"We the Others, Neo-Iberians": The in-between space of national identity in Manoel Bomfim's thought

Abstract

The works of Manoel Bomfim (1868 1932) demons­trate a profound and forward-thinking understan­ding of the complex and ambiguous relationship between the Iberian nations and “neo-Iberians,” terminology that Bomfim prefers to “Latin Ame­ricans.” Bomfim denies the unique place occupied by Brazil within the social, political, and cultural landscape of the Lusophone world in terms of a dialectic between a mentality conscious of its diffe­rence (qualified as post-colonial as early as the 17th century) and the persistent “parasitism” of the Ibe­rian heritage supposedly infecting our political and social body, and leaving dire consequences from which we have been unable to completely recover. Rejecting notions of synthesis and harmony dear to official thought and codified in the 19th century writings of von Martius, Bomfim constructs Bra­zilian national identity as an “in-between space,” configured as a kind of psychomachy between an independent, creative, contestatory spirit on one hand, and a diseased (socio-political) body, conta­minated by the decadent Portuguese colonialism on the other. Bomfim’s writings prefigure many concepts that would be developed by the cream of the Brazilian intelligentsia during the first half of the 20th century, including such seminal thinkers as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto Freyre, and Caio Prado, Jr., among others.