Antonio Candido in the mirror

Abstract

In an exercise of deconstructive, metacritical, and metatheoretical debate, I return to Antonio Candido, seeking to understand, based on the sign of Whiteness, how his way of reading, when dealing with difference, especially racial difference, transforms the critical exercise into a mechanism for suppressing difference, according to the perspective formed by the uspian author, translating the writing of history as the acceptance of the writing of time based on a focus exclusively on the whitened narrative of Modernity. Thus, “violence” becomes almost synonymous with Candido’s historiographical research, as I will seek to propose. It is only by understanding Candido’s rhythm that we can, thus, not assume its overcoming, but understand the dilemmas and dictates and that are still carried from his name or even in critical responses to his method. To this end, I will use Candido’s reading of Lima Barreto’s diaries as an example, seeking not to propose that, given the problems pointed out in the reading, we could inoculate Candido’s text by seeing something problematic in it, but rather, viewing it as problematic, that we begin to read the uspian author in another key, that of his whiteness, not from his Humanism or Marxism.