Cunning of Nationalist Reason

Abstract

The title of this essay is based on the text written by Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant entitled “The Cunning of the Imperialist Reason” in which they discuss the pertinence of transferring concepts regarding race from the American to the Brazilian context. The authors maintain that this is a false friend because the same words are used to signify different things in places in which the concept of race is understood in different ways. I would like find the false friends in certain uses of “postcolonial theory” in Brazil in the field of art and understand the complexity of notions such Mestizaje. An excellent point of departure for this essay is the following contradiction: Abroad, Brazil attracts a great deal of international interest due to its postcolonial condition, and the power of its discourses of racial hybridity through concepts such as cultural anthropophagy. This makes Brazil an appealing enclave from which to challenge eurocentrism. But, internally, postcolonial studies have attracted little or no interest, especially in academic circles. Why? We will use the exhibition Histórias Mestiças (2014) as a case study for this purpose.