The race and the nation: Discourses and narratives for a national identity in Nina Rodrigues e Gilberto Freyre

The construction of Brazilian national identity crossed the story without the so-called revolutions or social disruption. By investigating the formation of national identity is possible notice that it’s already being produced by writers of Brazilian Romanticism as José de Alencar, who sought to relate the national character with indigenous peoples of Brazil. The Guarani, Iracema and Ubirajara are examples of narratives intended for a construction of national character. In this way, many intellectuals were concerned, especially after the Abolition of Slavery (1888) and the Proclamation of the Republic (1889), in erecting a national history, as well as people who could represent the nation of Brazil. Under the perspective of European raciological theories, the brasilian intelligentsia consolidated a new outlook of Brazil, which fed not only racism, but explained the conditions of economic backwardness, cultural and social development through the racial and biological characteristics of the population. The delay, the colonial situation, as well as the marginalization of social groups - such as blacks, mestizos and Indians - are not substantiated by the story of three centuries of economic dependence, but by the conditions of bio-psychological development of the Brazilian people. The objective of this paper is to analyze the discourses and narratives that sought in the late nineteenth century the formation of a Brazilian national identity, based on the idea of ​​three races (white, black and Indian). In this context we will analyze two intellectuals who thought Brazil and ethno-national question: Raimundo Nina Rodrigues - editor of the Archives of Psychiatry in Buenos Aires and vice president of the Society of Legal Medicine of New York - in his book The Human Race and Criminal Liability in Brazil (1894) and Gilberto Freyre, with his job Casa-Grande & Slaves (1933), the basic reference in national and international collective imagination to understand the formation and identity of the Brazilian people.