ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experience of what David Frisby has called 'the phantasmagoria of the dream world of commodities' in Clarice Lispector's novel A cidade sitiada. It argues that, in the context of Brazil, this necessarily involves a forgetting of issues of race, given that, in Brazil, modernization was driven by an ideology of whiteness, and whitening the nation. The transformations caused by modernization are experienced by Lucrecia as a monolithic, static presence. It is interesting to note that the narrative is, in fact, set in the 1920s, the decade of the modernist avant-garde in Brazil, a period when the idea of modernity could still suggest the possibility of social change and positive transformation. The novel contrasts this utopian aspect of the modernist avant-garde with a less optimistic perception of modernization. The idea of modernity has been paramount for the construction of the Brazilian nation.
