| Abstract |
"Until recently, Arab-Brazilian relations have been largely invisible to area studies and Comparative Literature scholarship. Yet Arabs have left a permanent imprint on Brazil: from the Moorish legacy of Muslim Iberia, transmitted by Portuguese settlers; to waves of Arab immigrants since the late nineteenth century; to the prominence today of Brazilians of Arab descent in politics, the economy, literature, and culture. The first book of its kind, Arab Brazil: Fictions of Tertiary Orientalism 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. Author Waïl S. Hassan 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 (different language, culture, and religion) and solidarity (cultural, historical, demographic, and geopolitical ties). What explains this contradiction, argues Hassan, is a Brazilian variety of Orientalism, distinct from the British, French, and U.S. varieties analyzed by Edward Said, that 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"-- Provided by publisher. |
