Arab Brazil: Ternary Orientalism and the Question of South-South Comparison
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, Hassan’s Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary 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. The book shows how the Arab world works paradoxically as a site of otherness (different language, culture, and religion) and solidarity (with cultural, historical, demographic, and geopolitical ties). What explains this contradiction is a Brazilian variety of Orientalism that is distinct from the British, French, and U.S. varieties analyzed by Edward Said, and which 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. The book raises questions such as: If Orientalism represents a discourse of Western mastery over the “Orient,” what happens when it migrates to another part of the developing world? What are, for example, the contours of Brazilian Orientalism? If not driven by imperial interests, what are the ideological stakes of a Euro-derived discourse mediating a South-South relationship? Hassan argues that whereas colonial Orientalism is based on the duality of Self/Other, East/West, and colonizer/colonized, Brazilian Orientalism has a ternary structure that defines the country’s cultural identity in relation both to the Arab world and to Europe and the U.S.
About the speaker
Waïl S. Hassan is professor and head of the Department of Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association. A specialist in modern Arabic literature and intellectual history, Hassan is the author, editor, and translator of nine books, guest editor of six journal issues, and author of over eighty articles, chapters, and reviews. His most recent publications include Arab Brazil: Fictions of Ternary Orientalism (Oxford, 2024) and the forthcoming collection O mundo árabe e o Brasil (Makunaima, 2024).