transnationalizing comparison: the uses and abuses of cross-cultural analogy

7/31/2019 Transnationalizing Comparison: the Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural Analogy

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Transnationalizing Comparison: The Uses and Abuses of Cross-Cultural

Analogy

Robert Stam

Ella Shohat

New Literary History, Volume 40, Number 3, Summer 2009, pp.

473-499 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/nlh.0.0104

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New Literary History, 2009, 40: 473499

Transnationalizing Comparison:The Uses and Abuses o Cross-Cultural Analogy

Robert Stam and Ella Shohat

In this essay, we explore the role o comparison within the raceand colonial debates as they play across various national and culturalzonesAmerican, French, and Brazilian. Any discussion o these na-

tional zones is haunted by a discursive history o comparative dichotomieswithin situations o assymetrical empowerment: Europe and its others;the West and the rest; Global North and Global South. How should weanalyze the rubrics, keywords, and evaluative repertoires in which debatesabout race and cultural dierence are conducted in these diverse sites?

What happens in the movement o ideas rom one geographical spaceand cultural semantics to another, and how does that impact the rheto-ric o comparison? Here we will deploy a relational and transnationalmethod that seeks to eludicate the insights and blindspots and aporiaso diverse comparative approaches and rameworks.

Poststructuralist approaches to translation and adaptation gure in ourdiscussion to the degree that they challenge a moralistic and dichoto-mous idiom o delity versus betrayal, as, or example, in the discussiono lmic adaptations o novels that assumes the possibility o one-to-oneadequation between the cultural/textual worlds o original and copy.1In terms o cross-cultural translation and adaptation, we preer to speaknot o adequate or inadequate copieso cultures seen as originary andnormative, but rather o an unending process o reciprocal transtextuality.Our stress, thereore, is on the interactive and recombinant dialogismevoked by terms like revoicing, reaccentuation, indigenization, and me-diation. At the same time, these dialogical mediations are shaped andproduced within specic cultural contexts that imply a situated takeon the act o comparison itsel. And just as adaptation theory tries toavoid the axiomatic superiority o one medium (or example, literature)over another (or example, cinema), or o the novel as original and thelm as a denitionally inadequate copy, so cross-cultural comparison

risks surreptitiously inscribing one cultural or national zone as originaland the other as copy, one culture as ontological real and the other asphenomenal imitation, one culture as substance and the other as acci-dent, one culture as normative and the other as aberrant. Here we will


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new literary history474

be especially critical o comparisons that operate through colonialist,reductivist, culturalist, or essentialist grids that assume linear and dichoto-mous axes o oreign/ native, export/import, inside/outside,

transmitter/receiver, origin /copy.Asymmetries o power, meanwhile, impact the discourse and rhetorico comparison. Thus cross-cultural comparisons can be reciprocal orunilateral, multidirectional or unidirectional, dialogic or monologic.The question, then, becomes: Which ideas transit easily, and which aceobstacles at the border? What are the social conditions o what PierreBourdieu called, in the title o the last article he ever published, theinternational circulation o ideas?2 In what ways do national interests,cultural institutions, and global socioeconomic alignments mark the

itineraries o traveling theories (Edward Said)? How are comparisonsshaped by inranational, national, and supranational exceptionalisms,narcissisms, and disavowals? How is national memory narrated and instru-mentalized within cross-national comparison? What anxieties and hopes,

what utopias and dystopias, are provoked by a comparative treatmento such issues as race, colonialism, and multiculturalism in diversesites? Why does cross-national comparison provoke deensive objectionsalong the lines o: But our situation is completely dierent; it is simplynot comparable? Here we will examine a ew examples o the rhetorics

o comparison, some embedded in cultural-essentialist assumptions, whileothers are mobilized in the critique o such assumptions.The operative terms o comparative debates sometimes shit their

political and epistemological valence in diverse national zones. What,then, are the blocages symboliques which prevent comparabilities rombeing recognized and translated, or, conversely, how do certain taken-or-granted rames o comparison actually impede transnational analysis?How do key terms crystallize identity in ways that prevent the recognitiono commonalities? Why, or example, is the concept o la Rpubliqueso central to debates in France but not in the United States or Brazil,even though all three are republics? Why is miscegenation a constanttheme in Brazil but not in France or the United States, even though allthree countries are, in their own way, miscegenated? Why does the termcommunitarianism carry such a powerul negative charge in France yetseldom gure in the debates in Brazil and the United States? In sum, theunpacking o the transatlantic trac o race/colonial debates requires arelational analysis o knowledge production and dissemination.

How, then, have cross-cultural and transnational comparisons beeninstrumentalized? What does comparison illuminate or ail to illuminate?Is national or ethnic narcissism inevitable, or can it be transcended?By transnationalizing the debates, we hope to scrutinize what mightbe called cross-border looking relations. What are the grids, prisms,


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475transnationalizing comparison

tropes, and even un-house mirrors through which comparisons areestablished? How does cross-national comparison intersect with othermodalities o comparison, such as metaphor, simile, and allegory? Along

which vectors does comparison take place? What is the cognitive value ocross-national comparison? Does comparison assume a prior assumptiono an illusory coherence on both sides o the comparison? How doescomparison change when we move rom comparing two entities (withthe concomitant danger o reied binaries) to comparing three or moreentities (with the danger o a dizzying prolieration)? Or is comparisonalways in search o a third entity, Aristotles tertium comparationis, and isit a sideways-glancing utterance that is addressed to a third party, whichalso implies the transcendance o binarism? Is comparison necessarily

premissed on overly neat national and geographical boundaries?

Nation as Comparison

Nation-states dene themselves with and against other nations in adiacritical process o identity ormation. The ctive we o the nationis orged with, through, and against other nations, oten through arhetoric o (sometimes invidious) comparison, a specular play o sel

and other. For example, France has historically dened itsel againstthe Muslim world (Charles Martel, the Crusades, El Cid), then againstEngland and Germany, and now, at least in political terms, against theU.S. hyperpower. The United States has dened itsel with and againstNative Americans internally, and externally against Great Britain (theRevolutionary War), Spain (the Spanish-American War), Germany and

Japan (the two World Wars), the Soviet Union (the Cold War), and nowIslamic undamentalism (the War on Terror). American neoconser-

vatives, meanwhile, have tried to dene the perennial ally, France, asan enemy. Brazil, too, has dened itsel vis--vis various colonizing orneocolonizing powersPortugal, France, Spain, Holland, Great Britain,and the United States. Thus ego-reinorcing national narration is alwaysalready engaged with national others. It is not only a question o how anation projects itsel but also how it projects others within these mutu-ally shaping projections.

Exceptionalist mythologies in the United States, meanwhile, havetended to stress the ways that the United States is not comparable toEuropean nations, or example, that it has never been a colonial orimperial state, even though the United States colonized indigenous

America, came to imperialize Latin America, and has indulged in vari-ous neoimperial binges and surges. French exceptionalism, by the sametoken, edits out Frances massive participation in the slave trade in the


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Caribbean. The structure o these amnesiac denials o commonalitiesrecalls that o the denegations (je sais mais quand mme or I know,but still . . .) theorized by psychoanalysis. The perpetual temptation,

given that nation-state histories always have an element o the sordid andthe violent, is to project repressed historical memories onto the screenso other nations and to search or comparisons that fatter rather thanthose that shame or embarrass.

Exceptionalist discourses oten go hand in hand with cultural essential-ism and national characterologies, whether mobilized to celebrate (oron occasion denounce) ones own nation or denounce (or celebrate)another nation. American exceptionalism promotes the idea o the UnitedStates as uniquely democratic and destined to exercise wonder-working

benevolent power in the world. Within the American exceptionalist view,the United States accumulates a series o rstsand rsts are simplythe chronological version o comparisonpremissed on U.S. narcissisticadvantage. The United States is proclaimed to be the rst new nation,the rst modern constitutional democracy, the rst immigrant nation onations, and the only country based on opportunity or the individual.Blessed by Providence with a unique purpose and ate, the United States,in comparison to others, avoided their petty oibles and thus transcendedthe gravity and downers o history as that which hurts. U.S. exception-

alism promotes the myth o innocence through tropes o prelapsarianAmerican Adamsagain, innocent in comparison to postlapsarianEuropean otherswandering in a virgin paradise.

Exceptionalism, whether in the American Beacon-to-the-World ormor in the French mission-civilisatriceorm or in the exceptionalism-light othe we-are-all-mixed-and-tolerant Brazilian orm, is comparison in thesuperlative mode, with each nation proclaiming itsel to be the greatestin some respect, whether in terms o political model or cultural expressionor popular practices. Exceptionalism orms part o the standard rhetorico American politicians rom both parties who constantly embroider theirspeeches with ritual reerences to this great land o ours, the greatestnation in history, and the greatest democracy on the ace o the earth.Exceptionalism, in this sense, consists in the reusal to compare, in thetendency to nd ones own nation peerless, beyond compare. Yet thisexceptionalism is rie with aporias. How can a nation-state that regardsitsel as exceptional demand that others ollow in its tracks, i those trackshave already been dened as exceptional? The discourse is inherentlyparadoxical: while seeing itsel as exceptional, the United States alsodeclares itsel as a norm to be diused and emulated, thus containingits own aporia and potential dissolution as it moves rom exception tonorm.3 But the United States is not exceptional in its exceptionalism;nationalism, in general, shapes ctions o unsullied virtue and seamless


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unity and coherence, yet the very oundations o modern nation-statesorcibly entail the monopolization o violence, the repression o dier-ence, and the mandatory orgetulness o originary crimes.

Cross-national comparisons are equally imbued with aect, ears, vani-ties, desires, and projections. They can idealize the home country ordenigrate it, just as they can idealize the away country or denigrateit, or they can seek broad relationalities, which deconstruct nation-statethinking by discerning commonalities, thereby bypassing the borderpolice. U.S. pro-American exceptionalism is sometimes countered bythe negative exceptionalismo its homegrown American critics who ailto see the embeddedness o the United States within broader historicalpatterns o pan-European hegemony. French anti-Americanism also rests

on a tacit comparison: American imperialism in the present is worse thanours in the past.4 American anti-Americanism, or negative exceptional-ism, meanwhile, oers the upside-down narcissism o superlative badness:Our own imperialism is the absolute worst; no one is as breathtakinglyevil as we are.

Cross-cultural and transnational comparisons serve myriad purposes.Negotiating constantly between the acile universalism which deniesdierence (Were all human beings!) and the bellicose stigmatizationo dierence (good versus evil; us versus them), comparison at times

can trigger, as we shall see, a salutary deprovincialization and mutualillumination. Variously emphasizing contrasts, similarities, or comple-mentarities, comparisons can move along a spectrum that goes rom amaximalist dierentialism (We have nothing in common with them!),to a paternalistic top-down good neighborism (We have everything incommon but do not orget youre subordinate), to a quasi-masochisticsel-denigration (We will never be as good as you!). Nations can projecttheir own worst tendencies onto alter-ego nations, imagining in otherstheir own most ignoble traits. Or they develop a resentul discourse o

victimization that remains narcissistic because the aggrieved victim nationretains the psychic capital o its own proessed innocence. Or dissidentminorities and internal migrs can endow other nations with utopianpossibilities, seeing them as the sites o hope in a situation o despair.

Sometimes comparisons get mapped onto stagist teleologies, whichinscribe countries into larger, global temporalities that project some na-tions as comparatively ahead or behind on an imaginary timeline oprogress. Stagist theory within Europe goes back to the Enlightenmentas a secularization o the teleologies o Divine Providence. According tothe modernizing discourse o a G. W. F. Hegel or a Max Weber, Southnations like Brazil were seen as behind the North. But recently, we haveseen a number o historiographical reversals, whereby Latin Americanistsstress that Latin America historically preceded Anglo-America by almost


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a century, and even that most o North America, as evidenced in statenames such as Florida and Caliornia, was Latin beore it was Anglo.The ethnocentric provincialisms o the West, rom the Enlightenment

to twentieth-century modernization and even, ironically, to postmoderntheory, have tended to cast non-European cultures and regions as al-lochronic (Johannes Fabian) or behind in the race or progress.

Comparison as Ethnic Ranking

Nationalist and panethnic exceptionalisms sometimes go hand in handwith an especially invidious orm o comparison: ranking. We nd an ex-

ample in Hegels The Philosophy o Historywhere every attribute o Hegelspersonal identity becomes associated with supreme rank: Germany is thebest country, Europe the best continent, Christianity the best religion(and Protestantism its best incarnation). Eurocentric/racist discourse,meanwhile, classically took the orm o ranking the higher and lowerorms o civilization and comparing the glorious achievements o theWest to the allegedly paltry achievements o the rest. In The Philosophyo History, Hegel contrasts the Northern hemisphere, characterized byrepublican constitutions, Protestantism, prosperity, and reedom, with

a Southern hemisphere characterized by authoritarianism, Catholicism,militarism, and unreedom. While South America was conquered, Hegelwrote, North America was colonized.5 In terms o relative prosperity,historians might correct Hegel to say that in the early Iberian stage ocolonization, which Karl Marx sarcastically called the rosy dawn ocapitalist accumulation, it was South America that was actually wealthierthan the North. The European domination o the Americas, moreover,usually involved bothconquest and colonization

Despite its problems, Hegels overdrawn North/South schema becamehugely infuential. The North was erected as the model or the South,

just as the West was inscribed as the model or the East. Both Brazil-ian and American commentators stressed that the countries o South

America were less prosperous and dynamic than the United States andthat this dierence was rooted in national character. Many negative

views o Latin American character, both rom within and rom without,also betray the infuence o Max Weber, whose work might be describedas an exercise in comparative characterology. The narcissistic questionthat orients (occidents?) Webers The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit oCapitalismis how to explain something Weber takes to be axiomaticEuropean superiority. Why did Europe develop industry, science, andliberal institutions, Weber asks, while the rest o the world did not? For

Weber, European advantages were not the result o massive appropria-


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tion o the land, resources, and labor o the Americas, Arica, and Asiabut rather the product o a superior cultural personality, a confationo ethos (character), ethnos (people), and religion whereby Europeans,

and especially Protestant Europeans, were seen as uniquely rational,inquisitive, and ethical.There are also internal dierentiations within Eurocentric thinking, to

wit, the amilial quarrel between the Anglos and the Latins. The conven-tional wisdom would place two o the three nation-states in our trilateralcomparison (that is, France and Brazil) on one Latin side o a culturaldivide and the third (the United States) on the Anglo-Saxon side. Thusour discussion is always already haunted by a perennial binarism thatconstructs a strong cultural divide between two transnational panethnic

groups. What we have observed time and time again, however, is that thetwinned terms Latin and Anglo-Saxon, especially when deployed aspart o strongly drawn and reied dichotomous comparisons, betray aretreat into tired paradigms, a conusion o levels, which has hinderedthe thinking o transnational relationalities.

The two terms Latin and Anglo-Saxon have to be thought (andunthought) in relation to each other, especially since the two categories

were largely constructed in mutual opposition and antipathy. The twoterms give expression, we would argue, to regional variants o that larger

orm o sel-love called Eurocentrism.6

Thus one orm o Europeanethnic/cultural exceptionalismwhich we will call Anglo-Saxonismisassociated with Northern Europe and its expansion into the Americasand around the world. As we have noted, gures such as Hegel and

Weber gave expression to that orm o exceptionalism. The other orm,which we will call Latinism, meanwhile, is associated with France andSouthern Europe and its expansion into the Americas. It was ormulatedas a means o lateral dierentiation rom the Anglo-Saxons and verti-cal dierentiation rom non-Europeans in the Americas. Paul Adam, theFrench author o a 1910 book about Brazil (Les visages du Brsil), givesexpression to this orm o narcissism when he speaks o the miracleproduced by the Latins who accomplished in the New World what theMediterraneans had begun earlier in Europe: How is it possible toignore the continuity o this unilateral evolution . . . navigation, steam,electricity, aviation, Hertzian waves, all that is the work o elites o Medi-terranean origin.7 Adams account echoes the Hegelian and Weberiandiscourse o European superiority, but in its warm-water Mediterraneancurrent. But Adam goes on to lament that Latinity has been historicallydeeated by a eudal, iconoclastic, disciplinary Protestantism opposedto Catholic, sensual, iconolatrous mores.8

O course, i one takes a Native American or an Arodiasporic viewrom below, these dierences become largely immaterial, mere nuances


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within European whiteness. Indeed, many o the debates about race, co-lonialism, and imperialism revisit, sometimes without acknowledgment,enmities rooted in interimperial wars and debates. For centuries, the

Spanish, the Portuguese, the British, the Dutch, the French, and theAmericans all vied or domination and infuence around the world in asituation where all parties were convinced that their particular orm oimperial domination was well intentioned and benecial, and that alltheir deeats were tragic misortunes. It is a case o what Freud called thenarcissism o minor dierences, in this case the dierences between

various European (and Euro-American) orms o imperialism.The overdrawing o the line between Latin and Anglo imperialisms

in the Americas orgets that the two were initially linked through envy

and emulation. Spanish and Portuguese colonialism preceded that othe Dutch and British and French. In the early stages o discovery, thetwo Iberian powers dominated most o the Americas until challenged(and imitated) by the other powers. The various latecomerssuch asthe British and the Dutchadmired Spain or having transormed itselrom a relatively poor country into a major European puissance throughthe inusion o wealth rom its New World possessions. In their own New

World endeavors, the British oten attempted to emulate the triumphso the Spanish. Britains late entry into the sweepstakes meant that it

could hope only or the letovers o Spanish conquest, oten swept upby English pirates o the Caribbean.Our research has led us to a vast corpus o texts, which directly or

indirectly assert either a hard Anglo-Saxonist and imperialist orm osuperiority or a sot Latin, colonial superiority. Countless texts, orexample, contrast the racially phobic and segregationist Anglo-Saxons(whether operating in the U.S. South or in British colonies) with themore open, assimilationist, and tolerant Latins. This binarism hauntseven contemporary French books that engage sympathetically with post-colonial theory. A 2002 book by Jacqueline Bardolph on tudes postcolo-niales et littraturecalls or a study o dierent colonial imaginaries, ora study o the way in which French history, marked by Catholicism andthe spirit o the Enlightenment, might oer a less hierarchical vision onon-European peoples than the British imperial vision.9 Thus old Anglo-French rivalries become embroiled in a new rivalry within postcolonialstudies about the relative humanity o variant orms o colonialism.

Writers end up parroting the ethnonationalist exceptionalist narrativesarticulated in schools, history books, museums, and colonial expositions,now voiced by progressive intellectuals supposedly speaking on behal othe colonized subaltern. What we have, then, are latter-day expressionso narcissistic nationalism, which historically generated claims that ourconquest was more gentle than yours, our slavery more humane, ourimperialism more cultivated.


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The panethnic rivalry between the Latins and the Anglo-Saxonsalso had implications or how histories o conquest and slavery wererepresented through culturalist comparisons. The advocates o Latini-

dad promoted the myth o a benevolent Catholic conquest and slavery.What especially interests us here is the role o multilateral comparison,as occurs, or example, when a French commentator on Brazil comparesrace relations in Brazil and in the United States. The Frenchman JosephBurnichon summarizes the contrast between two orms o colonizationrom a Latin perspective: The Anglo-Saxon represses the indigenesand ends up annihilating them [while] Spain and Portugal, the Latincolonizers, mix with the so-called inerior race . . . resulting in new pe-oples, with their own originality and their own value.10 Such a contrast

between Brazilian racial harmony and North American hostility is arequent leitmoti in French and Brazilian commentary on Brazil.At the same time, the positions on these issues cannot be predictably

aligned with ethnicity or nationality. Some Latins preerred the Anglo-Saxon approach, and vice versa. Writing in the 1920s, a French visitor toBrazil, Abel Bonnard, lauds the Anglo-Saxon deense o racial purity,arguing: We know how stubbornly North Americans, to this day, havepreserved the purity o their blood and or our part we will never stoprepeating that in so doing they ullled their primary duty and thus

rendered an uncommon service to humanity. . . . The oreigner who seesthe variety o colors in the pedestrians o Rio or Bahia can have no doubtthat the true tragedy o Brazil lies in its mixture o races, in this sinisterstruggle where the dierent spirits o humanity get coiled together likeserpents.11 The Latinists, interestingly, constructed a dierent, but insome ways equally arbitrary, hierarchy, which acknowledged the material,technological superiority o the Anglo-Saxons but asserted the spiritual/intellectual superiority o the Latins. But all o these comparisons takeplace between elites; they center on whose slavery is worse or who hasbetter treated our Indians and our blacks. They have little to do

with the placing in relation o subaltern perspectives or with mobilizingcomparison to critique colonial ormations or discover dierent modeso resistance to slavery and dispossession.

The Ambivalence o Comparative Identity

An ill-ormulated injunction suggests that we should not compareapples and oranges, but in act one can pursue comparison in manydirections and or dierent ends. Even apples and oranges, ater all,are comparable as ruits, and or that matter, one can compare ruitsand vegetable as oods, or compare ones beloved to a summers day.The point o the oranges and apples dictum is that one should not


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compare objects that are too dissimilar, yet a poetics o improbablecomparison (discordia concors) has catalyzed major artistic schools, rom

John Donne and the metaphysical poets to the paintings o the Surreal-

ists, to the lms o Jean-Luc Godard. Jorge Luis Borgess heterotopicChinese Encyclopedia might be absurd rom the standpoint o logic,but its exploding the ground o commensurability has been productiverom the standpoint o aesthetics.

One nds a kind o productivity in the vast cross-national corpus ocomparative writing that ocuses on Brazil and the United States or onFrance and the United States. The sheer volume o this comparativecorpus, which swells with every passing year, is remarkable. For variousreasons, intellectuals rom these three countries have ound the other

countries good to think with. Comparisons usually operate on the basiso what semioticians called principles o pertinence. The comparativewriting treating France and the United States, or example, tends tospotlight the two countries rival revolutions and discrepant social mores.In Bourdieus evocative phrase, the United States and France representtwo imperialisms o the universal. One result o this competition overthis shared revolutionary heritage is a perennial love-hate relationshipbetween the two countries, accompanied by the emotions associated

with sibling rivalry.12 In the case o Brazil and the United States, the

comparisons do not have to do with comparative revolutionssinceBrazil, unlike other Latin American nations, did not have a revolutionleading to independencebut rather with the two countries sharedstatus as settler states in the Americas whose histories have both beenmarked by European colonialism (British and Portuguese), by slavery,abolition, and immigration.

Henry M. Brackenridge was perhaps the rst American writer, in 1817,to intuit the need or a systematic comparison between the two countries.

While recognizing that limiting the comparison to the present would beto compare a young giant with a mature dwarBrazil, ater all, hadnot even achieved independence at that timeBrackenridge emphasizedthat it was necessary to imagine what the two nations would become inthe uture. Contrasting the stormy disunity o the Spanish-speaking na-tions in Latin America with the unied and indivisible Brazilian nation,Brackenridge concludes that given the vast capacities and resources oBrazil, it is not to be a visionary to oresee that this [Brazilian] empireis destined to rival our own.13

In the case o Brazil, comparisons with the United States have beenunending, orming an integral part o a specular and reciprocal processo sel-denition. Although cross-national comparisons are oten narcis-sistic, in the case o Brazil they have just as oten been sel-deprecating,

whether about Brazils supposedly derivative culture or about its inad-


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equate political institutions. In Brazil, comparison has oten been wieldedto the detriment o Brazil by Brazilians themselves. Indeed, playwrightNelson Rodrigues amously called Brazilians upside down Narcissists

who spit on their own mirror image. The process is similar to any situa-tion o stratied and unequal power as instantiated in the internalizedmale gaze analyzed by eminism, or exampleby which one group isprodded to see itsel rom another perspective deemed to be superior.The dominated, whether among nations or within nations, are those whoare obliged to compare themselves to a partly imaginary yet empoweredorm o normativity.

As Brackenridge predicted, both Brazil and the United States consoli-dated their territories and grew rom strength to strength over the course

o the nineteeth century. National identity became crystallized in clichmetaphors. Brazil became known as the Minotaur o South America,and the United States as the Colossus o the North. These compari-sons are asymmetrical and power laden, o course, since Brazilians makethe comparison rom a position o relative geopolitical weakness, while

Americans have made their comparisons rom a privileged position otaken-or-granted empowerment. Sociologist Jesse Souza articulates thiscomparative obsession with the United States very well, noting: We donot compare ourselves with Bolivia, Guatemala, or even with Argentina.

We compare ourselves obsessively with the United States. In act, explicitor implicit comparison with the United States is the central threadin practically all o the twentieth-century interpretations o Braziliansingularitybecause we perceive that only the United States is as greatand infuential as we are in the Americas.14

In Brazil, urthermore, such comparisons are made not only in scholarlytexts but also in everyday Brazilian discourse, while in the United Statesthe comparisons tend to be limited to specialists or those Americans

who happen to come into contact with Brazil. There is both pathosand grandeur in this generally unreciprocated Brazilian penchant orcomparison; on the one hand, it represents a desire to see onesel asequal to the most powerul (and an implicit disdain or ones weakerneighbors); on the other, it constitutes a cry o despair and anger. In itsrightist version, the cry was, How can we ever be equal when you areso great? and in the letist version, it was, How can we be equal to thisimperialist giant when the game is rigged and you oppress us? Needlessto say, this power dynamic has shited signicantly with the economiccrisis in the United States and the rise o Brazil and other powers romthe Global South such as India and China.

Much o the comparative historical work bears on the role o the ron-tier in the two countries. The question o territory and expansion wasessential in both Brazil and the United States. While Brazilians spoke o


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the Marcha para Oueste (the march toward the West), the United Statesspoke in more grandiloquent and messianic terms o maniest destiny.In the United States, we encounter Frederick Jackson Turners rontier

hypothesis, presented to the American Historical Association in 1893,around the time o the ocial closing o the rontier. At the sametime, i Brazil has no rontier hypothesis la Turner, there is nonethe-less a pervasive discourse o another rontier, that o the Amazon Basinas a reserve o hope and social mobility and supposedly inexhaustibleresources, a discourse which, i not identical to the American rontier,nevertheless serves a similar unction.

The classic comparative work on the role o the rontier in the twocountries, Vianna Moogs Pioneers and Bandeirantes(1954), revolves around

what seems like a rather humiliating question: why did the United Statesbecome so successul and a leading power in the world, while Brazil re-mained so poor and weak? (A more fattering question or Brazilandsome cultural nationalists have come close to this ormulationmightreverse the terms: why did the United States become so bellicose, andimperialistic, and Brazil so cordial?) Indeed, the comparison to theUnited States is never ar away whenever Brazilians talk about theirown history or national character, as we see in the work o such majortheorists o Brazilian identity and character as Gilberto Freyre, Srgio

Buarque de Holanda, Raimundo Faoro, Roberto Da Matta, and DanteMoreira Leite. What varies is the question o who or what is blamed orBrazils supposed ailure. For Buarque de Holanda, Brazils comparativedisadvantage derives rom the negative legacy o Portugal, a backwardcountry where the Enlightenment, the Reormation, the French Revolu-tion, and industrial capitalism had little impact, and where authoritar-ian personalism reigned. Thus a atalistic causality, rather like originalsin, marks this vision o the history o Brazil. For lawyer, philosopher,and literary critic Raimundo Faoro, in his 1959 book Os donos do poder:

ormao do patronato politico brasileiro, the villain is the patrimonial state,again derived rom Portugal (although the concept o patriominalismis derived rom Weber). What Jesse Souza calls the sociology o inau-thenticity and a logic o decit portrays Brazilian historical becomingas a case o aborted Western development. In a strategic move parallelto that which sees counter and para Enlightenments as opposed toa single Enlightenment, Souza switches the terms o comparison by see-ing Brazil as a case not o ailed but rather o selective modernization,existing not in opposition to the United States and Europe but ratheras one point on a modernizing spectrum.15

Cross-national comparison is oten instrumental in shaping the sel-perception o nations. In the case o Brazilian thinkers like Freyre,Buarque de Holanda, Moog, and DaMatta, comparisons to the United


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States have oten come close to the very heart o debates aboutBrazilianidentity. As intellectual popstar Caetano Veloso put it, Brazil is the othergiant o the Americas, the other melting pot o races and cultures, the

other paradise promised to European and Asian immigrants, the other.The double, the shadow, the negative o the great adventure o the NewWorld.16 While in no way identical, then, various Brazilian and Americanthinkers have seen the two countries as eminently comparable. Within araught dialectics o attraction and repulsion, even strong and reiteratedstatements o dierence have historically been addressed to a privilegedinterlocutor. For many Brazilian intellectuals (as or many AmericanBrazilianists), the natural and inevitable historical comparison, orBrazil, has not been to the mother country Portugal, or to a European

country like France or even to a Spanish-speaking neighbor like Argen-tina, but rather to the United States. The issue is not one o identity buto relationality; similar historical elements exist in both countries, butthey are reshufed. Major chords in one country become minor chordsin the other. But this penchant or nation-based comparisons remainspower laden and overdetermined. The comparisons themselves dependon who is doing the comparing, in relation to which social groups, along

what axes, and to what ends.

The Pitalls o Comparison

One o the most infuential and widely cited contemporary theorists oBrazilian national identity against a comparative U.S. backdrop is Brazil-ian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta. Oten insightul and entertaining,DaMattas writing prolierates in brilliant aperus which highlight whathe sees as the quotidian cultural contrasts between the two countries.His omnivorous and all encompassing analytical method turns almostany social eventa birthday party, a soccer game, a chance encounterin the streetinto material or comparative analysis.

One o DaMattas books engaging the U.S./Brazil comparison bearsthe title (quite signicantly or our trilateral comparative purposes) Toc-quevilleanas: noticias da america(Tocquevilliana: News rom America). Oneessay, called Images o Brazil and the U.S. in Popular Music, comparesthree songs, which explicitly address the issue o national culture: TheHouse I Live In [What is America to Me] by Earl Robinson and Lewis

Allan; Ary Barrosos Watercolor Portrait o Brazil (popularly knownas Brazil); and Jorge Ben Jars Pais Tropical. The American song,or DaMatta, denes the collectivity as sharing a modern, civic aith, abelie in reedom and equality as values. The Brazilian songs, in contrast,dene Brazil not in terms o its universal political creed but according


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to its generous, paradisal nature and the seductive, rich, beautiul, andinviting culture that goes with it. DaMatta sums up the dierence: Tobe American, it is enough to be governed by external rules. But to be

Brazilian, one has to samba, wiggle, mix, drink, sleep and sing, in a word,to be, rather than, as in the American case, to belong. Do I exaggerate?Without a doubt, but that is exactly what the songs express.17 DaMattais not anti-American; indeed, his writing reveals a good deal o aectionor U.S. cultureespecially popular musicand his generalizing contrastsare oten overly generous to the United States, as when he associates it

with equality beore the law. At the same time, DaMatta is especiallyadept at ormulating what might be called the Brazilian dierence, thatis, particularly sympathetic aspects o Brazilian behavior and attitude. He

accounts very well or the dierent eeling generated by Brazilian versusAmerican styles o lie, at least in the dominant mainstream versions oboth cultures.

However, whether speaking o Brazil or o the United States, DaMattaalmost always thinks rom an unacknowledgedly white-dominant perspec-tive. In this sense, DaMatta oers a slightly revised version o the Anglo/Latin dichotomy, which contrasts the personalities o two dominantelitesone branco-branco (white-white), the other branco-moreno(white-dark). But the idea that some ideal Anglo type has persisted unaltered

through centuries o U.S. history implies that the non-Anglo elementshave not infected the national character. This view quietly encodes aneo-Hegelian triumph o the North European spirit version o the his-tory o nations, whereby Protestant whiteness inevitably prevails over itsnon-Protestant, nonwhite others. (Samuel Huntington is deeply Hegelianin this sense.) This view, problematic even in its own terms, is undulystatic. The idea that the Protestant work ethic dominates the UnitedStates overprivileges New England as the primordial source o Americanculture, while also ignoring the substantial part o the population thatis not Protestant or even Christian and other dierentiations within acomplex and heteroglossic society.

Although DaMattas analysis o carnival is indebted to Mikhail Bakhtins,his analyses o the United States bypass Bakhtins preerential option oralterity and multiplicity (crystallized in such Bakhtinian neologisms asheteroglossia, polyglossia, pluristylism, double-voiced discourse,polyphony) in avor o variations on a single numberone. ForDaMatta, the United States has one language, one ethos, and one styleo lie. He writes like an anthropologist who claims to have cracked thecode o a tribal society, discerning a system unknown even to the trib-als themselves. Such an approach, already problematic in relation to a

well-dened object o study such as a small group o the same origins ina single location, leads to an analytic aporia when applied to multitribalpeoples and polyethnic states like Brazil and the United States.


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The problem, then, is a methodological one, to wit, the reciprocalreication o dierences, and the erasure o commonalities, betweennations. Ideal type generalities homogenize very complex and varie-

gated national ormations while denying common eatures. In a bipolarmethod o comparison, all individuals line up in conormity with a seto a priori characteristics: on one Latin side, openness, sensuousness,syncretism, and hybridity; on the other Anglo side, closedness, purita-nism, segregationism, and exclusivity. DaMattas comparisons leave bothBrazilians and inhabitants o the United States locked up in a monolithicidentity in which there is no room or contradictions and anomalies. Hisdichotomies make one wish or a comparative anthropology/sociology oexceptions, ocusing not on taken-or-granted typicalities but rather on

Brazilians who hate soccer and samba, Americans who love carnival, andso orth. Such analyses would at least have the virtue o unpredictability,o not leaving us incarcerated in the prisons o national stereotype. Suchbinaristic comparisons, in sum, delineate overdrawn dichotomies ratherthan dierentiated commonalities, resulting in the ontologization ocultural dierence.

Race through a Comparative Prism

Much o the comparative refection on Brazil, France, and the UnitedStates explores the touchy subjects o slavery and race. Cross-nationalrace-related comparisons have been instrumentalized in extremely diverse

ways, emphasizing contrasts, similarities, or complementarities.18 Com-parison has been deployed by American blacks (or progressive whites)to needle the white-dominated United States, as when American blacksexalted Frances relatively benign domestic model, or Brazils apparentlack o racial tension and prejudice, as a way o shaming a segregated white

America. At times we nd what Bakhtin calls double-voiced discourse, aswhen Arican Americans praise Brazils miscegenated cordiality in orderto criticize white racism in the United States but conde to ellow blacksthat the situation in Brazil is less than ideal. Or comparison can be usedin the reverse direction, by Brazilian blacks to needle the white Brazilianelite, as i to say: Look at those American blacks, unlike we Brazilianblacks, theyve gained real status and power! They have generals andmayors and intellectuals and celebrities and theyre constantly visible inthe media, and now they have a black president! Or comparisons canbe instrumentalized by the white Brazilian elite, as i to remind blackBrazilians that they are lucky to be in Brazil and how much worse o they

would be over there, in the racist United States. And comparison can bewielded as a conservative warning, as when white Brazilian (or French)


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opponents o multiculturalism or armative action in Brazil or Franceargue that it will bring U.S.-style tensions and even segregation.

Arican Americans have historically looked both to France and Brazil

as models o nonracist societies. Many Brazilian blacks, conversely, havepointed to the Arican American civil rights movement as a model o ac-tivism and pride. Already in 1918, a writer or the black journal O Alneteexhorted ellow blacks to strive to eradicate our illiteracy and see whetheror not we can imitate the North American blacks.19 And in 1933, anotherblack Brazilian writer praised the condent and sel-possessed Arican

American who lits up his head, arguing that the Brazilian model ismore devastating or blacks even than the brutal American model: The

Americans lynch ty Negroes a year. We kill the entire Brazilian Negro

race.20

At times, North American comparative commentary conveys anethnocentric and subalternizing stagism, the idea that Brazilian blacksneed to catch up with American black achievements.

Although intellectuals in all three countries have engaged in com-parative scholarship concerning slavery and discrimination, the debateoten operates within nationalist boundaries whereby scholars ignore theamily resemblances to be ound in the countries o the Black Atlantic.National narcissism sometimes leads intellectuals rom the nation-stateso the Black Atlantic to project racism as characteristic only o other

nations, as i conquest and slavery-spawned oppression were a monopolyo only one country. French commentators sometimes like to orgetFrances massive participation in the slave trade. Popular mythology inthe United States, meanwhile, claims that it, unlike European nations,is not a colonial or imperial nation.

Just as narcissism sometimes lies at the core o cross-national com-parison, so can it be ound at the core o ocial versions o the historyo slavery. Thus some nationalist historians in the Unites States, France,and Brazil oer prettied versions o their countrys relation to slavery,downplaying the cruelty or longevity o the institution, or its continuingtraces in the present. In the Unites States, slavery, even though it lastedor centuries, is sometimes treated, in school textbooks or example, asan early and temporary glitch in an overarching narrative o progress.It is presented as the exception to the rule o democracy, when in actslavery and segregation have been more the rule, and reedom and equalrights more the exception. In Brazil, some historians argued or another

version o exceptionality, in the guise o a suave version o slavery inthe past, and a cordiality and lack o confict in the present, a relativebenevolence variously explained by the heritage o Portuguese fexibilityand racial tolerance or by Catholicisms more inclusive and corporativeembrace or by widespread mixing and miscegenation.

For many scholars, the two situations oer variations on a theme oracial hierarchy: the dierences have to do with the specic modalities


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o domination. One staple contrast in the scholarship is between thevirulent and phobic racism typical o the United States, especially inthe past, and the more camoufaged, paternalistic, and cordial rac-

ism more typical o Brazil. But another position argues that preciselybecause racism in the United States was so virulent, blacks were moremotivated to struggle against it; Arican Americans had no illusion oan easy assimilation. Brazil, in contrast, seems at rst glance to presenta situation o racism without racists where there is no Ku Klux Klan,no lynching (except o marginals who just happen to be black), and

where politicians seldom make racist statements, yet where black peopleare constant victims o inormal discrimination and are even more dis-empowered politically, in some ways, than they are in the United States.

Race, in this sense, is both a kind o salt rubbed into the wounds o class,and a wound in itsel.Ater more than a century o comparative studies o slavery, race, and

discrimination in the United States and Brazil, scholars are beginningto pursue comparative analyses o race and racism in France and Brazil.

Alexandra Poli, or example, compares the dominant racial mythologieso the two countries, noting that the myth o racial democracy in Brazilseems at rst glance to be the polar opposite o the French myth o theRpublique. While one common Brazilian line sees the harmonious racial

relations created by miscegenation as the key to Brazilian democracy, theFrench republican myth preaches the reusal o cultural particularismin order to assure equal treatment or all citizens. Meanwhile, the criticso this latter position argue that the impossibility o taking into accountdierences related to the body, to origin, to ethnicity, or religionandeven the absence o race-based statisticsprevents a realistic assessmento the contours o racial discrimination.

Despite the clear dierences, the two models share, according to Poli,their denial o the experience o victims oppressed by racism and discrimi-nation who are expected to keep quiet in the ace o the aggressions theyhave suered. Thus racial democracy in Brazil and republican valuesin France constitute the ideological background or any discussion o rac-ism in the two countries: The expressions country o the rights o manand the country o the mixture o races serve to reinorce the unity othe people and exclude rom the outset any discussion o racism.21 Yetin both France and Brazil, citizens have protested discrimination andasserted their ethnic, cultural, and religious right to dierence in sucha way as to bring the issue o racism and discrimination back to the table,bypassing narcissistic discussions o who is less racist?

While comparison can become an instrument o placing nations orcultures in a rigid hierarchical paradigm, or or establishing rigid andreied contrasts, it can also serve as a trampoline or epistemologicalleaps and dialogical interventions.It is in this context that we will draw


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attention to a specic stream o cross-cultural comparative writing con-cerning the European indigenous encounter, to wit, an ongoing intertexto French writing about Brazil, and specically about the Brazilian Indian

and about Aro-Brazilian culture. While cross-cultural comparisons tendto treat the two societies in question in their hegemonic orms, this hasnot always been the case. French commentary on Brazilian Indians, orexample, goes back to the travel writings o the early sixteenth century,beginning with French captain Paulmier de Gonnevilles relation to theFrench authorities about his 15031505 voyage to Brazil, just three yearsater Pedro Cabrals discovery.22 A number o sixteenth-century textsnotably Andr Thvets Les singularits de la France Antartique(1557) andCosmographie universelle(1575), Jean de Lrys LHistoire dun voyage la

terre du Brsil(1578), and the German Hans Stadens sensationally titledBrasilien: die wahrhatige Historie der wilden nacken, grimmigen Menschenresser-Leute (1557)emerged out o an aborted French attempt to ound acolony near present-day Rio de Janeiro, called France Antartique, whichlasted rom 1555 until 1560.

Sixteenth-century cultural dierences not only between Europeans(French versus Portuguese; Protestant versus Catholic; Christian against

Jew) but also between Europeans and native Brazilians (the misnamedIndians) shaped how the various groups conceptualized the Tupi

peoples, the native group that the French, in this case Protestant Frenchrom Normandy and Brittany, came to know with a greater intimacy thandid the conquering Portuguese. This encounter became an exercise incomparative cross-cultural projection between the French Huguenotminority and the indigenous Tupi peoples in Brazil. Just as the nativepeoples projected their cosmologies and assumptions onto the Euro-peans, dierent European groups projected their ideologies onto theTupinamba.

These dierential readings by Christian actions become evident intheir treatment o the Tupinamba leader Cunhambebe, the leader othe Federation o the Tamoios, an aggregation o native groups ght-ing Portuguese colonization. Although Cunhambebe was a French ally,the Catholic Thvet and the Protestant Lry do not portray him in thesame way. The ocial cosmographer Thvet sees Cunhambebe as com-parable to a French King; as Frank Lestringant points out, he royalizesCunhambebe with exuberant eulogies to the King o Ubatuba; heturns the cacique into a French-style monarch.23 The Huguenot Lry,meanwhile, deeply skeptical toward any monarchy reminiscent o the onethat practiced such cruelty against his coreligionists in Europe, resentsany authority incarnated in a single person. He thereore mocks Thvetsroyalization o Cunhambebe and sees him instead as comparable to theleader o a closely knit, ideal Protestant-style communitas. The actual


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attributes o Cunhambebe, in short, are less important than the discur-sive and ideological grids through which the comparison is seen. BothThvet and Lry oer a positive image o Cunhambebe, but Thvet sees

him as incarnating a divinely sanctioned hierarchical society, while Lrysees him as the communal avatar o a Protestant leader o an egalitariancommunity.

In LHistoire dun voyage la terre du Brsil (1578), Lry described hisexperience, some two decades earlier, o being captured by BrazilianIndians and welcomed into the Tupinamba community while waitingor his own ritual deglutition. Lry used comparison as a didactic deviceto explain Tupi culture to French readers. Claude Lvi-Strauss hailedLrys history as a masterpiece o anthropological literature, while

Michel de Certeau called Lrys account seminal or historiography andethnography, the equivalent o a primal scene in the construction oethnological discourse.24 By deending what he sees as the gregariouscultural values and practices o his captors, Lry uses comparison bothto explain Tupi customsor example, by making analogies to Frenchcustomary practicesbut also to point out the relative humanity o thenatives when compared to a Europe scarred by wars o religion. Lrycontrasts the cruelty o the French Admiral Villegagnon, who deniedhis companions nourishment, with the open-handed generosity o the

Tupinamba. The Indians walk around naked, Lry tells us, but only toavoid having to constantly change clothes in a hot climate.25 Anticipat-ing Jean-Jacques Rousseaus ideas about child rearing, Lry proposes thepractical Tupinamba manner o nursing and caring or children as asuperior model or French parents. When Lery explains the Europeancustom o saving up money to leave an inheritance or the children, anelderly Tupinamba ridicules the idea since the same earth that eedsthe parents will eed the children.26

In contrast to the later European Naturalists, who compared the ertilityo Europe to the supposed sterility o the Americas as a place o stuntedgrowth and degeneration, Lry described a robust Tupi society wherepeople were stronger, tter, and less prone to disease than Europeans,and where everything that was planted grew. Lry draws contrasts be-tween the two groupsnative nudity/European dress; native estivity/European productive laborbut he avoids ranking the two cultures.One might object that Lry is actually ranking the two cultures andnding the Tupi superior to the Europeans, but this is not exactly thecase. First, Lry points out many negative eatures o Tupi lie as well,their penchant or cannibalism, or example, and their perpetual small-scale wars. He does not applaud cannibalism, but he points out that ithad been seen in Europe as well during the religious wars. Second, hedoes not go nativehe remains a believing Protestant Christian, and


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more precisely a Huguenot. Third, he generally speaks not o morallysuperior and ineriorpeoplebut rather o better and worsepractices, suchas child rearing, that can be adopted by any group. He does not make

his comparisons in order to assert superiority but rather in the interesto nding pragmatic benets in the practices o another culture.Ater Thvet and Lry, this strain o thought entered the European

Renaissance more directly and dramatically with Michel de Montaigne.As an early exponent o what would later be called cultural relativism,Montaigne takes rom Lry the emphasis on primitive communalism,the absence o laws o inheritance, and so orth. Montaigne met threeTupinamba Indians in 1562, at the court o King Charles IX, and thememory o the encounter ollowed him throughout his lie. By Mon-

taignes account, the Tupinamba engaged in a comparative critique oFrench society based on their own axiomatic principles o consensus ruleand equal sharing; they wondered why tall adults could bow down to asmall boy (the regent), why some people ate well and others ate barelyat all, and why those who barely ate did not strangle those who were eat-ing well. Two centuries beore the French revolution, Montaigne relayedand ventriloquized the Indian voice to criticize European civilizationalhierarchies. Here, too, it is easy to say that Montaigne was simply turningthe usual rankings upside down, but that is again not quite true: rather,

he is deploying a comparison in order to question the conventional as-sumption o superiority o his own culture.Montaigne practiced a rhetoric o chiasmus or civilizational reversals by

arguing that the violence o Tupinamba cannibalism paled in comparisonto that triggered by religious wars in Europe, where people were drawnand quartered and tortured in the name o a religion o love. With theirirreverent questions and their implied comparisons, the Tupinamba,at least as Montaigne presents them, demolished with a ew probingquestions the prestige o the hereditary monarchy and the class system.Centuries later, Lvi-Strauss went out in search o Indians, writingconsciously in the tradition o Lry and Rousseau, whom he called themost ethnographic o the philosophers. We discern here a dierentmodality o comparison, in the orm o quasi-allegorical identicationsand investments operating across time as well as space, with Lvi-Straussstressing his strong sense o identication with Lry and praising thegeneric traits and ormal qualities o the Voyageas a model or an eth-nological essay.

On some levels, one might argue that Lvi-Strauss deploys a techniqueo reverse ranking, lauding Indian social lie as an alternative and evensuperior social model. While Western culture, as Lvi-Strauss put it inThe View rom Aar, isolates man rom the rest o creation and [denes]too narrowly the boundaries separating him rom other living beings,


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native culture sees all o lie on a continuum. While the Biblical tradi-tion sees human beings as lords o creation, native thought sees themas collaborators rather than dominators o nature.27 Given his insider-

outside perspective on a Europe about to slaughter its internal others,Lvi-Strauss perhaps ound in the gentle ways o the external otherso Europe an alternative to what John Murray Cuddihy calls the ordealso European civility.28 One might accuse Lvi-Strausss praise o theIndians as Rousseauiste, and a simple reversal o valence, but there aretwo important dierences: 1) Lvi-Strauss, unlike Rousseau, had detailedand intimate knowledge o the Nambiquara and the Bororo and madeprecise observations about them. And 2) given what was happening inthe Europe o the Shoah, he had every reason to cast doubt on any

pretension to ethical superiority on the part o Europe. But beyond thatthere is an important dierence between a civilizational ranking thatmerely resembles and consolidates the preexisting hierarchical powerarrangements between peoples and a sympathetic view o an alien cul-ture, which challenges at the same time those dominant powers and theconceptual models deployed in the conventional ranking. Lvi-Straussdeploys comparison as a critique o Eurocentric ranking; his praise othe lieways o the Nambiquara is not designed to consolidate privilegebut rather to undermine it.

Comparison as Excess Seeing

In the case o the French polymath Roger Bastide (18981974), theoreigners look rom aar (Lvi-Strauss) illuminated Brazil even orBrazilians themselves. The French anthropologist lived in Brazil or six-teen years, teaching sociology at the University o So Paulo where hetook over an academic chair rst occupied by Lvi-Strauss. In a sense,Bastide prolongs the tradition going back to Jean de Lry, but he iden-tied less with indigenous people than with black Brazilians, or moreprecisely, with Aro-Brazilian culture. While the ocial representativeso France were glorying in a Latinit shared by Brazilian and French

white elites, Bastide discerned the cultural agency o a socially despised,dclass, black Brazil.29

Bastide exemplies a kind o transnational gnosis. Born a FrenchProtestant, he draws variously on Arican religion, Brazilian literature,French anthropology, North American sociology, and Chicago Schoolanthropology along with many other currents, becoming a transculturalmedium who spoke through and to these various voices. To borrow acomparison rom Aro-Brazilian religions, he was the horse who wasmounted by diverse methodological spirits. At the same time, he can


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also be compared to the ethnographic surrealists o whom James Cli-ord speaks, that is, the French writers who orchestrated an encounterbetween artistic modernismin this case, not only French but also Brazil-

ian modernismand the socioethnography o Arican and Arodiasporicculture. Bastide oers a signal instance o the power o what we haveelsewhere called, paraphrasing Raymond Williams, analogical structureso eeling as a key to transcultural comprehension.30

In his studies o the possession religions o Bahia, Bastide broke with thedominant views o Arican-derived religions as pathological or irrational,appreciating them on their own terms and merits. Most visitors, whetherFrench or American, were inclined to see little more than superstitionor animism in the West Arican religions as practiced in Brazil. Bastides

project was to show that these religions were not superstitious, quasi-demonic cults but rather legitimate belie systems which embraced acosmology, a psychology, and a theodicy; and that they express an Aricanthought that is erudite and deeply cultivated.31

Long beore authors such as Cliord and George Marcus spoke orefexive anthropology, but very much alongside and in dialogue withthe ethnographic surrealists, Bastide developed an anti-ethnocentricmethod with quasi-mystical overtones: It is a matter, or the sociologist,o not placing onesel outside social experience but rather o living it . . .

we have to transorm ourselves into that which we are studying, into themultitude, the mass, the class, or the caste. . . . It is necessary, as in theact o love, to transcend our own personality in order to join ourselvesto the soul linked to what is being studied.32 Here, ethnography itselbecomes a kind o trance, the trigger or a transormation o identitiesthat recalls the scrambled analogies, the exchange o identities, literallyat play in candomble, where the medium becomes the saint, wheremale can become emale, the adult a child, and so orth.

Bastide suspended the usual ideal o scientic distance and amouslydeclared Aricanus sum (I am Arican), a ormulation that ironicallymingles complete identication with Arica with a Latin language redo-lent o cultural capital and quintessential pan-Europeanness. Comingup against the limits o Eurotropic analogies, Bastide acknowledgedthat three centuries o rationalist Cartesianism had blinded him to thecomplexity o Arican religion, speaking o the subtle philosophy ocandomble. Bastide believed in immersion (mergulho) in the culturebeing studied, while also practicing a certain refexivity about his ownmethods and limitations. He practices both identication and exotopy,the trance and the distanced analysis perormed subsequent to thetrance. He was also careul not to all into the trap o Negritude-style (andlater Arocentric) essentialism about Arica, aware o the gap betweenthe real Arica and the Arica reinvented in Brazilian terreiros. At the


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same time, his descriptions are marked by a vitalism that runs the risko reproducing a gendered dichotomy o rationality versus intuition thatat times ails to grasp the semiotic complexity o candomble as a living,

changing orm o religious practice.For Bastide, the recognition o incommensurabilities and even thelimits o cross-cultural comparison triggered an epistemological leapbeyond the connes o ones own axiomatic culture. Unlike many an-thropologists, Bastide recognized the limitations o the a priori systemsand discourses and other cultural baggage that he carried to Brazil, notonly in anthropology but also sociology. The Brazilian experience, then,sensitized Bastide to the epistemological limitations o Eurotropic modeso comparative analysis. Rather than orce those modes and conceptual

categories onto an experience that escapes and resists them, and ratherthan rank religions in an order o superiority and ineriority, Bastideopened himsel up to new modes, including poetic modes, o appre-hension. But unlike other writers, Bastide does not orientalize Brazilas a place where European categories do not work because o its puta-tive irrationality. Rather, he discerns the inadequacies o the categoriesthemselves and pleads or new paradigms worthy o a complex culturethat is not inerior but only dierent.

The Misrule o Metaphor

In this essay, we have seen comparison deployed as an exercise inranking and civilisational superiority (Hegel, Weber), as a narcissisticantasy (the diverse national exceptionalisms), as a binarist essentializingo complex cultures (DaMatta), and nally (in Lry, Lvi-Strauss, andBastide) as an instrument or discerning comparabilities within and be-tween in other ways incommensurable societies. While our text exploresthree national zones, we have also tried to transcend nationalist raming.

We address cross-national and transnational comparisons in order toperorm an analytical dislocation by constructing and deconstructing,threading and unraveling, the tangled webs o ideas and practices thatconstitute coimplicated national relationships. It is not a question omerely juxtaposing three national histories, then, but rather o exploringtheir interrelations and linked analogies within a global system o power.Indeed, part o the methodological/theoretical thrust o our project isto stress the interstitial connections and interwoven strands that makeup all national ormations, which binaristic cross-cultural comparisonshave oten ailed to capture.

Much as Paul Ricoeur in The Rule o Metaphordeems metaphor to be acognitive instrument, so the more general phenomenon o comparison


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can also be seen as a perennial model o cognition that seeks out anddelineates analogies and disanalogies in the search or cross-culturalprecision and comprehension. In this sense, we are also interested in the

role o metaphor in actively reshaping conceptualizations o academicdisciplines and the relations between them. We are struck, in this sense,by the emergence o certain types o tropes within scholarly trends thatseek to go beyond the nation-state as the primary unit o analysis. Maniestin such prexes as trans and cross and inter and meta, and inthe prousion o terms like transnational, diasporic, transcultural,exilic, and globalized, this trend oten appeals to oceanic imagery. Thephrase Black Atlantic (R. F. Thompson, Paul Gilroy) and coinages suchas circum-Atlantic perormance (Joseph Roach) and planetary cur-

rents (Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker) and tidalectics (EdwardKamau Brathwaite), and even emerging subelds like oceanic studiesand island studies, orm part o this tendency. Within a poetics o fowsand eddies and currents, aquatic imagery is deployed as a dissolvent oborders and binarisms, all part o a search or a more fuid idiom oraddressing transnational circuitries o ideas.

Transnational studies also deploy tropes o color to speak both o ra-cialized societies and o a historicized grid o analysis. While the Black

Atlantic evokes the Middle Passage and the chronotope o the ship,

an ancillary concept like the Red Atlantic would conjure up canoesand kayaks, the Conquest, and the Trail o Tears.33 Red and Blackand White do not reer to isolatable and unchanging racesrst,because no one is literally black, white, or red. English colonists, orexample, reported that the native peoples o North America were o

white complexion, while French and Portuguese colonists said that thenative peoples o Brazil were o the same color as the Iberians. Here

we intend tropes o color not to reer to distinct races but rather aspositions on a spectrum, as an experimental method, a way o casting acertain blackish or reddish light on history to see what becomes visible

when we see the history o the spectral Atlantic as Black or Red orWhite or all at the same time. Our assumption, shaped by critical race,intersectional-eminist, and postcolonial cultural studies, is that suchdemographic/symbolic tropes as blackness and whiteness and rednessare overlapping and relational; they take on meaning only in reerenceto one another, as part o a mobile, ever-changing conguration striatedby power and inequality.

Our study o the role o comparison in the Red, Black, and WhiteAtlantic in three zones echoes the triangular trac by which Europesent manuactured goods to Arica, Arican slaves to the New World,and raw materials back to Europe in an unending and lucrative cycleo exploitation. The metaphor o currents is especially suggestive in


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that the Atlantic Ocean is swept by vast circular rivers and streamsa northern circle running in a clockwise direction rom its southernbeginnings, and a southern circle fowing in a counterclockwise direc-

tion, in a swirling movement evocative o the trade o ideas and goodsback and orth between Arica, Europe, and the Americas.34 Given theseliquid transers and trade windsan expression that goes back to theslave tradethe issue becomes one o discerning the common currentsrunning through the various zones, the ways that histories and texts anddiscourses mingle and interact within situations o unequal liquidity.

All national comparison takes place on transnational territory. Wehave proceeded rom the assumption that all nations are, on one level,transnations and that all cultures are transcultures, which cannot be seen

as monolithic or as congruent with the boundaries o nation-states. Whilenation-states exercise political and to some extent economic sovereigntyand while some regimes have brutally demonstrated the horric damage

wreaked by nation-statesnations are still sites o perpetual contestation,not reducible to single ideologies. Culture, urthermore, does not con-orm to neat political boundaries or obey the mandates even o the mostauthoritarian regimes. National cultural elds are dynamic, heteroglossic,impure, dissensual, and internally dierentiated. Cultures are not com-parable in the orm o a stable set o unchanging properties or a static

list o traits. France is not eternally Cartesian; Brazil is not perpetuallycarnivalesque; the United States is not unailingly puritanical. Althoughcross-border comparisons have oten conjured up the image o nationsas coherent, consistent, and hermetically sealed units, our emphasis hasbeen on the contradictions, gaps, and ssures within a transnationalperspective. We have called attention, in this sense, to what douardGlissant calls transversalities, that is, the comparisons and dialogismstaking place across fuid transnational spacesnot between nation-statesbut rather between nation-relations.

New York University

NOTES

Some o this material is drawn rom the manuscript o The Culture Wars in Translation(orthcoming). The project o the book was outlined in prelimary orm in Robert Stamand Ella Shohat, Traveling Multiculturalism: A Trinational Debate in Translation, inPostcolonial Studies and Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzel, AntoinetteBurton, and Jed Esty (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 293316.1 For an extended elaboration o this idea in relation to lm adaptations o novels,

see Robert Stam, Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art o Adaptation(Oxord:Blackwell, 2005).2 Pierre Bourdieu, The Social Conditions o the International Circulation o Ideas,in Bourdieu: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxord: Blackwell, 1999), 223.


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3 Some orms o American-style exceptionalism could be called solipsistic ethnocentrism,taking the orm not o explicit claims o superiority but rather o a lack o interest inother nations, even those in which the United States is intervening. The U.S. educationalsystem has become more nation centered, with less space or geography and world history,

while the U.S. media increasingly limit their oreign coverage to spectacular catastrophesor direct challenges to U.S. interests. U.S. exceptionalism has recently morphed into theidea that the United States makes exceptions or itsel when it comes to international lawand human rights. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy inthe Age o Empire(New York: Penguin, 2004), 89.4 In our book Flagging Patriotism: Crises o Narcissism and Anti-Americanism(New York:Routledge, 2007) we support political anti-Americanism that critiques American socialsystems and oreign policy but reject culturalist orms o anti-Americanism that based theirarguments on supposed ethnic traits.5 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy o History(New York: Colonial Press, 1899), 84.6 We explore the subject o national narcissism and exceptionalism at greater length in

Flagging Patriotism.7 Paul Adam, Les visages du Brsil (Paris: P. Latte, 1910), 15051. Unless otherwisenoted, all translations rom French and Portuguese are our own.8 Adam, Les visages du Brsil, 16566.9 Jacqueline Bardolph, Etudes postcoloniales et littrature (Paris: Champion, 2002),1718.10 Joseph Burnichon, Le Brsil daujourdhui(Paris: Perrin, 1910), 77.11 Abel Bonnard, Ocean et Brsil(Paris: Flammarion, 1929), 7677.12 Pierre Bourdieu, Deux imperialismes de luniversel, in LAmrique des Franais, ed.Christine Faure and Tom Bishop (Paris: Francis Bourin, 1992), 14955.13 See Henry M. Brackenridge, Voyage to South America, Perormed by Order o the American

government in the years 1817 and 1818, in the Frigate Congress, 2 vols. (London: John Miller,1820), 1:12829. Cited in Denis Rolland, ed. Le Brsil et le monde(Paris: LHarmattan, 1998),2526.14 Jesse Souza, ed., A invisibilidade da desigualdade brasileira (Belo Horizonte: EditoraUFMG, 2006), 100.15 See Jesse Souza, A modernizacao seletiva: uma reintrpretacao do dilema brasileiro(Brasilia:UnB, 2000).16 See Caetano Veloso, Verdade tropical(So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), 14.17 Veloso, Verdade tropical, 11818 For an illuminating critique o comparison as a method, see Micol Siegel, Uneven

Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the UnitedStates(Durham, NC: Duke Univ.Press, 2009).19 A. Oliveira, Aos nossos leitores, O Alnete, September 3, 1918; cited in Siegel, Uneven

Encounters, 190.20 Jose Correia Leite, O grande problema nacional,Evolucao, May 13, 1933; quoted inSiegel, Uneven Encounters, 202.21 Alexandra Poli, Faire ace au racisme en France et au Brsil: de la condamnationmorale laide aux victimes, Cultures and Conficts59 (2005): 1145.22 See Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, Le voyage de Gonneville (15031505); et la decouvertede la Normandie par les Indiens du Brsil, with commentary by Leyla Perrone-Moises, trans.

Ariane Witkowski (Paris: Chandeigne, 1995).23 See Frank Lestringant, Le huguenot et le sauvage(Paris: Klincksieck, 1999), 26.24 Michel de Certeau, The Writing o History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: ColumbiaUniv. Press, 1988), 211.25 Here we nd a clear contrast with Robinson Crusoe who, ater many years on histropical island, is obsessed with remaining clothed, even though he is alone. Crusoes

wealth, incidentally, is generated by a sugar mill (engenho) in Bahia, Brazil.


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26 The 1989 documentary Kayapo: Out o the Forest (Granada Television, 1989), whichconcerns the well-publicized protests o a coalition o indigenous groups against theconstruction o a hydroelectric, eatures similar dialogues between the protestors and therepresentatives o the energy corporation Eletronote.

27 Todorov argues that Lvi-Strauss, who claims to be a cultural relativist, ultimatelynds Indian culture superior, thus still alling into the trap o ranking and mere binaryreversal. Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in FrenchThought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993), 6089.28 See John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeals o Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the JewishStruggle with Modernity(Boston: Beacon, 1974).29 Bastide ultimately wrote thirty books on an astonishingly wide variety o topics, rangingrom psychoanalysis (A psicanalise do caune, 1941), to literature (A poesia Aro-Brasileira,1943), to mysticism (Imagens do nordeste mistico em branco e preto, 1945), to racial relations(Relacoes entre negros e brancos em So Paulo, 1955), to olklore (Sociologia do olclore brasileiro,1959), to Aro-Brazilian religions in general (As religioes aricanas no Brasil, 1971). His work

transgressed diverse rontiers: those between disciplines; those between the high andlow arts; those between class and racially-dened groups; and those between the sacredand the proane. By mingling the social sciences with artistic analysis, Bastide anticipated

what would later be called cultural studies.30 See our Unthinking Eurocentrism(London: Routledge, 1994), 351.31 Roger Bastide, O candomble da Bahia(So Paulo: Companha Editora Nacional, 1978),1011.32 Roger Bastide, Macunaima em Paris, in O Estado de So Paulo, February 3, 1946;quoted in Fernanda Aras Peixoto,Dialogos Brasileiros(So Paulo: Ediora da Universidadede So Paulo, 200), 16.33 The trope o the Red Atlantic is explored in Robert Stams essay The Red Atlantic:

Tupi Theory and the Franco-Brazilian-Indigenous Dialogue, presented at the ShelbyCullom Davis Center or Historical Studies at Princeton University, April 17, 2009. Thisconcept will also orm part o our The Culture Wars in Translation.34 See Jack D. Forbes, The American Discovery o Europe (Urbana: Univ. o Illinois Press,2007), ch. 2, passim.

transnationalizing comparison: the uses and abuses of cross-cultural analogy

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