Third World Literary Fortunes introduces the reader to the life and work of five of Brazil's greatest writers, including (apart from Rosa and Amado): the country's other "greatest" writer, the extraordinarily subtle and psychologically acute Machado de Assis, a mulatto who, though a witness to slavery completely effaced his own racial identity from his work; its best poet, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the great twentieth century portraitists of urban bourgeois mediocrity; and the seminal Renaissance man of Brazilian modernism, Mrio de Andrade. The book examines their respective domestic and international receptions, discerning a clear pattern of international irrelevance with the exception of the black sheep, Jorge Amado - the only major Brazilian writer who celebrated negritude.
The enormous differences between the other writers lead Armstrong to the conclusion that the common point determining international failure is the absence of the one marketologically apt rhetoric of identity, the "Carmen Miranda syndrome" - the cultural aura of coastal and urban Afro-Brazilian and the sexual mystique of the mulatta, present in Amado's work but also in the brilliant speculative socioanthropology of Gilberto Freyre, Rio's carnaval and in the current explosion of cultural tourism to Bahia.
