This book looks at the relationship of literary criticism to the social construction of race in Brazil. Isfahani-Hammond considers Gilberto Freyre's model of master/slave synthesis and examines what "multiculturalism" means after the turn of the century.

Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction * Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima's White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective * White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre * Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas * From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist's Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing