Description: Despite great ethnic and racial diversity, ethnicity in Brazil is often portrayed as a simple matter of black or white, a distinction reinforced by the ruling elite's efforts to craft the nation's identity in its own image -- white, Christian, and European. In Negotiating National Identity Jeffrey Lesser explores the role ethnic minorities from China, Japan, North Africa, and the Middle East have played in constructing a national identity, thereby challenging dominant notions of Brazilian nationality and citizenship.

Lesser examines how, despite their desire to have a racially homogeneous Brazil, the ruling classes recruited migrant labor from Asia in an attempt to "expand" the definition of "whiteness". Although they were encouraged to consider themselves white regardless of their actual race or ethnicity, immigrants from many countries -- as well as their descendents -- employed different strategies to negotiate their places as citizens. Some believed that their ethnic heritage was too high a price to pay for the "privilege" of being white and created alternative categories for themselves, such as Syrian-Brazilian, Korean-Brazilian, and so on. By examining how acculturating minority groups have represented themselves, Lesser reenvisions what it means to be Brazilian.

Based on extensive research, Negotiating National Identity will be valuable to scholars and students in Brazilian and Latin American studies, as well as those in the fields of immigrant history, ethnic studies, and race relations.

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