enemy as colonialism when the real enemy
was communism.6 Third World socialism, some ex-gauchistes argued, could only
lead to the gulagization of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Disappeared in
this account were the horrors of Vietnam (conducted rst by French and then
by U.S. armed forces), the French massacres and torture in Algeria (and even in
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France itself ), the U.S. military/economic domination of Latin America, and the
general hegemony of the North. The new antiThird Worldism bore an uncanny
resemblance to that of the colonialists who lauded the civilizing mission of the
West while deriding all possibility of democratic rule after independence. In both
the United States and France, anticommunism became articulated together with
antiThird Worldism (and later antimulticulturalism).7
Sobbing for the White Man

An important text in this antiThird Worldist backlash was Pascal Bruckners
1983 book Le Sanglot de lHomme Blanc (The White Mans Sobs).8 A contemporary reading of Bruckners text in the light of the culture wars reveals the extent
to which Bruckner anticipated the lachrymose tone of hysterical victimization of
the right in both the United States and France a decade later. Bruckner does, to
be sure, score some valid points. He rightly calls attention to a certain religious
(largely Christian) substratum in some leftist thought. (Unfortunately for his
argument, the point is equally true, if not more so, of right-wing thought.) He
scores the tendency of some Western leftists to project themselves into idealized
Third World revolutionaries, romanticizing regimes about which they knew virtually nothing. This charge is certainly accurate in relation to French and American Maoists who turned China into a site of romantic projection, a revolutionary ailleurs, forgetting Maos megalomania and the depredations of the Cultural
Revolution. But Bruckner places an unnecessarily insidious interpretation on the
lefts overly generous assessment of revolutionary movements abroad, reading it
as a sign of a totalitarian project, when in fact these sometimes naive projections
were often premised on disillusionment, within the binaristic logic that if the
West is so imperialist and racist, the East must be the opposite. Yet in other
cases, First World support for anti-imperialist struggles, for example in Vietnam,
was more informed. Although Bruckner also rightly scores the hypocrisies of
European Third Worldists who reject U.S. imperialism yet fail to account for the
common origins of European colonialisms and U.S. imperialism.
As a kind of camera obscura Fanon, Bruckner oers the white mans inverted
version of Fanons Black Skin, White Masks. While Fanon speaks of the colonialist and racist mechanisms that generated self-hatred on the part of the colonized,
Bruckner speaks of the ways that Third Worldism itself has imbued white Europeans with irrational guilt and insecurity. Rejecting what he calls Fanons ridiculous plea to go beyond Europe, Bruckner warns that for the peoples of the
Third World to become themselves, they must become more western, since it
is impossible to go beyond democracy.9 The equation of Europe and democracy
is, of course, a staple of Eurocentric discourse. Bruckner makes this equation just
134
four decades after the advent, in the very heart of Europe, of the fascist regimes
of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Ptain and just three decades after a period
when Muslim Algerians under French colonialism were living rules of exception that deprived them of their rightful vote. Fanon had called for going beyond
Europe precisely because Europe had not been truly democratic itself and had
not advanced democracy abroad.
The role of Maurice Papon in events that transpired just two decades before
the publication of Bruckners book vividly illustrates the limits of Bruckners
depiction of a democratic postwar Europe. Papon, who had organized deportations of Jews to the concentration camps during his tenure as police chief of Bordeaux during Vichy, served in the 1950s in the French colonial administration.10
On October 17, 1961, Papon, in his function as Pariss chief of police, presided
over a horric massacre. After a peaceful protest march by thousands of Algerians, police red machine guns into the crowd and literally clubbed demonstrators
into the Seine to drown. Six thousand Algerians were herded into a sports stadium, where many died in police custody. Over two hundred people were known
to have died, hundreds were reported missing, and corpses bobbed up all along
the Seine.11 The ocial police-led cover-up relayed by the press claimed that the
Algerians opened re and that the police were obliged to restore law and order.
Despite Papons murderous past toward both Jews and Muslims, he reached the
highest ranks of the French government before he was tried and jailed in 1998 for
his role in deporting Jews. Long repressed, the memory of the massacre has been
recently resurrected in books (Einaudis La Bataille de Paris), television dramas
(La Nuit Noire), and feature lms (Hanekes symptomatically titled lm Cach
and Boucharebs Hors-la-Loi).
Despite such crimes, Bruckner uses the language of anticolonialism in an
upside-down manner to portray the West as the real victim. Here is Bruckner:
Indeed, there weighs on every westerner an a priori presumption of crime. We
Europeans have been brought up to hate ourselves, in the certitude that there was
at the heart of our world an essential evil which required a vengeance without any
hope of forgiveness. ... We have been led to regard our own civilization as the
worst, after our parents thought it the best. To be born after the Second World
War was to be sure that one belonged to the very dregs of humanity, to an execrable milieu which, for centuries, in the name of a supposed spiritual adventure, had
suocated the totality of the globe.12
Poor Europeans! Poor whites! Powerless, persecuted, and penniless all over the
globe, oppressed everywhere by the color line, subject to racist taunts, disproportionately imprisoned, harassed by police, their languages forbidden, their land
stolen, stereotyped as lazy and criminal, their culture repressed, living in poverty because of their race, buked and scorned because of nothing more than
135
the white color of their skin! It turns out that Bruckner really does not mind the
white mans sobs, as long as those sobs are for himself. Anticipating the beleaguered tone of the U.S. right, presumably defending the ramparts of a threatened
Western civilization, Bruckner conveniently forgets that the West has been overwhelmingly empowered in military, economic, cultural, political, and mediatic
terms. It is as if Bruckner has lived the seismic shift and decolonization of culture
as a trauma of personal and collective relativization, a mourning for a lost moral
grandeur. But rather than oer a self-reexive analysis of such feelings of loss,
Bruckner recrowns the West and demeans the Rest, in what amounts to a return
to the Eurocentric status quo ante.
Like U.S. rightists, Bruckner resuscitates colonialist nostrums as if they were
courageous forays in truth telling. He resurrects the hoary canard that the West
alone is capable of self-criticism and of seeing itself through others eyes.13 Bruckner proclaims Europes willingness to criticize itself, ironically, at the same time
that he displays his own hypersensitivity to criticisms against the West. Bruckner
makes this argument, curiously, shortly after demonstrating his own incapacity
to see Europe through the eyes of its others, thus undermining his own claims
about a unique European capacity for self-critique. The subtitle of Bruckners
bookThe Third World, Culpability, and Self-Hatredreects a psychologistic emphasis on the imbecilic masochism and needless feelings of guilt supposedly forced on white Westerners. The issue, ultimately, is not so much one of
guilt over the Wests past and present actionsalthough guilt is on one level a
perfectly normal reaction to the conjugated histories of anti-Semitism, slavery,
and colonialismbut rather of lucidity and responsibility to make sure that such
ills do not occur again and that their memory be preserved.
The dominant emotion among Third Worldists in the 1960s, whether in Paris
or Rio or Berkeley, as Kristin Ross points out, was not guilt but anger:
Third-worldist discourse, far from being masochistic or self-hating in its attention
to the unevenness and disequilibrium between rich and poor nations, was an
aggressive new way of accusing the capitalist systemmultinational rms, aid
programs from the United States or Western Europethe whole neo-imperialist
apparatus, culminating in Vietnam. Third-worldists did not feel personally
responsible for third-world misery, as Bruckner asserts; rather, they were actively
pointing a nger at thosethe military, state leaders, big businesswho they
thought indeed were responsible.14
Is Bruckner suggesting, Ross asks, that the United States did well to drop more
bombs on Vietnam than were dropped by the Allies during all of World War II
or that the French empire in Vietnam and Algeria should have been maintained
at all cost? Bruckner develops a hysterical discourse of victimization in defense
of a West presumably on the verge of extermination yet in fact as dominant as
136
ever, whether in its U.S. bad cop form (Iraq, Guantnamo, etc.) or its European
good cop form.15
Minorities and the Specter of Identitarianism

Metropolitan France in the postwar period underwent huge demographic
changes as it absorbed former colonial subjects seeking jobs, education, or political asylum. The attractive pull of the postwar French prosperity, combined with
the push of postindependence travails in North Africa itself, subsequently reinforced by new French laws facilitating family reunication, led to a situation in
which hundreds of thousands of Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians in France,
along with thousands of West Indian French people and sub-Saharan West Africans, came to form the countrys visible minorities. For a period in the 1970s and
early 1980s, members of these minoritiesand especially the second-generation
children of the largely North African migrant workers displaced to the colonial
metropole in the 1950s and 1960srose up in protest movements in favor of
minority and immigrant rights. The high point was the 1983 March for Equality
against Racism, dubbed by the media Marche des Beurs, modeled on the demonstration, two decades earlier, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., in Washington.
D.C. The activists of SOS Racisme and other antiracist organizations couched
questions of identity in the assimilationist terms favored by the Socialist Party.
While Mitterrand in the early 1980s had endorsed a multiculturalism-light
known as le droit la dirence (the right to dierence), the left subsequently
retreated from that project when confronted by the Lepenisation des esprits.
The celebration of a dierence-friendly France was cut short when the Socialists, practicing a nonstrategy of avoidance, took refuge in an abstract rhetoric of
human rights and republicanism. The result was what some called a neoracist
consensus shared by the far right and the center left. Azouz Begag is unsparing in his evaluation of this historical error: The Left carries a heavy historical
responsibility for this [neoracist consensus]. ... It instrumentalized the question
of the banlieues in its political struggle with the Right, stiing the Beurs desire
for political emancipation by backing SOS Racisme, which, in 1985, snatched out
of the hands of the young activists . . . the political momentum.16 The return
of the right wing to power in 1986 brought the harsh Pasqua laws and the televised debacle of the forced embarkation of 101 Malians onto a charter plane at
Orly Airport. The socialist left became cautious, aware that while only a minority might actually vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, a much larger group sympathized
with his xenophobic stance. In 1993, the code of nationality was changed so as
to require a declaration on the part of children of immigrants, at eighteen years
of age, of a desire to be French. The targets of the law denounced it as a way of
137
stigmatizing the descendants of the earlier postcolonial migrants. A decade later,

the 2002 election revealed a shockingly strong showing by the extreme right, with
Le Pen in second place and the nal victory going to the center-rightist Jacques
Chirac. (Le Pen was scapegoated, as iek correctly points out, for taking the
mask o a more general consensus racism.)17
The developing minority movement ran up against what David Blatt calls a
resurgent popular and political xenophobia rooted in the struggles over decolonization, now reinforced by contemporary social and political developments.18 Postcolonial immigrants and their descendants became a lightning rod for fears about
worsening socio-economic conditions, the breakdown of public order in urban
areas, and the erosion of national identity and culture.19 Nativists such as Le Pen
went so far as to call for forced repatriation of Maghrebians to North Africa. As the
anti-immigration agenda of the National Front gained ground, a new generation of
the immigrants children underwent what Begag identies as a three-phased disintegration, moving from indierence, to frustration, to la haine (hatred, rage).20
It was in this context that a politically diverse spectrum of intellectuals, such as
Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, Pierre-Andr Taguie, Rgis Debray, and Alain
Finkielkraut, while criticizing the racism of the far right, also expressed reservations
about what they saw as the American dierentialist approach to race.
In many cases, the lefts intention was to protect social solidarity and avoid
what many in France saw as a fragmentation characteristic of U.S.-style pluralism. The lefts overreaction was in some ways the result of a consensus forged
between mainstream political forces of the right and the left with the aim of marginalizing the National Front. As Jim Cohen explains,
According to the prevailing argument at the time, racism and xenophobia could
only be combated in the name of a universal notion of citizenship, not in the
name of any particular group interests, such as the interests of minorities (the
very term became a no-no). Otherwise, it was said, two dire consequences would
ensue: (1) the minority groups themselves ... would be tempted to organize along
community lines and thus contribute to the rise of communautarisme, another
denite no-no; and (2) as a result of this (supposed) danger of particularistic
expression by ethnic groups stigmatized by racists, the racists themselves would
have a good pretext for accusing the dominant order of favoring the immigrants,
while neglecting the true French peopleand this would presumably result in
a ballooning of the National Fronts share of the electoral vote. By occupying the
terrain of national citizenship and by dening it as a non-racialist, non-particularist, universal form of collective belonging, the republican model was conceived as
an arm of struggle against the far right.21
The attempt to marginalize Le Pen by appealing to republican ideals ultimately

backred. The National Front kidnapped the idea of right to dierence to mean
138
yes, they are dierent, and let them preserve their dierence back in their countries of origin. As Herman Lebovics points out, Le Pen cleverly transformed an
appeal for a new democratic vision of pluralism into a formula for cultural and
racial exclusion.22
It was in this larger context that multicultural identity politics came to be
seen as a pernicious American import. For much of the 1990s, a large swath of
the French political spectrum denounced multiculturalism as a symptom of
hysterical American identitarianism. Journalists spoke of une Amrique qui fait
peur (a frightening America). The words identity politics and multiculturalism were mobilized to evoke all the problems associated with U.S. race relations that France presumably did not have and did not want. This united front
led to bizarre alignments and strange bedfellows. Appealing to the same tropes
of imminent Balkanization and Lebanonization deployed by the U.S. right,
the French left, as incarnated in Les Temps Modernes, Esprit, and Libration,
portrayed multiculturalism as inherently divisive. Some even linked the cult of
dierence to fascism, much as Rush Limbaugh spoke of femiNazis and totalitarian thought-control. Politically diverse gures converged in their rejection;
Touraine, Bourdieu, Todorov, Jospin, Le Pen, Chirac, and Finkielkraut were not
closely aligned politically, yet they all shared a common hostility to multiculturalism. For very complex reasons, the dominant French line was not so far from
that of a Schlesinger in the United States, even though its historical sources and
political drift were quite distinct, and even though the French critics sometimes
had little else in common.
The language of the French left came to overlap, on a discursive/rhetorical
level, with the U.S. rights view of race and identity-based movements. The same
left French intellectuals who would normally have denounced George H. W.
Bush adopted a Bush-like stance toward political correctness. It was Bush Sr.,
after all, who weaponized the PC phraseinitially a self-mocking coinage of the
leftagainst leftist campus movements. The rights goal was to bury the Vietnam Syndrome and place all 1960s-derived egalitarian, Third Worldist, and antiracist forms of activism on the defensive. But this context was often missed by
the French left, even though France itself was undergoing its own parallel wave
of conservative demonization of the 68 legacy. Just as the U.S. campus left was
absorbing (and transforming) the poststructuralist ideas of Foucault, Derrida,
and Deleuze, the French left portrayed the U.S. movements as rooted in essentialist notions of identity. Indeed, the paroxysm of this transatlantic short circuit
came when the originally leftist (later centrist) newspaper Libration turned for
an account of identity politics to none other than Dinesh DSouza, the neoconservative whose book The End of Racism argues, to put it crudely, that slavery was
139
not so bad (and anyway Africans did it too), that segregation was well intended,
and that racial discrimination could be rational.23
The 1990s, then, brought a spate of French attacks on American multiculturalism. A special 1995 issue of Esprit was devoted to what was tellingly called
the spectre of multiculturalism. The hostility at times became codied even
in French dictionaries and encyclopedias. The entry on multiculturalism in
the Dictionnaire des Politiques Culturelles contrasts U.S.-style multiculturalism,
alleged to favor the mere coexistence of separate cultures, with French interculturalism, which stresses the process of exchange. (In fact, both terms have
been used to emphasize exchange and interaction.) The Dictionnaire mentions
blacks and women as constituent members of the coalition but elides such key
groups as Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. It nonetheless adds
to the list, in a tone of ridicule, the handicapped, gays, criminals, non-smokers,
and bicyclists. This derisive kind of surreal enumeration has become a topos in
both left (iek) and right (DSouza) attacks on identity politics. In the wake of
U.S. right-wing discourse, the entry emphasizes the putative penchant for euphemistic language (vertically challenged for tall) and repeats the (largely apocryphal) right-wing anecdotes about the supposed purging of bibliographies, the
ring of incorrect professors, and hysterical sexual harassment suits.24 This caricatural portrait of a censorious multicultural left coincided, ironically, with a historical moment when it was the U.S. right that was censoring the left while busily
reshaping governmental institutions in a procorporate and militaristic direction.
An essay by Tzvetan Todorov, The Cult of Dierence and the Sacralization of
the Victim, oers a similar caricature. A moderately progressive humanist thinker,
Todorov too derided multiculturalism in terms redolent of those of the U.S. right,
seeing it as symptomatic of a competition for victim status, as giving special rights
to blacks, and so forth. Intoning some of the favorite tunes from the neoconservative songbook, Todorov asks readers if they would like to be operated on by a
doctor who got his diploma through Armative Action, as if Armative Action
had been designed to grant diplomas to the incompetent. Ignoring the centuries
of corporeal abuse and aesthetic brainwashing that made whiteness normative and
blackness undesirable, Todorov declares the slogan black is beautiful to be racist,
since its political equivalent (black is just) would never be accepted. Approvingly
citing black conservatives such as Shelby Steele, Todorov adopts a reverse racism
argument that sees blacks as asking for special rights, since the former victim is
now supposed to be treated, not just like all the others, but better than all the others.25 (A decade later, at a Columbia University conference, Todorov blamed the
2005 banlieue riots on the dysfunctional sexuality of Muslim youths.)26
In the 1990s in France, as in the United States and Brazil, animosity toward
multicultural identity politics sometimes became linked to an animus toward
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the excesses of feminism. Sliding into the standard litany about the harassment of male professors due to trumped-up sexual harassment charges, Todorov
complains that whereas men and whites used to be privileged, now it is women
and blacks.27 What is it about male intellectuals (of diverse national origins),
one wonders, that makes them hypersensitive to something as statistically rare
as trumped-up charges of harassment even when sexual harassment is not
the theme under discussion? What is seen as a paranoid obsession with sexual
harassment sometimes gets linked in French antimulticultural discourseat
times even by declared feministsto the stereotype of puritanical and hysterical Anglo-Saxon women,28 as when journalist Franoise Giroud repeatedly ridiculed American feminism as an antimale movement with castrating tendencies.
Unlike American women, Giroud often declared, French women love men.29
A common deep-structural impulse fueled the hostility to both feminism and
multicultural identity politics. Since they could not be denounced as egalitariangiven that equality forms part of the French creedthey were denounced
as identitarian, separatist, and communitarian. Whereas American (and
French) feminists saw patriarchy as appropriating the universal for the male gender, writers such as Mona Ozouf censured any appeal to gender as identitaire.
Yet in the political sphere, France did adopt one identity-based policy, to wit, gender parity for female political candidates. The critics of parity, as Joan Wallach
Scott suggests in her nuanced account, deployed cross-national comparison to
denounce the new policy: Parit was likened to American armative actionby
denition a failed attempt to reverse discrimination. . . . The complex facts of
the American experience were beside the point in these arguments: it was the
image of America, riven by conicting ethnic, religious, and racial communities,
that served as the antithesis of the desired unity of France.30 French sociologist
Michel Wieviorka sums up the general attitude behind these arguments:
In France [the multicultural debate] is almost impossible, and it serves to reveal
a deeply rooted political culture which brooks no opposition or discussion. The
debate touches on a postulate which is seen as self-evident: [multiculturalism]
supposedly constitutes a danger for democracy and for the national collectivity
because it would consider recognizing cultural particularisms within institutions and within political life, where it could only have disastrous eects. These
particularisms should not ourish outside of the public sphere, and any identitary
or communitarian pressure within the public realm should be rejected, repressed,
condemned. ... The Republic is the best rampart against inter-community
tensions, against violence, against political and cultural fragmentation and the
destruction of democratic public space.31
Multiculturalism, in sum, became a repoussoir, an obscure object of projective

hostility. The blanket rejection of multiculturalism conjugated an idealization
141
of the homegrown republican model, on the one hand, and a caricature of an

alien project on the other. The incantatory appeals to republicanism ended up
having an intellectually repressive function. The caricature of an alien movement
yielded narcissistic benets by attering French readers that they had avoided the
absurd fanaticism of the United States. At the same time, the caricatures served
to ward o fears of similar movements emerging in France. What Clarisse Fabre
and ric Fassin call (in their Libert, galit, Sexualits) the American scarecrow
was wielded as part of a demagogic rhetoric that contrasted a sensible universalist French republicanism with the out-of-control particularism of political
correctness.32
The Anxieties behind an Antagonism

But what cultural intertext, what historical unconscious, and what categories of
perception molded this antagonism? What explains the specic forms of these
anxieties about race, identity, and multiculturality? A number of factors were at
work. First, there was the issue of language, arising from the relationship between
two similar yet distinct political cultures, resulting in a problem of translation
due to a partial mismatch of vocabularies. Many of the terms common to both
French and U.S. discourse have similar connotations, but others are ideological
faux amis. Whereas in the United States Republicans and Democrats refer
to the two political parties, in France rpublicain refers to the Rpublique and its
ideas of citizenship, while dmocrate often refers to a society made up of communities. Indeed, the concept of multiculturalisme is sometimes translated as
communautarisme (ethnic separatism or communitarianism), seen as a regrettable
descent from the lofty abstraction of republican citizenship into basely embodied identities and communities. For many French intellectuals, communitarianisme is reminiscent externally of a fetishized German Volk and internally of those
regional monarchist movements that threatened the early republic. Thus, French
critics of multiculturalism warn against lengrenage communautaire, roughly translatable as a dangerous downward spiral into communitarianism. Often linked to
Islam, communautarisme in French suggests a threat to secular lacit and thus
tends to trigger a reexive antipathy.
Even the same word can alter its meaning in a novel ideological environment.
Whereas in the United States, identity and dierence emerged as critical terms
to evoke oppressed minorities, in French left discourse, identity and identitarian are just as likely to evoke anti-immigrant right-wingers and Islamic fundamentalists, seen as specular reections of the same impulse. Some French hostility therefore focuses on terms such as identity politics, armative action, and
even race, seen as inappropriate foreign impositions. Armative action is often
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translated, in France, as discrimination positive, a translation that encodes hostility by framing the concept as a subset of the larger category discrimination and
thus feeding into reverse discrimination arguments. Race, especially, is seen
as injection of U.S. race obsessions into a presumably race-blind France. (And,
indeed, race relations discourse does carry the unfortunate implication that
objectively distinguishable races exist and interrelate, eectively eliding asymmetrical commonalities.)
Second, the anxiety is embedded in the long intertext of French commentary
on the United States. Not unlike American commentators on France, French
commentators on the United States often generalize about America without
the benet of any substantive knowledge. As Jean-Philippe Mathy explains, the
French rhetoric of America serves local political purposes; judgments passed on
the United States from France must be read as discourses about France.33 And
while multiculturalism in the United States was seen both by its advocates and
by its opponents as a challenge to Anglo-hegemony, in France, paradoxically, it
was seen as incarnating that very same Anglo-hegemony. Socialist president Lionel Jospin, for example, publicly rejected what he called the Anglo-Saxon model
of the communities. That model, it must be said, is very much a French-Latinist
theoretical construct, since it has never been articulated as a model by intellectuals in the nations in question. In any case, the critics on both sides of the Atlantic
seemed to share the Eurocentric and white-normative assumption that U.S. society has an inevitable Anglo-Saxon coloration.
Third, the hostility to Anglo-Saxon dierentialism correlates with a common
view of French society itself as at least in principle unied. Privileging national
unity and uniformity over diversity, the constitutions of the First, Fourth, and
Fifth Republics all portray France as a Republic, one and indivisible, with one
legislative body, one centralized administration, and, implicitly, one ( Jacobin) ideology. Any questioning of this foundational unity was traditionally seen as a form
of complicity with the ancien rgime or with external foes. Decentralizing federalizers were viewed, often correctly, as being in league with counterrevolutionary
forces. The very precariousness of unity generated panic in the face of multiplicity, symptomatic of a need to overcome centrifugal dispersal through a vast central organization. The threat was of a loss of cohesion triggered by supposedly
inassimilable dierences. French national discourse, as Mathy points out, often
lumps together those against whom the French had traditionally dened themselves: the Germans, the English, and, later, the Americans, in sum, the AngloSaxons.34 French antidierentialism can thus be located within a specic history
embracing both the internal Jacobin and the external assimilationist model by
which non-French-speaking provincials, formerly colonized peoples, and noncolonized immigrants were all supposed to repress traces of their dialectal identities
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and assimilate to the langue of an elusive Frenchness. Any sense of hyphenated,

conictual, or polyphonic identity was excluded.
Fourth, the anxiety has had to do with the assumption that nations embody
single political models. Herman Lebovics traces the exclusivist idea of one
true France to a shared French universalism derived from a mlange of Gallic Catholicism, absolutism, the Enlightenment and Jacobinism.35 In France, as a
result, right and left often argue over what should be the model for French identity and society, in contrast with an imagined single U.S. model, at once suspectly
individualista brewing Hobbesian war of each against eachand as overly
communitarian, premised on separate, ethnically dened groups rather than on
the universal rights of citoyens. At the same time, French republicanism brings
some undeniable social advantages. France has largely avoided, at least in the
Hexagon itself, many of the problems characteristic of the U.S. polity. French
constitutions, unlike the U.S. Constitution, have never even implicitly endorsed
slavery or racism. There is no French equivalent to the federal ratio or to the
Dred Scott decision nationalizing slavery or to the claim that blacks had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect. The anti-Semitic Vichy regime,
revealingly, felt obliged to repudiate the republican triad of Libert, galit, Fraternit, substituting instead Work, Family, and Tradition. Rather than a rigid
orthodoxy, republicanism oers a broad matrix of debate. For some analysts,
the real debate in France takes place within the republican model, between leftleaning and neoliberal versions of the model or between dierence-friendly and
dierence-erasing models. There is nothing in the republican model itself that
requires the prohibition of religious insignia in schools or that prohibits an eective multiculturality. The real problem, for Jim Cohen, occurs when a dogmatic
version of normative republican discourse and the ideal of the universal equality
is hypostasized into a truly-existing equality of opportunity.36
Fifth, the anxiety has to do with the Jacobin view of the citoyen as blankly
universal, somehow beyond and above race and gender. If the U.S. system
is individualistic, the French system is both collective and atomistic, in that it
sees the citizen as a substitutable monad interpellated only by the state and
not by intermediaries such as communities. In the French republican equivalent of color-blind ideology, to speak of race is to besmirch republican ideals.
A commonplace attitude contrasts the race-obsessed Germanic Volkish idea of
the nation with the traditional French idea of the nation as a free association of
consenting individuals adhering to a common political project rearmed by the
daily plebiscite of national belonging. Le Penist racism and separatist multiculturalism, in this view, form twin subversions of republican unity. The precepts of
the republican model as executed by a socially narrow elite, as Blatt puts it, serve
to legitimize and hide the exclusion of identity-based groups and complicate the
144
tasks of minorities attempting to gain a role, either collectively or individually, in

the political process.37
Sixth, the anxiety has to do with a widespread rejection of race as shadowed
by the memory of scientic racism and Vichyiste anti-Semitism. Acutely aware
of the catastrophic results of Nazi race theory, progressive intellectuals hoped
that eliminating the pernicious vocabulary of race might also eliminate the evils
of racism. Any recognition of ethnic particularity is presumed to dilute the force
of the transcendental principle of equality before the law.38 Yet denying the existence of race hardly diminishes the reality of racism. And French intellectual history is hardly raceless, since French thinkers played a role in three of the principal
forms of racism to emerge in Europe: anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and prejudice against people of color.39
Seventh, the anxiety has to do with the projection of cultural movements
as separatist. In some French accounts (which mirror and sometimes draw on
U.S. right-wing accounts), multicultural identity politics calls for a world in
which societies should be divided up into autonomous communities. This caricature acts in tandem with a view of U.S. society itself as ethnically ghettoized.
Although the United States is in some ways segregated (especially in residential
terms), this pattern has not been actively designed by multiculturalists seeking
racial ghettos but rather by longstanding discriminatory policies. While inaccurate, the charge of separatism helps us name the fear lurking behind the virtually
consensus rejection of multiculturalism by established French intellectuals in the
1990s.
Eighth, another anxiety, among the literarily inclined, has to do with the critical interrogation of the canon, which goes against the grain of the traditional
French investment (in all senses of that word) in high literary culture and the arts
as the canonical expressions of what the mission civilisatrice was all about.40 Like
the republic, the canon too was seen as threatened by particularism. What was
missed was that the rethinking of the canon in the English-speaking world has
also opened it up to Francophone and French writers of color, leading to a new
wave of translations and the reshaping of French departments to include North
African, West African, and French-Caribbean writers.
Finally, the anxieties are rooted in contemporary anxieties about a double
sense of engulfment in the era of globalization. French nationhood, for some
people, now seems challenged by infranational forces (Le Pen and the right wing),
transnational forces (the European Union, a recongured NATO, U.S.-led globalization), and postnational forces (immigration from former colonies). The
attack on the multicultural projects comes to allegorize vulnerable self-assertion
and lexception franaise, a way of saying that we French will deal with these challenges on our own terms. But alongside this legitimate aspiration to sovereignty
145
lurks a malentendu that sees multiculturalism and globalization, as Mathy puts

it, as related manifestations of transnational capitalism, combined to undermine
the national idea, the one from within and the other from without.41
The project being denounced was in many cases not even the same object. For
Bourdieu/Wacquant, multiculturalism was simply neoliberalism and imperialism by another name; for Alain Finkielkraut, in contrast, it was a new edition of
May 68 revolutionism. As a result of these superimposed anxieties, the transatlantic discussion, in the 1990s at least, came to have the air of a dialogue des sourds.
The static of dierent grids, vocabularies, and prisms meant that much was
lost in translation due to nonsynchronous repertoires of understanding. Many
French intellectuals were conditioned by the national cultural eld to hear multiculturalism as meaning American, Anglo-Saxon, separatism, globalization,
and threat to the republic, while identity conjured up the image of French Le
Penists or Muslim fundamentalists.
Hip-Hop and the Racialization of the Everyday

Culture and politics are not always in sync. Just as the antagonism to multicultural identity politics was at its height, France was also undergoing a thoroughgoing and irreversible process of multiculturalization, manifest especially in the arts
and popular culture. In the ironically titled Paris Est Propre (Paris Is Clean), the
Zairian painter Chri Samba, in pop faux-naf images, portrays the Third World
workers who sweep the streets and pick up canine feces in front of the Trocadro.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Paris was becoming a capital of African fashion, animated by gures such as the Malian Lamine Badian Kouyat, the designer who
created Xuly Bt with boutiques in Paris and New York, and Alphadi, creator
of the Festival of African Fashion. The City of Light had also become the main
global center for the diusion of African and Arab world music, a major disseminator of ra music, Salif Keita, Cheb Khaled, Papa Wemba, Youssou NDour,
Cesria vora, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The names of popular bands such
as Les Ngresses Vertes, Mano Negra, and Rak were redolent of Third World
and Afro-diasporic culture. In 1998, the Acadmie Franaise gave its Grande
Mdaille de la Chanson to the rapper MC Solaar. The beur or banlieue lms
such as Bye-Bye and LHexagone, meanwhile, oered a triangular bouillabaisse
of North African, French, and African American culture. Syncretism also took
linguistic form in the verlan of the banlieue, which drew on Arabic, African languages, black American slang, and French gangster argot.
As a global phenomenon, hip-hop illustrates the transoceanic crossings of
diasporic cultures. As an international lingua franca, rap is performed not only
in French and Portuguese but also in Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Aymara, and Yor-
146
uba. The U.S. movement that began in the Bronx in the 1970s was energized by
gures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation who mingled pop culture,
high art, Caribbean, and Brazilian inuences (capoeira). The French version too
was simultaneously musical (rap), graphic (grati), and choreographic (break
dance). Emerging into the public sphere in the early 1980s, hip-hop became the
privileged mode of expression of what was variously called la banlieue, la cit,
or les quartiers sensibles. Disseminated by DJs such as Sydney and Dee Nasty,
hip-hop attracted thousands of fans from the immigrant neighborhoods, providing a cultural alternative to young people for whom neither ocial French
culture nor the Maghrebian/sub-Saharan home culture of origin provided a
comfortable t.42
In France as elsewhere, rap turned social stigmata into a badge of honor. And
like rappers in the United States and Brazil, French rap groups such as Assassin and La Rumeur have all denounced the police harassment of young men of
color. The group Nique Ta Mre (literally, Fuck Your Motherniquer being
a loan word from Arabic), partially modeled on the gangster-rap group NWA,
lambasted police brutality and racial proling. Nique Ta Mere was denounced
for cop-killing fantasies such as the 1993 Jappuie sur la gchette (roughly My
Finger on the Trigger). In July 2002, Sarkozy, then interior minister, pressed
charges against the rapper Mohamed Bourokba (a.k.a. Ham) from La Rumeur
for slandering the national police. Both a commercial product and a vehicle of
social desire, hip-hop also resonated in France because it oered an open, protean medium for treating social issues common to the Black Atlantic. For Mehdi
Belhaj Kacem, rap culture ourishes especially in France and the United States,
because both societies are essentially founded on the idea of the universal combined with a culture of immigration and miscegenation.43
French rappers do not merely imitate African American rappers, however;
rather, they address partially analogous situations through distinct artistic
forms, within the constantly mutating Afro-diasporic transtextuality of sampling and cut n mix. Rappers forged their own layered constellation of styles,
combining U.S.-style hip-hop with African dance, Islamic majdoub, Japanese
butoh, and French avant-garde elements. Styles have ranged from the gross
provocations of Nique Ta Mre to the alexandrines of MC Solaar, an AfroFrench admirer of Ronsard and Baudelaire. Signifying on Godards children
of Marx and Coca Cola, Elsa Vigoureux calls rappers the children of hip-hop
and Derrida, since they draw not only on Derrida but also on Deleuze, Said,
Fanon, and Bourdieu.44 Just as Brazilian rappers constantly shout out to James
Brown, French rappers often cite black American music, as when IAM samples Stevie Wonders Past Time Paradise to speak of slavery and the Middle
Passage. While Brazil oers the soulful Phat Family, France gives us Fonky
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Family. While African American rappers point to a monumental Egypt as a

locus of symbolic pride, and while Brazilian rappers aectionately invoke the
homegrown spiritual Africana of Candombl and Xango, French rappers carry
a genetic link to Africa in that many are themselves of direct African descent
MC Solaar is from Chad, Hamed Daye from Mali, El Tunisiano (as his name
implies) from Tunisia, and so forth. As practitioners of polyglossia (Bakhtin),
some rappers shift from French to Wolof and Arabic and back.45
At times, French rappers perform a percussive version of what in an academic context would be called postcolonial critique. Perhaps inspired by Louis
Sala-Molins, the rapper Fabe titled one of his songs Code Noir. MC Solaar,
in the same vein, connects past colonial and present-day exploitation in Les
Colonies, while Liste Noire (Blacklist) called their rst album Les Damns
de la Terre (Wretched of the Earth) in honor of Fanon. La Brigades Partir
Ailleurs reminds its audience of the role of Africans in French colonial armies.
French rappers, like their counterparts in the United States and Brazil, also
denounce racial proling, corrupt politicians, and the lack of political representation, sometimes in a gendered and masculinist language.46 A rap by Monsieur R., provocatively entitled FranSSe, begins with a description of a state
of institutional violence and moves to a call for violent opposition:
France is wearing us down
To the point that we dont trust our neighbor
The laws are conceived to kill us o
With brothers behind bars and now
Our mission is to exterminate the ministers and the fascists
For today its useless to yell, its like talking to the wall
The only way to be heard
Is by burning cars...
France is a bitch and we got betrayed
Its the system that makes us hate
And anger that makes us speak in a vulgar way
So we fuck France with our music
We mock their repression
And dont care about the Republic
and its freedom of expression.
But the song ends with a call for political representation:

We have to change the laws so we can see
Arabs and blacks in the Elyses.
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French hip-hoppers (like their Brazilian peers), in sum, identify not only with the
percussive kineticism of black American music but also with the social drift of
lyrics denouncing police brutality, racial proling, media stereotypes, and political
exclusion.47
Despite (the often legitimate) antagonism to the concept of race in France,
everyday life in France is very much racialized. Despite dierent historical trajectories and despite a well-oiled welfare state that takes some of the edge o the
pain of discrimination, French social problems partially resemble those of Brazil
and the United States. In Brazil, the victims might be the poor mixed-race people
from the favelas of City of God; in the United States, blacks and Latinos from
the inner city of Do the Right Thing; and in France, the children of Maghrebian
and sub-Saharan Africans from the banlieue of La Haine. Yet despite clear dierences, the social situations bear a family resemblance. Accounts of certain aspects
of everyday life in the inner cities, in the banlieues, and in the favelas, often seem
more or less interchangeable. Here is Azouz Begags account of the daily lives of
the marginalized children of immigrants in the banlieue:
The social damage arising from the confusion of personal success with nancial
gain goes far wider than the banlieues and youths of immigrant origin. The question of value at stake here could be summarized in the following terms: If we
take young people living in poverty who have seen their fathers exploited as cheap
labor, then thrown onto the scrap heap of unemployment, who have no culture
[sic], are completely depoliticized, are subjected to constant racism and are able
to express themselves only through violence, how can we expect them to accept a
temporary job for a thousand euros a month when they can earn that much in a
day or two in the parallel economy?48
A social version of what linguists call a commutation test would show that
with minor alterationsthe substitution of dollars or reais for euros and
favela or inner city for banlieuethis text could be describing the life of a
clocker in a U.S. inner city or a falco in a Brazilian favela. But in other ways, the
dynamics and histories are distinct and partly untranslatable. Islamophobia and
North African immigration, ltered through the bitter memory of the Algerian
War, for example, play a greater role in French postwar history. Addressing antiMuslim discrimination in France, critics speak of the racialization of religion
and the religionization of race. Marine Le Pen of the Front National has compared Muslims praying in the French streets to the Nazi occupation of Paris.
Practicing other-demonization as electoral strategy, Sarkozy has maintained
a steady drumbeat of anti-Muslim rhetoric, declaring Islamic veils unwelcome
in France and calling for debates about national identity and about Islam in
France. His focus on the burqa neatly conjoins fears of the Islamicization of
France with post-9/11 evocations of the Taliban, terrorism, and the oppression
149
of women. It is often noted that in France it is worse to be North African than

to be black. At the same time, the current wave of Islamophobia in the United
States, and the hysteria about mosques, suggests that the United States is far
from immune to the contagion.
The Atlantic world is not only Red, Black, and White; it is also Brown, in the
sense of being Arab, Muslim, and even Moorish/Sephardic in terms of the Iberian roots of much of the Americas. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, however,
mingled strains of anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia have become virulent in
both France and the United States. Historically, Orientalism and Islamophobia
are embedded in a long intertextual chain: crusading anti-Islamic tales, Orientalist narratives, anti-Semitic protocols, imperial adventure novels and lms. The
historical conjunctures and discursive genealogies, of course, display national
nuances. Whereas France has dened itself against the Islamic world since the
Battle of Poitiers in 732, the U.S. hostility to Arabs and Muslims begins a millennium later, with U.S. interventions against the Barbary pirates. U.S. Arab-hating
also borrows from antecedent racisms exercised against Jews, Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos. In the 20th century, preexisting prejudices
became superimposed on geopolitical tensions in the Middle East.
Whatever its genealogies, Islamophobia is currently raging in France and the
United States. In both countries, politicians exploit racialized divisionswedge
issues in the United States; politique de clivage in Franceas a lever to gain
power. A wide range of phenomenaacts of desecration, expulsion, violence,
and even murder, alongside racist discourses and tropesexpress and foster the
resentment of the majority population. Azouz Begag inventories the discursive
mechanisms of prejudice (many of which nd counterparts in the United States):
the rhetorical demonization of multiculturalism and communitarianism as
code for hostility toward Muslims; a discourse of false victimization on the part
of the majority population that sees itself as invaded or even occupied by an
alien force; the denition of Islam (like Judaism earlier) as a problem; the journalistic association of young men of color with crime and illegality; the monologization of national identity as a ploy to reassert a normative Frenchness; and
the constant otherization of French citizens of North African background, born
in France and distanced from North Africa yet told to go back where you came
from.49 The attack on the veil, we would add, recycles the colonial doxa that positions white European men (and sometimes women) as protecting brown Muslim
women from their brown overlords. Thus, French editorialists express hostility
to Islamic dress such as the veil or the burqa, seen paradoxically as ostentatoire
(showing o ) and self-denying; Muslim women are condemned for calling attention to themselves by hiding, in a kind of visible invisibility. A culturally connoted
choice of clothing engenders moral panics and irrational hatreds.
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The American right, meanwhile, exhorts real Americans to take back the
country, presumably from blacks, Latinos, and Arabs. As in France, politicians
fan the ames of xenophobia for electoral purposes. Surges of hysteria about
mosques and minarets are carefully orchestrated to coincide with electoral
campaigns. Protestant pastors burn the Quran, while rightist politicians warn
absurdly of the imminent imposition of Sharia law in the American heartland.
Congressional committees, meanwhile, investigate the radicalization of Arab
neighborhoods, regarded as breeding grounds for terrorism. A panoply of marginalizing rhetoricsexclusionary denitions of Americanness, racist taunts
such as cameljockey, and the characterization of Islam as an evil religionserve
to otherize Arabs/Muslims. The crudeness of right-wing Islamophobia is encapsulated in Ann Coulters atavistic call for a new crusadeWe should invade
their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianityhardly
an empty threat in the age of the Iraq and Afghan wars.50 Far from marginal,
anti-Arabism and Islamophobia have moved to the center of the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party. An important dierence separates the
French and American versions of xenophobia, however. Unlike the American
right, the French right does not hate the welfare state; it simply prefers not to
share its benets with immigrants of color.
Despite dierentiated social systems, the complaints of people of color in
France resemble those of their diasporic peers in the United States. They concern
everyday humiliation, job discrimination, suspicious salespersons, racial proling, and harassment by the physiognomists of the discothques. According to a
Sofres/Cran poll of 581 French blacks, 67 percent said that they had been victims
of discrimination, 37 percent had experienced scornful or disrespectful behavior,
64 percent had suered in public spaces and transport.51 Three quarters of those
interviewed recognized the existence of discrimination in housing, and 65 percent
recognized discrimination in employment.52 As in the United States, researchers
use testing (the English word is used) by having blacks and whites apply for
the same positions. The tests reveal a multistage discrimination: (1) initial lies to
the applicant about the availability of the position, (2) extra demands made on
people of color but not of whites, and (3) the stipulation of inferior conditions
when the job is oered.53 (The television series Living in a Black Skin staged and
illustrated these forms of discrimination.) The refusal to compile race-based statistics has the practical eect of making it dicult to assess the social well-being
or material disadvantage of discriminated populations.
The media, meanwhile, are only beginning to oer a sociologically proportionate representation of people of color on television screens. As Franois Durpaire points out, it took one of the worst air disasters in historythe August
16, 2005, crash that led to the death of 152 Martinicansfor that demographic
151
group to nally appear on French television.54 News anchors in France are rarely
black or Maghrebian, and the dominant perspective relayed by the news reports
is usually Franco-Franais. (The situation on French cable television is signicantly better.) Black faces on French television were more likely to be from U.S.
television programs. The mediatic image of France, in short, does not resemble
the France of the streets. Television ctions feature a few stars of colorMouss
Diouf, the policeman in Julie Lescaut, Jacques Martial in Navarro, Sonia Rolland
in La Parkerbut they are the exception. Actors of color in France, like their
homologues in Brazil and the United States, point out that roles have to be designated black for them to be considered; white casting is the assumed default
position. French people of color, again like their peers elsewhere, have formed
organizations such as Collectif galit to protest discrimination and to organize
boycotts and have created black magazines such as Amina (for African women),
Cit Black, Miss bne, and Couleur Mtisse (addressing hip-hop), and Pilibo (for
West Indians), clear counterparts to Essence, Jet, and Ebony in the United States
and to Raa in Brazil.55
Despite the inveterate racism of U.S. media, some French visitors have been
struck by the visibility of minorities in the U.S media. According to Yazid and
Yacine Sabeg, members of French ethnic minorities visiting the United States are
often astounded at the spectacle of the American street and the American media:
one sees black journalists, lawyers, bankers, prime-time black and Asian anchors
and reporters, members of the government, business leaders, high-grade military people, black and Asian Secretaries of State.56 Azouz Begag oers a similar
account of his late-1980s sojourn at Cornell as a visiting professor: I was struck
the most by what I saw on television. Journalists of every color under the sun
held front-rank positions in prime-time slots. ... And the more they were mixed
by ethnicity and gender, the less attention you paid to their origins, and the more
you listened to what they had to say and why they were therethe news!57 This
by now taken-for-granted multicolored representativeness constitutes in itself a
form of empowerment in a mass-mediated age in which cultural power is certied by media visibility. At the same time, all that color does not make the dominant coverage more progressive or less procorporate. In fact, television political
talk shows often privilege that social anomaly called the black conservative
some (such as Armstrong Williams) literally in the pay of the right and others
serving as tokens for the Republican Party.
One social feature common to the United States, France, and Brazil is the
constant police harassment of young men of color. In the United States, police
(usually white) have killed hundreds of defenseless blacks and Latinos, often
motivated by phantasmatic hallucinations of imaginary weapons, whereby a cell
phone or a wallet, especially when in black hands, is perceived as a weapon.58 In
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Brazil, police and death squads (sometimes composed of o-duty police) have
killed thousands of marginals, the vast majority black or of mixed race. In
France, young children of immigrants are subject to the dlit de facisthe crime
of having a certain kind of face. In other respects, of course, the situations are distinct. Stricter gun control in France, for example, makes the situation much less
lethal than in Brazil and the United States. The long-term historical contexts are
also dierent. In colonial-settler states such as Brazil and the United States, present-day discrimination emerges out of centuries of conquest and slavery, while in
France, it morphs, at least in part, out of a colonialism that was external. At the
same time, it reects the historic residues of earlier discriminations both in the
colonized Maghreb itself and in the dilapidated bidonvilles of France.
French philosopher Alain Badious eloquent account of an incident involving his sixteen-year-old adopted son testies to the kinds of harassment all too
typical of the multiracial metropolises of the Black Atlantic. In an essay entitled
Daily Humiliation, Badiou explains that his son had been arrested six times
in eighteen months, for doing nothing at all except existing while black, and as
a result was interrogated, insulted, and left handcued to a bench for hours on
end, sometimes for a day or two. Badiou explains in detail one incident in which
his sons Turkish friend buys a bicycle only to discover that it had been stolen.
Honorably, they decide to return the bicycle to its rightful owners, even though
they would lose the money spent. Badiou describes what happened next:
It is at this point that a police car, brakes screeching, pulls up to the curb. Two of
its occupants jump out and pounce on Gerard and Kemal, pinning them to the
ground; they then cu their hands behind their backs, and line them up against
the wall. Insults and threats: Idiots! Arseholes! Our two heroes ask what theyve
done. You know damn well. Turn around. Still handcued, they are made to
face the passersby in the street: Everyone should see who you are and what you
did. A revival of the medieval pillory (they are exposed like this for half an hour)
but with a novelty: its done prior to any judgment, prior to any accusation. ...
Handcued to a bench, kicked in the shins every time a policeman passes, insults,
especially for Gerard: Fat pig. Filth. This goes on for an hour and a half without
their knowing what theyre accused of. ... At home, I await my son. Two and a
half hours later the telephone rings: Your son is being held in detention on probability of gang assault.59
It turns out that Badious son was misidentied by a school supervisor and that
the police requested, and received, photos and school les of all the black students
at his sons school. Badiou concludes acerbically, We get the riots we deserve. A
state in which what is called public order is only a coupling of the protection of
private wealth and dogs unleashed on children of working people and people of
foreign origin is purely and simply despicable.60
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Allegorical Crossings: Blacks, Jews, Muslims

Since the postwar seismic shift, racial identications have taken many twists
and turns, as some minority communities have gradually come to be viewed as
white, although never quite.61 While Jews have been racialized by anti-Semitic
discourse, the U.S. Census has never oered a nonwhite slot for Jews or, for
that matter, for Arabs or Middle Easterners. Jewish status in the United States
has been ambiguous and oating in relation to normative notions of whiteness.
The black-Jewish relationship, meanwhile, has mingled solidarity and tension. In
the late 1960s, James Baldwin claimed that blacks identied with Jews because
both groups shared a common history of oppression rooted in Christianity:
The crisis taking place in the word, and in the minds and hearts of black men
everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David but by the old, rugged cross on
which Christendoms most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.62 At
the same time, Baldwin attributed anti-Semitism among blacks to mingled anger
and envy toward Jews who had assimilated into the white mainstream. From the
Jewish side, meanwhile, countless Jewish intellectuals declared their problack
sympathies. Hannah Arendt, for example, declared, As a Jew I take my sympathy
for the cause of the Negroes, as for all oppressed or underprivileged peoples, for
granted.63
Many authors trace a certain solidarity between the two minorities back to
Jewish and black participation in the U.S. Communist Party and in the labor
movement in the 1930s and subsequently to Jewish support for Civil Rights in
the 1960s, culminating, perhaps, in the moment when Martin Luther King, Jr.,
about to address the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, was
greeted by one thousand rabbis singing We Shall Overcome in Hebrew. In one
narrative of the intercommunal relationship, this initial camaraderie was undercut beginning in the late 1960s by divergent attitudes toward community control
of schools, Armative Action, Israel/Palestine, and so forth. During the 1980s,
public controversies sometimes degenerated at their worst into black accusations
of a supposed Jewish domination of the slave trade (e.g., by Leonard Jeries) and
Jewish allegations of black genetic inferiority (by Michael Levin). Overstated
claims of unity and alliance in the past have sometimes given way to equally overstated claims of unalloyed hostility in the present. The Israeli-Palestinian conict,
meanwhile, was falsely portrayed as rooted in age-old enmities of two peoples
entangled in a civilizational clash entailing an unbridgeable divide between Arab
and Jew, or Muslim and Jew.
In our view, black-Jewish and Jewish-Muslim relations, as well as the interlinked issues of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and antiblack racism, must be
framed within a longer perspective that stresses overlapping but also distinct
154
histories over the longue dure. Often forgotten in the discussion is that some
Jews are black and some blacks are Jewish and that while Jews are denitionally
not Muslim, they can be Arabs.64 But even apart from these hybrid forms, the
destinies of Jews, Arabs, Muslims, and blacks have been interwoven for centuries. These linked trajectories and submerged analogies can be traced, as we have
argued elsewhere, back to the events associated with the cataclysmic moment
summed up in what might be called the two 1492s, when the conquest of the
new world converged with the expulsion of Muslim and Jews from Spain. At
that time, the ground for colonialist racism was prepared by the Inquisitions
limpieza de sangre, by the expulsion edicts against Jews and Muslims, by the Portuguese expansion into the west coast of Africa, and by the transatlantic slave
trade. Spain in the 15th century provided a template for ethno-religious cleansing and the creation of other racial states. The crusades against Muslim indels
abroad coincided with anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe itself. Although the limpieza de sangre was formulated in religious termsJewishness and Muslimness
could be remedied by conversionthe metaphor of purity of blood prepared
the way for biological and scientic racism in subsequent centuries.
Christian demonology about Muslims and Jews thus set the tone for racialized colonialism, equipping the conquistadores with a ready-made conceptual
apparatus to be extended to the Americas. Amerigo Vespuccis travel accounts
drew on the stock of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim imagery to characterize the
indigenous peoples as indels and devil worshipers.65 The conquest of the Indians in the West, for 16th-century Spanish historian Francisco Lpez de Gmara,
prolonged the struggle against the Muslim indels in the East.66 The Hieronymite friars, for their part, referred to the inhabitants of Hispaniola as Moors.67
Shakespeares Caliban in The Tempest, meanwhile, mingled the traits of African
Moors and indigenous Americans. Within a transoceanic drifting of tropes, the
frightening gure of the cannibal, rst elaborated in relation to the Caribs and
Tupi of the Americas, was transferred to Africans. A partial congruency ties the
phantasmatic imagery projected onto both the internal non-Christian enemy
and the external indigenous American and African savage, all portrayed as
blood drinkers, cannibals, and sorcerers. West African orixas (such as Exu)
and indigenous deities (for example, the Tupi deity Tupan), meanwhile, were
diabolized to t into a normatively Manichean Christian schema.
The Iberian wrestling with its legacy of the Orient, associated with Africa
and the South, and the Occident, associated with Europe and the North, persisted in the Americas. In this version, the concept of Orientalism functioned
as synonym for the negative view of the Moorish Muslim and Sephardic Jewish
Orientalization of Iberia and consequently of its new territories in the Americas.68 In this expanding Atlantic space, the ritual legacy of the struggle between
155
Christians and indels, such as the equestrian combats between Spaniards and
Moors, continued to be reenacted, for example, in Brazil in the form of Easter
Sunday street festivals. The Christians, in the words of Gilberto Freyre, were
always victorious and the Moors routed and punished. And Easter Saturday
ended or began with the egy of Judas being carried through the streets and
burned by the urchins in what was evidently a popular expression of religious
hatred of the Catholic for the Jew.69 Jews were viewed, in the words of Freyre,
as the secret agent of Orientalism.70 Thus, before the contemporary Eurocentric erasure, as it were, of the hyphen in the Judeo-Islamic and the insertion of
the hyphen in the Judeo-Christian, the Jew and the Muslim, or the Sephardi
and the Moor, or the Morisco and the converso were articulated within the
same conceptual space, as one allegorical unit. As a form of Iberian anxiety about
its Arabization/Judaization, Orientalism was thus carried over to the Americas,
where it participated in the shaping of emerging regional and national identities.
Yet, if Iberia witnessed centuries of an ideology that justied the cleansing
of the Orientalized Moorish/Sephardic past, Latin America, as a complex site
of global cultural encounters and of ambivalence toward the colonial metropole,
has also witnessed a certain nostalgia for that Oriental past. The tropical imaginary has been partly shaped by what could be called the Moorish unconscious
of Latin America, where denial and desire of that forgotten origin have coexisted
simultaneously. The mundane pride of some families in their Moorish Morisco
or Sephardi converso lineage has been expressed in popular tales and registered
in the work of various writers. From Jos Marts exhortation Seamos Moros!
to Carlos Fuentess celebration of Mexicos buried mirror, the question of the
Moor never stopped haunting the Latin American imaginary, even if only on the
margins.71 In Freyres theorization of Brazilian identity, he gives great weight to
the Moorish/Sephardic cultural history of Portugal as actively shaping Brazilian customs and practices. In the early colonial era, Brazilian people maintained
Moorish/Sephardic traditions such as the covering of women attending church,
the preference for sitting on rugs with legs crossed, and the use of Moorish architectural structures and artistic designs, including the glazed tiling, checkered
window panes, and so forth.72 But the programmatic adoption of OccidentalEuropean customs, institutionalized with Brazils independence in 1822, catalyzed a detachment from the Moorish/Sephardic heritage.73
Part of a shared cultural landscape, both Muslims and Jews were seen by Iberian and Ibero-American authorities as alien excrescences to be extirpated from
a putatively pure body politic. Although one can argue about the degree or the
depth of the religious convivencia of Al-Andalus, clearly Muslims and Jews lived
in a densely textured cultural intimacy, in which the more potent divide was not
between Muslim and Jew but between Christians, on the one hand, and Mus-
156
lims and Jews on the other.74 A swelling corpus has documented the long history of a cultural continuity and political alliance between Muslim and Jew.75 Key
philosophical, literary, grammatical, and medical texts within Judaism were written in Arabic and in dialogue with Islamic writings, while Sephardi (and even
some Ashkenazi) synagogues were built in the Moorish style. The Star of David
hexagram (also known as the Seal of Solomon) adorned the faades of some
mosques such as the Testour mosque in Tunisia, as well as Moroccan coins and
the Moroccan ag. Muslims and Jews also revered some shared holy gures, such
as Sidi Abu-Hasira, whose graves became sites of pilgrimages for both faiths.
Similar zones of Muslim-Jewish anity, embedded within a larger JudeoIslamic cultural geography, mark even the modern period. Although Arab and
Jew have come to be seen as antonyms in the wake of the Israeli-Palestinian
conict, this dichotomy is of recent vintage. In Orientalist discourse, Arabs and
Jews were seen not only as speaking similar Semitic languages but also as actively
allied or as sharing similar origins. The Jewish question, as Gil Anidjar puts it,
has never been anything but the Arab question. . . . Islamophobia and Judeophobia have always been the two faces of the same and only question.76 With
the emancipation of the European Jew, the Orientalist gure of the single Jewish/Muslim Semite was split into two, in the form of the assimilated European
Jew and the backward Muslim Arab, with the Arab-Jew occupying an ambivalent
position between the two.77 Approaching the same question with regard to a later
point in history, Domenico Losurdo points to the continuities between Judeophobia and Islamophobia. The same charges once advanced against Jewstribalism, antimodernity, dual loyalty, the refusal to integrateare now pressed against
Arabs/Muslims. The diabolical gure of the Islamo-fascist terrorist has replaced
the old Jewish-anarchist.78
Foundational to our approach is an engagement with the inherent relationality of the intra-European and the extra-European, thus rendering problematic
the internal/external distinction itself. If Nazi exterminationism in one sense
grew out of the millennial internal traditions of anti-Semitism, in another sense
it grew out of external colonialism. The Shoah and colonialism were linked both
metaphorically and metonymically, metaphorically comparable in their demonizations of internal and external others but also metonymically connected in
historical and discursive terms. Hitler, as he began to frame the Final Solution,
appealed to the precedent of colonial genocides. Already in a 1932 speech, Hitler
hailed the Spanish Conquest of Central America and the British colonization of
India as based on the absolute superiority of the white race. The large-scale murder of indigenous Americans, Tazmanians, and Armenians, for Hitler in Mein
Kampf, showed that entire peoples could be exterminated with impunity, provided that the people in question were powerless and dened as beyond the pale
157
of the human. Hitler himself cited the North American extermination of red
savages as an example to be emulated. Around the turn of the century, German
colonists themselves had virtually annihilated two southwest African peoples
(the Herrero and the Nama) in what retroactively looks like a rehearsal for the
later attempt to annihilate the Jews, along with the Gypsies, homosexuals, and
other pathological bodies.
In this sense, both anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe and colonial annihilations
outside of Europe could be seen as training sessions for Nazi genocide of the
Jews. While the Holocaust, as the paradigm for exterminationist racism, has its
own horric specicity, it also exists on a historical continuum with other forms
of colonial racism. Even Nazi experiments on Jews can be viewed on a continuum
with the scientic racism that made the bodies of Africans and indigenous Americans available for experimentation and dissection. To see the Shoah and colonial
slavery as completely unrelated, or as involved in a grotesque rivalry over the ethical capital of victimhood, or even worse to lapse into anti-Semitism or antiblack
racism by dismissing the historical centrality of either, is not only to miss their
inherent connectedness but also to downplay the signicance of such aliations
as perceived by racialized intellectuals themselves. To place in relation dierent histories of victimization is not to rank them in an obscene hierarchy but
rather to mutually illuminate them as partially analogous yet also distinct forms
of racialized degradation. For Csaire in Discourse on Colonialism, the Holocaust
constituted the crowning barbarism of a long history of massacres in Africa,
Asia, and Latin America.79 Csaire conceptualized the Holocaust as a blowback
or choc en retour of colonialist racism. Hannah Arendt, similarly, in The Origins of
Totalitarianism, saw the formation of racist societies within imperialism as a key
step toward racial exterminationism in Europe itself.80 Delinking the Shoah and
colonial genocides downplays zones of historical aliation and potential coalition and identication.
In the aftermath of the war and the Shoah, Jewish intellectuals played a boldly
progressive role in both the United States and France, often becoming key contributors to the seismic shift. Jewish historians such as Herbert Aptheker, Lawrence Levine, Howard Zinn, and Stanley Elkins disinterred the buried histories of black resistance through sympathetic histories of slave revolts. Formed
both by the Civil Rights struggle and the vibrant tradition of Jewish radicalism,
many Jews became catalytic gures in the 1960s radical movements. Herbert
Marcuse, I.F. Stone, George Mosse, Studs Terkel, Jerry Rubin, Abby Homan,
Mark Rudd, Paul Wellstone, Bettina Aptheker, Michael Lerner, and Todd Gitlin
became highly visible gures on the radical left. Indeed, Jewish intellectuals such
as Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Zillah Eisenstein, Seymour Hirsch, Joel
Kovel, Amy Goodman, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Alissa Solomon, Tony Kush-
158
ner, Naomi Klein, and so many others have formed an indispensible part of left
and antiracist movements. (To even begin to list such gures risks implying an
impossible comprehensiveness.)
In France, similarly, Jewish writers such as Claude Lvi-Strauss, Henri Alleg,
Lon Poliakov, Maxime Rodinson, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Benny Lvy were in
the forefront of the struggle against racism, anti-Semitism, and colonialism. The
communist Alleg, a supporter of the Algerian anticolonial struggle, was imprisoned and tortured (including electroshock, waterboarding, and truth drug injections) by the French in Algeria. His 1958 book about the experience (La Question)
provoked a restorm of controversy. Another supporter of Algerian independence, the Tunisian Jew Albert Memmi, in Portrait du Colonis, Prcd de Portrait
du Colonisateur (1957) and LHomme Domin (1968), stressed the anities among
oppressed people, including Jews. In France, the mutually respectful structure of
feeling between Jews and Muslims became evident in the reaction of prominent
Jews to the police massacre of Algerians, on October 17, 1961. Representatives of
the Jewish community expressed solidarity with the Algerian Muslim community on the basis of a common memory of oppression. A text largely written by
Claude Lanzmann but signed by such gures as Laurent Schwartz and Pierre
Vidal-Naquet denounced what might be called an anti-Arab pogrom:
If we do not react, we French will become the accomplices of the racist fury for
which Paris has been the theatre and which bring us back to the darkest days of
the Nazi occupation. We refuse to distinguish between the Algerians piled up
in the Palais des Sports waiting to be refoules, and the Jews parked in Drancy
before being deported. ... The undersigned demand that all parties, unions and
democratic organizations, not only demand the end of these terrible measures, but
also manifest their solidarity with the Algerian workers by inviting their members
to resist any renewal of such violence.81
French Jews and Maghrebian Arabs, in this case, were comrades in arms. But this
was hardly the only case of such solidarities. In the postWorld War II period,
considerable testimony points to alliances within France between Jews and other
stigmatized groups such as blacks and Arab/Muslims. Many of the Jewish participants in the May 1968 movementnotably Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Alain Geismar, Alain Krivine, Benny Lvy, Henri Weber, Serge July, Edgar Morin, Benjamin Stora, Ilan Halevi, and Sophie Bessis, to name just a fewdeveloped a
rhetoric of solidarity and alliance among the victims of racism, xenophobia, and
anti-Semitism. (Conversely, during Vichy, the Paris mosque protected Jews.)
At the same times, many black anticolonialist thinkers expressed an identication with Jews as peers in suering. In a contemporary context where Jews and
Arabs, and Jews and blacks, are often discussed as separate and even antonymical, it is useful to reread Fanon, writing in an earlier historical conjuncture when
159
progressive thinkers often linked Jewish and black oppression. Fanon cites his
West Indian philosophy professor as warning him, Whenever you hear anyone
abuse the Jews, pay attention, because he is talking about you. ... An anti-Semite
is inevitably anti-Negro.82 Fanons recollection of his professors words reverberates with the broader tradition of diasporic cross-cultural identications found,
for example, in the black allegorization of Jewish biblical stories of slavery, Exodus, and the Promised Land. It is this long historical dure that provides context
for the following Fanon statement: Since I was not satised to be racialized, by
a lucky turn of fate I was humanized. I joined the Jew, my brother in misery.83
Drawing parallels between the anti-Semite and the racist, Fanon recalls Sartres
argument that the Jew is a creation of the anti-Semites xating gaze. For Sartre,
it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew, just as, for Fanon, it is the white who
makes the black.84 The emotional life of both is split in two as they pursue a
dream of universal brotherhood in a world that rejects [them].85 The attempts
by the Jew, for Sartre, or by the black, for Fanon, to assimilate into an oppressive
society lead only to the pathologies of self-hatred and inferiority.
Along with identication, the Jew and the black served as sites of comparative analysis of racism. Expanding Sartres dialectics of identity in Anti-Semite and
Jew, Fanon delineates the distinct psychic mechanisms that emplot the Jew and
the black within the racist imaginary. The assimilated black, unlike the assimilated (European) Jew, remains overdetermined by the visibility of the black body.
The Jew is also a white man. ... He can sometimes pass unnoticed, ... [while] I
am not the slave of the idea others have of me, but of my appearance.86 Signicant distinctions separate anti-Semitic and antiblack imageries, then, precisely in
terms of corporeality. The Negro, Fanon writes, symbolizes the biological danger; the Jew, the intellectual danger.87 While Jews are feared in their presumed
control over everything, blacks are feared in their mythically tremendous sexual
powers.88 Seen as possessing self-control and the power to control others in subtle, even invisible ways, the Jew functions as superego, while the black is projected
as id, lacking in self-control, signaling immanent chaos. It is in this context that
Fanon began to explore the dierential overlappings, the Venn diagrams of racism.89 Comparing the violence toward Jews and blacks, Fanon writes,
No anti-Semite would conceive of ... castrating the Jew. He is killed or sterilized.
... The Jew is attacked in his religious identity, in his history, in his race, in his
relations with his ancestors and with his posterity; when one sterilizes a Jew, one
cuts o the source; every time that a Jew is persecuted, it is the whole race that is
persecuted in his person. But it is in his corporeality that the Negro is attacked.
It is as a concrete personality that he is lynched. It is as an actual being that he is
a threat. The Jewish menace is replaced by the fear of the sexual potency of the
Negro.90
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Fanons comparative framework does not conate the experiences of Jews and
blacks, then, but places them in productive relationality.
Anities in victimization, however, do not guarantee cross-communal identication and may even result in a rolling series of resentful transferences among
the oppressed. While dierent forms of victimization should ideally illuminate
each other mutually, they have too often come to overshadow each other.91 Fanon,
in this sense, touched on the question of the black in the eyes of the Jew. He
writes of Michel Salomon, He is a Jew, he has a millennial experience of antiSemitism, and yet he is racist.92 Fanons attention to a racist Jew in a period
immediately following the Jewish Holocaust serves as a harbinger of the later ssures in the black-Jewish alliance. Fanon invites us to reect on the parallel and
distinct forms of interminority racism in comparison with that of normal white
Christian racism. Fanons text anticipates the gradual entryhowever tenuous
and contradictoryof the Jew into the terrain of whiteness in the postWorld
War II era, especially in the United States. In Fanons text, one nds the seeds
of whiteness studiesdiscussed in chapter 7and specically the study of the
whitening of the Jew within the general imaginary and even within the social
psyche of some Jews.
Although Fanon carved out spaces of black identity in relation to Jewishness
and Arabness, and although he saw both anti-Semitism and anti-Arabism as an
integral part of French colonial ideology, the question of Palestine and Israel is
not present in his work. Yet Fanons life and text did not fully escape it. While
Fanon was experimenting with new social-therapeutic methods in Tunisia, rival
colleagues tried to have him dismissed by accusing him of being a Zionist undercover agent maltreating Arab patients on orders from Israel, an accusation dismissed outright by Ben Salah, then Tunisian minister of health.93 In the wake of
the 1967 war, Fanons French widow, Josie, then living in Algeria, insisted that the
publisher omit Sartres preface from the French reprint of The Wretched of the
Earth because of his pro-Zionist position.94 Sartre and Beauvoir had been among
the most vocal French leftists in support of Algerian self-determination. Their
journal Les Temps Modernes oered a crucial platform for denouncing the rampant torture of Algerians and the daily violence generated by the colonial system.
Those who supported an independent Algeria suered retaliation in the form of
blacklisting and terror; Sartre was declared public enemy number one, and on
July 19, 1961, a bomb exploded at the entrance hall to his apartment.95 Yet, in the
post-1967 era, many Arab critics found that Sartre had crossed over to the other
side by signing a petition describing Israel as threatened by its Arab neighbors.96
The French writer Jean Genet, in contrast, supported the Palestinian cause, just
as he supported the Black Panthers in the United States. Retrospectively, one
might locate in this post-1967 moment the beginnings of a gradual shift away
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from the enthusiastic embrace of Israel by some French leftist intellectuals. It was
also the moment when a number of Jewish intellectuals in the West, disturbed by
Third World support for Palestine, began to move to the right.
From Mao to Moses: Neocons and the Nouveaux Philosophes

It was largely in the wake of the 1967 war and the ongoing occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza that the Jewish-black and JewishThird World alliance
began to fray. Initially associated with the left, a number of Jewish-French guresnotably Claude Lanzmann, Bernard-Henri Lvy, Andr Glucksmann, and
Alain Finkielkrautand Jewish American guresnotably Norman Podhoretz,
Irving Kristol, and David Horowitzslowly moved away from solidarity with
blacks, Arabs, and Third World causes. In France, some of these gures became
associated with the nouveaux philosophes, while in the United States, those associated with the neocons moved even further to the right. An impassioned defense
of the state of Israel slowly became knitted together with an antiThird World
structure of feeling (Williams). A kind of zero-sum rivalry surfaced within
the public sphere, whereby attention paid to racism came to be seen not only as
detracting from the ght against anti-Semitism but also, worse, as propagating
anti-Semitism. Although simplistic equations between Zionism and Judaism at
times stem from anti-Semitism, the response of these intellectuals was not to
deconstruct the equation or to engage the dilemmas that Zionism poses to leftist
Jews and even to certain Enlightenment principles but rather to forge a new (old)
vanguard in defense of the West.
In a shift in qualier and noun, a number of leftists evolved from being Jewish
radicals to being radical Jews. The itinerary of Benny Lvy, the Egyptian-born
leader of the radical Proletarian Left movement, condenses the rightward turn
of some Jewish 1968 leftists in France. An intimate of Sartre, Lvy abandoned his
revolutionary nom de guerre Pierre Victor in the mid-1970s as part of an odyssey
from Mao to Moses.97 Lvy replaced the 1968 slogan Under the paving stones,
the beach with the more Judaic Under the cobblestones of politics, the beach
of theology. In 2000, he moved to Jerusalem, where he founded, together with
Bernard-Henri Lvy and Alain Finkielkraut, an institute dedicated to the work
of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The trajectory of Albert
Memmi also personies a (more mild) turn to the right. The radical anticolonialist of The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) has become progressively more critical of the Arab/Muslim world. In Decolonization and the Decolonized, Memmi
also voices anxiety about what he calls the Trojan Horse of Islamic immigration
in Europe itself. He stigmatizes the banlieue youth as resentful zombies who
adopt the insignia of the hip-hop subculture as a sign of revolt. Although Memmi
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remains resolutely secular, he also pathologizes and essentializes an Arab mind

constructed as coherent and without contradiction.98
In retrospect, we can detect an anticipatory sign of the post-1968 turn to the
right in Pascal Bruckners already discussed 1983 polemic The White Mans Sobs,
which intermittently links Jewish concerns with antagonism to Third Worldism. At times, and especially in the footnotes, one senses that for Bruckner, in
the period following the Zionism is racism proposition in the United Nations,
Israel and Jews are at the very kernel of the West; for him, a threat to one is a
threat to the other, as we see in the hyperbolic language of the following very
revealing sentence: No one has the right to declare the West guilty for the sole
reason that it exists, as if the West were an insult to creation, a cosmic catastrophe, a monstrosity to be wiped o the map of the world (and that is why the
question of Israel is capital: through the non-recognition of Israel, it is the illegitimacy of the West which is really at stake).99 Here Israel (and by implication
Palestine) comes to allegorize the West/East relation generally. Bruckner thus
relays a foundational Zionist trope, dating back to Herzls notion of the state of
the Jews as an outpost of Western civilization, a Switzerland in the Middle East.
But unlike a Herzl traumatized by the Dreyfus Aair, Bruckner, a century later,
rhetorically transfers to the imperializing and often anti-Semitic West the moral
authority bestowed by the historical legacy of Jewish pain in Europe. And here
we nd a contradiction between one of the central premises of Zionismthat
is, that Jews need Israel as unique refuge from Western anti-Semitismand the
paradoxically pro-Western bias of Zionism itself, even though the movements
founding assumption was that the experiment with Jewish safety and equality in
Europe had failed, not that it had succeeded.
In hyperbolic language, Bruckner claims that the Wests enemies regard it
as a cosmic catastrophe and a monstrosity to be wiped o the map. He thus
associates Third Worldist intellectuals with the idiom of exterminationist antiSemitism. Bruckner asserts a homology between the two issues: just as Israels
enemy, the Arabs, are presented as wanting to wipe Israel o the Middle Eastern map, so Europes enemies are presented as wanting to erase the West o the
world map. Bruckner here displays an astonishingly short historical memory.
Writing only forty years after the Jewish Holocaust took place in Europe and
only in Europe, and after the Vichy government sent thousands of Jews to the
death camps, Bruckner portrays the West as innocent. Whereas Fanon mobilized
the gure of the Jew to draw analogies and anities between the various groups
oppressed by Western racism, Buckner deploys the same gure to portray the
West itself as oppressed. Israel, meanwhile, is for Bruckner the incarnation of
Western modernity, while Arabs/Muslims reincarnate traditional anti-Semitism.
While assuming the perspective that Zionism was a national liberation project
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for Jews, the representatives of the rightward turn do not engage the possibility
that it was at the same time, within the fraught dialectics of independence and
nakba, a national destruction project for Palestinians.
Bruckner transfers what in Israel has been termed the siege syndrome to the
West as a whole, imaged as besieged by Third World barbarians yelping at the
gates of Europe. Bruckner anticipates the rhetoric of North American neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle, who warn, in An End to Evil, of a new
Holocaust, this time directed not at Jews but rather at the United States: There
is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or Holocaust.100 The United States
is viewed as the potential victim of an imminent Final Solution projectthis
time conducted by fanatical Arabs/Muslimsanalogous to that which victimized Jews during the Shoah. The equation of Arabs/Muslims with Nazis has
often served in Zionist discourse to justify the policies of the Israeli state, an
equation updated and recongured by the post-9/11 neoconservative coinage
Islamo-fascism, a term that tars a vast and variegated cultural-religious sphere
with a totalitarian brush. In a period of anti-immigrant racism and ongoing
battles over le voile in France, the nouveaux philosophes have been asserting the
metanarrative of the West. The U.S. neoconservatives, meanwhile, have been
forging a strong Judeo-Christian alliance, including with American Christian
fundamentalists. (Here the Judeo-Christian hyphen not only asserts a strong
Jewish-Christian alliance but also embeds a supersessionist Christian teleology
implying a progression from the Old Testament, i.e., the Jewish Bible, to the
New Testament.) Although anti-Semitism remains a serious and persistent
problem, including among fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, an isomorphism here connects the right-wing Israeli and right-wing American self-portrait; a rhetoric of siege and encirclement depicts vastly militarily and
geopolitically powerful nation-states as weak and vulnerable.
Bruckner continues this line of thought in his 1995 book The Temptation of
Innocence.101 For Bruckner, the nearly universal condemnation (including by some
Israelis) of concrete Israeli actionssettlements, targeted assassinations, and
so forthderives not from the actions themselves but rather from resentment
against Jews for not conforming to the stereotype of the Jewish victim. What is
missed in this pop-psychological diagnosis is that often the same kind of sensitivity to injustice that made some non-Jews sympathetic to Jews as a minority
and to Israel as a project also motivates contemporary sympathy for the Palestinian victims of Israeli policies. In our view, anti-Israelism coincides with antiSemitism only when the critics anticolonial passion applies uniquely to Israel or
when the criticism becomes entangled with anti-Jewish pathologies and essentialist characterizations of Jews or Israelis in general, or equates Jews everywhere
with Zionism and Israeli policies, or forgets that Israeli policies resemble those of
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settler-colonial states generally (with the dierence that Jews, unlike the French
in Algeria, had no metropole to which to return and did have an abiding cultural-religious-historical attachment to the Holy Land). Bruckner typies the
ideological mutation by which some Jewish thinkersand we insist again on this
somemoved from the antiracist left to the center right of the political spectrum, and to the far right in terms of Israel.102 The New Right thus came to participate in a discourse that frames the Israeli-Palestinian conict as about antiSemitism, thus placing all the weight of European anti-Semitism on the backs of
Palestinians, who had no role in the Shoah, while ignoring issues of land, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and autonomy.
Like the neoconservatives in the United States, the nouveaux philosophes are
former leftists who now despise everything evoked in the phrase the 1960s. In
the discursive encounter between some pro-American French and Francophobic neocon American commentators, the analogy between anti-Americanism and
anti-Semitism has been pervasive, as if Americans had become, in symbolic terms
at least, the new Jews. This conation pervaded American right-wing commentary about France, seen as both anti-Semitic and anti-American in the wake of
French resistance to the Iraq War. One has to look to France, wrote Charles
Krauthammer in Europe and Those People in the Washington Post (April 26,
2002), to nd perennial anti-Semitism. Although it is true that France, like
Europe generally, had indeed been the site of a long history of anti-Semitic prejudice and violence, it is also true that France was also the rst European country
to emancipate the Jews, and many French Jews reached high positions of literary prestige (Marcel Proust), economic inuence (the Rothschilds), and political power (Lon Blum, Pierre Mends France, Simone Weil, Bernard Kouchner).
Setting aside the barefaced anti-Semitism of Le Pen and the Holocaust negationism of Faurisson, most of the denunciations of French anti-Semitism centered
on anti-Jewish attacks in France (some perpetrated by right-wing anti-Semites
and others by resentful Maghrebian youth scapegoating French Jews for events
in the Middle East). Violence against French Jews has usually been followed by
strong denunciation by the authorities and often by massive popular protests, for
example, in the case of the brutal torture and murder of a Ilan Halimi, a French
Jew of Maghrebian origin. The anti-French stance of the neoconservatives also
had do with the fact that France did not support the Iraq War and was critical
of the Israeli occupation, an attitude taken as emblematic of anti-Semitism by
American neoconservatives and by some from the French New Right.
The name Alain Finkielkraut has been a constant reference in the French
discussions of multiculturalism, identity politics, and Zionism. A charismatic
mediatic presence, praised by Sarkozy as a key public intellectual, Finkielkraut
combats left antiracist identity politics in the name of a very French Enlighten-
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ment that emancipated the Jews and favored the universal over the particular.
Over the years, he has become increasingly hostile to people of color and to antiracist movements. Like his counterparts in the United States, Finkielkraut sets
up a series of Jewish-over-black hierarchies, claiming that Jewish immigrants,
unlike others, made it on their own, without the help of special remedial measures. Ignoring the very dierent circumstances of Jews emigrating from eastern
Europe and of immigration from spaces colonized by France, Finkielkraut adopts
a resentful discourse reminiscent of that of some white ethnics in the United
States by proclaiming his own Jewish group a model minority. At the same time,
in a French variation of the Asian Americans as model minority discoursea
way to subtly marginalize blacks as the non-model minorityhe contrasts the
peaceful hardworking Vietnamese immigrants with the rebellious North Africans. Unlike the others, blacks and Arabs are after personal gain.103
In Finkielkrauts discourse, ethno-national narcissism goes hand in hand with
the otherization of Arabs/Muslims and the endorsement of the mission civilisatrice. Finkielkraut expresses a Mandarin disgust for the way they speak French,
a French whose throat has been cut. Finkielkraut has even complained that contemporary school curricula no longer teach that the colonial project also sought
to educate, to bring culture to the savages.104 In a postrebellion (November 15,
2005) interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, later translated in Le Monde,
Finkielkraut resorted to an anti-immigrant version of love it or leave it!: They
have a French ID card, so they are French. And if not, they have a right to leave.
... No ones keeping them here.105 Forgetting that banlieue youth were deeply
imbued with the civic values of French republicanism but excluded from its social
benets, Finkielkraut saw the 2005 banlieue rebellions as triggered not by police
brutality, unemployment, or institutional racism but rather by the Muslim identity of young blacks and Arabs. The critics of identity politics, we see, can also
deploy identity as an explanatory principle when it serves a culturalist argument
against their adversaries.
Whereas Fanon discerned anities between the victims of racism and the
victims of anti-Semitism, Finkielkraut has increasingly come to equate antiracism both with racism and with anti-Semitism, usually in conjunction with a
blinkered adoration of the United States as a supposedly victimized nation-state.
Finkielkrauts most dangerous idea, repeated ad nauseam in his books, is the
absurd notion that antiracism is the new totalitarianism. Seduced by the elegance
of his own paradoxes, Finkielkraut sees opposition to racism as the opposite of
what it is and what it appears to be. Finkielkraut also sees the very idea of a black
people as racist and anti-Semitic. Those who speak of a black nation, or of a
black people, as he put it in an October 16, 2005, interview with Radio de la
Communaut Juive (RCJ), are creating a black Ku Klux Klan. And who is their
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principal enemy? Its not the white, no, its the Jew who is both rival and model.
It is the model of the exterminated Jewish people that constitutes the image of
enslaved and colonized black people. A model which it tries to combat, discredit,
to place out of the competition, in order to supplant it, to occupy its throne.106
Where others might see historical anities and aective solidarities, Finkielkraut
sees a malicious plagiarism or mimetic usurpation of the Jewish narrative. Just
as some Zionists accused Palestinian intellectuals of Jewish narrative envy,
Finkielkraut laments that the Shoah now belongs to everyone: La Shoah pour
tous! Refusing to put the Shoah and slavery on the same level, Finkielkraut goes
so far as to deny that slavery was a crime against humanity. Rather than envision
black history and activism in terms of cross-community dialogue, Finkielkraut
sees it as encroaching on Jewish terrain in an ethnic turf war.
Parallel to Finkielkrauts denial of the existence of a black people comes his
denial of the existence of a Palestinian people. Melding Sartres the anti-Semite
creates the Jew with Golda Meirs there is no Palestinian people, Finkielkraut
regards the Palestinians as merely an epiphenomenon of Israel. Is there anything
in Palestinian identity, he asks in his book of dialogues with Peter Sloterdijk,
besides the refusal of Israel?107 Finkielkraut has even claimed that blacks detest
Israel because it is not a pays mtiss (miscegenated country). Here Finkielkraut
paints himself into a corner by denying something recognized, now even celebrated, by ocial Israeli discoursethat is, the multiculturality of Israel itself,
with its people gathered from the four corners of the earth, a country whose
phenotypical spectrum ranges from Russian blonds to Ethiopian blacks and
which features a linguistic polyglossia embracing scores of languages both European and non-European (Arabic, Amharic, Farsi, Kurdish, and Turkish, among
others). For millennia, Jews have been miscegenated and hyphenated almost by
denition, with new Zelig-like mixings even in the Jewish state.
And what is the substantive content of Israel Westernness, and why would
Westernness necessarily be positive (or negative)? Here we see that the idea of
the West, a complex, contradictory, and partly imaginary concept like the East,
can become a screen onto which very diverse desires are projected. In this sense,
Finkielkraut occidentalizes Judaism. But can Judaism, rooted in the geography of
the East, be dened simply as a Western religion? Are Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic,
Farsi, Kurdish, and Turkishall spoken by JewsWestern languages? How
did Jews become part and parcel of a West seen as synonymous with tolerance,
given the Wests well-documented history of the oppression of its perennial Jewish
other? In demographic terms, is Israels majority population of Palestinian Arabs
and Sephardi/Mizrahi/Arab Jews Western?108 Even Israels Ashkenazi Jews
(the Ostjuden) came largely from the East of Europe. Israeli Westernism, then,
is less a demographic/cultural fact than an ideological tropology. Arab Jews, that
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is, those from the Arab/Islamic world who are Jewish in religion and Arab in culture, complicate neat divisions between East and West. What is their relation, in
the dominant imaginary, to the neo-Orientalist splitting of bad Semite (the Muslim Arab) and good Semite (the Westernized Jew)? A certain Ashkenazi-centrism
surfaces in Finkielkrauts derisive comments about the contemporary exaltation of
hybridity and syncretism: In fact, I have never heard anyone openly proclaim the
hybridization of Jews and Arabs, even though that would be a logical consequence
of the grammar of absolute mlange.109 Finkielkrauts evocation of what he sees
as the purely hypothetical possibility of Arab-Jewish hybridizationpresented as
a witty reductio ad absurdumgives voice to his Arab-versus-Jew Manicheanism. His formulation ignores a millennial history of hybridization between Jews
and Arabs, whence the hyphenated existence of Arab-Jews, the long-term product
of Judeo-Islamic syncretism. While naturalizing one Judeo-Christian hyphen, he
declares the other Judeo-Muslim hyphen beyond the pale.
Finkielkrauts defense of French universalism is directed against a specic
political target: the anti-imperialist and antiracist left as potential allies of the
Palestinians, North African immigrants, and the Global South. The enemy is not
always named, however; it is sometimes evoked in villainized abstractions such
as dierentialism, postmodernism, relativism, and communitarianism, representing tendencies that in Finkielkrauts eyes abandon the very category of the
universal. (Here we see a partial convergence with the views of leftists such as
iek, but without ieks Marxism or his capricious embrace of Pauline Christianity.) Despite the ponderous elegance of Finkielkrauts style and the weight
of his cultural baggage, his arguments bear a family resemblance to those of the
much cruder David Horowitz in the United States, although a dierent political
spectrum positions Finkielkraut farther to the left than his U.S. peers.
A number of progressive French Jewish intellectuals have lamented the neoconservatization of some French Jews. French Jewish intellectuals are extremely
diverse in ideological terms, and the debates are much too rich and complex to
survey here; but we can provide a rough schema of the issues at stake. An obsessive defense of the state of Israel, in the view of these progressives, has led to a
defensive, almost paranoid posture on the part of some French Jews. Jean Daniel,
founder of the left-of-center Nouvel Observateur, argues in his La Prison Juive
that French Jews have committed a kind of self-incarceration whereby they live in
a ghetto of their own construction.110 Many draw parallels with neoconservatives
in the United States, with the dierence that neoconservatism is now ltered not
through the American exceptionalism of the New American Century but rather
through French republicanism.
Jean Birnbaum, in Les Maoccidents, writes that the French neoconservative is not a Trotskyist who joins the elite but rather a Maoist who has lost his
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people, passing from the cult of the Red East to the defense of the West.111
Birnbaum points to Grard Bobillier, Andr Glucksmann, Guy Lardreau, and
Jean-Claude Milner as political gures who moved from the extreme left of La
Cause du Peuple and Maos Cultural Revolution to Mosaic Judaism and Zionism. The alliance with French conservatism was sealed when former Maoist
Andr Glucksmann was granted the Legion of Honor by Sarkozy. Ivan Segr
develops a similar thesis in La Raction Philosmite, criticizing a number of
intellectuals ( Jewish and non-Jewish) for whom Islamophobia, Zionism, and
a turn to the right go hand in hand.112 The total embrace of Zionism has led
to the veritable excommunication of any Jews who dare to criticize the state of
Israel: Edgar Morin (known for a half century of principled leftism) is accused
of negationism, that is, Holocaust denial; Eyal Sivan, Israeli lmmaker, is
accused of the same thing on the basis of his lm (made with Michel Khlei)
Route 181; Stphane Hessel, diplomat son of the Jewish German writer Franz
Hessel (prototype for the Jules of Jules and Jim, model of the neur for Walter Benjamin, and a victim of Vichyiste anti-Semitism), is prosecuted by the
tribunals of BNVAC (National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism)
for having supported economic sanctions against Israel.
Guillaume Weill-Raynal, meanwhile, has denounced in a series of books, the
ways that Zionist pressure and propaganda have made it virtually impossible to
discuss the Israel/Palestine conict in a rational manner. He speaks of a climate
of McCarthyism surrounding any criticism of Israel. Emphasizing disinformation, he criticizes public intellectuals such as Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre-Andr
Taguie, who have created the phantasm of a new anti-Semitism in France. The
idea of a Judeophobic France and Europe has spread around France, the United
States, and Israel. In Une Haine Imaginaire: Contre-Enqute sur le Nouvel Antismitisme, Weill-Raynal argues that gures such as Taguie, Finkielkraut, and
Jacques Tarnero, allied with media elites, have constructed an imaginary hatred,
whereby the struggle against anti-Semitism has been instrumentalized as an
arm of intimidation and disqualication.113 Those diasporic more Israeli than
the Israelis Jews nd anti-Semitism everywhere. In Les Nouveaux Dsinformateurs, Weill-Raynal speaks of an ensemble of procedures and precise mechanisms
through which opinion is manipulated, in this case through the marketing of
Israel and the demonization of the Arabs, Muslims, and the pro-Palestinian
left.114 The point of this manipulation is to cast in an anti-Semitic light even the
most mild and indirect criticism of Israel. Within the new anti-Semitism, it
is argued, Israel is being vilied, demonized, Nazied. For Weill-Raynal, these
attitudes have led to the worst forms of racism and Islamophobia, resulting in a
double standard: the mildest statements are taken to be anti-Jewish, a comment
about Jews and commerce, a remark in the some of my best friends genre, if
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pronounced by a critic of Israel, is taken to be Hitlerian, while the pro-Israeli side

can say the most outrageous things. Weill-Raynal cites numerous examples from
the website of the UPJF, the Union of the Jewish Managers and Professionals of
France: claims that there are too many mosques in France, that there is no economic migration from the Islamic countries but only a fourteen-hundred-year
Caliphate conspiracy to take over Europe. The same kind of verminization of
the other practiced against Jews in anti-Semitic Vichy newsreels is now recycled
in the idea that Arabs/Muslims breed like mice. Instead of the conspiracy of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, we have an emplotment of the Elders of the
Caliphate.
The gure of the Jew has been mobilized in remarkably diverse ways by intellectuals in France. For Finkielkraut, the Jew is virtually consubstantial with the
West, much as Israel was preimagined by Zionism as a Jewish Switzerland. Jews
in this discourse become a metonym for Europe, the threatened part representing
the Western whole. For the Tunisian French writer Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, meanwhile, the gure of the Jew is the paradigmatic example of historical victimization. Some people might object that this equation positions Jewish people, la
Sartre, as lacking any history or identity apart from anti-Semitism, but that is
not really Kacems point. The Jew, for Kacem, has become the emblematic gure of alterity through which to think all oppressions. Those who protest racism
constantly invoke the Jewish analogy as a kind of gold standard for prejudice :
Would you say that about a Jew? The question itself recognizes that anti-Semitism bears a historical-existential kernel that makes it analogous to other racisms.
Historical conditions, Kacem argues, have laid down a just and salutary taboo
against anti-Semitism, since the Shoah represented the only time that the West
came close to fullling its morbid fantasy of exterminating the other. At the
same time, Kacem warns against the instrumentalization of anti-anti-Semitism
as part of the constitution of new second-zone racisms. For Kacem, Auschwitz
concerns all of humanity; it is not an ethical capital to be exploited in a victimological competition. Never again, for Kacem, cannot mean never again only for
Jews; it must mean never again for everyone.115
If for Kacem the Jew forms the very paradigm of irreducible alterity, for the
Moroccan American Anouar Majid, in We Are All Moors, it is the Moor who
becomes emblematic of exclusion, but a Moor who is very connected to the
Jew, a Moor who might actually be a Jew. If for the 1968 supporters of Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands, for Majid, nous sommes
tous des Maures. Writing in the wake of Victor Frankel, Primo Levi, Giorgio
Agamben, and Gil Anidjar, Majid sees the Nazi nomination of the most helpless and abject Jews as Muselmnner (Muslims) as historically overdetermined
by the intertwined status of the two groups as the expellable others of European
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purity. Through a process of crisscrossing analogy, Jews and Muslims have sometimes occupied the place of the other, and at times identied with one another.
The dichotomous discourse generated by the Israel/Palestine conict, unfortunately, has too often conspired to drown out the voices of analogy, identication,
and aliation. In Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East, Christopher Wise suggests that Jacques Derrida at times envisions the Messianic Jew as the appropriate gure for all non-European people, including African Muslims. Wise points
out both the major limitation of Derridas thinking on these issueshis failure
ever to challenge Zionismand the advantages oered by a deconstruction that
could be amplied and opened up to be more inclusive than its articulation in
Derridas own writing.116
Like progressive Jewish intellectuals in the United States, many French Jewish intellectuals have taken nuanced positions combining condemnation of racism and anti-Semitism, criticism of Zionism and of Israeli policies, and solidarity
with racialized minorities in France. While deploring the anti-Semitism both of
Le Pen and of some Muslim/Arab militants, Jolle Marelli writes that Jews have
shared with non-European peoples and particularly with colonized peoples, the
fate of being considered as belonging to a specic race seen as inferior to the white
European race.117 Although anti-Semitism has a specic history, those specicities exist on a continuum with other forms of racism. Figures such as Bruckner,
in Marellis view, isolate anti-Semitism from other racisms, resulting in a hierarchy that delegitimizes other antiracist struggles. In contrast to the rightward
turn of the nouveaux philosophes, French Jewish intellectuals such as Henri Alleg,
Alice Cherki, Maxime Rodinson, Benjamin Stora, Edgar Morin, Eric Hazan,
Jolle Marelli, Ilan Halevi, Emmanuelle Saada, Simone Bitton, Eyal Sivan, and
Sophie Bessis do not see Jews as consubstantial with the West but rather as allied
on some levels with the Wests internal and external others. The identication, to
put it in gural terms, is with Jews as the slaves in Egypt and not, as with the
neoconservative Pentagonites, with the modern Pharaohs. Since the 1980s, Jewish-black and Jewish-Muslim collaboration has persisted through such groups
as Perspectives Judeo-Arabes, the Black Jewish Friendship Committee, and Les
Indignes de la Rpublique, which have given concrete political expression to this
coalitionary impulse.118
Jews have been an integral part of the leftist coalition and indispensible contributors to the left antiracist intellectual corpus. A long tradition of Jewish
activism has supported revolutionary causes, and countless radical thinkers have
fought for justice and equality, although they have not necessarily spoken as Jews.
The American group Jews for Racial and Economic Justice ( JFREJ), for its part,
has oered robust solidarity with people of color, while working on the grassroots
level against discrimination, racial proling, police harassment, and so forth. Such
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activists, acknowledging both Jewish advantages via whiteness and the Ashkenazi
dimension of their Jewishness, also resuscitate the progressive history associated
with the New York Yiddishkeit that faded with postwar embourgeoisement and
the post-1967 turn to Zionism. As signied by the slogan Not in Our Name,
these leftists refuse the idea that the dominant Zionist organizations speak for all
Jews. JFREJ calls attention to the hybrid spaces of Jewishness of those of mixed
backgrounds, as well as to the sexual diversity of the Jewish community. The San
Francisco Jewish Film Festival, founded by Deborah Kaufman and Janis Plotkin,
meanwhile has shown what can be done on the cultural front; the festival began
in the 1980s to encourage a lmic dialogue not only between Jews and non-Jews
but also between Jews and Muslims/Arabs and between Israelis and Palestinians.
Many Jewish intellectuals are nding new ways to formulate diasporic Jewishness, delinking it from Zionism. In Destins Marranes, Daniel Lindenberg argues
that the Marranism provoked by the Spanish Inquisition, resulting in the philosophy of heroes of reason such as Baruch Spinoza, furnished the matrix not
only for Jewish emancipation but for European emancipation generally.119 In Figures dIsral: Lidentit Juive entre Marranisme et Sionisme (16481998), Lindenberg
speaks of the Marranism of Menasse Ben Israel, Sabbatai Tsvi, and Spinoza as
alternatives to nationalist mythologies.120 In The Jew and the Other, Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias explore the long tradition of openness to the
other in many of the earliest strands of Jewish thought.121 Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, for her part, speaks of radical Diasporism as an answer to Zionism:
Where Zionism says go home, Diasporism says we make home where we are.
The word Zionism refers uniquely to Jews; Diasporism deliberately includes the
variety of diasporic experience. ... Diasporism is committed to an endless paradoxical dance between cultural integrity and multicultural complexities.122 This
social and cultural activism has challenged hegemonic denitions of Jewishness,
opening Jewishness up to gay and lesbian Jews and to Arab Jews, all in collaboration with multicultural, critical race, and whiteness scholars. Kaye/Kantrowitzs
book The Colors of the Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism and anthologies such as Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomons Wrestling with Zion and Adam
Shatzs Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and
Israel have charted alternative paths for Jewish leftists.123
Frances Multicultural Turn

Although we have been critical of the positions of some French intellectuals on
issues of race and coloniality, it is worth recalling the achievements of French and
Francophone intellectuals, as well as the many features of French social system
universal health care, virtually free education, worker benetsthat meliorate
172
the situation of all citizens, regardless of color. Despite political corruption and
Enarchist elitism, a relatively well-lubricated welfare state does make life less anxious and more egalitarian than in the United States. Unlike George W. Bushs
ownership society that left the largely black victims of Hurricane Katrina on
their own, the French social system oers a much more secure safety net for the
entire population. The collective life, as a result, is less Social Darwinist and in
some ways more equal, although this rough equality has not yet reached the virtually all-white political class in France (including the Socialist Party). Nonetheless, the 2005 banlieue rebellions demonstrate that the welfare state is simply not
sucient. Although French police do not kill people of color at anything like the
rate that applies in the United States or, even more, in Brazil, scores of young
men of color have been killed by French police. Playing with the resonances
of the word banlieue, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem calls the banlieue the place of the
banned of the republic, recalling Agambens notion of homo sacer, the dead man
outside of the law yet caught up in the mechanism that bans him, perpetually in
relation with the power that bans. Kacem links the word banned to ban-dits,
the half-human, half-animal scum (racaille) denounced by Sarkozy. For the rst
time since the war in Algeria, Kacem points out, we nd states of exception,
ethnically dened curfews, and the Palestinization of the banlieue, generating
a kind of Euro-intifada. Kacem expects little from a French Parliament that is
male, white, bourgeois, and heterosexual and has not represented anyone for a
long time.124
The Bourdieu/Wacquant screed against multiculturalism was published,
ironically, just as French public debate was on the cusp of a massive discursive
shift. In the rst decade of the 21st century, many people on the left moved from
a broad rejection of race-conscious critique and postcolonialism toward a partial
embrace of both projects. Clarisse Fabre and ric Fassin, in their book Libert,
galit, Sexualits, point to an ironic trajectory, in France, from a position that
the culture wars in the United States have absolutely nothing to do with us to
a position that they have everything to do with us. A 2000 book by Fred Constant, titled simply Le Multiculturalisme, oers evidence of this shift. The French
model, Constant asserts, privileges unity against diversity, while the AngloAmerican model constructs unity through diversity. But Constant rejects a reied
dichotomy between pluralism and assimilationism that would make the models
seem more opposed than they really are: In France, not only has the State always
been the agent for the denition and structuration of identities, but also the
republican model has accommodated identitary groups and communities much
more than is generally admitted.125 In a generally unacknowledged convergence,
pragmatism tends to triumph over the rigidity of abstract models and the purity
of ideal types.126
173
Given the new respectability of diversity arguments, some on the French right
are now less preoccupied with American multiculturalism than with French multiculturalism. The JanuaryMarch 2005 issue of the conservative French journal Gopolitique on the theme of le politiquement correct oers a striking exemplum of this trend. In an idiom redolent of the U.S. right, the issue associates
PC with censorship, feminism, totalitarianism, anti-Christianity, and, paradoxically, both moral relativism and moral rigidity. But now, as French conservative
Paul Thibaut asserts in his essay Exception Franaise!, these feared trends have
reached French shores. In the 1990s, he recalls, French intellectuals had seen multiculturalism and political correctness as typically bizarre products of American
idiosyncrasies. Thus, American Puritanism could explain the aggressivity of
feminism, the absence of an aristocratic tradition could explain the populist critique of the canon, and so forth.127
This falsely reassuring discourse, for Thibaut, implied that none of this nonsense would ever come to France. Yet it is now France, he laments, that has introduced gender parity in politics, has irted with quotas and positive discrimination, and has framed laws against Holocaust denial and racism. While the
United States has survived political correctnessthanks to what Thibaut sees
as the far-seeing policies of George W. Bush and the brilliant analyses of Allan
BloomFrance has revealed itself to be even more vulnerable to the multicultural epidemic than the United States itself. Like Ronald Reagan speaking of a
paradisal time back when we didnt have a race problem, Thibaut conjures up an
idyllically unied prelapsarian France subsequently fractured by identity politics.
The situation has become so extreme, he complains, that people now feel free to
denounce Christianity while regarding Islam as sacrosanct. While political correctness was marginal in the U.S., he notes, it is not at all marginal in France.128
In a remarkable turnabout, multiculturalism, once derided as an American
thing, has now become, at least in the mind of this French rightist, a thoroughly
French thing.
174
t he p ost wor l d war ii period in Brazil was a time of relative

democratization after the demise in 1945 of Vargass authoritarian New State rst
installed in 1937. Internationally, the defeat of Nazism led to the global discrediting of fascist racism. After 1945, the chauvinistic right-wing movement called
Integralism was on the defensive, and democratic, union, and black movements
were on the upswing. At the same time, Brazilian left intellectuals expressed support for the decolonization of much of Asia and Africa, including in the region
that most directly concerned Brazil: the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and So Tom, which ultimately achieved independence
relatively late, in the 1970s. Many left Brazilian intellectuals sympathized with
Indian independence in 1947, the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and Algerian independence in 1962. At the same time, left intellectuals began to analyze Brazils
status as a geopolitically neocolonized, dependent, and peripheral country.
The Brazilian lefts strongly nationalist political project was also marked by
the rejection of European and U.S. economic liberalism and cultural imperialism ... and the construction of state-regulated capitalism and an indigenous
national culture with a popular foundation.1 In this conjuncture, Brazilian
intellectuals focused on colonial aspects of the Brazilian situation. Dependency
theory, to which Brazilian intellectuals were major contributors, was a product
of this colonial awareness, which went in hand in hand with a critique of U.S.
political and economic hegemony. While left sociologists in the United States
attacked the dominant sociology of celebration, Marxist social scientists such as
Florestan Fernandes and Octvio Ianni dismantled its rough equivalent in Brazil, what might be called the Freyrean anthropology of celebration. The challenge
for Brazilian intellectuals of all colors was to move away not only from academic
dependency on the dominant codes and lexicon of U.S. and European social sciences but also from the conservative Freyrean tradition.
Racial Democracy and Black Consciousness

At the same time, postwar Brazil witnessed a growing black consciousness movement. Building on earlier black journals such as Menelik and A Voz Negra in the
1920s, Afro-Brazilian actor/poet/dramatist/plastic artist/activist Abdias do
Nascimento founded Quilombo, which published from December 1948 through
175
July 1950. The journal came in the wake of Nascimentos founding of the Black
Experimental Theatre (BET; 19441968), an institution whose goal was to train
black actors and ght against discrimination. Outraged by a Lima, Peru, performance of ONeills Emperor Jones starring a white actor in blackface, Nascimento
resolved to valorize actors of color. In a summary of the groups goals, he wrote,
Both on a social and artistic level, the Black Experimental Theatre strives to restore,
valorize, and exalt the contribution of Africans to the Brazilian formation, unmasking
the ideology of whiteness which created a situation such that, as Sartre puts it, As
soon as he opens his mouth, the negro accuses himself, unless he tries to overthrow
the hierarchy represented by the European colonizer and his civilizing process.2
The goals of the BET were (1) to integrate blacks into Brazilian society, (2) to
criticize the ideology of whitening promoted by the dominant social sciences,
(3) to valorize the African contribution to Brazilian culture, and (4) to promote
the theater as a privileged medium for these ideas. The BET also organized the
National Black Conference (1949) and the First Congress for Black Brazilians
(1950). The BET highlighted the theatrical aspects of African and Afro-diasporic
culture, exemplied by the continents religious feasts, its danced liturgies, and
the primordial role of performance. No more folkloric than Christianity, African religions deployed song and dance to capture the divine and congure the
gods, humanizing them and dialoguing with them in mystic trance.3
Quilombo from its rst issue took an uncompromising stance on racism: Only
someone characterized by a perfectly obtuse naivete or by cynical bad faith, Nascimento wrote in the inaugural editorial, could deny the existence of racial prejudice in Brazil.4 The leading gures in QuilomboGuerreiro Ramos and Nascimentofused class-conscious Marxism with pan-Africanism. But as Abdias do
Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento note in their preface to the facsimile
version of the journal, Quilombo was riven by tensions between the more radical black-activist insiders and the largely white guest-essayist outsiders (including Gilberto Freyre), some of whom clung to the nostrums of racial democracy.
In the overture editorial, Nascimento anatomized the recombinant varieties of
racism in the Black Atlantic. Racism can take the form, Nascimento wrote, of
depriving indigenous blacks of political and economic power over their own territory, as in South Africa, or of violently depriving them of their rights in a land
which they helped build, as in the United States, or of cleverly depriving them of
the psychological and mental means for acquiring the consciousness of their real
condition despite formal equality, as in Brazil.5
Quilombo published some of the most incisive black Brazilian thinkers on race
(Guerreiro Ramos, Solano Trindade, and Nascimento himself ), alongside progressive (white) French writers such as Roger Bastide and Jean-Paul Sartre, as
well as African Americans such as Ralph Bunche and George Schuyler, while also
176
maintaining regular contact with Prsence Africaine, the house organ of Ngritude in France. Quilombos range of themes reected this Afro-cosmopolitanism,
with essays on such subjects as the relations between black Brazilian intellectuals
and Prsence Africaine and the achievements of African Americans such as Nobel
Prize winner Ralph Bunche, opera singer Marian Anderson, and choreographer
Katherine Dunham. Quilombo also published translations from French (Sartres
Orphe Noir preface) and English (George Schuylers Pittsburgh Courier article
comparing racism in the United States and Brazil).6
Abdias do Nascimento personies the pan-Atlantic dimension of Afro-diasporic cosmopolitanism, evidenced by his in-the-esh dialogue with such gures
as Aim Csaire, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bobby Seale, Keorapetse Kgositsile,
and C.L.R. James. Exiled by the dictatorship, Nascimento taught at SUNY
Bualo before returning to Brazil to create the United Black Movement against
Racism and Racial Discrimination (in 1978) and the Institute for Afro-Brazilian
Research and the Memorial Zumbi (in 1980). For Nascimento, the construction of a true democracy necessarily passes through multiculturalism and the
eective implantation of compensatory measures in order to make possible full
citizenship for all the discriminated groups.7 In 1992, year of the anti-Columbus
quincentennial protests, Abdias and Elisa Larkin Nascimento contested the concept of a Latin America, which in their eyes spreads only the domination of
a white elite minority over the majority indigenous and African population, ...
resulting in a grotesque distortion of the demographic and sociocultural reality
of the region.8 As Nascimentos career suggests, Afro-Brazilian intellectuals form
an essential part of the larger practice of diaspora deftly anatomized by Brent
Hayes Edwards. Indeed, Nascimentos writings thread together a palimpsestic
multiplicity of currents: Third World Marxism, pan-Africanism, problack Brazilian nationalism, West Indian Ngritude, and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement.
The 1950s UNESCO studies of race constituted another key vector in the
postwar shift as it took place in Brazil. UNESCO deputized an international
team of scholars: Florestan Fernandes, Roger Bastide, and Oracy Nogueira were
assigned to research racial relations in So Paulo; Thales de Azevedo and Charles
Wagley were assigned to Bahia; and Darcy Ribeiro was to study the assimilation of indigenous people. In most cases, the research uncovered a subtle web
of structural disadvantage and prejudice entrapping blacks and indigenous people. According to Peter Frys summary of the work of Marcos Chor Maio, the
UNESCO studies produced three ideas that subsequently became academic
common sense: (1) that understanding racial relations in Brazil also requires
understanding class; (2) that racial taxonomies in Brazil are extremely complex;
and (3) that, despite racial democracy, the strong correlation between poverty
and color reects a prejudice against those who are darker.9
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Building on the pan-Africanist work of Nascimento and Quilombo, and on

the Marxist-inected work of the UNESCO-sponsored scholars, a black consciousness movement gained strength in the postwar period. Although the movement was partially derailed by the hostility of the dictatorship (19641984) to
any manifestations of subversive Afro-Brazilian activism, the 1970s were nonetheless a time of increasing militancy. Inspired by a wide array of movements,
from the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements to the independence
movements in the Portuguese colonies in Africa and to the Third Worldism and
tricontinentalism sweeping much of the world, Brazilian black activists created
innumerable cultural organizations, culminating in 1978 in the founding of the
MNU (Unied Negro Movement), itself a coalition of diverse groups such as
So Paulos CECAN (Center for Black Art and Culture), Rio de Janeiros Institute for Research on Black Culture, and various Bahian Afro-cultural groups.10
In Bahia, the Afro-blocos Il Aiy (founded in 1974) and Olodum (founded
in 1979) organized blacks culturally and politically.11 Also in the 1970s, a wave
of black pride began to spread through Rio and other cities. Sambista Candeia
founded the Quilombo Samba School in 1975. Urban youth, especially in Rio,
adopted African American symbols of black pride, such as coded handshakes and
soul music, in a style dubbed bleque pau (a Portuguese pronunciation of black
power). Shaping black Brazilian identity, soul and reggae inspired black Rio
in Rio, black samba in So Paulo, and black mineiro in Minas Gerais. The
ever more conservative Gilberto Freyre, who supported Portuguese colonial rule
in Africa, denounced such movements as North American exports that would
replace happy and fraternal sambas with a melancholy revolt.12
Many of these issues came up on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in 1988. For the rst time, the manifold forms
of racial inequality against Afro-Brazilians became a principal theme in national
debate.13 A persistent leitmotif was the idea that slavery has not really ended,
with Rios samba pageant protesting the farce of abolition.14 The champion
samba school Vila Isabel, with its Kizombo: Feast of the Race, lauded Zumbi
as the force behind abolition: Zumbis the one/ The strong shout of Palmares/
Crossing land, and air and sea / Shaping abolition. For many Brazilians, the
quilombos symbolized the power of black resistance. May 13, the traditional commemoration date for abolition as granted by Princess Isabel, was replaced by
November 20, celebrating the memory of Zumbi, as the National Day of Black
Consciousness.
As suggested earlier, the seismic shift took a dierent form in Brazil than in
France and the United States. Since Brazil was not an imperialist power, the
struggle was not against Brazilian imperialism but against U.S. imperialism and
the U.S.-supported dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1984. Although black
178
activism existed, it did not take the form of massive marches to end segregation.
Nonetheless, throughout this period, Brazilian scholars were producing progressive work on Portuguese colonialism, on U.S. imperialism, on Brazilian racism, and on Afro-Brazilian and indigenous culture. This work is much too vast
to survey here, but a small sampling only of the work on race from the 1980s
would include such texts as Nascimentos Quilombismo in 1980; Lana Lage da
Gama Limas Black Rebellion and Abolitionism in 1981; Lelia Gonzalez and Carlos Hasenbalgs The Place of Blacks in 1982; Clovis Mouras Brazil: The Roots of
Black Protest and Solange Martins Couceiro de Limas Blacks on Television in So
Paulo, both in 1983; Zila Bernds The Question of Negritude and Dcio Freitass
Palmares: The War of the Slaves, both in 1984; Oracy Nogueiras Neither Black nor
White in 1985; Joo Jos Reiss Slave Rebellions in Brazil in 1986; Clovis Mouras
Quilombos, Resistance to Slavery in 1987; Joo Jos Reiss edited volume Slavery
and the Invention of Freedom and Clovis Mouras Sociology of the Black Brazilian
in 1988; Manoel de Almeida Cruzs Alternatives for Combating Racism and Lilia
Schwarczs Portrait in Black and White: Slaves and Citizens in So Paulo in the 19th
Century, both in 1989.
The Anatomy of Skepticism

It was against this longer backdrop of redemocratization, U.S. hegemony, the
emergence of the black movement, and substantial scholarship on race that we
nd a partial backlash against multicultural identity politics in the 1990s. While
many Brazilian intellectuals had pursued cognate race/colonial research (largely
under others rubrics), some media journalists, rather than see the anities linking such work to similar work in Brazil, rejected multiculturalism in terms largely
borrowed from the U.S. right. Some in the Brazilian media depicted multiculturalism as awed in its own terms and irrelevant, even dangerous, for Brazil.
The hostility came especially from the dominant media and publishing establishments, which sometimes bought into, and literally translated, the U.S. conservative portrayal of multiculturalism as separatist, puritanical, and politically correct. Major newspapers and periodicals such as Folha de So Paulo, Veja, and
Isto were more likely to feature translations of essays by critics such as Harold
Bloom, Camille Paglia, and Tom Wolfe rather than the work of the multicultural
writers themselves.
Contemporaneous with similar articles in France, a February 1, 1995, article
in the Brazilian weekly news magazine Isto (roughly the Brazilian Newsweek),
titled The World Upside Down, illustrates the terms and drift of the rejection.
The articles subheading reads, In the U.S., politically correct schools, in the name
of minorities, are creating new prejudices. Signed by former leftist Osmar Frei-
179
tas, Jr., the article mocks the notion that Columbus did not discover America and
that ancient Greece was not the birthplace of universal culture, statements that the
author, without engaging the actual scholarship, regards as outrageous on their face.
Conating Afrocentrism with multiculturalismwhen in fact the two projects are
quite distinct and at times mutually waryFreitas denes multiculturalism, rather
tendentiously, as a pompous name for politically correct behavior when applied
to teaching and learning, especially University teaching and learning. According
to Freitas, minorities in the United States were calling for a new segregationism.
The article cites Arthur Schlesingers usual equation of multiculturalism with ethnic separatism, without citing a single writer who actually calls for separatism. But
by the mid-1990s, the charges of ethnic separation and Balkanization had been
repeated so often that they acquired, despite the lack of evidence, a discursive density that contaminated left and right discussions of the subject.
Two entries in The Critical Dictionary of Cultural Politics, edited by Teixeira
Coelho, meanwhile, reect almost opposite takes on multiculturalism.15 The
rst, by Solange Martins Couceiro de Lima, sees multiculturalism in the United
States as the legitimate heir of the 1960s radical and Civil Rights movements. For
Lima, multiculturalism critiques melting-pot assimilationism, which the author
compares to Brazilian-style racial democracy, as an ideology that sees minorities as progressing toward a single white-dominant national identity. For Lima,
it is the strength of the assimilationist racial democracy ideology that makes
multiculturalism seem alien in Brazil. The second entry, by Teixeira Coelho himself, in contrast, basically translates into Portuguese the U.S. conservative view
of multiculturalism as discriminatory, politically correct, and even totalitarian. The obsession with race makes the movement itself racist and emblematic, for Coelho, of a culture of victimization. As occurred with some French
critics, the argument gets linked to anxious projections about Anglo-feminism.
Like Todorov in France, Coelho symptomatically slides from multiculturalism
to sexual harassment, recycling the rights anecdotal claims about tragic situations in which perfectly innocent (male) professors lose their jobs due to unfair
accusations by hysterical females. All of Coelhos terms of abuse, hurled at the
demagogues of diversity, are drawn from the U.S. far-right lexicon. The bibliography features no actual multiculturalists at all but only two of the projects
critics: Richard Bernsteins Dictatorship of Virtue (1995) and Harold Blooms The
Western Canon (1995).
In Brazil, multiculturalism was sometimes portrayed as an unwelcome U.S.
export, at times for the same reasons as for the French but usually for reasons
specic to Brazilian cultural politics. In Brazil, unlike France, the topic of race
was not taboo. The concept of a multicultural societyencapsulated in the oftrepeated story of Brazil as a mlange of three raceshad long been the norma-
180
tive view. The question was not whether Brazil was de facto multicultural but
rather what kind of race-related project was appropriate. Was multiculturalism
pertinent or just one more out-of-place idea? For some people, it was the North
American ideological correlative to the racial democracy that emerged in Brazil in the 1930s. For Italo Moriconi, multiculturalism has been the state ideology since Vargas, but the problem is the gap between the ocial discourse and
the quotidian reality of racist violence.16 Yet racial democracy is not an exact
equivalent to multiculturalism. While racial democracy was a top-down concept forged by the Brazilian state in alliance with establishment intellectuals,
multiculturalism was never an ocial ideology embraced by the U.S. political
establishment. The equivalent to racial democracy, in this sense, would be the
mythology of the American melting pot or of equal opportunity.
Some Brazilian scholars have examined the crisscrossing movement of ideas
about multicultural identity politics between France, the United States, and Brazil. In Atlas Literaturas (1998), Leyla Perrone-Moiss, whose indispensable work
on Franco-Brazilian cultural relations we have already cited, oers the high-literary version of the antimulticultural backlash. Based on Fulbright-supported
research undertaken at Yale, her book denounces identity politics in an idiom
largely drawn from the U.S. conservative lexicon. The politically correct tendency to analyze texts in terms of race, gender, and class, she laments, threatens
the study of literature as an autonomous discipline. In tones reminiscent of Yales
own Harold Bloom, she regrets that Western ideology has been disqualied
as sexist, imperialist, and bourgeois. The PC squads, she reports, have thrown
Twain and Melville out of the curriculum, Twain because of his writings on slavery and Melville because he was anti-ecological.17 She cites no one who actually
censors Twain or Melville, and in fact both writers are often seen as multicultural
heroes, Twain (by Susan Fishkin, for example) for his questioning of slavery in
Huckleberry Finn and for his opposition to U.S. imperialism (for example, in the
Philippines) and Melville (by Eric Sundquist) for his multiracial Pequod and his
incisive chronicling of slave revolts in Benito Cereno.18
Perrone-Moisss Franco-diusionist approach gures good ideas as emanating from Europe and then degenerating during their transatlantic passage. Along
the classical Latin/Anglo divide, she sees good French ideas as out of place in
the United States, but not in Brazil. She credits the French poststructuralists
with generating the good ideas that transformed the U.S. academy, while she
elides (1) the contribution of Third World Francophone thinkers such as Csaire
and Fanon to French poststructuralism itself; (2) the role of Native American,
African American, Latino, and progressive white intellectuals in transforming the
U.S. academy; and (3) the role of North American scholars in reenvisioning and
indigenizing French theory itself. Misidentifying the Parsi-Indian-English now
181
U.S.-based Homi Bhabha as a Turk and the founder of postcolonial studies,

a status usually attributed to Said, Perrone-Moiss declares postcolonial theory
symptomatic of a puritanical and Manichean American culture.19 In fact, of
course, the postcolonial intellectuals in question are highly cosmopolitan gures,
whose work reveals a deep abhorrence for Manichean notions and an aection for
a uid tropology of slippage, hybridity, and the in-between. By transforming
three diasporic postcolonial intellectuals, of Palestinian and Indian background,
into stereotypical Anglo-Saxon puritans, merely on the basis of their U.S. location, Perrone-Moiss denies the transnational complexity of the circuitries of
ideas. (We return to Perrone-Moiss in chapter 9.)
Given the fundamental asymmetries of knowledge and power shaped by
neocolonial hegemony, some Brazilians understandably resisted multiculturalism precisely because it was seen as American. At a time when IMF and World
Bankstyle globalization, for many Brazilians synonymous with Americanization, was exacerbating inequality both within and between nations, resentment inevitably spilled over against anything associated with the United States.
Although both Brazilian and French responses to multicultural identity politics
can be seen as defensive of the national terrain, the context and trajectories were
quite distinct. Two major dierences distinguish the Brazilian reaction from the
French. First, while many French intellectuals in the 1990s saw multiculturalism
as a dangerous antirepublican import, Brazilian intellectuals did not speak in the
name of the Brazilian republic. They were more likely to see multiculturalism as
a constitutive feature of Brazil, as something Brazil already had and did not need
North Americans to name for them. If for the French, the question was How
can we import something so alien and contrary to the values of the republic?
for Brazilians the question was Why import something we already have? In the
academy, as Italo Moriconi points out, the critique of multiculturalism in Brazil
usually comes wrapped as resistance to American imperialism. The idea is that if
anyone is going to oer lessons to Brazilians, it will certainly not be Americans.20
Despite some overlap with French attitudes, the Brazilian anxieties had their
own sources. For Marxists, it was the culture in multiculturalism that was disconcerting, signaling for them a superstructural distraction from more consequential infrastructural matters of class and political economy. The anti-imperialist left worried about new modes of hegemony on the part of the Colossus
to the North, now transmitted through its academic/artistic projects. For many
Brazilians, endorsing multiculturalism (perceived as American) would mean
throwing the baby of Brazilian cordiality out with the bathwater of racism. Brazil, they feared, would become a more harsh, rigid, judgmental, and puritanical
place, rather than the uid, exible, gregarious, sensual, and caressing place that
Brazilians (and others) know and love.
182
The occasional Brazilian left rejection of multiculturalism and cognate projects carried with it a number of ironies, however. First, in opposing race/multicultural projects, some on the Brazilian left took up arguments associated in the
United States with the far right. Second, while the U.S. right wing saw such projects as a challenge to Anglo-hegemony, some Brazilian (like French) intellectuals
saw them as themselves Anglo, as in that oxymoronic phrase Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism. (If a movement is essentially Anglo-Saxon, it is by denition not
multicultural.) Third, left Brazilians were rejecting a project that constituted a
Latinization or Brazilianization of North American self-conceptualization, in
that it opted out of the binary race relations model to highlight a rainbow spectrum of ethnicities as constitutive of the nation. What could be more Brazilian
in style than to conceive of the United States as a fundamentally mixed nation?
Caetano Velosos description of the United States as inevitably mestizo, in this
sense, corresponds to Albert Murrays description (in his 1970 book The OmniAmericans) of the American culture as incontestably mulatto.21 Fourth, such
intellectuals were rejecting a project that aimed to open up space in the American
media and in schools for Latin American curricula, faculty, and scholarship, part
of an attempt to reverse the asymmetrical ows of cultural knowledge between
North and South.
The Uses and Abuses of Comparison

The intertext of these debates partly lies in the vast cross-national corpus of comparative writing that focuses on Brazil and the United States. The sheer volume
of this corpus, which swells with every passing year, is remarkable. These comparisons are asymmetrical and power laden, of course, since Brazilians have historically made the comparisons from a position of relative geopolitical weakness,
while Americans have made them from a privileged position of taken-for-granted
power. Brazil-U.S. comparisons take place against the larger ideological frame of
the widely disseminated Hegelian and Weberian comparisons of South America
and North America. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel, for example, contrasted
a prosperous, orderly, and unied Protestant North America with a militarized,
disorderly, and disunited Catholic South America.22
In the case of Brazilian thinkersfrom Gilberto Freyre and Srgio Buarque
de Holanda to Vianna Moog and Roberto DaMattacontrasts between Brazil
and the United States have sometimes come close to the very heart of debates
about Brazilian identity, at times forming an integral part of a specular process of
national self-denition. Sociologist Jess Souza discerns a stubborn pride behind
the obsessive comparisons: Explicit or implicit comparison with the United
States is the central thread in practically all of the 20th-century interpretations of
183
Brazilian singularitybecause we perceive that only the United States is as great

and inuential as we are in the Americas.23 For many Brazilian intellectuals (and
for many American Brazilianists), then, the inevitable historical comparison has
not been with the mother country Portugal or with a European country such as
France or even with a Spanish-speaking neighbor such as Argentina but rather
with the United States. Because of this predominance, some have called either for
South-South comparisons or have questioned the Eurocentric premises of the
comparative paradigm itself.24
Although cross-cultural comparisons are often narcissistic, in the case of Brazil they have sometimes entailed ambivalence and even self-rejection, whether
about Brazils supposedly derivative culture or about its inadequate political
institutions. Indeed, playwright Nelson Rodrigues famously called Brazilians
upside-down Narcissists who spit on their own mirror image. In the wake of
the Hegelian (and later Weberian) dichotomies of dynamic North and indolent
South, many Brazilian intellectuals searched for culturalist explanations for Brazils putative failure, in comparison, usually, with the United States or Europe.
In an animal fable of inferiority, Brazilian historian Joo Capistrano de Abreu
claimed that Brazils most appropriate national symbol would be the sad-eyed
and lazy jaburu bird.25 In contrast to later stereotypes of Brazil as the site of
paradisal jouissance, Paulo Prado, in Retrato do Brasil (1928), portrayed Brazil as
a melancholy mlange of three sad races. Contrasting what he saw as Brazils
libidinous languor with the United States hygienic dynamism, Prado blamed
Portuguese colonialism for creating an ethos in which manual labor was scorned,
culture was ornamental and derivative, and malandragem (roughly, quick-witted
street-smart improvisations) was the cultural norm. Portugal, in this discourse,
became a kind of bad father in a postcolonial family romance, with some Brazilians suggesting, only partly in jest, that Brazilians would have been better o
with a more worthy European progenitor such as Holland.
Eduardo Freire answered Prado in a book whose title says it all: The Brazilian
Is Not Sad (published in 1931). Although Brazil does not exercise power in the
larger world, Freire argued, its culture is vibrant, capacious, and harmonious. In
the same period, Brazilian modernists such as Mrio de Andrade and Oswald
de Andrade also highlighted Brazils positive cultural features. And decades later,
Jos Guilherme Merquior recast what had been seen as tropical deciencies into
cultural strengths by arguing that Brazilian carnivalism inoculated the country
from the deadening rationalization, puritanism, and disenchantment typical of
the relentlessly productivist Occident.26
Over the span of history, comparisons have served diverse, even contradictory,
purposes, sometimes working to denigrate Brazil as lawless, corrupt, and inecient and sometimes to exalt it as tolerant, sensuous, and pacic. Even the phrase
184
racial democracy was comparative in origin, intended as a contrast with the

non-racially-democratic United States. It is not always easy, in these comparative
discourses, to separate actual cultural dierences from clichs about a presumably
unied national character. What matters is the very centrality of cross-national
comparison and how it has impacted the reception of the race/colonial debates.
Within the fraught dialectics of attraction/repulsion, even strong statements of
dierenceWe are not at all like you!are nonetheless addressed to a privileged interlocutor, whether dened as imperial nemesis or as ideal ego. While
comparison can illuminate national self-understanding by drawing distinctions,
it can also obscure transnational relationalities between those such as indigenous
or Afro-diasporic peoples who have historically had a more ambivalent relation
to the nation-states of the Americas and who are therefore less invested in certain
nationalist exceptionalisms.
Despite the limitations of a methodology that too often lapses into overdrawn
national contrasts, comparative race studies have nonetheless made a signal contribution to the understanding of variant modalities of slavery and discrepant
conceptualizations of race.27 These studies have highlighted many commonalities
between Brazil and the United States. In both, the historical inertia of colonialism and slavery, and an abolition negotiated on white ruling-class terms, shaped
racialized hierarchies even under a free-labor regime. In both, the ruling elite
favored European immigrants over blacks, a fact perhaps more obvious in Brazil
only because European immigrants arrived en masse in the immediate aftermath
of emancipation, rather than decades later, as in the United States. And in both
countries, self-exculpatory myths covered the reality of racialized oppression:
in the United States, myths of the American dream and equal opportunity; in
Brazil, the myth of social harmony and racial democracy. Comparatists have
also underlined points of contrast: (1) racism in Brazil has been less virulent,
explicit, and phobic than in the United States; (2) Brazilian history has not been
marked by lynchings, race riots, and so forth; (3) Brazil has generally rejected
legal segregation, although an informal segregation, premised on blacks knowing their place, did sometimes exist; (4) the Brazilian situation encouraged a
paternalistic dependency on white elites (padrinhos), in contrast to the North
American racial segregation that ironically favored the development of parallel
institutionsblack colleges, the black church, an independent black press, sports
organizations.
At the same time, not all the historical comparisons work to Brazils advantage. Brazilian slavery began earlier than U.S. slavery and lasted longer; it was
national rather than regional; and Brazilian society has been structured in depth
by the relations between the Big House and the Slave Quarters, in ways that still
leave traces in the everyday social dynamics of Brazilian life. In a kind of shift-
185
ing of gure and ground, just as a barely concealed class subtext lurks behind
racialized injustice in the United States, so a barely concealed racial subtext lurks
behind the everyday social inequities of Brazilian life. The clich that blacks are
discriminated against only because they are poor, meanwhile, forgets that the
nonblack poor do not carry the stigma generated by racialized slavery and whitesupremacist ideology and that the perception of blackness as an index of poverty
(and thus powerlessness) is itself an oppressive burden in a stratied society. In
this sense, racism can be seen both as a kind of salt rubbed into the wounds of
class and as a wound in itself.
Another leitmotif in comparative discussions is the contrast between the Brazilian racial spectrum and the U.S. bicolor system based on the one-drop rule.
This strange rule, which rarely enunciates itself as a rule, has played a deeply
pernicious role in American life. Originally, it gave expression to the virulent racist sentiment that pervaded white society in the early twentieth century, [which]
reinforced the low regard in which European Americans held African Americans
and the stigma they attached to African ancestry.28 Rendered ocial only at the
end of the 19th century, the one-drop rule codied into law what had become
at least for whitesthe racial common sense. The idea that all Americans fall
on one side or the other of an imaginary racial line leads to situations of labyrinthine incoherence, which is why a tremendous eort was required to make it
stick. There was nothing natural or inevitable about its (always partial) triumph.
Indeed, the United States, like Brazil, began as somewhat miscegenated,
although hardly to the same degree. During the 17th century, the distinction
between white indentured servants and black slaves, for example, was often
blurred. The two groups shared similar working conditions and sometimes
jointly resisted bondage by escaping together. Even in the 18th century, the shortage of women in both communities led to indentured or free whites marrying
African slaves, sometimes the only women they knew, and white female servants
accepting oers of marriage from black men, both slave and free.29 In the U.S.
Lower South, also known as Latin North America, the situation was closer to
the Brazilian model, including in terms of liaisons between white men and native
women. The earliest laws did not forbid interracial unions, and when such laws
were enacted, it was precisely because interracial unions were so common.30
In the long term, the United States became much more miscegenated than is
commonly recognized. The countrys largest minority, Latinos, are mixed almost
by denition. The majority of Native Americans intermarry with other ethnic
groups. DNA testing has shown that one-third of African Americans have partial white ancestry. Black public intellectual Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his research
discovered that more than 50 percent of his genetic material is European.31 But
such statistics are not something about which to be either proud or ashamed.
186
In the case of African Americans, the miscegenation could often be traced back
to a rape by an empowered white. Although racial mixedness clearly existed in
both countries, however, it was more harshly stigmatized, both legally and culturally, in the United States. The dierence, then, did not have to do with the
sheer fact of mixing but rather with (1) its extent and (2) its ideological drift and
judicial denition. The African Americans who passed over to the white side,
for example, did so by denying their mixedness. At the same time, Brazilian-style
mixing began earlier, on a more massive scale, with the intermarriage of Portuguese and indigenous people. In Brazil, the mixing accrued to the nation itself,
while in the United States, the mixing was separated o, ocially quarantined, at
least until the advent of the multiracial movements of the last decades. What we
nd, then, is two complementary forms of denial: a segregationist U.S.-American
model that downplays interracial mixing and intimacy and an assimilationist
Brazilian model that downplays the hierarchies that structure intimacy.
An analysis of the question of political and economic power results in a
paradox. In the United States, which is clearly more segregated in terms of the
one-drop rule and informally segregated residential neighborhoods, blacks have
nonetheless exercised considerable power as political gures, business executives, military leaders, artists, and entertainers. While not racially segregated in
the U.S. or South African manner, Brazil, meanwhile, has its own subtle forms
of social segregation, in the perverse urban dialectics of the ghettoized and the
gated and in the self-segregation of the rich, who retreat behind walled islands of
wealth that become girdled by new favela settlements.32 Many blacks feel imprisoned in what samba composer/historian Nei Lopes calls invisible bantustans,
from which they can escape only thanks to a very special kind of passport: that by
which one abandons ones black identity.33 The social separation takes place not
only within the urban geography of the divided city but also within the shared
space of apartment buildings, with their two entrances, two elevators, and two
independent circulation systems, where the organizing principle is controlled
separation to ensure minimal informal contact between the servant and master
classes.34 Brazil is also segregated in terms of power, in the sense that the higher
echelons of the military, the diplomatic corps, the legislature, the judiciary, corporate boardrooms, and the university are all very white. Even in Salvador, Bahia,
where blacks and people of mixed race compose the overwhelming majority, and
where Afro-Brazilian popular culture is vibrant, the political and media elite
remains white dominated. On the other hand, the ruling PT party has nourished
black advances and a cautious Armative Action, and the 2010 presidential election featured, with remarkably little fanfare in the media, the rst self-declared
black woman presidential candidate, the Green Partys Marina Silva, who won 19
percent of the vote.
187
Another historical dierence is that in Brazil, those who oppress people of

color, going back to mulatto slave-catchers, might also be themselves people of
color. Some major historical instances of state repressionof the maroon republic of Palmares in the 17th century, of the millenarian rebellion in Canudos in the
19th century, and of the Carandiru prisoners in the 20th centuryhave not simply pitted black against white; rather, people of color have fought on both sides,
even if an overarching chromatic hierarchy still structures the whole. This dierence becomes evident when one compares two 1990s secret video recordings of
police brutality: the Rodney King beating in the United States and the recorded
beatings in two Brazilian favelas (Diadema in So Paulo and City of God in Rio).
While most of the police ocers beating Rodney King were white, in Brazil both
the police and their victims were mixed, yet in both cases race was a factor in the
brutality. In Brazil, some of the police ocers were black or of mixed race, but
the leader-killer (nicknamed Rambo) was white. The victims, meanwhile, were
largely black or mestizo, dening the confrontation as, if not directly racial, at
least highly racialized. Yet the beatings in both instances were entirely gratuitous,
and the Brazilian case became a cold-blooded murder of a completely innocent
man. The body language of the favela residents conveys a sense of resignation, as
if such abuse were a taken-for-granted quotidian routine.
The same social problems that plague the United Statespolice brutality, a
cruel prison system, class inequality, and so forthalso plague Brazil. The Brazilian
police murder literally thousands of marginals every year, most black or of mixed
race. A Globo editorial on April 4, 2006, pointed out that the police (municipal and
federal) in Rio de Janeiro alone kill more people than are killed by the police in
all of the United States. A December 2009 Human Rights Watch Report titled
Lethal Force revealed that police in Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo killed more than
eleven thousand people between 2003 and 2009, often disguising summary execution as resistance to arrest.35 Thus, we nd a commonality of racialized domination, expressed in distinct ways, in which the coecient of class versus race and
gender might vary but each modality has minor echoes in the other country.
At the same time, it would be inaccurate to see Brazil as a mirror image of
the United States, where exactly the same racism exists but in veiled form. Many
comparatists emphasize the relatively less stressful manner of living race in Brazil, evoked in such aect-laden words as cordiality and gregariousness. The cold
statistics of racial advantage, in this sense, do not convey imponderables such as
aection, solidarity, and emotional comfort zones. Atmospherics lubricate social
relations and shape the daily texture of existence, even if they are not amenable
to statistical proof. The fact of greater miscegenation also makes black Brazilians
less easily otherizable, more an assumed part of the social totality. As long as one
speaks of epidermic appearances (We are all mixed) or of atmospherics, the
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Brazilian situation seems much more livable than the American. It is when one
poses the crucial question of economic, political, and cultural power that the situation seems less than ideal.36
Desire, Denial, and Linked Analogies

Over the past half century, the myth of racial democracy has severely frayed.
Recently, Brazilian scholars have highlighted the ways that various ethnic groups
in Brazil have, as Antonio Guimares puts it, carefully distanced themselves
from the racial democracy model ... [whereby] middle-class whites looked for a
second nationality in Europe, the United States, or created a regional xenophobia
in the Europeanized south; the black in search of roots constructed an imaginary Africa, or saw the United States as an Afro-American mecca, while the misnamed Indians identied with their group of origin or with Indians in general.37
The rearticulation of the black movement, the emergence of the feminist and gay
movements, the growth of non-Catholic religions, the ourishing of indigenous
movements, and the celebration of immigrant hybridity have all pointed to the
centrifugal fracturing of cohesive myths of a unied Brazil.
A recent polemical book, Antonio Risrios The Brazilian Utopia and the Black
Movements, is framed, revealingly, by the authors discomfort with the black
movement in Brazil. Writing from a position of a man besieged by politically
correct critics, Risrio argues,
Today we have a serious problem here in Brazil. The discussion and the debate
are constantly becoming more suspect and cursed. There is no room for criticism,
only for adhesion or denunciation. Almost all of the people who speak of dialogue
do not really believe in it. If I criticize feminists, Im macho. If I dont like some
form of popular culture, Im elitist. ... If I have objections to the black movement,
Im a racist. And so forth.38
The discourses of minorities, Risrio continues,

have been incorporated literally. And thus they stayed, undiscussed and unquestioned. A religious attitude emerged. Women, gays, Indians, blacks, lesbians, etc.
were all in the right. They were the humiliated and oended ones, the victims of
oppression and prejudice, the ones who spoke of their pain and resentment, their
anxieties, projects, and demands. The role of the others, the majority, was to listen
to them and support their struggles. As if the majority was guilty and were there
to expiate a racist and macho past ... since only women could speak for women in
a macho world, since only blacks knew what it meant to be black in a racist society,
since only minority people could speak for minorities, etc.39
A brilliant advocate and analyst of Afro-Brazilian culture and coauthor (with

Gilberto Gil) of a major book on slavery and negotiation, Risrio shares with
189
some Brazilian, French, and American critics of identity politics a feeling of displacement and a ressentiment about the putative impugning and silencing of white
men. Black Brazilian activists, for Risrio, have overinvested in the idea that the
camouaged form of Brazilian racism is worse than overt U.S. racism because
it is harder to ght. Those whom Risrio derisively calls the neo-negros have
adopted the binary black/white U.S. model in a miscegenated Brazil where that
model simply does not t. The identication that some black Brazilians feel with
blacks in the United States irritates Risrio, which is hardly surprising since diasporic minority movements challenge nationalist framings. Risrio dismisses
these identications, typical of the Black Atlantic, as merely a byproduct of the
dissemination of the U.S. racial model, now spread by American foundations
and by Brazilian black elites inuenced by the American academy. His position
is close to that adopted by Bourdieu/Wacquant in their critique of Hanchards
Orpheus and Powerdiscussed in chapter 9even though Risrio is innitely
more knowledgeable about the debates and about Afro-Brazilian culture than are
Bourdieu/Wacquant.
Risrios text betrays an acute anxiety about the status of individuals who are
socially positioned as white, who identify with Afro-Brazilian culture and with
black people, yet who feel a certain malaise when a black movement names the
power structure as white. Terms such as whites and white power structure, by
naming the color of power, position even sympathetic and knowledgeable whites
ambivalently vis--vis black subjects. Both in the United States and Brazil, the
black movements dared to go beyond the question of prejudice to pose the question of racially coded power. As a consequence, whites became raced, no longer
universal oating human beings but rather a group with a precise relation to a
power structure. For a North American reader, Risrios lament has a familiar
ring. It recalls the complaints of liberal-leftist veterans of the Civil Rights struggles who felt eclipsed by the rise of the Black Power movement and later by identity movements. If Risrio at times sounds like the disenchanted white American
leftist, at other times, his resentment makes him sound like an American rightwinger, as when he tries to discredit the reparations movement by reminding his
readers, as Dinesh DSouza might, that some freed slaves acquired slaves themselves, a point that, while not completely false, is marshaled tendentiously.
If Risrio loves Afro-diasporic culture, he loves it mainly in its Afro-Bahian
Nago form. Thus, African for Risrio means acaraj, capoeira, and the orixas.
If we follow out the logic of this approach, the vast majority of Africans themselves, and the thousands of contemporary Africans who have emigrated to the
United States, would not qualify as truly African. In line with his regionalist,
nationalist, and Yoruba-centric delineations, Risrio disparages African Americans as alienated and de-Africanized.40 Blind to their endless activism, Risrio
190
contrasts black American passivity with the rebelliousness of black Brazilian maroons. And here we come to his most provocative claim: For the simple,
strong, and profound reason that Negro-African cultures came to impregnate
and nurture, progressively and in a seductive way, the whites of Brazil, thus coming to constitute their codes and symbolic repertoires . . . to the point that we
feel free to say that Brazilian whites are, for the most part, more black, or more
precisely, more African than black Americans.41 Risrio here gathers into himself
the various credit lines of cultural capital (Bourdieu) and, we would add, racial
capital.42 On the one hand, he enjoys the cultural/racial capital of whitenesshe
grants that he has never suered racial ostracism in his skinwhile also claiming the cultural capital associated with intimate knowledge of African cultural
codes. That insider knowledge, in his view, makes him more African than African Americans, whom he assumes to be ignorant of the orixas and mired in souldeadening Protestant pietism.
Risrios claim is premised on a separation between culture and history. Without making primordial claims about any essential black subject (Stuart Hall),
certain incommensurabilities of experience, rooted not in blood but in the memory of slavery and the experience of discrimination, inevitably create a certain gap
in perspectives and sensibilities. It is one thing for those who are socially identied as white to appreciate the cultural practices of Afro-diasporic people, and
even to live them virtually as their own, and to identify with the victims of slavery
and discrimination; it is quite another to be the literal heirs of that history and
to have been discriminated in ones esh due to ones visible, epidermal dierence.
Even a deep knowledge of African culture does not completely ll that gap.
Although Risrio argues for a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism, what has
struck us repeatedly while researching this book is how a claim about one country can easily be extended to another country, even when the authors claim to be
stressing some national uniqueness. Risrio, for example, oers extremely evocative descriptions of Brazilian cultural diversity, as in the following passage:
Brazil is an anthropological mosaic. A world made of many worlds, each with
its own physiognomy, its distinctive traces. That is what allows us to speak of a
Brazilian reality, but also of Brazilian realities, in the singular and in the plural.
Because what we constructed, in our segment of the planet, was a country of
foci, or cultural poles or spaces for special matrices of a dierentiated population,
as a consequence ofand as a response todiverse social historical processes
and dissimilar ecological circumstances. ... Our singularity is made up of many
singularities, visible in the internal variations of our culture. But this rich internal
diversity, unlike what one might think, given the huge territorial dimensions of the
country, did not result in a chaotic mess or a bizarre collage of mutually alienated
and separate elements.43
191
Risrios richly textured portrait eloquently describes the fantastic cultural cornucopia that is Brazil. Yet many of his formulationsanthropological mosaic,
worlds made up of many worlds, multiple foci, internal variationsare conceptually apt descriptions of many national cultures. Most nation-states in the
Americas, as invented collectivities, have tried to forge a fragile coherence out of
bizarre collages of native, European, African, and Asian peoples, partly through
the enforcing power of the state. The U.S. E Pluribus Unum, the Mexican Raza
Csmica, and the Brazilian fable of three races were all attempts to muster a
semblance of order out of a chaotic mess. But these bricoleur identities are not
merely celebratory; they also mask real conicts. In all of the Americas, indigenous concepts of land ownership, for example, still collide with Euro-dominant
conceptions. Stressing the uniqueness of single nation-states edits out the analogies linking all of the colonial-settler states of the Americas.
Some of the most perceptive commentaries on comparative racial politics come,
not surprisingly, from intellectuals familiar with both national contexts. Hermano
Vianna, author of illuminating books on samba and popular culture, speaks of
his encounter with multicultural identity politics during his doctoral research in
the very segregated city of Chicago. Feeling at rst like an anthropologist doing
eld-research in a remote village of New Guinea, Vianna soon realized that the
discussion was very serious and profound. On his return, full of respect for [his]
American colleagues, he reports that he could not bear to see such a serious and
emotionally charged debate treated as a kind of joke in Brazil. For Vianna, the
United States was performing a service for humanity with this anthropological
experiment, one that deserves our respect, collaboration, and constructive critique. Whereas other Brazilian analysts regarded multiculturalism as a ready-made
product packaged for export, Vianna regarded it as an audacious experiment:
Seeing all the suering provoked by that movement (certainly much less serious
than that caused by centuries of discrimination and racism, but still suering) I
confess that I felt relieved to not be from the U.S. ... and for having the opportunity to leave, since I was feeling suocated (including because I was classied
as Hispanic, something I never imagined, despite my love for the culture of the
Chicanos and Puerto-Ricans of Chicago). But I was thankful to North Americans
for going through all that pain, in such a demanding and in my view, such a radical
manner. Who knows if important lessons would emerge for other peoples, lessons
which could be adopted world-wide, since we would know what worked and what
did not. Since it is obvious, even for the most politically correct Americans, that
aspects of this experimentlike any other experimentwill not work out.44
Viannas account shows respect for the multicultural project as a brave social
experiment (along with an awareness of its limitations) as well as an appreciation
of the Brazilian dierence (and awareness of its limitations).
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At the same time, Viannas terms are perhaps exaggeratedly Christological, as if Chicago academics were taking on the racial sins of the world. While
Vianna recognizes the unbearable heaviness of these discussions, he perhaps
misses another element, to wit, a certain exhilaration and sense of joyful discovery not only in liberatory ideas but also in new forms of coalitionary conviviality.
The selective emphasis on pain reects a reaction of a Brazilian accustomed to a
lighter approach, where the lightness is at once an unselfconscious social code
and, at times, a way of artfully dodging confrontation through practices and discourses of exible accommodation. It is in this context that Vianna emphasizes
the social functionality of Brazilian humor and its deriding of some American
movements. Although Vianna does not mention it, feminism too was initially
disqualied on the basis of jokes, going back to the naming of a seasonal u after
Betty Friedan because her arrival in Salvador, Bahia, happened to coincide with
the us onset. While carnivalizing North America power, such humor can also
serve to marginalize egalitarian ideas.
In the end, Vianna calls for a relational study of the ways that dierent peoples experiment and try out things so that they can subsequently be compared,
exchanged, and mixed by others.45 He does not categorically defend Brazil as a
racial democracy, however. One can arm Brazilian miscegenation, he points
out, and yet still not believe that Brazil is a racial democracy. At the same time,
he sees U.S.-style multiculturalism ultimately as out of place in Brazil because it
risks costing Brazil its trump cardthe mixing of dierences.46 Yet one wonders if the mixing of dierences remains such a trump card when it has become
the norm in much of the Atlantic world. Nonetheless, Viannas praise for Americans courage oers an ironic twist on a theme from the period of the UNESCO
studies. In the 1950s, Brazils racial democracy was seen as a model for a world
then emerging from the battle against Nazism. But now the terms of discussion
have shifted dramatically. The present-day United States is not regarded, as Brazil was then, as a racial paradise; rather, it is the place where the racial hell is
being openly confronted, in an atmosphere of pain and suocation. While it was
the Brazilian socius itself that served as model in the early 1950s, now it is not the
United States itself but rather U.S. self-critique that provides the model.
Drawing on British cultural studies and postcolonial studies, Brazilian sociologist Srgio Costa skillfully negotiates between the various positions in The
Two Atlantics: Social Theory, Anti-racism, Cosmopolitanism. Most Brazilian intellectuals, Costa points out, no longer dispute the existence of racism but only the
best methods for dealing with it. For him, the Brazilian academic debate has
polarized into two antiracist camps: the integrationist antiracist camp and the
racially dened antiracist camp. The integrationist camp places excessive faith in
culture, neglecting material inequalities, while the race-conscious camp is overly
193
tied to a specic (African American) model. The concrete historical form taken
by the struggle to create a just social order in the United States, with its successes
and failures, he reminds us, constitutes only one possibility [with] no guarantees
that it will produce good results everywhere. Both groups neglect the postnational and transnational dimensions of the debate, since national frontiers no
longer demarcate an adequate analytical unit for sociological investigation in an
era when social, cultural, and political processes exceed such borders.47
Popular Culture, Tropiclia, and the Rainbow Atlantic

Nothing better illustrates the dysfunctionality of forcing cultures into sealed
national compartments than Brazilian popular music. As a cosmopolitan orchestration of vernacular and erudite musical idioms, Brazilian musi reects, and
reects on, Brazils constitutive multiculturality. Part of an endlessly creative
multidirectional movement of ideas owing back and forth around the Atlantic,
Brazilian music generates such hybrids as jazz-samba, samba-rap, samba-reggae,
reforengue (a blend of rock, merengue, and forr), and belly-samba (a blend of
samba and belly-dance). Incorporating a broad variety of musical stylesthe
melisma of African American singing, the deep-breath South African choral
style, the whiny steel guitar of country music, the thump of funk, and the obeat
syncopation of reggaeinto an overall Brazilian ensemble, it displays an anthropophagic capacity to devour a wide range of inuences. It is this other-absorbing
capacity, paradoxically, that denes Brazilian music as Brazilian.
U.S.-American and Brazilian music resemble one another to some extent, not
only because of mutual inuence but also because of common roots. Thus, we
nd clear parallels between chorinho and ragtime, between cool jazz and bossa
nova, between funk and ax music. As syncretic products of the African-European
encounter in the New World, the music of George Gershwin, Aaron Copeland,
Duke Ellington, Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Antonio Carlos Jobim all mingle the popular and erudite, the European and the Afro-diasporic.48 While U.S. jazz musicians
have occasionally referenced Africa, Brazilian popular music demonstrates a much
deeper familiarity with Afro-Brazilian religious culture, whether in the incorporation of Candombl rhythms or in lyrical allusions to ia (initiates in the West African religions), terreiros (the Candombl temples), acaraj (religiously consecrated
food), and the orixs (Oxum, Iemanj). Even Carmen Mirandas uid way of dancing and singing recalls the way that Oxum, the goddess of love and wealth, lifts
her arms and proudly exhibits her adornments.49 African references animated the
Afro-sambas of Vinicius de Moraes and Baden-Powell in the 1960s, the sambas of
Clara Nunes and Martinho da Vila in the 1970s, and the work of Caetano Veloso,
Gilberto Gil, Carlinhos Brown, and Maria Bethnia throughout their careers.
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But what is most germane for our purposes here is the extent to which Brazilian music directly thematizes multicultural, diasporic, and indigenous issues, not
only through lyrics but also through percussion, melody, harmony, and performance. Prior to the 1960s, Brazilian popular music thematized race and multiculturality in a light and sometimes prejudicial mode, as in Nega do Cabelo Duro
(Black Woman with the Bad Hair), or in a more serious patriotic mode, as with
Ary Barrosos portrait of Brazilian culture as a multicultural stew in Aquarela do
Brasil (known in the United States as Brazil). Many sambas directly thematize
race. The 2009 Carnival, for example, brought samba tributes to Barack Obama.
One song played on the sonorous links between Obamas name and the Yoruba
expression Oba (a kind of viva): African voices, sing your strength / Obamala/ Now, my love, the White House is black. Another Carnival song declared,
Theres a black guy in the White House/ Prejudice has gone to Baghdad [an
expression meaning went far away] / Bye-bye, Bush. Some Brazilian songs
stress themes of cross-racial identication and transformation, a theme also common in U.S. popular culture.50 Thus, the phenotypically white singer Joyce sings,
Im a mulata, and Caetano Veloso punningly sings sou mulato nato (Im a born
mulatto), while Moraes Moreira allegorizes Brazil, la Freyre, as the three graces
of Brazil, that is, three feminine gures allegorizing the Amerindian, the African,
and the European. (Scholars have rarely studied these cross-ethnic identications
in a transnational manner; one might compare, for example, the pro-Amerindian
symbolism of the Black Indians of New Orleans Carnival and that of the largely
black Comanches and Apaches of Carnival in Salvador, Bahia).
Rappers, for their part, foreground race and resistance through their very
names. The young organizers of the bailes funk (funk dances) invoked Black
Power and Revoluo da Mente, after James Browns Revolution of the Mind.
Bahians called themselves browns in homage to Brown, and a number of Brazilian musiciansnotably Carlinhos Brown, Mano Brown, and Berimbrown
named themselves after the Godfather of Soul. Berimbrown mingles an homage to Brown with the berimbau, the African gourd-and-bow instrument used
in capoeira. One Berimbrown song performs a historical counterpoint by linking Jorge Velho, the Portuguese military leader who crushed the 17th-century
maroon republic of Palmares, to the present-day racist police. What George
Ydice has called the funkication of Brazil has been proceeding apace for
decades, with funk and rap and jazz entering the very bloodstream of Brazilian
popular music, just as bossa nova entered into the bloodstream of U.S. popular
music decades earlier. Popular musicians such as Ed Motta, Berimbrown, and
Phat Family, for their part, have Brazilianized soul, funk, and rap. The rap groups,
meanwhile, also interact with civil society, whether through Rap in the Schools
projects or through the group Banda AfroReggaes concept of batidaniaa neol-
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ogism, roughly translatable as percussive citizenshipthe rough equivalent of

one nation under a groove. The video Batidania: Power in the Beat (1998) shows,
as Ydice puts it, that music and performance are acts of citizenship, a way of
opening up public spheres.51
Critical race analysis can take many generic forms: political speech, the religious jeremiad, academic research, and popular music. Rappers in the 1980s
echoed the scholarly disenchantment with the ideology of racial democracy. The
Urban Discipline song High Tech Violence informs us that the police go up
into the favelas/ invade your home / without shame / and the treatment you
receive/ will depend on the color of your skin. Rappa makes contrapuntal links
between past enslavement and present-day incarceration in Every Police Wagon
Is Reminiscent of a Slave Ship. Journal of a Prisoner by the rap group Racionais MCs, led by Mano Brown, memorialized the 1992 massacre of 111 prisoners
in Carandiru prison. In Pavillion Number 8, some of the prisoners themselves
penned rap lyrics about the massacre. Rap has thus become a musical testimonial
registering social oppression. At the same time, the sounds themselveshard,
machine-gun-likesignify on the good-natured sweetness both of middle-class
bossa nova and of favela-based classical samba.
Brazilian artists have been fecund in innovative and subtly anticolonial aesthetic coinages, whether literary, painterly, cinematic, or musical, among them
anthropophagy (Oswald de Andrade), the aesthetics of hunger (Glauber
Rocha), the aesthetics of garbage (Rogrio Sganzerla), and Tropiclia (Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso). Most of these aesthetics revalorize by inversion what had formerly been seen as negative, especially within colonialist discourse. Thus, cannibalism, for centuries the very name of the abject savage other,
becomes with the Brazilian modernists an anticolonialist trope and a term of
value. At the same time, these aesthetics share the jiujitsu trait of turning strategic weakness into tactical strength. Anticipating the postcolonial and postmodern stress on cut n mix and sampling aesthetics, such movements have appropriated existing discourses for their own ends, deploying the force of the dominant
against domination.
The Tropiclia movement inaugurated in 1967, led musically by Caetano
Veloso and Gilberto Gil, brought these trends into the mass-mediated arena.
Updating the ideas of modernist Oswald de Andrade, the movement drew on the
favored modernist trope of anthropophagy, the Global Souths version of intertextuality as seen from the standpoint of neocolonial power relations. Like the
modernists, the Tropicalists eagerly cannibalized artistic movements. While the
modernists devoured Dada and surrealism, the Tropicalists, as Caetano himself
liked to put it, devoured Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, all part of a sampling
aesthetic later seen as a proleptic form of postmodernism. Cannibalizing foreign
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inuences from a position of national pride, the Tropicalists easily absorbed rock,
rap, reggae, country, and salsa into a very Brazilian synthesis.
A striking feature of Brazilian popular music is its naked intellectual ambition. Pop star intellectuals such as Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico
Buarque, and Z Miguel Wisnik write books and compose music that comment
on the burning questions of the time. As a multiart movement, the Tropiclia
movement dynamized and reorganized the cultural eld, while actively intervening in the debates about race and national identity. Whatever the vicissitudes of
their sometimes problematic prise de positions, Gil and Caetano are major commentator-theoreticians on race in Brazil, both as incisive critics of racism and as
celebrants of Brazilian conviviality. They perform those theories in very diverse
genres and media, ranging from music, books, and interviews to happenings and
public policies. Journalistic critics of the English translation of Caetanos memoir
Tropical Truth were surprised to encounter a pop star who could write knowingly
about European, American, and Brazilian culture, in a text in which names like
Ray Charles and James Brown brush up easily against names like Stockhausen,
Wittgenstein, and Deleuze. Both Caetano and Gil (onetime minister of culture
in the Lula government) constitute Orphic intellectuals, or to coin a variation
on Gramscis organic intellectual, Orphoganic intellectuals; they write books
in one moment and lead dancing crowds in another. While performing popular
culture, they also theorize it. In a multimedia intervention, they enact the cultural
debates in visual, sensuous, written, lyrical, percussive, and even institutionalpolitical form.52
The Tropiclia movement was born, in a sense, in an audiovisual epiphany of
Africanness. According to the Tropicalists themselves, one of the works of art
that helped crystallize the movement was Glauber Rochas 1967 lm Terra em
Transe, with its superimposition of the music of Candombl with aerial views
of the Atlantic coast. Caetano, who once described himself as a cross between
Rocha and Joo Gilberto, delineated the lms impact on the movement. That
whole Tropicalist thing, as Caetano famously put it, became clear to me the day
I saw Terra em Transe. My heart exploded during the opening sequence, when, to
the sound of a Candombl chant, an aerial shot of the sea brings us to the coast
of Brazil. Without that traumatic moment, Caetano writes, nothing of what
came to be called tropicalism would have ever existed.53 Tropiclia was born,
then, quite literally under the sign of the Black Atlantic.
As a musical bard of that same Black Atlantic, Gil has oered scintillating
odes to Afro-Brazilian diasporic culture, whether to the orixas of Candombl, as in
Iemanj, or to Macumba, as in Batmakumba (a play on Batman and Macumba)
or to Umbanda in Umbanda Um. Gils 1973 musical homage to the Bahian Afromusical group Filhos de Gandhi helped reinvigorate that group. His ChuckBerry
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Fields Forever, meanwhile, links both the Beatles and Chuck Berry to the caneelds of slavery, while Quilombo, the Black Eldorado memorializes the longestlasting maroon republic in the Americas. A very cosmopolitan Gil composed A
Prayer for Freedom in South Africa (1985) and created a theme song, Touche
Pas Mon Pote, adopted by French antiracists. Although such music might not
instigate a revolution, it can provide the sound track for social change.
Tropiclias contribution was both thematic and aesthetic. In its cultural proposals, it oered (1) a critique of the conservative cultural politics of the orthodox
left; (2) an emphasis not on harmony and cordiality but rather on unharmonizable contradictions; (3) a simultaneous openness both to the lowest reaches
of Brazilian popular culture and to the high reaches of the transnational avantgarde; (4) the parodic interrogation of Brazils foundational myths and icons;
(5) the audacious taking on of momentous historical questions such as slavery,
syncretism, and transcultural relations; (6) a transtemporal and contrapuntal aesthetic; and (7) a refusal of the norms of correctness in favor of the transformation
of the very criteria of taste. Rather than aspire to technical correctness, the Tropicalists preferred to make productive mistakes while forging a new revolutionary
set of criteria rooted both in the avant-garde and in popular culture.
While Tropiclia takes the entire world as its province, it does not create
world music, that bland concoction that channels music from the Global South
into Northern markets, touching lightly on ethnicity while dodging painful
issues of appropriation and racism. At its most radical, Tropiclia nourishes a
full-throated dissonance. In this sense, it echoes and instantiates some of the part
serious, part tongue-in-cheek principles of the movement (led by Ned Sublette)
called Postmamboism (from Kikongo imbu, as word, law, song, or important matter) as the portable theory that places music at the center of understanding and uses music to interrogate other elds of study. Although applicable
to other musics, Postmamboism begins with the study of African and African
diaspora musics, given their historical centrality to the music of the world and
their deep connection through slavery, neoslavery, and liberation struggles and
expands to fundamental questions of colonialism, capitalism and civilization.54
Here we look closely at specic songs addressing diasporic ows around the
Atlantic. The Caetano CD Noites do Norte, for example, constitutes a musical
meditation on slavery and its sequels, moving from the Nigeria of Two Naira
Fifty Kobo and the Angola of Congo Benguela Monjolo Cabinda Mina to the
Brazil of slave auctions and sugar cane elds forever, as well as to the call for
revolt with Zumbi and later the ambivalent abolitionism of Joaquim Nabuco in
Noites do Norte, on to blacks celebrating abolition in 13 de Maio. The musical genre chosen for each songan animated samba de roda for 13 de Maio; a
melancholy-romantic lied style for the musicalization of Nabucos reections on
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slavery; and stylized dissonant-modernist rap music for Haiticonveys a social

intonation and perspective.55 In short, the CD reaches back in time and outward
in space to compose a veritable musical essay on the history of the Afro-diaspora.
The song Haiti, in its treatment of the theme of police brutality, conveys in
poetic form a sense of the intersectionalities of race and class in a country like
Brazil, a sense of how race becomes the modality in which class is lived (Stuart
Hall).56 The lyrics recount an episode in which Caetano himself played a role.
Just as he was being presented with a Citizenship Award on a stage overlooking
Salvadors historic Pelourinho Square, Caetano saw mostly black police beating
up a mostly black or mestizo or poor white crowd. The song begins,
When you are invited to go up to the roof
Of the Jorge Amado Foundation
And see from above the line of soldiers, almost all of them black
Hitting on the nape of the neck
Black hustlers, mulatto thieves, and others almost white
But treated like blacks
Only in order to show to the others almost black
(and they are almost all black)
And to the almost white but poor as blacks
How it is that blacks, poor people, and mulattos are treated
Caetano begins by acknowledging his own privileged position as honored citizen and middle-class observerhe is not the one being beaten. At the same time,
his lyrics ventriloquize, in what Bakhtin would call double-voiced discourse, a
racist voice expressive of the doxa about how blacks are supposed to be treated.
The song treats race in a conjunctural and antiessentialist manner, since even
poor and marginalized whites can be treated like blacks. Yet blackness remains
the default position of oppressability, the oor of social deprivation.
Caetanos music generally orchestrates counterpoints of musical genres, each
with their own social overtones. Haiti, in this sense, encodes cultural tensions
and syncretisms in the manner of national allegory, not only through lyrics but
also through melody, harmony, and percussion. The song stages the power relations between Europe and Africa, between the cello and the surdo, between melody and percussion, between the Big House and the Slave Quarters. The European-derived cello is used in an Africanized way, as a percussive instrument, and
it yelps with anthropomorphic pain just as the lyrics mention the police blows
on the nape of neck of the persons being beaten. The dcor of the performance
on the DVD, with a hint of a fencing in the black percussionists, evokes a mild
Brazilian separationism.
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The song continues:

And it doesnt matter if the eyes of the entire world
Are at that moment focused on that Square
Where slaves were punished
And today a drumming, a drumming
With the purity of uniformed schoolchildren on parade day
And the epic grandeur of a people in formation
Attracts us, amazes us, and stimulates us
All that has no importance
Not the lens from the Fantastic Show
Not the Paul Simon CD
No one, no one is a citizen
And if you go to the party in Pelourinho
And if you dont go
Think about Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here, Haiti is not here
The songs refrainHaiti is here, Haiti is not heresignies on a famous

phrase from Brazilian literary critic Slvio Romero. Almost a century after the
Haitian Revolution, on the eve of abolition, Romero, still frightened by what
was for him the spectre of the Haitian Revolution, said that Brazil is not, and
should not become, a Haitithat is, there should be no revolution and no end
of slavery. The song lyrics link Brazil to Haiti as a double site, both of a black
revolutionary past and of a neocolonized present place where black police beat
up black people. The lyrics also recall the legacy of slavery and the pillory as the
site of disciplinary punishmentsPelourinho, after all, refers to the pillory used
as part of a disciplinary spectacle during slavery. But now the whipping post has
given way to mass incarceration and police murder, where no one is a citizen.
(Here Caetano plays with the double, even opposite meanings of cidado [citizen] in Brazilian Portuguese, both as the bare-life unprotected rights-less individual and as the societally endowed rights-bearing person.) At the same time,
the lyrics and the percussive style evoke the sounds of resistance in the drumming of Afro-blocos such as Olodum, whose epic grandeur dazzles us. Yet such
culturalist strength is ultimately insucient when citizenship is so fragile and no
one is a citizen. And it does not matter that Lente Fantstico (a Globo network
program) visits Salvador or that Paul Simon collaborates with Olodum to make
The Rhythm of the Saints.
The music is interrupted by a dramatic announcement concerning the 1992
massacre of prisoners at Carandiru prison:
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And when you hear the smiling silence of So Paulo

During the Massacre ...
111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black
Or almost black, or almost white almost black because so poor
And poor people are like rotten people and everyone knows how blacks are treated
And when you take a trip around the Caribbean
And when you fuck without a condom
And oer your intelligent contribution to the embargo of Cuba
Think about Haiti, pray for Haiti
Haiti is here, Haiti is not here
The eect of the pause in the music is of an eruption of the real into a musical
entertainment, as if to say, We interrupt this performance to announce a catastrophe. The show must not go on. The song is declaimed, moreover, in a Brazilian
variation on the rap style associated with black Americans but also linked to Brazilian traditions such as embolada, repente, and talking sambas. In its principled
incivility, the rap style breaks with the gentler harmonies of bossa nova and the
suave discourses of racial democracy. The aggressivity contrasts even with the
sweetness of Caetanos song about surfers (Menino do Rio), whose refrain
Hawaii, be herethe song both echoes and transforms. Here relations are no
longer cordial, and the music is no longer sweet; instead we nd the politicization
of avant-gardist dissonance.
The music video of the Gilberto Gil song Mo de Limpeza (Hand of Cleanliness) also deconstructs the racial doxa, this time by resignifying and carnivalizing what would usually be seen as a hopelessly compromised performance mode
of blackface. As performed by Gil and Chico Buarque, the songs lyrics satirically
upend a racist Brazilian proverb:
They say that when blacks dont make a mess at the entrance
They make it at the exit
Imagine!
But the slave mother spent her life
Cleaning up the mess that whites made
Imagine!
What a damned lie!
Even after slavery was abolished
Blacks continued cleaning clothes
And scrubbing oors
How the blacks worked and suered!
Imagine!
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Black is the hand of cleanliness

Of life consumed at the side of the stove
Black is the hand that puts food on the table
And cleans with soap and water
Black is the hand of immaculate purity
They say when blacks dont make a mess at the entrance
They make it at the exit
Imagine!
What a damned lie!
Look at the lthy white guy
Gils song provokes a Brechtian Verfremdungseekt; it estranges the racist common sense, asking us to imagine how anyone could ever have associated blackness with dirtiness. Within a Brechtian separation of the elements, the gaiety of
the music exists in tension with the gravity of the topic. The visuals, meanwhile,
recuperate an incorrect stereotype within an anti-illusionistic chromatic schema
that plays on and subverts the black/white dichotomy. The phenotypically white
singer Chico Buarque appears in blackface and is dressed in black, while the black
Gil appears in whiteface and is dressed in white. In cultural terms, the references
are both to the boneca de pixe (tar doll) tradition in Brazil and to the racist North
American tradition of minstrelsy. In the United States, the practice of blackface
has been highly fraught, as evidenced by the confused reactions to the satirical
use of blackface in Spike Lees Bamboozled.57 Mo de Limpeza recongures the
old racist representational practice by counterpointing blackface with whiteface.
Historically, blackface was unilateralthere was no whitefaceand white spectators often took the representation as authentic. But here the choice of performance mode comes not from white media entrepreneurs but from the black
artist himself. In a sly Brazilian rewrite of the costumed inversions of Genets
Les Ngres, the song overturns the racist binarism that equates blackness with
dirtiness; blackness now connotes immaculate purity, while whiteness connotes
the dirtiness of the branco sujo (lthy white guy). At the same time, the stylized performance itself implies the transcendence of the black/white binarism
emphasized by the mise-en-scene: the two singers are obviously friends having
a splendid time while playing at a kind of carnival. The racism of the proverb
does not mean that whites and blacks cannot be friends or ght together against
racism.
Already in the 1980s, Gil was commenting musically on the favored postcolonial theme of cultural hybridity. Gils From Bob Dylan to Bob Marley: Samba
Provocation poetically addresses the intercultural transit of ideas back and forth
across the Black Atlantic, in this case between Brazil, Jamaica, North America,
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and Africa. The songs subtitle designates it as a provocation samba, a play on

the Vargas-era exaltation sambas that lauded Brazilian heroes. The provocation here is to exalt not the nation-state but rather Afro-diasporic hybridity. The
lyrics go as follows:
Soon after Bob Dylan converted to Christianity
He made a reggae album as a form of compensation
He abandoned the Jewish people
But returned to them while heading in the wrong direction ...
When the peoples of Africa arrived in Brazil
There was no freedom of religion ...
As a result, Africans in Brazil adopted Our Lord of Bomm
An act both of resistance and surrender
The refrain:
Bob Marley died
Because besides being black
He was Jewish
Michael Jackson, meanwhile
Is still around
But besides becoming white
Hes become very sad
The song explores the roots and routes of Afro-diasporic culture, ranging easily, in a musical version of magic realism, over ve centuries and diverse continents, orchestrating a creative counterpoint between the early 16th century
when Africans arrived in Braziland the late 20th-century era of Bob Dylan,
Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson. The allusion to a putative Dylan reggae album
through which he returned to the Jewish people clearly references Rastafarianism as an Afro-diasporic religion imbued with Jewish symbologies (the Lion of
Judah, Babylon, and so forth); Dylan, leaving Judaism, returned to it through
the sacred music of Jamaica. When the peoples of Africa arrived in Brazil, Gil
goes on, there was no freedom of religion. Signicantly, Gils lyrics speak not of
blacks but of the peoples of Africa, since the reifying totalization of blacks
was itself the product of colonialism and slavery. The values of religious freedom
and tolerance, the song reminds us, did not extend to African or indigenous religions in the Americas. Given this lack of freedom, Africans in Brazil adopted
Our Lord of Bomm, an act both of resistance and surrender. The nal refrain
indexes two forms of syncretism, one in the form of the music of Bob Marley
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and the other in the more melancholy and compromised form of Michael Jackson: Bob Marley died/ Because besides being black/ He was Jewish/ Michael
Jackson, meanwhile/ Is still around/ But besides becoming white/ Hes become
very sad. In sum, the song allegorically contemplates one set of times and spaces
through another set of times and spaces, in a suggestive contrapuntal haunting
across national and epochal boundaries.
If Gils provocation samba relationalizes blackness and Jewishness, Caetanos
1977 song Um ndio places in relation the indigenous past, present, and future.
An Indian not only is written in the prophetic genre but also turned out to be
literally prophetic of the indigenous resurgence that has been taking place since
the 1970s throughout the Red Atlantic. Some of the lyrics go as follows:
From a shining colored star will descend an Indian
From a star that spins with dazzling velocity
A star that will lodge in the heart of America in an instant of clarity
An Indian preserved in his full physical presence
In solid, in gas, in atoms, words, soul, color, in gesture, in smell, in shadow, in light,
in magnicent sound
As a spot equidistant between the Atlantic and the Pacic
The Indian will descend from a resplendent object
And the thing that I know he will say I do not know how to say explicitly
And what is to be revealed at that moment to the people
Will surprise everyone by not being exotic
And by its power to have always remained hidden
When in fact it was obvious
With uncanny prescience, Um ndio sets to music the theme of the transnational ow of ideas around the gure of the Indian. Encoding indigenous ideas
about stars and astronomy, and specically the idea that culture heroes become
constellations, the Indian pictured arrives in the guise of a visitor from another
planet, in a spaceship reminiscent of Spielbergs Close Encounters of the Third
Kind. The song portrays a Columbus-like discovery in reverse, in terms that
recall both native legends and blockbuster science ction. But this time the god
who arrives from afar is not European but indigenous, foreshadowing a passage
in Tropical Truth in which Caetano speaks of another discovery, this time mutual,
in which the heart inclines more toward the Indian than toward Cabral.58
The song scrambles various genres (prophecy, science ction, Indianist poetry),
while at the same time resuscitating the Enlightenment topos, found in Raynal and
Diderot, of the New World Avenger, the Indian or black Spartacus who comes
to redeem suering peoples. The reference to the most advanced of technologies,
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meanwhile, subverts any primitivist nostalgia by calling up not only Oswald de

Andrades indio tecnizado but also contemporary Indians who use technology to
outwit the powerful, for example, the activist-politicians such as Juruna with his tape
recorder registering political promises, since politicians always lie to the Indians.
Um ndio, in this sense, brings together many of our themes. The songs
transnational references draw on the taproot of indigenous culture (the reading of the nights starry face for signs and omens), on 19th-century Indianism
(Peri), as well as on 20th-century modernism. Ever the overturner of hierarchies,
Caetano imagines the redemptive gure of the Red Avenger in pop-cultural
terms, as a multiracial amalgam of postmodern culture heroes: rst, Muhammad Ali, African American boxer and war resister who converted to Islam and
whose transnational genealogy goes back to Africa, through an imposed European (slave) nameCassius Clayand nally to an Arabic/Islamic name; second, Peri, the pure romantic Indian from Alencars Indianist novel O Guarani,
valued here for his passion but not for his role as collaborator; third, Bruce Lee,
an Asian master of a millennial martial art, with an Anglo-American name; and
nally, the ax (Yoruba for energy) of the afox (Africanized Carnival percussion
group), composed mainly of black people from Bahia, which named itself Sons
of Gandhi in 1948, a year after Indian independence, in an homage to a pacist
Indian leader (Mahatma Gandhi) by a Carnival bloco whose costumes were modeled on the imperial lm Gunga Din.
These Tropiclia songs oer a relational perspective on cultural crossings
around the Black and Red Atlantic. They suggest the socially anticipatory power
of music to provide metaphors and models for a more equal society. Tropiclia
shows how music can transgure historical relationalities by staging multicultural conicts and connections in ways that complement the methods of written
history and the social sciences. Artists such as Caetano and Gil display a chameleonic ability to move easily between various cultural repertoires, to negotiate multiple worlds in a ludic dance of identities reminiscent of Carnival and
Candombl. They perform the cultural debates in visual, sensuous, and percussive form. Artistic practices here are not mere mirrors of identity; rather, they
are communicative events that shape, critique, and fashion new forms of identity
and identication. Music and art create new registers of feeling and new forms
of social subjectivity. In the music of Tropiclia, one hears not only the musical
memory of pain and discrimination but also proleptic tones of a social utopia,
communicating a visceral and kinetic sense of what freedom and equality might
feel like in a society shorn of its oppressive features.
In this light, it is worth contemplating the political productivity of popular
music as a source for mobilizing socially collaborative tropes such as polyphony,
polyrhythms, call-and-response, and counterpoint. One could conceive of a trans-
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national orchestration of a coalitionary movement of movements, the political

equivalent of a jazz-like ensembleWynton Marsaliss jazz democracya defpoetry jam of strong and diverse voices, or a Carnival of blocos and samba schools.
The norm of a single nation or culture implies marginalization of other subnations or parallel nations within the multination state. But in musical polyphony,
the ute does not win over the guitar, nor the trumpet over the bass, nor melody
over percussion. Tropiclia, in this sense, shows musics capacity to give pleasurable, kinetic shape to social desire, to mobilize feeling in a mass-mediated form.
In terms of our more immediate purposes in this book, it exemplies an artistic
form of thinking that goes beyond xed and monolithic notions of culture to
explore the linked analogies of the cultures of the Rainbow Atlantic.
Scholarship and the Persistence of Race

Race studies, (multi)cultural studies, and to an extent postcolonial studies have
been a much more accepted part of Brazilian scholarship than they have been
in France. Brazilian scholarship constantly engages, for example, the mantra of
race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire. The Brazilian equivalent of the Modern
Language Association, ABRALIC, at its 2000 conference in Salvador, Bahia, featured four frequently cited gures in race and postcolonial studies: Stuart Hall,
Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Robert Young. Most young Brazilian academics
in the humanities are comfortablesome critics would say too comfortable
with estudos culturais (cultural studies) while slightly more ambivalent about
multiculturalism, both for the pretentiousness of the -ism and for its perceived
North American provenance.
It would be inaccurate to see this eorescence of scholarship as in any way an
epiphenomenon of Anglo-American inuence. First, (multi)cultural studies is a
worldwide current with many points of origin, part of a broader democratization
of culture that moves from Arnoldian elitist conceptions of culture as the best
that has been thought and written to anthropological conceptions of culture as
the way everyday people live and think. Second, Brazilian (multi)cultural studies build on Brazilian intellectual traditions: 1920s modernism with its appeal to
popular culture as a source for art; the 1930s Freyrean exploration of such varied
phenomena as cuisine, folklore, and sexuality; and Tropiclia and Cinema Novo
in the 1960s, with their rejection of the high-art/low-art hierarchy. Many of the
artistic movements had in common an aesthetic based on the erudite reelaboration of popular materials, such as samba and cordel literature, and the indigenization of out-of-place ideas. The ground for cultural studies, then, was richly prepared in Brazil; the phrase merely provided a rubric for energies and movements
already well under way in the moving depths of the culture.
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Recent years have also featured a remarkable surge of Brazilian scholarship

on race and racism, generating such titles as Racism in Brazil; Racisms and Antiracisms in Brazil: Ethnic Pluralism and Multiculturalism; Removing the Mask:
Essays on Racism in Brazil; Media and Racism; Media and Ethnicity in Brazil and
the U.S.; Negritude, Cinema, and Education; Multiculturalism: The Thousand and
One Faces of Education; The Social Psychology of Racism; Race as Rhetoric; The Persistence of Race; and Racism: Explained to My Children. The collection Removing
the Mask: Essays on Racism in Brazil, edited by Brazilian Antonio Srgio Alfredo
Guimares and American Lynn Huntley privileges comparative, diasporic, and
transnational perspectives. The trope of the mask in the title is itself Afrodiasporic, simultaneously evoking Du Bois, Fanon, and Paul Lawrence Dunbar,
whose poem we use the mask that laughs and lies serves as epigraph to the
volume. Part of the Comparative Human Relations Initiative, linked to various
Brazilian institutions along with the Southern Education Foundation in Atlanta,
Georgia, and the Institute for the Development of South Africa, the volume proposes a comparative study of race in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa.
Despite nuances (more or less mixing, more or less tension), the three countries
share salient points: historical legacies of colonialism and slavery, racially diversied populations, discrimination toward blacks, and rationalizations that explain
away inequality.
Helio Santos speaks in his essay of various aspects of racial subordination in Brazil: the absence of blacks in advertising and television commercials;
police abuse of nonwhite subcitizens; the denial of black historical agency in
conventional pedagogy; and the lefts dismissal of race as less urgent than class.
He salutes the various manifestations of black activism in Brazil: the Palmares
Cultural Foundation; the black movement within the Catholic Church; the nongovernmental organization Geledes (Institute of the Black Woman); the Afroblocos in Salvador, Bahia; the Black Culture Research Institute; and so forth. In
Reections on the Black Movement in Brazil, 19381997, Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento trace the history of black activism in the
20th century, going back to the 1910 Revolt of the Whip (the struggle against
corporeal punishment in the navy led by the Black Admiral Joo Cndido). The
authors cite various cases of discrimination against African American notables
(anthropologist Irene Diggs, choreographer Katherine Dunham, singer Marian
Anderson), along with an International Seminar on African Culture, sponsored
by UNESCO and the Brazilian government, to which no blacks were invited.
Another 2002 collection, titled Race as Rhetoric: The Construction of Dierence, edited by Yvonne Maggie and Claudia Barcellos Rezende, features Brazilian, American, Belgian, South African, British, and Italian scholars. In the
preface, Peter Fry argues that racial democracy is not a mask for racism but
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rather a utopian projection.59 Anthropologist Olvia Maria Gomes da Cunha,

meanwhile, unpacks the racial politics of the putatively democratic space of Rios
famous beaches. She focalizes the media portrayal of the October 1992 Arrasto
(dragnet), when hundreds of young favelados and suburbanos (residents of the
poorer Northern Zone of Rio) frightened the usually dominant middle-class
whites from Ipanema. The arrival of summer, in Cunhas words, foreshadowed
chaos and violence through the explosive combination of young suburbanos,
theft, music, and confusion on the burning sands of a crowded Ipanema beach.60
For Cunha, the media represented the incident as a sample of the danger posed
by the out-of-control horde uninhibitedly defying the subtle borders of Carioca
sociability.61 While a deracialized vocabulary described the participants as vandals, marginals, and gangs, any telespectator could easily see that most of the
participants were nonwhite. The question of color was omnipresent, but in a
mode of denegation.62 In the next chapter, we will further explore the issue of
denegation in relation to reparations, Armative Action, and whiteness studies.
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From Armative Action to

Interrogating Whiteness
t h i s c ha p t e r a ddr e s s e s , within a larger Atlantic context,

two issues that might at rst glance seem to be only vaguely related: Armative Action and whiteness studies. While the former represents concrete remedial measures, the latter forms part of an innovative academic trend. Yet the two
issues are linked in that they address two forms of white privilege, one social and
material, the other subjective and cognitive. Remedial measures have the eect
of outing and naming, as it were, a preexisting white advantage accumulated
over centuries. While Armative Action centers on those who have been disadvantaged by a racialized system, whiteness studies performs a psychosocial
analysis of the advantaged. Here whites are asked to relinquish not simply a
material advantage but also a psychic advantage, that is, the luxury of imagining
themselves as unimplicated in social/racial domination. If Armative Action is
literally remedial, whiteness studies is metaphorically remedial in correcting the
misconception that only blacks are raced.
Our purpose here is not to oer a comprehensive institutional history or
to detail concrete solutions but rather to examine the transnational dimension
of the debates. Extending a discussion usually focused on the United States to
France and Brazil highlights both the continuity and discontinuity of arguments
across the borders. How have these discussions been conducted and translated
across the three zones? While the debates have often mobilized a comparative
method, either to endorse or to condemn remedial measures, they have sometimes remained premised on unitary conceptions of the nation. Our hope is to
transnationalize the debates through a translational prism that accounts for the
connectivities between diverse cultural geographies.
Remedial Measures and the Legacy of Armative Whiteness

The debates over reparations and Armative Action form new editions of
Enlightenment debates about slavery and freedom and the universal and the
particular. Is the social contract of Hobbes and Locke also racial and sexual?
Are rights universal or limited on the basis of race, gender, and property? Such
debates are not the product only of the 20th century. In the United States, David
Walkers Appeal, in 1829, already hinted at blacks right to reparations. In 1868,
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just ve years after the Emancipation Proclamation, hundreds of former slaves

led suit to compel former slave masters to pay wages earned during the prior
seasons work. (Whites responded by burning down the courthouse that held
the eighteen hundred lawsuits led by the freedmen.) Raymond A. Winbush
delineates three distinct phases in the reparations discussion: (1) from 1865 to
1920, with U.S. government proposals such as 40 Acres and a Mule, to compensate the three million freed African Americans; (2) from 1920 to 1968, with the
attempts by Marcus Garvey and other nationalists to educate blacks about the
debt owed them; and (3) from 1968 to the present, with eorts by black nationalist groups such as Republic of New Africa and by leaders such as Randal Robinson to explore the possibility of congressionally mandated reparations.1
In Brazil, formal demands for reparations were submitted in 1987 to the countrys Constituent Assembly. Over a century before, however, abolitionist Joaquim
Nabuco, in 1883, had already called attention to the debt owed black Brazilians:
Everything that has to do with Mans struggle against nature, with the conquest of
the soil through habitation and culture, with roads and buildings, caneelds and
coee plantation, the home of the master and the quarters of the slave, telegraphs
and train tracks, schools and hospitals, everything, absolutely everything that
exists in Brazil, as a result of manual labor and accumulation of wealth, is nothing
more than a gift from the race that has done the work.2
The underlying premise of the reparations movement is that the transatlantic slave trade and slavery itself were crimes against humanity, among the most
grave ever committed, and that these crimes had massive consequences that beneted the enslavers and their heirs and grievously harmed the enslaved and their
descendants. Slavery constituted not a single crime but rather a constellation of
crimes, including kidnapping, rape, and theft. The reparations movement thus
calls attention to an in some ways unpayable debt. Indeed, one discursive advantage of emphasizing reparations rather than racism is that the proposal reminds
whites of the cumulative benets brought them as a result of slavery and its
sequels, even if they arrived as immigrants who acquired some of the taken-forgranted perks of whiteness.
In both the United States and Brazil, reparations advocates cite signicant
historical precedents: U.S. payments to Native Americans (e.g., the Alaska
Native Claims Settlement Act), U.S. payments to Japanese Americans for their
internment during World War II, Florida legislature grants (in 1994) for the heirs
of the black victims of white mob violence, Canadian land grants to rst peoples,
German and Austrian payments to Jews for the Holocaust, and so forth. Since
individuals can be compensated for unfair individual incarceration, it is argued,
groups too can logically also be compensated for their collective loss of personal
freedom and the prerogatives of citizenship. But whether or not the reparations
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movement results in actual reparations, the discourse of the movement itself has
a salutary eect. Short-circuiting the usual white defense mechanisms, the issue
of reparations changes the subject from highly subjective and often narcissistic
questions about prejudice to very concrete issues concerning unpaid labor, stolen land, and unkept ocial promises. Whites standard reaction to accusations
of racism has often been a ight from responsibility. But with the reparations
debate, the energy wasted by whites proving their lack of racism is channeled
into more productive material questions: Precisely how much are indigenous
people owed for genocide and the loss of land, or diasporic blacks for the physical, psychological, economic, and moral harm engendered by slavery? The legal
system often compensates trauma; does not the historical trauma of segregation
merit compensation as well?
A product of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Armative
Action in the United States proposed to rectify inequality through preferential
treatment in the distribution of resources and jobs. Although often discussed by
both detractors and proponents as if it were a uniquely American concept, Armative Action is not unique to the United States. Many nation-states have developed forms of Armative Action, although not necessarily under that rubric. In
India, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar led the movement to include legislative mechanisms for remedial measurescalled reservationsfor the untouchables
(Dalit) already in the 1948 Indian Constitution. Malaysia adopted a quota system
for the bumiputeras in 1971, while Canada, Australia, and South Africa have all
adopted similar measures for their respective minorities.
First appearing in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Armative Action called for
concrete action on the part of employers to promote equal opportunity and for
developing concrete forms of assistance to minority ethnic groups ocially recognized as having suered a history of legal discrimination. (A 1965 executive order
subsequently implemented the law in the eld of employment.) Rather than being
exclusively about race, Armative Action was also about color, religion, sex, and
national origin. During the 1970s, a new positive argumentdiversitywas
added to the negative argument of prior discrimination. The problem with diversity, however, is its vagueness: in a ssion-like process, everyone, even white racists, can claim to be diverse. More recently, we encounter a judicial fatigue with
group rightsprecisely because the groups demanding rights are potentially
inniteresulting in a defensive move from particular group rights to universal
equal rights. Thus, the argument shifts from the rights of blacks to everyones
right not to be discriminated against or from the rights of the handicapped to
everyones right to have access to political institutions.
Lively debates about compensatory measures have emerged in all three countries, whether under the rubric of Armative Action in the United States or la
211
discrimination positive in France, or cotas (quotas) in Brazil. In the United States,

supporters have shied away from the word quotashistorically redolent of
anti-Semitic decreeswhile supporting mechanisms whereby race becomes one
factor among others in opening up higher education and employment to historically disadvantaged communities. Some Brazilian activists argue the desirability
of numerical quotas as asserting a general social goalan equality of results
rather than an individualist competitive equality of opportunity. In all three zones,
compensatory measures have provoked anxious discussions, sometimes exposing
tensions about race and class within progressive movements. Given the concrete
legal and practical consequences of Armative Action, it forms one place where
the rubber of critical race theory meets the road of everyday social praxis. Kimberl Crenshaw distinguishes between the mere rejection of white supremacy
as a normative vision and a societal commitment to the eradication of the substantive conditions of black subordination [through] the actual distribution of
goods and resources, status, and prestige.3 Armative Action, for perhaps the
rst time in history, calls for public policies that might actually entail the loss of
some taken-for-granted privileges on the part of whites. No longer asked simply
to condemn racism verbally, whites are asked actually to give up a modicum of
power in the name of broader egalitarian goals.
As an attempt to undo injustices produced by centuries of inequality, Armative Action has embraced a wide range of initiatives having to do with public employment, access to education, hiring, community representation, and so
forth. These initiatives are widely regarded as having diminishedbut clearly not
eliminatedracial and sexual discrimination in hiring, promotion, and wages.
For more radical critics, Armative Action is but one small and inadequate gesture that risks becoming a g leaf that hides the dirty secret of the systematic
production of inequality. A deeper restructuring would feature a broader arsenal
of redistributive techniques embracing class, race, gender, sexuality, and region.
Race-sensitive measures such as Armative Action and reparations would ideally form part of a continuum of complementary strategies designed (1) to combat racial inequality and discrimination; (2) to penalize acts of discrimination
against people of color, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals; (3) to heal injured minority self-esteem through cultural, educational, and media armation; and (4) to
empower women and people of color in key media and educational institutions.
An alternative and in some ways complementary approach favors genderand race-blind public policy initiatives to equalize wealth, prestige, and power
generally.4 Apparently race-neutral measuresfree or aordable education, universal health care, day care for children, unemployment benets, family leave,
pensionsimprove quality of life for the majority but also especially benet the
people of color usually placed at the bottom of the social ladder. (That the French
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welfare state already oers these advantages suggests both (1) how unequal the
U.S. social system is and (2) that the welfare state in itself does not eliminate discrimination and marginalization.) To wax utopian, one could imagine a sharply
progressive tax code calibrated in relation to intersecting factors of social exclusion including race, class, and gender, which might entail small sacrices for the
prosperous but could massively aid subalternized communities. A well-conducted form of a class-narrowed reparations might apportion nancial help to
those who are mired in transgenerational structural unemployment. A domestic
Marshall Plan, meanwhile, might reconstruct inner-city communities. Rather
than grants for individuals, such remedial programs might transfer funds from
corporations that demonstrably proted from slavery and discrimination toward
institutions and communities that have just as demonstrably suered from slavery and its sequels. The institutions directly or indirectly enriched by slavery
shipping companies, agribusiness, insurance rms, real estate companieswould
be obliged to give back to the people and communities whose labor has enriched
them. Such race-based remedial measures need not revolve around individual
white guilt and resentment but rather around historical responsibility. Instead of
a favor to people of color, such measures constitute a contribution to a more perfect union, one that potentially facilitates a reconciliation of the dominant group
with the better angels of their own conscience. Remedial measures can constitute
at once an expression of collective responsibility for historical injustice and an
expression of gratitude for blood shed and labor spent, thus helping salve the
racial wound for everyone.
While some conservatives acknowledge the successes of Armative Action,
they argue that it is no longer needed and that it entails unfairness to white
males, since gains by women and people of color, within a zero-sum game, necessarily entail white losses. Objections to remedial measures are often premised
on individualist and moralistic assumptions that obscure the processes by which
the racial system systematically allots advantages according to racial criteria that
have little to do with merit. The meritocratic argument ignores the unacknowledged forms of preferential treatment that have historically operated in favor of
white Europeans, going back to the Discovery Doctrine that authorized white
Europeans to occupy sovereign indigenous territories. Transatlantic slavery, similarly, enriched Europe and its descendants in all of the Americas. In both the
United States and Brazil, the white advantage persisted in the form of discriminatory land grants, discriminatory immigration policies, and property giveaways
or simply through the disqualication, on the basis of race, of a large sector of the
population from competition for jobs, benets, and the vote.
In discursive-ideological terms, individualism, meritocratism, Social Darwinism, and antigovernment free-market ideology all play a role in the rejection of
213
remedial measures. Some middle-class whites, convinced that their gains derive
solely from individual merit rather than from inherited resources, reject not only
Armative Action but also other democratizing measures such as universal
health care, even though health care is to middle-class advantage. At the same
time, longstanding prejudices project racialized minorities and immigrants of
color as irresponsible parasites undeserving of entitlements. A short-sighted
narcissism seeks to deprive others of their fair slice of the pie yet ends up boomeranging against the prejudiced themselves, who lose their own slice.
One Orwellian claim by the opponents of remedial measures is that antiracist
measures are actually racist. The claim equates the mere naming of racism with
racism itself. As part of that equation, the opponents dene racism in a constrictive and ultimately trivializing fashion. In The End of Racism, for example, Dinesh
DSouza calls racism an opinion that recognizes real civilization dierences and
attributes them to biology.5 This denition embeds a number of sleights of hand,
beginning with the idea that racism is an opinion. If racism is simply an opinion, and if we all have our opinions, then racism is just one more idea operating
in the free market of ideas, where the best idea wins in the most meritocratic
of all possible worlds. But racism is above all a social relationsystematized
hierarchization implacably pursued, in Fanons concise formula6a structured
ensemble of social discourses and institutional practices anchored in material
structures and embedded in historical relations of power. Individuals do not have
to actively express or practice racism to be its beneciaries. If racism were merely
an opinion, it would not be so dangerous.
Revisiting Enlightenment debates about race and civilizational hierarchies,
DSouza speaks of real civilizational dierencesa polite way of saying civilizational hierarchiesthus siding with the ideologists who rank civilizations as
superior or inferior. The very word civilization brings its own historical baggage
of the line marking o civilized from savage. DSouzas only concession to antiracist discourse is to reject the attribution of civilizational dierences to biology, a
move that opens the way for attributing these dierences to culture. On the one
hand, DSouza borrows from the critique of scientic racism, but his invocation
of civilizational dierences tips the scales toward hierarchical rankings and thus
moves from biological to cultural racism. Confronted with the armative correction of historical injustices, the right, forgetting the history of white advantage,
becomes the partisan of an abstract equality. The empty ideal of color-blindness
posits progress as transcending race and therefore condemns both white racism
and black liberationism as wrongfully race conscious. But color-blindness itself
can be a particular discourse of power used by the dominant group to rationalize its own privileged status.7 Legalistic claims about equality and rights, in this
sense, actually hide another unacknowledged set of social credentials (whiteness,
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maleness, propertiedness, Americanness), that o-the-books racial contract that

constitutes the real basis of inclusion.8
In all three national zones, the backlash against Armative Action programs
has been expressed in accusations of reverse racism, race-based quotas, special
rights for blacks, rigid quotas, preferential hiring, and so forth. But to those
who reject compensatory measures in the name of fairness and color-blindness,
we pose the following questions: What explains this recently acquired passion
for fairness? Why were there no protests about the discriminatory policies that
historically favored your own group? And why not correct the horrendous legacy
left by those prowhite measures? Also, the inertia of discrimination penalizes the
nation as a whole, condemning a vital part of the citizenry to withered dreams
and the waste of human resources. And how do we explain the selective outrage
about cost? Why have so many white Americans willingly allowed their taxes to
benet the Pentagon yet reject measures to help people of color? (The Tea Partys
hostility to government, for example, is highly selective, aimed not at costly wars
but only at programs beneting the poor and people of color.) Why is it only
when nonwhites benet that whites develop a passion for cost cutting?
Critics of Armation Action call it divisive, impractical, and rooted in race
thinking. But when asked for concrete alternatives, they usually oer only a motley of tired proposals such as improving education, in short, more of the same
universalist proposals that fail to address the specically racial dimension of the
problem. Those who refuse all concrete proposals for moving the society toward
substantive equality ultimately support the status quo of racial advantage. The
real question is not who is racist but what can be done collectively to transform
the systems of racialized inequality. Although the debates about remedial measures often devolve into passionately anecdotal quarrels about individual cases
and comparative qualications, the issues gain a dierent perspective when seen
within the longue dure of colonial history and the Enlightenment debates. In our
ve-century perspective, the history of the Black Atlantic since 1492 becomes
readable as a case of self-perpetuating armative whiteness, whereby some Europeans (obviously not all, since some were indentured servants) were granted the
right to invade, dispossess, enslave, occupy, and dominate resource-rich land.
Armative Action for whites operated even at the time of abolition, in that
slaveholders were compensated for losing their slaves. If blacks have the right
to be free, as Alexis de Tocqueville put it, the colonists [also] have the right not
to be ruined by the freedom of the blacks.9 The slave owners were compensated
for their crime, while the enslaved were not compensated for their suering and
their loss of freedom.10
In the United States, postabolition ocial policies have almost always favored
whites, including poor southern whites who were symbolically compensated for
215
not allying with blacks. The U.S. government has blandished a cornucopia of benets on whites, whether in the concessions of land taken from the Native Americans (e.g., the Homestead Act in 1862) or in laws that favored whites by segregating housing.11 As William Julius Wilson points out, many government programs,
such as the Federal Housing Administration inaugurated in 1934, were selectively
administered to benet whites.12 Educational set-aside programs, meanwhile,
funnel the children of elite whites into prestigious universities. It was a legacy
program that guaranteed George W. Bushlater an opponent of Armative
Actiona place in Yale University despite his mediocre academic performance.
In fact, Bushs entire career provides a striking exemplum of Armative Action
for wealthy whites, even those with learning disabilities and a penchant for alcohol, cocaine, and destructive behavior.
The hostility to compensatory measures for blacks is undergirded by toxic
prejudices about the history of Africa and slavery that go back to the right wing of
the Enlightenment. First, the Eurocentric view of Africa as a dysfunctional continent lacking in legitimate culture implied that kidnapped Africans had lost nothing of value and were therefore undeserving of compensation. Second, the hostility is reinforced by the claim, traceable to conservative Enlightenment thinkers,
now resuscitated by right-wing ideologists such as David Horowitz, that slavery
served to civilize and humanize Africans. Third, the hostility is exacerbated by
the outrageous notion that blacks owe whites compensation because whites such
as Lincoln freed the slaves. Fourth, it is reinforced by the liberal mystication of
a purely individual freedom, supposedly violated by group rights. The hostility
is buttressed, nally, by a complacent gradualism, voiced by some abolitionists in
the past and by some white liberals later, that blacks were not ready for freedom.
This gradualism has a very old pedigree. Some 18th-century philosophers, some
American Founding Fathers, and even some French and American abolitionists
warned against a precipitous emancipation. Some 20th-century white liberals,
meanwhile, warned black activists to go slow. But only master race assumptions
could normalize the idea that black people, after centuries of oppression, should
patiently wait for full equality, especially when the promise of equality had been
inscribed in ocial documents as the national creed from the very beginnings of
the republic.
The Quotas Debate in Brazil

In Brazil, in the wake of redemocratization in the mid-1980s, and thanks to the
eorts of activists of all colors, many remedial measures, based on both race and
class, have been proposed or adopted. A rst eort, Law 650, proposed by Senator Jose Sarney in 1998, mandated that blacks be granted 20 percent of the posi-
216
tions in public jobs and in higher education. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, state
law mandated that 40 percent of the places in the state universities be granted to
blacks. The Federal University of Bahia, the State University of Rio, the University of Brazilia, and the University of So Paulo have also developed projects to
facilitate access for black students. Rosana Heringer, in her study of ten Brazilian
cities between 1995 and 1999, identied 124 programs designed to combat racial
discrimination, and such programs have increased exponentially since then.13 The
Lula government instituted a Ministry of Racial Equality. It also named Joaquim
Benedito Barbosa Gomes, a black judicial scholar and an expert on comparative (United StatesBrazil) Armative Action, to the Supreme Court. Barbosa
Gomes argues in his writing that the Brazilian state, despite a rhetoric of impartiality, has indirectly supported the white elite through tax laws favoring private
schools.
Along lines similar to those argued by proponents of critical law, critical race,
and racial contract theory in the United States, Barbosa Gomes contrasts the
merely formal and procedural equality of the oft-invoked equality under the law
derived from classical contractarian theory with a more substantive equality that
would rectify the inequities generated by a racialized system. Those nations that
prattle the most about equality before the law, Gomes points out, often display
the highest indices of social injustice, since the emphasis on process ignores all the
factors that precede the entry of individuals within the competitive job market.14
Anthropologist/activist Jos Jorge de Carvalho, similarly, argues that Brazilian
society has functioned ... as a self-regulating system which constantly reproduces
the same racial inequality.15 He metaphorizes the unfairness as a race across a
river in which whites cross by motorboat, while blacks have to swim.16 (Deploying a dierent sports analogy, Kimberl Crenshaw compares the U.S. situation
to a racetrack where some socially privileged individuals are granted immediate
access, while others are hampered by endless hurdles before even getting within
sight of the track.)17
The 1988 Brazilian Constitution was remarkably progressive with regard to
womens and indigenous rights, antiracist and antisexist laws, principles of tolerance and cultural pluralism, and the protection of individual dignity. The constitution rejected a merely formal equality of opportunity in favor of a material
equality of results. The challenge has been to translate those golden proclamations into the leaden currency of everyday life, in a national context where the
law is often more of a pious expression of nice ideas than of real-world practice. Armative Action, in this sense, gives esh and vitality to the constitutions
promises. Yet egalitarian provisions are not completely new: every Brazilian
constitution has contained provisions for formal due process and fundamental
rightsprovisions inspired by the French and U.S. constitutionsbut in prac-
217
tice the courts have only protected the rights of the powerful. Yet at the same
time, the 1988 constitution has fueled what James Holston calls insurgent citizenship, an unprecedented attempt to use the law to secure rights, but which
has in turn exposed the incapacities of the law and amplied the problem of
impunity.18
Some critics point to a technical aw in the application of any quota system
in Brazil, that is, the dependence on individuals self-designation as black, a procedure even more problematic in Brazil than elsewhere given the instability of
racial denition. In one notorious case, one identical twin was declared black,
while the other was declared white. Some phenotypically black students have
refused, as a matter of principle, to take advantage of quotas, while some phenotypically white students have rushed to take advantage of them.19 Thus, Armative Action raises fears of the opportunism spoofed in the Hollywood lm Soul
Man, in which a white student blackens his skin to qualify for nancial aid. To
the argument that no one really knows who is black since we are all mixed, some
black activists have responded that when the military police single out black people for arrest or a beating, or when doormen send black people to use the service
elevator, they seem to know the code that determines essential blackness. When
the military police raid a bus and arrest only black people, the police, in their
assigned social role as impromptu physiognomists, act according to a clear idea
of who qualies as black. Black, in this sense, refers not only to phenotype and
color but also to the oppressed positionality of those whom Brazilian philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the aectables, those whom state disciplinary
power treats as subcitizens.20 Racial proling in Brazil, denounced both in activist literature and in rap songs, in this sense, reveals the existential limitations of
miscegenation as panacea, much as racial proling of blacks and Maghrebians in
France reveals the limitations of republican color-blindness, or as racial proling of blacks for DWB (driving while black) or of Arabs for FWA (ying while
Arab) in the United States reveals the limitations of equal opportunity and all
men are created equal.
Unlike in the United States, the Brazilian opposition to Armative Action
does not necessarily come from those who are normally associated with rightwing or with laissez-faire market ideologies. Nor have Brazilian politicians
exploited race as a wedge issue. The Brazilian left critics often endorse egalitarian
goals while objecting to the means. A certain Marxizing left, meanwhile, argues
that it is not race but class, or it will divide the working class. Yet the actual
arguments, in another instance of the right-left convergence noted earlier, bear
a discursive anity with those of the U.S. right. On occasion, the Brazilian critics even explicitly cite U.S. conservatives. One of the most vocal opponents of
Armative Action, journalist Ali Kamel, for example, cites as obligatory read-
218
ing Thomas Sowells attack on Armative Action, calling him one of the most
renowned American intellectuals, without explaining that Sowell, as an ally of
the Bush administration and a Fellow of the right-wing think tank the Hoover
Institution, forms part of that statistical rara avis called the black Republican.21
The opposition to Armative Action in Brazil was expressed in the popular media and in protest petitions. The cover of the newsweekly Veja ( June 6,
2007) declared that race does not exist. An April 21, 2008, petition entitled 113
Anti-racist Citizens against Racial Laws, meanwhile, argued that educational
laws (ADI 3.330 and ADI 3.197) favoring racial quotas violated the constitution
by establishing distinctions between Brazilians. Signed by well-known academics
(Alba Zaluar), poets (Ferreira Gullar), theater directors (Gerald Thomas), and
novelists ( Joo Ubaldo Ribeiro), the petition claimed that such laws risk racializing social life in Brazil by installing the U.S. black/white system of classication.
Like U.S. conservatives, the petitioners quote Martin Luther King, Jr.s content
of character discourse, specically citing Thomas Sowells claim that Armative Action has aggravated the racial divide. The text even cites Bush-appointed
Supreme Court Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., to the eect that Armative Action
constitutes a form of racial discrimination. While acknowledging racial prejudice
in Brazil, the petition reiterates the usual comparative commonplaces that Brazil,
unlike the United States, is miscegenated, lacks racial hatred, and so forth, to
claim that Brazil is not a racist nation.
A former critic of the myth of racial democracy, British-born anthropologist
Peter Fry, meanwhile, argues for a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism that obviates the need for compensatory measures.22 Due to the specic congurations of
race and class in Brazil, Fry suggests, Armative Action risks sowing the seeds
of racial division within the very group that is now the most socially integrated:
the Brazilian lower middle class. While Fry would otherwise have little in common with Arthur Schlesinger or Dinesh DSouza, he shares with them the idea
that compensatory measures bring social division. Sambista/activist/intellectual
Nei Lopes, in contrast, argues that Armative Action policies would help create
a real racial democracy by forging full citizenship for black Brazilians.23 While
many activists reject the myth of racial democracy, Fry argues that this myth has
the virtue of giving voice to a progressive norm condemning racism and endorsing democratic tolerance as values shared by all Brazilians. Racial democracy,
for Fry, is not descriptive but prescriptive, an inspiring ideal or good idea with
positive eects in the world.24 (Here, one is tempted to invoke Gandhis boutade
about Western Civilization as a good idea that has also never been tried.)
Although such myths can function as part of a consensus antiracism, however,
they can also function as a form of denial. The rough functional correlative to
racial democracy in the United States, in this sense, might be the myth of equal
219
opportunity as a productive ction or salutary belief shared by all Americans,

even if, unlike racial democracy, it does not explicitly invoke race. The all men
are created equal clause of the Declaration of Independence, similarly, might
also be seen as a good idea or promissory note that Civil Rights activists tried
to redeem. These value-laden slogans are invested with dierent signications
by dierent groups; only concrete struggles give them esh and meaning. In this
sense, the ght for racial justice can take place within various discursive frameworks, whether within racial democracy in Brazil or the Bill of Rights and equal
opportunity in the United States, or republican egalitarianism in France.
Fry roots his opposition within a larger comparative geographical/cultural
schema that contrasts Anglo-segregationist societies such as the United States, the
United Kingdom, and colonial Rhodesia/Zimbabwe (where Fry lived and worked),
as places where cultural borders are rigid and strictly policed, with Luso-Tropical
societies such as Brazil and Mozambique as sites of fusion, ambiguity, and exibility. Fry thus recongures two traditional discourses: the perennial Anglo/Latin
dichotomy and Luso-Tropicalism la Freyre. But Frys analysis departs from these
antecedents in crucial ways: (1) Frys choice of model is not a product of national or
ethnic narcissism in terms of his own origins as an Anglo, since he clearly favors
the Latin/Luso-Tropical side of the dichotomy; and (2) unlike Freyre, whose visceral antipathy to black militancy was allied with a sentimental attachment to Portuguese colonialism, Fry has been a progressive antiracist and anticolonialist.
In Armative Action in Brazil, Joo Feres, Jr., rebuts the antiArmative
Action arguments by pointing out (1) that roughly half the Brazilian population suers from mechanisms of social exclusion despite the principles of formal
equality expressed in the law; (2) that inequality is statistically evident in clear
gaps in income, education, and employment; (3) that this chronic inequality has
not been ameliorated by the modernization of the economic system or by the
democratization of political and social institutions; (4) that the most prestigious
positions in the country are occupied almost exclusively by whites; and (5) that
education, rather than being a remedy for social exclusion, forms a key site in the
reproduction of inequality. Since Armative Action seeks to counter precisely
those forms of the reproduction of inequality that have escaped universal policies, Feres argues, it is nonsensical to assert that such universal policies must precede the adoption of Armative Action policies.25
The Brazilian Deleuzians associated with the thinking of Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, meanwhile, contest identity while also scoring the hypocrisy
of the opponents of Armative Action. Antonio Negri and Giuseppe Cocco
object to the opportunistic use of miscegenation as a proof of lack of racism:
The way in which the corporatist-nationalist oligarchy recognizes the rich processes of miscegenation only in order to negate them could not be more clear: they
220
deny the innitely multiple dimension (in terms of colors, cultures, languages)
produced by miscegenation (and not only in the past) while at the same time
denying its element of resistance in contesting the most perverse forms of domination (of bipower, of power over life itself ) that characterized the slaveholding state
in Brazil. The necessarily multiple dynamics of miscegenation is opposed to the
gray conguration of ocial discourses: Here there are no blacks and whites; we
are all dark; we are all gray. This is the argument used systematically, by both left
and right, against Armative Action quotas. This double negation converges in a
general consensus among the elites who claim that the contemporary struggle in
Brazil is social not racial. ... By denying the general notion of racism the nationalist left closes its eyes to the evident modulation which connects class and color.26
The implicit contrast here is between miscegenation as a subversive bottom-up

process and miscegenation as a stabilized reality of which a unitary nation, and
especially its elite, is proud. The alarmist warnings about an imminent chaos
supposedly to be brought about by Armative Action, constitute what Negri/
Cocco call chantagem (blackmail) aimed at distracting attention from the fact
that it is the racialized inequality itself that is alarming.
Anthropologist Jos Jorge de Carvalho brings these arguments to bear on
higher education. As the open sesame to opportunity, the Brazilian university
forms the key to access to economic and cultural capital. Provocatively calling the
Brazilian university one of the most racist on the planet, for him even more discriminatory than the South African university during the twilight years of apartheid, Carvalho oers devastating statistics about white advantage. In a country
generally considered to be 47 percent black or mestizo, the student population
is roughly 2 percent black and 8 percent pardo (dark). The faculty, meanwhile, is
99 percent white. Black professors at the University of So Paulo represent less
than half of 1 percent of the aggregate. At the current rate, Carvalho points out,
it will take sixty years for the university to arrive even at a scandalously low 1
percent gure.27 For black students and faculty, racial stress gets superimposed on
socioeconomic and educational stress, to the ultimate advantage of whites: The
racial disadvantage suered by blacks in economic terms provides an advantage
to whites in the struggle to enter the best universities.28 In a point also relevant
to the United States, Carvalho links the racist immigration policies that favored
European immigrants over blacks in the past to the fact that many of the present-day beneciaries of the status quo, now opposed to Armative Action, are
themselves descendants of these same European immigrants. Thus, a discrimination eectuated through immigration policy at the turn of the 20th century has
mutated into another kind of discrimination at the turn of the 21st century, in the
form of resistance to measures that would correct the social imbalance created by
inherited advantages.
221
Armative Action for blacks (and Amerindians) in higher education, for

Carvalho, could potentially bring many benets: (1) reparations for three hundred years of slavery; (2) the substantive acquisition of the equal rights promised
by the 1988 constitution; (3) the multiplier eect triggered by placing blacks in
positions of power; (4) an intellectual life less hampered by the blind Eurocentrism of a university system rooted epistemically in an ethnocentric imaginary;
and (5) the intensication of antiracist struggle in Brazil. To those who warn
of increased tension, Carvalho argues that such tension is productive in that it
forces intellectuals to abandon their pose of scientic objectivity in order to opt
for or against concrete action. Finally, Carvalho calls for a black-white-indigenous alliance for justice and inclusion.29 Lulas minister of racial equality, Matilde
Ribeiro, answered the increased tension argument in an even more frontal way:
Id rather have whites resentful, with blacks in the universities, than whites
happy and blacks out of the universities.30
On June 17, 2010, the Brazilian Senate approved a Racial Equality Law
aimed at reducing racial inequality. The law mandates the teaching of the history
of Africa and of Afro-Brazil and recognizes the property rights of descendants
of the rebel quilombos. To the chagrin of many activists, however, the law did not
endorse quotas for blacks in Brazilian schools or scal incentives for enterprises
hiring 20 percent black employees, or a proposal for a 10 percent quota of blacks
in political party organizations. The law also rejected compensatory indemnization for blacksthat is, reparationsfor the consequences of discrimination
over the course of Brazilian history.
The American Foil

Many of the perennial Brazil-U.S. comparative topoi make their way into the
current debates. Some defenses of the Brazilian racial status quo present themselves as resistance to the American model, as if the refusal of measures to correct injustice against blacks were somehow a refusal of imperialism. (A similar
sophism operates when Third World nationalists defend patriarchal practices
by denouncing feminism as a Western export.) The critics, at their most ideologically barren, use the United States as a foil, so that the angelization of Brazil
goes hand in hand with a demonization of the United States. Some U.S.-based
advocates of Armative Action, meanwhile, arrogantly assume that Brazilians,
as colonial mimic men, need only copy the superior U.S.-American civil right
model.
The U.S.-Brazil comparison is deployed by both advocates and detractors in
the Armative Actions debates. Thus, the detractors invoke the very real horrors
of U.S. segregation, lynching, and the one-drop rule to rebut Armative Action
222
proposals. Jos Jorge de Carvalho speaks of a nationalist sophistry, whereby the

question shifts from what measures would reduce social exclusion to the supposed national provenance of the measures. Carvalho therefore invokes comparisons not to the United States but rather to other countries such as Mexico, Cuba,
Trinidad, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, countries whose
universities, in his account, are all more racially integrated than the Brazilian
university.31
One of the most brazen examples of the instrumentalization of comparison to
narcissistic advantage is Ali Kamels symptomatically titled We Are Not Racists:
A Reaction against Those Who Want to Transform Us into a Bicolor Nation.32 The
title itself is perhaps more revealing than the author intends. First, the We and
the Us are constructed as implicitly white, since it is to whites that accusations
of racism are usually addressed. Second, the subtitle mistakenly assumes that
Armative Action aims to promote a bicolor view of race, when in fact it indirectly undermines bipolarity by promoting greater equality for a transsectional
series of discriminated groups, including Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian
Americans, and, importantly, women. Even if seen as bureaucratically separable,
the groups invoked actually form more of a spectrum. In fact, many analysts see
women, of all colors, as having been the primary beneciaries of these measures.
For Kamel, Armative Action signies the danger of an Americanization
whereby, as Kamel puts it, we, who were so proud of our miscegenation, of our
spectrum of colors, will be reduced to a nation of blacks and whites, and worse,
a nation of whites and blacks where whites oppress blacks.33 Kamels use of the
future tense to envision a Brazil that might someday become a nation where
whites oppress blacks constitutes a remarkable piece of historical amnesia. The
buried premise is that Brazilian whites have never oppressed blacks, while any
future oppression will be due to outside inuence! Three centuries of slavery and
over a century of postabolition racial disadvantage are airbrushed away. This outrageous claim passes only thanks to the comparison to the United States, where,
for Kamel, racism is harder, more explicit, more direct, ... [where] there is a total
repulsion toward everything that is associated with blacks; while here, almost
everyone, including the racists, are in love with everything that is seen as coming
from Africa.34
Despite the hyperboletotal repulsion, everyone in love with AfricaKamel
does point to some real dierences. One can indeed nd a broad enthusiasm in
Brazil, at least in recent decades, for Afro-Brazilian culture, although one can also
nd hostility to it (from the Catholic Church in the past and from Pentecostalists
in the present). Kamels analysis elides the elites historical hostility to African
culture on the Brazilian side, or the millions of white Americans who treat blacks
as equals, admire black celebrities, and vote for Barack Obama on the U.S. side.
223
A binaristic schema pits a very rosy portrait of Brazil against a very sinister portrait of the United States. The point is not that racism in the United States is not
sinister, only that the standard contrasts require recalibration in the age of Oprah
Winfrey and Barack Obama. They also require revision at a time when continental AfricansNigerians, Ghanaians, Senegalese, Malians, Ethiopiansare
immigrating to the United States in record numbers. In fact, the United States is
experiencing the largest wave of African (and Caribbean) immigration since the
importation of slaves was outlawed in 1808. Furthermore, these immigrants are
the best-educated immigrants in the countryand the loss here is for Africa
better educated than immigrating Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans. The
point is not that the United States is ahead of Brazilau contraire!but rather
that distinctions based on reied comparisons no longer enjoy the purchase that
they once had.
Kamels title, by giving voice to a falsely accused white we, hints at the burning core of the narcissistic wound. In Kamels view, not only are white Brazilian individuals not racist, but also Brazil as a whole is not racist: Here, and this
cannot be denied, one nds fewer of those odious peopleracists.35 First, let
us grant that there are more racists in the United States. The huge audience for
racist demagogues such as Limbaugh, Savage, and Beck who envenom public
discourse would suggest that Kamel is absolutely right. In our constant shuttle
between Brazil and the United States, we are often horried by the xenophobic
meanness and race-baiting that permeates the U.S. media, where everything is
seen through a black/white grid very much out of sync with the complex multiplicities of the actually existing country. Racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia
are close to the emotional center of the Tea Party, which is close to the center of
the Republican Party, which is close to the center of power. Unlike the United
States, Brazil has no vocal minority of white racists, no KKK, militias, Minute
Men, no negrophobic politicians and pundits. In the wake of Obamas election,
a boundlessly paranoid American right has questioned Obamas very legitimacy
as an elected president by painting him as not really American or a Muslim or
a communist or a fascist. No accusation is o-limits, and the corporate media
amplify these absurd charges. It is as if hysterical white supremacists were busily
conrming Charles Millss idea that the racial contract exists for whites alone.
The racism of U.S. racists, moreover, is arguably more repulsive than that of
Brazilian racists. Many horrendous practiceswhite riots against prosperous
blacks, sunset towns where blacks were forbidden entry after sunsetnd no
equivalent in Brazilian history. In these struggles, Brazil also has important cultural advantages. Intermarriage and miscegenation do make minorities less otherizable. Given the racial divisiveness that has marred many progressive movements in the United States, a class- and race-based interracial egalitarian politics
224
now seems more likely in Brazil.36 Brazil also has political advantages. Given a
political spectrum pitched to the left, social-democratic, and green, Brazilian
politicians, like French politicians but unlike U.S. politicians, can propose redistribution of wealth without being accused of class warfare and communism.
While millions of Brazilians have moved out of poverty, millions of Americans
have moved into poverty.
Unlike the United States, where millions of people who want to vote are
excluded, in Brazil virtually everyone who wants to vote can vote. And while
Obama was demonized merely for being in the same room as a 60s radical (Bill
Ayers), Brazil just elected a woman (Dilma Rousse ), who had actually participated in an outlawed guerrilla group (the National Liberation Command).
Speaking more generally, one could argue for a kind of Brazilian exceptionalism
in terms of a striking lack of xenophobic demonization. In both France and the
United States, right-wing politicians develop discourses that contrast real Americans or real French with less legitimate others or that contrast those whose
dierences are assimilable with those whose dierences are not. Such discourses
are not part of mainstream political discourse in Brazil. Even the Brazilian dictatorship stigmatized ideological othersthe enemy withinbut not racial or
alien others.
In some ways, the United States is struggling with problemsthe legacies
of racial segregation, the extremism of white-supremacist groups, and the antiLatin and anti-Arab xenophobia of an out-of-control right wingthat do not
exist in Brazil. Yet in other ways, Brazil confronts problems that do not currently
exist in the United States to the same extent: massive poverty, favelacation, a
dysfunctional judicial system, an almost exclusively white political and corporate
class, and so forth. The real issue, in any case, is not either the relative severity of
the racism or the exact proportion of racists but rather the structured (and structuring) system of cumulative racial advantage that characterizes both countries.37
The dumb inertia of inequality in both countries can be said to have produced a
situation of racism without racists or, more accurately, a system that no longer
needs racists, a system that habitually allots privileges to one group and immiseration to the other. Within this social reproduction of inequality, class, caste,
race, color, cultural capital, and the relative coecient of behavioral Europeanness all play a role. The Whose racism is worse? and Where are there more
racists? questions are the wrong questions. Critical race studies has long gone
beyond them to explore the deeper institutional, legal, systemic, and epistemic
undergirdings of racism. The more crucial question is what societies can do collectively to dismantle systems of racialized advantage.
The we are not racist like the Americans argument advanced by Kamel is
ultimately a non sequitur. First, it implies that only North Americans are accusing
225
Brazilians of racism, when in fact it is largely Brazilians (black and some white)
who make the claim. Second, Kamel seems to be making the absurd suggestion
that the introduction of American measures in Brazil, even those designed to
combat racism, can only bring ... more racism! Kamels argument is parasitic on
the widely disseminated portrait of the odious American racistand American
racists are indeed odiousas a foil for the tolerant Brazilian. Transposing situations, it would be as if Americans, in the 1960s, were to oppose Civil Rights by
pointing to the even harsher inequities of South African apartheid. The point,
in our view, is not to establish whose racism is worse but rather to confront the
specic modalities of racial domination in each zone, drawing on local cultural
strengths along with global strategies of resistance.38
Although Kamel acknowledges that racism exists in Brazil, the acknowledgment comes accompanied by disqualifying asides such as like everywhere else
in the world that downplay its signicance. The admission is articulated in the
manner of a recognition that diseases exist, that is, problems exist, and of course
we are trying to eradicate them. But racial hierarchy is rooted in the enslavement,
subordination, and discrimination of African-descended peoples and is thus
foundational to a Brazil that received some 40 percent of the Africans sent to
the Americas. In what might be called the default mode of sentimental nationalism, Kamel oers an amnesiac history of a Brazilian nation that always condemned racism, and where after abolition, there were no institutional barriers
to blacks.39 Kamels formulation leaves us with a questionIf there were no
barriers, why did Brazilian blacks end up so poor and marginalized?and an
implied answerThey must have themselves to blame. Thus, a country whose
structures were dominated by slavery during almost four centuries, that systematically favored European immigrants over the newly freed blacks, is supposed
to have magically transformed itself into a nonracist country with the stroke of
Princesa Isabels abolitionist pen. In this sense, Kamels narrative recalls the magical history proered by American right-wingers, for whom U.S. racism ended
with Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, leaving black Americans completely
equal and ready for meritocratic normalcy, rendering superuous any racist
measures such as Armative Action.
Kamels text demonstrates an implicit convergence with the arguments of
U.S. conservatives. The dierence is that for Kamel the problem to be addressed
is the bicolor racial model itself. But while the bicolor model is indeed oppressive,
discrimination can also occur without it. Like some anti-antiracist analysts in
France and the United States, Kamel implies that calling attention to racial injustice is itself racist. But Brazil, like the United States, was already riven by social
and racial disunity long before the Armative Action debates. Brazilian journalists have long spoken of social apartheid and an undeclared civil war, which,
226
while certainly not exclusively racial, clearly has a racial dimension, as becomes
obvious in the sociological literature, in news reports of police massacres, and
in the many feature lms and documentaries about the favelas of Rio (City of
God, City of Man, Quase Irmos, Falco, and others), all of which expose a situation of class and race oppression. Both class and race are inscribed in everyday
languagein a society divided between the familiarly addressed vocs and the
noble senhoresand in architecture, where even the Brazilia apartment buildings
designed by the Communist Oscar Niemeyer are equipped with maids quarters.
With a nod to class-not-race economism, the not-exactly-Marxist Kamel
writes that racism derives essentially from classism.40 Ignoring the history of
elite stigmatization of miscegenation as a cause of degeneracy, Kamel also claims,
We Brazilians have always been proud of our miscegenation.41 In any case, miscegenation is the ambiguous product of a painful power-laden process of contact
and domination, not something to be praised for its own sake. (Serbian soldiers
raping and impregnating Bosnian Muslim women engendered a kind of miscegenation, but few would call it progressive.) Miscegenation can even become a
means of ethnocide. In Brazil, as Antonio Negri and Giuseppe Cocco point out,
the native peoples were systematically annihilated through two mechanisms:
extermination pure and simple (through the sword or through contamination)
as well as through a miscegenation calculated to make up for the demographic
insuciency of migrationary ow from the Iberian peninsula.42 A society can be
deeply miscegenated and structurally oppressive, like Brazil, or somewhat miscegenated and structurally oppressive, while in denial about its miscegenation, like
the United States. Praising miscegenation per se runs the risk of sanctifying the
fait accompli of the colonial violence that generated the mixing in the rst place.43
Kamels denial of racism is especially ironic in light of the fact that he is the
news director at Brazils powerful Globo network. Going back to protests over a
blackface version of Uncle Toms Cabin in 1968, Globo has been a prime target of
black activists, who have accused both the entertainment and news divisions of
discriminating against blacks. The star reporters are almost all white, as are the
heroes and heroines of the vast majority of the telenovelas. As detailed in Joel
Zito Arajos book (and lm) Negation of Brazil, telenovelas rarely include middle-class black characters, couples, or families. Under the pressure of boycotts
and protests, Globo has made a few concessions, and the situation has improved
in the wake of the commercial success of the lm City of God and its television
spino, City of Men. Some black actors, notably Tas Arajo and Lzaro Ramos,
have broken out of the maid, servant, slave, and hustler syndrome to become
leads, but in the news shows, only one black male reporter occasionally anchors
weekend shows, and one black female reporter appears on Brazils Sunday-night
news show. Television networks and advertising agencies have lobbied vigorously
227
against all bills that would require them to cast more blacks. Although Kamel
speaks of a general Brazilian pride in our miscegenation, the racial aesthetics of
Globo telenovelas and commercials contradict this claim, seeming more appropriate to a Scandinavian country than to a black-mestizo-majority Brazil.
Kamel, in his desire to protect Brazilians from charges of racism, invents
a Brazil that does not exist. Bicolorism, after all, is hardly unknown in Brazil.
Black and white are commonly used racial designations, not only by black
activists and rappers but also on T-shirts, in popular music, in sociological literature, and in everyday discourse. When poet/composer Vinicius de Moraes called
himself the blackest white man in Brazil, when Florestan Fernandes and Roger
Bastide wrote about blacks and whites in So Paulo, when Paulinho Camafeu
wrote, White guy, if you knew/ the value of being black/ youd take a bath in
pitch/ and become black too, their words clearly assume that the black/white
polarity has a recognized social meaning. A long line of black activists and artists have called attention to blackness in their very names: the theatrical Black
Revue Company in the 1920s, the political Black Front Party in the 1930s, the
Black Experimental Theatre in the 1940s, not to mention the chromatically
tinged names of popular musicians such as Blecaute (Blackout), Chocolate, and
Prncipe Pretinho (Little Black Prince). The lack of white parallelsthere is no
White Experimental Theatreitself signals white normativity. The bicolor
model, in sum, already coexists alongside the spectrum model, as it does, to a
lesser degree, in the United States as well; the dierence is one of degree.
An assimilationist spectrum model also brings its own problems. Given the
hypervalorization of whiteness typical of such a model, whiteness as ego-ideal
becomes an all-pervasive norm. Racism everywhere is a situated utterance; it
depends on who addresses whom, with what intention, in what tone, and in
relation to what power dynamic. Nothing better illustrates the Brazilian mix
of camaraderie and paternalism than the situation in which white Brazilians, in
order to spare the feelings of their black interlocutors, pay them the compliment
of calling them moreno (brown-skinned) rather than preto (black). Such acts of
interlocution conjugate sincere goodwillthe white person really is concerned
with the black persons feelingswith a racist premise (that lighter is better than
darker), along with a certain uidity of racial denition. Within down-the-ladder
racism, the white is constructed as superior to the moreno, who is constructed as
superior to the mulatto, and so on; what is forgotten is the hegemonic whiteness
that constructed the ladder in the rst place.
Some Brazilian critics argue that remedial measures will bring all that is
wrong with U.S. society into a tolerant Brazilian society. In the latter half of the
20th century, a putatively coherent and univocal American Way of Life came to
be seen in Brazil, not without reason, as tense, stressful, hypercompetitive, and
228
racially segregated, all contrary to a lived sense of Brazilianness. The critics fear
that such measures would undermine the hospitable, easygoing, live-and-let-live
ways of Brazil, leading to censorious attitudes and increased racial tension, so
that Brazilians would begin to look at each other across a chasm of suspicion all
too common in the United States. But while this concern is completely understandable, Brazil would arguably be even more generous and cordial, and less
hypocritical in its cordiality, were it shorn of the inequalities that rend the society.
The issue, ultimately, is not one of Brazils borrowing a movement from elsewhere but rather of seeing the potential zones of reciprocity, within parallel and
interconnected struggles, as part of a transnational antiracist network.
In the 20th century, discourses of racial superiority have partially given way to
discourses of fear, and here clear dierences distinguish the various situations. In
Brazil, some potential white fears are of a black-mestizo majority, whence resistance to melding pardos (dark-skinned people) and pretos (blacks) into one group
of black-mestizos and the need to ward o a fear of that majority through ideologies of co-optive inclusiveness. Redening Brazil as a black-mestizo country
would change the social dynamics; the key question would no longer be about the
relative degree of racial integration in comparison with other nation-states but
rather about the historical process by which whites came to dominate a whiteminority country. In the United States, meanwhile, the fear is of a relatively powerless minority, and in this sense the fear is an even more phobic and irrational
attempt to ward o fear by otherizing the people supposedly provoking the fear.
The Black Atlantic thus oers a variegated spectrum of white anxieties: the fear
of a black minority (more typical of the United States), the fear of a black majority (more typical of Brazil), and the fear of what Public Enemy called a black
planet (i.e., fears based on the minority status of whites in the larger world).
The Advent of Whiteness Studies

While a critique of whiteness was implicit in proposals for Armative Action, it
was explicitly thematized in the academic project called critical whiteness studies. The consolidation of positions for academics of color, and the increased
institutional space for race-related elds of inquiry, helped open the way for
this ancillary project. As an interdisciplinary formation, whiteness studies
exposed whiteness as unmarked social norm, shedding light on the process by
which whites have been authorized to y above race in the bright skies of the
wild blue yonder, while others remain mired, as it were, in the mud of their dark
particularity.
Whiteness studies as a eld would not have existed without its precursors: the
black critics of white racism who suered rsthand the consequences of white
229
supremacy and were thus well equipped to discern and articulate the psychic
disturbances of whiteness. As a matter of sheer survival, diasporic blacks have
been obliged to become astute scrutinizers of the signs and evasions typical of
the dominant group. David Roediger has written of the perceptive regard of the
enslaved even in the depths of slavery, so that the stark realities of the auction
block enforced the urgent imperative for slaves to penetrate the psychologies of
whites and the necessity to make distinctions even among white slave buyers.44
Thus, what remained invisible to whitesnot only the reality of white power but
also the blindness of white perceptionhas historically been visible to most people of color. What Charles Mills calls the antipodal position of blacks enabled a
critical grasp of the system in its entirety. A vantage point from the margins of the
charmed circle of white privilege fostered a view not so much from afarsince
the oppressed were often within breathing distance of the oppressorsas from
the bottom, a point from which, at least potentially, the marginalized could not
but discern the crushing weight of the system pressing down on them.45
The rst practitioners of whiteness studies, in this sense, were the Afrodiasporic intellectuals who argued that racism was not a black but a white
problem. Long before Francophone writers such as Csaire, Fanon, and Memmi
unpacked colonial racism, and long before James Baldwin spoke of the lie of
whiteness, the forebears of critical whiteness studies emerged in all three zones.
In 1910, in The Souls of White Folk essay, W.E.B. Du Bois asserted that the
world, in a sudden emotional conversion, has discovered it is white, and by that
token, wonderful.46 In oceanic metaphors, Du Bois declared, Wave upon wave,
each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the
shores of our time.47 Du Bois, whiteness was a form of possessive individualism, a sense of ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen.48 In 1924, E.
Franklin Frazier wrote a similarly seminal essay titled The Pathology of White
Prejudice. Racist whites, he argued, exhibited many of the dening symptoms of
dementia. Frazier compared the white negro complex to the somnambulism of
the insane.49 Stephen Steinberg rightly calls Fraziers groundbreaking essay the
seminal beginning of what much later came to be called whiteness studiesa
reversal of the lens whereby whites instead of blacks were made the object of
inquiry.50
Another iconic gure, this time from the other side of the color line, was
the white American abolitionist John Brown. Inspired by the Haitian Revolution, Brown led a cohort of black and white rebels in an armed attack at Harpers
Ferry, Virginia, on October 16, 1859. His plan was to ignite a slave rebellion in
Virginia, to establish a free state in the Appalachians, and to spread the rebellion throughout the South. American history textbooks, as James Loewen points
out, tend to imply that Brown was insane,51 failing to explain why Brown became
230
a hero to many blacks and to abolitionist whites. After Browns condemnation

by a U.S. court, Victor Hugo wrote from France, The gaze of Europe is xed
at this moment on America. [Hanging Brown] . . . may consolidate slavery in
Virginia, but it will certainly shatter American Democracy. You preserve your
shame but you will kill your glory.52 Brown was inspired in his plans to found a
multiracial maroon community not only by the Haitian Revolution but also by
Native Americans rebellions, and especially by the black-Indian Seminole revolt
in Florida.53 Unlike many paternalistic abolitionists, Brown actually defended,
and practiced, total and radical racial equality. Although a white gentleman, said
Frederick Douglass, he is in sympathy a black man, and as deeply interested in
our cause, as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.54
Brown illustrates our contention that radical positions in favor of full racial
equality were historical options even for whites. Like Diderot, Brown believed
not only in the black right to ght back but also in the black capacity to ght back.
Blacks richly repaid Browns love for them. For Du Bois, Brown was the equal of
Toussaint Louverture and Nat Turner. If you are for me, Malcolm X said, you
have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.55 Many blacks regarded Brown as
an honorary black because of his complete identication with the oppressed. ...
[He] was a Negro, and it was in this aspect that he suered.56
In the United States, whiteness studies responded to the call by scholars of
color for an analysis of the role of racism in generating social injustice. Rejecting
class-over-race arguments, scholars such as David Roediger have analyzed the
wages of whiteness in dividing the working class, within texts that moved toward
the goal of the abolition of whiteness.57 Whiteness scholars have questioned
the quietly overpowering normativity of whiteness, the process by which race
has been unilaterally attributed to racialized others, while whites themselves are
silently enthroned as humanity in its pure, undeviant state. Within this critique,
whites unknowingly dwell in a protected fortress of selfhood, which amounts
to an unconsciously collective form of bourgeois (un)self-consciousness. (Feminists of color have made similar critiques about gender-over-race arguments that
elided the advantages of white women.) While whites represented themselves in
the cherished nuances of their individual complexity, blacks (and other people of
color) carried the allegorical burden of representing a race, in relation to which
they could be a credit (Martin Luther King, Jr.) or a debit (O.J. Simpson). Presumed to be nonimplicated spectators of the racial battles, whites could observe
voyeuristically, without being seen. But with black critics of whiteness, as Sartre
already pointed out in his Orphe Noir preface to Senghors collection of poetry,
the white Peeping Tom is caught in the act; the voyeur is vu.
A related scholarly trend calls attention to the complex identities within
whiteness itself. It is often forgotten that many whites, especially in the early cen-
231
turies of American history, had themselves been virtual slaves or, as they were
then called, indentured servants. In White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britains White Slaves in America, Don Jordan and Michael Walsh focalize the white
surplus people who were treated just as savagely as black slaves and, indeed,
toiled, suered and rebelled alongside them.58 This group, composed of forced
migrants, debtors, and vagrants submitted to enclosure or to British rule, were
the ancestors of tens of millions of white Americans. The point is not that such
whites were the equals in suering with blackssince white enslavement was
relatively short-livedbut rather that the history of cross-racial victimization,
and the possible solidarities implied by it, have been airbrushed out of ocial
history. A racial wedge has separated out the two histories so as to abolish the
memory of shared suering and (potentially) mutual identication.
Other scholars, have explored the transmutational alchemy involved in the
becoming white phenomenon. Historians Theodor Allen and Noel Ignatiev have
shown how so-called white ethnics such as the Irish gradually came to dene themselves as white.59 Caren Kaplan, meanwhile, has explored the fulcral in-between
relationality of Jews, alternately colored dark in relation to WASPs but tinged
with whiteness in relation to people of color.60 While addressing the positionality
of whiteness for British Jews, Ruth Frankenberg also shows that whites generally
occupy a structural vantage point of assumed power, from which they see both
themselves and others from within a comfort zone of the geography of race.61
Opposition to the special claims of racial minorities, as George Lipsitz has
suggested, often masks the hidden identity politics of the dominant groups
possessive investment in white Europeanness.62 Whiteness studies at its best
denaturalizes whiteness as norm, exposing its unacknowledged privileges: easy
access to institutions, the assumption of noncriminality, the luxury of being
above police suspicion and of not being the object of media stereotyping. Critical whiteness studies, in its most radical form, has called for a new abolitionism
or a radical opting out of white privilege and even for race treason in the John
Brown tradition. Given actually existing social structures, such voluntaristic selfdisenfranchisement is more easily said than done, since a racist system accords
benets even to those whites who do not demand them. Although whiteness,
blackness, and redness are merely cultural ctions without any scientic basis,
the socially constructed hierarchy between races is also a social fact with very
real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige, opportunity, and psychic well-being.63 The academic deconstruction of race, furthermore, does not
necessarily mean that race stops doing its pernicious work in the world. The same
celebrated black professors who deconstruct race in their classrooms are liable to
be harassed for driving while black in the streets or even for trying to enter their
own homes in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
232
If whiteness studies at its best reveals the subtle operations of racial hegemony,
at its worst it recenters whiteness, changing the subjectin a racial version of the
show-business dictum that all publicity is good publicityback to white subjectivity. This narcissistic turn amounts to saying, So enough about you, lets get back
to what really mattersus! And at times, whiteness, with its constant companion
blackness, remains locked into the old black/white dichotomy, slighting not only
the rainbow of colors but also ignoring other factors in social oppression such as
caste, religion, and cultural capital. Overall, however, whiteness studies has had the
salutary eect of outing whiteness, revealing it to be a construct inseparable from
its equally constructed black counterpart. Whiteness studies relativized whiteness
by putting it in its place as just another ethnicity alongside the othersalbeit one
historically granted inordinate privilege. Whiteness studies thus signals the demise
of what might be called, paraphrasing Stuart Hall, the innocent white subject, putting an end to the unilateral ascription of race to minority others, while whites
remain raceless and above the fray.64 This outing of whiteness has also come to
pervade popular culture with best-sellers such as Michael Moores Stupid White
Men and Christian Landers A Whiter Shade of Pale. Bill Maher, on his Real Time
cable show (October 15, 2010), similarly mocked the pseudovictimized male crybabies of the Tea Party: If penises could cry, and I believe they can, he said, white
penises are crying all over America.
Debating Blackness, Whiteness, and Mestiagem

Whiteness studies per se began in Brazil in the 1990s, with a strong inuence
from the Anglo-American project, while also building on earlier Brazilian critiques of the ideology of whitening, exemplied by such gures as Oliveira
Vianna, who had argued for the whitening and Aryanization of Brazil, which
would turn an inchoate, pullulating mob of inferior mixed-bloods into respectable Brazilians.65 As in the United States, in Brazil too the rst whiteness critics
were the black writers who called attention to racism as a white problem. Here
a key gure was sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, who participated in the
Experimental Black Theatre and its aliate the National Black Institute in the
1940s. In the 1950s, Ramos organized group-therapy sessions aimed at healing
the dilacerated psyches of black Brazilians. In 1957, Ramos published a seminal
article whose titleThe Social Pathology of the Brazilian Whiteechoed
that of Fraziers 1924 bombshell. Under slavery, Ramos writes, the dominant
minority, of European origin, not only resorted to force and violence, but also
to a system of pseudo-justications, stereotypes, and to processes of psychological domestication. The dogmatic armation of the excellence of whiteness and
the aesthetic degradation of blackness formed the psychological supports for this
233
exploitation.66 Ramos socio-psychoanalyzed, as it were, the regnant white ideal

ego as a vestige or survival which hinders the process of psychological maturing
of Brazilians.67 As Jos Jorge de Carvalho points out, black radical thinkers such
as Ramos, Edison Carneiro, and Clvis Moura, despite their scholarly achievements, were never fully embraced by the Brazilian academy, sometimes dismissed
as militants rather than scholars, as if social commitment were incompatible
with scientic objectivity.68
Given the long discussion of race in Brazil, and the many links between the
Brazilian and U.S. academies, it is hardly surprising that whiteness studies has
emerged, resulting in, for example, the University of So Paulos Studies in
Whiteness project. Iray Carone and Maria Aparecida Silva Bento argue in their
introduction to The Social Psychology of Racism: Studies on Whiteness and Whitening in Brazil (2003) that whiteness as lived in Brazil takes the form of not wanting
to name oneself as white.69 Whiteness, they argue, (1) is more apparent to blacks
than to whites, (2) encodes dierence as superiority, (3) entails discomfort with
the subject of racial discrimination, (4) involves negative attitudes toward blacks
who act as equal to whites and are seen as uppity exhibitionists. Edith Piza, in
White in Brazil? Nobody Knows, No One Saw, points out that white Brazilians
might express pride in some safely distant indigenous ancestora Tupi greatgrandmother, for examplebut without relinquishing white status. For Piza,
race is often euphemized, as when her Italo-Brazilian father would not explicitly
forbid her befriending or dating blacks but only recommend that she socialize
with her peers. Understanding the implicit norm, she soon restricted her socializing to whites.70 Rita Segato, meanwhile, stresses the insecurity of a Brazilian
whiteness worried about a contamination rooted not in ethnic distance and fear
of aliens as in more segregated societies but rather in relatedness.71
If Ali Kamel proclaims, in eect, that no white Brazilian is racist, Marco
Frenette, in his Black and White: The Importance of Skin Color, proclaims exactly
the opposite: all white Brazilians are racist. Both accounts, to our mind, overemphasize the psychological question of racism while neglecting the question of
systemic racism. Frenette describes his own childhood as an apprenticeship in
white self-entitlement: Already as a child, they taught me to praise the monotone
of whites, and to confound dark skin with an absence of dignity and courage.72
With whiteness as a crutch for personhood, Frenette remembers that the black
children who joined in games were not our equals; they were black. Whites
grew up with a comforting sense of superiority, so that white skin was an informal passport to the good things of life.73 To be black, meanwhile, was to live permanently in a hostile reality veiled by a veneer of good manners.74 For Frenette,
racism can take a wide range of forms: irrational hatred, a desire to possess the
(unusual) black body, a zoological curiosity about the black specimen, or the
234
self-congratulatory cultivation of camaraderie (How extraordinarily generous I

am to befriend blacks!).75 For Frenette, the white Brazilian psyche, as the involuntary repository of a shameful collective unconscious, is revealed in symptomatic expressions such as pretty but black and other verbal gems revelatory of an
obsolete mentality.76
Frenette also questions the quiet dictatorship of whiteness that pervades
the media. The occasional exceptions, such as black actresses in the telenovelas,
merely conrm the rule, since their beauty largely ts into white aesthetic norms.
Black children, meanwhile, internalize white ideals of beauty. At home, the mirror provokes quotidian torture, reinforced by harassment of the black body in the
streets. In the accumulation of countless humiliations, direct and veiled insults
to ones blackness, the black child becomes conscious of her dierence, ... [obliging her] to develop psychological mechanisms of compensation in order to be
emotionally integral, thus avoiding a dangerous fall into resentment or self-pity.77
Frenette sums up his conclusions: (1) millions of white Brazilians are racist;
(2) millions of black Brazilians suer racism; (3) millions of mixed-race Brazilians oscillate between the attitudes of the dominant and the dominated; (4) the
millions of nonracists in Brazil do little to concretely help black people; (5) the
mediascape is dominated by a white aesthetic; and, the only positive point, (6) a
black movement, the real sleeping giant, educates children against racism. Like
Kamels book, but from the opposite standpoint, Frenettes book allows little
space for contradiction and ambivalence within white attitudes.
Anthropologist Jos Jorge de Carvalho, meanwhile, oers a powerful indictment of white denial but places more stress on the structures of advantage: All of
us whites draw daily and illicit benet from living in a racist society. Innumerable
privileges ... help us to maintain our advantages and garner resources. To the
extent that Brazilian racism operates within the quotidian, we whites are favored
with social, economic and cultural capital which has been distributed unfairly
according to racial criteria.78 In contrast to South African and American whites,
Carvalho continues, Brazilian whites do not recognize their status as part of a
white collectivity: The white elite controls the general portrait of race in Brazil,
but does not recognize itself as the author of this portrait, nor does it question
the tendentiousness which results from its control of the portrait.79
Brazilianist John M. Novell, for his part, analyzes the uncomfortable whiteness of the Brazilian middle class.80 The clichs that we Brazilians are a mixture
of races and that there is no race in Brazil, only the Brazilian race, he argues,
are highly ambiguous. If there are no races, he asks, how can there be a mixture
of races? Novell traces the celebration of Brazilian miscegenation to three classic
texts: Paulo Prados Portrait of Brazil (1928), Freyres Masters and Slaves (1933),
and Srgio Buarque de Holandas Roots of Brazil (1936). In this period, something
235
the white elite had earlier seen as a cause for degeneracyracial mixture between
black and white (as opposed to the red-white miscegenation celebrated by Indianism)was transformed into a point of pride. But the typical formulation tendency has we Brazilians mixing with blacks. Anthropologist Angela Gilliam
calls this the Freyrean Great-Sperm-Theory-of-National-Formation;81 Novell,
more discreetly, speaks of a white indeterminate discursively privileged subject
choosing to mix with people of color.82 Often this mixture becomes linked to a
mythology of the bed, as when Brazilians joke that they have solved the racial
problem through mixed sex.
Whiteness studies in Brazil might have been called moreno studies, since
some of Brazils elite intellectuals gure Brazil as a basically moreno (brunette,
dark white) country beneting from injections of chromatic alterity. The moreno
norm is implicit when blond Brazilians are told by other Brazilians that they
do not look Brazilian. Anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro gives voice to this moreno
pride in O Povo Brasileiro: We are better, because bathed in black and Indian
blood, improved and tropical.83 In this unidirectional formulation, the implicit
we is Euro-Brazilian: We [white] Brazilians mix with Indians and blacks and
not We [black] Brazilians mix with Portuguese and Europeans. Given asymmetries of power, the rst version implies top-down tolerance, while the second
implies an opportunistic improving the race. For Novell, the mixed Brazilian is
a genealogical paradox that, in a linguistic construction, is the mixed product of
three dierent races, but as an active grammatical subject, mixes with dierent
races, but not with Europeans, because the assumed underlying continuity and
norm is European.84
In Color Witchcraft: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil, Elisa Larkin Nascimento examines the history of defensive reactions to black Brazilian radicalism.
What happens to national identity, she asks, in a mestizo country where Eurocentric hegemonies inltrate the general subjectivity? One result is the symbolic
whitening of Brazil, whether through the concept of Latin America or through
the calls for the Aryanization of Brazil or through the myth of a tanned Brazilian metarace. The appeals to slippery categories such as moreno (brunette),
pardo (dark), and nordestino (northeasterner), she points out, hide the blackness
of the people being referenced. A relational approach to racism, she concludes,
necessitates naming whiteness as an identity and exposing the privileges and deficits generated by racism for dierent social actors.85
A major gure in Brazilian whiteness studies is cultural studies scholar Liv
Sovik, a Norwegian American who has lived and taught in Brazil for decades. In
Here No One Is White, Sovik points to the invisibility of Brazilian whiteness, in
a situation where the supervalorization of whiteness goes hand in hand with the
slighting of blackness.86 Arguing against the mere extension of the U.S. move-
236
ment to Brazil, she argues that whiteness studies is not a one-size-ts-all model
that need only be applied; it must be theorized dierently in dierent contexts.
In Brazil, whiteness is a site of enunciation, a position at the apex of the social
pyramid, one that does not necessarily preclude partial black ancestry but that
orchestrates the valorization of color, style of hair, facial features, and literal and
cultural capital. Race in Brazil is conjunctural; the person who is white in Bahia
might not be white in Rio Grande do Sul.87 The Brazilian approach to race, for
Sovik, is in some ways more exible and less moralistic and guilt ridden than in
the United States. Unlike whiteness discourse in the United States, whiteness in
Brazil develops an aective discourse that embraces unequals, while leaving social
hierarchy intact.
Sovik points to the Janus-faced doubleness of mestiagem, which deploys two
discourses, one used by whites among themselves, the other reserved for racially
mixed groups. The claim that all Brazilians are mixed, she argues, tends to be
addressed either to foreigners or to those Brazilians who accuse other Brazilians
of racism. (Kia Lilly Caldwell speaks usefully of mestizo essentialism.)88 The
intent is to say, How can we be racists if were all mixed? The implicit comparison, once again, is to North American whites, assumed not to be mixed and
therefore more likely to be racist. At the same time, many Brazilians express an
understandable irritation with some North American critical commentary on
race. The irritation has to do with a smug and self-righteous tone, present in ocial pronouncements and in the American common sense regarding the peoples
and nations of the Global South.89 She quotes Caetano Veloso on the subject of
this resentment of U.S. power:
When you say American, you are saying rapid, eective and immediate international protection for the American citizen, whether he is black, yellow, or white.
To be an American citizen conveys a huge advantage, no matter the color of that
citizen. The African American is immediately superior, because he is American,
and this advantage is lived deeply and naturally by Americans, Brazilians, Peruvians and so forth.90
For Caetano, Brazilians are annoyed by the presumption that everything American
is better, to the point that even American racism is better than Brazilian racism!
Unlike those Brazilianists who wanted to show us that Brazil cultivated a racism
which was hypocritical and therefore even more harmful than the open and
declared racism once practiced in the United States, Iapart from preferring that
a racist should be, at a minimum, constrained to pretend that he is not a racistI
think the Brazilian racial confusion reveals a profound miscegenation which
inevitably also occurred despite the fact that they pretendedwith racist laws and
with its attempts at antiracist compensationthat in the United States the same
thing did not take place.91
237
Some of those who resist Armation Action, according to Sovik, are motivated
by a certain nostalgia not for slavery or for black submissiveness, but for the sympathy of blacks and the memory of relations that were cordial despite the brutality of social hierarchy.92 But this interracial harmony, she adds, usually takes
place on the terrain of blacks welcoming whites into their space and not of whites
welcoming blacks into the dominant space. The result is paradoxical. The harshness of U.S. racial relations led to more activism against segregation, while the
relatively suave character of Brazilian racial relations made it easier to maintain
slavery for decades after it had been extinguished elsewhere.
The Critique of Normative Frenchness

While the scholarly comparative literature on race in Brazil and the United
States dates back centuries, now, for the rst time, scholars are pursuing comparative analyses of race and racism in France and Brazil. In Facing Racism in
France and Brazil: From Moral Condemnation to Help for the Victims, Alexandra Poli compares the dominant racial mythologies of the two countries. The
myth of racial democracy in Brazil, she points out, seems at rst glance to be the
polar opposite of the French myth of the Rpublique. While the orthodox Brazilian line makes the harmonious racial relations created by miscegenation the key
to the practice of democracy, the French republican myth rejects cultural particularism in the name of the equality of all citizens. Yet for Poli, the two models
share a denial of the lived experience of the victims of racism and discrimination,
who are prodded to keep quiet about the aggressions they have suered. The
expressions country of the rights of man and the country of the mixture of races
both serve to reinforce the unity of the people and exclude from the outset any
discussion of racism.93 Yet in both France and Brazil, citizens have protested discrimination and asserted their right to dierence, in such a way as to bring the
question of racism back to the table from which it had been banned.
The conventional contrasts drawn between France and the United States
resemble those drawn between Brazil and the United States: racial segregation
has never been legalized, racism is surrounded by a symbolic taboo, and so forth.
Yet despite the discursive-ideological divides, many commentators have found
unexpected similarities not only in patterns of inequality but also in the legal
measures taken against discrimination. Azouz Begag speaks of a convergence
between French and American approaches to advancing equal opportunities.94
Both countries share ocial denitions of discrimination as deliberate, individual
actions such as refusing to hire someone because of his or her race.95 The French
state has passed some antiracist laws, going back to the rst law against racism
and anti-Semitism: the Anti-racism Law of 1972, subsequently completed by the
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1990 Gaysott Law penalizing all racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic actions.
Given the legal diculties in proving racism, the French Senate, in 2000, created
the Fund for Social Action (FAS), which oers nancial aid to integrate immigrant workers and their families, along with programs in French-language education and access to social institutions such as schools. French law also allows for
the judicial condemnation of those who promote racial hatred, as in the February
2011 case in which prominent television and press commentator ric Zemmour
was ned $14,000 for justifying racial proling and job discrimination against
blacks and Arabs.
The central aim of French law, as Erik Bleich points out, has never been to
foster numerical racial equality or to compensate a class of victims dened by
race. Rather, French law is designed to punish racists committing bigoted acts
motivated by racist intent.96 At the same time, the French government euphemizes race-oriented policies through what Gwnale Calvs calls covert implementation, whether basing compensatory measures on geographical location,
as with urban revitalization zones, or on disparities in educational level (priority educational areas). Indeed, Calvs expresses surprise at the remarkable
speed with which Armative Action rhetoric and policies have been adopted
in France, through the adoption of U.S. 1960s-style outreach and 1980s-style
diversity promotion, despite the widespread hostility expressed in the 1990s.97
Yazid and Yacine Sabegs Armative Action: Why France Cannot Escape It
(2004) traces contemporary discrimination to the colonial Native Code, which
imposed harsh measures such as forced labor and collective punishment.98 This
discrepant attribution of rights in the colonies morphed within France itself into
discriminatory measures such as curfews, restrictions, and dierential access
to the welfare system. The subordination of visible minorities in France thus
emerges from a complex set of institutional practices partially inherited from
colonialism. After explaining the historical rationale for Armative Action, the
authors rebut the objections: that it is reverse racist, violates meritocratic norms,
is juridically impossible, and so forth, calling, nally, for an Armative Action
la Franaise, one that would avoid the legalism and litigiousness typical of the
U.S. version.
While lively debates rage about Armative Action in France, whiteness studies has not scanned as a recognized eld of knowledge. Indeed, at rst glance,
looking for whiteness studies in France might seem absurd. Common sense tells
us that France is a white, European, and Christian (Catholic and Protestant)
country, hardly so deeply engaged with blackness (and redness) as are the settlercolonial states such as the United States and Brazil. Yet it is precisely this common sense that needs to be dismantled. For one thing, there have always been
people of color in France, ranging from assimilated native people from Brazil to
239
blacks working as slaves or servants, even under the ancien rgime.99 Yet the fact
that 18th-century French naturalists and ethnologists felt obliged to explain the
anomaly of black pigmentation (and for Cuvier, genitalia and buttocks), moreover, shows that they saw the black body as aberrant and the white body as normative. As Lon-Franois Homan puts it in Le Ngre Romantique, Europeans
never reected on the problem of their own color; there is every reason to believe
that they saw it as the norm.100
Two centuries later, on March 5, 1959, Charles de Gaulle gave voice to the
power of white normativity:
Its all very ne that there are yellow French people, black French people, brown
French peoplethey show that France is open to all races and that she has a
universal vocation. But on condition that such people remain a small minority,
for if not France will no longer be France. We are in the end above all a European
people, white in race, of Greek culture and Christian religion.101
The presence of some black Frenchmen, for de Gaulle in 1958, demonstrated the
openness and universal vocation of France, but he put restrictions on that universality by warning that blacks should remain a small minority so that France
could remain France.102 His native village, de Gaulle warned, would no longer be
Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises but rather Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquees.103 Any
serious injection of color, or of Islam, would compromise Frances ethno-ontological essence as France. By implication, de Gaulle was naturalizing the French
Christian presence in Algeria, while delegitimizing any substantive Muslim/
black presence in France. In the 1950s, French blacks entered the public sphere
largely in the terms delineated by Roland Barthess famous analysis of the cover
photo of Paris Match, showing a black soldier (actually a boy scout) saluting the
French ag, in which every semiotic element sent a reassuring message of black
adherence to the white imperial project. On June 19, 1991, Prime Minister Jacques
Chirac outdid de Gaulle in a tirade about an overdose of immigrants, who were
annoying hardworking French families with the horrendous odors emerging
from their overcrowded polygamist apartments.104
Language too can quietly encode normative whiteness or in this case normative Frenchness. Thus, the term immigrants in French evokes people of color
from the former colonies, while trangers (foreigners) suggests light-skinned fellow Europeans. Even progressive 21st-century work on colonialism and discrimination tends not to engage whiteness. Whiteness, as Didier Gondola puts it,
plays no part in the ways in which academics in France wrestle with notions that
could gain clarity when paired with this critical issue. Most of the recent works by
noted French academics [on slavery, colonization, immigration, and citizenship]
make no explicit engagement with the concept of whiteness. In none of these
works are blackness and whiteness seen as correlated and mutually constitutive....
240
This glaring omission mirrors the invisibility of whiteness in the French social
landscape and, by contrast, magnies the visibility of blackness and Arabness as
inescapable conditions that account for the exclusion of Blacks and Beurs.105
This invisibility of whiteness continues decades after Fanon outed the normative whiteness that informed the French childs frightened Look, a Negro! For
Fanon, even blacks show symptoms of what he calls a lactication process,106
which in the French colonies existed both in relation to the most stigmatized
group (those of dark black color) and in relation to mixed-race people seen as
assimilated and evolved and therefore more compatible with French norms.
Scholars of color have long been contesting what Jean-Baptiste Onana calls (in
his 2007 book Be Black and Shut Up) the myth of white France.107 Whiteness, as
Pap Ndiaye points out, has been constitutive of French national identity, in ways
that are not essentially dierent from the British and U.S.-American modalities
of whiteness.108 The privilege of belonging to the dominant group, for Ndiaye,
is to be blind to ones color because it is thought to be universal.109 While there
is no scholarly wave of self-designated whiteness studies work in France, one
nds a close equivalent in a book such as Pierre Tvanians La Mcanique Raciste.
The author begins by marking his own subject position as white: I deal with the
question What to do about racism? from the only point of view available to me,
that of a white man who occupies the place, within racial relations as socially constituted in our postcolonial Republic, of the dominant.110 In a chapter ironically
titled The White Question, Tvanian asks what denes whiteness and answers
with a paradox: To be white is not to be obliged to answer the question what it
means to be white.111 To be white in France, for Tvanian, implies the privileges
(1) of not being black, Arab, Asian, Turkish, or Muslim, in short, of not being
made to bear the burden of a stigmatized identity; (2) of not suering discrimination; (3) of assuming the double imposture of enjoying exorbitant privilege while
denying its existence; and (4) of being seen, unlike racialized others, as legitimate, credible, and serious. Tvanian ends with An Ode to Treasonreminiscent of U.S. Race Traitor manifestoesconcluding that whites must recognize
white privilege while putting it in a troubled state of crisis.
French intellectual life does feature, if not critical whiteness studies per se, at
least its functional correlative in the critiques of what might be called normative
Frenchness. Americanist Franois Durpaire, for example, speaks of a specically
French kind of denial: If there is no specicity in French racism itself, there is
a specicity in the manner of its negation.112 In France, it is always easy to say
that one is not opposed to blacks or Arabs, but only to black communitarianism and Arab communitarianism.113 The key word used to stigmatize race-conscious activism and scholarship in France has been communautarisme (communitarianism), regarded as an ignoble descent into identitarian politics and a threat
241
to republican color-blindness. Wielded as a kind of scarecrow, the word has

the same repressive function as the PC and separatist charges in the United
States. Instead of the warning, la Schlesinger, that multiculturalism is dividing America, we nd the admonition that communitarianism is dividing France.
The actual people identied as minorities disappear into the ether of stigmatized abstractions. The very denition of communitarianism in the 2004 edition
of the Petit Robert dictionary stigmatizes it as divisive: A system which develops
the formation of communities (ethnic, religious, cultural, social) and thus divides
the nation to the detriment of integration.114 The logic undergirding the communitarianism-versus-republicanism binarism, in this sense, is ultimately not so
distant from a Huntingtonian clash of civilizations discourse.
A racializing regard attributes an imagined unity of color to a disparate
groupcomposed, for example, of a Maghrebian, a Martinican, a Senegalese
which it then projects as communitarian. But for Durpaire, the real communitarianism resides in the racializing gaze itself, which (1) imagines a monolithic
black community that does not exist and (2) denies the veiled communitarianism of the bearers of the racializing gaze. Ironically, the people condemned as
communitarian are often precisely those who leave their communities of origin to join with others in activist coalitionary movements against racism. Durpaire oers a vivid example: A noble Soninke who marries a Soninke servant,
thus ignoring the caste barrier, or a Senegalese woman who marries a man from
Cameroun, or a Muslim African who marries a Christian African, or an African
who marries a West Indian, can all be called communitarian by a white majority that sees only the common black skin of the people in question.115 Durpaire
unveils the hidden whiteness of universalist discourse. Those who hurl the charge
of communitarianism, he continues, do not think of themselves as a particular
group, but as the carriers of a universalist ideal. Only the dierence of others is
communitarian. In this selective denunciation, one nds an unconfessable reality, that of the communitarian character of anticommunitarian discourse.116 Durpaires strategic critique thus recalls what critical race whiteness theorists see as
the unacknowledged white identity politics hidden in the attacks on the identity
politics of people of color, attacks proered by those who imagine themselves as
universal subjects existing in a realm beyond identity. Anticommunitarianism,
in this sense, is a euphemistic form of racism.
Without using the actual phrase normative whiteness, Durpaire, by speaking about the communitarian character of anticommunitarian discourse, makes
an analogous point about normative white Frenchness.117 The censure of communitarian discourse is intrinsically comparative and diacritical, in that communitarianism is very much associated in many French minds with a partly
imagined Anglo-American type of society and thus encodes the Latin/Anglo-
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Saxon dichotomy. The manifest evils of U.S. societyimpoverished ghettoes,

racial tension, a tattered social safety netare often seen in France as inherent
in an Anglo-Saxon approach that sees society as an agglomeration of ethnic lobbies. Yet one of the unfortunate byproducts of the rejection of the Anglo-Saxon
model, for Durpaire, is that in France itself ghettoization and anticommunitarianism work hand in hand: they marginalize certain populations, even while they
take away the possibility of ghting against discrimination.118
Durpaire boomerangs communitarianism to make it designate not radical
Muslims or neoliberal Anglo-Saxons but rather normal white French society.
Postcolonial scholar Franoise Vergs, in the same vein, refers to the colonial
communitarianism that cordoned o white French people into their own segregated clubs, churches, and balls. This typically colonial form of social organization, she argues, is now returning to France itself.119 Fanons sharply divided
two cities, at the time of the Algerian war, now morphs into the burning social
divide separating prosperous city center from marginalized banlieue. We nd a
response to the charge that dierentialism and communitarianism threaten
republican unity in the subtitle of Frdrique Mouzer and Charles Onanas Un
Racisme Franais. Bringing to their paroxysm the contradictions addressed in this
chapter, the books jiujitsu subtitle reads, White Communitarianism Threatens
the Republic.120
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it is in france , one of the key sites of Enlightenment thinking,

that the contemporary debates are most explicitly seen as continuous with early
debates around Les Lumires and the Revolution. Both the popular media and
high-prole public intellectuals portray the conict as one between universal
secular Enlightenment and religious and communitarian particularism. As we
saw earlier, the dominant line in French intellectual life during much of the 1990s
was antagonistic to discourses of critical race, identity politics, and multiculturalism. Until recently, postcolonial theory too formed a structuring absence in the
dominant French discourse. This absence contrasted not only with the AngloAmerican academic world but also with other parts of Europe (the Netherlands.
Germany, Scandinavia) and with many parts of Asia and Africa, all sites where
postcolonial studies have been a signicant presence for decades. In France, the
word postcolonial functioned largely as a chronological marker, a synonym for
postindependence rather than as an index of a discourse or eld of inquiry.1 For
complex reasons, many French intellectuals ignored at best, and maligned at
worst, a constellation of interrelated projects such as postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies. There was a manifest hostility to what were
perceived as Anglo-American currents in general, whether in the form of multiculturalism (associated with the Anglo-Saxons) or cultural studies (associated
initially with the United Kingdom and later with the United States) or postcolonial theory (associated with the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and
the Anglophone zone generally). Thus, the debates have taken on national-allegorical overtones, in terms of both how French intellectuals imagined their own
role and how they imagined the role of intellectuals from other nations.
There was in France a postcolonial terrain, however, occupied not by postcolonial studies but rather by work within the traditional disciplines. Whereas postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world was initially the product of scholars in
English and comparative literature and the humanities generally, what one might
call proto-postcolonialist studies in France was dominated by anthropologists
and historians. Already in 1971, anthropologist Georges Balandier, for example,
anticipated Homi Bhabhas notions of sly civility as a coping mechanism within
colonialism by speaking of collective reactions that could be called clandestine
or indirect or of calculated manifestations of passivity as subtle ways of undermining colonial domination.2
244
This chapter charts a new situation where the old antagonisms persist but
when new voices and discourses also emerge. In the late 1990s and in the rst
decade of the 21st century, we witness a major engagement with what has variously been called postcolonial theory, postcolonial critique, and postcolonial
studies. Numerous conferences and special issues of journals such as Esprit, Labyrinthe, Rue Descartes, and Mouvements treat the colonial fracture, the sequels of
colonialism, and the wars of colonial memory. Many of the recent publications
thematize the historical delay itself through a quasi-ritualistic acknowledgment
of the French hesitation in joining the postcolonial trend. To take just one of
many examples, Dino Costantinis The Civilizing Mission: The Role of Colonial
History in the Construction of French Political Identity begins by acknowledging
a gap between France and the Anglophone countries. In the latter, the fact that
colonial history forms a constitutive part of a common Western identity has been
recognized for decades, while France has only recently begun to interrogate the
theoretical and practical consequences of the centuries of colonial engagements
and the way they have fashioned Frances political identity up to the present.3
Ironies of an Aversion
A number of poignant ironies hover around the initial reluctance of French
intellectuals to embrace postcolonial studies. The rst and most obvious is that
postcolonial studies itself has been very much shaped by Francophone anticolonial discourse. Many key problematics within postcolonial critique trace back
to Francophone intellectuals such as Csaire, Senghor, Fanon, Memmi, and
Anouar Abdel-Malek. The chapter titled The Pitfalls of Nationalism in Fanons
Wretched of the Earth, for example, anticipated the postnationalist aspect of postcolonial theory, while Abdel-Maleks critique of Oriental studies in the 1960s
foreshadowed Saids classic Orientalism. The second irony is that French Theory, as Robert Young pointed out in White Mythologies, was shaped by the colonial situation and by the fact that many of the leading theoreticians (Derrida,
Althusser, Lyotard, Cixous) were linked to North Africa. The third irony is that
French poststructuralism has had widely acknowledged impact on leading postcolonial thinkersone thinks of Foucaults inuence on Said, Derridas on Spivak, Lacans on Bhabhaand on the postcolonial eld in general, manifested in
myriad references not only to Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan but also to Deleuze,
Guattari, Irigaray, Cixous, Lyotard, and Certeau. (This poststructuralist aspect
of postcolonial theory is all the more striking given the fact that the leading
poststructuralist thinkers themselves rarely engaged in any systematic way with
anticolonialist texts.) It thus seems surprising that the French Theory aspect
of postcolonial studies has had so little resonance in France.4 In another sense,
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however, it is not surprising at all, since French Theory was often seen in France
as a transatlantic invention.5 Despite the French theoretical sources of the various post- movements, they generated little enthusiasm in France, partly because
they came to be seen as themselves Anglo-American. Yet in another perspective,
poststructuralism itself absorbed while reconguring some of the themes of anticolonial discourse, for example, its undermining of Europes claim to being the
exclusive culture of reference.
A fourth irony about the aversion to postcolonial theory revolves around the
fact that France in the 1960s and early 1970s had been the epicenter of Third
Worldism, precisely the tradition that postcolonialism was both embedding
and superseding. With the postwar dismembering of the French empire, colonialism and decolonization were necessarily at the core of many polemics, even
if only by implication. Indeed, much of the French contribution to the seismic
shift stems from these early battles, as Third Worldist writers such as the Martinicans Csaire and Fanon, alongside African writers such as Amlcar Cabral,
Cheikh Diop, and Mongo Beti and radical African American expatriates such
as Richard Wright or Arab/Maghrebian/Francophone writers such as Albert
Memmi, Gisle Halimi, Anouar Abdel-Malek, Mohammed Harbi, and Assia
Djebar found Hexagonal allies in gures such as Edgar Morin, Maxime Rodinson, Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Henri Alleg,
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Franois Maspero, Yves Bnot, and Francis Jeanson.
A fth irony about the antagonism to postcolonial theory involves the slighting
of a specically French intertext, rst the French tradition of thematic analyses of
the colonial novel and of literary exoticism (for example Martine Astier-Louftis
Littrature et Colonialisme and Martine Mathieus Le Roman Colonial) and second
the highly politicized literary theories of Lukcs, Goldmann, Althusser, Macheray, and Barthes and the work of journals such as Tel Quel (post-68), Cahiers
du Cinma, and Cintique. In the 1960s and early 1970s, French intellectuals were
in the vanguard of ideological and symptomatic readings of literary, mediatic,
and cultural texts, a style of reading anticipatory of postcolonial-style analyses
exploring the ssures and structuring absences both of the texts themselves
(slavery in Jane Austens Manseld Park) and of the exegeses of such texts (the
blindness to colonialism in New Critical analyses of Heart of Darkness).
A sixth irony about the antagonism to postcolonialism is that contemporary
France, as a product of colonial karma, is itself a postcolonial nation in demographic, political, and cultural terms. This postcolonial legacy becomes evident in
an endless chain of events with racial, colonial, or anti-Semitic overtones, events
thoroughly mulled over by the press and the media: the national euphoria over the
black-blanc-beur World Cup soccer victory in 1998 (contrasting with the scapegoating of the players of color after the 2010 defeat), the scandal of the children
246
of Maghrebian immigrants booing the Marseillaise at soccer games, the diverse

outbreaks of anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim violence (such as desecrations of Jewish
or Muslim cemeteries), the accusations against Le Pen about torturing Algerians
during the so-called Battle of Algiers, and the scandalous memoirs by key military gures such as Massu and Aussaresses. The tensions also manifested themselves in the ideological litigiousness of lawsuits accusing prominent pro-Palestinian intellectuals, whether French Jewish (Edgar Morin) or Israeli French (Eyal
Sivan) of anti-Semitism and Holocaust negationism. On the other side, lawsuits
were addressed to historians such as Olivier-Ptr Grenouilleau accused of slavery negationism. (The word negationisme represents a metonymic slide from the
Shoah to slavery, symptomatic of the fraying of the black-Jewish postwar alliance
and what some French intellectuals deride as the competition of victims.)
Playing an active role in these debates, French president Nicolas Sarkozy
demonstrated that colonialist/racist discourse was alive and well in his speech in
Dakar on July 26, 2007. Sarkozy deployed the kind of rhetoric denounced over
half a century earlier by Csaire in his Discourse on Colonialism:
The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not suciently entered history. The
African peasant who has lived with the seasons for millennia, whose life ideal is
to be in harmony with nature, knows only the eternal recurrence of a time set to
an endless rhythm of repetition of the same gestures and the same words. Within
this imaginary where everything constantly begins again, there is no place for the
human adventure or for the idea of progress. In this universe where nature controls everything, man escapes the anxiety of history which torments modern man,
but man stays immobile in the middle of an unchanging order where everything
seems decreed in advance. The African has not suciently entered History. ...
The African peasant lives the rhythm of the seasons.6
Sarkozys speech simply recycled a Eurocentric view of Africa as allochronically

mired in a dead past, a perspective reminiscent of Hegels interpretation of Africa
as refractory to the dynamizing charm of the European geist. For writers formed in
that tradition, ahistorical peoples lacked key human and social attributes: namely,
writing, reason, and a state. Sarkozy described Africa, to the Africans themselves,
as pretechnological, desperately in need of science and modern technique, yet culturally rich in its capacity to reawaken the simple and ephemeral pleasures ... and
the need to believe rather than to understand, the need to feel rather than reason.
The only hope was for Africans to give free expression to their European part calling for freedom, emancipation, and justice. The real addressee of Sarkozys speech,
however, was the French public, and the goal was to bury once and for all what
Frances conservative humanist intellectuals saw as a masochistic cult of repentance concerning colonialism. In an exercise of national self-exoneration, Sarkozy
declared that colonialism was not responsible for all the present-day problems of
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Africa, ... not responsible for the bloody wars between Africans, ... not responsible for the genocides, ... not responsible for the dictators. Sarkozy reminded his
Dakar audience that Africans themselves had often fought against and hated one
anotheras if such hatred were unimaginable in Europethat no one should ask
children to apologize for the faults of their parents, that while the colonizers had
taken from Africa, they had also given to Africa. In this sense, Sarkozy transformed
the white mans sob into a self-aggrandizing ocial metanarrative.
Implicitly, Sarkozy was denying what had been established by many critical
scholars, to wit, that France had been enriched by colonialism and slavery. Francophone Africaor what critics such as Jean-Franois Verschave punningly called
Franafrique or France-a-fric (roughly, French money/Africa)had been deeply
corrupted by French support for African kleptocrats, whereby the corporate and
political elite of France, together with African dictators, exploited Africa for their
own purposes. At least two collections, LAfrique Rpond Sarkozy and Petit Prcis de
Remise Niveau sur LHistoire Africaine lUsage du Prsident Sarkozy, feature African
responses to Sarkozys libel against Africa.)7 On another occasion, Sarkozy addressed
his own love it or leave it ultimatum to African immigrants in France itself: We cannot change our laws and customs because a tiny minority doesnt like them. If certain
people dont like France, they should feel free to take their leave.8
For Alain Badiou, Sarkozys new Ptainism conjoins the fear of racialized
minorities with the fear of a resurgent left (for Ptain, the Popular Front; for Sarkozy, May 1968).9 Sarkozys call for a discussion of national identity, meanwhile,
has placed minorities on the defensive by subtly reinforcing a normatively white
French view of that identity. Like the U.S. right wing, the French right stokes
fears of internal and external enemies: for Sarkozy, the banlieue scum at home
and Islamicists abroad; and for the U.S. right, blacks, Latinos, and Muslims at
home and Islamic fascism abroad. Just as American rightist politicians are proposing to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment in order to penalize undocumented
Mexican workers (and indirectly American citizens of Mexican background),
Sarkozy proposed stripping immigrants convicted of serious crimes of their citizenship. Just to clarify the anti-Muslim and anti-African drift, Sarkozys interior
minister added polygamy and female circumcision to the list of oenses bringing
the loss of citizenship. Sarkozy also threatened to send one of Europes paradigmatic internal othersthe Romaback to Romania and Bulgaria, for which
he was duly chastised by the European Union.
Decolonizing la Rpublique
The reconceptualization of France as an oxymoronic colonial republic has challenged some of the key precepts of republicanism. As Seloua Luste Boulbina puts
248
it, decolonization was experienced by some French as a morcellement (fragmentation), resulting in perverse eects: It is as if the French postcolonial state was
being raised on a eld of ruins so that in order to exist it became necessary to
rehabilitate the Republic (which ignores dierence and communities), along
with lacit (which rejects the veil), and national identity (which covers over cultural diversity).10 Recent French history, in this sense, has featured a veritable culture war between those who stress the negative legacies of colonialism and those
who bemoan the cult of repentance concerning those very same legacies. The
phrase cult of repentance served to downplay colonialisms crimes, while shifting
attention to the whites who choose to repent or not to repent as the main actors,
with the rest as spectators on an intrawhite quarrel. Thus, Daniel Lefeuvre, in
To Put an End to Colonial Repentance (2008), mocks what he sees as an obsession with interpreting contemporary phenomena as aftereects of colonialism:
The racism of police or administration? Colonial Legacy! The failure of schools?
Colonial Legacy! The dicult insertion of Islam in national space? Colonial Legacy. Lambasting Marc Ferros 2003 book Le Livre Noir du Colonialisme, Lefeuvre
calls for a white book of colonization dedicated to the glory of the French colonial enterprise, including works by indigenous authors themselves. To repent
for colonialism, for Lefeuvre, is sheer charlatanism and blindness.11 In the same
vein, Alain Finkielkraut, giving voice to his own colonial nostalgia, laments that
French schools no longer teach that the goal of the colonial enterprise was to
educate and bring civilization to the savages.12
In these paradigm wars, the argument has not been about whether colonialism was violent but only about whether colonialism was essentially and irrevocably violent or only circumstantially and sometimes benecially violent. The enemies of the cult of repentance rekindle the embers of the imperial-romanticist
dream of the colonial epic and the adventures of colonial pioneers. Academics
like Lefeuvre and politicians like Sarkozy, in this sense, form part of an ideological coalition trying to reanimate the mission civilisatrice for the postindependence
period. Presidential candidate Sarkozy even gave voice to his own neo-orientalist
imaginary in a May 2007 Toulon speech lauding the dream that sent the knights
of Europe on the routes of the Orient, the dream of Napoleon Bonaparte in
Egypt, of Napoleon III in Algeria, of Lyautey in Morocco, . . . a dream not of
conquest but of civilization.13 The consensus conservative line seems to be that
despite some abuses, colonialism was well intentioned and generally benecial.
These arguments produce political eects by undercutting any claims by formerly
colonized peoples, or by the French people of color descended from them, that
anything is owed them.
In the United States, similar cultural wars have opposed advocates of radical
pedagogy against rightist superpatriots. The dierence between the French and
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the U.S. culture wars derives, in part, from the dierences between the practices of
a grounded colonizing nation-state in Europe and those of a colonial-settler state
in the Americas. In colonial-settler states, as the name implies, colonialism is at the
very kernel of the social formation, yet that centrality is obscured by exceptionalist narratives such as nation of immigrants and the Conquest of the West or, in
Brazil, the March to the West and the fable of the three races. Colonialism is
omnipresent yet rendered invisible, renarrated as a legitimate expansion into an
empty space. In France, meanwhile, colonialism, even though it shaped the metropole economically, culturally, and politically, was seen as taking place over there.
Our research has led us to a vast corpus of intercolonial texts that directly
or indirectly assert the superiority of some colonialisms over others (British over
French, American over both, and so forth). Many texts contrast the racially phobic and segregationist Anglo-Saxon colonialisms with the more open, assimilationist, and tolerant Latin colonialisms. This binarism haunts even books that
engage postcolonial theory with sympathy. To cite just one example, Jacqueline
Bardolphs tudes Postcoloniales et Littrature calls for a study of dierent colonial
imaginaries, for a study of the way in which French history, marked by Catholicism and the spirit of the Enlightenment, might oer a less hierarchical vision of
non-European peoples than the British imperial vision.14 Thus, ancient AngloFrench tensions become reinvoiced in a new intercolonial rivalry, this time within
postcolonial studies, about the relative humanity of variant forms of colonialism.
Such nationalist-exceptionalist narratives are absorbed through schools, history books, museums, colonial expositions, and the media. The ocial history,
according to the classical protocols of je sais, mais quand mme denegation,
becomes a form of national apologetics. Nationalism, in this sense, entails obligatory amnesia. As Nietzsche put it, Memory says I did that. Pride replies, I could
not have done that. Eventually memory yields.15 The various powers deeply
entangled in slavery, for example, developed comparative discourses of relative
innocence. This specular competition of preening national egos has historically
generated claims that our conquest was more gentle, our slavery more humane,
and our imperialism more cultivated. More productive, to our mind, would be
a comparative study of the role of narcissism within intercolonial discourse. It
would examine the various vernaculars of the larger language families of imperialism, such as U.S. militaristic exceptionalism (We promote democracy and
crave not one inch of Iraqi, Afghan, Vietnamese, Laotian, Korean ... land), British free-trade imperialism (We only care about trade, which benets everyone),
the French mission civilisatrice (Vive la culture franaise), Luso-Tropicalism
(We have Moorish blood and adore mulatas).
At the same time, certain asymmetries characterize theoretical exchanges in
the various sites. The rst asymmetry is between the power of the Anglophone
250
academy, with its logistical capacity to project and disseminate ideas (reinforced by the hegemony of English), compared with the relative lack of projection (despite the celebrity of Frances matres penser) of the French academy.
On the other hand, some asymmetries work in the opposite direction. First, the
intellectual Anglophobia of many French intellectuals is not generally matched
by Francophobia on the part of Anglo-American left intellectuals, who are just
as likely to be Francophile. Anne Berger, professor of French and Francophone
literature at Cornell and thus a passeur or truchement gure well placed to compare the two academic formations, points to a contrast between the two academies: Unlike France, which hopes to export its knowledge and ideas and receive
lessons from no one, America [sic] is an avid importer of ideas.16 Rada Ivekovi
makes a similar point about French intellectuals who might believe that they
are resisting the importation of ideas but in so doing miss the positive, enriching side of such importations. The polemic about postcolonial studies, Ivekovi
elaborates, begins in a somewhat vain and anxious way, since it revolves around
Republican national pride and a desire for independence, whereby an unfortunate tendency leads to new ideas being received with simplistic fors or againsts
which atten out all structural complexity and historical depth.17
The problem on the Anglo-American side, we would add, is at times an insular, self-satised, monolingual provinciality, in tandem with a certain fashionoriented superciality that prefers ornamental citations of consecrated matres
penser to a deeper engagement with the substantive scholarship emanating
from France and the French-speaking world. The point, then, is not that French
intellectuals should simply join the postcolonial bandwagon but rather that all
intellectuals should widen the circles of the debates, including by criticizing the
provincialities of the local forms that the debate has taken. The question is not
one of who is importing and who is exporting but rather of developing a more
complex account of the circulation of ideas across boundaries, a point to which
we shall return in the nal chapter.
A colonial thread runs through many recent French polemics around such
issues as the veil and religious insignia in French schools; laws prohibiting denials of the Armenian genocide and the Shoah; the commemoration of slavery and
abolition and the Taubira law declaring slavery a crime against humanity; the
colonial heritage of French museums; Sarkozys proposal for a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Codevelopment; the lm Indignes,
concerning pensions for the North African soldiers who liberated France at the
end of World War II; the ocial recognition in 2005 by Chirac of the 1947 massacres in Madagascar; the rediscovery of the October 17, 1961, police massacre
of hundreds of Algerians in Paris; the accusations, three decades later, of French
complicity in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; and the debates in Parliament about
251
the benecial eects of colonialism. Occasionally, prestigious veterans of the

anticolonial struggles have participated in these debates, as when Csaire refused
to meet with Sarkozy, then minister of education, stating that as the author of
Discourse on Colonialism, I remain faithful to my credo as a resolute anticolonialist [who] cannot appear to be in agreement with either the spirit or the letter of
the February 23, 2005, law [concerning the positive eects of colonialism].18
Much of the postcolonial eervescence came to the fore in the year that might
be called the winter of postcolonial discontent: 2005. The year began with the
furor over the proposed parliamentary law calling for national recognition for
the French repatriated from Algeria (i.e., the former colons or pieds-noirs) and the
positive accomplishments of French colonization. (The proposed law was subsequently rescinded.) It ended with the banlieue rebellions of November, partially triggered by provocative comments by government ocials, which turned
into a paroxysm of anger against police violence, discrimination, racial proling,
and unemployment. More than ten thousand cars were burned, and over two
hundred public buildings were torched all around France. The coalitionary optimism of the 1983 Marche des Beurs, it appeared, had in two decades given way
to the inchoate rage of the banlieue oppressed.
This was also the year of the formation of Indignes de la Rpublique, the radical group whose very name fuses the memory of the colonial indigenous code
with the Republic, thus asserting the persistence of the colonial in the presumably postcolonial era. In 2005, the organization issued a public appeal lamenting
the situation of the new natives:
Discriminated against in hiring, housing, health, in school, and in leisure activities,
the people of the ex-colonies or of the current ones, or whose presence in France
is a result of post-colonial immigration, are the primary victims of social exclusion and privation. Independently of their actual origins, the populations of the
quartiers are indigenized, that is, relegated to the margins of society. ... Identity
checks, provocations, and persecutions of all sorts are multiplied; police brutality,
sometimes extreme, is only rarely sanctioned by a system of justice that functions
at two speeds.19
The text goes on to assert that France remains a colonial state, whether in the
form of territorial dpartements (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane, La Runion)
or of overseas territories (Nouvelle-Caldonie, Tahiti), where the level of economic development is far below that of the metropole. In France, the text states,
the children of these colonies are consigned to the status of immigrantssecond-class French citizens without all their rights. The appeal boldly states that
the treatment of populations who are products of colonization prolongs colonial
policy. At the same time, it underscores the economic dimension of oppression:
The gure of the indigne ... has become interwoven with other logics of social
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oppression, discrimination, or exploitation. Thus, today, in the context of neoliberalism, immigrant workers are made to play the role of deregulators of the
labor market in order to facilitate the extension of the logics of precarious living
and exible production to the entire wage-earning population. The text ends by
calling for (1) a radical questioning of the Enlightenment chauvinism of the universal and (2) radical measures to end discrimination in access to jobs, housing,
culture, and citizenship, eliminating those institutions which relegate formerly
colonized populations to a subhuman status.
The Indignes de la Rpublique describe present-day France, in sum, as a
quasi-colonial state. The racial proling and harassment of West Indians, subSaharan Africans, and North Africans, for les indignes, merely transposed into
the Hexagon the old racist attitudes and discriminatory practices that typied
French colonialism. On January 16, 2005, the group disseminated an Appeal for
a Conference on Postcolonial Anti-colonialism. It also organized a rally on May
8anniversary of the brutal French repression of an Algerian demonstration
in Stif in 1945against the amnesia about past French massacres and a police
brutality rarely punished by a multiple-speed judicial system. Among the other
points made in the appeal,
France is and remains a colonial state. ... In its former colonies, it continues
a policy of domination. ... The treatment of the populations descended from
colonialism prolongs, without being reducible to, colonial policy. ... The gure
of the native continues to haunt political, administrative, and judicial actions ...
imbricated with other logics of oppression, discrimination, and social exploitation.
... We, descendants of slaves and of African deportees, daughters and sons of the
colonized and of immigrants, we, French and non-French living in France, ... we
are the natives of the Republic.
The Indignes de la Rpublique met with a hostile reception from much of the
political spectrum, not only from the centrist Nouvel Observateur, which called
their manifesto a confused cocktail of poujado-leftism, shallow alter-mondialism, and post-Fanonian radicalism,20 but also from some on the left who found
the movement communitarian and even racist.21 This partial convergence of
right and left suggested that colonial attitudes rooted in a Eurocentric universalism persisted in the postcolonial era.
Also published in 2005 was the edited volume The Colonial Fracture: French
Society through the Prism of the Colonial Legacy. As the editors write in the
introduction,
It is today dicult to ignore postcoloniality, given the extraordinarily strong
tensions that go with it: the extension of the comparison between the colonial
situation and the situations of social, economic, cultural, educational, and religious
marginalization in urban neighborhoods; ... the demands concerning histori-
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cal memory of the children of colonization; ... the rise of a sense of insecurity
regarding postcolonial immigration and the failure, on the part of republican elites,
to understand extranormal identities (seen as communautaristes); the denunciations in the media of a so-called antiwhite racism at the same time as we witness
a growing rigidity of the French model of integration; the rejection of France
and policies of francophonie in Francophone Africa. ... All these signs make the
colonial fracture a multifaceted reality that can no longer be ignored.22
Absorbed in the struggle to change the way French history is presented in school
textbooks and in the media, the volume features essays on the role of the dominant republican model in (1) suppressing critical thought about race (Achille
Mbembe), (2) marginalizing postcolonial migrants and their descendants
through the myth of integration (Ahmed Boubeker), and (3) stereotyping Arabs
and Muslims (Thomas Deltombe and Mathieu Rigouste).
The reactions to the work of French postcolonial scholars reveal both similarities and dierences vis--vis the Anglo-American situation. Referring to
some 250 commentaries and critical references in the press, in the media, and
on the Internet, Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard examine the responses to
their inuential La Fracture Coloniale. A rst axis of critique consisted in denying any clear connection between colonialism and the contemporary situation.
(The authors answer that the situation is both linked and distinct.) A second,
more Marxist critique censured the privileging of race over class, and culture over
economy. (For the authors, all are essential, intertwined, and complexly interarticulated.) A third critique accused the authors of subverting republican values,
while a fourth lamented the reopening of historical wounds. Such skittish reactions to postcolonial scholarship in both France and in the Anglophone world
are symptomatic of a common structure of feeling (Williams) that resists any
deeper engagement with the impact of colonialism on national history.
The fact is that contemporary France exhibits both continuities and discontinuities with the colonial past. As evidence for continuity, one might cite the facts
that (1) the demographic majority in the overcrowded projects (banlieue) are
literally a byproduct of the French colonization of parts of sub-Saharan Africa
and the Maghreb; (2) the reinstatement of martial law on November 8, 2005,
was based on a 1955 state-of-emergency decree originally used for repression in
French Algeria; (3) repatriated pieds-noirs from Algeria form a major presence in
the anti-immigrant National Front; and (4) many repatriated colonial civil servants from Algeria were placed in positions of control over postcolonial immigrants.23 The residents of these areas, for urban sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie, experience themselves as colonized people in the sense that Frantz Fanon,
Albert Memmi, or V.S. Naipaul give to this term: they are dened by external
and dominant perceptions [le regard] and categories ... like colonized people, the
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inhabitants of the sensitive zones have the impression that they have no political
existence, that they are not considered citizens.24 Other analysts nd the continuity thesis overstated: after all, the indigenous code itself is extinct, and even
the Indignes de la Rpublique are citizens. Taking a carefully calibrated position, Pap Ndiaye suggests that it would be outrageously simplistic to claim that
contemporary racial discriminations are due to the old colonial slave order, while
it would also be quite dishonest to claim that contemporary injustices have
nothing to do with that order. The postcolonial project, for Ndiaye, invites us to
reect precisely on the maintenance of structures of domination after decolonization. The reection on this non-indierent dierence [dierence non indierente] between past and present situations is precisely what is at stake in contemporary social sciences.25
The Hesitation-Waltz of French Postcolonial Studies

The past decade has generated a substantial body of postcolonial work in
France, founded, according to Marie-Claude Smouts, on three propositions long
accepted in the Anglophone academic world: (1) that the colonial fact forms an
integral part of the history of the French present; (2) that colonialism has thoroughly transformed not only the former colonized societies but also the colonizing society itself; and (3) that France, in order to shape a more inclusive republic,
has to recognize the legacy of its colonial past.26
Before examining the current postcolonial work, it is worth reecting on the
reasons for the defensiveness vis--vis postcolonial studies. What explains the
specically French hesitations about the postcolonial project? To reiterate our
earlier questions about the reception of multicultural identity politics, in what
ways do national interests, cultural institutions, and global socioeconomic alignments dictate the itineraries of traveling theories such as postcolonialism? What
structure of feeling, what resistances and interferences, lie behind this initial
antagonism? Here we rst examine the reasons for the antagonism and then look
at the remarkable recent owering of writing on topics that directly bear on the
postcolonial.
By way of preamble, it is important to draw some distinctions concerning the
public reception of postcolonialism in the various zones. Despite the resistance
to academic postcolonial theory, the political debates about colonialism became
much more part of the public sphere in France than was the case in the United
States and the United Kingdom. It would therefore be wrong to see the issue
in a stagist and linear way, as if it were merely a question of French intellectuals getting up to speed with the Anglo-American academe. The temporalities
and historicities of dierent languages, as Rada Ivekovi puts it, do not always
255
coincide.27 Some of the French hesitation about postcolonial studies derived, as

we have seen, from a longstanding intellectual strength, that is, Frances status as
a privileged terrain for anticolonial, anti-neocolonial, and anti-imperialist writing by both French and Francophone writers within and beyond the Hexagon,
going back to Csaire, Senghor, douard Glissant, Maryse Cond, Alioune Diop,
Hamidou Kane, Amadou Hampat B, Abdelmalek Sayad, Alice Cherki, Yves
Bnot, Francis Jeanson, and so many others. This anticolonial and anti-imperial
work later morphed, it could be argued, not so much into the postcolonial academic eld but rather into the activism associated with the antiglobalization and
alter-globalization movements.28 The World Social Forum, for example, began as
a collaboration between progressive Brazilians and the anti-imperialist leftists of
Le Monde Diplomatique. Thus, while there has been less postcolonial academic
production in France, there has also perhaps been more political activism related
to the latter-day sequels of colonialism and imperialism.29
At the same time, there was a marked dierence in the role of the various
disciplines. While postcolonial work in France was largely conned to specic
disciplines, postcolonial studies in the Anglophone world has long been transdisciplinary. As a result of this dierence in academic genealogies, what in the
Anglophone world would have been called postcolonial in France might be
simply called history or anthropology or economics or literature. Postcolonial literature, similarly, might be called in France literature of development or
emergent literature.30 Such work was often critical of colonialism in theory and
practice, even if it did not suciently unpack such infantilizing terms as emerging and developing. What was lacking in the French academy, perhaps, was the
metatheoretical and transdisciplinary thrust of postcolonial studies, even though
that thrust was partially inspired by French critical theory.
In the search for a more multidimensional analysis, some commentators have
racialized and postcolonialized, as it were, the categories of Foucault and Bourdieu. Rather than speak simply of racism, sociologist Nacira Gunif-Souilamas
foregrounds the normative biopolitics that shape citizenship and subcitizenship
in postcolonial France, regulating the bodies and behavior of the children of
immigrants of color. While the dominant discourse assumes a general freedom
of self-invention for all people, the marginalized are made to feel incarcerated in
their own bodies, held back by the invisible barrier that separates o those who
lack civilizational legitimacy.31 In dense Foucauldian prose, Gunif-Souilamas
critiques biopolitics in the service of the reigning order:
Our epoch, so solicitous of the freedom of everyone to invent themselves, has
reserved for the most dominated a very particular kind of self-invention, a new
form of captivity, a new privation of freedom which assaults those French people
who are incarcerated in their own bodies. Thus, the barrier erected between those
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who enjoy civilizational legitimacy and those who do not is no longer exterior. ...
This uncrossable border marries bodies themselves, enveloping them in a transparent lm which resists all the corrosions of contact, ... isolating those who are
so circumscribed. ... For those who have experienced or witnessed these virtual
incarcerations prodded by racial proling of bodies ... it becomes clear that one
can be imprisoned while apparently being free.32
Picking up on concepts developed by Bourdieu and by Norbert Elias, GunifSouilamas argues that customs and habitus play a crucial role in the economy of
distinction and the maintaining of class barriers. Presocial, literally natural, in
other words, in our vernacular, profoundly cultural, racial traits are constructed
to serve the purpose assigned to them: debase in order to separate, designate the
evil in order to protect oneself from it.33
Gunif-Souilamas speaks of the consubstantial link between colonialism and
assimilationism [obscured by] integrationist rhetoric.34 The most obvious link is
the symbiotic connection between a racialized civilizing process that once took
place abroad and that now takes place within French institutions. The body itself
plays an allegorical role as the new protagonists of alterity incarnate the disquieting gure of the undomesticated other. Just as the African American body has
played an allegorical role as an ambulatory reminder of the repressed memory of
white crimes against blacks, in France too the very presence [of the protagonists
of alterity] is a reminder of that which they are the involuntary recipients.35 Even
feminism is wielded against a generic Arab/Muslim other. For Islamophobes,
only one (Islamic) faith is stigmatized as inherently sexist. Gunif-Souilamas
mocks the patriarchal feminism of the white male French critics of Islam, who
pose as chivalric defenders of Muslim women against Muslim meninevitably
reminding us of Spivaks evocative formula white men rescuing brown women
from brown men.36 As in the United States, white feminists sometimes join in
the condemnations, as when Elisabeth Badinter, in a kind of secular fundamentalism, pathologizes a religious tradition by calling veiled Muslim women very,
very sick. A religiously connoted choice of dress becomes the trigger for an undialogical analysis tinged with projections that completely deny the subjectivity of
the wearer of the veil, which for Badinter, symbolizes the categorical refusal to
come into contact with the other, ... a triple pleasure over the other: the pleasure
of nonreciprocity, the pleasure of exhibitionism, and a voyeuristic pleasure.37
The eld of the postcolonial in France was also occupied by another discursive formation, to wit, la Francophonie. Less a critical theory than an ocially
mandated postindependence reformatting of the mission civilisatrice, la Francophonie can be seen as a Gaullist cultural, diplomatic, and commercial project
partially aimed at Anglo-Saxon rivals for inuence in the Third World. This
situation generated an ambiguous status, at once privileged and marginalized,
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for Francophone writers. Pascale Casanova pinpoints the awkward situation of

Francophone writers: Paris had never been interested in the writers from its
colonial territories; in fact, it has for a long time scorned and mistreated them
as provincials, too close for their dierences to be recognized or celebrated yet
too far to simply be perceived.38 The Caribbean writers, for example, come to be
seen as too Caribbean to be French and too French to be Caribbean. Much of
the postcolonial air was thus sucked up, at least in literature departments, by la
Francophonie and Francophone literature.39 Yet the very concept of Francophonie
is being more and more challenged both by the critics and by the writers themselves, who prefer such terms as world literature in French.
A number of French-speaking scholars who transit easily between the Americas, Europe, and the Caribbeannotably Franoise Vergs, Anne Donadey,
Franoise Lionnet, Winifred Woodhull, Brent Hayes Edwards, Tyler Stovall,
Dominic Thomas, and Georges Van Den Abbeele, among othersspeak of
(and themselves instantiate) new hybrid transdisciplinary formations that subsume French and Francophone concerns into larger congurations such as
Francophone postcolonial studies. In the anthology French Civilization and
Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, Tyler Stovall and Georges Van
Den Abbeele note the general lack of interest of the Hexagon in these currents.
The study of French literature and culture that has arisen outside of France
and indeed throughout the French-speaking world, they note, has emerged in
spite of metropolitan French indierence and hostility. The exhilarating expansion of the corpus of French studies, they continue, nds few approving echoes
in the metropolis, and this despite the sudden development of something like a
global Francophone consciousness with an almost dizzying array of lateral contacts all around the periphery as Anglo-American scholars circumvent Paris to
interact with their Caribbean, Canadian, African, and Pacic counterparts.40
The increasing level of interchange between Francophone locations, the authors
conclude, in what is perhaps an overstatement, bypasses Paris entirely.41 The
notions of tout-monde and creolization drawn from Glissants relational theories, now standard protocols of reading in the West Indies, black Africa, and the
Maghreb, they point out, have been largely ignored in France itself.
Frances own postcolonials, as a result, have been turning away from French
tutelage and institutions in favor of other alternatives. Many French-speaking African and Caribbean intellectuals, including some who formerly lived in
France, have immigrated to the United States. Despite the fact that Africans (and
Afro-Caribbeans) in the United States are not exempt from the racism suered
by African Americans generally, prestigious French-speaking intellectuals and
writers from the Caribbean and from Africa have taken up positions in American universities: Souleymane Bachir Diagne and Maryse Cond (emeritus) at
258
Columbia; douard Glissant at CUNY; Mamadou Diouf at the University of

Michigan; Assia Djebar, Manthia Diawara, and Awam Amkpa at New York University; Jean-Godefroy Bidima at Tulane; Mbye Cham at Howard; and Valentin
Mudimbe at Dukewithout necessarily cutting o their links to France, Africa,
and the Caribbean. During the 19981999 school year, for example, 165 African
scholars came to the United States from Francophone countries.42 Jean-Philippe
Dedieu speaks of African appreciation for relatively open networks of scientic
knowledge and professional recognition, in contrast with France, where the circle of professional knowledges never widens. The African scholar in the United
States, one historian reports, is showered with invitations for participation, creating a familiarity and a continuity ... never found on the French side.43 American
philosophy departments, meanwhile, are hiring in the eld of African philosophy, even as academic job listings in French studies are increasingly specifying
Francophone and postcolonial literature.44 African postcolonial thinkers in the
United States also benet, ironically, from the Francophilia of some branches of
the U.S. academy. Francophonic scholarship in the United States, for Dedieu, has
two advantages: (1) that it is African and (2) that it is French and philosophically
oriented, thus beneting from the aura of poststructuralism in the United States.
The causes of the French hesitation about postcolonial studies are at once linguistic (resentment against the hegemony of English), demographic (the relative
lack of professors of color in French universities), and institutional (the lack of
openings for such studies). Alec G. Hargreaves attributes French ambivalence
toward postcolonial studies to (1) Frances traumatic separation from its colonies,
notably in Vietnam and in Algeria, leading to a desire for erasure; (2) the antiAmericanism of French intellectuals who resent the spread of (Anglo-)American
inuence both in France itself and in a larger world where French intellectuals
once reigned supreme; (3) the unidisciplinary conservatism of French research
institutions, in contrast with an Anglo-American academy in which literary
scholarsin aspiration if not always in factbecame pluridisciplinary and transnational. While the terrain for such work was prepared in the Anglo-American
world by various forms of interdisciplinary studies, in France transdisciplinary
elds such as postcolonial studies fell into the limbo of the unclassiable.45 This
limbo status was caused less by a lack of transdisciplinary desire or vocation on
the part of scholars themselves than by the centralized nature of the French state,
since any transdisciplinary experiments would require the approval of the Ministry of Universities, which controls the creation of tenured faculty positions. Here
the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), with its encouragement of cross-disciplinary anity groups, forms a partial exception to the rule.46
The elitist and hierarchical character of French higher education allows little
space for initiatives by graduate students to form associations, to publish essays
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and books, and so forth. All of these are mixed blessings, of course, and it would
be absurd to idealize a U.S. academy plagued by billionaire trustees, outrageously
high tuition, the intrusion of market values, an academic star system, and the
publish-or-perish syndrome.
The ambivalence about projects such as postcolonial studies is also tied to
the vexed question of how France sees its role in the world in the afterwash of
empire, as at once the victim of U.S. imperialism and as the formerly colonialist but now benevolent patron of many of the countries not completely absorbed
into the Anglo-American sphere of inuence. De Gaulle presided over the end of
the French empire and then almost immediately fabricated the image of France
as the defender of the Third World against les Anglo-Saxons. Although France
could no longer pretend to be a superpower, it could speak for the rest as the
sponsor of an alternative universality posed against the false universalism of the
hyperpower. Defensive and inferiorized in relation to the (now declining) hyperpower, France could be a spokesperson for the excluded by articulating the general resistance, for example, to the U.S.-led Iraq War. France, in this sense, has
also come to play a special role in world cultural production. Already in 1984, Jean
Guiart, from the Muse de lHomme, had spoken of the new mission of French
ethnology: to valorize the cultural riches of each non-European people.47 One
nds this welcome valorization of non-European cultures in many manifestations
of French cultural policies, whether in the area of the World Republic of Letters,
with the key French role, stressed by Pascale Casanova, as Gatekeeper or World
Bank for Literature, or in World Music, of which France is a major producer, or
in World Cinema, where France has helped nance emerging cinemas in Francophone Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, combating Hollywood hegemony while
also walking a ne line between a generous pluralism and a subtle paternalism.
Other institutional factors impede the development of transdisciplinary elds
such as postcolonial studies in France. Anne Berger criticizes certain features of
the U.S. academythe cult of success, celebrity intellectuals, the political impotence of many academics for whom academic freedom is merely academicwhile
also praising a exible system that empowers students and teachers to create new
objects of research. Contrasting the proliferation of spaces of encounter in the
United States with the isolating morcellement typical of the French academy, she
lauds the transdisciplinary research groupings or studies programs, dened by
ethnicity, area, or subject. Such discursive formations, she argues, both shape new
objects of study and inaugurate new reections on ways of looking at those objects
so as to encourage multiple and overlapping aliations. Thus, a humanities professor can simultaneously participate in feminist studies, Francophone studies, cultural studies, critical race studies, transnational feminist studies, diaspora studies,
and so forth. (Some grids, such as feminism, are potentially relevant to all elds.)48
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Looking back at postwar intellectual history, what is perhaps most disappointing is the failure of the leading matres penser to theorize race and coloniality,
despite their usually progressive politics. Sartre wrote incendiary prefaces and
opposed the Algerian War and American imperialism, but his literary and philosophical writings rarely addressed French imperial domination. The participants in
Socialisme ou Barbarie defended the right of colonized people to self-determination, but they were largely ignored in France. Foucault briey developed theories of
the racial state but soon moved on to other issues. Here tienne Balibar, who has
for decades been theorizing neoracism, racism without race, and universalism as
racism and who has seen racism as at the core of contemporary European politics,
forms a major exception.49 But apart from Balibar, the Foucault of the racial state,
and to a certain extent Derrida, Lyotard, Guattari, and Deleuze, most of the matres, left unexamined the racial/imperial architectonics of France itself.
Building on a Foucauldian metaphor, Ann Stoller speaks provocatively of
colonial aphasia, an impaired condition that interrupts connections through
disabled histories and severed links in pathways of association.50 Little of
Frances high-powered theoretical energy across the disciplines (so incisive about
political culture, totalitarianisms, state structures and class), she writes, was
aimed at the racialized foundations of the French state.51 A theory of dierence
animated theoretical movements from semiotics to poststructuralism, yet the
idea of racialized and gendered dierence was dismissed as dierentialist. Both
Bourdieu and Derrida, Stoller writes, divorced their sharp critiques of scholastic
knowledge from the racial milieus of French empire that they knew intimately
and on the ground.52 Bourdieu, she points out, waited some thirty years before
articulating the dilemma created by the separation between theoretical work and
ethnographic practice. Bourdieus theoretical constructs, according to Paul Silverstein and Jane Goodman, entered the mainstream of social thought independently of the North Africa and French political and social contexts in which they
were initially developed.53 Phyllis Taoua sums up the situation as follows: An
accurate assessment of decolonization cannot have French theory of the 1960s as
its ethical center of gravity, since that corpus of texts is antithetical to the basic
necessities of what that struggle for freedom required. ... Never in the history of
France had theoretical inquiry resorted to such mystifying abstraction, even as its
focus was allegedly the politics of dierence.54
The Quarrel over Genealogy

One of the most massive critiques of postcolonial studies in France is Africanist Jean-Franois Bayarts Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition?55 Words like postcolonial and postcoloniality, Bayart notes, have become
261
part of the intellectual debates in France, to the point that social scientists are no
longer shelteredthe choice of adjective is symptomaticfrom the polemics
triggered by their usage. Bayart endorses many of the critiques of postcolonial
theory already made in the Anglophone world by such Marxists as Arif Dirlik,
for whom postcolonial theory began with the arrival of Third World intellectuals
in the First World academy. Bayart also echoes what he himself calls Anthony
Appiahs self-admittedly mean dismissal of postcolonial intellectuals as a comprador intelligentsia mediating cultural exchanges between world capitalism and
its periphery. In Bayarts summary, this mediating group, now surrounded by
white disciples, sees the colonial situation as shaping contemporary social relations both in the former colonies and in the metropolitan countries.
The river of postcolonial theory, for Bayart, has many currents, some pulling like the Bosphorus in opposite directions. While Gayatri Spivak stresses the
epistemic violence of Western thought, others such as Depesh Chakravarty, Bayart points out, see Western thought as a gift to the world. What is new, according
to Bayart, is that a proliferating postcolonial studies has generated as a corollary
the image of a provincial, conservative France reluctant to confront its colonial
past or, even worse, as tainted by a racist imaginary. The concern that motivates
the essay, then, is a patriotic onethe image of France. Postcolonial studies,
Bayart complains, essentializes France, obscuring its demographic, political, and
ideological heterogeneity. Are French intellectuals being criticized, he asks, for
refusing to speak a new global pidgin and avoiding the civic rituals of aiction
that now pass for political engagement? Perhaps, he speculates, French researchers are right to reject a fashionable postcolonial trend whose heuristic virtues
have not yet been demonstrated.56
Bayarts essay, homogenizing postcolonial studies much as he claims that
postcolonial studies homogenizes France, is dedicated to proving that writers in
French (he mentions Csaire, Senghor, Memmi, and Sartre) were the founding
fathers of postcolonialism. Like Monsieur Jourdain, who spoke prose without
knowing it, these French writers practiced postcolonial studies without knowing
it.57 In other words, postcolonialism is superuous in France because the work
has already been done. In what amounts to a Francocentric account of the genesis
of the eld, Bayart ardently scavenges intellectual history for any and all Frenchspeaking writers who have performed scholarship in any way loosely analogous
to what is elsewhere considered postcolonial. Francophone anticolonialists such
as Csaire and Fanon become simply French, even though Fanon, in the later
period, insisted that he had never been French and that language and culture
are not enough to make you belong to a people.58 Bayarts Francocentrism
sometimes borders on the absurd, as when he claims that postcolonial studies
was inspired to link the critique of colonialism to the critique of other forms of
262
domination, notably in the area of gender, by borrowing from Bourdieu, Deleuze,

and Foucault. Where one might have expected names like Simone de Beauvoir,
Hlne Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, one nds instead, in a phallocentric narrative,
the names of the latecomer male matres, with no recognition of the many feminist writers who analyzed gender in greater depth long before them.
Bayart seeks out a seminal French connection for almost every non-French
thinker: Raymond Aron and Pierre Hassner inuenced Hannah Arendt; Sartre
was anti-Orientalist before Edward Said; Fernand Braudel inuenced Immanuel
Wallerstein; George Balandier examined postcolonial situations already in the
early 1950s; and so forth. While informative, the discussion reminds one of jejune
nationalist arguments about who invented the airplane. Bayart does provide a
thorough inventory of all the colonial-related work by a wide array of French
historians ( Jean Suret-Canale, Charles Andr Julien, Charles Robert Ageron),
political sociologists ( Jean-Frdric Schaub), creative writers ( Jean Genet,
Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux), Francophone novelists (Mongo Beti, Ahmadou
Kourouma, Ousmane Sembne, Yambo Ouologuem, Sony Labou Tansi, Alain
Mabanckou, Tierno Monnembo), and Maghrebian intellectuals (Mohammed
Harbi, Mostefa Lacheraf, Abdallah Laroui, and Mohamed Tozy).
At the same time, Bayart is not uncritical of French institutions. The mistreatment of postcolonial studies in France, for Bayart, derives not from an ideological allergy but from institutional malaise, including the misery of the French
university and of CNRS (the National Center of Scientic Research) that has
hindered the recruitment of young African scholars subsequently welcomed by
U.S. universities; an absurd visa policy that restricts intellectual exchanges with
the Global South; the weakening of Prsence Africaine; the absence of journals
comparable to the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement;
the archaic character of book distribution; the high cost of translation; and the
institutional inertia of la Francophonie, which has distracted scholars from a
deeper questioning of colonialism and its aftereects.
Rather than a behind-the-curve France, Bayart sees only a dierent conguration of the academic eld, one that French intellectuals should accept rather
than risk becoming new avatar[s] of academic Atlanticism.59 Bayart discerns (or
projects) a number of rather unsavory motivations for the postcolonial vogue: a
strategy of niche self-promotion on the part of scholars covetous of their share of
the academic market; a French coquettishness that mingles snobbism, Americanophilia, and Hexagonal masochism; the desire to resuscitate the gure of the
Sartrean engaged intellectual; the migratory conformism of French academics
paying homage to their Anglophone host institutions; the marketing strategies
of French publishers proting from an academic fashion; and a France-bashing
typical of the neoliberal age.
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Bayart accuses the French adepts of postcolonial studies of remaining within

a national narrative even while inverting it by demystifying the French Revolution, the Rpublique, and the mission civilisatrice. In the end, he does not say that
postcolonialism is wrong, only that it is unnecessary, since it is all dj vu and dj
lu, all been done before and better by writers working in French. At the same
time, he rejects postcolonial studies embrace of the identitarian proclivities of
the most extreme forms of the cultural turn. For Bayart, postcolonialism ontologizes colonialism, according to a tropical Calvinism that sees the colonies and
slavery as predestined.60 (Bayarts religious categorization embeds a sublimated
version of the Anglo/Protestant/Latin Catholic dichotomy.) Finally, postcolonialism ethnicizes the social question of the banlieues through the catastrophic
concept of identity, failing to see the internal dierentiations and spatiotemporal
variations within the colonizing process.
One leitmotif in some French critiques is the invocation of the ideal superego of sober scienticity, contrasted with the frivolous grand academic carnival
of postcolonial studies. Bayart, like historians such as Frederick Cooper in the
United States, whom he frequently cites, calls for more historical precision on the
part of postcolonial scholars. While postcolonial studies, for Bayart, postulates a
mechanical, univocal, overdetermined and Manichean reproduction of colonialism, colonialism is actually historically diverse, contingent, and ambivalent. We
can no longer maintain, he writes, a static and binary vision of a reied tte-tte between colonizer and colonized. As an antidote to what he sees as the ahistoricity of postcolonial theory Bayart calls for the kind of comparative historical sociology exemplied by such gures as Fernand Braudel, Jean Aubin, Denys
Lombard, and Serge Gruzinski. In the background of this argument against
postcolonial studies lies the debris of the History-versus-Theory debate that took
place during the heights of poststructuralism; the tension is not so much about
political perspective as about dierent disciplinary methods of reading the past.
Some of Bayarts points are valid, even if most had already been made within
the broader postcolonial eld. We can appreciate his indispensable inventory
of the French and Francophone contribution to scholarship, while regretting
the resentful we French did it rst and better tone and vive la France drift of
the essay. Eagerly enlisting any and all critics of postcolonialism, even those of
extremely diverse political stripes, Bayart mingles the Marxist-style critiques of
an Arif Dirlik with the standard French identitarian charge. His metaphor of
postcolonialism as a global pidgin carries an unfortunate colonialist aroma. His
sarcastic account of masochistic exercises in civic rituals of aiction, meanwhile, clearly echoes the French rightist lamentations about the cult of repentance. Calling postcolonialism politically dangerous and a form of cultural
engineering,61 Bayart demonstrates a limited knowledge of the postcolonial
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eldhe conates Octave Mannoni with his archnemesis Fanon, for example
while manifesting an acute impatience with the more radical work. In the end, he
illustrates the pitfalls of national narcissism in the realm of scholarly exchange.
The point is not to claim a single origin for postcolonial studies but rather to
insist on the multidirectional circuitries of intellectual ows.
Genres of Postcolonial criture

Despite such critiques, the past decades have seen a veritable explosion of postcolonial studies in France in the 21st century and especially after 2005. As Jim
Cohen points out, the French debate over the postcolonial was not led by literary
academics; rather, it was
a crystallization of several dierent but converging political controversies over the
heritage of colonialism and its possible eects in contemporary society. ... It was
a response to ongoing political debates over the republican model of integration
in its various implications, including the question of how to treat ethnoracial
discrimination and how to treat religious diversityin particular as embodied by
Islam; over the notion of race which many sociologists have begun to consider in
spite of strong republican presumptions against the legitimacy of the notion; and,
last but not least, over controversies concerning the memory of colonialism, slavery
and abolition and the role of public authorities in recognizing and conserving such
memory.62
Here we can delineate some of the major genres of such work, while acknowledging that the genres never come pure or unalloyed. While only some of the work
is performed under the rubric of the postcolonial, it is all directly or indirectly
related to colonialism and its aftermath. Lacking the space here to thoroughly
unpack the work, we will cite books whose very titles communicate the postcolonial thrust of the argument.
In terms of basic trends, rst, a large body of current work focuses on the hidden history of French colonialism and the contradictions inherent in republican
colonialism: Bernard Mouraliss Republic and Colony: Between History and Memory (1999); Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribes White Ferocity (2001); Yves Bnots
Colonial Massacres (2001); Marc Ferros edited volume The Black Book of Colonialism (2003); Olivier Le Cour Grandmaisons Colonize/Exterminate: On War
and the Colonial State (2005); Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Franoise
Vergss The Colonial Republic: Essay on a Utopia (2003); and Jean Pierre Dozons
Brothers and Subjects: France and Africa in Perspective (2003). The Dozon book,
for example, explores the central paradox of French-style colonialism in fashioning colonials who were simultaneously citizens within republican discourse and
subjects and indigenes within colonial discourse.
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Second, another body of work treats colonial/imperial popular culture as

consumed by the French populace within the Hexagon: Nicolas Bancel, Pascal
Blanchard, Gilles Boetsch, Eric Deroo, and Sandrine Lemaires Human Zoos
(2002); Pascal Blanchard and Sandrine Lemaires Colonial Culture: France Conquered by Its Empire, 18711931 (2003) and Imperial Culture: The Colonies at the
Heart of the Republic, 19311961 (2004); and Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel,
and Sandrine Lemaires The Colonial Fracture: French Society Seen through the
Prism of Its Colonial Heritage (2005). These books address the ways in which
ordinary French people could enjoy the spectacles provided by imperial culture
as manifested in colonial expositions and Human Zoosportrayed in Abdellatif Kechiches lm Black Venuswhere colonials were displayed for the delectation of the European and American populace.
Third, other textsRomain Bertrands Memories of Empire: The Controversy
about the Colonial Fact (2006), Benjamin Storas The War of Memories: France
faces its Colonial Past (2007), and the collective work An Unfortunate Decolonization: France from the Empire to the Banlieue Riots (2007)critically explore the
war of memories spiraling around colonialism.
Fourth, postcolonial texts treat the corollary theme of the history and memory
of slavery: Franoise Vergss Chained Memory: Questions about Slavery (2006)
and douard Glissants Memories of Slaveries (2007). The work on slavery presents an ambiguous relation to a postcolonial eld that too often brackets slavery,
as if it were not also at the very kernel of the colonial question. These texts seek
to demonstrate a clear continuity between colonialism and slavery, including in
the form of fervent abolitionists, such as Victor Schoelcher, who subsequently
metamorphosed into equally fervent colonialists.
Fifth, some work probes the colonial dimension of French philosophical
thought. Scholars such as Yves Bnot and later Louis Sala-Molins have examined the ways that the Enlightenment philosophers give voice to both colonialist
and anticolonialist opinion. In Sala-Molinss study of the Code Noir, he notes
the tendency of the philosophes to speak of slavery largely as a metaphor for
white oppression, while eliding the nancial benets slavery brought to Hexagonal France. Books such as Odile Tobners On French Racism: Four Centuries of
Negrophobia and Alain Ruscios The White Mans Credo, meanwhile, explore what
might be called the sottisier colonialiste or the anatomy of colonial stupidities.
Sixth, there is work on postcolonial literary studies: Jean-Marc Mouras Francophone Literatures and Postcolonial Theory (1999) and Jacqueline Bardolphs Postcolonial Studies and Literature (2002). Pascale Casanovas massively informed The
World Republic of Letters certainly engages postcolonial writers but generally
avoids the idioms of postcolonial theory in favor of political and economic metaphorsthe stock market of literary values, literary currency exchanges and the
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Republic of Lettersdrawn from Bourdieus concepts of cultural capital and

literary distinction.
Past years have witnessed an increasing engagement with race-conscious discourses, which Alec Hargreaves attributes to (1) the growing awareness on the
part of political elites and civil servants of the reality of discrimination against
immigrant minorities, (2) the greater visibility of violent protests (direct or indirect) against discrimination, and (3) political opportunities for antidiscrimination legislation.63 The recent period has also seen the emergence of black studies la Franaise in the form of Pap Ndiayes 2008 book-manifesto: The Black
Condition: Essay on a French Minority. French blacks, Ndiaye notes, are visible as
individuals but not as a social group or as an object of academic study. In contrast
with the profusion of French academic studies of Native Americans and African
Americans, he points out, there are almost none of blacks in France itself.64 The
contemporary social, political, and mediatic presence of the black question had
not been matched in the world of scholarship, with the result that race came to
form a structuring absence in postwar French social theory.
Favoring a transdisciplinary approach that synthesizes the social sciences with
the humanities, Ndiaye nds the conjunctural notion of a black minority more
productive than the essentialist notion of a community, a term seen as intrinsically antirepublican in France. The concept of visible minority, meanwhile, has
the advantage of embracing very varied groups, in disparate situations, who nevertheless confront common challenges and problems triggered by their visible (and
sometimes audible or nominal) dierence. Basing himself on extensive research,
Ndiaye points out that his black interviewees insist on their Frenchness partly
because it is constantly being placed in doubt, sometimes through well-meant
questions such as Where are you really from? Even complimentsYour
French is so uent addressed to an Antillais who grew up speaking Frenchcan
become a dagger dipped in the poison of an ethnic insiderism that reminds black
French citizens of their outsiderness.
Ndiaye discerns a supple, conjunctural deployment of racial identity on the
part of French blacks. While some proudly arm their blackness, others describe
themselves as mtis (mixed race) or arm a national identity, such as Senegalese.
Each option, as Ndiaye metaphorizes it, constitutes one card in the identitarian wallet.65 Code-switching within a complexly hierarchized classicatory repertoire, French blacks often place Frenchness in the primary position but add in
other elements and aliationsto a country, to a region, to an ethnic groupin
an identity bricolage. Although blacks in France live their blackness in ways that
vary with class, gender, religion, language skills, national origin, and self-conception, they are still likely to be seen as noir by their white compatriots. Thus,
there is a tension, to use the phenomenological language evoked by the titular
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concept of a black condition, between the chosen pour soi identity and the prescribed en soi identity constituted by le regard dautrui.
The real goal, for Ndiaye, is not to go beyond race but rather to eliminate
race as a social marker of inferiority. Fighting antiblack racism has a universal
dimension in that it will benet not only black people but all of humanity, including some who suer racisms consequences without even knowing it. Despite the
obvious dierences between the United States at the beginning of the 20th century and France at the beginning of the 21st, Du Boiss double consciousness, for
Ndiaye, retains contemporary relevance for French blacks:
It means that we want to be French and black, without that seeming strange or
suspect, or merely tolerated as a temporary problem while assimilation completes
its work. We want to be invisible in terms of our social life, such that the abuses
and discriminations that aect us as blacks are reduced. But we also want to
be visible in terms of our black cultural identities, in terms of our precious and
unique contribution to French society and culture.66
Within a nuanced, antiessentialist, intersectional, and coalitionary approach,

Ndiaye recommends forms of black solidarity that ideally operate in tandem
with other minority activisms. The real basis for solidarity is not identity per se
but rather a common social experience and a common struggle. Skin color, he
argues, designates an interest group, not a culture.67
In the 21st century, race has emerged as an analytical category within French
academic work. This work takes various generic forms such as, rst, work on
immigration and the racial question in France, for example, Michel Wieviorkas Racist France (1992); Vronique de Rudder, Christian Poiret, and Franois
Vourchs Racist Inequality: Republican Universality Put to the Test (2000); Eric
Savareses Colonial History and Immigration: An Invention of the Foreigner (2000);
Dominique Vidal and Karim Bourtels The Arab Malaise: Children of Colonization (2005); Jean-Michel Blier and Solenn de Royers Racial Discrimination: How
to End It (2001); and Nacira Gunif-Souilamass edited volume The Republic
Exposed by Its Immigration (2006). Second, this critical work takes the form of
witness (tmoinage) texts concerning everyday racial discrimination, for example,
Frdrique Mouzer and Charles Onanas A French Racism (2007), Mongo Betis
Africans, If You Could Speak (2005), Franois Durpaires White France, Black
Anger (2006), and Jean-Baptiste Onanas Be a Nigger and Shut Up (2007).
In the anthology From the Social Question to the Racial Question (2006), Didier
Fassin and ric Fassin and their collaborators take up Balibars challenge, in the
Actuel Marx dossier, to think racism after race, in a situation where race does
not exist, where it is known to be constructed, yet where racism remains a tangible, brutal reality. Attempting to delineate new articulations of race and class,
the contributors appeal to a cross-cultural comparative method. While the multi-
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cultural and critical race projects in the United States tend to be oriented around
the idea of an equal recognition of formerly stigmatized identities, the struggle
in France, according to some contributors, has less to do with identities per se
than with the recognition of the reality of discrimination. As the Fassins sum up
the situation, one speaks as in order not to be treated asBlack, Arab, Jewish
but also Woman and Homosexual: that is the minoritarian paradox inscribed
in the very condition of being a minority which means that one cannot get the
critique of minorization heard without engaging the already constituted terms of
the majoritarian discourse.68 In the end, the Fassins conclude, it matters little if
ones discourse is universalist or particularist; what matters is that one reect on
the sense and performativity of ones discourse; what it really signies, and, in the
last analysis, what it does.69
In any case, probing questions about race and postcoloniality are now being
asked in contemporary France, posed both along a spatial axisconcerning
whether colonialism is internal or external to French historyand along a temporal axis, concerning whether colonialism still shapes contemporary French history. Subsequent to the mid-1990s demonizations of multiculturalism and to the
initial antipathy to postcolonialism, the French academic scene has shifted substantially. As the editors of a special postcolonial issue of Mouvements put it, So
who is afraid of the postcolonial? There is no simple response to this question.
There is no principal enemy to denounce, except for the colonial Unconscious
that haunts French society and its social hierarchies, whose endurance it assures
in a discontinuous continuity. There is no republican plot to expose but only a
specically French diculty in revisiting the fundamentals of republicanism and
confronting them with the facts of its own historicity.70
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i n t h i s c ha p t e r , we theorize the multidirectional trac of ideas

concerning race/coloniality across the three zones through an analysis of a quadrille of readings whereby intellectuals from one country engage with intellectuals from a second country who make claims about a third country. We also
sketch out the history of U.S. and French academic studies of Brazil, while intervening in the debates about the dissemination of French theory in the Americas.
As part of our transnational and translational approach, we analyze Bourdieu/
Wacquants critique of Michael Hanchards work on the black consciousness
movement in Brazil, including a discussion of that critiques reception in Brazil,
in order to explore the literal and metaphorical translation of ideas around the
Atlantic.
France, the United States, and Brazil Studies

A thoroughgoing analysis of the triangular trac of ideas requires contextualization regarding the history of academic writing on Brazil by both France-based
and U.S.-based scholars. Whereas in the French case this writing traces its longterm origins to the 16th-century beginnings of the Franco-Brazilian relationship, in the U.S. case such writing is much more recent. In the postwar period, a
number of factorsthe surge of area studies in the United States, the Brazilian
dictatorships desire to improve higher education, and the Gaullist desire for alliances with the Third Worldall led to a major expansion of scholarly exchange
between the three countries. In Brazil, the military regime created scholarships
for study abroad, with the United States being the most popular destination, followed by France.
Historian Edward A. Riedinger notes in his overview of Brazil-related research
in France that from the time of the rst doctoral dissertation on Brazil in 1823 up
until 1999, 1,344 theses or dissertations about Brazil had been written in French
universities, over 98 percent of them in the postwar period.1 A cursory overview
of the dissertations reveals certain patterns: First, the majority are by Brazilians
working under French professors (such as Raymond Cantel and Guy Martinire)
knowledgeable about Brazil or with Brazilian scholars based in France (such as
Katia de Queirs Mattoso) or with celebrated scholars (such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Maurice Godelier, Pierre Bourdieu, and Alain Touraine) known more for
270
their innovative social theories than for their knowledge of Brazil. Second, a prestigious gallery of Brazilian scholars on African, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous
culture and historyLuiz Felipe de Alencastro (the South Atlantic slave trade);
Juana Elbein dos Santos (Afro-Brazilian religion); Renato Ortiz (Umbanda and
popular culture), and anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (indigenous
philosophy)did their graduate work in France. Third, the relatively rare comparative and cross-national dissertations tend to concern Brazil-Africa ( Jean-Paul
Coleyn on possession cults in Mali, Brazil, and Haiti) or France-Brazil (Gabriel
Colo on French versus Brazilian images of the Brazilian; Claudia Andrade dos
Santos on French travelers and the Brazilian slavery debates). Many dissertations
treat Afro-Brazilian religion, and one treats black Brazilian activism (Luiz Alberto
Oliveira Gonalvess 1994 thesis The Black Movement in Brazil). While the
theme of comparative race has been ubiquitous in scholarship by Brazilians and
North Americans, little comparative race work has been done by French scholars,
partly because the category of race is itself suspect.2
Riedinger notes in his comparison that (1) the French scholarship is largely
in the sciences or the social sciences, while the U.S. work is in both the sciences
and the humanities; (2) the French work is more inected by Marxism; (3) the
Annales School wields considerable inuence, partially because of its focus on
a Franco-Mediterranean sharing of certain cultural features with Brazil; (4) in
geopolitical terms, French studies envision Brazil as a regional power in alliance
with France and in opposition to the United States, while American studies see
Brazil as complementary to the United States; and (5) in the United States, Brazilian studies research has been conducted largely by North Americans linked to
Brazil, while Brazilian scholars in the United States tend to work with American
experts for whom Brazil, or at least the Third World, is an area of expertise.3
(Some of this is changing as Brazilian Brazilianists enter the U.S. academy in
greater numbers.)4
In any case, Brazilian studies has been a growing eld in North America.
BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association), founded in 1992, today has over a thousand members. At this point in history, we must speak of multiple generations
of Brazilianists, going back to the founders, such as Ruth Landes, Donald Pierson, and Charles Wagley, on up to the hundreds of scholars working today. Some
scholars express discomfort with the label Brazilianist, feeling that the word
distances scholars who in fact identify with a Brazilian perspective. While some
prefer to call themselves abrasileirados (Brazilianized) rather than Brazilianists,
others emphasize a broad disciplinary aliation, such as comparative literature,
where the label Brazilianist seem overly restrictive. Others stress their special
identity or their specic angle of approach, as when Ghanaian Anani Dzidzienyo
calls himself an Afro-Brazilianist.
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A basic nonreciprocity has often marred the intellectual relationship between

Brazil and its non-Brazilian interlocutors.5 According to the regnant division of
intellectual labor, the periphery is not supposed to study the center; rather, it
is supposed to learn from the center how to study itself. While Brazilian students migrated to France and the United States in order to study Brazil or
Brazil-related topics, French and American students did not ock to Brazil to
study their own societies. Yet as a consequence of these asymmetries, the periphery also has less need to study the center; the periphery is already familiar with
the center, which is why the center is called the center. At the same time, the
center/periphery dichotomy can become an impediment in charting the more
multidirectional exchanges that we address here. Despite the generally asymmetrical ows of information, Brazilian intellectual and artistic movements have
often impacted cultural and political life in the United States and France, as
occurred with dependency theory in economics (where future president of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso played a major role), social geography ( Josu
de Castros geography of hunger); education theory (Paulo Freires pedagogy of
the oppressed), radical theater (Augusto Boals theater of the oppressed), cinema (Glauber Rochas aesthetics of hunger), anthropology (Viveiros de Castros
indigenous perspectivism), and music (bossa nova, Tropiclia).
French Theory In and Out of Place

In the background of the discussion of the trilateral exchange of ideas across
France, Brazil, and the United States lie issues of center and periphery. In an essay
titled Post-structuralism and Deconstruction in the Americas, Leyla PerroneMoiss laments the fact that the U.S. academy has popularized French poststructuralist thinkers to the point that Brazilian intellectuals now absorb French ideas
through the United States. The main targets of her critique are cultural studies,
multiculturalism, and the politically correct, all seen as the deformed ospring
of French philosophical parent trends. She correctly points to the strong French
poststructuralist presence within cultural studies, which absorbed Althussers
antihumanist rereading of Marx, Lacans rereading of Freud, Barthess critique
of mythologies, Foucaults genealogical critique of power, Deleuzes immersion in dierence and ux, Derridas critique of logocentrism, Lyotards end of
metanarratives, Cixouss defense of criture fminine, and so forth. (She leaves out
Lefebvre, Certeau, and Bourdieu, but that is not germane here.)6
Perrone-Moiss contrasts what she calls the unquestionably progressive
political causes defended by cultural studies with what she sees as its reductive
method of reading. For her, French Theory has been dragooned into the service
of the politically correct, at great cost to literary and philosophical studies. In
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the barren soil of the U.S. academy, fertile French ideational seeds could only
produce strange and grotesque hybrids. Our echo here of the language of 18thcentury European naturalists is quite deliberate, for Perrone-Moiss inadvertently relays and updates the European naturalists ideas about the Americas in
general as a place of putrefaction and decay, where dogs dont bark and plants
dont grow. In her rejection of American cultural studies, Perrone-Moiss draws
on the same naturalist trope of infantilization that disqualied the Americas
generally as culturally young and undeveloped. This perennial trope of New
World youth underlies the following passage: The most caricatural forms of cultural studies occur in countries of recent culture, lacking in a strong philosophical tradition and in the specic formation of diverse disciplines that such studies
demand. In the Americas, there is a tendency to deconstruct what has not yet
been constructed.7 Here Perrone-Moiss reproduces the venerable contrast of
old Europe and the young Americas, which have to catch up with a Europe
that is both young in being at the cutting-edge of progressive thought and creativity yet also old in its philosophical maturity. That some of the nation-states
of the Americas are technically older than some nation-states in Europe, and
that Europes progress culminated in World War II and the Holocaust, certainly
casts doubt on any special claim to maturity, just as the imperialistic practices
of the United States cast doubt on exceptionalist claims of youthful innocence.
In any case, the Americas generally are not young but palimpsestically old, in
that they inherit, by their very composition as nations, the millennial traditions
of indigenous America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. What Melville wrote in Redburn applies to the Americas generally: We are the heirs of all time, and with all
nations we divide our inheritance. On this Western Hemisphere all tribes and
people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future that shall see
all the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearth-stone in Eden.
... The seed is sown, and the harvest must come.8
For Perrone-Moiss, North Americans impoverished Derridas thought by
turning deconstruction into a slogan. Deconstruction became a prestigious
label within American universities, she speculates, because Americans were
amazed at the vast philosophical and literate culture of Derrida, something not
so frequent in the United States.9 The observation mistakenly implies that Derridas vast erudition is common in Francewhen it is his exceptional erudition
that makes him a matreand that such erudition is unknown in American
(and Brazilian) universities. Derrida himself, ironically, saw the United States
as an especially favorable terrain for the reception of his ideas, famously remarking that America is deconstruction. In defending the philosopher of dierence from his supposed vulgarizers, Perrone-Moiss denies the inevitability of
dierence when it comes to the transtextual extrapolations of Derridas ideas
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into other idioms and locations, where they inevitably assume a local accent and
coloration.
Behind Perrone-Moisss polemical claims, one glimpses again the contours of
the unproductive Latin/Anglo-Saxon binary:
Some among us are faithfully adopting approaches which have to do with the
Anglo-Saxon world, without taking into consideration the dierences from our
Latin American histories and cultures. ... Multiculturalism, which has been
criticized within the United States itself, favors the maintenance of separate
ghettoes. ... People speak of a Latin American postcolonialism. But Anglo-Saxon
postcolonialism refers only to the use of English by recently decolonized writers,
while our postcolonialism is already two centuries old, and our appropriation of
metropolitan languages goes back a long way, as it does in the United States. Who
would ever treat North American literature as postcolonial? 10
On one level, Perrone-Moiss is right: some forms of postcolonial writing, as we

ourselves have argued, have indeed been Anglocentric, downplaying the innovative Latin American discussions of hybridity, syncretism, and colony-metropole
relations, along with the indigenous critique of coloniality/modernity. But the
term Anglo-Saxon ethnicizes the political and essentializes the antiessentialist.
The contradiction becomes agrant in the last two sentences, where she notes
that both the United States and Brazil appropriated metropolitan languages
but then ridicules the idea that North American literature could also be called
postcolonial. But in fact all of the Americas are postcolonial in the sense of
having achieved independence from European colonialism, even if Britain and
the United States exercised hegemonic power in Latin America. But either all
the colonial-settler states are postcolonial or none of them are. More precisely,
they all form a palimpsestic mlange of temporalities and chronotopes, mingling
the colonial (in relation to indigenous peoples), the postcolonial (in the sense of
postindependence), the neocolonial (in the political economy of North-South
domination), and the paracolonial (in that colonialism does not explain everything). The more crucial issue is the discrepant manner in which the diverse
nations, and diverse groups within nations, live this same postcolonial moment.
Perrone-Moiss wraps her critique in the mantle of anticolonialism: Brazil, in
adopting North American proposals, celebrates the end of our cultural colonialism in relation to France, without noticing that at the origin of these proposals,
are French theorists. The only dierence, for us, is that in the past we sought
theoretical inspiration within the French matrix, and now we do it through the
United States.11 This highly ambivalent critique seems almost to exhort Brazilians to imitate the French themselves, rather than imitate the imitators, that
is, the Americans. Perrone-Moiss views the post- movements as mere epiphenomena of French Theory, when the more germane issue is not delity
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to a European original but rather the fascinating indelities, the translational

twists and turns and transformations of the theories. The more productive question would have to do with the ways that Jameson politicizes Greimas or Spivak
subalternizes Derrida or Stoller racializes Foucault or Bhabha postcolonializes
Lacan and so forth. In the same vein, the issue is how Brazilian intellectuals and
artists indigenize out-of-place ideas, the ways that Roberto Schwarz indigenizes
Adorno, that Glauber Rocha Africanizes Brecht, that Haroldo de Campos Brazilianizes Faust, that Ismail Xavier national-allegorizes Walter Benjamin, that
Srgio Costa samples Stuart Hall, and that Jess Souza peripheralizes Bourdieu.
Or, to move to another sphere, it is how rappers such as Racionais MCs Brazilianize the African American group Public Enemy or Carlinhos Brown Bahianizes James Brown or Gilberto Gil tropicalizes the Beatles.
Perrone-Moiss is hardly alone in pointing to the crucial U.S. role in disseminating French Theory. In French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, &
Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, Franois Cusset oers a
nuanced account of these disseminational processes. He describes the giddy heyday of French Theory, when French authors reached a level of ocial notoriety
and underground inuence in the United States that they never achieved in their
own country.12 In what Cusset calls a perfect chiasm or symmetrically reversed
situation,13 the heights of French Theory in the United States coincided with its
erasure in France itself. At the very same moment that Foucault, Lyotard, and
Derrida were being eclipsed in France, they were becoming ubiquitous names in
the American university. At that time, the French media were promoting the telegenic nouveaux philosophes eager to sweep away leftist, radical, multicultural, and
postcolonial ideas. Yet the same French Theory demonized by the nouveaux philosophes, for Cusset, was becoming a powerful force not only in the U.S. academy
but also even in the most unexpected recesses of the culture, from pop art to the
cyberpunk novel.14
The inuence of French Theory abroad was mediated not only by French
cultural institutions such as the Maison Franaise but also by a gallery of prestigious American universities, notably the golden triangle of Johns Hopkins,
Cornell, and Yale, along with New York University, Columbia, and the University of California, in tandem with journals such as Diacritics, Enclitic, Substance,
Semiotexte, and so forth. Using Bourdieu-style language, Cusset speaks of the
processes of selection, labeling and classication through which American academics fashioned the intellectual trends of the 1980s.15 Through a dpaysement
des ides, French concepts were unmoored from their origins and made to drift
into contact not only with concepts more common in the United States but also
with concepts from other French thinkers. But for Cusset, this unmooring generated political use-value by reinventing French texts that in France had become
275
trapped in their editorial and publishing straitjackets.16 Cusset sees a virtue, then,
in what Bourdieu calls the denationalization of texts. As a result, French Theory,
as what Cusset calls the new transdisciplinary object fashioned by literary scholars from French poststructuralism, penetrated into the interstices of American
intellectual life.17
One of the uses to which the posts were put, in the United States, was to
theorize race, multiculturality, and the postcolonial. Postcolonial studies and cultural studies, in this sense, form transnational amalgams of diverse currents
French, certainly, but also British, African, Native American, Latin American,
South Asian, Caribbean, Middle Eastern, and so forth. That U.S.-based academics, in contrast with the Francophobic U.S. right wing, have embraced these
French thinkers might have been interpreted as an index of a salutary receptiveness to ideas from elsewhere or a sign that American and Brazilian intellectuals
(like intellectuals around the world) all share a French-inected intertext, even
if absorbed, assimilated, and transmogried in discrepant ways in the various
locations. Perrone-Moiss censures only one of the terminals in a broadly global
transtextual process. While invoking poststructuralism in a positive way, she conducts the argument within pre-poststructuralist paradigms. For Derrida, intellectual exchange involves an endless process of dissemination and intertextuality, entailing reaccentuations without origins, where the copy can be as valid
as the original, indeed where it is the copy that produces the prestige and even
the originality of the original. The defense of Derrida against betrayal implies an
abandonment, paradoxically, of his critique of origins.
Allegories of Intrusion
Bourdieu/Wacquants essay On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason also
addresses the intellectual relations between France, the United States and Brazil. A polemic against African American political theorist Michael Hanchards
analysis of black consciousness movements in Brazil in his 1994 book Orpheus
and Power,18 the essay singles out Hanchard as an avatar of the cunning of imperial reason that now enlists people of color to promulgate the Macdonaldization
of thought: Cultural imperialism (American or otherwise) never imposes itself
better than when it is served by progressive intellectuals (or by intellectuals of
colour in the case of racial inequality) who would appear to be above suspicion
of promoting the hegemonic interests of a country against which they wield the
weapons of social criticism.19 In hyperbolic language, Bourdieu/Wacquant portray Hanchard as a pawn of imperialism who injects ethnocentric poison into
the debate about race by imposing a binary North American grid on a Brazilian
society substantially without racism.
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Like many critics of identity politics, the authors are not above using identity to their own ends. Hanchards identity as an Afro-American political scientist forms a key piece in their argument; it cues the Hegelian cunning in the
title that makes Hanchard part of an imperialist ruse. The identity that actually remains above suspicion, meanwhile, is that of the authors whiteness and
Frenchness. Their identity is so far above suspicion that it is not even named as
an identity. While it is true that the U.S. rightist power structure has cunningly
used some rare black conservatives to support neoliberalism and imperialist
interventions and even to attack Armative Action, Hanchard is hardly a black
conservative. Indeed, few social theorists are less susceptible than Hanchard to
the charge against U.S. social thought in general as depoliticized and blind to
class and domination. Written from a densely theoretical/historical perspective,
and informed by the conceptual categories of Marx, Gramsci, Fanon, and other
left theorists, Orpheus and Power is deantly political, class-conscious, and very
much concerned with social domination. Yet for Bourdieu/Wacquant, Hanchard
unilaterally exports the dichotomous American folk concept of race into a exible and open Brazilian society.20
Bourdieu/Wacquant enter into contradiction by denouncing both multiculturalism and American dichotomous thinking on race. The multicultural project, whatever its faults, generally eschewed racially dichotomous thinking in favor
of discourses of cultural mixing and rainbow alliances. Indeed, many analysts discern a kind of Brazilianization of the United States, not only in terms of heightened class dierences and disparities in wealth but also in terms of novel ways
of thinking about the modes of intersection of class, race, and ethnicity, as some
whites become impoverished (like many blacks), as some people of color claim
a multiracial status, and as intermediate groups such as Latinos, Arab Americans, and Asian Americans scramble customary dichotomous schemas. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva predicts a burgeoning Latin Americanization of the
North American spectrum due to a number of factors: (1) changing demographics (population projects predict a minority-majority United States by 2050); (2)
the advent of a kinder and gentler white supremacy; (3) the emergence of a
Latin Americanstyle color-blind racism; (4) the absorption of darker others
by global capitalism; (5) the increase in interracial marriage, slight in black-white
terms but massive in terms of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, only 33
percent of whom marry other Native Americans.21
The Bourdieu/Wacquant charge of a brutal intrusion into a Brazilian society without racism ies in the face of most of the serious research on Brazil, most
authored by Brazilians, over the past half century or more. A gendered language
positions Bourdieu/Wacquant as the protectors of a feminized Brazil violated by
a brutal intruder, in this case a black male American scholar. The essays reduc-
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tionist notions of intercultural exchange break with the more complex drift of
Bourdieus own concept of cultural elds. While Bourdieus work in general discerns the interaction of structure and agency, these essays see only active U.S.white domination and passive Third World victimization. In quasi-conspiratorial
fashion, the authors speak of the symbolic dominion and inuence exercised by
the United States over every kind of scholarly and, especially, semischolarly production, notably through the power of consecration they possess and through the
material and symbolic prots that researchers in the dominated countries reap
from a more or less assumed or ashamed adherence to the model derived from
the United States.22 These one-way formulations recall unproblematized Frankfurt School hypodermic needle cultural theories, whereby the culture industry
injects passive consumers, as well as media imperialism theses that have imperialism penetrating Third World psyches, theses that have been revised even
by their erstwhile proponents such as Ariel Dorfmann and Armand Mattelart.
Bourdieu/Wacquant portray researchers in the dominated countries as either
naive dupes enthralled by imperialist cultural products or as cynical opportunists lusting after material and symbolic prots.23 The denial of agency could not
be more totalizing, a point reinforced by the fact that the bibliography of the
Cunning essay includes no Brazilian scholars. At the same time, ironically, the
bibliography cites favorably ve American experts on Brazil (Charles Wagley,
Anthony Marx, George Reid Andrews, Edward Telles, and Howard Winant),
precisely those whom the theory would normally denounce as imposing their
ethnocentric vision on Brazil!
Although stemming from an anti-imperial logic, the anxiety about African
American ethnic intrusions nds an ironic precedent in the wariness of the
Brazilian military dictatorship (19641985) toward any collaborations between
black Brazilian and black American activists, seen by the regime as a menace to
national security. An ocial questionnaire exhorted censors to be vigilant about
any direct or veiled allusions to the Black Power movement. The juntas censors
even forbade journalists to use the word black in a racial sense.24 All-black musical groups such as Abolio were ordered to integrate. The National Security
state banned as subversive any discussion of racial discrimination, including in
the form of race-related census statistics. According to historian Thomas Skidmore, the forced exile of scholars such as Abdias do Nascimento, Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Octvio Ianni was largely due to their
questioning the nationalist consensus on Brazil as a racial democracy.25
We will not try here to undo all the folded misrepresentations in the second Bourdieu/Wacquant essay. Indeed, Brazilianist John French, in an essay
titled The Missteps of Anti-imperialist Reason, has already written a carefully
calibrated but devastating critique.26 After summarizing their argument fairly,
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French points to the innumerable errors of evaluation in their text: the broad
and undierentiated caricature of American and Brazilian intellectual trends, the
clueless misstatements about the current state of scholarship on race in Brazil,
the misrepresentations of the positions of specic scholars, the agenda-driven
idealization of the Brazilian racial situation, and the concomitantly schematic
oversimplication of the U.S. situation. The authors, French argues, clearly hold
to a double standard when they compare the U.S. versus Brazil. They oer an
excessively harsh and negative depiction of the racial situation in the U.S. and are
intolerant of its national mythology; by contrast, they oer an excessively tolerant and positive depiction of the racial situation in Brazil while embracing its
national mythology without criticism.27 French then speculates as to why the two
French sociologists would be so unforgiving of U.S. illusions yet so accommodating of Brazilian ones.28 He nds a clue in a footnote about what the authors
call a scientically scandalous book: Wieviorkas Racist France. How long will it
be, Bourdieu/Wacquant ask in a tone of ridicule, before we get a book entitled
Racist Brazil patterned after the scientically scandalous Racist France of a French
sociologist more attentive to the expectations of the eld of journalism than to
the complexities of social reality?29
Apart from the fact that Bourdieu/Wacquant misrepresent Wieviorkas rich
and varied work much as they caricature Hanchards work, one is bewildered by
such an apoplectic reaction to the idea of a French book about French racism or a
Brazilian book about Brazilian racism. The authors reaction reects a surprising
amnesia concerning French and Francophone intellectual history. Csaire did not
require a brutal ethnocentric intrusion to nd France racist when he wrote Discourse on Colonialism, nor did Fanon when he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, nor
did Memmi when he wrote Portrait of the Colonized and Dominated Man. In fact,
all of these authors found both France and the United States racist. John French
speculates that the two authors might be making opportunistic use of Brazil in
order to attack intellectuals ... who might undermine their cherished sense of
Frenchness. If racism is by denition something that only North Americans do,
French adds, then neither France nor Brazil can be called racist.30
A white narcissism of national distinction thus leads some analysts to defend
specic Black Atlantic societies as somehow exempt from racism, despite a
shared history of conquest, colonialism, and slavery. A covertly national pathos,
in this case, compromises the authors methodology and lures them away from
their own theoretical axioms. The view purveyed in Frenchs essay and throughout our own text, in contrast, is of a historical and social continuum of racist
ideologies and practices extending around the postcolonial Atlantic. In this context, books critical of Racist America, Racist France, and Racist Brazil hardly
seem scandalous; rather, they seem inevitable, even salutary; the scandal would
279
be if such books did not exist. The rendering innocent of France and Brazil only
occurs, revealingly, in the context of cross-national comparisons. The comparative framework itself seems to trigger what might be called a family protection
or dirty laundry syndrome, analogous to the ways that quarreling families suddenly unite in the face of outside criticism.
The facile dismissal of the possibility of a book about Racist Brazil, furthermore, bespeaks a lack of engagement with the history of scholarship in Brazil.
As we have seen with Ali Kamel, the authors write as if criticisms of Brazilian
racism come exclusively from North Americans. Yet countless Brazilian books
bear titles that, if they do not say precisely racist Brazil, carry a similar charge. A
quick look through our bookshelves garners the following titles (translated from
Portuguese): Racism and Anti-racism in Brazil (1999), Racism in Brazil (2002),
The Genocide of Brazilian Blacks (1978), and Racism Explained to My Children
(2007). The title of a 2007 Brazilian bookRacism: The Truth Hurts. Face It
might be addressed to the racism deniersof Brazil (and of the world generally).
Even the mainstream newspaper Folha de So Paulo recognized a generalized
Brazilian racism in a 1995 special investigative report entitled Cordial Racism, in
a verbal play on historian Srgio Buarque de Holandas celebrated description of
the Brazilian as cordial man. In any case, the dialogue between black Brazilians
and African Americans and the critique of racism in Brazil did not begin with
Hanchard. Whatever legitimate criticisms might be made of Hanchards book
and some Brazilians have criticized it for privileging the African American Civil
Rights model of activism as norm and for a certain smugness in its implication
that Brazilian blacks are victims of false consciousnessthe view of Hanchard as
a race-obsessed imperialist bringing ethnocentric poison into a paradisal Brazil
is clearly o the mark.
Bourdieu/Wacquants tacitly idyllic portrait of Brazil is out of step with
decades of critical scholarship. As we have seen, benign Freyrean myths of racial
democracy had been deconstructed by Abdias do Nascimento and Guerreiro
Ramos already in the 1940s and by the So Paulo school (Florestan Fernandes,
Octvio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso) in the 1950s.31 Bourdieu/Wacquant
reverse the historical movement of scholarship; rather than cite the later critical
work to discredit the earlier celebratory work, they draw on the idealizing ctions
of the earlier work to discredit the more disenchanted conclusions of the later
generations. The two authors belatedly enter a vast intertextual eld whose contours they only dimly discern. While we have stressed the linked yet dierentiated analogies between all the variegated racisms of the Atlantic, Bourdieu/ Wacquant draw a line of absolute dierence between Brazil and the United States
and between France and the United States, denying similarities, parallelisms,
continuities, and relationalities.
280
On one level, Bourdieu/Wacquant are not completely wrong to note that racial
relations are less tense and hostile in Brazil, a trait noted by countless observers. A number of features of Brazilian social life do indeed lend a more humane
face to what is in structural terms a racially and economically hierarchical society.
Many factors play a role in this relative lack of tension: a history that has favored
conciliation over confrontation, a miscegenation that undercuts racial binarism,
and the elaborately choreographed pas de deux between a top-down populism
that plays down tensions and a bottom-up civility that slyly and ambivalently
collaborates.32 Many elements in Brazilian popular culturethe role playing of
Carnival and the open-ended identications of Candomblfavor an extraordinary suppleness of code-switching and jogo de cintura (social adaptability). James
Holston speaks of ideologies of inclusion that ... give personal relations of gender, racial, and economic dierence a gloss of complicit accommodation, a sense
of intimacy that obscures but maintains fundamental inequalities ... [produced
through] the (untranslatable) artices of jeitinho, malicia, malandragem, jinga,
jogo de cintura, and mineirice.33 Despite the diminished racial tension, the material inequalities between the white elite and racialized subalterns have historically
been greater than in the United States. Yet the which is worse? question is still
the wrong question. More precisely, it is not wrong to point to better or worse situations; it is wrong to use a worse situation elsewhere to deny injustice at home.
The two societies oer distinct modalities of white- and Euro-domination, one
rooted in segregationist racism in a very rich country, the other in assimilationist
paternalism in a relatively poor country, but with regional variations and many
mixed forms in both sites. At this point in history, the various racial formations
around the Black Atlantic conjoin social segregation, assimilation, and economic
disempowerment. Ultimately, the point is to discern the relative coecient of
each element in the general mix and, more important, to discern what activists/
scholars can learn from one another in terms of analyses and solutions.
Bourdieu/Wacquant purvey the impression that the United States is essentially racist, while Brazil is only conjuncturally oppressive, constrained by imperialism and corrupted by American inuence. Notice the following formulation:
Carried out by Americans and Brazilians trained in the United States, most of
the recent research on racial inequality in Brazil strives to prove that, contrary to
the image that Brazilians have of their own nation, the country of the three sad
races ... is no less racist than others.34 This passage raises a number of questions. First, why would critical intellectuals normally skeptical about nationalist doxa be so respectful of the image that a nation has of itself ? Second, the
locational determinism of the phrase Americans and Brazilians trained in the
United States falsely conveys the image of a monolithic group of researchers
advancing a single political position. Third, the authors speak as if Brazilians
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have a single image of their own nation, when in fact Brazil shelters a lively
debate about competing images of the various Brasis (Brazils, in the plural).
Fourth, the authors speak as if Brazils self-image were static and transhistorical, when in fact it is in perpetual mutation. In sum, the formulation embeds a
simplistic dichotomy between the vast totality of normal Brazilians holding a
positive image of their country, on the one hand, and two outlier microfactions,
on the other, that is, American scholars and Brazilians trained in the United
States. All potential critics of the Brazilian racial formation are exiled, as it were,
to join the American side.
In trying to discredit Hanchard, Bourdieu/Wacquant resuscitate myths long
dismantled by critical Brazilian scholars, even if these myths retain some residual
purchase in the hegemonic discourse. In defending Brazil, and implicitly France,
against potential charges of racism, Bourdieu/Wacquant inadvertently revisit the
old interimperial rivalries and the Anglo/Latin dichotomy. And while it would
be simplistic to say that all societies are racist or even that any single society
is simply and essentially and only racist, we can arm, more prudently, that all
those countries that participated, whether actively or passively, in colonialism and
slavery are likely to exhibit not only the institutional traces of these systems of
oppression but also the ongoing struggles against them.35
Some of the hostility to race-based scholarship derives, it would seem, from a
historically problematic assumption that such work is allied to hegemonic power
in the United States itself. It is in this context that Bourdieu/Wacquant criticize
the role of U.S.-based foundations in supporting race-related research in Brazil:
One would obviously need to invoke here also the driving role played by the major
American philanthropic and research foundations in the diusion of the U.S.
racial doxa within the Brazilian academic eld at the level of both representations
and practices. Thus, the Rockefeller Foundation and similar organizations fund
a programme on Race and Ethnicity at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
as well as the Centre for Afro-Asiatic Studies of the Candido Mendes University
(and its journal Estudos Afro-Asiticos) so as to encourage exchanges of researchers and students. But the intellectual current ows in one direction only. And, as a
condition for its aid, the Rockefeller Foundation requires that research teams meet
U.S. criteria of armative action, which poses insuperable problems since, as we
have seen, the application of the white/black dichotomy in Brazilian society is, to
say the least, hazardous.36
While right to critique the unidirectionality of exchange, Bourdieu/Wacquant

also seem to project their own assumptions about a state-dependent and centralized French cultural eld onto very dierent contexts. In France, a highly centralized system is seen as incarnating the general will, and both left and right have
tried to harness the power and prestige of culture for political ends. In the United
282
States, in contrast, foundations step into the vacuum left by a neoliberal system
that minimizes government support for the arts and for education.
In political terms, American foundations have had a long and often shady history. In the realm of economics, the Ford Foundation played a very pernicious
role in funding the University of Chicagos economics program, a hotbed of neoliberal thinking led by Milton Friedman. Ford came to be associated with the
shock-doctrine agenda of the neoliberal Chicago Boys in Chile and the Berkeley Maa in Indonesia. In the mid-1970s, however, Ford did an about-face and
became a leading funder of human rights activism. After severing its links to the
Ford Motor Corporation in 1974, the Ford Foundation helped persuade the U.S.
Congress to cut o military support to Argentina and Chile. As Naomi Klein
points out, it was as if Ford were doing penance for its earlier sins: After the left
in those countries had been obliterated by regimes that Ford had helped shape,
it was none other than Ford that funded a new generation of crusading lawyers
dedicated to freeing the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners being held
by those same regimes.37
Foundations play a highly contested role both in the United States itself and
in the Global South, at times spreading neoliberal doctrine and at times compensating for the depredations of transnational capitalism. Although the Ford
Foundation developed initiatives to promote social justice and to combat racism
though legal, mediatic, judicial, and research activities,38 it would nonetheless be
dicult to discern any theoretical or political uniformity in the foundation-supported research on race, much less any orthodoxy imposed by U.S. institutions
and scholars. Nor is it clear (1) that Armative Action is premised on the white/
black dichotomy or (2) that foundations are dedicated to spreading U.S. racial
doxa. In the end, the point is not to unequivocally defend or defame foundationsponsored work but only to highlight the contradictions for leftist academics
working in diverse locations who try to produce adversary scholarship partially
funded by foundations or, for that matter, governments. A truly democratic society would not depend on the whims of philanthropic foundations to provide private Band-Aid solutions for deeply rooted public social problems. The challenge
is to avoid reductionism: to recognize the weight, inertia, and shaping power of
governmentality and to acknowledge the ways that myriad institutions and interests work over social projects, but without falling into a vulgar institutionalism,
whereby individuals, artists, and academics are seen as completely determined
and ideologically reducible to their institutional locations and aliations.
In the Bourdieu/Wacquant view, ideology spreads like the pods in Invasion of
the Body Snatchers. Hanchard passively absorbs U.S.-style dichotomous thinking
on race (even though, as an African American, he is himself its victim) and then
passes it on to equally passive Brazilian intellectuals whose weak immune sys-
283
tems leave them prey to the contagion. Brazilians studying in the United States,
equally powerless to resist, catch the virus and bring it back to Brazil. Rather
than an out-of-place idea, race-inected analysis is envisioned as an out-ofplace ideological virus. Within the viral view, entire countries such as Great Britainin an echo of perennial Anglo-Saxon/Latin quarrelsbecome passeurs for
imperialism. Thus, a footnote to the essay posits England as structurally predisposed to act as the Trojan horse by which notions of American scholarly common sense penetrate the European intellectual eld.39 This reductionist view,
expressed again in a masculinist language of penetration, forms the cultural
correlative to the geopolitical analysis that sees Britain as facilitating the inltration of neoliberal Anglo-American ideology into the European Union. Our problem is not with the critique of neoliberal ideology or even with the role of specic
nation-states but rather with the conation between critical intellectuals and
their governments. To put it crudely, although Tony Blair may have been Bushs
poodle, Stuart Hall was not. Nor was Edward Said the servant of the U.S. State
Department, nor is Michael Hanchard the academic equivalent of Colin Powell.
Bourdieu/Wacquants self-narration as the saviors of a feminized Brazil is a little
too reminiscent of a neocolonial rescue narrative, especially since the essay does
not engage with Brazilian intellectuals at all. Progressive Brazilian intellectuals
deserve allies and interlocutors, not saviors, of any nationality.
Cultural Studies and Critical Utopias

In the same Cunning of Imperial Reason essay, Bourdieu/Wacquant also
express disdain for cultural studies:
Thus it is that decisions of pure book marketing orient research and university
teaching in the direction of homogenization and submission to fashions coming
from America, when they do not fabricate wholesale disciplines such as Cultural
Studies, this mongrel domain, born in England in the 1970s, which owes its
international dissemination (which is the whole of its existence) to a successful
publishing policy.40
Despite this acerbic dismissal of a complex eld, it is precisely cultural studies

and more broadly multicultural, postcolonial, and transnational studiesthat
is methodologically equipped to deal with contemporary cultural syncretism in
the Red, Black, and White Atlantic. While Bourdieu, in books such as Distinction, performed incisive critiques of social, educational, and cultural privilege,
the coauthored polemical essays undermine possible cross-border alliances with
those elsewhere who challenge elitist/racist conceptualizations of culture. In
condemning cultural studies en bloc, the two authors, to pick up on Wacquants
formulation in another context, judge [cultural studies] through the very cate-
284
gories of thought that [those elds] aim at transcending.41 Their mockery of a

mongrel domain, for example, forgets the colonialist tint of the mongrel trope
in racist thinkers such as Gobineau, for whom hybridity and miscegenation signaled degeneracy. The metaphor forms part of a set of binary pairsmongrel
versus pedigree, pure versus impurehistorically deployed to reinforce elitist
hierarchies. By reinstating the high/low hierarchy that cultural studies aims to
transcend, the metaphor undercuts Bourdieus own critique of the elitism of the
heirs in education.
Bourdieu/Wacquants casual dismissal of a multifaceted project called cultural studies exemplies vulgar institutionalism at its most egregious. All
the work of the Birmingham School and its innumerable heirs is portrayed as
nothing but the eect of a marketing gimmick. Bourdieus own work on sport,
museumgoing, and the media, in a further ironic wrinkle, might elsewhere qualify
as cultural studies. Indeed, Bourdieu is an oft-cited gure within cultural studies, the transdisciplinary formation that mingled, as Bourdieus own work did,
the methods of the social sciences and the humanities. Even though the authors
deride French cultural studies, some of that elds practitioners, such as MariePierre Le Hir, speak of the longstanding historical ties between the Birmingham
Center and the Bourdieu group and posit Bourdieus reexive sociology as a
methodological model.42
Bourdieu/Wacquant mockingly predict the kind of work that European
cultural studies is already doing: And one may forecast that, by virtue of the
principle of ethnicoeditorial parthenogenesis in fashion today, we shall soon
nd in bookstores a handbook of French-Arab Cultural Studies to match its
cross-channel cousin, Black British Cultural Studies, which appeared in 1997 (but
bets remain open as to whether Routledge will dare German-Turkish Cultural
Studies).43 One is struck at the tone of derision toward even the hypothesis of
scholarship addressing racialized minorities in Europe. The underlying assumption, perhaps, is that minorities are by denition particular and not universal
and, moreover, might be an American invention alien to Europe, and especially
to France. But why not endorse, rather than ridicule, the prospect of FrenchArab cultural studies and German-Turkish cultural studies? Given ethnic tensions in present-day France, it would seem that French-Arab cultural studies are
exactly what the doctor ordered. And given recurrent waves of Islamophobia in
Germany, what could be more vital than German-Turkish studies? Nor are European minority scholars merely mimic men imitating American doxa; they are
intellectuals trying to formulate their own ambiguous social status within a situation of racialized minoritization.
French intellectuals such as Bourdieu/Wacquant have not yet assimilated
the relevance of (multi)cultural and postcolonial studies to an irreversibly plural-
285
ized European culture. As Franois Cusset put it (prior to the recent eorescence of postcolonial studies in France),
Among the major American intellectual currents of the last quarter century, virtually none have been received to any signicant degree in France, neither analytic
philosophy, nor the convergences of pragmatism and Continental philosophy,
nor radical multiculturalism, nor deconstructionist readings of literature, nor
postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, nor even the new theories of gender
identitydespite a timid, recent emergence, slowly but surely, of the queer question. Indeed, France changes only slowly, or under duress.44
Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro makes a cognate point about

the reluctance of French intellectuals to pick up on the more radical implications
of poststructuralism, underlining the paradox that the Anglophone academy has
been more open to Continental philosophy than French anthropology itself. The
principal source of the rapprochement between philosophy and anthropology, he
adds, has taken place in English-speaking countries (not without provoking violent reactions on the part of the local [French] academic cardinals).45
The lack of engagement with these transnational currents has resulted in a
gap between academic scholarship and the irrevocably hybrid cultural life of contemporary France. Little of the cultural syncretisms typical not only of Parisian
streets but also of popular French culture makes its way into the theorizations by
French matres penser. In Bourdieus case, this oversight was perhaps correlated
with the assumption that the hard social sciences need not deal with soft popular culture or perhaps linked to the Frankfurt School equation of mass culture
with false consciousness. In many countries, cultural studies names the attempt
to close the gap between popular culture and academic theory, as well as between
the social sciences and the humanities. The failure of cultural studies to take hold
in the French academy is especially ironic in that French thinkers such as Henri
Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and Michel de Certeau, along with Csaire, Fanon, and
even Sartre and Beauvoir, were all precursors of cultural studies. Here again we
nd the same paradox we encountered earlier with postcolonial studies, where a
movement that is partially the intellectual ospring of French thought has been
shunned, at least until recently, by the metropolitan parents.46
Bourdieu/Wacquants curt dismissal of British cultural studies and American multiculturalismtwo complex projects falsely equated with single national
originsreveals a kind of specular repulsion. The two authors seem to be lashing
out at alter egos, at cultural theorists who, apart from their national location, in
some ways look like them. They denounce British cultural studies, even though
Stuart Halls role and stature in Britain as an incisive critic of dominant media
and elitist institutions parallels that of Bourdieu in France. Anglo-American
radical pedagogy aims to undermine entrenched privilege in the school system,
286
much as Bourdieus work purports to do in France. It is this ailing out at phantasmatic doubles that raises warning ags about a hidden national and perhaps
disciplinary narcissism at work.
As a post-Marxist eld, cultural studies has questioned the base/superstructure model and detected resistance in sites previously dismissed as the loci
of alienation and false consciousness. Although cultural studies has at times
inated, in a kind of Madonna syndrome, the quantum of resistance in mass culture, it has also detected utopian moments that go beyond prescriptive blueprints
for social change. It has shown us that contemporary political struggle necessarily
passes through popular culture. An encounter between Bourdieu and German
writer Gnter Grass, lmed by the television channel Arte (December 5, 1999),
around the time of Bourdieu/Wacquants two polemical essays, is very revealing
in terms of contrasting conceptualizations of culture. Grass praises Bourdieus
project in La Misre du Monde as a critique of social oppression but notes a missing element: humor. Bourdieu responds that suering is not a laughing matter,
to which Grass responds that works such as Voltaires Candide show that satire
and parody can expose frightful social conditions. Intellectuals, he adds, must
describe suering but also insist on the capacity of people to resist, including
through humor. Bourdieu responds, Globalization does not inspire laughter;
our era is not amusing. Grass responds that he is not saying that globalization
is funny but only that the infernal laughter triggered by art can also be an indispensable arm in social struggle.
We agree with Grass that unamusing eras, especially, need the subversive tonic
of laughter. For Brecht, a sense of humor was indispensable in comprehending
dialectical materialism, and in this sense, Bourdieus dismissal of humor as a
form of social agency is undialectical. It reects what literary critics would call
a genre mistake or a mimetic fallacy in that it suggests that suering-laden
erasand what era has not been suering-laden?cannot be treated in comic or
satirical genres. Only science, in the austerely superegoish Bourdieu conception,
can accurately register, analyze, and combat social oppression. French media sociologist ric Maigret sees in the Grass-Bourdieu exchange an opposition between
two visions: one (Bourdieus) associates the mass of people with suering, symbolic passivity, and dispossession while positing the intellectual as the designated
spokesperson for the inexpressive masses; the other (Grasss) discerns both suffering and popular resistance.47 Although Bourdieu gives lip service to agency,
he ultimately portrays common people (and Brazilian intellectuals) as cultural
dupes beset by symbolic privation. His project, in this sense, could benet from
a more dialogical and nonnalizing vision of culture and agency.
Bourdieus work, through all its various momentsfrom the anthropological
work in Algeria, through the Marx-, Weber-, and Durkheim-inected sociology
287
of education, to the work on symbolic violence in art and consumption, on to

the polemical writings on televisionconveys a thoroughgoing skepticism about
popular culture. Bourdieu argues in On Television that television hinders serious
thought since it is produced under the sign of simultaneity and velocity of direct
transmission.48 Such a view fails to explain why totalitarian regimes invariably
try to eliminate live television and direct transmission. (One wonders what Bourdieu would have made of the role of social media in the Twitter revolutions in
the Middle East, where simultaneity and velocity were crucial to revolutionary
activism.) Within what Arlindo Machado calls Bourdieus Platonic and aristocratic conception, the mass media signify the end of free thought and intelligence
thanks to the reign of spectacularization and mercantilization.49 The only real
solution, for Bourdieu, lies in the distinction of the scientic expert.
Thus, although Bourdieu tries to mark o his dierence from the elitist determinism of the Frankfurt School, he ends up by rearming the Adornonian
equation of popular alienation and the dominant cultural industries. As Maigret
puts it,
Reading Bourdieus writings can at rst have a liberatory eect, engender a feeling
of revolt, because they unveil the unknown corridors of privilege, the daily fabrication of power. But then they provoke a comedown when they reveal a metaphysical conception of closure within the social game, justied or rationalized through
the Spinozist philosophy: awareness of determinism helps one become free. For
most people, however, who lack access to this form of knowledge, there is no solution to the problem of symbolic violence since those who experience it fail to make
sense out of their world and those who perpetrate it are also its victims.50
Thus, within Bourdieu-style analysis, everyone is trapped within a cruel and

unequal social game, except those enjoying access to the truths of social science,
who escape the shipwreck of capitalist modernity to tell the story of the disaster.
Bourdieu displays no faith in what Maigret calls the individual negotiation of
meaning, or the collective management of social stakeholding.51 For Bourdieu,
people are doubly dominated, rst by social and economic domination itself and
then by their own naive belief in the legitimacy of this domination. But without
a theory of popular agency, the dominated possess neither a valid culture nor a
capacity to react. Bourdieu thus falls back into what Maigret calls an astonishingly conservative discourse inherent in the old bourgeois rhetoric of culture.52
For conservatives, social life is a competition for status and power, wherein
capitalism is perfectly matched to the actually existing human beings whose
nature makes them winners or losers in that combat. Like the conservatives,
Bourdieus work also gures social life, including academic life, as a perpetual
struggle for status, distinction, and autonomy via the accumulation of economic,
academic, social, and symbolic power, even if his goaland this dierence is
288
crucialwas to rearrange that system to end social oppression. In Demand the

Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, Tom Moylan distinguishes between scientistic blueprint utopias, which form part of a totalizing
metanarrative of progress, and critical utopias, which seek seditious expression
of social change carried on in a permanently open process of envisioning what is
not yet.53 Critical utopias, in this view, are generated by the concrete dissatisfactions of everyday life under capitalism and aim at reimagining the possible, while
retaining awareness of the structural obstacles that make utopias dicult to realize. It is hard to nd in Bourdieu a critical utopia consonant with that found
not only in Moylan but also in Marx (the sigh of the oppressed creature) and
in such writers as Bakhtin, Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, Paul
Gilroy, and many others. In the Bourdieuvian dialectic of structure and agency,
the second term is downplayed, with little but science and a redemptive reexivity as consolation.
Although Bourdieu expresses a quasi-Bakhtinian enthusiasm, in Distinction,
for the satires and carnivalesque parodies that satisfy the taste for and sense of
revelry, the plain speaking and hearty laughter which liberate by setting the social
world head over heels, overturning conventions and priorities,54 he ultimately
attens Bakhtins carnival by suggesting in the Postscript that for Bakhtin the
popular imagination can only invert the relationship which is the basis of the
aesthetic sociodicy (emphasis ours).55 If Bakhtin errs on the side of euphoric
utopianism, Bourdieu errs on the side of bleak dystopianism. The left needs both
what Ernst Bloch calls Marxisms cold currentthe disabused analysis of economic stratication and social alienationand its warm current (the intoxicating glimpses of collective freedom).56 Which is why the left needs the warm current of Bakhtin and Blochnot to replace Bourdieu but to complement the cold
current of his thought.
Triangular Readings
After the publication of two special issues of the journal Theory and Culture
and one special issue of Black Renaissance Noire, the two Bourdieu/Wacquant
essays are by now among the most thoroughly dissected and rebutted essays in
recent intellectual history, including within Brazil, where a special issue of Estudos Afro-Asiticos ( JanuaryApril 2000) was dedicated to the Michael Hanchard
polemic.57 Our spiraling focus here is on Brazilian intellectuals reading back to
French intellectuals reading an African American reading Brazil.
The best-received aspect of the Cunning of Imperial Reason essay in Brazil was its denunciation of imperialism; Brazilian intellectuals were happy to see
prestigious French intellectuals validate a longstanding Brazilian anti-imperial
289
critique. But the Brazilian participants in the Estudos Afro-Asiticos issue express
surprise at seeing themselves portrayed as sheeplike followers of U.S. intellectual fashions, without acknowledgment of the long line of Brazilian historians,
anthropologists, sociologists, activists, and cultural critics who have addressed
race in Brazil. The French sociologists, for these Brazilian scholars, were inattentive both to the variety of the actual work and to the complexity of U.S.-Brazilian
scholarly relations. For Bourdieu/Wacquant, American scholars of Brazil impose
an alien bipolar American prism on their Brazilian followers, yet ironically they
only cite scholarship by North Americans, exactly those who according to their
theory would favor an American bipolar point of view. But we would argue that
there is no single American (or Brazilian or French) point of view on race but
only an unending battle over rival analyses of race, which explains why some
U.S. analysts prefer Brazilian approaches to race and why some black Brazilians
admire the African American model of activism.
Like other contributors, Joclio Teles dos Santos scolds Bourdieu/Wacquant
for speaking as if Brazilian intellectuals exercise no agency in the debate, while
boomeranging Bourdieus own terminology against his argument: [Brazilian
intellectuals] are not mere tabula rasa victims of the cunning of imperial reason
and its hegemonic racial model. A serious in-depth reading of the existing bibliographysomething one expects from serious intellectualswould reveal all
the resignications one nds in the struggle over this eld of power.58 Santoss
usage of resignication conjures up a paradigmatic strategy whereby Brazilian
intellectuals have indigenized and transformed ideas from elsewhere. Brazilian
intellectual life, as Osmundo de Arajo Pinho and ngela Figueiredo argue, has
always been impacted by foreign models, especially French and North American
ones. 59 While censuring one (North American) strand of inuence, the Bourdieu/Wacquant account normalizes (while rendering invisible) the multicentury
European, and especially French, inuence in Brazil. The price of internal colonization, for Pinho and Figueiredo, was the permanent malaise of the thinking and
administrative stratum facing a nation composed of what to them were aliens,
virtual foreigners in the country, resulting in elitist admonitions against African
barbarism or the illiteracy of the masses.60 Entire disciplines, such as sociology,
were imported whole cloth from abroad. Sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos
had spoken of the canned character of the social sciences in Brazil, where forms
of anthropology were literally transplanted from European countries or from
the United States, constituting little more than a rationalization or a distraction
from colonial exploitation.61 It was not Hanchard, therefore, who rst introduced alien ideas into the national intellectual panorama. Bourdieu/Wacquant
seem seduced, as Pinho and Figueiredo put it, by a vision of Brazil and its racial
relations that for many of us seems completely unacceptable.62
290
Michael Hanchard, responding to his critics, stresses the transnational character of Afro-diasporic movements as drawing inspiration from a wide variety
of Black Atlantic sources: the Haitian Revolution, Palmares and the quilombos,
the Frente Negra, the Harlem Renaissance, the Francophone Ngritude poets,
African decolonization, and the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements.
A nationalist-essentialist approach, for Hanchard, blinds us to the diasporic
conditions that complicate supercial distinctions between imperialist and nonimperialist nation-states. The Bourdieu/Wacquant analysis leaves little room
for ideological or political divisions within countries or points of convergence
across national borders. The authors do not imagine the possibility of internal
antistate movements, as exemplied by the black American activists who resisted
both state-mandated social apartheid within the country and the imperialism
carried out beyond its borders. Both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X
condemned racism at home and imperialism abroad; indeed, they insisted on
the intimate connection between the two phenomena. Bourdieu/Wacquant
simplistically equate black American transnationalism with the foreign policy
of the United States, apparently viewing multinational corporations, the U.S.
government, liberal foundations, and the countrys dominated populations as
virtually interchangeable. Their formulations, for Hanchard, assume stable and
internally coherent self-contained national units, presided over by a state whose
policies determine the national ideological disposition of all citizens. American
intellectuals and activists simply encode the dominant imperial DNA of the
United States, a view as absurd, Hanchard suggests, as claiming that Gobineau,
Georges Bataille, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Chirac, and Henri Lefebvre all instantiate a French mode of thinking. If nation-state aliations determine ideology,
Hanchard wonders, how did Bourdieu and Wacquant themselves escape from
the prison-house of ideological domination?
Sociologist Srgio Costa, meanwhile, questions the pertinence of imperialism to describe relations between intellectuals from the Global North and the
Global South, since all societies feature a postnational aspect that imperialism,
with its connotation of unilateral domination, fails to capture. The debate, Costa
points out, has at times degenerated into a ght between the supposed defenders
of racial democracy and those who call attention to racialized oppression. This
discursive reduction, Costa writes, transforms the academic debate into a (false)
moral quarrel around the monopoly on the protection of the victims of social
oppression, whether it is a matter of Brazilian racism or of American imperialism, and is useless in terms of buttressing the theoretical reection about existing
social problems and the political means for solving them.63 Costa thus points to
the tensions within and between the competing national vanities of white elites,
when the goal, in his view, should not be to exalt any single country as model
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but rather to forge the analytical tools, and the political and institutional mechanisms, needed to fashion societies where epidermic appearances no longer wield
the same horric power that they have historically exercised.
In sum, the reception of the Bourdieu/Wacquant essay in Brazil points to a
general problem in narrating intellectual exchange according to a unilateral cultural imperialism thesis. Historically, Brazilian intellectuals have not only exercised
agency in these transnational exchanges; they have also been in the vanguard of
those theorizing the asymmetries of cultural production and dissemination. The
appropriation of French ideas by the Brazilian modernists, for example, was selective rather than servile. Some French ideas were tasted and then spit out, while others were chewed, transformed, and digested so as to nourish Brazilian multiculture.
More than a provocative trope, anthropophagy was a theory of cultural exchange.
Brazilian literary theory and literary history have developed innovative theories of
dependency, translation, and transtextuality as seen within the context of postcolonial domination. For literary critic Antnio Cndido, a kind of obligatory cosmopolitanism makes Brazilian literary analysts fundamentally comparatist, aware of
the congenital connection of Brazilian literature to other literary traditions such as
the Portuguese, the French, and the Anglo-American, existing always in relation to
cultural currents from outside that shaped a literature at once dependent on and
distinct from the dominant outside literary currents.64
Bourdieu/Wacquant rightly foreground the asymmetries in the global distribution of intellectual labor but fail to historicize them, seeing the process only
in its latest American imperialist incarnation. Within the crossings of literary
production and ideas, Brazil, for example, has operated at a severe disadvantage.
Within the colonial imaginary, Europe represented culture, and Brazil agriculture; Europe renement, and Brazil sugar cane. In the international division of
intellectual labor, Brazil was seen as a consumer, not a producer, of ideas, just as
Brazil was a consumer of economic goods manufactured elsewhere. Brazils relatively disadvantaged geopolitical position, and in the colonial period the concrete
lack of academic institutions and publishing houses, moreover, led not only to
scant academic production but also to diminished power to disseminate existing production. But these imposed limitations did not mean that Brazil did not
produce culture. Brazil was from the beginning staggeringly creative in generating
new forms of popular and erudite culture, ranging from Africanized cuisine and
Islamicized architecture to urbane literature and richly syncretic music. For centuries, the slaveholding elites aversion to work meant that most of the artisans,
artists, and musicians in Brazilfor example, the baroque composers and sculptors in 18th-century Minas Geraiswere black or mestizo. Yet the dominant
discourses stigmatized the black populationthe only population that actually
workedas the cause of Brazils backwardness.
292
Modernist writer Mrio de Andrade reected on the processes of cultural

discrimination that devalued the work of Brazilian artists, a question that came
to the fore later in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of the cultural dependency
debate. While very optimistic about the creativity of our literature and other
contemporary arts, Andrade suggested that Brazilian texts would never win the
applause they deserved due to factors having nothing to do with artistic merit.
Some countries, he wrote, weigh in with great force in the universal scale; their
currency is valuable or pretends to be valuable, and their armies have the power
to decide in the wars of the future. ... The permanence of the arts of any given
country in terms of the worlds attention exist in direct proportion to the political
and economic power of the country in question.65 Just as the prices of Brazils
raw materials were once set in Europe or North America, whether in Lisbon,
Amsterdam, London, or New York, so the value of Brazils cultural goods tended
to be calibrated outside of Brazil, again in those very same world capitals.
The Bourdieu/Wacquant formulations about intellectual relations between
France, Brazil, and the United States fail to take into account the fact that French
and American intellectuals are jointly privileged vis--vis intellectuals in the
Global South. Latin American academics in the humanities are likely to be familiar with both French and American scholarship, while French and American academics are much less likely to know the work of the Latin Americans. Brazilian
intellectuals tend to read both the French (Deleuze, Rancire) and the AngloAmericans ( Jameson, Hall), while neither the Americans nor the Frenchwith
the exception of American and French Brazilianistsare likely to read Brazilians such as Antnio Cndido, Walnice Galvo, Heloisa Buarque de Holanda,
Roberto Schwarz, Ismail Xavier, Srgio Costa, and so forth. Bourdieu/Wacquant
thus ignore the relatively empowered institutional status of French intellectuals
vis--vis the South. The French language, while having lost its earlier powerful position, still enjoys a global prestige rooted in a network that supports the
dissemination of French ideas. Our point is not that So Paulo or Buenos Aires
should become the new capitals of the Republic of Letters. Rather than replace
one metropolitan capital with another, the point is to decenter the production
and dissemination of artistic/intellectual work, generating more egalitarian ows
of cultural work including currents moving South-South and South-North.
Theorizing Cross-Border Interlocution

Nation-state-based analyses, in sum, are inadequate to the multidirectional trafc of ideas. Loc Wacquants essay concerning the reception of Bourdieus work
in the United States, in this sense, can serve as a trampoline for our discussion
of transnational intellectual interlocution.66 For Wacquant, the reception of any
293
foreign oeuvre is mediated by the structures of the national intellectual eld,

resulting in interferences and disjunctures between the objective position of
the imported work in its native intellectual space and the position of its international consumers in the receiving academic space. Wacquant speaks of sending
and receiving intellectual universes and of the schemata and prisms that shape
the reception of foreign intellectual products. Bourdieus theories, he laments,
have been judged through the very categories of thought that his theories aim
at transcending. The hegemonic status of American social sciences, he further
argues, makes them less attentive and open to foreign intellectual currents than
foreigners are to American ones. Ethnocentric U.S. social theorists, in sum, have
gotten Bourdieu wrong due to ethnocentric misinterpretations, misconstruals,
and uncontrolled projections, splintered and fragmented readings that miss
the main thrust of Bourdieus endeavor.
Wacquant may be correct to point out that many U.S. social scientists have
gotten Bourdieu wrong, and he is undoubtedly right to score the reactionary
drift of dominant social theory in the United States. (Ever since C. Wright Mills,
American leftists have criticized the exceptionalist sociology of celebration.) But
if one looks at the broader academic spectrum of the humanities and the social
sciences, the picture alters. There, American scholars are more likely to be reading the French writers than the reverse. The humanities, especially, form a bastion of Francophilia. American Ph.D. dissertations in the humanities proliferate
in quasi-ritualistic homages to Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Irigaray, and
more recently Badiou and Rancire, or to French-inected U.S.-located thinkers
such as Spivak, Butler, and Bhabha, whereas the converse is hardly true in the
humanities as taught in France. Laments about French victimization in this area
therefore seem rather overstated.
Many of Wacquants claims about the misapprehension of Bourdieu in the
United States boomerang so as to apply with equal force to his own projections about the decolonizing projects we have been addressing. Like Bourdieus
misinterpreters, Bourdieu/Wacquant themselves judge those projects, to paraphrase Wacquant, through the very categories of thought these projects aim at
transcending. Our purpose here, in any case, is to question Wacquants methodological choice of idiom and metaphors for treating the movement of ideas. Wacquants language of senders and receivers not only evokes archaic, precybernetic
forms of technology but also the psychologistic premises of a Saussurean linguistics dismantled by Bakhtin already in the late 1920s and by Derrida in the mid1960s. A Bakhtinian/Voloshinovian translinguistic approach would see such
transnational intellectual encounters as historically shaped and socially situated
forms of interlocution. In a back-and-forth process, both speaker and listener
294
shape, and are shaped by, partially shared and partially dierentiated elds of discourse, while being constrained by the social tact (Bakhtin) of power relations.
The national utterance, to paraphrase Bakhtin, takes place on transnational territory. The process is also to some extent reciprocal, especially in situations of relative equalityfor example, that obtaining between French and American intellectualsin which both speaker and listener impact each other. (The process in
relation to the mass media, in contrast, is extremely unequal, whence the calls for
the French cultural exception.)
Wacquants dichotomous termssender/receiver, export/import, native/
foreign, producer/ consumerdraw overly bold lines between points of origin
and points of reception within strongly demarcated national spaces. Yet it has
been the implicit argument of this book that the globalized era of asymmetrical
interdependencies requires a heightened sense of the (partially regulated) ow
of ideas, of crisscrossing messages and multidirectional but still power-inected
channels of exchange, where nations and states are not necessarily coterminous.
Wacquants economistic import-export language implies a trade with national
winners and losers, and negative or positive balances of trade. But in the trade
of ideas, one can win by losing, as when an imported theory turns out to be
useful for the importing nation. Brazilian modernism did not lose by borrowing (and resignifying) the European avant-garde, just as United States and Brazilian academics do not lose by importing the various post- thinkers or, for
that matter, by importing Bourdieu. In short, the ow of ideas, despite a material,
even commercial, dimension, is not reducible to the logic of the ledger book.
Wacquants veristic and originary language, furthermore, sees only misinterpretations, mistranslations, and misconstruals rather than translinguistic reaccentuations and misprisions. Although translations can be accurate or inaccurate,
they can also be seen as productive or unproductive, fecund or sterile. Wacquant
writes as if the structuralist and poststructuralist move from verism and origin to
intertextuality had never taken place. In his analysis, ideas are simply good or bad
at their point of origin and then preserved or damaged during their transatlantic
passage; they are never changed for the better during the journey. Reception in
the United States, for him, is a veritable festival of misapprehensions; ideas sent
from European ports are destined to a sad itinerary of degradation. French intellectuals ship o top-notch ideas at their point of departure, but this fragile cargo
is mishandled when it arrives on American docks. Like ill-refrigerated cheeses,
perfectly good French ideas spoil in other national climes. Europe alone, it
seems, generates ideas; intellectuals in the Americas simply transcribe those ideas
badly, in crooked lines. American intellectuals, in contrast, do not generate good
ideas that then go bad on arrival in France. Rather, their ideas are already bad at
295
their point of departure and therefore can only be barred at the border through
intellectual protectionism. What Bourdieu/Wacquant implicitly call for, therefore, is not engagement with those ideas but rather a protective quarantine.
Within the Wacquant narrative, intellectuals such as Bourdieu produce
knowledge, while Americans and Brazilians passively consume it. Ironically, Brazilian intellectuals and artists have been in the forefront of those dismantling this
passive conception by demonstrating, in theory as well as practice, that dominated cultures can indigenize, transform, expropriate, cannibalize, and resignify
out-of-place ideas. Within the processes of indigenization, even misapprehensions can be fecund, as is suggested by Oswald de Andrades ode to the millionaire contribution of mistakes or by Silviano Santiagos praise of fecund errors
and Caetano Velosos call for an aesthetic of mistakes.
An economic dependency model, in this sense, fails to grasp the complexity
of the cultural eld. In On Anthropophagic Reason: Dialogue and Dierence in
Brazilian Culture, poet/critic Haroldo de Campos envisions modernist anthropophagy as a brilliant strategic move for thinking the national within a dialogical
relation to the universal. Picking up on Oswalds anthropophagic cues, Campos
arms the values of appropriation, expropriation, dehierarchization, and deconstruction.67 Brazilian culture, for Campos, adapts art to local times and places
through a provocative transvalorization. Metropolitan ideas become spiritual
food for renovation. Devoured, chewed, and digested, the texts from the center become a sustenance for what Eneida Maria de Souza calls a multicultural
feast on the periphery.68 Roberto Schwarz remind us in his essay The National
by Subtraction that in an era when virtually everyone claims to be marginal, the
Derridean recuperation of the copy oers narcissistic satisfaction, since it makes
the periphery not only equal but even superior in that it has always recognized
itself as peripheral. Unlike the First World, the more modest Third World easily
accepts the rejection of origins and is therefore better prepared for modernity
and postmodernity. But while a salve for the anxieties of Third World intellectuals, this recuperation of the copy, for Schwarz, is not a sucient defense for
national culture.69
In an example of what Althusserian Marxists called uneven development,
Bourdieu/Wacquant, who are incisive critics of neoliberal globalization, remain
epistemologically Eurocentric in that they fail to make connections between
Enlightenment philosophy and colonial practices in an earlier period and
between coloniality and globalization in a later. In Acts of Resistance, Bourdieu
argues eloquently for the preservation of welfare-state social entitlements, the
results of several centuries of intellectual and political battles for the dignity
of workers. Bourdieu then slides into a revealing analogy. Rightly mocking the
neoliberals who call the protection of social entitlements conservative, he asks
296
rhetorically, Would anyone condemn as conservative the defense of the cultural

achievements of humanity [such as] Kant or Hegel?70 In fact, many critical intellectuals would indeed nd Hegel and Kant conservative and even colonialist and
racist. Oblivious to the more unseemly aspects of European philosophical traditions, Bourdieu does not take into account how Hegel might be perceived from
the vantage point of the native peoples whose expiration Hegel celebrated as a
triumph of Spirit. Denouncing false universalism while lauding one of its philosophical progenitors, Bourdieu scores the false universalism of globalizing doxa.
(Bourdieu/Wacquant give as an example the End of History thesis of Fukuyama yet fail to note Fukuyamas self-declared Hegelianism.)
While Kants and Hegels work does indeed represent a brilliant cultural
achievement of humanity, there is little humanity in their portrayal of nonEuropean peoples. Bourdieu slides easily, then, from defending hard-won social
entitlements within Europe to endorsing philosophers who felt entitled to condemn most of humanity to irrelevance in the name of a self-evident European
superiority. We are not of course suggesting that the work of such philosophers
is reducible to racism or that there are no progressive dimensions to their work.
Yet the less savory aspects of their work should not be cleaned up in the usual
whitewashing operation. A more relational method, to adopt a word favored
by both Bourdieu and ourselves, would see a connection between entitlements
within Europe and the lack of such entitlements in the colonies and neocolonies
of the West. A relational method would discern not only an intimate connection
between the wealth of Europe (lato sensu) and the poverty of the colonized world
but also that linking (1) the philosophers sense of entitlement to belittle nonEuropean civilizations, (2) the historical entitlement of colonizers who appropriated non-European communal land in colonial times, and (3) the entitlement
of the transnational corporations who patent indigenous knowledge under the
pretext that the indigenous inhabitants hold no title to the land or its products.
Bourdieus critique of social privilege within the French educational system is
clearly pertinent to other similarly stratied educational systems. For Bourdieu,
cultural capital is the accumulation of prestige through education, class standing,
family status, and ritualized initiations into the privileged standing by which value
is socially produced. Disadvantaged through his social origins in the rural south of
France; Bourdieu suered the French version of what Richard Sennett has called
the hidden injuries of class.71 In Sketch for a Self-Analysis, Bourdieu speaks movingly of the ways that his undistinguished social background led to a agrant
empathy for the [Algerian] natives.72 Deploying analogy as a cognitive-aective
instrument helped Bourdieu understand oppressive situations elsewhere. He perceives an analogy between his memories of the prestigious high school leaders
a kind of provincial micronobilityand the historical memory of the French
297
nobility itself. Bourdieu evokes a variant of what we have called the epistemological advantages of those who observe the social scene from the bottom: Perhaps
in this case the fact of coming from classes which some like to call modest oers
virtues which are not taught in manuals of methodology: a lack of any scorn for
empirical minutia, the attention paid to humble objects, the refusal of thunderous
ruptures and spectacular breaks.73 If the social wounds of Bourdieus rural origins
prodded him to see the hidden injuries of class, could not this same analogical
capacity help expose the hidden (and not so hidden) injuries of race and gender?
On a global scale, colonialist racism has produced a situation in which cultural and
symbolic capital has unfairly accrued to one group and been unfairly subtracted
from another group. Colonialism, slavery, racism, and neocolonialism, and their
discursive corollary Eurocentrism, have deeply impacted the contemporary production and dissemination of knowledge. While addressing many dierent forms
of capitaleconomic, social, cultural, and so forthBourdieu ignores the white
racial capital inherited and passed on from generation to generation over the past
centuries. A group of people has inherited advantages simply by, to paraphrase
Beaumarchais, taking the trouble to be bornin this case to be born white.
Translational Relationalities
In Race in Translation, we have conceptualized the circulation of the race/colonial
debates in term of multiple chromatic Atlantics. We have tried to forge mutually haunting connections between three divergent yet historically linked colonial/national zones, in order to demonstrate the potentialities of cross-border
illumination. At the same time, our tale reveals a partly phantasmatic encounter
bueted by various nationalisms, narcissisms, and exceptionalisms. The aversion
to multicultural/critical race/postcolonial studies, we have argued, is sometimes
premised on national paradigms, so that the rejection is triggered more by projective anxieties than by any in-depth engagement with the decolonizing corpus.
What is forgotten is that ethno-national identity, as a partly imaginary construct,
forms a case of shifting identications rather than an ontological essence or xed
list of traits (the ontologi-nation); France is not eternally Cartesian, Brazil is not
perpetually carnivalesque, and the United States is not unfailingly puritanical.
Although nation-states exercise unequal political and economic power, intellectual work is still not reducible to a single ethos or to state-dictated ideology. A
passport does not stamp a determinate national character on a person, a text, or
a discourse. Nor do culture and knowledge production conform to tidy political
boundaries or obey the mandates even of the most authoritarian regimes.
Monolithic conceptualizations of nationhood mue the intellectual heteroglossia of cultural zones characterized by a multiplicity of social dialects, jargons,
298
and ideologies. Since nation-states are dened not by single political models but
rather by endless internal struggles over rival models, the intellectual arena is necessarily dissensual and internally dierentiated. Nation-states are polyperspectival and multichronotopic, forming dissonant polyphonies of partially discordant voices. Instead of a Clash of Civilizations, we nd, in Arjun Appadurais
inversion, a Civilization of Clashes.74 Our argument with some leftist intellectuals has ultimately revolved not around anti-imperialist geopolitics, on which we
are in agreement, but rather around the reductionist representation of complex
intellectual elds.
Attempting to move beyond national-exceptionalist accounts and binary comparisons, our book has registered certain historical and discursive convergences.
Much as comparatists have discerned a convergence between racial dynamics in
the United States and Brazil, Tyler Stovall now speaks of a convergence between
black life in France and in the United States.75 In the wake of the 2005 rebellions, it has become more dicult to deny the parallels and linkages between the
racialized tensions in the diverse sites across the postcolonial Atlantic. Indeed,
French, American, and Brazilian cities all display social fractures shaped by
interwoven histories of coloniality and race. Fanons colonial two cities have
morphed into the postcolonial divide between banlieue and city center in France,
between ghetto and white suburb in the United States, and between favela and
bairro nobre (elegant neighborhoods) in Brazil. Thus, the three zones, and the
discourses about them, have increasingly come to echo each other in ways not
reducible to globalization and Americanization. It is not a question of merely
juxtaposing colonial/national histories within an additive approach, then, but
rather of exploring their connectivities within a global system of intercolonial
hegemonies and struggles. We have thus addressed national locations, but only
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 and regional formations.
We have proceeded from the assumption that all nations are, on one level,
transnations, existing in a translational relationality of uneven interlocution.
Rather than discuss intellectual works in terms of clear nation-state boundaries,
we have highlighted the transnational interconnectedness of ideas. As intellectual
work proliferates in borrowings, indigenizations, and adaptations, the coimplication of histories and geographies blurs the lines between inside and outside. A
translinguistic view of translation, in this sense, challenges any idiom of delity and betrayal that would assume a one-to-one correspondence between an
ethno-national culture and an intellectual eld. Rather than conceive of adequate
or inadequate copies of original ideas, translinguistics stresses dialogism, interlocution, reinvoicing, and mediation. At the same time, these mediations do not
299
escape the gravitational pull of history; they are produced and reshaped within
specic geographies and political contexts. Each act of translation is situated,
inevitably shadowed by the architectonics of inequality.
The movement of ideas, as we have seen, is multidirectional, with diverse
points of entry and exit. As a plurilogue across multiple locations, the diverse
critical race/coloniality projects have drawn on a range of discourses not reducible to a national origin, especially given the postcolonial dislocations of many
of the intellectuals themselves. We have tried to track ideas in transit, pointing
to their reaccentuation as they circulate through various zones in a back-andforth that transcends an idiom of origin/copy, native/foreign, and export/import,
within a narrative that foreground the in-between of languages and discourses.
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Notes
All translations in the book are our own unless otherwise indicated.
notes to the prefac e
n ot e s to c ha p t e r 1
1. While the term Black Atlantic has been

in a wide circulation, the terms Red Atlantic
and White Atlantic have appeared only
sporadically. After writing our section on the
Red Atlantic, we discovered that a number
of writers have referred in passing to the Red
Atlantic. Most of these authors use the expression either in the sense of radical left or in a
historical-ethnographic sense of movements
of peoples. We assume that core sense but
overlay it with a more conceptual sense of the
movement of ideas. The radical red remains
as an overtone in our writing since we stress
the link between indigenous social norms and
Western radicalism. Jace Weaver stresses the
hermeneutical possibilities of the Red Atlantic in an essay in American Indian Quarterly
35, no. 3 (Summer 2011), while Tim Fulford
has spoken of a Red Atlantic in terms of the
crucial role of the gure of the Indian within
Romanticism. See his Romantic Indians: Native
Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic
Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006). Historians have occasionally spoken of
a White Atlantic but have not linked it, as we
do, to the concept of critical whiteness studies.
2. On the theory of comparison, see
not only R. Radhakrishnans essay Why
Compare? but also the entire New Literary
History 40, no. 3 (Summer 2009) issue on the
subject, with essays by Rita Felski and Susan
Stanford Friedman, Ania Loomba, Bruce
Robbins, Gayatri Spivak, Ella Shohat, Robert
Stam, and others.
3. See Jack D. Forbes, The American
Discovery of Europe (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2007), chapter 2.
1. Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967),
447.
2. David Roediger, How Race Survived U.S.
History (London: Verso, 2008), 20.
3. Eugene Jolas, quoted in Emily Apter,
The Translation Zone: A New Comparative
Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 113.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet,
Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), 58.
5. Robert J. Miller, Native America, Discovered and Conquered: Thomas Jeerson, Lewis
and Clark, and Manifest Destiny (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1.
6. Quoted in Matthew Restall, Sete Mitos
da Conquista Espanhola (Rio de Janeiro:
Civilizao Brasileira, 2006), 158159.
7. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin
America (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 22.
8. The occasional proposals to make Tupi
the ocial language of Brazil are comically
extrapolated in Lima Barrettos novel O Triste
Fim de Policarpo Quaresma (1915).
9. Larry Rohter, A Colonial Language
Resurfaces, New York Times (August 28, 2005).
10. See Donald Grinde, Jr., and Bruce
Johansen, Exemplar of Liberty: Native America
and the Evolution of Democracy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
11. See John F. Kennedy, Introduction to
William Brandon, The American Heritage Book
of Indians (New York: Dell, 1961).
12. Felix Cohen, Americanizing the White
Man, American Scholar 21:2 (1952): 181.
301
13. Vandana Shiva quotes from Djelal Kadir,

Columbus and the Ends of the Earth (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), 66, in her
essay Biodiversidade, Direitos de Propriedade
Intelectual e Globalizao, in Boaventura de
Sousa Santos, ed., Semear Outras Solues:
Os Caminhos da Biodiversidade e dos Conhecimentos Rivais (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao
Brasileira, 2005), 321.
14. Ibid. The 2010 lm Even the Rain
compares the colonialism of Columbuss
time with contemporary globalization. Set in
Cochachamba, Boliviathe site of struggles
regarding the privatization of waterthis
reexive lm stages the story of a lm director
who has chosen Cochabamba as a cheap location for a lm about Columbus. The rebellion
of a Taino leader against Columbus in the lm
comes to resonate with contemporary struggles
against transnational corporations.
15. Ibid., 324.
16. More recently, indigenous activists from
the Amazon region, identifying with the Navi
people of Avatar, have teamed up with James
Cameron in opposition to the same hydroelectric dam.
17. Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Discovering
White People, in Povos Indigenas 996/2000
(Brasilia: Instituto Socioambiantal, 2000).
18. Ailton Krenak, The Eternal Return of
the Encounter, in Povos Indigenas, 48.
19. Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native
American Social and Political Thought (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littleeld, 2004).
20. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques Cannibales (Paris: PUF, 2009), 5.
21. Charles W. Ephraim, The Pathology of
Eurocentrism: The Burden and Responsibilities
of Being Black (Trenton, NJ: Africa World,
2003), 34.
22. For more on recent archeological
research into Palmares, see Ricardo Bonalume
Neto, O Pequeno Brasil de Palmares: Escavaes Arquelogical Sugerem que o Quilombo
de Zumbi era Multietnico como um Pequeno
Brasil, Folha de So Paulo ( June 4, 1995), 516.
Palmares has great contemporary resonance in
302
Brazil, as black nationalists invoke quilombismo

and celebrate Black Consciousness Day on
the anniversary of the death of the Palmarino
leader Zumbi. Indeed, black farmers still
cultivate the land that their ancestors settled,
and a quilombo clause could give land titles
to ve hundred thousand descendants of the
free black communities. Musical groups from
Bahia, specically Olodum and Il Aiy, have
organized support for the present-day descendants of the quilombos, composing lyrics such
as Quilombo, here we are/ My only debt is
to the quilombo/ My only debt is to Zumbi.
See James Brooke, Brazil Seeks to Return
Ancestral Lands to Descendants of Runaway
Slaves, New York Times (August 15, 1993), 3.
23. R.K. Kent, Palmares: An African State
in Brazil, Journal of African History 6, no. 2
(1965): 167169.
24. Palmares has been celebrated in two
Brazilian lms by Carlos Diegues, Ganga
Zumba (1963) and Quilombo (1983).
25. See Jos Jorge de Carvalho, Incluso
tnica e Racial no Brasil: A Questo das Cotas no
Ensino Superior (So Paulo: Attar, 2005), 141.
26. See Germn Arciniegas, America in
Europe: A History of the New World in Reverse
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986),
120.
27. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Figures
in Black, points to Jean Toomers concerns as
as anticipatory of the postmodern and the
poststructural. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial
Self (New York: Oxford University Press,
1987), 210.
28. See Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998), 5.
29. Quoted in Mia Bay, The White Image
in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas
about White People, 18391925 (Oxford: Oxford
30. Ibid., 25.
31. Quoted in ibid., 17.
32. Quoted in ibid., 16
Notes to Chapter 1
34. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The

Revolutionary Generation (New York: Vintage,
2002), 102.
35. For an in-depth discussion of how
these issues are reected in the behavior and
decisions of U.S. presidents, see Kenneth
OReilly, Nixons Piano: Presidents and Racial
Politics from Washington to Clinton (New York:
Free Press, 1995).
36. Mills, Blackness Visible, 87.
37. On the concept of analogical structures
of feeling, see Shohat/Stam, Unthinking
Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 351.
38. Quoted in Bay, The White Image in the
Black Mind, 16.
39. Quoted in Howard Zinn, Passionate
Declarations: Essays on War and Justice (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003), 231.
40. Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment?, in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault
Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 45.
41. See Louis Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir,
ou Le Calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1987).
42. Ibid.
43. Montesquieu, Chapter VII: Another
Origin of the Right of Slavery, in The Spirit of
the Laws (1748).
44. Sala-Molins, Le Code Noir.
45. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New
World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004),
13.
46. Aim Csaire, Toussaint LOuverture:
La Rvolution Franaise et le Problme Coloniale
(Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1981), 23.
47. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the
Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston: Beacon, 1995), 68.
48. Ibid., 70107.
49. Quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New
World, 290291.
50. Ept. 27, 1803 letter, in Germaine de Stal,
Correspondance Generale 1 (Paris: Hachette,
1982), quoted in Gilles Manceron, Marianne et
les Colonies (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005), 68.
303
51. From Victor Schoelchers Vie de Toussaint Louverture, cited in Manceron, Marianne
et les Colonies, 68.
52. Ibid., 142.
53. See Daniel Rasmussen, American Uprising: The Untold Story of Americas Largest Slave
Revolt (New York: Harper, 2011), 48.
54. Quoted in David. R. Roediger, How Race
Survived U.S. History (London: Verso, 2008), 60.
55. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 304.
56. Ibid., 305.
59. Ibid., 105.
60. William Wells Brown, St. Domingo, Its
Revolutions and Its Patriots (Boston: B. Marsh,
1855), quoted in J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the
United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1988), 11.
61. Quoted in Dubois, Avengers of the New
World, 305.
62. The Vastey citation is from his Reections, quoted in J. Michael Dash, The Other
America: Caribbean Literature in a New World
Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 1998), 44.
63. Quoted in Gary Wills, Negro Prresident: Jeerson and the Slave Power (New York:
Houghton Miin, 2003), 44.
64. For an early discussion of the anticolonialism of Diderot and other Enlightenment
gures, see our Unthinking Eurocentrism,
chapter 2 (Formations of Colonialist
Discourse). Two key works which unearthed
Diderots often hidden contributions to these
debates were Yves Bnot, Diderot: De lAthisme
lAnti-colonialisme (Paris: Maspero, 1970), and
Michle Duchet, Diderot et lHistories des Deux
Indes, ou Lcriture Fragmentaire (Paris: A.G.
Nizet, 1978).
65. Denis Diderot, Supplment au Voyage
de Bougainville, quoted in William B. Cohen,
Franais et Africains: Les Noirs dans le Regard
des Blancs (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 251.
66. Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against
Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2003), 52.
Notes to Chapter 1
67. Quoted in Bnot, Diderot, 209.

68. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz
Fanon, Les Damns de la Terre (Paris: Franois
Maspero, 1961).
69. See Yves Bnot, La Rvolution Franaise
et la Fin des Colonies (Paris: La Dcouverte,
1987), 26.
70. Sankar Muthu, La Globalisation au
Temps des Lumires: Diderot Observateur
du Commerce Global et du Pouvoir Imprial,
in Patrick Weil and Stephane Dufoix, eds.,
LEsclavage: La Colonisation, et Aprs... (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 2005).
71. Diderot, LHistoire des Deux Indes, IV,
33, quoted in Muthu, Enlightenment against
Empire, 87.
72. Ibid., III, 41, quoted in Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 101.
73. Ibid., XVIII, 52, quoted in Muthu,
Enlightenment against Empire, 102.
1. Liv Sovik makes a brief reference to the
concept of the White Atlantic in her essay
We Are Family: Whiteness in the Brazilian
Media, Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies 13, no. 3 (December 2004): 315325.
2. David T. Goldberg has argued that
racialization has been constitutive of modern
state formation, in that racialized distinctions
instituted by the state have produced homogeneity out of heterogeneous populations. Thus,
race is integral to the emergence, development,
and transformations (conceptually, philosophically, materially) of the modern nation-state.
David T. Goldberg, The Racial State (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 2002), 4.
3. See Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
4. See James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship:
Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in
Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2008), 27.
5. Ibid., 41.
6. See Achille Mbembe, Figures of Multiplicity: Can France Reinvent Its Identity?,
trans. Jane Marie Todd, in Charles Tshimanga,
304
Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds.,

Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity
and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
7. Azouz Begag, Ethnicity and Equality:
France in the Balance, trans. Alec G. Hargreaves
(Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2007), xxvi.
8. For a discussion of these issues, see
Daniel Gordon, Democracy and the Deferral
of Justice in France and the United States,
in Ralph Sarkonak, ed., France/USA: The
Cultural Wars, Yale French Studies 100 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
9. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London:
Verso, 2006).
10. Paulo Arantes quoted in Giuseppe
Cocco, MundoBRaz (Rio de Janeiro: Record,
2009), 34.
11. Quoted in Mary del Priore, Dans
le Apaguer des Lumieres: Francophilia e
Lusofobia na Capital do Brasil Oitocentista, in
Carlos Lessa, ed., Enciclopdia da Brasilidade:
Auto-Estima em Verde e Amarelo (Rio de
Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2005), 158.
12. Pierre Rivas, Dilogos Interculturais (So
Paulo: Hucitec, 2004), 3435. Although Rivas
is addressing Latin America in general, his
comments apply very well to Brazil.
13. Victor Hugo Le Vaste Brsil aux Arbres
Sems dOr, quoted in Mario Carelli, Herv
Thry, and Alain Zantman, eds., France-Brsil:
Bilan pour une Relance (Paris: Entente, 1987),
142 (translation ours).
14. Quoted in George Raeders, O Conde
de Gobineau no Brasil (So Paulo: Paz e Terra,
1997).
15. Paulo Emlio Salles Gomes, Cinema:
Trajetria no Subdesenvolvimento (So Paulo:
Paz e Terra, 1997), 90.
16. Gobineau quoted in Raeders, O Conde
de Gobineau no Brasil, 134
17. Gobineau quoted in ibid., 137.
18. See Thomas Skidmore, Black into White
(New York: Oxford, 1974).
19. See Oswald de Andrade, Do Pau-Brasil
Antropofagia e s Utopias (Rio de Janeiro:
Civilizao Brasileira, 1972).
Notes to Chapter 1
20. See Patrick Petitjean, As Misses

Universitrias Francesas na Criao da Universidade de So Paulo (19341940), in Amlia I.
Hamburger, Maria Amlia M. Dantes, Michel
Paty, and Patrick Petitjean, eds., A Cincia nas
Relaes BrasilFrana (18501950) (So Paulo:
USP, 1996).
21. Claude Lvi-Strauss and Didier Eribon,
Conversations with Claude Lvi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 38.
22. See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal
of Civility: Freud, Marx, Lvi-Strauss, and
the Jewish Struggle with Modernity (Boston:
Beacon, 1974).
23. Roger Bastide, Estudos Afro-Brasileiros
(So Paulo: Perspectiva, 1973), 183.
24. For more on the critique of Eurocentric
approaches to Afro-diasporic trance religions,
see Robert Stam, Tropical Multiculturalism: A
Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997), especially chapter 8.
25. Henri Troyat, Brsil, Les Oeuvres
Libres, quoted in Rgis Tettamanzi, Les
crivains Franais et le Brsil (Paris: Harmattan, 2004), 186.
26. Roger Bastide, O Candombl da Bahia
(So Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional,
1978), 1011.
27. Bastide, Estudos Afro-Brasileiros, xxi.
28. Roger Bastide, Macunama em Paris, O
Estado de So Paulo (February 3, 1946), quoted
in Fernanda reas Peixoto, Dilogos Brasileiros:
Uma Anlise da Obra de Roger Bastide (So
Paulo: USP, 2000), 16.
29. On Rouch, see Steven Feld, ed.,
Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
30. See Jean Rouch, Les Hommes et les
Dieux du Fleuve (Paris: Artcom, 1997).
31. For an excellent study of Rouch, Rocha,
and their creative deployment of possession
religions, see Mateus Arajo Silva, Jean Rouch
e Glauber Rocha, de um Transe a Outro,
Devires 6, no. 1 ( JanuaryJune 2009).
32. Bastide quoted in Peixoto, Dilogos
Brasileiros, 117.
305
33. Bastide, O Candombl da Bahia, 226.

34. See Leyla Perrone-Moiss, Gallophilie
et Gallophobie dans la Culture Brsilienne
(XIXe et XXe Sicles), in Katia Queirs
Mattoso, Idelette Muzart-Fonseca dos Santos,
and Denis Rolland, eds., Modles Politiques
et Culturels au Brsil: Emprunts, Adaptations,
Rejets XIXe et XXe Sicles, 2354 (Paris:
Presses de lUniversit de Paris-Sorbonne,
2003), 23.
35. Mario Carelli, Culturas Cruzadas (So
Paulo: Papirus, 1994), 254.
36. 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),
1:128129, quoted in Denis Rolland, ed., Le Brsil
et le Monde (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 2526.
37. Ibid.
38. See Thomas E. Skidmore, O Brasil Visto
de Fora (So Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1994), 34.
39. See Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A
Problem in American Institutional Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); and
Marvin Harris, Patterns of Race in the Americas
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980).
40. Isabel Lustosa, Nos, os Americanos e
America, in Lessa, Enciclopdia da Brasilidade,
170.
41. Patricia de Santana Pinho, Mama Africa:
Reinventing Blackness in Bahia (Durham: Duke
42. A. Oliveira, Aos Nossos Leitores, O
Alnete (September 3, 1918), quoted in Micol
Seigel, The Point of Comparison: Transnational Racial Construction: Brazil and the
United States, 19181933 (Ph.D. dissertation,
New York University, Graduate School of Arts
and Science, 2001), 162.
43. Jos Correia Leite, O Grande Problema
Nacional, Evoluo (May 13, 1933), quoted in
Seigel, The Point of Comparison, 171.
44. David J. Hellwig, African-American
Reections on Brazils Racial Paradise (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
Notes to Chapter 2

48. Ibid., 95.
49. France Winddance Twine, Racism in
Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White
Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick: Rutgers
50. Using a dierent methodology,
anthropologist Robin E. Sheri comes to
similar conclusions in her Dreaming Equality:
Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
51. Kia Lilly Caldwell, Negras in Brazil: Reenvisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the
Politics of Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 2006), xviii.
52. Ibid., xxii.
53. Ibid., xix.
54. Ibid., 9.
55. Ibid.
56. See Pinho, Mama Africa, 20. Strangely,
the argument seems to be about whether
black Brazilians are misrecognizing their
own oppression (the Twine view) or whether
African Americans are misrecognizing black
Brazilians as being oppressed.
57. See ibid.
58. Interview in Revista Rap Internacional
(2001), quoted in Patricia de Santana Pinho,
Reinvenes da frica na Bahia (So Paulo:
Annablume, 2004), 48.
59. Frederick Douglass, Letter from Paris,
in Adam Gopnik, ed., Americans in Paris: A
Literary Anthology (New York: Library of
America, 2004), 166.
60. Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton
Miin, 1996), xii.
61. James Weldon Johnson, Along This
Way, in Gopnik, Americans in Paris, 199.
62. Stovall, Paris Noir, 132.
63. Pascale Casanova, La Rpublique
Mondiale des Lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 49.
64. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
(1967; repr., New York: Grove, 1994), 112.
65. Ibid., 116.
66. Stovall, Paris Noir, 48. Already in 1923,
some white American tourists had persuaded
306
the owner of a Montmartre cabaret to throw

the Dahomean Kojo Tavalou out of the club,
leading to protests in the French Parliament
and government sanctions against any cabaret
owners who did not accept people of color
alongside whites.
67. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life
(London: Granta, 2000), 93.
69. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of
Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise
of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard
70. Lopold Senghor, To New York,
in The Collected Poetry (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1991), quoted
and analyzed in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze,
Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the
Postracial Future (New York: Routledge,
2001), 125127.
72. Much of this work has already been
done, but this is not the place for a comprehensive bibliography. See, for example, Christopher L. Millers The French Atlantic Triangle:
Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), a
dense exploration of the French Atlantic slave
trade as represented in literature and lm.
73. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father
(New York: Canongate, 2007), 123.
74. Fernando Jorge, Se No Fosse Brasil,
Jamais Barack Obama Teria Nascido (Rio de
Janeiro: Novo Seculo, 2009).
75. Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphe Noir (1948),
preface to Lopold Sdar Senghor, Anthologie
de la Nouvelle Posie Ngre et Malgache de
Langue Franaise (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1977).
76. Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin
Nascimento, Africans in Brazil: A Pan-African
Perspective (Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1992),
46.
77. On Welles, Frank, and Vinicius de
Moraes, see Stam, The Power of Blackness, in
Tropical Multiculturalism.
78. Obama, Dreams from My Father, 124.
Notes to Chapter 2
79. In what might be called an international competition over race, Jorge also points
out that Brazil had a black president before
the United States did, in the person of the
mulatto Nilo Peanhason, like Obama, of
a black father and a white motherwho took
oce on June 14, 1909. Yet it is noteworthy
that it took the election of Obama for
Brazilians to take notice of its own rst black
president.
80. Hallam cited in Theodore W. Allen, The
Invention of the White Race (London: Verso,
1954), 29.
81. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin
America (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005).
82. See Roberto Fernndez Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989).
83. Darcy Ribeiro, O Povo Brasileiro: A
Formao e o Sentido do Brasil (So Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1995), 239.
84. It is also sometimes forgotten that
the North/South division also inhabits the
Euro-Latin countries themselves. Spain, Italy,
and even France all have a south that is a little
darker, poorer, more Arabized, and more
Africanized than their respective norths. South
of the Equator, the situation, like the climate, is
reversed: Brazils north, unlike the rich, white
south, is poorer and darker.
85. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible
Future and Its Present Crisis (New York: Baker
& Taylor, 1885), 160177.
86. William Allen White, editorial, Emporia
Gazette (March 20, 1898).
87. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America,
5859.
88. Emmanuel Todd, for example, attributes
U.S. imperialist tendencies to the Anglo-Saxon
family structure, while claiming that the
United States has a major problem with race.
France does not. Emmanuel Todd, Le Destin
des Immigrs (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
89. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, 63.
90. Richard Morse, El Espejo de Prspero:
Un Estudio de la Dialctica del Nuevo Mundo
(Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1982).
307
91. See Jerey Rosen, Radical Constitutionalism, New York Times Magazine
(November 28, 2010).
92. Mike Davis, Magical Urbanism: Latinos
Reinvent the U.S. City (London: Verso, 2001).
Census reports show that more Americans
claim African than strictly English origin.
93. See Jorge G. Castaeda, ExMex: From
Migrants to Immigrants (New York: New Press,
2007), xiii.
94. Gloria Anzalda, Borderlands: La
Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Fransciso: Aunt Lute
Books, 1999), 25.
95. Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora, 52.
96. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners:
Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993).
97. Senghor quoted in Edwards, The
Practice of Diaspora, 32.
98. See Antonio Risrio, A Utopia Brasileira
e os Movimentos Negros (So Paulo: Editora 34,
2007), 34.
99. See Gerard Noiriel, The French Melting
Pot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996).
100. For Apters richly textured discussion
of translational/transnational issues, see The
Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), 6. See also Mona Bakers Translation
and Conict: A Narrative Account (New York:
Routledge, 2006).
101. See Shohat/Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
102. douard Glissant, Le Divers du
Monde Est Imprvisible, quoted in Walter
Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs:
Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border
Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 41.
103. See douard Glissant, Potique de la
Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).
1. Anibal Quijano, Coloniality of Power,
Eurocentrism, and Latin America, Nepantla
Notes to Chapter 3
1, no. 3 (2000): 533580; Mary Louise Pratt,

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking
Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media
(New York: Routledge, 1994).
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy
of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1988), 92.
3. Vandana Shiva, Monocultures of the Mind:
Perspectives on Biodiversity and Biotechnology
(London: Zed Books, 1993).
4. See J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United
States: National Stereotypes and the Literary
Imagination (London: Macmillan, 1988).
5. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, 81.
6. Hegel, Smtliche Werke, ed. J. Homeister
(Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1955), appendix 2, 243,
quoted in Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the
Americas (New York: Continuum, 1995), 24.
7. Quoted in Dussel, The Invention of the
Americas, 199.
8. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, 93.
9. Ibid., 96.
10. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History
and the Last Man (New York: Free Press,
1992).
11. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 11.
12. Ibid., 1.
13. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso,
1993), 27; Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible:
Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell
14. Marx to Pavel Annenkov, 1846, quoted
in Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 83.
16. Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 54.
17. Mandela quoted in Amartya Sen,
Democracy and Its Global Roots, New
Republic (October 6, 2003), 30.
18. Ibid., 31.
308
19. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and

the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer
(New York: Harper, 1965), 157.
20. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving
Our Humanity: The Idea of the Postracial Future
(New York: Routledge, 2001), 187.
21. Goody, The Theft of History, 14.
22. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation, in
Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Garth and C. Wright
Mills (New York: Macmillian, 1946), 2645.
23. Simone Weil, Simone Weil on Colonialism: An Ethic of the Other, ed. and trans. J.P.
Little (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld,
2003), 124.
24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans.
S.W. Allen (Paris: Prsence Africaine, 1963), 7.
25. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Social Content of the Algerian Struggle (1959), quoted
in Phyllis Taouas marvelous Forms of Protest
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 189.
26. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy
of Prejudices (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1996).
27. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
(New York: Penguin, 1972), xxvii.
28. Aim Csaire, Discours sur le Colonialisme (Paris: Rclame, 1950).
29. We have in mind, to cite a tiny part of
the scholarship, the work of Homi Bhabha,
Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Louis
Gordon, Neil Lazarus, David Macey, Anne
McClintock, Christopher Miller, Benita Parry,
Kristin Ross, Edward Said, Franoise Vergs,
and Robert Young.
30. Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds., The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man:
The Structuralist Controversy, 245267 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1970).
31. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(1963; repr., New York: Grove, 2004).
32. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban:
The Psychology of Colonization (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1991). See David
Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York:
Picador, 2000), 323.
Notes to Chapter 3
33. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.

34. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:
How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New
York: Columbia Univeristy Press, 1983).
35. Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (1964; repr., New York: Grove, 1988), 17.
37. Ibid., 211.
38. Ibid., 202.
39. Ibid., 18.
40. Ibid. 19.
41. Jean Genet, Les Ngres (1959), preface,
in Thtre Complet de Jean Genet (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).
42. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 102.
43. Ibid., 37.
44. See Antonio Srgio Alfredo Guimares,
Recepo de Fanon no Brasil e a Identidade
Negra, Novos Estudos 81 ( July 2008).
45. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, ed. Friedrich
Engels (New York: International, 1967), 751.
46. See Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
The Consumption of Dependency Theory in
the United States, Latin American Research
Review 3, no. 12 (1977): 724.
47. See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New
York: Academic, 1974).
48. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The
Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding (New York: Schocken Books, 1980).
49. Richard Slotkin, Gunghter Nation:
The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 1l0.
50. See the collection of interviews in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, org. Renato Sztutman
(Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2008), for quotation
see p. 79.
51. See Manning Marable, Dispatches from
the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the
African American Experience (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2000), 243264.
52. Noliwe M. Rooks, Black Money/White
Power (Boston: Beacon, 2006), 16.
309
53. Ibid., 22.

54. Warren Dean quoted in Jos Carlos
Sebe Bom Meihy, A Colnia Brasilianista:
Histria Oral de Vida Acadmica (So Paulo:
Nova Stella, 1990).
55. Levine quoted in Rubens Barbosa, O
Brasil dos Brasilianistas (So Paulo: Paz e Terra,
2002), 62.
56. James N. Green, We Cannot Remain
Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military
Dictatorship in the United States (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).
57. Barbara Weinstein, Buddy, Can You
Spare a Paradigm?, Americas 4, no. 57 (2001):
453466.
58. We examine this topic in Shohat/Stam,
Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and
Anti-Americanism (New York: Routledge,
2007).
59. A very partial list of the names associated with this constellation of elds would
include Norma Alarcn, M. Jacqui Alexander,
Paula Gunn Alien, Sonia Alvarez, Gloria
Anzalda, Joel Zito Arajo, Talal Assad, Pat
Aufderheide, Houston Baker, Derrick Bell,
Sophie Bessis, Homi Bhabha, J.M. Blaut,
Julianne Burton, Dipesh Chakravarty, Ward
Churchill, James Cliord, Kimberl Crenshaw,
Carol Boyce Davies, Angela Davis, Richard
Delgado, Vine Deloria, Manthia Diawara,
Arif Dirlik, Anne Donadey, Ariel Dorfman,
Richard Drinnon, Lisa Duggan, Enrique
Dussel, Michael Eric Dyson, Arturo Escobar,
Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Ruth Fankenberg,
Robert Fisher, Shelley Fishkin, Juan Flores,
Rosa Linda Fregoso, Coco Fusco, Diana Fuss,
Teshome Gabriel, Paul Gilroy, Faye Ginsburg,
Henry Giroux, Louis Gordon, Herman
Gray, Inderpal Grewal, Donald Grinde, Ed
Guerrero, Lani Guinier, Michael Hanchard,
Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Paget
Henry, bell hooks, Noel Ignatiev, Annette
Jaimes, Francis Jennings, Caren Kaplan, Robin
Kelley, Elaine Kim, Agostin La, Arturo
Lindsay, Franoise Lionnet, George Lipschitz,
James Loewen, Tommy Lott, Wahneema
Lubiano, Oren Lyons, Peter Maclaren, George
Notes to Chapter 3
Marcus, Armand Mattelart, Walter Mignolo,

Toby Miller, Trin T. Minh Ha, Nick Mirzoe,
Chandra Mohanty, Cherre Moraga, Toni
Morrison, Fred Motin, Jos Muoz, Abdias
do Nascimento, Elisa Larkin Nascimento,
Vidal-Naquet, Lucius Outlaw, Charles Payne,
Gary Peller, Gyan Prakash, Mary Louise
Pratt, Laura Pulido, Vincent Raphael, Cedric
Robinson, David Roediger, Renato Rosaldo,
Andrew Ross, Joef Runo, Vicki Ruiz, Edward
Said, Jenny Sharpe, Edward Soja, Hortense
Spillers, Gayatri Spivak, Benjamin Stora, Herbert Schiller, Richard Slotkin, Doris Sommers,
Eric Sundquist, Clyde Taylor, Kendal Thomas,
Robert Farris Thompson, Alice Walker, Cornel
West, Patricia Williams, Sylvia Winter, Robert
Young, George Ydice, and Howard Zinn.
60. See Cynthia A. Young, Soul Power:
Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S.
Third World Left (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006).
61. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981).
62. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976).
63. For a thorough overview of the changing
meanings of multiculturalism, especially
in the Anglophone world, see Sneja Gunew,
Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism:
Between Race and Ethnicity, Yearbook of
English Studies 27 (1997): 2239.
64. See United Nations Development
Program, Cultural Liberty in Todays Diverse
World, Human Development Report 2004.
65. We cite the report only to call attention
to antecedent critiques that painted multiculturalism in opposite ways. Our own reservations
about the UN report are that it is (1) overly
marked by liberal recognition and cultural
rights discourse; (2) idealist in its neglect of
material history (especially in terms of the role
of colonialism and imperialism in creating longlasting (yet morphing) structures of inequality
and political economy (the sheer inertia of a
racialized division of labor and prot within and
310
between countries, even in the postcolonial

period); and (3) apolitical in that it proposes
ideal solutions that are institutional and
psychologicalboth of which are important
but not sucientwithout examining deeper
historically sedimented structural relations
of power, for example, the role of corporate
globalization and the U.S. military-industrialinfotainment complex in rendering progressive
change exceedingly hard to achieve.
66. Brett Christophers, Ships in the Night:
Journeys in Cultural Imperialism and Postcolonialism, International Journal of Cultural
Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2007): 285.
67. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York:
Vintage, 1979).
68. The coloniality/modernity project is in
some ways similar to the one we outlined in
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and
the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994).
69. See Ramn Grosfoguel, preface to From
Postcolonial Studies to Decolonial Studies:
Decolonizing Postcolonial Studies, special issue
of Review 29, no. 2 (2006): 141143.
70. Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro,
Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian
Ontologies, Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Fall
2004): 463484.
71. Jack D. Forbes argues that native people
from the Americas might have traveled to
Europe before Columbus. See Jack D. Forbes,
The American Discovery of Europe (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2007).
72. See Silviano Santiago, O Entre-Lugar
Cal Cultura Latino-America, in Uma
Literatura nos Trpicos (So Paulo: Perspectiva,
1978), 1128; Homi Bhabha, The Location of
Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
73. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global
Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges,
and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton
74. Arturo Escobar, World and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American
Modernity/Coloniality Research Program,
Cuadernos del CEDLA 16 (2004): 3167.
Notes to Chapter 3
75. Quoted in Bernard Cassen, Tout a

Commenc Porto Alegre... (Paris: Mille et
Une Nuits, 2004).
76. See Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed.,
Semear Outras Solues: Os Caminhos da
Biodiversidades e dos Conhecimentos Rivais (Rio
de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 2005).
77. Andrea A. Lunsford, Toward a Mestiza
Rhetoric: Gloria Anzalda on Composition,
Postcoloniality, and Spirituality (1996), in
A.A. Lunsford and L. Ouzgane, eds., Crossing
Borderlands, 3366 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 54.
78. See Encarnacin Gutirrez Rodrguez,
Manuela Boatc, and Srgio Costa, eds.,
Decolonizing European Sociology: Transdisciplinary Approaches (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2010), 15.
1. Richard Bernstein, Dictatorship of Virtue:
How the Battle over Multiculturalism Is Reshaping Our Schools, Our Country, and Our Lives
(New York: Vintage, 1995).
2. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Disuniting
of America: Reections on a Multicultural Society
(Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct Books, 1991),
35.
3. William Phillips, Comment, Partisan
Review 59, no. 1 (1992): 12.
4. See Charles Krauthammer, An Insidious
Rejuvenation of the Old Left, Los Angeles
Times (December 24, 1990), B5.
5. ORourke quoted in the Brazilian
newsmagazine Isto (February 1, 1995), 61.
6. This portrayal served as a decoy to
distract attention from the deep substratal
strains of moralistic puritanism within the
right itself, evidenced in its obsession with
controlling womens bodies and adults sexual
preferences. It was the right, after all, that
narrativized HIV/AIDS as divine vengeance
against homosexuals, that objected to the
orice-stung performance art of Karen
Finley, and that censured the homoerotic
photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and
the lms of Marlon Riggs. Subsequent to the
311
1990s and the sexualized prosecutions of Bill

Clinton, the hypocrisy of the right became
more than evident, as many of the gures who
berated Clinton were subsequently caught in
their own sexual shenanigans.
7. Susan Moller Okin with respondents, Is
Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, ed. Joshua
Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C.
Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
8. On Al Jazeera, iek actually associated the phrase clash of civilizations with
the multiculturalists, exactly those who have
most combated Huntingtons ideas. iek
patronizingly told the Al Jazeera audience
what they already knowthat Egypt deserves
democracy just like everyone else. One would
think that the relevance of multiculturalism to
Egypt would be to point to that countrys fantastic multiculturality, to argue for an interfaith
Egypt featuring equality between Muslims
and Copts, for example, and to teach Egyptian
history in Western schools. iek also spoke
of his discovery in a Qatar museum of a
wonderful plate inscribed with a phrase from
an Iranian philosopher to the eect that only
the foolish man invokes Fate as an excuse, for
iek evidence that even the Islamic world
can be enlightened. We are reminded of the
ironic response of a Tunisian friend (Moncef
Cheikhrouhou) to a European interlocutors
reassuring assertion that she believed Arabs
are human beings: Merci!
9. Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, The Politics
of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, (Durham:
Duke University Press, 199
10. It is symptomatic, however, that the
Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples was signed by most of the world
but not by the United States, Canada, New
Zealand, and Australia (which recently
changed its mind), i.e., by the Anglo-dominant
settler societies. President Obama did endorse
statements about Native Americans right to
the land, however, which brought denunciations from the right about giving the land back
to the Indians.
Notes to Chapter 4
11. Todd Gitlin, The Twilight of Common

Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture
Wars (New York: Holt, 1995).
12. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays
in Cultural Politics (London: Taylor and
Francis, 1987).
13. See, for example, Linda Martin Alco,
Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
14. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Benet
from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), vii.
15. Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with
Diversity (New York: Holt, 2006).
16. Ibid., 7.
17. Ibid., 3.
18. Ibid., 12.
19. Ibid., 17.
20. Ibid., 89.
21. Survey cited in Tim J. Wise, Speaking
Treason Fluently: Anti-racist Reections from an
Angry White Male (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull,
2008), 71.
22. Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, 72.
23. Meizhu Lui, Brbara J. Robles, Betsy
Leondar-Wright, Rose M. Brewer, and
Rebecca Adamson, The Color of Wealth: The
Story behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide
(New York: New Press, 2006), 1.
24. Mel King quoted in ibid., 268.
25. David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of
Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), ix.
26. David Roediger, The Retreat from Race
and Class, Monthly Review 58, no. 3 (2006), 51.
27. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction
in America, 18601880 (1935; repr., New
York: Free Press, 1995), 700701. (It must
be remembered that the white group of
laborers, while they received a low wage,
were compensated in part by a sort of
public and psychological wage. They were
given public deference and titles of courtesy
because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to
public functions, public parks, and the best
schools.)
312
28. Martin Luther King, Jr., All Labor Has

Dignity (1968), in All Labor Has Dignity, ed.
Michael Honey (Boston: Beacon, 2011).
29. Taylor quoted in Charles W. Mills,
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race
30. Ibid., 39.
32. The problem of racing Islam has been
addressed by critics such as Rabab Abdulhadi,
Evelyn Alsutany, Moustafa Bayoumi, Nadine
Naber, and Sherene Razack.
35. Ibid., 143.
36. Ibid., 65.
37. Arturo Escobar, Latin America at a
Crossroads: Between Alternative Modernizations, Postliberalism, and Postdevelopment,
lecture at the Center for Latin American and
Caribbean Studies, New York University,
October 29, 2009.
38. During the course of history, culture
and economics have gone hand in hand in
the United States as well, for example, in the
case of conicts between the U.S. government
and Native Americans. The ethos of private
property and the imposition of individual allotments on Indian tribes, through the Dawes
Act, meant nothing less than the social death of
indigenous culture as a living mode of praxis.
39. Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in
America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 5.
40. Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant,
La Nouvelle Vulgate Plantaire, Le Monde
Diplomatique (May 2000): 67. Subsequent
quotations in the text are from this version of
the essay.
41. If the multicultural left certainly contributed to the widely noted decline of racism
among young Americans and thus to the
election of Barack Obama, the multicultural
left, and the left generally, have so far been
unsuccessful in pushing Obama to the left in
terms of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
Guantnamo, single-payer health care, and
corporate domination of the political system.
Notes to Chapter 4
42. Franois Cusset, French Theory: How

Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed
the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans.
Je Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 3839.
43. On these debates, see Gary B. Nash,
Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History
on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the
Past (New York: Knopf, 1997).
44. Weyrich quoted in Jodi Dean, introduction to Dean, ed., Cultural Studies and Political
Theory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 7.
45. Even some of the New Democrats such as
Joseph Lieberman (as in the manifesto Why Our
Universities Are Failing and What We Can Do
about It) attempted to censure and stigmatize the
tenured radicals of the critical university.
46. Quoted in Dean, introduction to
Cultural Studies and Political Theory, 7.
47. Frank Ellis, Multiculturalism and
Marxism: An Englishman Looks at the Soviet
Origins of Political Correctness, American
Renaissance 10, no. 11 (November 1999).
48. Pierre Bourdieu, Sketch for a SelfAnalysis (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007).
49. Gloria Anzalda., Borderlands: La
Frontera, 2nd ed. (San Fransciso: Aunt Lute
Books, 1999), 60.
50. On the other hand, critical race
formulations about U.S. law, as we have seen,
are often relevant to the constitutions and legal
systems of the other colonial-settler states of
the Americas, such as Brazil.
51. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance:
Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York:
New Press, 1999), 19.
52. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
258259.
53. We are thinking here of such gures as
Howard Zinn, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis,
Kimberl Crenshaw, Howard Winant, Ruth
Gilmore, Herman Grey, Wahneema Lubiano,
Manning Marable, Robin D.G. Kelly, Lisa
Lowe, David Lloyd, Ramn Salvdar, Ramn
Grosfoguel, David Roediger, George Lipsitz,
Juan Flores, Avery Gordon, and countless others.
313
54. See Michel Wieviorka, ed., Une Socit

Fragmente? Le Multiculturalisme en Dbat
(Paris: La Dcouverte, 1996).
55. George Ydice, A Globalizao e a
Difuso da Teoria Ps-Colonial, in Cnones e
Contextos: 5o Congresso ABRALICAnais (Rio
de Janeiro: Abralic, 1997).
56. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991);
and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
57. Cusset, French Theory, 83.
58. Jodi Dean, ieks Politics (London:
Routledge, 2006), xii.
59. Slavoj iek, Multiculturalism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,
New Left Review 225 (1997): 42.
60. Matt Taibbi, Griftopia (New York:
Spiegel and Grau, 2010), 209.
61. iek, Multiculturalism, 44.
62. Ibid., 44.
63. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel
Writing and Transculturation (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 197.
64. See also our discussion of the whiteness
of the musicals utopia. Ella Shohat and Robert
Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (New York:
Routledge, 1994).
65. We ourselves have examined the imperial gaze and the normative regard toward the
Third World as it operates in TV network
news, in Hollywood westerns, and in First
World lms set in the Third World. See our
Unthinking Eurocentrism.
66. iek, Multiculturalism, 47.
67. Slavoj iek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with iek (Malden, MA: Polity), 134.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 144.
70. See J. Ayerza, Hidden Prohibitions and
the Pleasure Principle (interview with iek,
1992), quoted in Ian Parker, Slavoj iek: A
Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2004).
71. William David Hart, Slavoj iek and
the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion,
Notes to Chapter 4
Nepantla 3, no. 3 (2002): 568.

72. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of
Christian Europe (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1965), 911.
73. Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man:
The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in
The Location of Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), 8592.
74. Chinua Achebe, The Education of a
British-Protected Child (New York: Knopf,
2009), 120.
75. Ho Chi Minh quoted in Phyllis Taoua,
Forms of Protest (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), 51.
76. See Slavoj iek, The Fragile Absolute,
or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
For? (London: Verso, 2000).
77. Slavoj iek, A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism, Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (Summer
1998): 988.
78 .Ibid., 1008, 1001.
79. Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and
Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 306.
80. iek, A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism, 1006.
81. Ibid., 989.
82. iek and Daly, Conversations with
iek, 147.
83. We refer here to Erich Auerbachs
famous comparison of Racine and Shakespeare
in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton
84. Slavoj iek, First as Tragedy, Then as
Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 33.
85. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers:
An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006).
86. Slavoj iek, First as Tragedy, Then as
Farce, 97.
87. Ibid., 102.
88. For work on the commons, see Peter
Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto
(Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009), 6.
89. iek, First as Tragedy, 111.
90. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel and Haiti,
314
Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (Summer 2000):

821865.
91. iek, First as Tragedy, 113.
92. Ibid., 114.
93. Ibid., 115.
94. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987), 36.
1. See Thomas Brisson, Les Intellectuels
Arabes en France (Paris: La Dispute, 2008).
2. Anouar Abdel-Malek, Orientalism
in Crisis, in Alexander Lyon Mace, ed.,
Orientalism: A Reader (New York: NYU Press,
2001), 51.
3. See Abdallah Laroui, La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes: Traditionalisme ou Historicisme?
(Paris: Franois Maspero, 1974).
4. Genet quoted in Edmund White, Jean
Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1994),
522.
5. See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the
East (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 321.
6. See Kristin Ross, May 68 and Its
Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 158169.
7. In the United States, intellectuals spoke
of the lap-dissolve, expressed in an inversion
of letters, from the demonizations of the CP
(the Communist Party, i.e., lefties) to the
demonization of PC (political correctness).
8. Pascal Bruckner, Le Sanglot de LHomme
Blanc: Tiers-Monde, Culpabilit, Haine de Soi
(Paris: Seuil, 1983).
9. Ibid., 156.
10. Michael Rothberg calls Papon the
material embodiment of the links between
the Holocaust and the violence of colonialism.
Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009),
235.
11. The issue of Les Temps Modernes
containing Sartres essay on this pogrom was
seized by Papon.
Notes to Chapter 4
12. Bruckner, Le Sanglot de LHomme Blanc,

12.
13. Ibid., 156. It is not clear how Bruckner
could make such sweeping claims about how
vast cultural complexes have seen each other.
Such claims presume not only the essential
transhistorical stability of cultures but also
an omniscient European capacity to enter
into other cultures, then manage to see them
through their collective eyes, and then return
to ones own set of collective eyes, only to
conclude that ones own group alone is capable
of seeing themselves through others eyes.
14. Ross, May 68 and Its Afterlives, 163.
15. A good example of European good cop
domination is the EU policy (which is similar
to U.S. policies) called CAP, or Common
Agricultural Policy, whereby subsidies and
taris richly reward European farmers (i.e.,
agribusiness) while depressing world food
prices and undercutting African exports, thus
impoverishing Africa.
(Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2007), 88.
17. Slavoj iek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with iek (Malden, MA: Polity), 129.
18. David Blatt, Immigrant Politics in a
Republican Nation, in Alec G. Hargreaves and
Mark McKinney, eds., Post-colonial Cultures in
France (London: Routledge, 1997), 40.
19. Ibid.
20. Begag, Ethnicity and Equality, 17.
21. Jim Cohen, Postcolonial Colonialism?,
Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 2,
no. 1 (2007).
22. Herman Lebovics, Bringing the Empire
Back Home (Durham: Duke University Press,
2004), 132.
23. Following up on his earlier argument
that African Americans had reintroduced
barbarism into the midst of Western civilization, DSouza has recently argued that Obama
channels the anticolonialism of his Kenyan
father so that the U.S. is being ruled according
to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s.
See Dinesh DSouza, Obamas Problems
315
with Business, Forbes (September 27, 2010):

94. Reective of the rights capacity to place
the preternaturally calm Obama within the
angry black man paradigm, DSouza titled his
forthcoming book The Roots of Obamas Rage.
24. The American right-wing spoof on PC,
The Ocial Politically Correct Dictionary and
Handbook, was translated into French in 1992,
apparently taken by some French readers not
as cynical parody but as a work of Zolaesque
naturalism.
25. Tzvetan Todorov, Du Culte de la Diffrence la Sacralisation de la Victime, Esprit
212 (1995): 98.
26. Todorov cited in Bashir EbrahimKhan, Is Islamophobia in Europe Leading
to Another Holocaust?, Muslim News 201
( January 27, 2006), http://www.muslimnews.
co.uk/paper/index.php?article=2274.
27. See Todorov, Du Culte de la Dirence
la Sacralisation de la Victime.
28. The word hysteria, as feminists have
long pointed out, traces back etymologically
to womb in Greek and thus blames women
themselves for their medical problem.
29. Franoise Giroud, Le Nouvel Observateur (March 1999).
30. Joan Wallach Scott, Parit! Sexual
Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005),
71.
31. Michel Wieviorka, introduction to
Wieviorka, ed., Une Socit Fragmente? Le
Multiculturalisme en Dbat (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1996), 56.
32. Clarisse Fabre and ric Fassin, Libert,
galit, Sexualits: Actualit Politique des Questions Sexuelles (Paris: Belfond, 2004).
33. See Jean-Philippe Mathy, Extrme-Occident: French Intellectuals and America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 7.
34. Ibid.
35. Herman Lebovics, True France: The
Wars over Cultural Identity, 19001945 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992), xiii.
36. Jim Cohen, Postcolonial Colonialism?
37. David Blatt, Immigrant Politics in
Notes to Chapter 5
a Republican Nation, in Hargreaves and

McKinney, Post-colonial Cultures in France, 40.
38. Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader
sum up the historical-ideological logics that
explain the present-day elision of race: (1) the
strength of the founding myth of the republic
as unitary and inclusive, with little room for
group dierences; (2) the tradition of Jacobin
hostility to the church as an authority in the
public sphere and the consequent relegation
of matters of faith to the private sphere;
(3) the Dreyfussard legacy of combating
anti-Semitism through race-blind and religionblind universalism. See Herrick Chapman and
Laura L. Frader, introduction to Chapman and
Frader, eds., Race in France: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on the Politics of Dierence (New
York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 4.
39. Ibid.
40. Jean-Philippe Mathy, French Resistance:
The French-American Culture Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000),
15.
41. Ibid., 14.
42. Merzak Allouaches lm Salut Cousin!
oers a striking example of this awkward
t when the aspiring rapper Mok, in a case
of misred syncretism, raps a song based
on La Fontaines fablesironically the one
(The Country Mouse and the City Mouse)
that reects his own relation to his country
cousinuntil he is nally booed o the stage
with shouts of on nest pas lcole! (were not
in grammar school!).
43. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, La Psychose
Franaise (Paris: Gallimard, 2006), 15.
44. See Elsa Vigoureux, Enfants du HipHop et de Derrida: Les Intellos du Rap, Le
Nouvel Observateur (May 18, 2006).
45. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Prehistory of
Novelistic Discourse (1940), in The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist,
trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
46. We are indebted here to Veronique
Helenons excellent overview of the French
rap scene in her Africa on Their Mind:
316
Rap, Blackness, and Citizenship in France,

in Dipannita Basu and Sidney J. Lemelle,
eds., The Vinyl Aint Final: Hip-Hop and the
Globalization of Black Popular Culture, 151166
(London: Pluto, 2006).
47. On French rap, see Charles Tshimanga,
Let the Music Play, in Charles Tshimanga,
Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds.,
Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity
and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
49. See Azouz Begag, Cest Quand il y en a
Beaucoup... (Paris: Belin, 2011).
50. Ann Coulter, This Is War: We Should
Invade Their Countries, National Review
Online (September 13, 2001), http://old.
nationalreview.com/coulter/coulter.shtml.
51. Cited in Jean Michel Blier and Solemn
de Royer, Discriminations Raciales, pour en
Finir (Paris: Jacob-Duvernet, 2001), 19.
52. Ibid., 8283.
53. Anti-immigrant and racist sentiments
are clearly registered in French polls. A study
by the National Human Rights Commission dated March 15, 2000, revealed that 70
percent of French people consider themselves
racist. Polls also reveal the extent to which a
larger public has absorbed the anti-immigrant
discourses of the right. While many French
whites might be hostile to Le Pen, 48 percent
of them agree with the proposition that
because of immigrants, one no longer feels
at home in France, while 63 percent nd that
there are too many immigrants in France.
TNS-Sofres Institute research carried out by
Le Monde and RTL, cited in Durpaire, France
Blanche, Colre Noire, 23.
54. Durpaire, France Blanche, Colre Noire,
184.
55. See Isabelle Rigoni, ed., Qui a Peur de
la Tlvision en Couleurs? (Paris: Aux Lieux
dtre, 2007).
56. Yazid Sabeg and Yacine Sabeg, Discrimination Positive: Pourquoi la France Ne Peut Y
chapper (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2004), 110.
Notes to Chapter 5
58. A Michael Moore television sketch

showed the magic by which an object seen as
innocent in white hands (a wallet, a beeper, a
cell phone) becomes something threatening in
the hands of blacks, at least within the warped
vision of police. Michael Moore, Dont Shoot,
Its Only a Wallet!, The Awful Truth, season 2,
episode 2, Bravo (May 24, 2000).
59. Alain Badiou, Polemics (London: Verso,
2006), 112113.
60. Ibid.
61. Jonathan Schorsch traces Jews ambiguous relation to whiteness all the way back to
the 17th century. See Jews and Blacks in the
Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge
62. James Baldwin, Negroes Are AntiSemitic Because Theyre Anti-White, in Paul
Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and
Arguments (New York: Delacorte, 1967), 41.
63. Hannah Arendt, Reections on Little
Rock, Dissent 6, no. 1 (1959).
64. Jews have a very long history in Africa.
Apart from Ethiopian Jews and the Jews of North
Africa, in the early 1990s geneticists discovered
that 9 percent of the men from the Lemba
people of South Africa carry a DNA signature
characteristic of the cohanim, the hereditary
caste descended from the biblical Aaron. See
Richard Hull, Jews and Judaism in African History
(Princeton, NJ: Marcus Weiner, 2009), 173.
65. See Jan Carew, Fulcrums of Change
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World, 1988).
66. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire:
The New World, Islam, and European Identities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
67. Anouar Majid, We Are All Moors
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009), 10. For an illuminating discussion of the
same issue of Andalusia and Moorishness in the
Americas, see Hishaam Aidi, The Interface of
al-Andalous: Spain, Islam, and the West, Social
Text 87, vol. 24, no. 2 (summer 2006).
68. See Gilberto Freyre, Orient and
Occident, chap. 9 in The Mansions and the
Shanties (New York: Knopf, 1963).
69. Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties, 297.
317
70. Ibid.
71. Jos Mart, Espaa en Melilla, in Cuba:
Letras, vol. 2 (Havana: Edicion Tropico, 1938);
Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror (New York:
First Mariner Books, 1999).
72. See Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves,
especially the chapter The Portuguese
Colonizer.
73. See ibid., chap. 9. For more on the
notion of the Moorish/Sepahrdic Atlantic and
the question of Orientalism, see Ella Shohat,
The Moorish Atlantic, in Evelyn Alsultany
and Ella Shohat, eds., The Cultural Politics of
the Middle East in the Americas (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2012).
74. On the hyphen in the Judeo-Muslim
and the Arab-Jew, see Ella Shohat, Rethinking Jews and Muslims MERIP 178 (1992):
2529; and Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories,
Diasporic Visions: Columbus, Palestine and
Arab-Jews, in May Joseph and Jennifer Fink,
eds., Performing Hybridity, 131156 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
75. See, for example, Allan Harris Cutler
and Helen Elmquist Cutler, The Jew as Ally of
the Muslim (Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1986); Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews
and Arabs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Majid, We Are All Moors.
76. Gil Anidjar, Postface: Reexions sur la
Question, in Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe Attias, Juifs et Musulmans: Une Histoire
Partage, un Dialogue Construire (Paris: La
Dcouverte, 2006), 130.
77. On the splitting of the Jew and the Arab,
see Edward Saids Orientalism (New York:
Vintage, 1979); and on the place of the Arab-Jew
as part of the splitting, see Ella Shohats Israeli
Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989);
and Ella Shohat, Columbus, Palestine, and Arab
Jews: Toward a Relational Approach to Community Identity, in Keith Ansell-Pearson, Benita
Parry, and Judith Squires, eds., Cultural Readings
of Imperialism (London: Lawrence & Wishart in
association with New Formations, 1997).
78. See Domenico Losurdo, A Linguagem
Notes to Chapter 5
do Imprio, trans. Jaime A. Clasen (So Paulo:

Boitempo, 2010).
79. See Aim Csaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972),
1415.
80. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; repr., New York: Harcourt,
1973).
81. Quoted in Jean-Luc Einaudi, La Bataille
de Paris, 17 Octobre 1961 (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 225.
82. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 122.
83. Ibid.
84. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew:
An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (1948;
repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 108.
86. Ibid., 93.
87. Ibid., 165.
88. Ibid., 157.
89. For a complex and subtle mapping of the
similarities and dierences between various racisms, sexisms, and homophobias, see Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl, The Anatomy of Prejudices
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
90. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
162163.
91. Michael Rothberg argues strongly against
this zero-sum approach, favoring instead what
he calls multidirectional memory, whereby the
oppressive experiences of diverse groups are
interarticulated within a malleable discursive
space where positions come into being through
their interactions with others. Rothberg,
Multidirectional Memory, 5.
93. See Peter Geismar, Frantz Fanon (New
York: Dial, 1971), 139140.
94. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (New York: Picador, 2000), 467468.
95. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses,
vol. 2 (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1971), 243.
96. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 467468.
97. See Yair Auron, Les Juifs dExtrme
Gauche en Mai 68 (Paris: Albin Miche, 1998).
98. See Albert Memmi, Decolonization and
the Decolonized (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2006).
318
99. Bruckner, Les Sanglots de LHomme

Blanc, 219.
100. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End
to Evil (New York: Random House, 2003), 9.
101. Pascal Bruckner, La Tentation de
LInnocence (Paris: Grasset, 1995).
102. In domestic electoral terms, American
Jews have remained overwhelmingly liberal,
including in their support for Obama. See
2010 Annual Survey of American Jewish
Opinion, commissioned by American
Jewish Committee, Consumer Opinion Panel,
Obama Administration (April 2010).
103. Finkielkraut interviewed by Dror
Mishani and Aurlia Samothraiz, They Are
Not Miserable, They Are Muslims, Haaretz
(November 15, 2005). All translations from
this interview in Hebrew are ours
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Complete transcript available at http://
lesogres.org.
107. Alain Finkielkraut and Peter Sloterdijk,
Les Battements du Monde (Paris: Pauvert,
2003), 38.
108. For further elaboration, see the
following works by Ella Shohat: Le Sionisme
du Point de Vue de ses Victimes Juives: Les
Juifs Orientaux en Isral (Paris: La Fabrique
Editions, 2006) and also the original essay, Ella
Shohat, Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from
the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims, Social
Text 1920 (Fall 1988); Israeli Cinema (1989),
and the new edition (London: I.B. Tauris,
2010); Taboo Memories, Diasporic Visions:
Columbus, Palestine and Arab-Jews (1997)
and Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse
and the Study of Arab-Jews (2001), both
reprinted in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
109. Finkielkraut and Sloterdijk, Les Battements du Monde, 47.
110. Jean Daniel, La Prison Juive (Paris:
Odile Jacob, 2003).
111. Jean Birnbaum, Les Maoccidents: Un
Noconservatisme la Franaise (Paris: Stock,
2009).
Notes to Chapter 5
112. Ivan Segr, La Raction Philosmite, ou,

La Trahison des Clercs (Paris: Lignes, 2009).
113. See Guillaume Weill-Raynal, Une
Haine Imaginaire: Contre-Enqute sur le Nouvel
Antismitisme (Paris: Colin, 2005).
114. See Guillaume Weill-Raynal, Les
Nouveaux Dsinformateurs (Paris: Colin, 2007).
115. Kacem, La Psychose Franaise, 52.
116. Christopher Wise, Derrida, Africa, and
the Middle East (New York: Palgrave, 2009).
117. Jolle Marelli, Usages et Malces du
Thme de lAnti-Smitisme..., in Nacira
Gunif-Souilamas, ed., La Rpublique Mise
Nu par son Immigration (Paris: La Fabrique,
2006), 136.
118. As we learn Leila Shahids The Slums,
the Near East, and Us [Les Banlieues, le ProcheOrient et Nous] (Paris: ditions de LAtelier,
2006), Shahid, former spokesperson for the
Palestinian Authority in France, Michael
Warschawski, French Israeli founder of the
Alternative Information Center ( Jerusalem),
and Dominique Vidal, editor of Le Monde
Diplomatique, visited the banlieues in order to
advance mutual understanding between Arabs
and Jews.
119. Daniel Lindenberg, Destins Marranes:
Lidentit Juive en Question (Paris: Hachette,
2004).
120. Daniel Lindenberg, Figures dIsral:
Lidentit Juive entre Marranisme et Sionisme
(16481998) (Paris: Hachette, 1997).
121. Esther Benbassa and Jean-Christophe
Attias, The Jew and the Other (Ithaca: Cornell
122. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors
of Jews: Racial Politics and Radical Diasporism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2007), 199.
123. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds.,
Wrestling with Zion (New York: Grove, 2003);
Adam Shatz, ed., Prophets Outcast: A Century
of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and
Israel (New York: Nation Books, 2004); and
Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews.
124. Kacem, La Psychose Franaise, 52.
125. Fred Constant, Le Multiculturalisme
319
(Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 35.

126. Ibid., 37.
127. Paul Thibaut, Exception Franaise!,
Gopolitique ( JanuaryMarch 2005).
128. Ibid.
1. Antonio Srgio Alfredo Guimares,
The Race Issue in Brazilian Politics (the
Last Fifteen Years), paper presented at the
conference Fifteen Years of Democracy in
Brazil, University of London, Institute of
Latin American Studies, London, February
1516, 2001.
2. Quoted in Ricardo Gaspar Mller, O
Teatro Experimental do Negro, in Mller, ed.,
Dionysos 28 (1988) (special issue on the Black
Experimental Theatre).
3. Abdias do Nascimento, preface to Sortilegio II (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1979), 28.
4. Abdias do Nascimento, editorial,
Quilombo (December 1948).
5. Ibid.
6. The overture editorial, and all the essays
mentioned here, are assembled in the facsimile
edition by Antonio Srgio Alfredo Guimares.
See Quilombo: Vida, Problemas, e Aspiraes do
Negro (So Paulo: Editora 34, 2003).
7. Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin
Nascimento, Reections on the Black Movement in Brazil, 19381997, in Antonio Srgio
Alfredo Guimares and Lynn Huntley, eds.,
Tirando a Mscara: Ensaios sobre o Racismo no
Brasil (So Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000), 221222.
8. Ibid., 228229.
9. Peter Fry, preface to Yvonne Maggie and
Claudia Barcellos Rezende, eds., Raa como
Retrica: A Construo da Diferena [Race as
Rhetoric: The Construction of Dierence]
(Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira, 2002).
10. Howard Winant, citing the research of
Maria Ercilia do Nascimento, lists the groups
in The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy
since World War II (New York: Basic Books,
2001), 233.
11. On the afox groups, see Christopher
Dunn, Afro-Bahian Carnival: A Stage for
Notes to Chapter 6
Protest, Afro-Hispanic Review 11, nos. 13

(1992).
12. Freyre quoted in Michael Hanchard,
Orpheus and Power (Princeton: Princeton
13. Ibid., 142
14. Ibid.
15. S.M.C. Lima, Multiculturalismo, in
Jos Teixeira Coelho Netto, ed., Dicionrio
Crtico de Poltica Cultural (So Paulo: Iluminuras, 1997), 263265.
16. The authors e-mail correspondence with
Italo Moriconi.
17. Leyla Perrone-Moiss, Atlas Literaturas:
Escolha e Valor na Obra Crtica de Escritores
Modernos (So Paulo: Cia das Letras 1998).
18. In To Wake the Nations: Race and the
Making of American Literature (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1993), Sundquist points out the ways that
Melville can be usefully seen as a black writer.
19. Perrone-Moiss, Atlas Literaturas.
20. The authors e-mail correspondence
with Italo Moriconi.
21. Caetano Veloso, Verdade Tropical (So
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 270;
Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans: New
Perspectives on Black Experiences and American
Culture (New York: Vintage, 1970), 22.
22. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History,
trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956).
23. Jess Souza, O Casamento Secreto
entre Identidade Nacional e Teoria Emocional
da Ao ou por que To Difcil o Debate
Aberto e Crtico entre Ns, in Jess Souza,
ed., A Invisibilidade da Desigualdade Brasileira
(Belo Horizonte, Brazil: UFMG, 2006), 100.
24. For a sophisticated critique of
comparison as a method and of ethnocentrism
in comparative Brazil-U.S. studies, see Micol
Siegel, Uneven Encounters: Making Race
and Nation in Brazil and the United States
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
25. Joo Capistrano de Abreu, epigraph in
Paulo Prados Retrato do Brasil (1928; repr., So
Paulo: IBDC, 1981).
320
26. Jos Guilherme Merquior, Saudades do

Carnaval (Rio de Janeiro: Forense, 1972), 117.
27. For a comprehensive comparative analysis of racial formation in the two countries, see
G. Reginald Daniels Race and Multiraciality
in Brazil and the United States: Converging
Paths? (University Park: Pennsylvania State
28. Ibid., 115.
29. Ibid., 87.
30. Ibid.
31. See Eugene Robinson, Disintegration
(New York: Doubleday, 2010), 10.
32. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship:
2008), 281.
33. Nei Lopes, O Racismo: Explicado aos
Meus Filhos (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 2007), 151.
34. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship, 277.
35. See Alexei Barrionnuevo, Group Questions Killings by Brazilian Police, New York
Times (December 9, 2009): A12.
36. Edward Telles, in Race in Another
America, uses the spatial metaphor of vertical
and horizontal social relations to clarify
some of these contradictions. In terms of
vertical power relations, Brazil is one of the
most unequal countries in the world, with
nonwhites at the bottom of a grossly distorted
economic pyramid, making the vertical
exclusion of mulattos and, especially, blacks
... greater than vertical exclusion for blacks in
the United States. For Telles, three factors
hyperinequality, a discriminatory glass ceiling,
and a racist cultureare responsible for this
vertical inequality. Edward Ellis Telles, Race in
Another America: The Signicance of Skin Color
in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 220224.
37. Antonio Guimares, quoting Srgio
Costa, A Construo Sociolgica da Raa no
Brasil (Estudos Afro-Asiticos 1 [2002]), in
Guimares and Huntley, Tirando a Mscara,
28.
38. Antonio Risrio, A Utopia Brasileira e
Notes to Chapter 6
os Movimentos Negros (So Paulo: Editora 34,

2007), 15.
39. Ibid., 381.
40. African American discourse, meanwhile,
might be said to be Asante-centric, given the
key role of Ghana in pan-Africanism.
41. Risrio, A Utopia Brasileira, 148.
42. On cultural capital, see Pierre
Bourdieu, Cultural Reproduction and Social
Reproduction, in R. Brown, ed., Knowledge,
Education, and Social Change: Papers in the
Sociology of Education, 71112 (London:
Tavistock, 1973).
43. Risrio, A Utopia Brasileira, 212.
44. Hermano Vianna, Mestiagem Fora de
Lugar, Folha de So Paulo ( June 27, 2004).
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Srgio Costa, Dois Atlnticos: Teoria
Social, Anti-racismo, Cosmopolitanismo (Belo
Horizonte, Brazil: UFMG, 2006), 216.
48. Brazilian musicians and musicologists
have commented on this shared feature of the
two traditions. Composer and literary scholar
Z Miguel Wisnik notes that European
intellectuals are sometimes surprised that
popular music in Brazil can dialogue with
erudite traditions and thus produce something
new. See Santuza Cambraia Naves, Frederico
Oliveira Coelho, and Tatiana Bacal, eds., A
MPB em Discusso: Entrevistas (Belo Horizonte,
Brazil: UFMG, 2006). Even Chico Buarque, an
anti-American in political terms, recognizes this
commonality with the United States: [Whereas
in Europe] popular music is relegated, with few
exceptions, to an artistic subworld, considered as
basically an industrial and commercial product
and nothing more, ... in Brazil there is more
malleability. ... In this sense [the Americans]
are closer to us. Ibid., 166167.
49. See Rita Amaral and Vagner Gonalves
da Silva, Foi Conta para Todo Canto: As
Religies Afro-Brasileiras nas Letras do Repertrio Musical Popular Brasileiro, Afro-sia
34 (2006): 189235. See also Zeca Ligeiros
NYU Ph.D. dissertation in performance
321
studies: Carmen Miranda: An Afro-Brazilian

Paradox.
50. Five hundred years of coexistence among
indigenous peoples, Africans, Europeans, and
Asians in the Americas have also generated an
innite variety of forms of cultural syncretism
and transformation. This mixedness characterizes both hemispheres and has found manifold
expressions in art, whether in European/indigene romances such as that of Diogo lvares
and Paraguau in 16th-century Brazil or Corts
and Malinche in 16th-century Mexico, or
Pocahantas and John Smith (later John Rolfe)
in 17th-century North America. Brazilian lms
such as Caramuru: The Invention of Brazil or
How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman, Venezuelan lms such as Jeric, and American lms
such as Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse
tell stories of white Indians who assimilated to
native ways. The narrative arts of the Americas
proliferate in mutational ctions that point to
the instability of racial identity and identication. In such ctions, characters undergo racial
metamorphoses, exceeding the rigidities of
racial classication. The chameleonic characters
of lms such as Macunaima in Brazil or Zelig
in the United States literally change color and
culture. Such racial metamorphoses render visible and palpable a process that usually remains
invisiblethe process of synchresis when
ethnicities brush up against and rub o on
one another in the context of centuries of asymmetrical cultural contact between Europeans,
Native Americans, and Africans. The theme
of racial transformation comes up in manifold
ways in U.S. popular culture, most obvious,
perhaps, in the theme of passing, whether in
such classical race melodramas as Imitation of
Life or in contemporary novels such as Philip
Roths The Human Stain, the story of a New
Yorker writer (Anatole Broyard) who passed as
white. In Palindromes, performers of dierent
colors play the same character, while in Im Not
There, various performers, including a black
teenager and a woman, incarnate the role of
Bob Dylan. In Soul Man, a white student black-
Notes to Chapter 6
ens up to take advantage of Armative Action.

Patrick Swayze inhabits Whoopi Goldbergs
body in Ghost. In the cable-television show
Quantum Leap, white protagonists leap into
other peoples bodies. In Coming Down to Earth,
Chris Rock dies and comes back in the form
of an old white man. The African American
performance artist Anna Deveare Smith
incarnates a wide gallery of ethnicities in her
one-woman performances such as Fires in the
Mirror and Twilight. The humorous aspect of
these various ethnic encounters is the basis of
much of the sketch comedy of Richard Pryor,
Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Wanda Sykes,
and Dave Chappelle.
51. George Ydice, The Expediency of Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 154.
52. Over recent decades, the Tropicalists
gained more public notoriety not only through
their music but also because of Gils appointment as minister of culture in the Lula government, the publication in English of Caetanos
memoir Tropical Truth, and various Grammys
and lm appearances. Gil became embroiled
in the debates about digital copyright law and
the ght, through Creative Commons, against
laws that privatize creativity through notions
of intellectual property rights. Just as Gil had
earlier said in a song that he wrote music to be
heard on the radio, in Pela Internet (On the
Internet), Gil multiculturalizes the discussion
of the Net by linking it to the Afro-Brazilian
culture of oriki and orixas, which were also
concerned with media and communication.
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 105.
54. Ned Sublette, Principles of Postmamboism, BoingBoing (blog), December 15, 2009,
http://boingboing.net/2009/12/15/principlesof-postma.html.
55. Liv Sovik develops the lied association
in Aqui Ningum Branco (Rio de Janeiro:
Aeroplano, 2010), along with a probing analysis
of the cultural politics of Brazilian popular
music.
56. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony
Jeerson, John N. Clarke, and Brian Roberts,
322
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law

and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
57. In Brazil, blackface was not common,
but in one instance the black community did
protest the casting of a white actor in blackface
in a Brazilian television version of Uncle Toms
Cabin. See Joel Zito Arajos lm A Negao
do Brasil (2000).
58. Caetano Veloso, Tropial Truth: A Story
of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York:
Random House, 2002), 7. For an illuminating
analysis of Caetanos work, including of Um
ndio, see Guilherme Wisnik, Caetano Veloso
(So Paulo: PubliFolha, 2005).
59. Fry, preface to Raa como Retrica, 8.
60. Olvia Maria Gomes da Cunha, Bonde
do Mal: Notas sobre Territrios, Cor, Violncia,
e Juventude numa Favela do Subrbio Carioca,
in Maggie and Rezende, Raa como Retrica, 86.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
1. See Raymond A. Winbush, introduction
to Winbush, ed., Should America Pay? Slavery
and the Raging Debate on Reparations (New
York: HarperCollins, 2003), xii.
2. Nabuco quoted in Liv Sovik, Aqui
Ningum Branco (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano,
2010), 146.
3. Kimberl Williams Crenshaw, Race,
Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation
and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,
Harvard Law Review 101 (May 1988): 1331.
4. For a comparative study of remedial
measures, consult Charles V. Hamilton, Lynn
Huntley, Neville Alexander, Antonio Srgio
Alfredo Guimares, and Wilmot James, eds.,
Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil,
South Africa, and the United States (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001)
5. Dinesh DSouza, The End of Racism:
Principles for a Multiracial Society (New York:
Free Press, 1995), 537.
6. Frantz Fanon, Racism and Culture,
Prsence Africaine 810 (1956).
7. Gary Peller, Race against Integration,
Notes to Chapter 6
Tikkun 6, no. 1 ( JanuaryFebruary 1991):

5466.
8. See U.S. Mehta, Liberal Strategies of
Exclusion, Politics and Society 18, no. 4 (1990):
429430.
9. De Tocqueville quoted in William B.
Cohen, Franais et Africains: Les Noirs dans le
Regard des Blancs (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 273.
10. This skewed approach harmed not
only black individuals but also black nations.
Newly independent Haiti in 1804 was forced
to pay crippling indemnities for the crime of
defeating the French and creating a republic
modeled, ironically, on the French republic
itself. It was these indemnities, and subsequent hostile actions by the United States,
that left Haiti in its present shell-shocked and
famished state. (In 2003, President JeanBertrand Aristide asked France to reimburse
Haiti to the tune of $21 billion, for the
Independence Debt.)
11. See Ira Katznelson, When Armative
Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial
Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New
York: Norton, 2005).
12. William Julius Wilson, More Than Just
Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
(New York: Norton, 2009), 2829.
13. See Rosana Heringer, Mapeamento das
Aes e Discursos de Combate s Desigualdades Raciais no Brasil, Estudos Afro-Asiticos
23, no. 2 (2001): 143.
14. See Joaquim B. Barbosa Gomes, Aes
Armativas, Aspectos Jurdicos, in Giralda
Seyferth et al., Racismo no Brasil (So Paulo:
Editora Fundao Petrpolis, 2000), 140.
15. Jos Jorge de Carvalho, Incluso tnica e
Racial no Brasil: A Questo das Cotas no Ensino
Superior (So Paulo: Attar, 2005), 60.
16. Ibid., 61.
17. Kimberl Crenshaw, National Public
Radios Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate, Its
Time to End Armative Action, moderated
by John Donovan, presented by Rosenkranz
Foundation, November 13, 2007.
323

2008), 286.
19. This situation is shown in the 2007 PBS
documentary Brazil in Black and White.
20. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a
Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007).
21. Ali Kamel, No Somos Racistas: Uma
Reao aos que Querem nos Transformar numa
Nao Bicolor (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira,
2006).
22. See Peter Fry, Politics, Nationality, and
the Meaning of Race in Brazil, Daedalus 129,
no. 2 (2000): 91.
23. Nei Lopes, O Racismo Explicado aos
Meus Filhos (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 2007).
24. See Peter Fry, A Persistncia da Raa:
Ensaios Antropolgicos sobre o Brasil e a frica
Austral (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira,
2005).
25. See Joo Feres, Jr., Ao Armativa no
Brasil, Economica 6, no. 2 (December 2004):
291312.
26. Antonio Negri and Giuseppe Cocco,
GlobAL: Bipoder e Luta em Uma Amrica
Latina Globalizada (Rio de Janeiro: Record,
2005), 149.
27. Carvalho, Incluso tnica e Racial no
Brasil, 96.
28. Ibid., 61.
29. Carvalho, perhaps in an attempt to
distance the Brazilian model from the negative
image of the U.S. Civil Rights model, argues
that Armative Action in the United States is
co-optive and individualist, rooted in a competitive ethos of winners and losers, while the
Brazilian model is rooted in a societal choice
for change, an equality of results rather than
equal opportunity per se. At the same time,
he makes untenable generalizations such as
the claim that racial and ethnic minorities
blacks, Indians, Hispanics, Asiansnever
created a politicized common front based on
solidarity. Ibid., 125.
30. Ribeiro quoted in Larry Rohter, Brazil
on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed
(New York: Palgrave, 2010), 76.
Notes to Chapter 7

Brasil, 68.
32. Kamel, No Somos Racistas.
33. Ibid., 18.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. See George M. Fredrickson, Race and
Racism in Historical Perspective, in Hamilton
et al., Beyond Racism, 14.
37. In metaphorical terms, one might
suggest that white U.S. racism is like that of
a snake that hisses and kills with bites and
venom, while Brazilian racism is like that of
an anaconda that slowly strangles with its
suocating embrace.
38. Ania Loomba points out that this
American foil and a kind of Indian exceptionalism was even invoked by intellectuals
from India when the Dalit, a group of roughly
180 million people who are debarred by the
caste system from eating or studying with
upper-caste individuals, from marrying outside
their caste, from dressing above their station,
and from drawing water from the wrong well
and who regularly meet with hostility and even
lynching, went to the Durban Conference on
Racism and Xenophobia to protest racism
in India. To discuss caste as race, some left
intellectuals argued, was to follow an American
imperialist agenda. In terms reminiscent
of the Bourdieu argument against Michael
Hanchard (discussed in chapter 8), it was
argued that race, then, as a central category
for the struggle, may be self-evident in the US
context, but not as useful in other settings.
Vijay Prashad, Cataracts of Silence, quoted
in Ania Loomba, Race and the Possibilities of
Comparative Critique, New Literary History
40, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 510.
39. Kamel, No Somos Racistas, 20.
40. Ibid., 101.
41. Ibid. On the idea of neo-Freyrean, see
Christopher Dunns A Retomada Freyreana,
in Joshua Lund and Malcolm McNee, eds.,
Gilberto Freyre e os Estudos Latino-americanos
(Pittsburgh: Instituto de Literatura Iberoamer-
324
icana, 2006).
42. See Negri and Cocco, GlobAL, 76.
43. While the United States would indeed
do well to abandon all vestiges of the bicolor
model in favor of a nonassimilationist
spectrum model, Kamels warnings about
a new apartheid seem to imply that the
mere introduction of some Armative
Action measures will put Brazil on a reverse
historical path toward legal segregation, even
though these measures were meant to combat
segregation. The reasoning here seems rather
opaque.
44. David R. Roediger, introduction to
Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers
on What It Means to Be White (New York:
Schocken Books, 1998), 3.
45. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract
46. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of White
Folk, originally published as an article in
Independent (August 18, 1910) and republished
in Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the
Veil (1920; repr., New York: Dover, 1999), 17.
47. Du Bois, Darkwater, 18.
48. Ibid.
49. Frazier quoted in Stephen Steinberg,
Race Relations: A Critique (Stanford: Stanford
50. Ibid., 64.
51. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told
Me (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995),
171177.
52. Victor Hugo quoted in ibid., 179
53. David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist (New York: Knopf, 2005), 106.
54. Douglass quoted in ibid., 104.
55. Malcolm X quoted in ibid., 498.
56. Lerone Bennett, Jr., quoted in ibid., 504.
57. See David Roediger, The Wages of
Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991) and
Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London:
Verso, 1994).
58. Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White
Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britains White
Notes to Chapter 7
Slaves in America (New York: NYU Press,

2007), 12.
59. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the
White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in
Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 1994); Noel
Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New
York: Routledge, 1995).
60. Caren Kaplan, Beyond the Pale:
Rearticulating U.S. Jewish Whiteness, in Ella
Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural
Feminism in a Transnational Age, 451458
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
61. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race
Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
62. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment
in Whiteness: How White People Benet
from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1998), vii.
63. Ibid.
64. In What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture?, Stuart Hall speaks of the end of
the innocence of the black subject, or the end
of the innocent notion of an essential black
subject. Stuart Hall, What Is This Black in
Black Popular Culture?, Social Justice 20, nos.
12 (SpringSummer 1993): 112.
65. See Jerey D. Needell, History, Race,
and the State in the Thought of Oliveira
Vianna, Hispanic American Historical Review
75, no. 1 (1995): 15.
66. Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Introduo
Crtica Sociologia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro:
UFRJ, 1995), 220.
67. Ramos quoted in Iray Carone and Maria
Aparecida Silva Bento, introduction to Carone
and Bento, eds., Psicologia Social do Racism:
Estudos sobre Branquitude e Branqueamento
no Brasil [The Social Psychology of Racism:
Studies on Whiteness and Whitening in
Brazil] (Petrpolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2003), 47.
68. See Carvalho, Incluso tnica e Racial no
Brasil, 9193.
69. Carone and Bento, introduction to
Psicologia Social do Racism.
325
70. Edith Piza, Branco no Brasil? Ningum Sabe, Ningum Viu, in Antonio Srgio
Alfredo Guimares and Lynn Huntley, eds.,
Tirando a Mscara: Ensaios sobre o Racismo
no Brasil, 97126 (So Paulo: Paz e Terra,
2000).
71. Rita Segato, The Color-Blind Subject of
Myth, or, Where to Find Africa in the Nation,
Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 147.
72. Marco Frenette, Preto e Branco: A
Importncia da Cor da Pele (So Paolo: Editora
Brasil, 2001), 21.
73. Ibid., 22.
74. Ibid., 29.
75. Ibid., 31.
76. Ibid., 54.
77. Ibid., 6566.
Brasil, 102.
79. Ibid.
80. John M. Novell, Uncomfortable Whiteness of the Brazilian Middle Class, in Yvonne
Maggie and Claudia Barcellos Rezende, eds.,
Raa como Retrica: A Construo da Diferena
[Race as Rhetoric: The Construction of Dierence] (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira,
2002).
81. See Angela Gilliam, Womens Equality
and National Liberation, in Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres,
eds., Third World Women and the Politics of
Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1991), 60.
82. Novell, Uncomfortable Whiteness.
83. Darcy Ribeiro, O Povo Brasileiro: A
Formao e o Sentido do Brasil (So Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 1995), 239.
84. Novell, Uncomfortable Whiteness, 257.
85. Elisa Larkin Nascimento, O Sortilgio da
Cor: Identidade, Raa e Gnero no Brasil (So
Paulo: Summus, 2003).
86. Sovik, Aqui Ningum Branco.
87. Patricia Pinho, meanwhile, points to the
process by which many Brazilian immigrants
to the United States become unwhitened.
Patricia de Santana Pinho, Reinvenes da
Notes to Chapter 7
frica na Bahia (So Paulo: Annablume,

2004), 219.
88. Kia Lilly Caldwell, Negras in Brazil: Reenvisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the
Politics of Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers
89. Sovik, Aqui Ningum Branco, 69.
90. Caetano Veloso quoted in ibid., 71.
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 505.
92. Sovik, Aqui Ningum Branco, 147.
93. Alexandra Poli, Faire Face au Racisme
en France et au Brsil: De la Condamnation
Morale lAide aux Victimes, Cultures and
Conicts 59 (2005): 15.
(Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2007), 116.
95. See Robert C. Lieberman, A Tale
of Two Countries: The Politics of ColorBlindness in France and the United States, in
Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader, eds.,
Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
the Politics of Dierence, 189216 (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004).
96. Erik Bleich, Anti-racism without Races:
Politics and Policy in a Color-Blind State, in
Chapman and Frader, Race in France, 166.
97. Gwnale Calvs, Color-Blindness at
a Crossroads in Contemporary France, in
Chapman and Frader, Race in France, 221.
98. Yazid Sabeg and Yacine Sabeg, Discrimination Positive: Pourquoi la France Ne Peut Y
chapper (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 2004).
99. See Lon-Franois Homan, Le Ngre
Romantique: Personnage Littraire et Obsession
Collective (Paris: Payot, 1973), 47.
100. Ibid.
101. De Gaulle quoted in Pascal Blanchard,
ric Deroo, and Gilles Manceron, Le Paris
Noir (Paris: Hazan, 2001), 154.
102. Ibid.
103. De Gaulle quoted in Jean-Baptiste
Onana, Sois Ngre et Tais-Toi! (Paris: ditions
du Temps, 2007), 61.
104. See Didier Gondola, Transient
Citizens: The Othering and Indigenization of
326
Blacks and Beurs within the French Republic,

in Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and
Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the African
Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2009), 162.
105. Ibid., 160.
107. Onana, Sois Ngre et Tais-Toi!.
108. Pap Ndiaye, La Condition Noire: Essai
sur une Minorit Franaise (Paris: CalmannLvy, 2008), 89.
109. Ibid., 107
110. Pierre Tvanian, La Mcanique Raciste
(Paris: Dilecta, 2008), 8.
111. Ibid., 74.
112. Franois Durpaire, France Blanche,
Colre Noire (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 13.
113. Ibid., 43.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 33.
117. Durpaire, France Blanche, Colre Noire,
85.
118. Ibid.
119. Franoise Vergs, La Mmoire
Enchane: Questions sur lEsclavage (Paris:
Albin Michel, 2006), 48.
120. Frdrique Mouzer and Charles
Onana, Un Racisme Franais (Nantes:
Duboiris, 2007).
1. One can distinguish between postcolonial as chronological marker and
postcolonial, sans hyphen, as referring to the
theory.
2. See Georges Balandier, Sociologie Actuelle
de lAfrique Noire: Dynamique Sociale en Afrique
Centrale (Paris: PUF, 1971).
3. Dino Costantini, Mission Civilisatrice: Le
Rle de lHistoire Coloniale dans la Construction de lIdentit Politique Franaise (Paris: La
4. In the case of Achille Mbembes De la
Postcolonie, for example, the book was rst
Notes to Chapter 7
written and published in French yet had more

impact through its English translation.
5. For a brilliant and comprehensive analysis
of these exchanges, see Franois Cussets
French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze,
& Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the
United States, trans. Je Fort (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
6. Nicolas Sarkozy, address at the University
of Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal ( July 26, 2007).
7. Makhily Gassama, ed., LAfrique Rpond
Sarkozy: Contre le Discours de Dakar (Paris:
Philippe Rey, 2008); Adame Ba Konar, ed.,
Petit Prcis de Remise Niveau sur LHistoire
Africaine lUsage du Prsident Sarkozy (Paris:
Le Dcouverte, 2008).
8. Nicolas Sarkozy, address to Union for a
Popular Movement, Paris (April 22, 2006).
9. See Alain Badiou, De Quoi Sarkozy Est-il
le Nom? (Paris: Lignes, 2007).
10. Seloua Luste Boulbina, Ce Que Postcolonie Veut Dire: Une Pense de la Dissidence,
Rue Descartes 58 (2006): 13.
11. Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en Finir avec
la Repentance Coloniale [To Put an End to
Colonial Repentance] (Paris: Flammarion,
2008), 13, 229.
12. Finkielkraut quoted in Costantini,
Mission Civilisatrice, 15. Such comments,
originally made in an interview with Haaretz
and subsequently reproduced in Le Monde
(November 24, 2005), provoked an enormous
polemic in France. In the United States,
meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, whose 1971 Ph.D.
thesis was a white mans burdenstyle defense
of Belgian colonial policy in the Congo, now
accuses Barack Obama of being a Kenyan
anticolonialist, a strange accusation from a
supporter of the Tea Party, since the original
Tea Party in Boston Harbor was nothing if not
anticolonialist.
13. Sarkozy quoted in Catherine Coquio,
introduction to Coquio, ed., Retours du
Colonial? Disculpation et Rhabilitation de
lHistoire Coloniale Franaise (Paris: LAtalante,
2008), 1415.
14. Jacqueline Bardolph, tudes Postcolonia-
327
les et Littrature (Paris: Honor Champion,

2002), 1718.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life [Vom
Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fr das
Leben] (1874), 187.
16. Anne Berger, Traverses de Frontires:
Postcolonialit et tudes de Genre en Amrique, Labyrinthe 24 (2006): 1137.
17. Rada Ivekovi, Langue Coloniale,
Langue Globale, Langue Locale, Rue Descartes
58 (2007): 2829.
18. Aim Csaire Refuse de Recevoir Nicolas Sarkozy, Le Monde (December 7, 2005).
19. For the full text of the appeal, see
Mouvement des Indignes de la Rpublique,
LAppel des Indignes de la Rpublique, June
12, 2006, http://www.indigenes-republique.
org/spip.php?article1.
20. Jean Daniel, Les Damns de la Rpubliques, Nouvel Observateur (March 9, 2005).
21. See Forence Bernault, Colonial
Syndrome, in Charles Tshimanga, Didier
Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom, eds., Frenchness
and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising
in Contemporary France (Bloomington: Indiana
22. Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and
Sandrine Lemaire, introduction to Blanchard,
Bancel, and Lemaire, eds., La Fracture
Coloniale: La Socit Franaise au Prisme de
lHritage Colonial (Paris: La Dcouverte,
2005), 1112.
23. On this last point, see Alexis Spire,
trangers la Carte: Ladministration de
lImmigration en France (19451975) (Paris:
Grasset, 2005), 268272.
24. Didier Lapeyronnie, La Banlieue
comme Thtre Colonial, ou la Fracture
Coloniale dans les Quartiers, in Blanchard,
Bancel, and Lemaire, La Fracture Coloniale, 214.
25. Pap Ndiaye, La Condition Noire: Essai
sur une Minorit Franaise (Paris: CalmannLvy, 2008), 346347.
26. Marie-Claude Smouts, ed., La Situation
Postcoloniale: Les Postcolonial Studies dans le
Dbat Franais (Paris: Sciences Po, 2008), 2425.
Notes to Chapter 8
27. Ivekovi, Langue Coloniale, Langue

Globale, Langue Locale.
28. It is also important to note the continuing capacity for mass mobilization of the
French left, whether in the 2005 resistance to
the referendum on the European Constitution,
the 2006 student mobilization against the
CPE attack on employee rights, or the 2010
mass mobilization against the conservative
changes to social security laws.
29. Many French writers have explored the
neocolonial underside of contemporary French
policy in Africa, for example. In La Franafrique: Le Plus Long Scandale de la Rpublique,
Franois-Xavier Verschave explores the mechanisms of French neocolonialism in Africa,
where the French political elite, both from the
right and from the left, has entertained very
close links with a series of African kleptocrats
and dictators, whose interests it favors.
30. See, for example, Bernard Mouralis,
Littrature et Dveloppement (Paris: Silex, 1999)
or Jean-Marie Grassin, Littratures mergentes
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1996).
31. Nacira Gunif-Souilamas, introduction
to Gunif-Souilamas, ed., La Rpublique Mise
Nu par Son Immigration [The Republic
Exposed by Its Immigration] (Paris: La
Fabrique, 2006).
32. Ibid., 2426.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 8.
35. Ibid., 17.
36. Gunif-Souilamas spoke of patriarchal
feminists in a talk given at La Maison Franaise, New York University, in November 2009.
In the United States, meanwhile, the term has
often been used in the context of critiquing
white or Eurocentric feminist discourse of
white women rescuing brown women from
brown men (Shohat). See Ella Shohat, ed.,
Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a
Transnational Age (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1998). The formulation white men are saving
brown women from brown men is from
Gayatri Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak?,
in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg,
328
eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

(London: Macmillan, 1988).
37. Public statement to the French National
Assembly, www.assemblee-nationale.fr, quoted
in Achille Mbembe, Provincializing France?,
Public Culture 23, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 9495.
38. Pascale Casanova, La Rpublique
Mondiale des Lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 218.
39. LInstitut du Tout-Monde, created at the
initiative of douard Glissant, was founded as
an attempt to advance the understanding of
the processes of creolization and to disseminate
the extraordinary diversity of the imaginaries of
peoples, expressed in a multiplicity of languages
and in a plurality of artistic expressions and
in unexpected modes of life. The goal is to
construct an international network of studies
and research, a space of invention and formation, a place of encounters and memories. The
ultimate goal of the institute is to live the world
dierently. Fondation Euro-Mditerranene
Anna Lindh pour le Dialogue entre les
Cultures, Institut du Tout-Monde, http://
www.euromedalex.org/node/5966.
40. Tyler Stovall and Georges Van Den
Abbeele, introduction to Stovall and Van Den
Abbeele, eds., French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, 116
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), 3.
41. Ibid., 10.
42. One collateral eect of this inux of
African academics on U.S. campuses has been
occasional tensions with African American
academics in black studies, who complain that
African and Afro-Caribbean academics are
being favored, along with tensions around the
proper emphasis between those who emphasize specically African American questions
and those who emphasize diasporic questions.
For an example of an African American evaluation, see Cecil Brown, Dude, Wheres My Black
Studies Department? The Disappearance of Black
Americans from Our Universities (Berkeley, CA:
North Atlantic Books, 2007).
43. Reported conversation with an African
scholar, in Jean-Philippe Dedieu, Des tatsUnis Sortent des Voix Africaines, et Fidlit
Notes to Chapter 8
Francophone, Black Renaissance Noire 5, no. 2

(Summer 2003).
44. Recent trends show that it is impossible to isolate French-speaking from Englishspeaking spaces in terms of the dissemination
of scholarship around questions of race and
coloniality. Indeed, African scholars such as
the late Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze (Bucknell), Kwame Gyeke (University of Ghana,
Temple University, and University of Pennsylvania), Jean-Marie Makang (University of
Maryland), D.A. Masoli (Antioch College
and University of Nairobi), Ngugi wa Thingo
(University of California, Irvine), Tsenay
Serequberhan (Simmons College, Boston),
Valentin Mudimbe (Duke University), and
Kwasi Wiredu (University of South Florida)
have been key gures in the critique of the
Eurocentrism and racism of some major
gures from the European Enlightenment,
notably Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Kant, and
Hegel.
45. Alec G. Hargreaves, Chemins de
Traverse, Mouvements des Ides et des Lutte 51
(SeptemberOctober 2007): 2431.
46. Our thanks to Jim Cohen for pointing
this out.
47. Guiart quoted in Benot de LEstoile, Le
Got des Autres: De LExposition Coloniale aux
Arts Premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 198.
48. Berger, Traverses de Frontires.
49. See, for example, Balibars essay Y-a-t-il
un Neo-racisme? in the coauthored (with
Immanuel Wallerstein) Race, Nation, Classe:
Les Identits Ambigus (Paris: La Dcouverte,
1988); and Racism as Universalism, in Masses,
Classes, Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994).
50. See Ann Laura Stoller, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France,
Public Culture 23, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 121156.
51. Ibid., 141.
52. Ibid., 131.
53. Paul A. Silverstein and Jane E.
Goodman, introduction to Goodman and
Silverstein, eds., Bourdieu in Algeria (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 12.
54. See Phyllis Taoua, Forms of Protest
329
(Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002),

257258.
55. Originally published as Les tudes
Postcoloniales: Une Invention Politique de la
Tradition?, in Socits Politiques Compares:
Revue Europenne dAnalyse des Socitis
Politiques 14 (April 2009); published in English
as Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention
of Tradition?, Public Culture 23, no. 1 (Winter
2011): 5584.
56. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 59.
57. Ibid., 60.
58. Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
(New York: Grove, 1965), 175.
59. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 63.
60. Ibid., 65.
61. Bayart, La Novlangue dun Archipel
Universitaire, in Smouts, La Situation
Postcoloniale.
62. Jim Cohen, Postcolonial Immigrants
in France and Their Descendants: The
Meanings of Frances Postcolonial Moment
(unpublished manuscript, provided to us
by the author), based on a presentation in
Amsterdam in 2009: Postcolonial Immigration and Identity Formation in Europe since
1945: Towards a Comparative Perspective,
IISG/KITLV Amsterdam.
63. See Alec G. Hargreaves, Half-Measures: Anti-discrimination Policy in France, in
Herrick Chapman and Laura L. Frader, eds.,
Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on
the Politics of Dierence, 227245 (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004).
64. Ndiaye gives credit to American
historian William Cohen, who published his
book The French Encounter with Africans in
1980, subsequently translated into French
as Franais et Africains: Les Noirs dans le
Regard des Blancs (Paris: Gallimard, 1982),
for opening up the eld of black history
in France. The book was denounced at the
time by Emmanuel Todd as propagating an
illegitimate subject and a case of agrant
historical delirium. See Ndiaye, La Condition
Noire, 111.
65. Ibid., 360.
Notes to Chapter 8
66. Ibid., 362.

67. Ibid., 353.
68. Didier Fassin and ric Fassin, loge
de la Complexit, in Fassin and Fassin, eds.,
De la Question Social la Question Raciale?
Reprsenter la Socit Franaise (Paris: La
69. Ibid., 130.
70. Who Is Afraid of the Postcolonial?,
special issue of Mouvements: Des Ides et des
Luttes 51 (SeptemberOctober 2007): 12.
1. See Edward A. Riedinger, Comparative Development of the Study of Brazil in
the United States and France, in Marshall
C. Eakin and Paulo Roberto de Almeida,
eds., Envisioning Brazil: A Guide to Brazilian
Studies in the United States, 375395 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).
2. We found one trilateral study in our
sense of exploring the relationalities of France,
Brazil, and the United States: Georgette
Medleg Rodriguess 1998 study French
Attitudes toward US Inuence in Brazil
(19441960), which explores, on the basis of
diplomatic archives and published writing and
memoirs, the ocial French eorts to exert its
inuence in the face of U.S. competition in a
situation in which France itself was also feeling
the pressure of American inuence, challenged
to present itself to Brazil as modern like the
United States and as the incarnation of a
traditional universality.
3. See Sergio Miceli, A Desiluso Americana:
Relaes Acadmicas entre Brasil e os Estados
Unidos (So Paulo: Sumar, 1973), 40.
4. See Piers Armstrong, Evoluo de uma
Dinmica Relacional: A Hermutica do Pensar
a Cultura Brasileira a Partir dos EUA, in
Cristina Stevens, ed., Quando o Tio Sam Pegar
no Tamborim: Uma Perspectiva Transcultural do
Brasil (Brasilia: Plano, 2000), 57.
5. Although the term Brazilianist came
in the wake of similar expressions such as
Latinist or Germanist, it also has behind it
an implied cultural hierarchy, internalized by
330
many Brazilians. For historical reasons, many

Brazilians nd it surprising that non-Brazilians
should choose to study Brazil. Brazilianists
are invariably asked by journalists (and sometimes by academics), How did you become
interested in Brazil? Those Americans and
Brazilians who write about France, or French
and Brazilians who write about the United
States, in contrast, are rarely asked the same
question. The assumption is that these major
cultures are inherently interesting, while only
some special experience or epiphanya trip to
Brazil, a love aair, a surprise fellowship, a stint
in the Peace Corpscould possibly explain
ones becoming interested in Brazil.
6. A more transnational and less Francocentric narrative of the genealogy of cultural
studies, we argue, would include not only the
French gures noted by Perrone-Moiss but
also the Francophone writers such as Fanon
and Csaire, along with C.L.R James from the
Caribbean, James Baldwin and Leslie Fiedler
from the United States, alongside the Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci, British Marxists
such as E.P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, and post-Marxist Stuart Hall.
7. Leyla Perrone-Moiss, Ps-estruturalismo e Desconstruo nas Amricas,
in Perrone-Moiss, ed., Do Positivismo
Desconstruo: Idias Francesas na Amrica,
213237 (So Paulo: USP, 2003).
8. Herman Melville, Redburn (1849; repr.,
New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 239.
9. Perrone-Moiss, Ps-estruturalismo e
Desconstruo nas Amricas, 226.
10. Ibid., 230.
11. Ibid., 232.
12. Franois Cusset, French Theory: How
Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed
the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans.
Je Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 2.
13. Ibid., xviii.
14. Ibid., 10.
15. Ibid., 8.
16. Ibid., 10
17. Ibid., 99.
Notes to Chapter 8
18. Michael George Hanchard, Orpheus and

Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro
and So Paulo, Brazil, 19451988 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994).
19. Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant,
On the Cunning of Imperial Reason, Theory,
Culture, and Society 16, no. 1 (1999): 51
20. Ibid., 48.
21. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism
without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the
Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United
States (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleeld,
2010), 183185.
22. Bourdieu and Wacquant, On the Cunning of Imperial Reason, 4546.
23. Ibid., 46.
24. Robert Stam in conversation with
Brazilian journalist Srgio Augusto in
September 1995.
25. See Thomas E. Skidmore, Race and
Class in Brazil: Historical Perspectives, in
Pierre-Michel Fontain, ed., Race, Class, and
Power in Brazil (Los Angeles: UCLA Center
for Afro-American Studies, 1985).
26. John French, The Missteps of Antiimperialist Reason. The essay was published
rst as a Duke University Working Paper
(no. 27) and was subsequently published in
Theory, Culture and Society 17, no. 1 (2000):
121, a special issue devoted to responses to the
Bourdieu/Wacquant essay.
27. Ibid., 122.
28. Ibid.
29. Bourdieu and Wacquant, On the
Cunning of Imperialist Reason, 44, 53, quoted
in French, The Missteps of Anti-imperialist
Reason, 122.
30. French, The Missteps of Anti-imperialist Reason, 122.
31. For Freyres boldest statement arming
Luso-Tropical exceptionalism, see Gilberto
Freyre, O Luso e o Trpico (Lisbon: Comisso
Executiva do Quinto Centenrio da Morte do
Infante D. Henrique, 1961).
32. The experience of Brazilian Carnival, for
example, involves a transracial gregariousness
that is not available in the same way in the
331
United States (or France). Both black and

white Americans visiting Brazil frequently
express a sense of relief at the lack of the racial
tension that often pervades and poisons social
life in the United States.
2008), 284.
35. Immanuel Wallerstein argues that
racism is disseminated throughout the world
system, so that no part of the planet, in terms
of local, national, and international policy,
is free of it. See Immanuel Wallerstein, O
Declnio do Poder Americano (Rio de Janeiro:
Contraponto, 2004), 267.
36. Bourdieu and Wacquant, On the
Cunning of Imperial Reason, 46. Bourdieu/
Wacquant seem to imply, absurdly, that some
American foundations demand that Brazilian research teams conform to the rules of
Armative Action, which, if true, would
mean that they would have to engage Native
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and
Pacic Islanders.
37. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New
York: Holt, 2007), 123.
38. See Srgio Costa, Dois Atlnticos: Teoria
Social, Anti-racismo, Cosmopolitanismo (Belo
Horizonte, Brazil: UFMG, 2006), 198.
40. Ibid., 47.
41. Loc Wacquant, Bourdieu in America:
Notes on the Transatlantic Importation of
Social Theory, in Craig Calhoun, Edward
LiPuma, and Moishe Postone, eds., Bourdieu:
Critical Perspectives (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), 241.
42. See Marie-Pierre Le Hir, The Popular
in Cultural Studies, in Marie-Pierre Le Hir
and Dana Strand, eds., French Cultural Studies:
Criticism at the Crossroads (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2000).
43. Bourdieu and Wacquant, On the Cun-
Notes to Chapter 9
ning of Imperial Reason, 47.

44. Cusset, French Theory, 232.
45. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Mtaphysiques Cannibales (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2009), 6667.
46. Despite the hostility of intellectuals
such as Bourdieu/Wacquant, some academics,
many of them French or French-speaking
academics in the United States or in the
United Kingdom, have begun to do cultural
studiesstyle work on French popular culture
itself, generating studies of the portrayals of
French colonialism in the lms of Brigitte
Roan and Claire Denis, for example, or the
representation of diasporic minorities on
French television or the role of hip-hop culture
in the banlieue or mtissage in postcolonial
comics. Catherine Liu sees MC Solaars rap
lyrics as the hybrid heir of both Public Enemy
and Baudelaire and as the contemporary
equivalent of Walter Benjamins ragpicker.
French postcolonial studies has focused on
exoticism in mainstream French writing,
on Francophone theories of language and
identity, and on the relevance of Anglo-Indian
postcolonial theory to French culture. And
some cinema studies scholars have detected a
submerged colonial and racial presence in the
French New Wave: the black man excluded
from the fascist student party in Chabrols
Les Cousins (The Cousins), the anticolonialist
Africans in Rouchs Chronique dun t and
Markers Le Joli Mai, the Black Panthers in
Godards Weekend, the allusions to colonial
carnage in Chabrols Le Boucher, and the coded
references to the war in Algeria in Vardas Clo
de 5 7, Roziers Adieu Philippine, and Demys
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. See, for example,
Dina Sherzer, ed., Cinema, Colonialism,
Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French
and Francophone World (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1996). See also Kristin Ross,
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the
Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1995).
47. See ric Maigret, Pierre Bourdieu, la
Culture Populaire et le Long Remords de la
332
Sociologie de la Distinction Culturelle, Esprit

(MarchApril 2002): 170178.
48. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (New
York: New Press, 1999).
49. See Arlindo Machado, A Televiso
Levada a Srio (So Paulo: SENAC, 2000), 127.
50. Maigret, Pierre Bourdieu, 175.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible:
Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination
(New York: Methuen, 1986), 213.
54. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 34.
55. Ibid., 491.
56. Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1971).
57. Special issue on On the Cunning of
Imperial Reason essay, Estudos Afro-Asiticos
( JanuaryApril 2002). Bourdieu/Wacquant
mention the journal, not in terms of the work
published there but only as an example of
foundation funding for race-related research in
Brazil. Wacquant himself, we would add, has
also received research funding from American
foundations.
58. Joclio Teles dos Santos, De Armadilhas, Convices e Dissenses: As Relaes
Raciais como Efeito Orlo, Estudos AfroAsiticos 24, no. 1 (2002): 183.
59. Osmundo de Arajo Pinho and ngela
Figueiredo, Idias Fora do Lugar e o Lugar do
Negro nas Cincias Sociais Brasileiras, Estudos
Afro-Asiticos 24, no. 1 (2002): 189210.
60. Ibid.
61. Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Introduo
Crtica Sociologia Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro:
UFRJ, 1995), 165.
62. Pinho and Figueiredo, Idias Fora do
Lugar, 193.
63. Costa, Dois Atlnticos, 54.
64. Antnio Cndido, A Formao da
Literatura Brasileira: Momentos Decisivos (So
Paulo: Martins, 1959).
65. Mrio de Andrade, Poesias Completas
Notes to Chapter 9
(So Paulo: Martins, 1972), 3233.

66. Wacquant, Bourdieu in America.
67. Haroldo de Campos, Da Razo Antropofgica: A Europa sob o Signo da Devorao,
Revista Colquio: Letras 62 ( July 1981): 1025.
68. Eneida Maria de Souza, Crtica Cult
(Belo Horizonte, Brazil: UFMG, 2002), 101.
69. Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas
(London: Verso, 1997), 219.
70. Pierre Bourdieu, Acts of Resistance:
Against the Tyranny of the Market (New York:
New Press, 1998), 61.
71. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The
333
Hidden Injuries of Class (New York: Knopf, 1972).

72. Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse pour une AutoAnalyse (Paris: Raisons dAgir, 2004), 13.
73. Ibid., 126.
74. Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small
Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of
Anger (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), 18.
75. See Tyler Stovall, No Green Pastures:
The African Americanization of France, in
Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, ed., Empire Lost:
France and Its Other Worlds (New York:
Lexington Books, 2009).
Notes to Chapter 9
Index
Abdel-Malek, Anouar, 133, 245, 246

abolitionism, 18, 28, 29. See also antiracism
ABRALIC, 206
Abreu, Joo Capistrano de, 184
Abu-Hasira, Sidi, 157
Acadmie Franaise, 146
Achebe, Chinua, 123
actors of color, 152
Acts of Resistance (Bourdieu), 114, 296297
Adams, Henry, 21, 44
Adams, Paul, 52
Adorno, Theodor, 275
Armative Action, 209239; attacks on, 101;
backlash against, 215216, 218219; bicolor
model/system, 223; black conservatives, 277;
Brazil, 187, 211212, 216222, 323n29,
324n43; Carvalho on, Jos Jorge de, 323n29;
Civil Rights Act (1964), 211; Civil Rights
Movement, 211; contrasts between Brazil
and United States, 222223; diversity, 211;
Enlightenment, 209, 216; fairness issue,
215; France, 211212, 239; gradualism, 216;
initiatives, 212213; racial democracy, 219;
as racial discrimination, 219; racism, 214;
remediation measures, 209, 213214, 215;
reparations, 98, 209; tax policy, 213; United
States, 209215, 323n29; white/black
dichotomy, 283; whiteness studies, 209; for
whites, 215216; iek, Slavoj, 128
Armative Action (Sabeg and Sabeg), 239
Armative Action in Brazil (Feres), 220
Africa: black Brazilians, 44; Brazilian scholars of,
271; cultural presence, xiii; Eurocentric view
of, 216; Hegels interpretation of, 247; Jews
and, 317n64; traditions of public reason and
pluralism, 65; trance religions, 3637
African aesthetics, 4849
African American rappers, 148
African Americans: black Brazilians, 278, 280;
Bourdieu/Wacquant, 291; Brazil, 42, 44;
Candombl, 44; conservatives among, 152,
277; France, 42, 4449; miscegenation, 186;
multiculturalism, 8485; Native Americans,
4; neoliberalism, 277; political power, 187;
Republican Party, 152; transnationalism,
291; voice in the academy, 122
335
African-American Reections on Brazils Racial

Paradise (Hellwig), 42
Afro-Brazilian culture, 223, 271
Afro-Brazilian intellectuals, 177
Afrocentrism, 180
Afro-cosmopolitanism, 177
Agamben, Giorgio, 170
Age of Revolutions, The (Hobsbawm), 19
agency, 6, 1112, 278, 287, 289
Ageron, Charles Robert, 263
Alco, Linda Martin, 100
Alencar, Jos de, 32
Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de, 271
Alexander, Jacqui, 80
Algeria, 2930, 42, 254
Algerian independence, 61, 71, 159
Algerians: in France, 29, 130; massacre of in
Paris, 135, 159, 251
Ali, Muhammed, 205
Alito, Samuel, 126127
Alleg, Henri, 70, 159, 171, 246
Allen, Theodor, 232
Allen, Woody, 122
Almanac (Benjamin Bannekers), 1516
Althusser, Louis, 128, 245, 246, 272
Amazon River, 1011, 40
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji, 211
America (the term), 58, 143
America in Europe (Arciniegas), 1415
American (the term), 117
American dierentialism, 138
American Enterprise Institute, 109
American ideas, 295296
American intellectuals: French intellectuals, 286,
294; Latin American intellectuals, knowledge
of, 293; scholars of Brazil, 290; Wacquant,
Loc, 296
American Revolution, 1, 8, 27, 44
American Scholar (Emerson), 40
American studies, 80
Amin, Samir, 74, 76
Amkpa, Awam, 259
An End to Evil (Bruckner), 164
Anchieta, Jos de, 6
Ancient Society (Morgan), 9
Andean movement, 105106
Index
Anderson, Benedict, 117

Anderson, Keven B., 64
Anderson, Marion, 177, 207
Andrade, Mrio de, 184, 293
Andrade, Oswald de, 7, 33, 184, 196, 203, 296
Andrews, George Reid, 278
Anglo/Latin dichotomy, 5157, 220, 274, 282
Anglophone world, postcolonial studies/theory
in, 244, 256
Anglo-Protestantism, 56
Anglo-Saxon colonialisms, 250
Anglo-Saxon communitarianism, 55
Anglo-Saxon dierentialism, 143
Anglo-Saxon family structure, 307n88
Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism, 183
Anglo-Saxon postcolonialism, 274
Anglo-Saxon vs. Latins, 51, 5556
Anglo-Saxonism, xvxvi, 5157
Anglo-Saxonists, 56
Anglo-Saxons, 55
Anidjar, Gil, 157
Annales School, 271
Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Ngre (Senghor),
69, 231
anthopophagy, 292
anthropology: anti-ethnocentric method, 36;
decolonization of knowledge, 7879; dependency theory, 272; dialogical anthropology,
79; French, 286; imaginary of the indigene,
13; reexive anthropology, 36, 37, 75;
reverse anthropology, 79; shared anthropology, 79; symmetrical anthropology, 79
anthropophagic modernists, 33
anti-Americanism, 116
anticolonial movements, 68, 86
anticolonial studies, Francophone, 245
anticolonialism: black anticolonialist thinkers,
159; Brazil, 8; Brazilian popular music,
196; Bruckner, Pascal, 135; Diderot, Denis,
2, 18, 2223; Fanon, Frantz, 124; France,
251252, 256; Francophone, 245; India,
123; Montaigne, Michel de, 2; PerroneMoiss, Leyla, 274275; West, learning from
the, 124; West as the real victim, 135136;
iek, Slavoj, 123
anticommunism, 133134
anticommunitarianism, 242
antidierentialism, French, 143144
anti-Eurocentrism, 125126
anti-immigrant sentiment in France, 316n53
anti-imperialism: Bnot, Yves, 256; Diderot, Denis, 23, 24; Francophone writers, 256; multiculturalism, 80; Sartre, Jean-Paul, 261
anti-Israelism, 164165
336
antinaturalism, 88
anti-Orientalism, 73, 263, 284
antipsychiatry, 72
antiracism: Bastide, Roger, 33; Brazilian intellectuals, 193194; Clastres, Pierre, 33; Diderot,
Denis, 18; Fanons Black Skin, White Masks,
73; France, 166167, 238239; public discourses of, 6970; totalitarianism, 166. See
also abolitionism
Anti-Semite and Jew (Sartre), 160
anti-Semitism: anti-Israelism, 164165; Baldwin on, James, 154; Bruckner, Pascal, 171;
Christian societies, 125; France, 145, 165,
169170; history over the longue dure, 154
155; Israeli-Palestinian conict, 165; Kacem,
Mehdi Belhaj, 170; Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 165,
171; Nazis, 157; racism, 162, 171; Sartre,
Jean-Paul, 160; Western history, 136
anti-Third Worldism, 133134, 162. See also
Bruckner, Pascal
Anzalda, Gloria, 57, 112, 121
Appadurai, Arjun, 299
Appeal for Future Mobilizations (World Social
Forum), 90
Appiah, Anthony, 262
Apter, Emily, 60
Aptheker, Bettina, 158
Aptheker, Herbert, 158
Arab Spring, 99
Arab world, 65
Arantes, Paulo, 31
Arajo, Joel Zito, 227
Arajo, Tas, 227
Arajo Pinho, Osmundo de, 290
Archer-Straw, Petrine, 47
Arciniegas, Germn, 1415
area studies, 8081, 116
Arendt, Hannah, 154, 158, 263
Armstrong, Louis, 50
Aron, Raymond, 263
artistic modernism, 37, 6667
Asian Americans, 122
Assad, Talal, 78
Assassin, 147
assimilationism in Brazil, 281
assimilationist spectrum model, 228
Astgier-Loufti, Martine, 246
Astier-Loufti, Martine, 246
Atlantic Enlightenment, xiixiii, 125 passim
Atlantic rainbow, 34
Atlantic Republicanism, xv
Atlas Literaturas (Perrone-Moiss), 181182
Attias, Jean-Christophe, 172
Aubin, Jean, 264
Index
Austin, Regina, 78
Australia, 84, 211, 311n10
Ayers, Bill, 225
Aymara, 104, 105
Azevedo, Thales de, 177
B, Amadou Hampat, 256
Bacharach, Burt, 41
Badinter, Elisabeth, 257
Badiou, Alain, 153, 248, 294
Baker, Chet, 50
Baker, Josephine, 45, 50
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 199, 289, 294295
Balandier, Georges, 244, 263
Baldwin, James, 45, 154, 230
Balibar, tienne, 261
Balkanization and identity politics, 93, 139
Bambaataa, Afrika, 147
Bancel, Nicolas, 254, 265, 266
Bandeira, Manuel, 32
Banneker, Benjamin, 1516
Barbosa Gomes, Jaoquim Benedito, 217
Bardolph, Jacqueline, 250, 266
Barlow, Joel, 16
Barroso, Ary, 195
Barthes, Roland, 240, 246, 272, 286
Bastide, Roger, xviii, 33, 3438, 176177, 228
Bataille, Georges, 291
Battle of Algiers (lm), 86
Baudrillard, Jean, 31
Bayart, Jean-Franoise, 261265
Be Black and Shut Up (Onana), 241
Beatles, 196, 198
Beauvoir, Simone de: African aesthetics, 4849;
Algerian self-determination, 161; cultural
studies, precursor to, 286; decolonization of
knowledge, 70; postcolonial studies/theory,
246; Second Sex, 69; universalism, 110
Bechet, Sidney, 45
Beck, Glenn, 102, 224
Beck, Julian, 37
Beck, Ulrich, 31
Begag, Azouz: American television, 152; discursive mechanisms of prejudice, 150; equal
opportunities in France and US, 238; French
racism, 2930; on immigrants children in
France, 138, 149; neoracist consensus, 137
Belindia, 26
Bell, Derrick, 78
Ben Israel, Menasse, 172
Ben Jor, Jorge, 39
Benbassa, Esther, 172
Benito Cereno (Melville), 19
Benjamin, Walter, 275
337
Bennett, William, 93
Bnot, Yves: anti-imperialism, 256; Colonial Massacres, 265; Diderot, 23; Diderot, Denis, 24;
Enlightenment philosophers, 266; postcolonial studies/theory, 246
Bento, Maria Aparecida Silva, 234
Berger, Anne, 251, 260
Berghe, Pierre van den, 15
Berimbrown, 195
Berlin Wall, 114
Bernd, Zila, 179
Bernstein, Richard, 93, 180
Berry, Chuck, 198
Bertrand, Romain, 266
Bessis, Sophie, 159, 171
Bethnia, Maria, 194
Beti, Mongo, 124, 246, 263, 268
Bhabha, Homi, 182, 244, 245, 275, 294
Bible, 66
bicolor model/system, 186, 223, 226, 228
Bidima, Jean-Godefroy, 259
Bill of Rights, 70, 220
biodiversity, 10, 9091, 105
Birmingham School, 285
Birnbaum, Jean, 168169
Bitton, Simone, 171
Black and White (Frenette), 234235
Black Atlantic: Brazil, 26; connotations, 3; cultural syncretism, 284; France, 26; Haitian
Revolution, 22; multinations of, 117; relations with Red, White Atlantics, 3; the term,
usage of, xx, 301n1; Tropiclia songs, 205;
white anxieties, 229
black Brazilians: Africa, 44; African Americans,
278, 280; black intellectuals, 35, 234; rst
black president, 307n79; indigenous Brazilians, 4; nationalists, 302n22; negros vs.
Negros da terra, 3. See also Brazilian Black
consciousness movement
Black Code, The (Sala-Molins), 18
black conservatives, 152, 277
Black Experimental Theatre (BET), 176, 228
Black Front Party, 228
Black internationalism, 47
Black Jacobins, 22
Black Jacobins, The ( James), 19
Black Marxism, 103
Black Orpheus (lm), 4951
Black Panthers, 71, 161
Black Panthers, The (lm), 133
Black Power, 79, 133, 178
Black Renaissance Noire (journal), 289
Black Revue Company, 228
Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon): antiracism,
Index
73; blackness, 7374; Bruckner, Pascal, 134;

brutal ethnocentric intrusion, Bourdieu/
Wacquants, 279; going beyond Europe,
134135; metropolitan racial tensions, 72;
paternalistic discourses, focus on, 47; psychoanalysis from colonized point of view, 112
black studies, 7980, 328n42
blackface, 202
black-Jewish relationship, 154, 161, 162, 166
blackness, 233234
blacks, Hegel on, 63. See also African Americans;
black Brazilians; Brazilian Black consciousness movement
Blacks, The (Les Ngres) (Genet), 49, 74, 202
Blair, Tony, 284
Blanchard, Pascal, 254, 265, 266
Blatt, David, 138, 144
Blauner, Robert, 107
Bleich, Erik, 239
Blier, Jean-Michel, 268
Block, Ernst, 289
Bloom, Allan, 93, 115, 131, 174, 181
Bloom, Harold, 179, 180
Blum, Lon, 165
Boal, Augusto, 74, 272
Boas, Franz, 34
Boatc, Manuela, 91
Bob Dylan, 203
Bobillier, Grard, 169
Boetsch, Gilles, 266
Bolivia, 104106
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 21
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, 277
border gnosis, 91
border theory, 112
Borges, Jorge Luis, 113
bossa nova, 50, 194
Boubeker, Ahmed, 254
Boulbina, Seloua Luste, 248249
Bourdieu, Pierre, 107115, 287289, 293298;
Acts of Resistance, 114, 296297; agency, 278,
287, 289; Brazilian scholars, 270; Casanova,
Pascale, 46; conceptual categories, 108;
cultural capital, 297298; cultural studies,
285; Distinction, 284, 289; dystopianism,
289; Foucault, Michel, 110; globalization,
287; Grass, Gnter, 287; Gunif-Souilamas,
Nacira, 257; humor, dismissal of, 287;
imperialisms of the Universal, 30; inuence of, 107, 109, 257; The Inheritors (with
Jean-Claude Passeron), 107; intellectuals,
ecacy of, 110; La Misre du Monde, 287;
multiculturalism, 139; neoliberalism, 107;
popular culture, skepticism about, 287288;
338
positionality, 112; postcolonial studies/

theory, 261; Reproduction, 107; Sketch for a
Self-Analysis, 112, 297; social inequality, 107;
on social life, 288289; On Television, 288;
United States, critiques of, 107108; United
States, reception in, 293295; universalism,
110, 114115; Wacquant, Loc, 296; welfarestate entitlements, 296297
Bourdieu/Wacquant, 106117, 276298; agency,
denial of, 278; American foundations and
Brazilian research teams, 331n36; American
scholars of Brazil, 290; Anglo/Latin dichotomy, 282; black American transnationalism,
291; Bourdieus method, 106107; Brazil,
portrait of, 280; Brazilian Black consciousness
movement, xviii, 276277; Brazilian intellectuals, xviii, 290; Brazilian scholars, 290; brutal
ethnocentric intrusion, 278279; campus
quarrels, 108109, 110111; class-over-race
assumptions, 107, 109; complex elds, narrow
view of, 108; critical race theory, 114; cultural
studies, 284287; decolonizing corpus, unfamiliarity with, 115116; Eurocentrism, 296;
French intellectuals, 293; Frenchs critique of,
John, 278280; globalization, 112; Hanchard,
Michael, xviii, 43, 190, 276277, 282; identity politics (the term), 92; identity politics,
108, 277; ideology, 291; imperialism, 146;
intellectual labor, global distribution of, 292;
intellectual relations between France, Brazil,
United States, 293; intercultural exchange,
277278; internal antistate movements, 291;
mechanisms of domination, 111112; multiculturalism (the term), 92; multiculturalism,
97, 114115, 117, 119, 146, 173, 277; nationstate framing, 113, 116; neoliberalism, 106,
112, 146; On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason, 276, 284285, 289290, 331n36; race,
106; race/coloniality discourse, 131; racism in
Brazil, 277278; resistant scholarship, 115;
revisionist historians, 114; subaltern subjectivity, 112; their whiteness and Frenchness, 277;
unilateral cultural imperialism thesis, 292;
vulgar institutionalism of, 285
Bourokba, Mohamed, 147
Bourtel, Karim, 268
Brackenridge, Henry M., 39
Braque, Georges, 4849
BRASA (Brazilian Studies Association), 271
Brasis, 282
Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, xx
Braudel, Fernand, 33, 263, 264
Brazil, 2660, 175208, 216222; abolitionism,
29; actors of color, 152; Armative Action,
Index
187, 211212, 216222, 323n29, 324n43;

African Americans, 42, 44; American tourists, 331n32; anthropophagic modernists,
33; anticolonialism, 8; assimilationism, 281;
bicolor model/system, 228; Black Atlantic,
26; blackness, 233234; blacks in (see black
Brazilians); Bourdieu/Wacquants portrait
of, 280; Carnival, 4950, 195, 205206, 281;
carnivalesque, 298; citizenship, 29; colonialism, 98; as color-blind utopia, 42; communitarianism, xiv; Constituent Assembly (1987),
210; Constitution (1988), 217; Constitution,
Imperial, 28; Constitution, Republican, 28;
cotas (quota system) in, 216222; cultural
intercourse with France, United States, 27;
cultural studies in, 206; egalitarianism, 29;
Enlightenment republicanism, 28; exceptionalism, 40, 191; fable of three races, 192, 250;
Fanon, Frantz, 74; feminism, 140141, 193;
France, relations with, 38; France compared
to, 238243; France on, inuence of, xv, 28,
3138; Golden Law, 28; higher education,
221222; immigration, 59, 221; imperialism,
American, 182; indigenous dispossession, 5;
indigenous peoples, 4, 27, 28; inequality, 220,
229; la Rpublique, xiv; Law 650, 216217;
the left, 175, 183; lingua franca (lingua geral),
6; literary history of, 40; March to the West,
250; mestizos, 229; Minas Gerais revolt
(1789), 32, 292; Ministry of Racial Equality,
217; miscegenation, 186187, 188, 193, 227,
235236; multiculturalism, 26, 84, 140141,
179183, 182, 192, 193; Museum of Modern Art, 40; nationalism, 31, 223; native
place names, 56; Palmares republic, 14, 59,
188, 195, 302n22; police brutality, 152153,
173, 188; popular culture, 194206, 281;
popular music, 194197, 205206, 321n48
(see also Tropiclia movement); post-World
War II period, 175; post-WWII activism,
71; poverty, 225; power relations, 320n36;
race, 237, 238243; race and colonialism,
interplay between, xix; race-related research,
282283; racial democracy, 175179, 185,
189, 193; Racial Equality Law, 222; racial
proling, 218; racial tension, 281; racial tolerance, as model of, 30, 42; racism, 33, 43, 185,
188189, 193194, 223224, 225226,
234236, 277278, 280, 324n37; Red Atlantic, 26; reparations, 210; So Vincente,
27; segregation, 185, 187; seismic shift in,
178179; self-image, 282; slavery, 3, 28, 29,
178, 185186, 238; social problems, 188,
225; state repression, 188; surrealism in,
339
33; Tailors Rebellion (1798), 20; television, 227228; as three sad races, 192,
281; United States, relations with, 3841;
United States compared to, 2728, 183189,
222229, 237, 281; United States on, inuence of, 28, 333n2; universalism, 30; voting,
225; White Atlantic, 26; white privilege, 213;
whiteness studies in, 233, 236238; xenophobia, 189, 225
Brazil studies, 270271
Brazilian academics: multiculturalism, 206;
race/colonial debates, xvii; in United States,
4041. See also Brazilian intellectuals; Brazilian scholars
Brazilian Black consciousness movement, xviii,
178, 276277
Brazilian independence movements, 1
Brazilian intellectuals: Afro-Brazilian intellectuals, 177; Afro-cosmopolitanism, 177; antiracism, 193194; black radical thinkers, 234;
Bourdieu/Wacquant, xviii, 290; Brazilian
social system, 35; Civil Rights Movement,
178; contrasts between Brazil and United
States, 184; dependency theory, 71, 175; independence movements, foreign, 175; Third
Worldism, 178; Wacquant, Loc, 296; white
elites, identication with, 35. See also Brazilian academics; Brazilian scholars
Brazilian Is Not Sad, The (Freire), 184
Brazilian rappers, 147148, 195196
Brazilian scholars, 271, 290. See also Brazilian
academics; Brazilian intellectuals
Brazilian scholarship, 206208
Brazilian Utopia and the Black Movements, The
(Risrio), 189192
Brazilianists, xviii, 184, 330n5
Brazilianization, 3031, 277
Brecht, Bertolt, 287
British Empire/Commonwealth, 89
Brook, Peter, 37
Brown, Carlinhos, 194, 195
Brown, James, 147, 195, 197
Brown, John, 230231, 232
Brown, Mano, 195, 196
Brown, William Wells, 21
Brown Atlantic, 150
Brown v. Board of Education, 226
Bruckner, Pascal, 134136; An End to Evil, 164;
anticolonialism, 135; anti-Semitism, 171;
cultural complexes, 315n13; Eurocentrism,
134135; pro-Americanism, 107; The
Temptation, 163164; White Mans Sobs (Le
Sanglot de lHomme Blanc), 134, 163164;
iek, Slavoj, 131
Index
Buarque, Chico, 197, 201202

Buarque de Holanda, Heloisa, 293
Buarque de Holanda, Srgio, 4041, 183, 235,
280
Buck-Morss, Susan, 130
Bunche, Ralph, 176177
Bush, George H. W., 93, 139
Bush, George W., 63, 111, 174, 216
Butler, Judith, 62, 294
Cabral, Amilcar, 70, 246
Caetano. See Veloso, Caetano
Cahiers du Cinma (journal), 246
Caldwell, Kia Lilly, 43, 237
Caldwell, Paulette, 78
Calvs, Gwnale, 239
Camafeu, Paulinho, 228
Cameron, David, 96
Caminha, Pro Vaz de, 7
Campos, Augusto de, 4041
Campos, Haroldo de, 4041, 275, 296
campus quarrels, 108109, 110111
Camus, Albert, 133
Camus, Marcel, 49
Canada, 84, 211, 311n10
Candeia, Sambisto, 178
Candide (Voltaire), 287
Cndido, Antnio, 4041, 292, 293
Candombl: African American rappers, 148; African Americans, 44; artistic expression and
performance, 36; Bastide, Roger, 3536; Brazilian popular music, 194; Rocha, Glauber,
37; Veloso, Caetano, 197
Cantel, Raymond, 270
capitalism: colonialism, 91, 128; culture, 97;
global capitalism, 118120, 122, 129; rosy
dawn of, 76; slavery, 64; transnational capitalism, 283
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 4041, 76, 272,
278, 280
Carelli, Mario, 38
Carneiro, Edison, 234
Carneiro, Sueli, 43
Carnival, 4950, 195, 205206, 281, 298, 331n32
Carone, Iray, 234
Cartesianism, 3536
Carvalho, Jos Jorge de: on Armative Action,
323n29; Brazilian black radical thinkers, 234;
Brazilian nationalism, 223; higher education, 221222; Palmares republic, 14; racial
inequality, 217; on racism, 235
Casanova, Pascale, 46, 107, 258, 260, 266
Castoriadia, Cornelius, 270
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 79, 88, 271
340
Castro, Josu de, 272

Cato Institute, 109
CECAN (Center for Black Art and Culture),
178
center/periphery theory, 76, 89, 272
Certeau, Michel de, 245, 286
Csaire, Aim: Afro-cosmopolitanism, 177; antiimperialism, 256; Congress of Negro Artists
and Writers, 48; cultural studies, precursor
to, 286; decolonization of knowledge, 132;
Discourse on Colonialism, 70, 158, 247, 252,
279; Fanon, Frantz, 71, 73; French racism,
4647; on Haiti, 1819; postcolonial studies/theory, 245; postcolonialism, 87, 262;
Shakespeares Tempest, rereading of, 73, 94
Chakravarty, Depesh, 262
Cham, Mbye, 259
Chapman, Herrick, 316n38
Charles, Ray, 197
Chateaubriand, Franois-Auguste-Ren, Viscomte de, 32
Chvez, Hugo, 130
Cheikhrouhou, Moncef, 311n8
Cheney, Lynne, 93, 97, 109
Cherki, Alice, 171, 256
China, 65, 134
Chinese Encyclopedia (Borges), 113
Chirac, Jacques, 138, 139, 240, 251, 291
Chomsky, Noam, 158
chorinho, 194
Christianity, 67, 174
Christophe, Henri, 22
Christophers, Brett, 85
Churchill, Ward, 115
Cinema Novo, 206, 272
Cintique (journal), 246
cine-trance, 37
circum-Atlantic connectivities, 34
circum-Atlantic performance, xx
citizenship, 29
City of God (lm), 227
City of Men (television series), 227
Civil Rights Act (1964), 211
Civil Rights Movement: Armative Action, 211;
Brazilian criticisms of, 280; Brazilian intellectuals, 178; Haitian Revolution, discussion
of, 19; Jewish support for, 154; Nascimento,
Abdias do, 177; postcolonial intellectuals in
United States, 116; the right, 111
Civilizing Mission, The (Constantini), 245
Cixous, Hlne, 245, 272
clash of civilization, 56, 311n8
class: class warfare rhetoric, 93; class-over-race
hierarchy, 101, 104, 107, 109, 119, 122, 127;
Index
health care, 129; justice, 111; race, 102103;

relationality, 111
classism, racism and, 227
Clastres, Pierre, 7, 12, 31, 33, 38
Cliord, James, 37
Clinton, Bill, 311n6
Closing of the American Mind (Bloom), 131
Cocco, Giuseppe, 13, 130, 220221, 227
Code Indigene, 29
Code Noir, 18, 29, 266
Coelho, Teixeira, 180
Cohen, Felix, 9
Cohen, Jim, 138, 144, 265
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 159, 170
Cold War, 95
Coleyn, Jean-Paul, 271
Collectif galit, 152
Colo, Gabriel, 271
Colonial Fracture, The (Bancel and Blanchard),
253254
colonial genocides, 158
Colonial Massacres (Bnot), 23
colonial multiculturality, 27
colonial novels, thematic analysis of, 246
Colonial Republicanism, 15
colonial studies, 244
colonialism, 249254; Anglo-Saxon colonialisms, 250; Brazil, 98; capitalism, 91, 128;
dependency complex, 73; Enlightenment, xv,
78; Eurocentrism, 66; France, 53, 132133,
247248, 249, 252254, 265266; globalization, 91; Haiti, 1819; Holocaust
(Shoah), 157; indigenous critiques, 12; intercolonial rivalry, xiv; Latin colonialisms, 250;
Marx, Karl, 64; Nazis, 157; neocolonialism,
91; nostalgia for, 249; police brutality, 153;
race, xix; resistance to, xiv; settler colonialism, 250, 274; trickle-down colonialism, 24;
United States, xix; iek, Slavoj, 120
coloniality, 61
Colonizer and the Colonized, The (Memmi), 162
Color Witchcraft (Nascimento), 236
color-blind ideology, 42, 45, 144, 214215,
241242
color-blind racism, 277
Colors of the Jews, The (Kaye/Kantrowitz), 172
Columbus, Christopher, 5, 10
commons, 130
communitarianism: Anglo-Saxon, 55; Brazil, xiv;
France, xiv, 138, 141, 142; French republicanism, 243; United States, xiv
Comte, Auguste, 32
Cond, Maryse, 256, 258259
Congo, Simon, 39
341
Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, 48

Congress Party (India), 123
Conquest, the: as best school for indigenous
peoples, 124; conicts initiated by, 1112;
enrichment of Europe, xv; frontier conquest,
model of, 77; linguistic dimension, 56; Native American deaths, 104; police brutality,
153; Red Atlantic, 3
Conquest and Discovery Doctrine, 5
conscientizao, 78
Constant, Fred, 173
Constantini, Dino, 245
constructivism, social, 12, 100
Cooper, David, 72
Cooper, Frederick, 264
Copeland, Aaron, 194
copyrights, 10
Coronil, Fernando, 87
cosmopolitanism, 292
Costa, Srgio, 92, 193194, 275, 291, 293
Coulter, Ann, 102, 151
counter-Enlightenment, 78
CP (Communist Party), 95, 99, 154
Crenshaw, Kimberl, 78, 212, 217
Creole consciousness, 54
creolity, 60
creolization, 258
Crvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 31
Critical Dictionary of Cultural Politics (Coelho),
180
critical law, 75, 78
critical pedagogy, 75
critical race (the term), 86
critical race theory (the term), 86
critical race theory: anticolonial movements, 86;
aversion to, xvi, 298; Bourdieu/Wacquant,
114; decolonization of knowledge, 78; decolonizing corpus, 82; Diderot, Denis, 23;
Fanon, Frantz, 73; French intellectuals, 244;
leftist arguments against, xvi; liberalism, 103;
Marxism, 103; racism, 225; U. S. Constitution, 114, 115; iek, Slavoj, 120
critical utopias, 289
critical whiteness studies, 23, 24
cross-border interlocution, 293298
cross-national comparisons, xviii, 184185
Cruz, Manoel de Almeida, 179
Cuba, 119
Cuddihy, John Murray, 34
Cult of Dierence and the Sacralization of the
Victim (Todorov), 140
cultural capital, 297298
cultural complexes, 315n13
cultural dierence, 9495
Index
Cultural Revolution, 134

cultural studies, 284287; Bourdieu, Pierre, 285;
Bourdieu/Wacquant, 284287; in Brazil,
206; Fanon, Frantz, 73, 286; French intellectuals, 132, 244, 286; of French popular
culture, 332n46; genealogy of, 330n6; poststructuralism, 272; precursors, 286; transdisciplinary trends, 285
cultural syncretism, 284, 321n50
culture: in Bolivia, 104; capitalism, 97; economy,
111; indigenous peoples, 106
culture wars: Enlightenment, 12; France, 173;
sobbing for the white man, 134136; the
term, usage of, xiiixiv; United States, 70,
249250; iek, Slavoj, 129
Cunha, Olvia Maria Gomes da, 208
Cunhambebe, 124
Cusset, Franois, 107, 109, 117, 275276, 286
Cuvier, Georges, 240
Daily Humiliation (Badiou), 153
Dalit, 98, 324n38
DaMatta, Roberto, 183
dAngola, Paulo, 39
Daniel, Jean, 168
Dash, J. Michael, 22
Dash, Michael, 62
Davis, Angela, 64, 77, 128
Davis, Mike, 31, 56
Davis, Miles, 45, 50
Daye, Hamed, 148
de Gaulle, Charles: Brazil, dismissal of, 38; independence path between US and USSR, 132;
post-WWII activism, 71; Sartre, Jean-Paul,
110; Third World, France as defender of,
260; white normativity, 240
De la Littrature des Ngres (Grgoire), 22
dead white males, 94
Dean, Warren, 81
Debray, Rgis, 138
Debussy, Claude, 50
Declaration of Haitian Independence, 20
Declaration of Independence, 2, 16, 17, 70, 220
Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
311n10
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 28
Decolonization and Decolonized (Memmi), 162
decolonization of knowledge, 6194, 248255;
American studies, 80; anthropology, 7879;
anticolonial movements, 68; area studies,
8081; black studies, 7980; dependency
theory, 76; ethnic studies, 7980; Eurocentrism, 6168; France, 7071; French Theory,
342
261; globalization, 9091; historiography,

77; independence movements worldwide,
61; la Rpublique, decolonizing of, 248255;
Latin American studies, 81; law, 78; literature, canon debate in, 80; minority liberation movements, 68; modernity/coloniality
research, 8990; multiculturalism, 8285;
pedagogy, 78, 93; philosophy, 78; postcolonial
studies/theory, 8592; power structures and
epistemologies, xiii; psychic fallout, 69; racial
hierarchies, dismantling of, 70; radicalization
of the disciplines, 7582; revisionist history,
75, 77, 9394, 109110; seismic shift in,
61, 6874, 79, 82, 178179, 246; standpoint
theory, 78; terminological panaceas, search
for, 9192; transdisciplinary trends, 7980;
United States, 70; iek, Slavoj, 123
decolonizing corpus, 82, 115116
deconstruction, 232, 273274
Dedieu, Jean-Philippe, 259
Defert, Daniel, 133
Degler, Carl, 41
Delany, Martin, 2122
Deleuze, Gilles, 60, 245, 272, 293, 294
Delgado, Richard, 78
delinking, 76
Deltombe, Thomas, 254
Demand the Impossible (Moylan), 289
democracy, 12, 15, 6465, 134135. See also
racial democracy
Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 31
Democratic Party, 99
Denis, Ferdinand, 32
dependency complex, 73
dependency theory: Brazilian intellectuals, 71,
175; decolonization of knowledge, 76; in
economics, 272; Fanon, Frantz, 74; Latin
America, 89; Marxism, 76
Deren, Maya, 37
Deroo, Eric, 266
Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (Wise), 171
Derrida, Jacques: American PhD. dissertations,
294; deconstruction, 273274; dislocation
of European culture, 72; French Theory, 245;
intellectual exchange, 276; logocentrism,
critique of, 272; Messianic Jew, 171; postcolonial studies/theory, 261; Spivak, Gayatri,
245, 275
Des Cannibales (Montaigne), 2, 78
Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 20, 21
Destins Marranes (Lindenberg), 172
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir, 258259
dialogical anthropology, 79
diasporic longings, 4249
Index
diasporism, 172
Diawara, Manthia, 259
Dictatorship of Virture (Bernstein), 180
Dictionnaire des Politiques Culturelles, 140
Diderot (Bnot), 23
Diderot, Denis: abolitionism, 18; anticolonialism,
2, 18, 2223; anti-imperialism, 23, 24; antiracism, 18; Bnot, Yves, 24; Constitutional
Assembly (1789), 8; critical race theory, 23;
critical whiteness studies, 23, 24; egalitarianism, 2225; indigenous peoples, 7; LHistoire
des Deux Indes, 24; native political thought,
inuence of, 124; New World Avenger
topos, 204; radicalism, 2225; relationality,
24; Supplment au Voyage de Bougainville, 23;
universalism, 126
dierentialism, 138, 143, 243
Diggs, Irene, 207
Diop, Alioune, 256
Diop, Cheikh, 246
Diouf, Mamadou, 259
Diouf, Mouss, 152
Dirlik, Arif, 262, 264
Discourse on Colonialism (Csaire), 70, 158, 247,
252, 279
Discovery Doctrine, 45, 213
Distinction (Bourdieu), 284, 289
Disuniting America (Schlesinger), 127
diversity: Armative Action, 211; France, 173;
identity politics, 101102; United States,
101102, 173
Dixon, Melvon, 47
Djebar, Assia, 246, 259
Dominated Man (Memmi), 279
Donadey, Anne, 258
Dorfmann, Ariel, 278
Douglass, Frederick, 21, 44, 45, 231
Dozon, Jean Pierre, 265
Dred Scott decision, 144
Dreyfus aair, 163
Drinnon, Peter, 77
Drinnon, Richard, 77
DSouza, Dinesh: derisive denunciations, 140;
The End of Racism, 139140, 214; identity politics, 93; multiculturalism, 97, 115;
Obama, Barack, 315n23; racism, outlawing
of, 101; slavery, 139140
Du Bois, W. E. B.: anti-imperialist thrust, 80;
Brown, John, 231; color line, 103; double
consciousness, 268; Marxism, 64; Paris, 48;
public/psychological wage paid to white laborers, 312n27; Souls of White Folk, 230
Dubois, Laurent, 18
Dumas, Alexandre, 48
343
Dunbar, Paul Lawrence, 207

Dunham, Ann, 49, 51
Dunham, Katherine, 177, 207
Durban Conference on Racism and Xenophobia
(2001), 98, 324n38
Durpaire, Franois, 151152, 241243, 268
Dussel, Enrique, 78, 87
DWB (driving while black), 218
Dylan, Bob, 202203
Dzidzienyo, Anani, 271
cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS), 259
ecology, 106
Ecuador, 105
Edwards, Brent Hayes, 47, 177, 258
egalitarianism: Brazil, 29; Diderot, Denis, 2225;
Enlightenment, 22; France, 29, 220; indigenous peoples, 106; political correctness, 95;
United States, 29
Egypt, 96
Eisenstein, Zillah, 158
El Tunisiano, 148
Eletronorte, 11
Elias, Norbert, 257
Eliot, John, 6
Elkins, Stanley, 41, 158
Ellington, Duke, 194
Ellis, Frank, 111
Emancipation Proclamation, 28
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 40, 44
Encyclopedia (Hegel), 62
End of History (Fukuyama), 63
End of Racism, The (DSouza), 139140, 214
Engels, Friedrich, 7, 9, 124
Enlightenment, 1719; Armative Action,
209, 216; American Revolution, 1; antiracist public discourses and, 6970; Atlantic
Enlightenment, xiii, 1; Black Jacobins, 22;
colonialism, xv, 78; contradictions of, 1719;
counter-Enlightenment, 78; culture wars,
12; as a debate, 12; egalitarianism, 22;
Foucault on, Michel, 17; foundational contradictions, xv; French Enlightenment, 1, 8,
32, 44; Haitian Revolution, 1; imperialism,
xv; indigenous peoples, 1; the left, 2; New
World Avenger topos, 204; racism, 78; reparations, 209; secularism, 67; slavery, xv, 18
Enlightenment against Empire (Muthu), 23
Enlightenment Republicanism, xv, 1, 20, 28
Enlightenment universalism, 17
Ephraim, Charles W., 1314
equal opportunity myth, 219220
Escobar, Arturo, 87, 8990, 106, 130
Index
Esprit (journal), 139

Essai sur Lingalit des Races (Gobineau), 33
essentialism: clash-of-cultures essentialism, 56;
identity politics, 100; mestizo essentialism,
237; Senghor, Lopold, 48; strategic essentialism, 100
Essmoricq, 88
Estudos Afro-Asitico (journal), 289290
ethnic cleansing, 94
ethnic studies, 7980, 87, 116
ethnography, 36, 305n29
ethnology, French, 260
ethno-national identity, 298
Eurocentric literary discourse, 66
Eurocentrism, 6168; artistic modernism,
6667; blind Eurocentrism, 222; Bourdieu/
Wacquant, 296; Bruckner, Pascal, 134135;
colonialism, 66; decolonization of knowledge,
6168; denition, 6162, 65; democracy, 64;
Hegel, G. W. F., 6264; Husserl, Edmund,
65; imperialism, 66; indigenous critiques,
12; Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 34; Marxism, 64;
Non-Abrahamic and polytheistic religions,
67; patterns of, 6566; political economy, 67;
power of, 65; presentist historiography, 66;
self-critical reexivity, 67; slavery, 66; iek,
Slavoj, 123, 124126, 129. See also antiEurocentrism
Euro-hegemonism, 61, 6263
Europe: Conquests enrichment of, xv; democracy
equated to, 134135; dislocation of European culture, 72; Third World as creator of, 74
Eurotropism, 62, 125
Even the Rain (lm), 5, 302n14
vora, Cesria, 146
exceptionalism: Brazil, 40, 191; France, 145146;
United States, 40, 103, 115
exterminationist racism, 157158
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 48, 65
Fabe, 148
Fabian, Johannes, 73, 78
Fabre, Clarisse, 142, 173
Fabre, Michel, 47
face of humanity, 119
Facing Racism in France and Brazil (Poli), 238
Fanon, Frantz, 4649, 7174, 159161; African
aesthetics, 4849; anticolonialism, 124; antipsychiatry, 72; backlash against, 72; Black
Skin, White Masks (see Black Skin, White
Masks); blackness in France, 4647; Brazil,
74; Csaire, Aim, 71, 73; colonized people,
254; critical race theory, 73; cultural studies, 73, 286; decolonization of knowledge,
344
70, 7174, 132; dependency theory, 74; as

French, 262; French racism, 46; independence in Third World, xvi; inuence of, 74,
124; Jews, 159161, 163; lactication process, 241; limitations, 72; Mannoni, Octave,
7273; postcolonial studies/theory, 2, 245;
postcolonialism, 87; on racism, 214; radicalization of academic disciplines, xvi; revolutionary Algeria to, 42; Said, Edward, 86;
Third World, 24; Toward the African Revolution, 73; two cities, 243, 299; United States,
74; whiteness studies, 73, 161; Wretched of
the Earth (see Wretched of the Earth)
Fanon, Josie, 161
Fassin, Didier, 268269
Fassin, ric, 142, 173, 268269
Faurisson, Robert, 165
Faust, 275
FBI, 113
Federal Housing Administration, 216
federalism and Native Americans, 9
Felski, Rita, 301n2
feminism: Brazil, 140141, 193; France, 140
141; hostility to, 142; identity politics, 96;
multiculturalism, 140141; roots, 69; United
States, 140141; iek, Slavoj, 128
feminist Francophone studies, 82
feminists of color, 231
Feres, Joo, Jr., 220
Ferguson, Niall, 25
Fernandes, Florestan, 175, 177, 228, 278, 280
Ferreira, Yedo, 74
Ferro, Marc, 249, 265
FESNF (Federation of Students from Balck Africa in France), 132
Figueiredo, ngela, 290
Figures dIsral (Lindenberg), 172
Filhos de Gandhi, 197
Finkielkraut, Alain, 165170; 1968 heritage,
attacks on, 111; American dierentialism,
138; colonial nostalgia, 249; French universalism, 168; Holocaust (Shoah), 167;
identity politics, 165166; Jews, 170; Levinas, Emmanuel, 162; Lvy, Bernard-Henri,
162; media elite, 169; Meir, Golda, 167;
multiculturalism, 139, 146, 165; pro-Americanism, 107; race/coloniality discourse,
131; Sartre, Jean-Paul, 167; slavery, 167;
victimization of racialized communities,
104; Zionism, 165
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (iek), 129, 131
First Congress for Black Brazilians (1950), 176
Fishkin, Susan, 181
Five Thousand Year Leap, The (Skousen), 56
Index
ux and reux, xx
Folha de So Paulo (newspaper), 179
Foote, Thelma Wills, 77
Forbes, Jack D., 115
Ford Foundation, 79, 283
Foreign Aairs (journal), 53
Forgotten Founders ( Johansen), 9
Foucault, Michel: American PhD. dissertations,
294; Black Panthers, 133; Bourdieu, Pierre,
110; Enlightenment, 17; genealogical critique of power, 272; indignity of speaking
for others, 63; postcolonial studies/theory,
245; racial state theories, 261; Said, Edward,
245; universalism, 110
foundations, 282283
Founding Fathers, 2, 6, 89, 216
Frader, Laura, 316n38
Fragile Absolute, The (iek), 125
France, 2660, 132174, 238243; 2005,
252254, 299; abolitionism, 29; actors of
color, 152; Armative Action, 211212,
239; African Americans, 42, 4449; Algerians in France, 29, 130; American Revolution,
27; anticolonialism, 251252, 256; antiimmigrant sentiment, 316n53; anti-imperialism, 256; antiracism, 166167, 238239;
anti-Semitism, 145, 165, 169170; banlieu
rebellions (2005), 173; Black Atlantic, 26;
blackness in, 4647; book distribution and
translation, 263; Brazil, inuence on, xv, 28,
3138; Brazil, relations with, 38; Brazil compared to, 238243; Brazil studies, 270271;
Cartesianism, 298; citizenship, 29; Code
Indigene, 29; Code Noir, 18, 29, 266; code
of nationality, 137138; colonialism, 53,
132133, 247248, 249, 252254, 265
266; color-blind ideology, 144, 241242; as
color-blind society, 45; communitarianism,
xiv, 138, 141, 142; Constitutional Assembly
(1789), 8; Constitutions, 30; cultural intercourse with Brazil, United States, 27; cultural
studies in, 244; culture wars, 173; Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,
28; decolonization of knowledge, 7071; diversity, 173; egalitarianism, 29, 220; Enlightenment republicanism, 28; exceptionalism,
145146; feminism, 140141; gap between
society and French academics, xviii; Gaysott
Law (1990), 239; globalization, 145146;
gun control, 153; Haiti, relations with, 21;
hip hop in, 146153; Ho Chi Minh on, 124;
Holocaust (Shoah), law prohibiting denial of,
251; as a hyperpower, 260; identitarianism,
141; identity politics, 2; immigrant rights,
345
137; immigration, 59, 149, 240, 252; imperialism, 32, 261, 262; indigenous peoples, 28,
44; institutional violence, 148149; Islamophobia, 145, 149150; Israeli Westernism,
167168; Jewish-black and Jewish-Muslim
collaboration, 171; Jewish-over-black hierarchies, 166; Jews, 29, 159, 168; Judeophobia,
169; la Rpublique, xiv; the left, 137140;
Les Trent Glorieuses (1945-1975), 7071;
Marche des Beurs (1983), 252; Mexico, 54;
minority rights, 137; mission civilisatrice, 14,
145, 249, 250, 257; multiculturalism, 2627,
137, 141146, 145146, 172174, 182;
national identity, 116; Native Code, 239;
Native Codes, 29; nativists, 138; negrophilie,
45; neoracist consensus, 137; Paris, 45, 46,
48, 132; parit, 141; police brutality, 152
153, 173, 253; police brutality in, 135, 147;
political correctness, 174; popular culture,
4849, 266, 332n46; as postcolonial nation,
246247; postcolonialism, xvii; post-WWII
activism, 71; race, 145, 149, 238243, 261;
race and colonialism, interplay between, xix,
7071; racial proling, 151, 218, 239, 252;
racism, 2930, 4445, 145, 151, 316n53;
Red Atlantic, 26; the right, 151; seismic
shift in, 178179, 246; separatism, 141;
slavery, 29; social problems, 149; socialists,
137; syncretism, 146; television personalities, 151152; Third World, 260; Third
Worldism, 132133, 246; United States,
commentary on, 143; United States, relations
with, 4449; United States compared to,
30, 238239; universalism, 30, 168; Vichy
regime, 144145, 163, 170; White Atlantic,
26; whiteness studies in, 239241; xenophobia, 137138, 225. See also la Rpublique
France Antartique, 27, 33
Franco, Francisco, 66
Franco, Jean, 94
Francophilia, 44, 294
Francophone anticolonial studies, 245
Francophone anti-imperialism, 256
Francophone intellectuals in American universities, 258259
Francophone literature, 258
Francophone Ngritude, 291
Francophone postcolonial studies/theory, 258
Francophone studies, feminist, 82
Frank, Andre Gunder, 74, 76
Frank, Thomas, 129
Frank, Waldo, 50
Frankenberg, Ruth, 121, 232
Frankfurt School, 278, 286, 288
Index
Franklin, Benjamin, 7
Franklin, John Hope, 77
Frazier, E. Franklin, 41, 43, 230
freedom, Hegel on, 6364
Freedoms Journal (newspaper), 15
Freire, Eduardo, 184
Freire, Paulo, 74, 78, 272
Freitas, Dcio, 179
Freitas, Osmar, Jr., 179180
French, John, 278279
French Academy (Acadmie Francaise), 146, 251
French anthropology, 286
French antidierentialism, 143144
French Attitudes toward US Inuence in Brazil
(Rodrigues), 330n2
French canon, 145
French Civilization and Its Discontents (Stovall
and Van Den Abbeele), 258
French critical theory. See French Theory
French Enlightenment, 1, 8, 32, 44
French ethnology, 260
French ideas, 295
French intellectuals, 244269; 1990s, 244;
achievements, 172173; American intellectuals, 286, 294; Bourdieu/Wacquant,
293; Brazil, inuence on, 34; colonial novels,
thematic analysis of, 246; critical race studies,
244; critical race theory, 244; cultural studies,
132, 244, 286; Jewish, 171; Latin American
intellectuals, knowledge of, 293; leftists,
161162; multiculturalism, 145, 146, 182,
244; negationism, 247; postcolonial studies/
theory, 132, 244246, 254, 255261; poststructuralism, 272, 286; pro-American, 107;
racism, 33; transnational currents, lack of
engagement with, 286; Wacquant, Loc, 296;
Zionism, 169170
French language, 5758
French Oriental studies, 132133
French poststructuralism, 272
French rappers, 147149
French Republicanism, 142, 144, 243, 265
French Revolution, 1, 21, 28, 93
French Theory, 272276; decolonization of
knowledge, 261; inuence abroad, 275276;
nouveaux philosophes, 275; postcolonial studies/theory, 245246; United States, 275
French Theory (Cusset), 109, 275276
French universalism, 144
Frenette, Marco, 234235
Freud, Sigmund, 54, 72
Freyre, Gilberto: Anglo/Latin dichotomy, 220;
Brazilian identity, 156; conservatism, 175,
178; indigenous peoples, 7; Masters and
346
Slaves, 235; Quilombo (journal), 176; racial

democracy, 280; Slave and Citizen (with Tannenbaum), 41; Tannenbaum, Frank, 41; in
United States, 4041
Friedan, Betty, 193
Friedman, Milton, 283
Friedman, Susan Stanford, 301n2
From Bob Dylan to Bob Marley (Gil), 202203
Frum, David, 164
Fry, Peter, 177, 207208, 219220
Fuentes, Carlos, 156
Fukuyama, Francis, 62, 63, 297
Fulford, Tim, 301n1
Furtado, Celso, 76
FWA (ying while Arab), 218
Gabriels Rebellion, 21
Galeano, Eduardo, 76
Galvo, Walnice Nogueira, 4041, 293
Gama Lima, Lana Lage da, 179
Gandhi, Mohatma, 205
Garrison, William Lloyd, 17
Garvey, Marcus, 210
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 186
gay rights, 212
Geismer, Alain, 159
generalizations, xix
Genet, Jean: Bayart, Jean-Franoise, 263; Blacks,
The (Les Ngres), 49, 74, 202; Palestinian
cause, 161; United States tour, 133
Genovese, Eugene, 41
Gopplitique (journal), 174
Germany, 84
Gershwin, George, 194
Getz, Stan, 41
Gil, Gilberto: anticolonial coinages, 196; From
Bob Dylan to Bob Marley, 202203; hybridity, 202; indigeneity, xvii; Mo de Limpeza,
201203; race, xvii; samba, 194; S.O.B.s in
New York City, 39; Tropiclia movement,
197198, 205, 206, 322n52
Gillespie, Dizzy, 45
Gilliam, Angela, 42, 78, 236
Gilroy, Paul, xx, 64, 206, 289
Gingrich, Newt, 2, 327n12
Ginsburg, Faye, 7879
Giroud, Franoise, 141
Giroux, Henry, 78
Gitlin, Todd, 98100, 131, 158
Glissant, douard: anti-imperialism, 256; creolity, 60; at CUNY, 259; LInstitut du ToutMonde, 328n39; Memories of Empire, 266;
relational theories, 258; Third Worldism, 60;
transversalities, xx
Index
global capitalism, 118120, 122, 129

Global North, 6768, 9798, 119
Global South, 6768, 98, 119, 283
globalization: Bourdieu on, Pierre, 287; Bourdieu/Wacquant, 112; cross-cultural interlocution, 295; decolonization of knowledge,
9091; France, 145146; intellectual labor,
global distribution of, 292; multiculturalism,
112; trickle-down globalization, 24
Globo network, 227228
Glucksmann, Andr, 162, 169
Gobineau, Arthur, Comte de, 33, 285, 291
Godard, Jean-Luc, 133
Godelier, Maurice, 270
Goebbels, Joseph, 125
Goldberg, David T., 304n2
Golden Law, 28
Goldman Sachs, 118
Goldmann, Lucien, 246
Gmara, Francisco Lpez de, 155
Gmez-Pea, Guillermo, 5657
Gonalves de Magalhes, Domingos Jos, 40
Gondola, Didier, 240241
Gonneville, Paulmier de, 88
Gonzales, Lelia, 43, 74, 179
Good Neighbor policy, 40
Goodman, Amy, 158
Goodman, Jane, 261
Goody, Jack, 64
Gordon, Lewis, 78
Graeber, David, 130
Gramsci, Antonio, 86, 89
Grande, Sandy, 12
Grandmaison, Olivier Le Cour, 265
Grass, Gnter, 287
Great Depression, 102
Green, James, 81
Grgoire, Abb, 22
Grenouilleau, Olivier-Ptr, 247
Grewal, Inderpal, 80
Griaule, Marcel, 37
Grinde, Donald A., Jr., 9
Grosfoguel, Ramn, 87
Grotowski, Jerzy, 37
group rights, 211
groupism, 116
Grumbach, Tiennot, 159
Gruzinski, Serge, 264
Guattari, Flix, 60, 72, 245
Gunif-Souilamas, Nacira, 256257, 268,
328n36
Guerreiro Ramos, Albert, 176, 233234, 280,
290
Guerrero, Annette Jaimes, 115
347
Guevara, Che, 70
Guiart, Jean, 260
Guimares, Antonio, 189, 207
Gullar, Ferreira, 219
gun control in France, 153
Gunboat Diplomacy, 40
habitus, 107108, 257
Haiti, 1822, 62, 323n10
Haiti (Veloso), 199201
Haitian Revolution, 1, 2122, 130131
Halevi, Ilan, 159, 171
Halimi, Gisle, 70, 246
Halimi, Ilan, 165
Hall, Stuart, 206, 233, 284, 286, 293
Hallam, Henry, 51
Hanchard, Michael: Bourdieu/Wacquant, xviii,
43, 190, 276277, 282; Brazil, vision of,
290291; Brazilian Black consciousness
movement, xviii, 276277; Brazilian racism,
280; Estudos Afro-Asitico (journal), 289;
nation-state as determinant of ideology, 291;
Orpheus and Power, 190, 276277; race,
283284
Harbi, Mohammed, 246, 263
Hardt, Michael, 130, 220
Hargreaves, Alec G., 259, 267
Harlem Renaissance, 47
Harris, Marvin, 41
Hart, William David, 123
Hart-Cellar Immigration Act, 75
Hasenbalg, Carlos, 179
Hassner, Pierre, 263
Hatoum, Milton, 4041
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44
Hazan, Eric, 171
health care, 129, 214
Hegel, G. W. F., 6264; Africa, interpretation
of, 247; Anglo-Saxonism, 52; blacks, 63;
Encyclopedia, 62; Eurocentrism, 6264;
Euro-hegemonism, 62; freedom, 6364;
indigenous peoples, 53, 297; inuence of, 62;
North America compared to South America,
183; Phenomenology of Spirit, 62; Philosophy
of History, 62, 63, 131, 183; Philosophy of
Right, 6263; primitive world, view of, 123;
racism, 78; iek, Slavoj, 96, 125
Hegel and Haiti (Buck-Morss), 130
hegemony theory, 89
Hellwig, David J., 42
Hemmings, Sally, 4445
Hendrix, Jimi, 196
Here No One Is White (Sovik), 236238
Heringer, Rosana, 217
Index
Heritage Foundation, 109

Herzl, Theodor, 153
Hessel, Stphane, 169
higher education in Brazil, 221222
Himes, Chester, 45
Hine, Darlene Clark, 77
hip hop, 146153; African American rappers,
148; Brazilian, 147148; Brazilian rappers,
147148, 195196; in France, 146153;
France rappers, 147149; police brutality,
148149; racial proling, 148149
Hirsch, Seymour, 158
historiography, 77
Hitler, Adolf, 66, 102, 157158
Ho Chi Minh, 70, 124
Hobbes, Thomas, 7, 123, 209
Hobsbawm, Eric, 19, 117
Homan, Abby, 158
Homan, Lon-Franois, 240
Holiday, Billie, 50
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 40
Holocaust (Shoah): colonial genocides, 158;
colonialism, 157; denial of, 251; European
maturity, 273; exterminationist racism,
157158; Finkielkraut, Alain, 167; French
law, 251; negationism, 169; slavery, 158
Holston, James, 29, 218, 281
hooks, bell, 94
Horowitz, David, 111, 124, 162, 168, 216
How Africa Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney), 76
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America
(Marable), 76
Hugo, Victor, 33, 48, 231
Hume, David, 123
Huntington, Samuel: Anglo-Saxonism, 52; Aymara and, 105; clash-of-cultures essentialism,
56; Hegel, G. W. F., 62; identitarianism, 105;
multiculturalism, 97; Samuel Huntington
(the term), 96
Huntley, Lynn, 207
Husserl, Edmund, 65
hybridity, 8889, 202, 285
IAM, 147
Ianni, Octvio, 175, 278, 280
identitarianism, 137142
identity, stigmatization of, 105
identity politics (the term), 92
identity politics, 93131; American conservatives, 181; as American import, 139; Balkanization, 93, 139; Bourdieu/Wacquant,
108, 277; class-based argument against, 100;
class-over-race hierarchy, 101, 104, 107, 109,
119, 122, 127; critiques of, 93100, 126;
348
dead white males, 94; diversity, 101102;

essentialism, 100; feminism, 96; Finkielkraut,
Alain, 165166; France, 2; the left, xvi, 95,
96; Marxism, 96; Marxists, 96; multicultural
identity politics, xvi, xvii; multiculturalism,
181; Northern imposition, 9798; Republican Party, 93; ressentiment, 190; the right, 82,
93, 96, 100; scapegoating, 96100; separatism, 93, 9495, 127; social constructivism,
12, 100; as synecdoche, 97; United States,
121122, 181; iek, Slavoj, 118, 125,
127128
If It Were Not for Brazil, Barack Obama Would
Not Have Been Born ( Jorge), 49
Ignatiev, Noel, 232
Il Aiy, 178, 302n22
Illich, Ivan, 78
immigration: Brazil, 59, 221; France, 59, 149,
240, 252; Islamic immigration in Europe,
162163; neoliberalism, 253; Sarkozy,
Nicolas, 248, 251252; United States, 59,
116, 224
Imperial Eyes (Pratt), 121
imperial gaze, 121
imperialism: Bourdieu/Wacquant, 146; Enlightenment, xv; Eurocentrism, 66; France, 32,
261, 262; racism, 291; trickle-down imperialism, 24; United States, 116, 182, 307n88
Incondncia Mineira revolt (1788-1789), 39
India, 213, 324n38
Indian (the term), 58
indigeneity: Appeal for Future Mobilizations
(World Social Forum), 90; Gil, Gilberto, xvii;
multicultural left, 12; Veloso, Caetano, xvii
Indignes de la Rpublique, 252253, 255
indigenous activism, 105106
indigenous dispossession, 5, 6
indigenous peoples, 415; agency of, intellectual/
historiographic, 1112; best school for,
124; biodiversity, 10, 105; Brazil, 4, 27, 28; as
catalysts for Western thinking, 79; cultural
agency, 6; culture, 106; Declaration of the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 311n10; democracy, 12; designation of, 58; egalitarianism, 106; Enlightenment, 1; epistemological
crisis in Atlantic countries, 713; European
response to, 6; European/indigene romances,
321n50; rst contact, 11; France, 28, 44;
Hegel, G. W. F., 53, 297; hybridity, 88; as
indels and devil worshipers, 155; intellectual property rights, 9; interchange between
European and indigenous thought, 1213;
the left, 8; nation-states, 67; native place
names, 56; Republicanism, 1415; transna-
Index
tional corporations, 1011, 105, 130; United

States, 4, 5, 27, 28; iek, Slavoj, 129130
indigenous rights, 46, 9
indigenous sovereignty, 4
indigenous thinkers, 13, 88
inequality, social, 107
inequality in Brazil, 220, 229
Inheritors, The (Bourdieu and Passeron), 107
Inquisition, 66
Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research, 177
Institute for Research on Black Culture, 178
intellectual labor, global distribution of, 292
intellectual property rights, 9, 9091
intercoloniality, ii, 3, 42, 75, 78, 333
interculturality, 91, 106, 140
intersectionality, 111
intertextuality, xviii
Iran, 65
Iraq War, 165, 260
Irigaray, Luce, 245, 294
Iroquois, 89
Iroquois and the Founding of the American Nation,
The (Grinde), 9
Iroquois League, 9
Islam, 174
Islamic dress, 150
Islamo-fascism, 164
Islamophobia, 149151; France, 145, 149150;
history over the longue dure, 154155;
Judeophobia, 157; neoconservatism, 151;
Orientalism, 150; racial proling, 103; Republican Party, 151; the right, 151; Sarkozy,
Nicolas, 149; sexist faith, accusation of, 257;
Tea Party, 224; United States, 150; wedgeissues tactics, 150; Zionism, 169
Israel, 162, 163164, 169
Israel, Menasse Ben, 172
Israeli Westernism, 167168
Israeli-Palestinian conict, 154, 157, 165, 169,
171
Isto (magazine), 179
Its All True (lm), 50
Ivekovic0107, Rada, 251, 255
Jackson, Michael, 203204
Jaimes Guerrero, Annette, 115
James, C. L. R., 19, 21, 64, 130, 177
James, E. R., 42
Jameson, Fredric, 62, 81, 275, 289, 293
Japan, 65
Jeanson, Francis, 70, 246, 256
Jeerson, Thomas, 7, 89, 1516, 39, 4445
Jeries, Leonard, 154
Jennings, Francis, 77, 115
349
Jew and the Other, The (Benbassa and Attias),

172
Jewish-Muslim relations, 154157
Jewishness, 172
Jewish-over-black hierarchies, 166
Jews, 154161; Africa and, 317n64; American
Jews, 318n102; black anticolonialist thinkers,
159; black-Jewish relationship, 154, 161, 162;
Fanon, Frantz, 159161, 163; Finkielkraut,
Alain, 170; France, 29, 159, 168; Jewishblack and Jewish-Muslim collaboration in
France, 171; the left, 158159, 171172;
liberalism, 318n102; miscegenation, 167;
Muslim-Jewish relations, 154155; Orientalism, 156; relationality of, 232; U. S. Census,
154; the West, 171
Jews for Racial and Economic Justice ( JFREJ),
171172
Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 194
Johansen, Bruce, 9
John M. Olin Foundation, 109
John the Baptist, 62
Johnson, Chalmers, 25
Johnson, James Weldon, 45
Johnson v. MIntosh, 5
Jolas, Eugene, 4
Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka), 177
Jordan, Don, 232
Jorge, Fernando, 49, 307n79
Jospin, Lionel, 143
Journal of Race Development, 53
Joyce (singer), 195
Judeophobia, 157, 169
Jules-Rosette, Benetta, 47
Julien, Charles Andr, 263
July, Serge, 159
justice, 111
Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 147, 170, 173
Kadir, Djelal, 10
Kamel, Ali, 218219, 223228, 280, 324n43
Kane, Hamidou, 256
Kant, Immanuel, 78, 123, 297
Kapayo (documentary lm), 11
Kaplan, Caren, 80, 121, 232
Kaufman, Deborah, 172
Kaye/Kantrowitz, Melanie, 158, 172
Kechiche, Abdellatif, 266
Keita, Salif, 146
Kelley, Robin, 64, 77
Kennedy, John F., 9
Kennedy, Randall, 78
Keywords (Williams), 8384
Kgositsile, Keorapetse, 177
Index
Khaled, Cheb, 146

Khan, Nusrat Fateh Ali, 146
Khlei, Michel, 169
Kieft, Willem, 39
King, Martin Luther, Jr.: content of character
discourse, 219; on integration without income, 103; Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement, 154; racial hierarchies,
dismantling of, 70; racism and imperialism,
291; Washington march, 137
King, Mel, 102
King, Rodney, 188
Kitt, Eartha, 45
KKK, 102
Klein, Naomi, 130, 159, 283
knowledge. See decolonization of knowledge
knowledge-power nexus, 86
Kojve, Alexandre, 62
Kouchner, Bernard, 165
Kourouma, Ahmadou, 263
Kouyat, Lamine Badian, 146
Kovel, Joel, 158
Krauthammer, Charles, 94, 165
Krenak, Ailton, 1112, 13
Kristeva, Julia, 138, 291
Kristol, Irving, 162
Krivine, Alain, 159
Kushner, Tony, 158159, 172
Kymlicka, Will, 26, 115
La Brigade, 148
La Crise des Intellectuels Arabes (Laroui), 133
la Francophonie, 257258
La Mcanique Raciste (Tvanian), 241
La Misre du Monde (Bourdieu), 287
La Prison Juive (Daniel), 168
La Raction Philosmite (Segr), 169
la Rpublique, xiv, 248255
La Revue Ngre, 45, 4950
La Rumeur, 147
Lacan, Jacques, 73, 125, 245, 272, 294
Lacheraf, Mostefa, 263
lacit, 249
Laing, R. D., 72
Lamartine, Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Prat de, 22
Lana, Luiz Gomes, 13
Lander, Christian, 233
Landes, Ruth, 41, 271
Lang, Jack, 111
language, 5760, 105
Lanzmann, Claude, 159, 162
Lapeyronnie, Didier, 254
Lardreau, Guy, 169
Laroui, Abdallah, 133, 263
350
Las Casas, Bartolom de, 1, 51

Latin America (the term), 53
Latin America, Moorish unconscious in, 156
Latin American intellectuals, 293
Latin American postcolonialism, 274
Latin American studies, 81, 82
Latin colonialisms, 250
Latinidad, 41, 52, 57
Latinism, xvxvi, 5157
Latinists, 5354
Latinit, 54
Latinity, 52
Latinos, 122, 130
Latins vs. Anglo-Saxon, 51, 5556
law, decolonizing of, 78
Le Bon, Gustave, 33
Le Hir, Marie-Pierre, 285
Le Livre Noir du Colonialisme (Ferro), 249
Le Multiculturalisme (Constant), 173
Le Ngre Romantique (Homan), 240
Le Pen, Jean-Marie: anti-Semitism, 165, 171;
Battle of Algiers, 247; multiculturalism,
139; public support for, 316n53; voters for,
137138; iek, Slavoj, 138
Le Pen, Marine, 149
Le Sanglot de lHomme Blanc (White Mans Sobs)
(Bruckner), 134, 163164
Lebovics, Herman, 139, 144
Leclerc, Charles, 19
Lee, Bruce, 202
Lee, Spike, 202
Lefebvre, Henri, 286, 291
Lefeuvre, Daniel, 249
left, the: American, decline of, 98100; AngloSaxon, usage of, 55; Brazil, 175, 183; Enlightenment, 2; France, 137140; identity
politics, xvi, 95, 96; indigenous peoples, 8;
Jews, 158159, 171172; literature, canon
debate in, 80; meaning of the term, 8182;
multicultural left, 12, 98; multiculturalism, 85, 98100, 113114, 139; neoracist
consensus, 137; nouveaux philosophes, 165;
Obama, Barack, 312n41; race, 102; racism,
103; the right, portrayal of, 9596
Lgitime Dfense (journal), 124
Leiris, Michel, 37, 263
Lemaire, Sandrine, 266
Leopold II, King, 66
Lerner, Michael, 158
Lry, Jean de, 7, 31
Les Maoccidents (Birnbaum), 168169
Les Mouches (Sartre), 49
Les Ngres (The Blacks) (Genet), 49, 74, 202
Les Ngresses Vertes, 146
Index
Les Nouveaux Dsinformateurs (Weill-Raynal),

169
Les Temps Modernes (journal), 139, 161
Ltudiant dAfrique Noire (journal), 132
Levi, Primo, 170
Levin, Michael, 154
Levinas, Emmanuel, 162
Levine, Lawrence, 158
Levine, Robert, 81
Lvi-Strauss, Claude: in Brazil, 34; Brazilian sjour, xviii; circum-Atlantic connectivities, 34;
Eurocentrism, 34; indigenous knowledge, 33;
indigenous peoples, 7; postcolonial studies/
theory, 246; raw and the cooked, 51; United
States, thinking of, 31
Lvy, Benny (formerly Pierre Victor), 159, 162
Lvy, Bernard-Henri, 162
LHistoire des Deux Indes (Diderot), 24
LHistoire Philosophique et Politique (Raynal), 23
LHomme Domin (Memmi), 159
liberalism, 103, 318n102
Libration (journal), 139
Libert, Egalit, Sexualits (Fabre and Fassin),
142, 173
Lies My Teacher Taught Me (Loewen), 77
Lima, Solange Martins Couceiro de, 179, 180
Limbaugh, Rush, 102, 139, 224
Lincoln, Abraham, 16
Lind, Michael, 31
Lindenberg, Daniel, 172
Linebaugh, Peter, 130
LInstitut du Tout-Monde, 328n39
Lionnet, Franois, 258
Lipietz, Alain, 31
Lipsitz, George, 100, 121
Lispector, Clarice, 4041
Liste Noire, 148
literature, canon debate in, 80
Living in a Black Skin (television series), 151
Lloyd, David, 97
Locke, John, 2, 7, 209
Loewen, James, 77, 230
Lombard, Denys, 264
Long While to Freedom (Mandela), 6465
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 44
Loomba, Ania, 324n38
Lopes, Nei, 187, 219
Lorde, Audre, 121
Losurdo, Domenico, 157
Lou Dobbs Tonight (television show), 102
Louisiana Purchase, 27
Lowe, Lisa, 97
Lukcs, Georg, 246
Lumumba, Patrice, 70, 124
351
Luso-Tropicalism, 220
Lustosa, Isabel, 41
Lyons, Oren, 115
Lyotard, Jean-Franoise, 69, 245, 272
M1 (of Dead Prez), 44
Mabanckou, Alain, 263
Macey, David, 47, 73
Machado, Arlindo, 288
Macheray, Pierre, 246
Maclaren, Peter, 78
Maggie, Yvonne, 207208
magical urbanism, 56
Maher, Bill, 233
Maigret, ric, 287, 288
Maio, Marcos Chor, 177
Majid, Anouar, 170171
malandragem, 184
Malaysia, 211
Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 87
Malek, Anwar Abdul, 86
Mama Africa (Pinho), 44
Mandela, Nelson, 6465
Mangabeira, Roberto Unger, 78
Mannoni, Octave, 7273, 265
Mano Negra, 146
Mo de Limpeza (Gil), 201203
Mao Zedong, 134, 169
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 311n6
Marable, Manning, 74, 76, 77, 79
March for Equality against Racism (Marche des
Beurs, 1983), 137, 252
Marcuse, Herbert, 158, 289
Marelli, Jolle, 171
marginalization, 213
Marley, Bob, 203204
Marranism, 172
Marsalis, Wynton, 206
Mart, Jos, 71, 156
Martial, Jacques, 152
Martinire, Guy, 270
Marx, Anthony, 278
Marx, Karl: colonialism, 64; Hegel, G. W. F., 62;
indigenous peoples, 7; Iroquois, 9; native political thought, inuence of, 124; native themes,
9; rosy dawn of capitalism, 76; slavery, 103,
122; wage slavery, 122; iek, Slavoj, 96, 125
Marxism: Black Marxism, 103; black oppression,
103; critical race theory, 103; dependency
theory, 76; discrediting of, 133; Du Bois, W.
E. B., 64; Eurocentrism, 64; identity politics,
96; indigenous critique of, 1213; multiculturalism, 97; pan-Africanism, 176; Third
World Marxism, 177; iek, Slavoj, 125, 168
Index
MAS (Movement for Socialism), 104

Maspero, Franois, 70, 246
Master Race Democracy, 15
Masters and Slaves (Freyre), 235
Mathieu, Martine, 246
Mathy, Jean-Phillipe, 143, 146
Mattelart, Armand, 278
Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, 54
Maxwell, Kenneth, 39
Mbembe, Achille, 29, 254
Mein Kampf (Hitler), 157158
Meir, Golda, 167
Mello, Breno, 49
Melville, Herman, 7, 19, 80, 181, 273
Memmi, Albert: colonized people, 254; The
Colonizer and the Colonized, 162; Decolonization and Decolonized, 162; decolonization of
knowledge, 70, 132; Dominated Man, 279;
Islamic immigration in Europe, 162163;
Portrait of the Colonized (Portrait da Colonis),
159, 279; postcolonial studies/theory, 245,
246, 262; turn to the right, 162163
Memorial Zumbi, 177
Menasse Ben Israel, 172
Mends France, Pierre, 165
Merkel, Angela, 96
Merquior, Jos Guilherme, 184
mestiagem, 59, 237
mestizaje, 84
mestizo essentialism, 237
mestizos, 5859, 229
Metheney, Pat, 41
mtissage, 59
Mexico, 54, 57, 84
Michaels, Walter Benn, 97, 101105, 109, 119
Michaux, Henri, 263
Mignolo, Walter, 54, 87, 89
Miller, Robert, 4
Mills, C. Wright, 294
Mills, Charles: antipodal position of blacks,
230; critique of Western philosophy, 78; on
Marxism, 103; racial contract, 15, 6364,
224; resistance to racial disrespect, 16; white
supremacy, 64
Milner, Jean-Claude, 107, 169
minorities, identitarianism and, 137142
minority liberation movements, 68
Miranda, Carmen, 41, 194
miscegenation: African Americans, 186; Brazil,
186187, 188, 193, 227, 235236; Gobineau,
Arthur, Comte de, 285; Great-Sperm-Theory-of-National-Formation, 236; Jews, 167;
Kamel on, Ali, 223; moreno norm, 236; racism,
220221; United States, 44, 59, 186187
352
miscigenao, 59
mission civilisatrice, 14, 145, 249, 250, 257
Missteps of Anti-imperialist Reason (French),
278279
Mitterand, Franois, 137
MLA (Modern Language Association), 80
MNU (Unied Negro Movement), 178
Moallem, Minoo, 80
model minority discourse, 166
modernism, modernity, 37, 6667, 296
modernity/coloniality research, 8990, 91
Mohanty, Chandra T., 78, 80, 100
Mohanty, Satya P., 100
Mohawk, John, 115
Mohawks, 6
Moiss, Massaud, 4041
Monnembo, Tierno, 263
Monk, Thelonious, 45
Monroe Doctrine, 39, 40, 77
Monsieur R., 148
Montaigne, Michel de, 2, 78, 33, 124
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de,
8, 18
Moog, Vianna, 183
Moore, Michael, 233
Moors, 170171
Moraes, Vincius de, 50, 194, 228
Moraga, Cherrie, 57
Morales, Evo, 104105, 130
moralism, 116
More, Thomas, 1
Moreira, Moraes, 195
Morgan, Lewis Henry, 9
Moriconi, Italo, 181, 182
Morin, Edgar: decolonization of knowledge, 70;
Jews and the West, 171; lawsuits against,
247; May 1968 movement, 159; negationism,
169; postcolonial studies/theory, 246
Moroccans, 130
Morrison, Toni, 121
Morse, Richard, 5455
Mosse, George, 158
Motta, Ed, 195
Moura, Clvis, 74, 179, 234
Moura, Jean-Marc, 266
Mouralis, Bernard, 265
Mouzer, Frdrique, 243, 268
Moylan, Tom, 289
Mudimbe, Valentin, 89, 259
multicultural coloniality, 27
multicultural identity politics. See identity politics
multicultural left, 12, 98
multiculturalism (the term), 86, 92, 9697
Index
multiculturalism, 8286, 94100, 139146,

179183; African Americans, 8485; Afrocentrism, 180; as American discourse,
115; American identitarianism, 139; AngloSaxon, 183; anticolonial movements, 86;
anti-imperialism, 80; aversion to, 298; Bourdieu, Pierre, 139; Bourdieu/Wacquant, 97,
114115, 117, 119, 146, 173, 277; Brazil,
26, 84, 140141, 179183, 182, 192, 193;
Brazilian academics, 206; Brazilian popular
music, 195; colonial multiculturality, 27;
communautarisme, 142; co-optive forms, 120;
corporate advertising, 113; decolonization
of knowledge, 8285; desire called, 82;
DSouza, Dinesh, 97, 115; ethnic cleansing,
94; far-right lexicon, 180; feminism, 140
141; Finkielkraut, Alain, 146, 165; France,
2627, 137, 141146, 145146, 172174,
182; French intellectuals, 145, 146, 182, 244;
French republicanism, 144; ghettoization,
274; global capitalism, 118; Global North,
9798; Global South, 98; globalization, 112;
hostility to, 139, 142; Huntington, Samuel,
97; identity politics, 181; Le Pen, Jean-Marie,
139; the left, 85, 98100, 113114, 139;
Marxism, 97; multicultural coloniality, 27;
Native Americans, 8485, 121; neoliberalism, 96, 113; political correctness (PC),
179180; racial democracy, 181; the right,
82, 85, 94, 109; Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.,
94, 139, 180, 280; separatism, 94, 179, 180;
social strife, 9495; star-striped multiculturalism, 85; as synecdoche, 97; United States,
26, 8283, 84, 140141, 182, 193; iek,
Slavoj, 96, 97, 118, 128
Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism (iek), 118
multiculturality, 8283
Multi-Kulti, 84
Murray, Albert, 183
Museum of Modern Art (Brazil), 40
music. See popular music
Muslim-Jewish relations, 154155
Mussolini, Benito, 66
Muthu, Sankar, 23, 24
Nabuco, Joaquim, 32, 198199, 210
Naipaul, V. S., 254
Napoleon III, 5354
Nascimento, Abdias do: Afro-cosmopolitanism,
177; black activism, history of, 207; Black
Experimental Theatre (BET), 176; Brazilian
black movement, 74; Civil Rights Movement,
177; exile of, forced, 278; Fanon, Frantz, 74;
353
First Congress for Black Brazilians (1950),

176; Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research,
177; Memorial Zumbi, 177; Quilombismo,
179; Quilombo (journal), 175176; racial
democracy myth, 280; United Black Movement against Racism and Racial Discrimination, 177; in United States, 4041; writings,
177
Nascimento, Elisa Larkin, 176, 177, 207, 236
National Endowment for the Humanities, 109
National Front (France), 138139, 254
national spirit, 117
national traits discourse, 116117
nationalism in Brazil, 31, 223
nationalism with a tan, 85
nation-state framing, 113, 116
nation-states: cultural borrowings between, xiv;
indigenous critiques, 12; indigenous peoples,
67; internal struggles, 299; narcissism of
national distinction, xiv; race, 304n2; Red
Atlantic, 6; as transnations, xiv, 299
Native Americans: African Americans, 4; American Indian movement, 71; Conquest deaths,
104; as exemplars of liberty, 8; federalism,
9; Founding Fathers, 6, 89; Johnson v.
MIntosh, 5; multiculturalism, 8485, 121;
Obama, Barack, 311n10; reparations, 210;
voice in the academy, 122
Native Codes, 29, 239
native place names, 56
nativism, 138
Nazis, 157, 164
Ndiaye, Pap, 241, 255, 267268
NDour, Youssou, 146
Negation of Brazil (Arajo), 227
negationism, 247
Negras in Brazil (Caldwell), 43
Negri, Antonio, 130, 220221, 227
Ngritude, 47, 177
negrophilie, 45
neocolonialism, 91
neoconservatism, 162172
neoimperialism, 84, 87
neoliberalism: black conservatives, 277; Bourdieu, Pierre, 107; Bourdieu/Wacquant, 106,
112, 146; immigration, 253; multiculturalism, 96, 113; racism, 90
neo-orientalism, 249
Netherlands, 84
Neto, Ricardo Bonalume, 302n22
New Zealand, 311n10
Newton, Huey, 133
Nicholas V, Pope, 4
Niemeyer, Oscar, 227
Index
Nietsche, Friedrich, 250

Nique Ta Mre, 147
Nixon, Richard, 16
Nkrumah, Kwame, 70
Nogueira, Oracy, 177, 179
Noites do Norte (Veloso), 198201
North/South division in Euro-Latin countries,
307n84
Notes on Virginia ( Jeerson), 1516
nouveaux philosophes, xvii, 165, 275
Novell, John M., 235236
Nunes, Clara, 194
Nyerere, Julius, 70
O Alnete (journal), 42
O Candombl da Bahia (Bastide), 37
O Povo Brasileiro (Ribeiro), 53, 236
Obama, Barack: American Jews, 318n102; Black
Orpheus (French lm), 5051; class-overrace approach, 101; Declaration of Independence, 2; demonization of, 225; DSouza,
Dinesh, 315n23; election of, 102; father,
315n23; Gingrich, Newt, 327n12; Jorges If
It Were Not for Brazil, Barack Obama Would
Not Have Been Born, 49, 50; the left, 312n41;
Native Americans, 311n10; Peanha, Nilo,
307n79; samba tribute to, 195
Ocial Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook (Beard), 315n24
Og, Vincent, 21
Okin, Susan Moller, 96
Olieveira Gonalves, Luiz Alberto, 271
Olodum, 200, 302n22
On Anthropophagic Reason (Campos), 296
On Television (Bourdieu), 288
On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason (Bourdieu/Wacquant), 276, 284285, 289290,
331n36
Onana, Charles, 268
Onana, Jean-Baptiste, 241, 243, 268
one-drop rule, 186187
ONeill, Eugene, 49
ontologi-nation, xix, 60, 298
opacity, 5960
Open Veins of Latin America (Galeano), 76
OReilly Factor, The (television show), 102
Orientalism, 150, 155156. See also anti-Orientalism
Orientalism (Said), 86
Orientalism in Crisis (Abdel-Malek), 133
Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 158
ORourke, P. J., 94
Orpheus and Power (Hanchard), 190, 276277
Ortiz, Renato, 271
354
Ouloguem, Yambo, 263

Outlaw, Lucas, 78
Ozouf, Mona, 141
Paglia, Camille, 179
Paine, Thomas, 12, 44, 124
Palmares republic, 14, 59, 188, 195, 302n22
pan-Africanism, 176
Papon, Maurice, 135
para-Enlightenment, 78, 91
Paris Is Clean (Paris Est Propre) (Samba), 146
parit, 141
Parks, Rosa, 70
Parnet, Claire, 301n4
Passeron, Jean-Claude, 107
passing, 321n50
Pathology of White Prejudice (Frazier), 230
Patterns of Race in the Americas (Harris), 41
Paul, Saint, 119, 125
Pax Americana, 52
Pax Brittanica, 52
Pax Hispanica, 52
Pax Romana, 52
PC (political correctness). See political correctness
Peanha, Nilo, 307n79
pedagogy: critical pedagogy, 75; decolonization
of knowledge, 78, 93; radical pedagogy, 78,
110, 249250
Pelourinho, 200
Peoples History of the United States (Zinn), 77
Pereira, Amauri Mendes, 74
Perle, Richard, 164
Perrone-Moiss, Leyla, 38, 181182, 272276
Peru, 105
Ptain, Philippe, 66
Petras, James, 74, 76
Phat Family, 195
Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (Husserl), 65
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 62
Phillips, William, 94
philosophy, decolonizing of, 78
philosophy, radical, 75
Philosophy of History (Hegel), 62, 63, 131, 183
Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 6263
Picasso, Pablo, 48
Pickering, Timothy, 22
Pierson, Donald, 41, 271
Pinho, Patricia de Santana, 42, 4344
Piper, Adrian, 78
Piza, Edith, 234
Plotkin, Janis, 172
Plumelle-Uribe, Rosa Amelia, 265
Index
Podhoretz, Norman, 162

pogroms, 157158
Poiret, Christian, 268
Poli, Alexandra, 238
Poliakov, Lon, 159
police brutality: Brazil, 152153, 173, 188;
colonialism, 153; the Conquest, 153; France,
152153, 173, 253; in France, 135, 147; hip
hop, 148149; slavery, 153; United States,
152153, 188
political correctness (PC): communist brainwashing, 111; egalitarianism, 95; France,
174; French Republicanism compared to,
142; multiculturalism, 179180; Ocial
Politically Correct Dictionary and Handbook
(Beard), 315n24; spoof on, 315n24
political economy, 67, 104
polycentrism, 91
polygenicism, 33
polyglossia, 148, 167
popular culture: Bourdieu, Pierre, 287288;
Brazil, 194206, 281; French, 4849, 146,
266; French, cultural studies of, 332n46;
postcolonial studies/theory, 266; United
States, 321n50
popular music: Brazil, 194197, 205206,
321n48 (see also Tropiclia movement);
United States, 321n48
populism, 116, 118, 122, 129, 281
Portrait of Brazil (Prado), 235
Portrait of the Colonized (Portrait da Colonis)
(Memmi), 159, 279
Portugal, 39
Portugues, Antonio, 39
postcolonial discourse, 86
Postcolonial Studies (Bayarts), 261265
postcolonial studies/theory, 8592, 244246,
252269; 2005 in France, 252254; academe, ties to, 9192; American academics, 116; Anglophone world, 244, 256;
aversion to, 246, 298; Bnot, Yves, 246;
British Empire/Commonwealth focus on,
89; decolonization of knowledge, 8592;
defensiveness vis--vis, French, 255256;
criture, genres of, 265269; Fanon, Frantz,
2; Fanons Wretched of the Earth, 8586;
Francophone literature, 258; French intellectuals, 132, 244246, 254, 255261;
French Theory, 245246; genealogy of,
quarrel over, 261265; genealogy of the
eld, 8586; hesitation-waltz of, 255261;
la Francophonie, 257258; Memmi, Albert,
262; Perrone-Moiss, Leyla, 181182; philosophical thought, 266; popular culture, 266;
355
postnationalism, 245; Saids Orientalism, 86;

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 262; Senghor, Lopold,
245, 262; sites of signicant, 244; slavery,
266; Third Worldism, 246; transdisciplinary
postcolonialism, 259260, 267
Postcoloniales et Littrature (Bardolph), 250
postcolonialism, 8689, 258260; Anglo-Saxon,
274; anticolonial movements, 86; antinaturalism, 88; Csaire, Aim, 87, 262; critiques
of, 8788; destabilization, 8687; Fanon,
Frantz, 87; France, xvii; Francophone postcolonial studies/theory, 258; hybridity, 8889;
indigenous thinkers, 88; Latin American,
274; transdisciplinary, 259260, 267
Postmamboism, 198
postmodernity, 296
poststructuralism, 272, 286
Poulenc, Francis, 49
poverty, 225
Powell, Baden, 50, 194
Powell, Colin, 103, 284
power relations, 320n36
Prado, Paulo, 184, 235
Pratt, Mary Louise, 59, 61, 121
Prebisch, Ral, 76
prejudice, discursive mechanisms of, 150
Prsence Africaine (journal), 177, 263
presentist historiography, 66
Prison Information Group, 133
Project for a New American Century, 77
Prophets Outcast (Shatz), 172
Prospero and Caliban (Mannoni), 7273
Prosperos Mirror (Morse), 5455
Proust, Marcel, 165
Public Enemy, 229
Quechua, 7, 104
queer theory, 82
Queirs Mattoso, Katia de, 270
Quijano, Anibal, 61, 78, 87
Quilombismo (Nascimento), 179
Quilombo (journal), 175177
quilombos, 178179, 302n22
race, 101109, 238243; academic deconstruction of, 232; American dierentialist
approach to, 138; Bourdieu/Wacquant,
106; Brazil, 237, 238243, 282283; class,
102103; class-over-race hierarchy, 101, 104,
107, 109, 119, 122, 127; colonialism, xix; elision of, 316n38; France, 145, 149, 238243,
261; Gil, Gilberto, xvii; Hanchard, Michael,
283284; justice, 111; the left, 102; Master
Race Democracy, 15; nation-states, 304n2;
Index
race (continued)
one-drop rule, 186187; passing, 321n50;
U. S. Constitution, 30; Veloso, Caetano, xvii.
See also critical race theory
Race as Rhetoric (Maggie and Rezende), 207208
Race in Another America (Telle), 320n36
Race Traitor manifestoes, 241
race treason, 232, 241
race/coloniality discourse, 131
racial contract, 15, 63, 224
racial democracy: Armative Action, 219; Brazil, 175179, 185, 189, 193; Freyre, Gilberto,
280; multiculturalism, 181; myth of, 280
Racial Equality Law, 222
racial metamorphoses/transformations, 321n50
Racial Oppression in America (Blauner), 107
racial proling: Brazil, 218; France, 151, 218,
239, 252; hip hop, 148149; Islamophobia,
103; social identities, 100; United States, 218
racism, 223227, 234236; Armative Action, 214; Anglo-Saxonists, 56; anticommunitarianism, 242; anti-Semitism, 162,
171; anti-Third Worldism, 162; Brazil, 33,
43, 185, 188189, 193194, 223224,
225226, 234236, 277278, 280, 324n37;
Carvalho on, Jos Jorge de, 235; class war,
129; classism, 227; color-blind racism, 277;
critical race theory, 225; Enlightenment, 78;
exterminationist racism, 157158; Fanon on,
Frantz, 214; France, 2930, 4445, 145, 151,
316n53; French intellectuals, 33; globalization, 91; Hegel, G. W. F., 78; imperialism,
291; Kant, Immanuel, 78; the left, 103;
neoliberalism, 90; as opinion, 214; outlawing of, 101; populist outrage, 129; reverse
racism, 140; Sarkozy, Nicolas, 247248;
social advantage, 102; socialism, 119; sociological theory, 107; United States, 77, 116,
185, 188189, 190, 223224, 225226, 281,
324n37; Wallerstein on, Immanuel, 331n35;
iek, Slavoj, 129. See also antiracism
Racism in Racial Democracy (Twine), 43
Racist France (Wieviorka), 279
Radhkrishnan, R., xviii
radical pedagogy, 78, 110, 249250
radical philosophy, 75
radicalism, worldwide retreat from, 114
Rak, 146
Rainbow Atlantic, 34
Ramos, Lzaro, 227
Rancire, Jacques, 293, 294
Raoni (Kayapo Chief ), 11
Rappa, 196
rappers. See hip hop
356
Rasmussen, Daniel, 20
Ravel, Maurice, 50
Raynal, Abb, 23
Reagan, Ronald, 174
Red Atlantic, 28; Brazil, 26; connotations, 3;
conquest, 3; cultural syncretism, 284; Discovery Doctrine, 45; France, 26; Indian as inspiration for social critique, 78; interchange
between European and indigenous thought,
12; nation-states, 6; relations with Black,
White Atlantics, 3; the term, usage of, xv;
Tropiclia songs, 205; Um ndio (Veloso),
204; United States, 26
Red Pedagogy (Grande), 12
reexive anthropology, 36, 37, 75, 79
Reis, Joo Jos, 179
relationality: class, 111; complexication of,
4; Diderot, Denis, 24; geopolitics of, 24; of
intra- and extra-European, 157; of Jews, 232;
nations as transnations, 299; postcoloniality,
86; resentful transferences, 161; revisionist
disciplines, 92
religious syncretism, 35
Removing the Mask (Guimares and Huntley),
207
reparations, 209211; Armative Action, 98,
209; Brazil, 210; Enlightenment, 209; Native
Americans, 210; phases in reparations discussion, 210; premise underlying, 210211;
Risrio, Antonio, 190; segregation, 211; slavery, 210; Walkers Appeal (Walker), 209
Reproduction (Bourdieu), 107
Republican Party: black conservatives, 152;
identity politics, 93; Islamophobia, 151; Tea
Party, 224; wedge-issues tactics, 16, 99. See
also Tea Party
Republicanism: Atlantic, xv; Blacks, 1415;
Colonial, 15; Enlightenment, xv, 1, 20, 28;
French, 142, 144, 243, 265; indigenous
peoples, 1415; Reds, 1415
Requerimiento document, 5
Restall, Matthew, 301n6
Retamar, Roberto Fernndez, 94
Retrato do Brasil (Prada), 184
returning the gaze, 121
Revere, Paul, 8
reverse anthropology, 79
reverse racism, 140
revisionist history, 75, 77, 9394, 109110, 114
Rezende, Claudia Barcellos, 207208
Ribeiro, Darcy, 7, 53, 177, 236
Ribeiro, Joo Ubaldo, 219
Ribeiro, Matilde, 222
Rice, Condoleezza, 103
Index
Rich, Adrienne, 126

Riedinger, Edward A., 270271
Riggs, Marlon, 311n6
right, the: Anglo-Saxon, usage of, 55; Civil
Rights Movement, 111; class warfare rhetoric, 93; French, 151; identity politics, 82, 93,
96, 100; Islamophobia, 151; the left, portrayal of, 9596; moralistic puritanism within,
311n6; multiculturalism, 82, 85, 94, 109
Rigouste, Mathieu, 254
Risrio, Antonio, 189192
Rivarol, Antoine de, 57
Rivas, Pierre, 32
Roach, Joe, xx
Robbins, Bruce, 301n2
Roberts, John G., Jr., 219
Robinson, Cedric, 64, 77
Robinson, Randall, 210
Rocha, Glauber: Aesthetics of Hunger, 74; anticolonial coinages, 196; Brecht, Bertolt, 275;
Candombl, 37; Cinema Novo, 272; Terra em
Transe, 197
Rochambeau, Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur,
Comte de, 19
Rodinson, Maxime, 159, 171, 246
Rodney, Walter, 74, 76
Rod, Jos Enrique, 52
Rodrigues, Nelson, 184
Roediger, David, 3, 33, 102, 121, 230, 231
Rolland, Sonia, 152
Romero, Silvio, 200
Rooks, Noliwe, 79
Roosevelt, Theodore, 40
Roots of Brazil (Buarque de Holanda), 235
Rosaldo, Renato, 78
Ross, Kristin, 133, 136
Rothberg, Michael, 318n91
Rothschild family, 165
Rouch, Jean, 37, 49
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 7, 8, 12
Rousse, Dilma, 225
Roy, Arundhati, 130
Royer, Solenn de, 268
Rubin, Jerry, 158
Rudd, Mark, 158
Rudder, Vronique de, 268
Run, Jean-Christophe, 31
Ruscio, Alain, 266
Saada, Emmanuelle, 171
Sabeg, Yazid and Yacine, 152, 239
Sahlins, Marshall, 13
Said, Edward: anti-Orientalism, 73, 263, 284;
Fanon, Frantz, 86; Foucault, Michel, 245;
357
Orientalism, 86; Palestinian counternarrative

of, 104; postcolonial studies/theory, 245
Salah, Ben, 161
Sala-Molins, Louis, 18, 148, 266
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 66
Salles Gomes, Paulo Emilio, 33
Salomon, Michel, 161
Salut Cousin! (lm), 316n42
samba, 50, 178, 194195, 206
Samba, Chri, 146
samba-rap, 194
samba-reggae, 203
Samuel Huntington (the term), 96
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, 172
Sanders, Bernie, 158
Santiago, Silviano, 4041, 89, 296
Santos, Claudia Andrade dos, 217
Santos, Helio, 207
Santos, Joclio Teles dos, 290
Santos, Juana Elbein dos, 271
Santos, Thereza, 43
Sarkozy, Nicolas: 1968 heritage, attacks on,
111; banlieu rebels (2005), 173; Bourokba,
Mohamed, charges against, 147; immigrants,
248, 251252; Islamophobia, 149; neo-orientalism imaginary, 249; racism, 247248
Sarney, Jose, 216
Sartre, Jean-Paul: African aesthetics, 4849; Algerian self-determination, 161; anti-imperialism, 261; anti-Orientalism, 263; Anti-Semite
and Jew, 160; arrest of, 110; cultural studies,
precursor to, 286; de Gaulle, Charles, 110;
decolonization of knowledge, 70; Fanons
Wretched of the Earth, preface to, 24, 161;
Finkielkraut, Alain, 167; Hegel, G. W. F.,
62; Les Mouches, 49; on Negroes, 176; postcolonial studies/theory, 246, 262; Quilombo
(journal), 176177; Senghors Anthologie de
la Nouvelle Poesie Ngre, preface to, 69, 177,
231; universalism, 110
Satie, Erik, 49
Sauvy, Alfred, 21
Savage, Michael, 102, 224
Savarese, Eric, 268
Sayad, Abdelmalek, 107, 256
Scaife Foundation, 109
Schaub, Jean-Frderic, 263
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.: Anglo-Protestantism,
56; Disuniting America, 127; identity politics,
93; multiculturalism, 94, 139, 180, 280; race/
coloniality discourse, 131
Schoelcher, Victor, 266
Schuyler, George, 176177
Schwarcz, Lilia, 179
Index
Schwartz, Laurent, 159

Schwarz, Roberto, 4041, 275, 293
Scott, Joan Wallach, 141
SCS (Society for Cinema Studies), 80
Seale, Bobby, 177
Second Sex (Beauvoir), 69
secularism, 67
Segato, Rita, 234
Segr, Ivan, 169
segregation: Brazil, 185, 187; reparations, 211;
United States, 185, 216
self-critical reexivity, 67
Sembrme, Ousmane, 263
Sen, Amartya, 6465
Senghor, Lopold: Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie
Ngre, 69, 177, 231; anti-imperialism, 256;
Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, 48;
essentialism, 48; New York City, visits to,
4748; persons of color, 58; postcolonial
studies/theory, 245, 262
Sennett, Richard, 297
separatism: communautarisme, 142; cultural
movements, 145; France, 141; identity politics, 93, 9495, 127; multiculturalism, 94,
179, 180
Seplveda, Juan Gins de, 1, 7
Sganzerla, Rogrio, 196
Shakespeare, William, 7, 94, 155
shared anthropology, 79
Shatz, Adam, 172
Shiva, Vandana, 10, 62, 130
Silko, Leslie Marmon, 104
Silva, Denise Ferreira da, 218
Silva, Marina, 187
Silverstein, Paul, 261
Simon, Paul, 200
Singer, Paulo, 76
Sivan, Eyal, 169, 171, 247
Sketch for a Self-Analysis (Bourdieu), 112, 297
Skidmore, Thomas, 33, 3940, 278
Skousen, W. Cleon, 56
Slave and Citizen (Freyre and Tannenbaum), 41
slavery, 1318; Afro-diasporic resistance to,
1317; Brazil, 3, 28, 29, 178, 185186, 238;
capitalism, 64; Code Noir, 18, 29, 266; Constitutional Convention (1787), 16; DSouza,
Dinesh, 139140; Enlightenment, xv, 18;
Eurocentrism, 66; Finkielkraut, Alain, 167;
France, 29; Holocaust (Shoah), 158; Horowitz on, David, 124; Marx, Karl, 103, 122;
police brutality, 153; postcolonial studies/
theory, 266; reparations, 210; United States,
28; U. S. Constitution, 16; wage slavery, 122
Slavery (Elkins), 41
358
Sloterdijk, Peter, 167

Slotkin, Richard, 77
Smith, Adam, 2, 96
Smith, Andrea, 115
Smith, Anna Deveare, 321n50
Smouts, Marie-Claude, 255
social advantage and racism, 102
social constructivism, 12, 100
social contract, 69, 209
social Darwinism, 33, 173
social inequality, 107
social life, 288289
Social Pathology of the Brazilian White (Ramos), 233
social problems: Brazil, 188, 225; France, 149;
United States, 149, 188, 225
Social Psychology of Racism, The (Carone and
Bento), 234
socialism (the term), 9697
socialism and racism, 119
Socialisme ou Barbaries, 261
Solaar, MC, 146, 147, 148
Soller, Ann, 261
Solomon, Alissa, 158, 172
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 133
SOS Racisme, 137
Sotomayor, Sonia, 127
Soul Man (lm), 218, 321n50
Souls of White Folk (Du Bois), 230
Soupault, Philippe, 49
Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 90
South Africa, 211
Souza, Edeida Maria de, 296
Souza, Jess, 183184, 275
Souza, Mrcio, 4041
Sovik, Liv, 236238
Sowell, Thomas, 219
Spain, 130
Spinoza, Baruch, 172
Spivak, Gayatri: ABRALIC, 206; American
PhD. dissertations, 294; Derrida, Jacques,
245, 275; postcolonial studies/theory,
245; strategic essentialism, 100; Western
thought, violence in, 262; white male rescuers
of brown women, 257
Stal, Germaine de, 19
standpoint theory, 78
star-striped multiculturalism, 85
Steele, Shelby, 140
Steinberg, Stephen, 230
Stepto, Robert, 47
Stewart, Ollie, 42
Stiglitz, Joseph, 24
Sting (musician), 11
Index
Stoler, Ann Laura, 7879

Stoller, Eve-Alice Roustang, 275
Stone, I. F., 158
Stora, Benjamin, 159, 171, 266
Story of a Three-Day Pass (lm), 46
Stovall, Tyler, 45, 47, 258, 299
strategic essentialism, 100
Strong, Josiah, 53
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC), 79
Stupid White Men (Moore), 233
subaltern studies, 89
Sublette, Ned, 198
Sumner, Charles, 21
Sundaram, Ravi, 31
Sundquist, Eric, 181
Supplment au Voyage de Bougainville (Diderot),
23
Suret-Canale, Jean, 263
surrealism, 33
Sydney (DJ), 147
symmetrical anthropology, 79
syncretism, 35, 94, 95, 146, 284, 321n50
Taguie, Pierre-Andr, 138, 169
Taibbi, Matt, 118
Tailors Rebellion (1798), 20
Tannenbaum, Frank, 41
Tansi, Sony Labou, 263
Taoua, Phyllis, 261
Tarnero, Jacques, 169
Taussig, Mick, 78
tax policy, 213
Taylor, Henry Louis, Jr., 103
Tea Party, 2, 215, 224, 233
Tel Quel (journal), 246
Telles, Edward, 278, 320n36
Temptation of Innocence, The (Bruckner), 164
Terkel, Studs, 158
Terra em Transe (lm), 197
Tvanian, Pierre, 241
Theory and Culture (journal), 289
Thibaut, Paul, 174
Third World: de Gaulle, Charles, 260; as Europes creator, 74; Fanon, Frantz, 24; France,
260; Israel, 163; liberation struggles, 61; modernity and postmodernity, 296; totalitarianism, equated to, 111
Third World Marxism, 177
Third World socialism, 133
Third World studies, 116
Third Worldism: Brazilian intellectuals, 178;
decolonizing corpus, 82; France, 132133,
246; Glissant, douard, 60; Haitian Revolu-
359
tions, 21; postcolonial studies/theory, 246

Third-worldist discourse, 136
Thomas, Dominic, 258
Thomas, Gerald, 219
Thompson, Robert Farris, xx
Thoreau, Henry David, 80
tidalectics, xx
To Put an End to Colonial Repentance (Lefeuvre),
249
Tobner, Odile, 266
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 3, 31, 215
Todd, Emmanuel, 31, 307n88
Todorov, Tzvetan, 97, 138, 139, 140
tolerance (the concept), 119
totalitarianism, 111, 166
Touraine, Alain, 139, 270
Tour, Skou, 70
Toussaint Louverture, 2, 21, 231
Toward the African Revolution (Fanon), 73
Tozy, Mohamed, 263
transdisciplinary trends, 7980, 259260, 267,
285
translation, 5760, 263, 295, 299300
translinguistics, 299
transnational capitalism, 283
transnational corporations and indigenous
peoples, 1011, 105, 130
transnational feminist studies, 80
transnational studies, 92
transnationalism, 90, 291
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 123
trickle-down economics, 6768
tricontinentalism, 178
trilateral exchange of ideas, 270, 272
Trindade, Solano, 176
Tristes Tropiques (Lvi-Strauss), 34
Tropical Truth (Veloso), 204, 322n52
Tropiclia movement, 196206; Andrade, Oswald de, 196; Beatles, 196; Gil, Gilberto, 196,
197198, 205, 206, 322n52; Hendrix, Jimi,
196; public notoriety of, 322n52; Veloso,
Caetano, 196197
Trouble with Diversity (Michaels), 101105
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 19, 130
Troyat, Henri, 35
Tsvi, Sabbatai, 172
Tupinamba, 7
Turkey, 65
Turner, Lorenzo, 41
Turner, Michael, 43
Turner, Nat, 231
Turner, Terence, 7879
Twain, Mark, 80, 181
Twilight of Common Dreams (Gitlin), 98
Index
Twine, France Winddance, 4344

Two Atlantics, The (Costa), 193194
Tyner, McCoy, 41
Um ndio (Veloso), 204205
Un Racisme Franais (Mouzer and Onana), 243
UN report on cultural literacy, 84, 310n65
Une Haine Imaginaire (Weill-Raynal), 169
UNESCO studies of race, 177178
unilateral cultural imperialism thesis, 292
United Black Movement against Racism and Racial Discrimination, 177
United Kingdom, 116
United States, 2660; actors of color, 152; Afrmative Action, 209215, 323n29; Black
Atlantic, 26; black president, rst, 307n79;
Bourdieus critiques of, 107108; Brazil, inuence on, 28, 330n2; Brazil, relations with,
3841; Brazil compared to, 2728, 183189,
222229, 237, 281; Brazil studies, 270, 271;
Brazilian academics in, 4041; Brazilianization of, 277; communitarianism, xiv;
cultural intercourse with Brazil, France, 27;
culture wars, 70, 249250; Declaration of
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 311n10;
decolonization of knowledge, 70; diversity,
101102, 173; egalitarianism, 29; Enlightenment republicanism, 28; equal opportunity
myth, 219220; exceptionalism, 40, 103,
115; family structure, 307n88; Fanon, Frantz,
74; feminism, 140141; foundations, role of,
283; France, relations with, 4449; France
compared to, 30, 238239; Francophilia, 44;
French commentary on, 143; French Theory,
275; French thinking about, 31; groupism,
116; Haiti, relations with, 21; identitarianism, 139; identity politics, 93, 121122, 181;
immigration, 59, 116, 224; imperialism, 116,
182, 307n88; indigenous peoples, 4, 5, 27,
28; Islamophobia, 150; la Rpublique, xiv;
Latinos in, 130; literary history of, 40; media
in, 224; Mexico, 57; minorities in media,
152; miscegenation, 44, 59, 186187; moralism, 116; multiculturalism, 26, 8283, 84,
140141, 182, 193; native place names, 56;
neoimperialism, 84, 87; police brutality, 152
153, 188; popular culture, 321n50; popular
music, 321n48; populism, 116; post-WWII
activism, 71; poverty, 225; power of, resentment of, 237; puritanism, 298; race and colonialism, interplay between, xix; Race Traitor
manifestoes, 241; racial proling, 218; racism, 77, 116, 185, 188189, 190, 223224,
225226, 281, 324n37; Red Atlantic, 26;
360
segregation, 185, 216; segregation in, 145;

seismic shift in, 178179; slavery, 28; social
problems, 149, 188, 225; universalism, 30;
voting, 225; White Atlantic, 26; white privilege, 213; xenophobia, 116, 151, 224, 225
U.S. Constitution: Bill of Rights, 70; Constitutional Convention, 2829; critical race theory, 114, 115; Declaration of Independence,
17; race, 30; slavery, 16; Tea Party, 2
U.S. Supreme Court, 5, 70, 101
U.S. Third World Left, 83
universalism: Beauvoir, Simone de, 110; Bourdieu, Pierre, 30, 110, 114115; Brazil, 30;
Diderot, Denis, 126; Enlightenment universalism, 17; false universalism, 114115;
Foucault, Michel, 110; France, 30, 168;
French, 144; Sartre, Jean-Paul, 110; United
States, 30; iek, Slavoj, 126
University of Paris VII, 132
University of So Paulo, 32, 34, 217, 221, 234
Unthinking Eurocentrism (Stam and Shohat), 61,
65, 121
untranslatability, 5960
UPJF (Union of Jewish Managers and Professionals of France), 170
Utopia, 196, 289
Vallerange, Prosper, 52
Van Den Abbeele, Georges, 258
Van Peebles, Melvin, 4546
Varda, Agns, 133
Vargas, Getlio, 71
Vastey, Pompe Valentn, baron de, 22
Vaughan, Sarah, 41
Veja (newsweekly), 179, 219
Velho, Jorge, 195
Veloso, Caetano, 194201; aesthetic of mistakes, 296; Candombl, 197; Haiti,
199201; indigeneity, xvii; mulatto identity,
195; Murray, Albert, 183; Noites do Norte,
198201; race, xvii; resentment of US
power, 237; samba, 194; Tropical Truth, 204,
322n52; Tropiclia movement, 196197;
Um ndio, 204205
Verger, Pierre, xx
Vergs, Franois, 243, 258, 265, 266
Verissimo, Erico, 4041
Verschave, Jean-Franois, 248
Vespucci, Amerigo, 30, 58, 155
Vianna, Hermano, 192193
Vianna, Oliveira, 233
Vidal, Dominique, 268
Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 159, 246
Viera, Joo Luiz, 4041
Index
Vietnam, 136137
Vigoureux, Elsa, 147
Vila, Martinho da, 194
Vila Isabel, 178
Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 194
Vitoria, Francsco de, 7
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 13, 272, 286
Vizenor, Gerald, 58
Vladimir et Rosa (Godard), 133
Voltaire, 8, 18, 44, 287
voting, 225
Vourch, Franois, 268
Wacquant, Loc, 293296; American ideas, 295
296; American intellectuals, 296; American
prisons, 108; Bourdieu, Pierre, 296; Bourdieus reception in United States, 293295;
dichotomous terms, 295; French ideas, 295;
language of, 295; producers and consumers
of idea, 296. See also Bourdieu/Wacquant
Wagley, Charles, 41, 177, 271, 278
Walker, Alice, 94
Walker, David, 16, 209
Walkers Appeal (Walker), 16, 209
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 74, 76, 263, 331n35
Walsh, Michael, 232
War on Terror, 103
Ware, Vron, 121
Washington, George, 27
Washington Consensus, 113
We Are All Moors (Majid), 170171
We Are Not Racists (Kamel), 223228
We Cannot Remain Silent (Green), 81
Weaver, Jace, 301n1
Weber, Henri, 159
Weber, Max, 52, 67
wedge-issues tactics, 16, 99, 150
Weil, Simone, 6869, 165
Weill-Raynal, Guillaume, 169170
Weinstein, Barbara, 81
Welles, Orson, 49, 50
Wellstone, Paul, 158
Wemba, Papa, 146
West, Cornel, 94
West Indian Ngritude, 177
Western Canon, The (Bloom), 180
Western look, 68
Weyrich, Paul, 110111
Wharton, Edith, 44
What Postcolonial Theory Doesnt Say (2010
conference), 88
White, William Allen, 53
White Atlantic: Brazil, 26; connotations, xv;
cultural syncretism, 284; France, 26; rela-
361
tions with Red, Black Atlantics, 3; United

States, 26
white Brazilians, 228
White Cargo ( Jordan and Walsh), 232
White in Brazil? (Piza), 234
White Mans Sobs (Le Sanglot de lHomme Blanc)
(Bruckner), 134, 163164
White Mythologies (Young), 245
white normativity, 240
white privilege, 209, 213, 233
white racial capital, 298
white solipsism, 126127
white supremacy, 3, 64
whiteness in France, 240241
whiteness studies, 229233; Armative Action,
209; in Brazil, 233, 236238; critical whiteness studies, 23, 24; decolonizing corpus, 82;
Diderot, Denis, 23, 24; Fanon, Frantz, 73,
161; in France, 239241
Whiter Shade of Pale, A (Lander), 233
Whittier, John, 22
Wieviorka, Michel, 116, 141, 268, 279
Williams, Armstrong, 152
Williams, Eric, 64
Williams, Patricia, 78
Williams, Raymond, 17, 8384
Wilson, William Julius, 101, 216
Winant, Howard, 278
Winbush, Raymond A., 210
Wise, Christopher, 171
Wisnik, Z Miguel, 197, 321n48
Wolfe, Tom, 179
Wolin, Richard, 133
Womens Liberation Movement, 69
Wonder, Stevie, 147
Woodhull, Winifred, 258
Wordsworth, William, 22
World Social Forum, 90, 256
world systems theory, 76, 89
World Trade Organization, 10
Wrestling with Zion (Kushner and Solomon), 172
Wretched of the Earth (Fanon): colonial domination, analysis of, 112; Europe as creation of
Third World, 74; hip hop album honoring,
148; native political thought, inuence of,
124; postcolonial studies/theory, 8586, 245;
revolutionary sociology, 73; Sartres preface,
24, 161; Third World revolutions, 72
Wright, Richard, 45, 48, 49, 70, 246
writing back, 121
X, Malcolm, 70, 291
Xango, 148
Xavier, Ismail, 4041, 275, 293
Index
xenophobia: Brazil, 189, 225; France, 137138,

225; United States, 116, 151, 224, 225
Yanomami, Davi Kopenawa, 6, 11, 13
Young, Cynthia A., 83
Young, Robert, 206, 245
Young Lords, 71
Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 69
Ydice, George, 116, 195196
Zaluar, Alba, 219
Zapatismo movement, 105
Zemmour, ric, 239
Zinn, Howard, 77, 158
Zionism, 162, 163166, 169170, 171, 172
iek, Slavoj, 118131; Affirmative Action,
128; Al Jazeera, 311n8; anticolonialism, 123;
anti-Eurocentrism, 125126; Bruckner,
Pascal, 131; Chvez, Hugo, 130; clash
of civilization to, 311n8; class-over-race
hierarchy, 122; colonialism, 120; critical race
362
theory, 120; culture wars, 129; decolonization of knowledge, 123; derisive denunciations, 140; Eurocentrism, 123, 124126,
129; feminism, 128; First as Tragedy, Then
as Farce, 129, 131; The Fragile Absolute,
125; global capitalism, 118120, 122, 129;
Haitian Revolution, 130131; identity
politics (the term), 92; identity politics,
118, 125, 127128; indigenous peoples,
129130; Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 138; Marx,
Karl, 96; Marxism, 125, 168; Morales, Evo,
130; multiculturalism, 96, 97, 118, 128;
Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism, 118; populism,
129; race/coloniality discourse, 131; racism,
129; saints, 125; Third World revolutionaries, 130131; unemployed black lesbian
single mothers, 126128; universalism, 126;
on the West, 131
Zulu Nation, 147
Zumbi, 178, 302n22
Index
About the Authors
robert sta m is University Professor at New York University. Among his

many publications are Franois Truaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and
Film Adaptation (2006); Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of
Adaptation (2005); Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of
Adaptation (2005); Companion to Literature and Film (2004); Film Theory: An
Introduction (2000); Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in
Brazilian Cinema and Culture (1997); and with Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and
Transnational Media (2000), and Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and
Anti-Americanism (2007). He has received Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Grants, and fellowships at Bellagio and at the Davis Center for Historical
Studies at Princeton. He has taught in France, Tunisia, Brazil, and Abu Dhabi.
His work has been translated into French, Italian, Greek, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Ukranian, Estonian, and Serbo-Croation.
ell a shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. Among
her many publications are Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (2006); Israeli Cinema:
East/West and the Politics of Representation (1989, 2010); Le sionisme du point de
vue de ses victimes juives: les juifs orientaux en Israel, 1988; 2006); Talking Visions:
Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (1998); Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (coedited, 1997); and with Robert Stam,
Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994), Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (2003), and Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (2007). She has also co-edited a number
of special issues for the journal Social Text, including Edward Said: A Memorial
Issue, Palestine in a Transnational Context, and 911A Public Emergency? Her
work has been translated into numerous languages, including: French, Portuguese,
Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, German, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, and Italian.
Shohat has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social
Text, Critique, Meridians, and Interventions. She is a recipient of such fellowships as
Rockefeller and the Society for Humanities at Cornell University, where she also
taught at the School of Criticism and Theory. In 2010, she was awarded a Fulbright
research/lectureship at the University of So Paulo.
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Robert Stam | Ella Shohat

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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The Atlantic Enlightenment

A Tale of Three Republics

The Seismic Shift and the Decolonization of Knowledge

Identity Politics and the Right/Left Convergence

France, the United States, and the Culture Wars

The Anxieties behind an Antagonism

Brazil, the United States, and the Culture Wars

From Armative Action to Interrogating Whiteness

French Intellectuals and the Postcolonial

The Transnational Trac of Ideas

in the long process of gestation of this bookgoing back to its

race in trans l ation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial

process were the massive expropriation of territory; the large-scale destruction

and Anglo-Saxonism as discourses. Both North and South, we argue, have

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Red Atlantic

The Atlantic Enlightenment

completely transformed racial, national, and cultural identities in what might be

The Atlantic Enlightenment

chromatic to a linguistic register, Eugene Jolas speaks of an Atlantic, Crucible

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Indigene and the Epistemological Crisis

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

rary transnational corporations. The word patents referred in 16th-century

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Black Atlantic and the Aporias of the Universal

The Atlantic Enlightenment

Africans were eectively deprogrammed as persons; they were depersonalized,

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

rejected Bannekers argument. In a private letter to Joel Barlow, Jeerson claimed

The Atlantic Enlightenment

nationalistic narratives. Displaying what we have called, amending Raymond

Antinomies of the Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

racismbut rather of probing the positive as well as the negative dialectics of

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

of French Louisiana. Historian Henry Adams wrote in 1889 that prejudice of

The Atlantic Enlightenment

White Voices against Imperial Reason

The Atlantic Enlightenment

The Atlantic Enlightenment

This passage is rich in anticipations of subsequent anticolonial thinking. In

The Atlantic Enlightenment

Foreshadowing what Chalmers Johnson later called the Sorrows of Empire,