Negotiating National Identity

Despite great ethnic and racial diversity, ethnicity in Brazil is often portrayed as a simple matter of black or white, a distinction reinforced by the ruling elite's efforts to craft the nation's identity in its own image-white, Christian, and European. In Negotiating National Identity Jeffrey Lesser explores the role ethnic minorities from China, Japan, North Africa, and the Middle East have played in constructing a national identity, thereby challenging dominant notions of Brazilian nationality and citizenship. Seeking to realise their vision of a white Brazil, the ruling classes welcomed "desirable" European immigrants yet did not anticipate the potential threat of social and labour activism. In reaction, Brazilian elites recruited migrant labour from Asia and the Middle East, then expanded the definition of "whiteness," encouraging the new arrivals to consider themselves white regardless of their actual race or ethnicity. Believing, however, that their ethnic heritage was too high a price to pay for the "privilege" of being white, many of these immigrants have created alternative categories for themselves, such as Syrian-Brazilian, Korean-Brazilian, and so on. By examining how acculturating minority groups have represented themselves, Lesser re-envisions what it means to be Brazilian. Based on extensive research, Negotiating National Identity will be valuable to scholars and students in Brazilian and Latin American studies, as well as those in the fields of immigrant history, ethnic studies, and race relations.