In Mandarin Brazil, Ana Paulina Lee explores the centrality of Chinese
exclusion to the Brazilian nation-building project, tracing the role of
cultural representation in producing racialized national categories. Lee
considers depictions of Chineseness in Brazilian popular music,
literature, and visual culture, as well as archival documents and
Brazilian and Qing dynasty diplomatic correspondence about opening trade
and immigration routes between Brazil and China. In so doing, she
reveals how Asian racialization helped to shape Brazil's image as a
racial democracy.
Mandarin Brazil begins during the second half of the nineteenth
century, during the transitional period when enslaved labor became
unfree labor-an era when black slavery shifted to "yellow labor" and
racial anxieties surged. Lee asks how colonial paradigms of racial labor
became a part of Brazil's nation-building project, which prioritized
"whitening," a fundamentally white supremacist ideology that intertwined
the colonial racial caste system with new immigration labor schemes. By
considering why Chinese laborers were excluded from Brazilian
nation-building efforts while Japanese migrants were welcomed, Lee
interrogates how Chinese and Japanese imperial ambitions and Asian
ethnic supremacy reinforced Brazil's whitening project. Mandarin
Brazil contributes to a new conversation in Latin American and Asian
American cultural studies, one that considers Asian diasporic histories
and racial formation across the Americas.
