Mixed Race Studies

Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television

Duke University Press
2005
280 pages
24 b&w photos
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3543-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3531-3

Yeidy M. Rivero, Associate Professor in the Department of Screen Arts and Culture and the Program in American Culture
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Tuning Out Blackness fills a glaring omission in U.S. and Latin American television studies by looking at the history of Puerto Rican television. In exploring the political and cultural dynamics that have shaped racial representations in Puerto Rico’s commercial media from the late 1940s to the 1990s, Yeidy M. Rivero advances critical discussions about race, ethnicity, and the media. She shows that televisual representations of race have belied the racial egalitarianism that allegedly pervades Puerto Rico’s national culture. White performers in blackface have often portrayed “blackness” in local television productions, while black actors have been largely excluded.

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, archival research, and textual analysis, Rivero considers representations of race in Puerto Rico, taking into account how they are intertwined with the island’s status as a U.S. commonwealth, its national culture, its relationship with Cuba before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and the massive influx of Cuban migrants after 1960. She focuses on locally produced radio and television shows, particular television events, and characters that became popular media icons—from the performer Ramón Rivero’s use of blackface and “black” voice in the 1940s and 1950s, to the battle between black actors and television industry officials over racism in the 1970s, to the creation, in the 1990s, of the first Puerto Rican situation comedy featuring a black family. As the twentieth century drew to a close, multinational corporations had purchased all Puerto Rican stations and threatened to wipe out locally produced programs. Tuning Out Blackness brings to the forefront the marginalization of nonwhite citizens in Puerto Rico’s media culture and raises important questions about the significance of local sites of television production.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Translating Televisual Blackness
• 1. Caribbean Negritos: Ramon Rivero, Blackface, and Black Voice in Puerto Rico
• 2. Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and the Resurgent Popularity of Blackface
• 3. The CubaRican Space Revisited
• 4. Mi familia: A Black Puerto Rican Televisual Family
• 5. Translating and Representing Blackness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements

University of Illinois Press
December 2013
224 pages
1 map
6 x 9 in
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03793-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07944-3

Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia

Winner of the National Women’s Studies Association/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize

How sexism, racism, and socio-economic inequality interact in the Brazilian sex industry

Brazil has the largest economy of any Latin American country with a population five times greater than any other South American country, and for nearly a decade, Brazil has surpassed Thailand as the world’s premier sex tourism destination. As the first full-length ethnography of sex tourism in Brazil, this pioneering study treats sex tourism as a complex and multidimensional phenomenon that involves a range of activities and erotic connections, from sex work to romantic transnational relationships. Erica Lorraine Williams explores sex tourism in the Brazilian state of Bahia from the perspectives of foreign tourists, tourism industry workers, sex workers who engage in liaisons with foreigners, and Afro-Brazilian men and women who contend with foreigners’ stereotypical assumptions about their licentiousness.

In her analysis, Williams argues that the cultural and sexual economies of tourism are inextricably linked in the Bahian capital city of Salvador’s tourism industry. She shows how the Bahian state strategically exploits the touristic desire for exotic culture by appropriating an eroticized blackness and commodifying the Afro-Brazilian culture in order to sell Bahia to foreign travelers. Drawing on eighteen months of ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements combines historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural studies, and feminist perspectives to demonstrate how sexism, racism, and socio-economic inequality interact in the context of tourism in Bahia.

Migrating race: migration and racial identification among Puerto Ricans

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 37, Number 3 (2014-02-23)
pages 383-404
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2012.672759

Carlos Vargas-Ramos, Research Associate
Center for Puerto Rican Studies
Hunter College, City University of New York

The pattern of racial identification among Puerto Ricans is not uniform. It varies depending on where they live. Most identify as white, but more do so in Puerto Rico than in the USA. This paper addresses the impact that living alternatively in the USA and in Puerto Rico has on racial identification among Puerto Ricans. Using Public Use Microdata Sample data from the American Community Survey and the Puerto Rico Community Survey 2006–2008, I find that while there is no single pattern of impact, those more grounded on the island’s racial system are more likely to identify as white in the USA, while those less grounded in Puerto Rico are more likely to identify as multiracial or by another racial descriptor. On their return to the island, they revert to the prevalent pattern of racial identification, while still exhibiting effects of their sojourn on their racial identity.

Census data on Puerto Ricans and race manifest the contingent nature of racial identity and identification and how specific racial formations impact an individual’s understanding of race and racial identification. Despite contemporary projections of Puerto Ricans as a multiracial people (Davila 1997), in fact a mulatto nation (Torres 1998; Duany 2002). the majority of Puerto Ricans portray themselves as white in the context of official statistics. This is the case for both Puerto Ricans on the island and in the USA. Their location, however, determines the proportions by which they identify as white or as something else.

Presently, more than half of the 8.3 million people who identify as Puerto Ricans live in the USA. Moreover, there is a recurrent movement of migrants between the island and the USA, with net migration reaching the hundreds of thousands between decades (Rivera-Batiz and Santiago 1996; Duany 2002; Acosla-Belen and…

Read or purchase the article here.

And if We Weren’t Genetically Mixed Race?

Cubanow
Havana, Cuba
2013-12-23

Luis Toledo Sande (Translated by Dayamí Interián)

To effectively fight racism, it’s necessary to know everything about it and expose its tricks. Otherwise, we run the risk of getting trapped by them, since they are powerful, able to “innocently” camouflage themselves in the interstices of language, which isn’t a simple code of signs but the natural medium – the easiest and most regular, together with behavior – for expressing the conscience. The mentioned tricks have an effect even when opting for “the equality of the human races,” because these terms imply accepting the existence of races within the species, and this is central to the heart of the deception. The name of the evil, racism, reinforces prejudices, even when it’s used to fight the reality it designates, because it originated from the erroneous imposition of racial divisions on the human race and carries it implicitly.

Cuba has a special and honorable responsibility in cultivating an enlightening legacy – there have been some – the one that José Martí bequeathed to this country and to the world as part of his thinking, more than a hundred years before science proved, with discoveries related to the human genome, that humanity is one only, regardless of external differences among its members. In Nuestra América (Our America), an essay published in January 1891, Martí categorically and with good reason denied the existence of races among humans. This opinion has been cited countless times, but the persistence in the world and the country of the fallacies he repudiated confirms the urgency of reiterating it more often, as the revolutionary concept it is:

“There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. Puny, arm-chair minds string together and reheat the library-shelf races that the honest traveler and the cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of Nature, where the universal identity of man leaps forth in victorious love and turbulent appetite. The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against Humanity.”…

Read the entire article here.

Brazil Endorses International Decade for People of African Descent

Americas Quarterly: The Policy Journal for Our Hemisphere
Blog
2014-01-16

Shari Wejsa

On Monday, December 23, 2013, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution establishing the International Decade for People of African Descent, which will run from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024. The aim will be to raise social consciousness in the fight against prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia, and racism.

The resolution follows a series of related efforts, including the General Assembly’s December 12, 1997 resolution, which convened the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, and the December 16, 2005 resolution, which guided the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action.

Assembly representatives emphasized its importance. Verene Shepherd, chair of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, stated that the “indigestible fishbone of slavery” continued to stick in the throat due to the persistence of its legacies.  She added that the impact of slavery and colonialism were most obvious in the Americas and on the African content itself.

Responses from Brazilian representatives reinforced this perspective.  Bruno Santos de Oliveira noted that the 2010 national census data indicated that “more than 100 million Brazilians, more than half the population, had declared themselves African descendants,” and that the country has the largest number of people of African descent outside of Africa. The Brazilian Delegation recalled that the country continues to face racism and intolerance inherited from its colonial past.

This legacy is evident in high poverty levels, which vary significantly by region within Brazil. More than half of all poor Brazilians live in the Northeast, which is home to the highest concentration of African descendants. In the Northeast, the head of the household is often illiterate, despite attending school, and works in agriculture. Poor households are generally quite large, having nearly twice as many children when compared to families in higher socioeconomic levels, with limited resources and access to utilities. In Salvador, the capital of the northeastern state of Bahia, approximately 80 percent of the population is said to be of African ancestry.  Some critics claim that “the majority of Brazilians of African descent in Salvador are an example of continuing discrimination, living in the poorest areas, their lives often blighted by violence and largely excluded from political power.” Although recent studies indicate that the income gap between black and mixed race Brazilians and that of white Brazilians has been falling, a notable difference remains. From access to a high quality education to health and housing, Brazilians of African descent are usually worse off than their white counterparts…

Read the entire article here.

(Re)mapping the Borderlands of Blackness: Afro-Mexican Consciousness and the Politics of Culture

Duke University
2013
233 pages

Talia Weltman-Cisneros

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

The dominant cartography of post-Revolutionary Mexico has relied upon strategic constructions of a unified and homogenized national and cultural consciousness (mexicanidad), in order to invent and map a coherent image of imagined community. These strategic boundaries of mexicanidad have also relied upon the mapping of specific codes of being and belonging onto the Mexican geo-body. I argue that these codes have been intimately linked to the discourse of mestizaje, which, in its articulation and operation, has been fashioned as a cosmic tool with which to dissolve and solve the ethno-racial and social divisions following the Revolution, and to usher a unified mestizo nation onto a trajectory towards modernity.

However, despite its rhetoric of salvation and seemingly race-less/positivistic articulation, the discourse of mestizaje has propagated an uneven configuration of mexicanidad in which the belonging of certain elements have been coded as inferior, primitive, problematic, and invisible. More precisely, in the case of Mexicans of African descent, this segment of the population has also been silenced and dis-placed from this dominant cartography.

This dissertation examines the coding of blackness and its relationship with mexicanidad in specific sites and spaces of knowledge production and cultural production in the contemporary era. I first present an analysis of this production immediately in the period following the Revolution, especially from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, a period labeled as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” This time period was strategic in manufacturing and disseminating a precise politics of culture that was used to reflect this dominant configuration and cartography of mexicanidad. That is, the knowledge and culture produced during this time imbedded and displayed codes of being and belonging, which resonated State projects and narratives that were used to define and secure the boundaries of a unified, mestizo imaginary of mexicanidad. And, it is within this context that I suggest that blackness has been framed as invisible, problematic, and foreign. For example, cultural texts such as film and comics have served as sites that have facilitated the production and reflection of this uneasy relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. Moreover, this strained and estranged relationship has been further sustained by the nationalization and institutionalization of knowledge and culture related to the black presence and history in Mexico. From the foundational text La raza cósmica, written in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, to highly influential corpuses produced by Mexican anthropologists during this post-Revolutionary period, the production of knowledge and the production of culture have been intimately tied together within an uneven structure of power that has formalized racialized frames of reference and operated on a logic of coloniality. As a result, today it is common to be met with the notion that “no hay negros en México” (there are no blacks in Mexico).

Yet, on the contrary, contemporary Afro-Mexican artists and community organizations within the Costa Chica region have been engaging a different cultural politics that has been serving as a tool of place-making and as a decolonization of codes of being and belonging. In this regard, I present an analysis of contemporary Afro-Mexican cultural production, specifically visual arts and radio, that present a counter-cartography of the relationship between blackness and mexicanidad. More specifically, in their engagement of the discourse of cimarronaje (maroonage), I propose that these sites of cultural production also challenge, re-think, re-imagine, and re-configure this relationship. I also suggest that this is an alternative discourse of cimarronaje that functions as a decolonial project in terms of the reification and re-articulation of afromexicanidad (Afro-Mexican-ness) as a dynamic and pluri-versal construction of being and belonging. And, thus, in their link to community programs and social action initiatives, this contemporary cultural production also strives to combat the historical silence, dis-placement, and discrimination of the Afro-Mexican presence in and contributions to the nation. In turn, this dissertation offers an intervention in the making of and the relationships between race, space and place, and presents an interrogation of the geo-politics and bio-politics of being and belonging in contemporary Mexico.

Contents

• Abstract
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Mapping Blackness Elsewhere: Mestizaje, Anthropology, and the Coloniality of Knowledge
  • 1.1 Mestizaje and the Mapping of Blackness Beyond the Borders of Modern Mexicanidad
  • 1.2 Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran: The Production of Knowledge and the Anthropological (Dis)placement of Blackness in Post-Revolutionary Mexico
  • 1.3 Recuerdos del Jarocho: The Museumification of Blackness
  • 1.4 The Coloniality of Knowledge and the Dis-placement of Blackness
• Chapter Two: Forjando Patria: Framing and Performing Blackness in the “Golden Age” of Mexican Culture
  • 2.1 Memin Pinguin: Dis-locating Blackness
  • 2.2 Angelitos negros: Absorbing Blackness and Saving the National Family
  • 2.3 Al son del mambo: Discovering and Modernizing the Primitive Place of Blackness
  • 2.4 On Framing Blackness and Popular Culture as a Racialized Regime of Representation
• Chapter Three; Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
  • 3.1 Articulating the Place of Blackness in the Costa Chica
  • 3.2 Understanding Cimarronaje Cultural as a Counter-Cartography of Blackness and as a Place-Making Narrative
  • 3.3 Cimarronaje Cultural: Towards a Counter-Cartography of Blackness
    • 3.3.1 El Centro Cultural Cimarron
    • 3.3.2 Naufragio and the Work of Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
    • 3.3.3 Cimarron: La Voz de los Afromestizos
  • 3.4 Conclusions: Cimarronaje as a Decolonial Project
• Chapter Four: Towards a Re-mapping of Blackness and Belonging in Mexico
  • 4.1 México Negro and the Encuentro de los Pueblos Negros: From Pluri-versal Networks to Social and Political Action
  • 4.2 Nomenclature, Identity in Politics, and the Re-thinking of Afro-Mexican Consciousness
• Conclusions
• Figures One-Six
• Bibliography
• Biography

LIST OF FIGURES

• Figure 1: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 2: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 3: Mural Painting, Centro Cultural Cimarrón
• Figure 4: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
• Figure 5: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez
• Figure 6: Naufragio, Aydée Rodriguez Lopez

Read the entire dissertation here.

Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist by G. Reginald Daniel (review)

Hispanic Review
Volume 82, Number 1, Winter 2014
pages 116-119
DOI: 10.1353/hir.2014.0008

Mércia Santana Flannery, Lecturer of Portuguese
Romance Languages Department
University of Pennsylvania

G. Reginald Daniel, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, 336 pages, hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

In Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the sociologist Erving Goffman (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1963) discusses the relationship between individuals who possess a social stigma and the “normals” (8). Reginald Daniel’s new book, Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist, discusses the stigmatized identity of the most celebrated Brazilian novelist as perceived in his literary work. Machado’s biography is traced, his work commented on, and we are offered a picture of the Brazilian mulatto writer as a way to understand the inclusion, or lack thereof, of race relations and black identification in his writings.

Having written extensively about Brazil’s racial relations and about Machado, Daniel is delving into known territory, being more than well qualified to take on the subject. In the introduction, the author comments on the importance of Machado’s legacy to the Brazilian literary canon, and on this famous author’s “betrayal” and his “racial self-negation” (1). From here on, the assumption seems to be that a mulatto writer should be expected to make his race a topic of his literary writings, but we miss the advancement of this line of thought.

In the first chapter, Daniel includes a panoramic consideration of Brazil’s racial configuration. A recapitulation of the country’s racial makeup and the role of miscegenation as an explanation for who Brazilians are as a people is also incorporated. Daniel discusses the Brazilian preference for the white-European phenotype, along with the stigmatization of African ancestry, which foregrounds the ensuing analysis of Machado’s relationship with his own racial ambiguity.

This chapter supplies an interesting account of Brazil, and particularly Rio de Janeiro, during the nineteenth century, the time when Machado wrote and that he used to contextualize most of his novels and short stories. Daniel stresses Brazil’s looking to the outside, especially to Europe (France and England in particular) as a way for the elites to “reckon with the embarrassing gulf between themselves and the masses” (26). Machado is guilty of the same, having chiseled out his characters mostly from European models.

In chapter two, Daniel reflects on the “absence” of literary voices of African ancestry in Brazil. He explains this situation through a description of the African Brazilian condition, which worked to “neutralize” those who could have worked as “mouthpieces in the African Brazilian struggle” (35). According to Daniel, this was a result of how European Brazilians thought about blackness. Considering that blackness in Brazil was so “irreconcilable with social advancement,” those who moved upwards could only be perceived as “whitened” (35). The chapter includes a brief account of other Brazilian mulatto writers and the degree to which they included the African Brazilian tradition in their work. For example, Caldas Barbosa used the African Brazilian vernacular in his modinhas and lundus, whereas Lima Barreto “openly discussed the topic of racism from an African Brazilian point of view” (58).

In chapter three, Daniel offers a biographical account of Machado’s life, including his modest origins in Livramento (born to a Portuguese immigrant mother, a washerwoman and seamstress, and a mulatto house painter), until his death as an acclaimed writer in Laranjeiras. Machado’s transition, the accomplishment of his hard-fought upward mobility, with scant formal education, as he was mostly self-taught, is a reason for praise and part of what is used to compose his portrait as a genius. However, as Daniel indicates, Machado was also condemned for his refusal to discuss racial themes in his works, or, as demonstrated by José do Patrocínio’s accusation, for having “hated his race” (67).

What is unclear is how we are meant to believe that Machado was a detractor, in view of what was said thus far in the book about Brazil’s racial relations. Was Machado acting as the majority of Brazilians did—and do—as far as race is concerned? Do we expect more of him because of his notoriety? In addition, Daniel notes, citing other scholars, that “Machado disguised his mulatto facial features by wearing a thick moustache and a beard and that he also wore his hair closely cropped in his late years to enhance this camouflage…

Home is Where the Hurt Is: Racial Socialization, Stigma, and Well-Being in Afro-Brazilian Families

Duke University
2012
228 pages

Elizabeth Hordge Freeman

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation examines racial socialization in Afro-Brazilian families in order to understand how phenotypically diverse families negotiate racial hierarchies and ideologies of white supremacy. As an inductive, qualitative project, this research is based on over fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil in fifteen poor and working-class Bahian families and 116 semi-structured interviews with family members and informants. Findings suggest that one of the most prominent features of racial socialization is the pervasive devaluation of black/African influences, which is conveyed through implicit and explicit messages as well as concrete practices (including rituals) that promote the stigmatization of negatively valued racialized physical features. The study reveals a pattern of unequal distribution of affection based on racial appearance (phenotype), which is evident in parent-child, sibling, extended family, and romantic relationships. Findings suggest that negative appraisals of racial phenotype may significantly compromise affective bonds in families and have social psychological consequences impacting self-esteem and sense of belonging, while also eliciting suicidal ideations and anxieties. These outcomes are most pronounced for Afro-Brazilian females. Racial socialization also conveys the “strategically ambiguous” logic of color and racial classification, uncritically exposes family members to racist messages, jokes, and stereotypical images of Afro-Brazilians, and encourages cultural participation that superficially valorizes Afro-Brazilian culture and fosters nationalism, rather than racial identity. In contrast to traditional findings of racial socialization in the U.S., messages valorizing racial heritage are rare and efforts to prepare family members for bias rely on universal terms. Families do employ counter-discourses and creative strategies of resistance; and so, racial socialization is characterized by practices that reflect both resistance and accommodation to racial hierarchies. I conclude that racial socialization in families is influenced by and sustains racialization processes that maintain the broader system of white supremacy. Contrary to how racial socialization has been framed as having a purely protective role in families, this study illustrates how it may disadvantage blacks vis-à-vis whites and uniquely stigmatizes the most “black-looking” family members vis-à-vis those who more closely approximate an idealized (whiter) somatic norm. Future studies should triangulate data on racial socialization from other regions of the Americas.

Contents

• Abstract
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1 “The Face of A Slave”
  • 1.2 Background
  • 1.3 Case Selection
    • 1.3.1 Community Site
  • 1.4 Data and Methods
  • 1.5 Methodology
  • 1.6 “Second Sight” or Double Vision? My Subjectivity in the Field
  • 1.7 Organization of the Dissertation
• 2. Literature Review
  • 2.1 Crafting a Social Order: Race and Racialization
    • 2.1.1 Towards a Phenotypic Continuum
  • 2.2 Blinded by the White: Whitening and Racial Socialization in Families
    • 2.2.1 Studying Families in the U.S. and Brazil
    • 2.2.2 Mothering in Families
  • 2.3 The Stigmatized Body and Well Being
  • 2.4 The Family Systems Paradigm and Emotions
  • 2.5 Conceptual Framework
  • 2.6 Theoretical Framework
  • 2.7 The Racial Rubik: Salvador, Bahia, Brazil
• 3. “All in the Family”: Implicit and Explicit Racial Socialization
  • 3.1 Chapter Preface
  • 3.2 “Strategic Ambiguity” and Color Inconsistencies
    • 3.2.1 Family Interventions in Racial Classification
    • 3.2.2 Will the real white person please stand up?
    • 3.2.3 There are no whites, We are all black!
  • 3.3 Race and Space
    • 3.3.1 Todo no seu Lugar – Everything in its Place
  • 3.4 “Explicit Socialization Messages?.
    • 3.4.1 Educação é Salvação: Education is Salvation
    • 3.4.2 Reading Bodies, Not Books
  • 3.5 Racially (Mixed Messages) and Quotas
  • 3.6 What is racism?
  • 3.7 Media and Culture
    • 3.7.1 Novelas
    • 3.7.2 Re-Telling National Tales
  • 3.8 Conclusion
• 4. What’s Love Got to Do With It? : The Stigma of Racialized Features, Affect, and Socialization in Families
  • 4.1 Context
  • 4.2 The Hand That Rocks the Cradle: Mother-Child Relationships
  • 4.2.1 Harbingers of Racial Socialization: Babies
  • 4.3 Like a Good Neighbor
  • 4.4 Mama’s Baby is Daddy’s Maybe
  • 4.5 Racial Roulette and Sibling Rivalry
  • 4.6 She’s just my (pheno)Type: Romantic Love
    • 4.6.1 Race and Romance
  • 4.7 Discussion
• 5. Black and “Blue”: Racial Stigma and Well being
  • 5.1 Incog-negro: Abandoning Blackness
  • 5.2 When Racial Roulette is Violent
  • 5.3 Depression, Trust, and Trauma
  • 5.4 Pretty Please?! Beauty and Self-Esteem
  • 5.5 We (Don’t) Belong Together
  • 5.6 Discussion
• 6. Pigments of the Imagination: Beauty, Body, and Racialization
  • 6.1 The Bodies Exhibit
  • 6.2 Hands, Feet, and Ears, Oh My!
  • 6.3 Hair-itage
    • 6.3.1 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
  • 6.4 The Roots of Resistance: Afro-Aesthetics
    • 6.4.1 Hide My Roots! Afro-Aesthetics and Cultural Movements at Home
  • 6.5 Discussion
• 7. “Where There is Power, There is Also Resistance
  • 7.1 Nascimento Family Values
    • 7.1.1 Racial Names.
    • 7.1.2 Race and Privilege
    • 7.1.3 Beauty
    • 7.1.4 Racial History
    • 7.1.5 Internalized Racism
  • 7.2 The Santos Family
    • 7.2.1 Racial Rituals
  • 7.3 The de Jesus Family: The Brazilian Black Panthers
    • 7.3.1 Brief Life History of Pantera Negra
    • 7.3.2 Explicit Socialization
  • 7.4 Discussion
• 8. Conclusion – The Ties That Bind
  • 8.1 Limitations and Future Directions
  • 8.2 Conclusions
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• References
• Bibliography

List of Tables

• Table 1: Color Categorization by Percentage
• Table 2: Summary of the color terms used in interviews and observations
• Table 3: Summary of responses to the question: What is your race?
• Table 4: List of all color or racial nicknames used by informants

Read the entire dissertation here.

Imagining Brazil: Seduction, Samba

Canadian Woman Studies / Les Caheiers de la Femme
Volume 20, Number 2 (2000)
pages 48-56

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

En utilisant des paroles de chants rythmés sur la samba et d‘autre matériel ethnographique, l‘auteure detecte la presence du mulâtre et de propos racistes dans la construction du nationalisme brézilien et discute sur l‘évidente ambivalence dans le discours ethnique local entre le désir et la rejection envers ce personage.

Using the words of songs and rhythmic samba on other ethnographic material, the author detects the presence the mulatto and racism in the construction of Brazilian nationalism and discusses the obvious ambivalence in the local ethnic discourse between desire and rejection to this personage.

A polysemic category, mulata in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes voluptuosity, sensuality, and ability for dancing the samba. In its restricted sense, however, it names an occupation. That is, only women who engage in dancing the samba in a commodified spectacle and receive some form of remuneration for it can be called mulatas. Under this specific signification, the concept of the mulata can be contrasted to that of the passita, a solo dancer in the Carnival parades who performs, not for money, but out of love for samba and for her Samba School of choice. However, regardless of the subtleties of this and other distinctions, mulata and passista are perhaps merely privileged signifiers in a larger paradigmatic chain associating multiple cultural terms such as cabrocha, morena, criouh, brasileira, nega, pretinha, baiana, to name just a few. These multiple signifiers denoting “black woman” in Brazil may be seen as lexicological crystallisations of what has been described by Marvin Harris as a fluid “system of racial classification.” In Brazil, “race talk” has a dermal character, where slight gradations in skin colour are constructed as distinctions begging specific denomination. Depending on the context of utterance, most of the above mentioned racialized and gendered terms carry with them a certain fetishistic quality. In Brazil, the mulata is commonly portrayed as a woman always ready to deploy her tricks of sorcery and bewitching, embodying sensuality, voluptuosity, and dexterity in dancing the samba. She has become a figure of desire in the Brazilian imaginary. It is due to this semantic proliferation that I have decided to use the Brazilian lexicon, rather than to reduce its meaning by making reference to a “mulatto woman.”

Using a series of samba lyrics as my ethnographic material, I will address the figuration of the mulata as the embodiment of sensuality in the Brazilian imaginary; explore the use of racialized tropes and the figure of the mulata in the constitution of Brazilian discourses of national identity; and briefly discuss the conspicuous ambivalence between desire and abjection toward the mulata in local discourses of race…

Read the entire article here.

Celebrating Afro-Venezuelan Heritage

Global Exchange
Reality Tour Blog
2013-12-13

The following post is written by Reality Tours communications intern William Jones Jr as he explores Afro-Venezuelan identity historically and in its current context. Visit Venezuela on a Reality Tour to learn more about the struggles, contributions, and successes of Afro-Venezuelans.

History and Legacy

Under the leadership of the late President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has made strides toward combating the historical legacy of racism and recognizing the national importance of African heritage, promoting social inclusion and respect for Afro-Venezuelans. Among them is the official celebration of the Month of Africa in May and Day of Afro-Venezuelans on May 10.

Although Abolition occurred in 1854, freedom did not bring equality. Venezuela, like many other Latin American countries, used the idea of the mestizo born of European, Indigenous, and African blood, to uphold a myth of racial democracy that denied rampant discrimination on the basis of skin color and African identity on paper.  In reality African cultural traditions remained marginalized and European traditions were promoted. Blacks remained at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy…

Read the entire article here.