Queer Miscegenation

Nineteenth-century national fictions in Latin America often attempted to quell ethno-racial tensions with allegorical representations of interracial romance. However, Adolfo Caminha’s naturalist novel, Bom-Crioulo (1895), among the first Latin American texts to portray homoeroticism, queers the interraciality of romanticism. By depicting the rise and fall of a relationship between an enslaved Black man impressed into the Brazilian navy and a white cabin boy, Caminha also queers the nation at the peak of immigration campaigns to whiten Brazil. Nonetheless, in the novel’s proto-eugenics perspective on the untenable survival of abject social actors like black people and queers, the protagonists’ signaling toward reprofuturity interrogate utopian dreams of racially achieving nationhood via a queer miscegenation and its imminent failure. The novel functions in favor and against the national project of whitening as it brings queerness and blackness closer in the discourse of Brazilian nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century.