Writing from Inside and Out: Edison Carneiro Tackles Marxism, Race, and Folklore in Brazil, 1930s–60s

This paper explores the life and work of Edison Carneiro, one of Brazil’s most influential, but still understudied, twentieth-century intellectuals.  Born in 1917 to a middle-class black family in Bahia, Carneiro rose to prominence in the 1930s as a journalist and member of the “Academy of Rebels,” a small leftist cohort of writers and artists that included the luminary novelist Jorge Amado.  Over the better part of four decades, he produced a mountain of work about Brazilian history and culture.  Of particular interest for this panel is the way that Carneiro engaged with Marxist thought, race relations, and folklore.  His relatively privileged background and connections to powerful cultural brokers such as Amado made Carneiro something of an academic and intellectual insider.  But his radical political views, skin color, and insistence that culture and folklore merited the same kind of empirical and intellectual rigor of other subjects of interest to social scientists also placed him outside the mainstream in several important ways.  To some white intellectuals, Carneiro’s skin color marked him as something closer to a “native informant” than an intellectual authority; his insistence that folklore merited the same respect and rigor as other emerging academic disciplines (especially anthropology and sociology) provided additional ammunition to those who cast him as an outsider.  His Marxist inflected ideas created additional challenges.  Under separate authoritarian regimes—Getúlio Vargas’s first run as head-of-state from 1930-1945 and a military dictatorship that assumed power in 1964—he was pursued and harassed by police.  As an insider and an outsider, Carneiro shaped the way that Brazilians thought about and studied history, race, class, and culture, but perhaps not always or exactly in the ways that he intended.