SOURCE: Bernd, Zilá. “The Construction and Deconstruction of Identity in Brazilian Literature.” In Latin American Identity and Constructions of Difference, edited by Amaryll Chanady, translation by Chanady, pp. 86-103. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Bernd discusses two Brazilian epics, particularly their focus on the use of mythology and tradition in order to articulate a national literature and identity.

Identity cannot have a different form from that of narrative, because to define oneself is, in the last analysis, to narrate.

—Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit (317)

Although the question of identity is always intimately associated with the act of narrating, as Ricoeur claims, it becomes central to emergent and peripheral literatures (as in the Americas), whose main preoccupation frequently is to provide an explicit or implicit definition of its communities in its narrative. As Edouard Glissant pointed out in his study of the formation of...