A critical analysis of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s PBS documentary film series Black in Latin America. The author discusses Gates' exploration of the history of early race mixture, the contemporary valorization of Blackness, and racial inequality in Brazil.
The article reviews the book "Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé," by J. Lorand Matory. "My extensive use of superlatives throughout this review should make it clear that I find the book to be invaluable and extraordinarily well researched. With that said, Black Atlantic Religion is not for the reader interested in the spiritual and/or practical side of Candomblé (e.g., practices/rituals, theology, internal hierarchy, etc.). In fact, I would argue that by focusing on the humanity of the practitioners (their interests, desires, strategies, and ideologies), Matory depicts Candomblé more as a political organization than a religious one." --Michael Iyanaga
Blacks; Women; Brazil; South America; Book reviews; PERRY, Keisha-Kkan Y; BLACK Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Book)
Explanations of the Abolitionist movement's success in Brazil (1888) have, since the 1960s and 1970s, emphasized the movement's material context, its class nature, and the agency of the captives. These analyzzes have misunderstood and gradually ignored the movement's formal political history. Even the central role of urban political mobilisation is generally neglected; when it is addressed, it is crippled by lack of informed analysis of its articulation with formal politics and political history. It is time to recover the relationship between Afro-Brazilian agency and the politics of the elite. In this article this is illustrated by analysing two conjunctures critical to the Abolitionist movement: the rise and fall of the reformist Dantas cabinet in 1884-85, and the relationship between the reactionary Cotegipe cabinet (1885-88), the radicalisation of the movement, and the desperate reformism that led to the Golden Law of 13 May 1888.
Seeks to quantify how socioeconomic, health care, demographic, and geographic effects explain racial disparities in low birth weight (LBW) and preterm birth (PTB) rates in Brazil. Methods. Focused on disparities in LBW and PTB prevalence between infants of African ancestry alone or African mixed with other ancestries, and European ancestry alone. Differences in prenatal care use and geographic location were the most important contributors, followed by socioeconomic differences. The model explained the majority of the disparities for mixed African ancestry and part of the disparity for African ancestry alone.
Investigates the interface between gender, color/race and public health in Brazil, focusing on the importance of reproductive health for the formation of a black feminism in the country, between the years 1975 to 1993.
Analyzes current urban governance policies and the spatial politics of resistance embraced by communities under siege in Brazil. Space matters not only in terms of defining one's access to the polis, but also as a deadly tool through which police killings, economic marginalization, and mass incarceration produce the very geographies (here referred to as 'the black necropolis') that the state aims to counteract in its war against the black urban poor.
Afro-descendant civil society organizations in Latin America have pursued an important strand of advocacy on reforming national censuses. The aim has been to increase the visibility of Afro-descendant populations through disaggregated data and thus to improve recognition of their distinct identity. Brazil is leading the way on such data collection while other countries are taking first steps, like Argentina and Chile.
