A cor da alma: ambivalências e ambigüidades da identidade nacional

Abstract

This article is aimed at discussing the Brazilian national Identity, a historic imaginary construction, which constructs a symbolic community of signification grounded on the elements of stress that pervade this representation of reality, which are ambivalent and ambiguous. Thus the paper points out issues related to the stress between originality and universality, the time re-configurations between barbarity and civilization, the problem of the myth of the origins, the ambivalence of the rhetoric of distinction, and the ambiguity of the definition of the national ethos.