Postcards from the Plantation: Brazil’s Tropical Dream Rebranded

In the global imagination, Brazil has always been the land of bodies and beats — a blur of brown skin, carnival feathers, and endless smiles. But behind the samba soundtrack and neon façades hides something older, quieter, and far uglier: a centuries-long project to bleach the soul of a nation.

That’s what Samuel Veissière called out almost two decades ago in his essay Tropicalism: Misplaced Logocentrism and the Production of Tropical Identities in Post-Colonial Brazil. The title is academic, but the point hits hard: Brazil never stopped thinking like its colonizers. It just learned to dance while doing it.

Whiteness in a Heatwave

Veissière arrived in São Paulo expecting to find the vibrant “mixed-race democracy” he’d seen in travel brochures and National Geographic spreads — the ones that turn poverty into colour palettes and Black bodies into “exotic rhythm.” What he found instead was a country where the rich imagined themselves as Europeans trapped in the tropics, and everyone else was branded as a beautiful failure.

Brazil’s so-called elites — “Paulistanos with imported wine and European nostalgia” — built what he calls “deterritorialized little Europes.” The rest of the country was written off as the degenerate offspring of miscegenation. Translation: whiteness still rules, even when the sun burns.

The Carnival of Control

The myth of mestiçagem — racial mixing as national harmony — is Brazil’s favourite hallucination. Sociologist Gilberto Freyre romanticized it in the 1930s, writing about white masters and their “voluptuous contact with the exotic woman.” It became the founding fantasy of a nation: a soft-focus porn of power where rape turned into romance and exploitation was rebranded as passion.

Veissière shows how this fantasy still moves through Brazil’s advertising, pop culture, and politics. The Black woman becomes the “mulata,” fetishized and sold as the nation’s most exportable body. She’s the carnival muse, the TV dancer, the tourism poster. She’s everywhere — except in power.

As anthropologist Donna Goldstein once put it, Brazilian men dream of a white wife, a mulata mistress, and a Black maid. That triangle of desire still organizes social life, economy, and media visibility. Even rebellion gets repackaged as rhythm.

Hybridity for Sale

By the time Veissière wrote his critique, “diversity” had already become a brand. Ads filled with brown faces promised inclusion while maintaining a silent pigmentocracy. The “Bank of Brazil billboard with a Black banker serving a blonde customer,” he wrote, was the perfect metaphor: a simulated equality designed by white executives.

It’s what he calls “commercial hybridity” — the neoliberal remix of racial democracy. A glossy post-racial fantasy that works precisely because it hides who’s cashing in on it.

The Colonial Mindset Reloaded

At the heart of his argument lies a philosophical bomb: Brazil’s racial system is not just economic — it’s metaphysical. Colonialism didn’t only steal land; it infected thought. Europe defined itself as mind, reason, and civilization, and cast the tropics as body, instinct, and chaos. That binary — white over Black, north over south, man over woman — still structures everything from fashion shoots to urban planning.

Veissière calls it “logocentrism,” the West’s obsession with ordering reality through reason and hierarchy. In Brazil, this logic got rebranded as tropical charm — the happy mask of a country that learned to eroticize its own trauma.

From Samba to Simulacra

Fast-forward to now, and the myth has mutated. Carnival is streamed on TikTok. The mulata has been replaced by an influencer in digital sequins. Brands speak the language of inclusion while quietly keeping the old hierarchy intact. “Hybrid Brazil” sells sneakers, but racial democracy still means “you can be anything — as long as you look white doing it.”

Veissière ends his essay with Homi Bhabha’s concept of the “Third Space” — that messy in-between where identities mix and mutate. It’s the only place where Brazil might finally stop performing for its colonizers and start dancing for itself.

The New Digital Carneval

Today, the tropical lie has gone wireless. The mulata dances in 4K. Algorithms curate the favela’s aesthetic for global consumption — minus the poverty, plus the filters. Diversity is now a marketing vertical, and whiteness has learned how to tan. From L’Oréal’s “Brazilian glow” campaigns to Rio influencers selling empowerment in colonial color palettes, the fantasy never really left — it just upgraded its Wi-Fi.

Veissière’s “tropicalism” wasn’t a movement, it was a mirror. And two decades later, it’s still reflecting the same thing: a nation that keeps performing its freedom for someone else’s gaze. The feathers just got lighter. The whitening cream got smarter. And the carnival never stopped.

Gilberto Freyre
Anthropologist, sugarcane aristocrat, and author of Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933). Romanticized Brazil’s colonial past as a sensual blend of races, turning centuries of rape and hierarchy into a myth of national harmony. Basically invented the “Brazilian exceptionalism” fantasy — and every carnival ad that followed.

Donna Goldstein
Anthropologist and author of Laughter Out of Place, who ripped apart Brazil’s racial democracy myth by showing how humor, TV, and everyday sexism hide structural racism. Her insight: the “mulata” image isn’t liberation — it’s a cage lined with sequins.

Michael Hanchard
Political scientist who coined the term “racial hegemony” to describe how Brazilian elites maintain inequality without laws — through politeness, beauty standards, and invisible violence. He saw through the samba smoke and found a colonial operating system still running underneath.

Samuel Veissière
Austrian-born anthropologist who moved to São Paulo and saw the myth from the inside. His essay Tropicalism: Misplaced Logocentrism dissects Brazil’s obsession with looking white while selling diversity. Think Marx meets Fanon in a fever dream of sunscreen and Catholic guilt.