부산대학교 도서관

Arabs have left a permanent imprint on Brazil: from the legacy of Muslim Iberia to Arab immigrants since the late nineteenth century and the prominence today of Brazilians of Arab descent in politics, the economy, literature, and culture. Arab Brazil argues that representations of Arab and Muslim immigrants in Brazilian literature and popular culture since the early twentieth century reveal anxieties and contradictions in the country’s ideologies of national identity. The book analyzes those representations in a century of Brazilian novels, short stories, and telenovelas to show how the Arab East works paradoxically as a site of otherness, of different language, culture, and religion; and of solidarity, with deep historical, demographic, and geopolitical ties. What explains this contradiction is a Brazilian form of Orientalism, distinct from the British, French, and US varieties analyzed by Edward Said, and which problematizes the idealized image of Brazil as a country built on mistura (ethnic and racial mixing) and cultural anthropophagy, or the digestion and incorporation of diverse cultural influences. The book raises such questions as: What happens when a discourse of Western mastery over the Orient migrates to another part of the developing world? What are the contours of Brazilian Orientalism? What are the ideological stakes of a Eurocentric discourse mediating a South-South relationship? Arab Brazil argues that whereas colonial Orientalism is based on the duality of Self/Other, East/West, and colonizer/colonized, Brazilian Orientalism has a tertiary structure that defines the country’s cultural identity in relation both to the Arab world and to Europe and the United States. In a country that lies in the American hemisphere but is part of the Global South, these differences exhibit anxieties about Brazil’s place in the world.