Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 6, 2004 An Introduction: The Predicament of Brazilian Culture DENISE FERREIRA DA SILVA University of CaliforniaSan Diego ABSTRACT: ‘Truth’ and ideology (as error or falsity), like any other oppositional terms, take up the same productive powers and necessarily track each other very closely. Not much is necessary for any statement to move from the former into the latter field. My review of the main twentieth-century lines of Brazilian racial studies, in this introduction, traces how they have moved miscegenation and racial democracy back and forth across the border between social scientific ‘truth’ and racial ideology. Because the papers included in this issue, rather than repeating this move, address how these socio-historical signifiers inform the contemporary Brazilian social configuration, they move beyond the predicament shared by both narratives of the nation and social scientific accounts of racial subjection in Brazil. For almost half a century many studies of Brazilian racial conditions have been proving that racial democracy is, after all, a myth. What else is there to say about race and the nation in Brazil? Quite a bit if one is not invested in the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ and ventures to explore of how ‘modern mythologies’ — the ‘white mythologies’ Jacques Derrida and others have unpacked — play out here, producing the social (juridical, economic, and moral) configurations within which men and women of colour exist as subaltern subjects. While they do not radically depart from studies that denounce racial democracy as the main instrument of racial subjection in Brazil, the papers published in this issue of Social Identities avoid (re)producing the predicament of the Brazilian culture — i.e., the need to demonstrate that widespread miscegenation does not render the Brazilian subject an affectable (pathological) consciousness. This claim is at the core of the main national constructs of whitening and racial democracy. In many contemporary analyses of racial subjection, it is displaced onto the black Brazilian subject. By contrast, the papers collected here deploy historical, legal, sociological, and anthropological analytical methodologies to show how repre- sentations of blackness produced in this construction of the Brazilian subject demarcate the subaltern social positions black (here I include mestic ¸os) Brazil- ians occupy in contemporary Brazil. In doing so, they challenge the pervasive view that, because of the powerful grip racial democracy holds over Brazilian (white and black) minds, the racial does not configure this country’s political landscape. My task in this introduction is to situate the papers published in this Special Issue of Social Identities among the current trend of studies of Brazilian racial 1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 On-line/04/060719-16  2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000323950