Brazilian Landscape With Rain: (Re)memorying Raciolinguistics Below the Equator

• In Event: Understanding Lived Raciolinguistic Realities Through Autoethnographies of Education Scholars

Abstract

1. Objectives
This critical autoethnography aims to examine the mobilization and implications of the term morenice (brownness) and its adjective form, morenx (brown), within the universe of Brazilian linguistic practices. The study explores how morenx covertly indexes the notions of brown and brownness as properties associated with whiteness.
2. Perspectives
Mitchell (2020) has argued that morenice remains a regressive notion from the past, hindering the emergence of satisfactory representations of racial progress in Brazil. This historical hang-up may be attributed, in part, to Brazil's “racial democracy” discourse, which allows individuals sharing specific phenotypes to draw upon morenx and indigenous identifications to avoid a strict association with blackness or indigeneity. Morenice surfaces as a result of the fusion of visual and auditory pedagogies acquired through attachments to both whiteness and blackness. It serves as a pseudo-compromise to stabilize the ambiguity of Brazilian cultural cannibalism—a symbolic aspect of the nation-building process driven by the desire for whiteness while celebrating brownness as a sliding signifier (Hall, 1997).
3. Inquiry Modality
This essay utilizes the artistic technique of grattage, which involves layering different materials and aesthetic ideas on a canvas without a specific direction. Similarly, I weave together historiographic and ethnographic accounts and episodes to highlight the significance of morenice as a signifier of willful ignorance concerning the mundanity of Brazil's raciolinguistic practices.
4. Data Sources
I draw on my experiences of racialized discourses in Brazil and my perspective as the brother of an adopted black sister. These personal accounts are examined with historiographic data to sensitize readers to issues of identity, representation, and the complexities of race discourse in Brazil. The analysis explores how distinctions between blackness and whiteness become entangled with specific raciolinguistic histories, resulting in the complexification of hierarchies and the erasure of African and indigenous languages and cultures in subtle and overt ways.
5. Results
The psychopathology of color in Brazil creates a discursive realm that strengthens ambiguities surrounding blackness and indigeneity linguistic claims, primarily due to the extensive history of miscegenation in the country. This discursive sphere reinforces whiteness as an esteemed attribute, manifesting through the notion of pure, non-transgressive practices of the Portuguese language employed by the elite. These practices often deviate from the normative political landscape characterizing discussions on Portuguese and its various forms of public education. This essay explores the manifestations of Portuguese raciolinguistics within the context of family dynamics and language ideologies, shedding light on the discourse of appropriateness surrounding the use of Portuguese as an attribute of whiteness.
6. Contribution
To date, raciolinguistics has predominantly focused on discursive phenomena related to the US or the relationship of othered languages with English and coloniality. In this study, I shift the focus away from English and delve into the power dynamics present in the circumscription of language as a property of whiteness and elite-identified vernaculars outside lingua franca English(es) debates. Furthermore, I explore competing forms of authority articulated as resistance through marginalized language practices that intervene in the hegemony of standard Portuguese language discourses.

Author

• Sandro Barros, Michigan State University