Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Globalization and Identity Discourse in Latin America: Caramuru and the Brazilian Foundation Myth

2010; Indiana University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/gso.2010.4.1.7

1932-8656

Ayoh'Omidire,

Globalization and Cultural Identity

Caramuru, a invenção do Brasil (Guel Arraes, 2001) is a film that retells the story of the original discovery of Brazil by a Portuguese sailor, Diogo Álvares Correia Cabral da Silva Sousa, who was nicknamed Caramuru, "son of thunder," by the Tupinambás, the original Amerindian tribe that inhabited that part of Brazil. Although the film was meant to be a comic version of the official record of the Discovery of Brazil by the Portuguese crown in the 1500s as documented by Pero Vaz de Caminha, the official scribe of the crown ship that landed in Porto Seguro years later, it ended up further strengthening, albeit inadvertently, the myth of the peaceful encounter of the races in a Brazil where each race supposedly had a divinely ordained place and role, stereotyping each race to the perfect tune of the Brazilian official racial discourse of the post-republican era. My paper analyzes the subtleties of racial and identity discourse in the film, juxtaposing it with the Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha, and inserting both within the larger modernity/globalization discourse in a bid to show that, as far as Latin America is concerned, globalization with all its attendant flaws and violence has been present since the very birth of the continent.