Machado de Assis

G. Reginald Daniel is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (Penn State, 2006), among other works.

• ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Machado de Assis: The Critical Legacy1Neither Black nor White: The Brazilian Racial Order2The Mulatto Author: The Literary Canon and the Racial Contract3Black into White: Racial Identity and the Life of Machado de Assis4The Public Racial Text: Racial Identity and the Writings of the Unknown Machado5The Meta-Mulatto: Racial Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis6The Hidden Racial Text: Racial Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis7Toward Literary Independence: National Identity and the Writings of Machado de Assis8The Transformative Vision: Seeing with the Third Eye9Machado de Assis: From Romantic Realism to ImpressionismEpilogue: Machado de Assis: An Alternative InterpretationG. Reginald Daniel with Gary L. HaddowNotesReferencesIndex

“G. Reginald Daniel’s work is a thoughtful analysis of how racial identity and race relations are dealt with in the work of Machado de Assis. It allows us to understand how Machado’s universal principles, as well as his ambiguity regarding the ‘mulatto’ condition in Brazil, in fact erode the very foundations of raciologic thinking. In so doing, Daniel opens a very interesting window onto the singularity of Brazil’s way of dealing with race and the differences between the Brazilian and the North American historical cases with regard to their African and African American (or Afro-Brazilian) heritage. Daniel’s book brings fresh air to the appreciation of Machado’s work in the United States, where it has gained the attention of outstanding critics, at the same time that it provides the reader with fundamental keys to the understanding of Brazil’s complex and at times unique position in the African Diaspora.”—Pedro Meira Monteiro, Princeton University