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.
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.
Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil's self image as a racial democracy. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilization. In doing this, these studies unreflectedly take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation.
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.
Africans have begun to form a new diaspora in Brazil, the country with the largest concentration of Afro descendents outside of Africa. This paper aims to explore, through interviews, the various motivations and experiences of these Africans, as well as to examine the official attitude of the Brazilian authorities and that of the society at large to the new residents of this modern African diaspora.
Brazil's 2009 National Household Survey provides information on a representative sample of 121,708 households and includes items that enable us to identify households that experience 'moderate' and 'severe' degrees of food insecurity. The findings support the hypothesis that, other things being equal, Afro-Brazilians experience higher rates of food insecurity compared to whites. The odds of moderate and severe food insecurity are, respectively, 31 percent and 45 percent higher among brown compared to white households. Among black households, the odds of moderate and severe food insecurity are 50 percent and 73 percent higher, respectively, compared to households headed by a person who declares themselves white.
Study aims to identify the major factors underlying the discrepancy in poverty levels between whites and blacks in Brazil. Results show that the characteristics effect explains a large part of the discrepancy in poverty levels: education and labor variables explain one-half of the gap, and geographic and sociodemographic variables another two-fifths.
