Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was Brazil's foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado's writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. G. Reginald Daniel, an expert on Brazilian race relations, takes a fresh look at how Machado's writings were inflected by his life-especially his experience of his own racial identity. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: Machado de Assis: The Critical Legacy 1 Neither Black nor White: The Brazilian Racial Order 2 The Mulatto Author: The Literary Canon and the Racial Contract 3 Black into White: Racial Identity and the Life of Machado de Assis 4 The Public Racial Text: Racial Identity and the Writings of the Unknown Machado 5 The Meta-Mulatto: Racial Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis 6 The Hidden Racial Text: Racial Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis 7 Toward Literary Independence: National Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis 8 The Transformative Vision: Seeing with the Third Eye 9 Machado de Assis: From Romantic Realism to Impressionism Epilogue: Machado de Assis: An Alternative Interpretation G. Reginald Daniel with Gary L. Haddow Notes References Index

About the Author :
G. Reginald Daniel is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (Penn State, 2006), among other works.

Review :
“G. Reginald Daniel’s work is a thoughtful analysis of how racial identity and race relations are dealt with in the work of Machado de Assis. It allows us to understand how Machado’s universal principles, as well as his ambiguity regarding the ‘mulatto’ condition in Brazil, in fact erode the very foundations of raciologic thinking. In so doing, Daniel opens a very interesting window onto the singularity of Brazil’s way of dealing with race and the differences between the Brazilian and the North American historical cases with regard to their African and African American (or Afro-Brazilian) heritage. Daniel’s book brings fresh air to the appreciation of Machado’s work in the United States, where it has gained the attention of outstanding critics, at the same time that it provides the reader with fundamental keys to the understanding of Brazil’s complex and at times unique position in the African Diaspora.” —Pedro Meira Monteiro, Princeton University “One of the most fascinating aspects of Brazilian society is the unique construction of racial identity. While racial discrimination does exist in Brazil, it has never been grounded, as in the United States, in institutional segregation, and, indeed, racial matters have played an important role in defining Brazilian national identity. Reginald Daniel explores the complex construction of racial matters in Brazil by grounding himself in the ironic, skeptical, and ambiguous narratives of the great mulatto writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.” —David William Foster, Arizona State University “G. Reginald Daniel is a gifted sociologist of race as well as a sensitive analyst of literary texts. His Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist is a masterful treatment of Assis’s writings, contextualized in a precise racial history of Brazil as well as in its intellectual and literary developments and traditions. This is a must-read for scholars and students of Assis’s writings, Brazilian literary traditions, the sociology of race, and African Brazilians, especially from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth century, a period that finally saw the Brazilian abolition of slavery.” —Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University “This thoughtful, scholarly study illuminates and contextualizes the writings of Brazil’s most famous author while casting him as a universalizing ‘meta-mulatto.’ Traditional critics have argued that Machado’s detached, ironic style, egoistic upper-class characters, and unreliable narrators bespeak indifference to social issues of the day—slavery, racism—and to the debate over literary brasilidade (‘Brazilianness’). . . . Daniel shows that despite Machado’s success, light color, erudition, and European orientation, he was regarded as a racialized other who experienced the dualism of being neither black nor white. Daniel submits that the mulatto dualism serves as a metaphor for a universal dualism that Machado believed characterizes human existence generally. . . . For Machado, the struggle to reconcile binarisms is both personal and universal.” —D. L. Heyck Choice