The discourses of “mestiçagem”: intersections with other discourses, criticism, ressemantizations

Abstract

This text proposes a cross reading of discourses of mestiçagem and other discourses of transcultu­ration, hybridism and creolization, mapping the ways they have been conceptualized throughout XXth century by some important authors in Latin America — continent emblematic of mestiçagem. It demonstrates, afterward, how they extrapolated this continent and have been used other contexts as a consequence of the flew of immigrants, in a diaspora that changes the aspect of countries such as Great-Britain, France, the United States and Canada, so far considered homogeneous, in ethnic and cultural point of view. Writers from different regions started to use these four terms, generally as synonymous. The text offers a reflection on the transit of these concepts in order to establish their historicity and to detect how the resseman­tizations occurred.