Abstract
In this dissertation I trace the confederado identity in Brazil from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. The term confederados refers to the ten to twenty-thousand Confederates who fled to Southeastern Brazil at the end of the U.S. Civil War to avoid Reconstruction. This is an anti-racist project that puts current notions of white supremacy in a historical and transnational context. I show how the construct of race has been used by hegemonic discourses to fashion identities (regional and national) by absorbing the legacies of colonialisms and the enslavement of Africans in a plantation economy. My research unsettles the historical erasure built-in to confederado identity and incorporates contemporary Black Brazilian activist voices who call for the Confederate flag’s removal from public spaces and events in the towns of Americana and Santa Bárbara D’Oeste. Chapter One situates the confederado identity from its early imaginings through the propagandist texts which were instrumental in the recruitment for the mass migration to Brazil. Chapter Two examines the confederado identity once installed in Brazil by analyzing representations in testimonials, fiction and film. Chapter Three discusses field research results, including an interpretation of a survey conducted to assess Brazilian perceptions of the confederados, key interviews and a review of a recent public hearing to ban the Confederate flag. My theoretical framework combines Critical Race Studies, Settler Colonialism and Docupoetic Creative Writing Aesthetics, applying Documentary Poetry, as both theory and form in select Creative Writing sections.