A Disruption of the National Identity in the Brazilian-American Novel Samba Dreamers

Abstract

The intensification of anti-immigration policies and discourses in the United States during Donald Trump’s administration reveals a reaction against the foreigner characterized, as Jacques Derrida proposes, by the widening of ethnocentric and xenophobic circles in face of the fluxes of capital, people, and information in contemporaneity. In this context, it is part of the critic’s responsibilities to address the link between literature and national identity, while attesting to the way literature transgresses the borders imposed upon it. This is the stance this article intends to take as it analyses Kathleen de Azevedo’s 2006 Brazilian-American novel Samba Dreamers. For this purpose, I depart from a discussion about the intrinsic relationship between hospitality and hostility to the foreigner, as well as from the possibility of literature of saying everything (tout dire), to argue that this novel objects to stable notions of nation, gestures towards a displacement of identity beyond the constraints of the state, and invites a post-national mode of thinking.