A Escrava Isaura 10.74 · 10.74

The compliment reaches for the exotic south of Spain: 'olhos de andaluza', the dark, flashing eyes of an Andalusian woman, a Romantic byword for southern beauty. The men place Isaura's loveliness in a foreign, faraway register, as if her striking dark eyes must come from some distant, glamorous elsewhere. The irony sits quietly beneath: they racialize her beauty toward the picturesque Iberian south precisely to avoid seeing the nearer, unspeakable truth — that this is a Brazilian woman of the enslaved caste, whose dark eyes belong to the country's own painful history, not to a poem of Andalusia. To make her an exotic is to keep from recognizing her as what she is. The compliment, like all the others, is a small act of not-seeing.

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