Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this article approaches Brazilian South-South cooperation ‘narratives’ in Africa as part of a politics of identity that helps redefine Brazil’s place in the modern world. The article discusses how South-South cooperation operates as a site of knowledge and power through which a developmentalist Brazilian identity is reproduced and subalternity can be constantly renegotiated. Through a brief analysis of the narratives of Brazilian involvement in Angola, it emphasizes how the production of the state self is also permeated by several ambivalences that update colonial tropes and bring new forms of subjugation. If, on the one hand, the movement undertaken in the article permits discussing the very ambiguity of the postcolonial condition – mainly by exposing the tensions and indeterminacies that permeate Brazil’s engagements in the global arena – on the other hand, it opens up new theoretical avenues for analyzing Brazilian foreign policy.
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