Canaã: o horizonte racial

Abstract

The article purports to examine the ideas which the main characters of Canaã, by Graça Aranha, express on the relations between race and culture, as well as on the racial melting process and the future whitening of the population of Brazil in a brotherly and solar Utopia. These ideas are correlated, on one side, to the concern of Silvio Romero, Euclides da Cunha and Araripe Jr. with the adequation between geography, race and culture; on the other side, to the concern of S. Paulo's Modernist movement to define a Brazilian national character. This concern can be seen, on the level of symbolical representation, in Macunaíma and, on the level of a more systematic theorizing, in Portrait of Brazil, which goes so far as to mention eugenics when discussing the future Brazilian ethnical type.