Old new world
Brazil is no model for post-racial consciousness, writes
THIS year I attended a workshop in theory and criticism in São Paulo — sounds dry, I know — but I was inspired by its theme: a desire to think beyond race.
“Since the 15th century, race has been a central element in the making of the modern world,” the organisers proclaimed. “It has marked masters from slaves, the exploiting from the exploited, the belonging from the non-belonging, the qualified from the supposedly unqualified.”
Billed as “Archives of the Nonracial”, the workshop was a utopian exercise. Very little has changed in our experience of race; it fixes, limits and oppresses any quest to realise that which is human.
Contra Desmond Tutu’s pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the endless blather about democracy, or the will to think beyond the pathological constraints that bind us, SA remains stuck in what Albie Sachs called “the ghetto of the apartheid imagination”.
Enter Brazil, a country that has captured the world’s imagination as a teeming vision of inter-racial harmony. On arrival in São Paulo, I was shocked to find that this image was little more than an exercise in advertorial wizardry.
The Brazilians in the room were largely white intellectuals, who, consciously or not, reaffirmed the dominance of a Eurocentric ideal. In my hotel, the TV screens were dominated by “lily-white” telenovelas, while street billboards reproduced a white-supremacist fantasy. There were more than 100 words for whiteness, I was told, reaffirming an obsessive preoccupation with separatist distinctions.
Utterly confused and depressed, I concluded that I’d entered a madhouse. At no point was the notion of the non-racial broached; rather, conversation returned endlessly to an entrenched theatre of race. Pele, I blurted, what of Pele? He was not black, they said: by crossing the class divide, he had miraculously been sanctified as something other: a creature rarefied, freed from the burden of blackness.
How was this possible? But then, returning to my home ground, I realised something similar had happened to Nelson Mandela. Both are figures larger than life: both seen as peculiarly “redeemed” from their black heritage.
Of course this is false. But such is the power of hype and illusion that it can change how we perceive the world. In Summertime, JM Coetzee replays the fantasy of a utopian Brazil. Therein he speaks of a “Brazilian future” in which we no longer see ourselves as African versus European. We would be neither “white nor black nor any- thing else, when family histories would have become so tangled and intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable”.
In São Paulo, I saw nothing to support this dream. Coetzee’s idea is a beautiful one, for to become “nothing”, freed from the bane of identity politics, would be sublime. But he also reminds us that we “will never abandon politics because [it] is too convenient and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions … Politics is a symptom of our fallen state and expresses that fallen state.”
Is this what awaits us in Brazil in the coming weeks? For with all the talk of Brazil’s “credit-led boom in domestic consumption”, its carnival, its ooze of sex, its conviviality, it remains a country divided, steeped in the culture of the junta, wanton in its love affair with power, and still cruel to its poor, despite the Lula government’s efforts to redistribute wealth on a grand scale.
In his latest book, Event: Philosophy in Transit, Slavoj Zizek asks: “Is an event a change in the way reality appears to us, or is it a shattering transformation of reality itself?” And if technology, as Zizek reminds us, alters “the attitude towards reality”, then how will the biggest technologised event — the World Cup — change the way we see Brazil and the world?
We tend to think that technology dumbs us down. As Alain de Botton writes in The News: A User’s Manual, the media with its obsessive immediacy can make us “clinically depressed”. This assumes that we become passive, neutered; that we give up our critical consciousness and our ability to create a better world. From this point of view, the World Cup amounts to nothing more than a fabulous distraction.
But then again, as Zizek reminds us, we are also suffering from another ailment — “future shock”. “People are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling pace of technological development,” and thus feel an urge to renounce its illusory power. Perhaps Brazil will somehow use this showdown to begin repairing the psychic damage at its core — and ours. LS