Brazilian, white: the boundary of whiteness in Paraná

Author(s)

Benno Victor Warken Alves

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2019-08-12

Examining board members

Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimaraes; Ruben George Oliven; Oswaldo Mario Serra Truzzi; Barbara Sue Weinstein

• Advisor: Antonio Sergio Alfredo Guimaraes

Abstract

In the postwar years, while racial democracy consolidated as a national ideology, an alternative ideology based on whiteness emerged in south Brazil. In this dissertation, I examine its construction during the state of Paraná centenary commemorations in 1953. Around those events, I analyze the crisis that forced members of the traditional dominant class, whites of Portuguese origins (Luso-Brazilians), to reshape the relationship between their region and the nation; the reasons and means by which they promoted the transformation of immigrant groups into Paraná\'s \"constitutive ethnic groups\", while at the same time they marginalized organized Blacks and Indigenous peoples; the ethnic performances prepared by the immigrants, especially Polish, Ukrainians, Japanese and Germans, to affirm their positions as ethnic Brazilians; and the new consensus on race and region established from the convergence of interests between Luso-Brazilians and immigrants. I argue that, as opposed to racial democracy, which was based on an asymmetrical political pact between white and black Brazilians and resulted in the idea of a mixed nation, the new southern consensus was based on a pact between white and ethnic Brazilians and resulted in the idea of a white region defined against the mixed nation. The strength of such pact came from the displacement of the boundary of whiteness so as to encompass Luso-Brazilians and ethnic Brazilians in a new social type of uncontested whiteness, with which southerners began to identify: the Brazilian white, more white than Brazilian. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 14/24976-0 - Family trajectories and the formation of whiteness in Southern Brazil
• Grantee: Benno Victor Warken Alves
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate