Book, Spectacle of races, The: scientists, institutions and question[LS]

A great racial laboratory: this was the image of Brazil at the end of the last century. Built by the countless travelers who arrived here, the allusion to a country of hybrid races was well received among our intellectuals - jurists, doctors, writers, naturalists. How can we understand, however, that these same thinkers have made deterministic and evolutionary racial theories their intellectual bulwark, spreading notions of racial superiority and the stigma of pessimism regarding the future of a mixed-race nation throughout Brazilian society? The author seeks to win, based on rare and often unpublished documents: understanding the mentality of a time in which political liberalism and racism originating from the various Darwinist schools coexisted. A paradox that still marks today and calls into question the country of racial democracy.