Mixed Race Studies

Race, Nation, And Cultural Identity In Brazil (AN200)

IES Abroad
Chicago, Illinois
Program(s): Rio de Janeiro – Study Brazil
Terms offered: Fall, Spring

Enrique Larreta, Director of the Institute of Cultural Pluralism
Candido Mendes University

The main focus of the course is the construction of national identity in modern Brazil, exploring the different processes that led to a range of cultural representations.  The course will start examining the concepts of race, racism and ethnicity in a comparative perspective, and will then discuss the issues of miscigenação, or the myth of racial democracy, and the contemporary politics of identity. Through the analysis of Brazilian modernism in architecture and culture, students will become acquainted with the dimension of Brazil as a future-oriented country.  A special focus of the course will be the study of the African slave trade until the abolition of slavery in 1888: during their visit to Bahia, students will be exposed to the ground-breaking work of photographer Pierre Verger.

Learning outcomes: By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Articulate the many dimensions of Brazilian cultural identity
• Conceptualize race and ethnicity in a comparative perspective
• Study the religious experience in Brazilian culture and society
• Elaborate on the notion of Brazil as land of the future

For more infomation, click here.

Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics

Peter Lang
2008
261 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-09-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-04-8

Peter Burke
University of Cambridge

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke
Centre for Latin American Studies
University of Cambridge

Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire – not to mention sex – made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others.

The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages, made into a comic book and a television miniseries, while two directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the USA, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience.

Contents

• The Importance Of Being Gilberto
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Masters and Slaves
• A Public Intellectual
• Empire and Republic
• The Social Theorist
• Gilberto Our Contemporary

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of  Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface. On the Translation of Race
• Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
• Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
• Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
• Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
• Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
• Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
• Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

The Race to Progress: Census Taking and Nation Making in Brazil (1870–1920)

Hispanic American Historical Review
Volume 89, Number 3 (2009)
pages 435-470
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2009-002

Mara Loveman, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

From the mid-nineteenth century, central statistics agencies contributed to nation-state building through their dual mission of producing statistical description and policy prescription in the name of national progress. This article examines how one such agency, Brazil’s Directoria Geral de Estatística, worked to simultaneously measure and promote national progress from 1870 to 1920. The article documents a fundamental shift in this period in the DGE’s vision of the qualities of the population essential for Brazil’s progress as a nation. In the 1870s, the DGE saw educational statistics as the key measures of national progress and lobbied for government investment in primary schools to ensure the advancement of the nation. By the 1920s, the DGE looked instead to immigration and racial statistics to measure progress and advocated cultural and biological “whitening” of the population to improve the Brazilian nation. Analysis of a broad range of archival and published primary sources reveals the gradual racialization of the DGE’s institutional definition of “progress.” The study contributes to a growing body of research that examines how racial thought influenced the development and official practices of state agencies in Latin America.

Read or puchase the article here.

The Importance of Mestizos and Mulatos as Bilingual Intermediaries in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Ethnohistory
Volume 59, Number 4 (2012)
pages 713-738
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-1642725

Robert C. Schwaller, Assistant Professor of History
University of Kansas

One of the most interesting aspects of sixteenth-century Mexico is the predominance of native languages, Nahuatl in particular, among all members of colonial society. Conquistadors, encomenderos, estancieros, missionaries, and even tradesmen learned native languages because it helped further their interests in a society divided between two cultural spheres, Hispanic and indigenous. This article highlights the unique position of sixteenth-century mestizos and mulatos as bearers of indigenous culture and language in colonial Mexico. These individuals born of mixed unions were often acculturated in both Hispanic and indigenous cultures. As people in the middle of colonial society, they were uniquely positioned to navigate within and between the two dominant cultural spheres of colonial Mexico. Using Inquisition documents, criminal records, and petitions to the crown, this article analyzes how these individuals served as more than just intermediaries between each cultural space. It suggests that mestizos and mulatos were much more prominent cultural actors than has generally been assumed. Their linguistic and cultural fluency helped shaped many aspects of New Spain’s evolving culture and society.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Politics of Samba

Georgetown Journal of International Affairs
Volume 2, Number 2 (Summer/Fall 2001)

Bruce Gilman

Samba, which was created in its present form in the 1910s, yet whose roots reach back much farther and tie Brazil to the African continent, has played an integral part in Brazil’s conceptualization as a nation. Originally despised by Brazil’s elite, samba’s message of racial integration was eventually used by both progressive reformers and authoritarian dictators. Despite samba’s image abroad as a catalyst for racial miscegenation, its political message never took hold in Brazilian society. Today, samba continues to be as much a source of social integration as a prism of Brazil’s racial fractures.

Historical Roots.

It is probable that the word “samba” originated in Angola, where the Kimbundu word semba designated a circle dance similar in choreography to the west African batuque that Bantu slaves brought to Brazil. While the exact number of blacks entering Brazil during its period of slavery is unknown, it is commonly estimated that at least eigh- teen million Africans were “imported” between 1538 and 1828. The primary center from which the Portuguese disseminated slaves into the Brazilian interior was Salvador, Bahia. It was the second largest city in the Portuguese Empire after Lisbon, and famous for its sensuality and decadence expressed in its beautiful colonial mansions and gold-filled churches. In Bahia, African culture took root to such an extent that today many African traditions are better preserved there than any-where else in the New World. Sambas rhythm is rooted in the rich musical heritage that Africans took with them in their forced migration to Brazil.

Although sambas rhythm is of African origin, its melody, harmony, form, and instrumentation are influenced by European traditions. The licentious lundu dance, derived from the rhythm of the batuque, became increasingly popular in Brazil in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, the flute, guitar, and cavaquinho, which initially accompanied the modinha the Brazilian way of playing the lyric song style of the Portuguese elite, would come to play an important role in samba. Brazilian poet and priest Domingo Caldas Barbosa (1740-1800), whose mother was a slave from Angola and whose father was a Portuguese businessman, broke with the tradition of the court style by substituting guitar for the harpsichord and introducing risqué lyrics in the most aristocratic salons of Lisbon. While Barbosa was indignantly criticized for his sensuous poetry, erudite Portuguese composers soon began producing their own modinhas. Both the lundu and the modinha crossed the boundaries between popular and elite, yet gained acceptance at the Lisbon royal court in an early instance of the fusion of African and Iberian styles. Brazil’s African-inspired musical traditions also merged with other non-Portuguese, European styles. In the mid-1840s, French traveling musical theater companies introduced the polka to Brazil. As the lundu fused with the polka, it turned into the maxixe, a Brazilianized version of the polka. The maxixe became the first genuinely Brazilian dance and decisively influenced the creation of samba as a specific genre, eventually finding acceptance among the elite of Rio de Janeiro.

…Racial marginalization was also fostered by the growing conviction among nineteenth-century intellectuals that true Brazilian nationhood required ethnic homogeneity. Influential scientists regarded people of mixed race as indolent , undisciplined, and shortsighted. They argued that Brazil’s racial composition did not exemplify cultural richness or vitality, but rather constituted a singular case of extreme miscegenation; consequently, the person of mixed race evolved into a symbol of Brazilian backwardness. Blacks were seen as a major factor contributing to Brazil’s inferiority because they would never be able to absorb, and could only imitate, “Aryan” culture. Racial mixing thus furnished an explanation for the defects and weaknesses of Brazilian society and became a central issue in Brazil’s conceptualization as a nation.

Most Brazilians believed that national homogeneity could be achieved through assimilation and miscegenation, but only if this guaranteed evolutionary superiority through a general “whitening” of the population. Thus, the most welcomed immigrants were southwestern Europeans who mixed readily with the rest of the Brazilian population; Africans were never considered among” possible candidates for immigration…

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‘Passing’ in colonial Colombia

Havard University Gazette
2009-02-12

Corydon Ireland, Harvard News Office

Racial categories today are self-evident — part of what social scientists might call “socially constructed discourse.” Contemporary people of one race are aware of what other races look like, as well as where they themselves belong in the racial scheme of things.
 
But racial categories were not so firm or reliable while being created centuries ago, in particular in early colonial Latin America. It’s this historical crucible of racial identities that anthropologist and Radcliffe Fellow Joanne Rappaport has chosen to study.
 
She gave a glimpse of her work last week (Feb. 4) during a talk at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, where 80 listeners were drawn in by her intriguing title: “Mischievous Lovers, Hidden Moors, and Cross-Dressers: The Meaning of Passing in Colonial Bogotá.”
 
“Spaniard or a mestizo, mulato, indio, or negro,” said Rappaport to begin. “What did these categories mean?”
 
Or to put it another way, she added, what did race mean to these early modern people?
 
For one, it wasn’t a matter of black and white, said Rappaport — that is, it was more subtle than “the genetic metaphor of bounded populations that has characterized the (pseudo) scientific discourse of race since the 19th century.”
 
The word “white” seldom appears in the 16th and 17th century Latin American and Spanish documents she has pored over, she said. Europeans were instead identified by where they were from — Spain, France, or England, for instance. And in what is now present-day Colombia, people were identified not so much by racial categories but more often as citizens — vecinos — of a particular town or city.
 
More important than “white” was the designation “noble,” said Rappaport, who teaches at Georgetown University. “It takes us out of a narrowly racial mindset.”…

…Rappaport, a frequent scholarly traveler to old archives in Spain and Latin America, is using many ways to study the emergence of racial identity in early colonial societies. She’s looking at phenotype and physiognomy as they were used in legal documents 400 years ago and more; at how the moral attributes of racially mixed groups were described; and how these attributes were challenged by the literature of the day…

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Peter Tosh did Not Joke with Words

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-10-14

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Shortly after Peter Tosh made his last concert appearance in December 1983, I did an interview with him that was published in Pulse magazine. One of his most powerful declarations was this: “… me don’t run joke wid words.” Tosh was objecting to the way in which the term ‘peace treaty’ was being used so loosely. And he gave a rather irreverent sermon on the subject:

“Claudie Mashup, or weh him want to name, him came to my house once and told me about this project that they had. And dem say that dem going to call it a peace treaty. I a look fe peace. Because to me, peace should have really meant people respecting people, people loving people.

“A man becoming his brother’s keeper. A man can lef him door open an go bout him business and a next man don’t come pop it off. Is so me call peace. A man don’t have gun over the next area an a tell you say him have a border cross ya-so and you can’t come across there.

“So I mek them know me don’t run joke wid words. Every time I see the word ‘peace’, you know where I see it? In the cemetery: ‘Here lies the body of such and such. May he rest in peace.’ So how a guy waan come tell me say him a go have a peace treaty amongst the living, where all the dead rest in wha? Peace? Ah-oh.”

I don’t know if this wicked mashing up Massop’s name was a Tosh original. There are many such examples of witty word play in his lyrics. Poliomyelitis became reggaemylitis, a joyous infection that moves every muscle in the body. The words ‘system’ and ‘situation’ were cleverly transformed by the addition of a well-placed ‘h’ and ‘t’. Tosh evoked the stench of the oppressive dunghills of social injustice and moral corruption that continue to rise up everywhere in Jamaica.

In his dread lecture delivered at the so-called ‘Peace Concert’ in 1978, Tosh chanted down the excremental system: “Four hundred years an de same bucky maasa bizniz. An black inferiority, an brown superiority rule dis lickle black country here fe a long [t]imes. Well, I an I come wid Earthquake, Lightnin an Tunda to break down dese barriers of oppression an drive away transgression and rule equality between humble black people.”

GARVEY’S AFRICAN REDEMPTION

Peter Tosh was an unapologetic advocate of what Marcus Garvey called “African Redemption”. We hear this in his rousing anthem, African, from the 1977 Equal Rights album: “Don’t care where yu come from/As long as you’re a black man/You’re an African.” Not all Jamaicans would agree. Some of us don’t even want to admit that we’re black, let alone African.

In a letter to the editor published in The Gleaner on September 25, Daive Facey asks a revealing question, “Who are ‘blacks’, Ms Cooper?” He already knows the answer: “Many classified as ‘blacks’ based on external features and placed into the 90 per cent majority can easily trace their mixed lineages, and in terms of genealogy are no less Caucasian, Indian or Chinese.”

Mr Facey is quite right. Many clearly black Jamaicans routinely claim ancestors of other races who have left no visible traces of themselves on the body of their supposed relatives. And even in cases where some racial mixing is evident, the African element in the mix is always the half that is never told. Mixed-race Jamaicans are half-Indian; half-Chinese; half-Syrian; half-white. But never half-African!

It is only people of African descent in Jamaica who do not define their racial identity in terms that point to ancestral homelands. Europeans, Chinese, Syrians and Indians are all raced and placed in their very naming. Africans are ‘so-so’ black. Going against the tide, Tosh deliberately chose ‘African’ as a marker of racial identity…

Read the entire article here.

Barbosa made Brazil’s first black Supreme Court leader

BBC News
2012-10-10

The judge overseeing a major corruption trial in Brazil has been appointed president of the Supreme Court, the first black person to hold the post.

Judge Joaquim Barbosa, who was born into a poor family, has been praised for his judicial independence.

He will take over the post once the “Mensalao” corruption trial ends.

Brazil has the largest black population after Nigeria, many of them descendants of African slaves, but black people rarely achieve high office.

Judge Barbosa, who is 58, has been appointed by other judges, following the Court’s tradition of nominating its most senior member…

…In 2003, he became a household name in Brazil when he was appointed by then President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to the Supreme Court.

Two mixed-race judges had previously been members of the court, but Mr Barbosa said he was the first one who could be “widely recognised as a black man”.

“This act has great significance, as it indicates to society the end of certain visible and invisible barriers,” he said at the time…

Read the entire article here.

Travels of self-discovery: African heritage in Mexico

American Observer: American University’s Graduate Journalism Magazine
American University, Washington, D.C.
2009-11-12

Carmen Castro

Cesareo Moreno clearly remembers his family visit to Guanajuato, Mexico, in 2004.

He was on a mission to learn more about his Mexican heritage. Moreno told his uncle he wanted to learn more about the African culture.

His uncle thought Moreno was talking about a project [what project? Is it African-related?] on the Mexican coastal state of Veracruz, Moreno says. When he told his uncle his research was about [African in?] their home state of Guanajuato, Moreno says his gave a look of disbelief.

“He tells me in a dead serious way … just no there isn’t. It’s like it doesn’t exist. Not in our backyard. Not in our family. Not in our hometown,” Moreno said.

It’s reactions like this that have motivated Moreno to put so much time into learning about the history of Afro-Mexicans, descendants of African slaves.  They were brought to Mexico during the Spanish colonization era in the early 16th century. It is a study that emerged in the 1940s with the groundbreaking research of anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán…

Read the entire article here.