A grammar of brazilian intimacy:

Colonial violence, miscegenation, and haptic authority in Darcy Ribeiro

Abstract

This paper investigates how the account of national intimacy in Brazilian social thought has been structured by a haptic-sonic grammar inherited from colonization, in which white male touch instrumentalizes the bodies of Black and Indigenous women to accumulate power, sensibility, and identity. Drawing on Darcy Ribeiro’s O povo brasileiro ([1995] 2012) and Mestiço que é Bom! (1997), read in dialogue with Gilberto Freyre ([1933] 2003), I analyze how mestiçagem is narrated not as violence, but as a civilizing, affective, and foundational gesture of the Brazilian people. The work argues that accounts of desire and sexual access to non-white women — often narrated with humor and condescension — constitute updates of a tactile sovereignty that co-opts them as sensitive surfaces, property, and affective vectors through which the white man’s self-determination and specificity as the national subject are reiterated.