Mixed Race Studies

Review of Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy by Samantha Nogueira Joyce

TriQuarterly: a journal of writing, art, and cultural inquiry from Northwestern University
Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois
2013-10-01

Reighan Gillam, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Department of Afroamerican and African Studies
University of Michigan

Telenovelas, or soap operas, are the main staple of television entertainment throughout Brazil and in many other Latin American countries. Unlike in the United States, where soap operas can run for decades, in Brazil telenovelas end after presenting their storyline over a six- to eight-month period. They are designed to attract men, women, and children as viewers and have dominated in television’s primetime slots for the last thirty years. Although the plotlines, characters, and settings are fleeting, telenovelas have remained Brazilians’ favorite form of primetime entertainment.

Often Latin American telenovelas have served as vehicles to introduce social issues by depicting a common problem, such as gender inequality or limited access for the disabled, in order to raise awareness and stimulate discussion. In Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, Samantha Nogueira Joyce takes one particular telenovela, Duas Caras (Two Faces), as her subject of study. Running for eight months in 2007–8, this telenovela deserves particular scrutiny because it was the first to include an Afro-Brazilian actor as the lead character and the first to make race relations and racism a constant theme. Joyce uses this telenovela as an opportunity to examine the role of television in contemporary currents of social change in Brazil. Through her analysis of Duas Caras, Joyce aims to demonstrate how “telenovelas are a powerful tool for introducing topics for debate and pro-social change, such as the instances where the dialogues openly challenge previously ingrained racist ideas in Brazilian society.”

The myth of racial democracy to which Joyce’s title refers is the Brazilian national narrative that defines the country’s citizens and identity as racially mixed. Put simply, it is generally thought that the Brazilian populace and culture emerged from a mixing of European, indigenous, and African people. Many believe that because there are no rigid racial lines that delineate black from white in Brazil, racism and racial discrimination do not exist there. In contrast to the “one-drop rule” of the United States, where “one drop of black blood” renders a person black, in Brazil, Joyce explains, “the racial blending has been validated not into a binary, but a ternary racial classification that differentiates the population into brancos (whites), pardos (multiracial individuals, also popularly known as mulatos), and pretos (blacks).”…

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‘Longing for Oneself’: Hybridism and Miscegenation in Colonial and Postcolonial Portugal

Etnográfica
Volume VI, Number 1 (2002)
pages 181-200

Miguel Vale de Almeida, Professor of Anthropology
Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa

This essay acknowledges that hybridism, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. Contemporary rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ within a cultural fundamentalism. This paper focuses on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of Miguel Vale de Almeida identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space.

This is an essay–not a research paper–that acknowledges that, in a troubling reminiscence of the 19th century debate on race and the hybrids, hybridism is a central issue of debate in the social sciences today. The term ‘hybrid’  was applied from botany to anthropology and was associated with both political and scientific speculations on ‘races’ as species or subspecies. The acknowledgment of the common humanity of all ‘races’ strengthened the separation between culture and nature as part and parcel of the project of Modernity (cf. Latour 1994); but it also diverted attention from hybridism to the field of miscegenation and mestiçagem – i.e., ‘racial’ and cultural mixing. Hybridism – and mixing in general – was condemned by some for its impurity and praised by others for its humanism. The result of the century-long debate is, however, much more hybrid itself than a clear opposition. Discourses on miscegenation and mestiçagem tended to be used as ideological masks for relations of power and domination. They were also used as central elements in national, colonial and imperial narratives. The Brazilian case is well known. The Portuguese case is one of the most complex and intriguing: if Brazil has been systematically praised as the example of  the humanistic and miscegenating characteristic of Portuguese expansion, it has also been used as an argument for the legitimization of later colonialism in Africa, as well as for the construction of a self-representation of the Portuguese as non-racists. The Portuguese nation, however, has seldom been described as a miscigenated nation and mestiça itself. In the discourses of national identity, emphasis has been placed upon what the Portuguese have given to the others–a gift of ‘blood’ and culture–and not on what they have received from the others. Present rhetoric on hybridity – as part of globalization, transnationality, postcolonial diasporas, and multiculturalism – clashes with the reality of the return of ‘race’ in cultural fundamentalism, policies of nationality and citizenship, and in the politics of representation. This paper will focus on discourses and modes of classification as the starting point for discussing specific practices and processes of identity dispute in the ‘Lusophone’ space. Three periods in the Portuguese production around miscegenation and hybridism will be analysed: a period marked by racist theories; a period marked by luso-tropicalism; and the present period marked by discussions of multiculturalism. Finally, the acknowledgment of creolized social formations as both the outcome of colonialism and the possible examples for thinking of new, less racist societies, closes this exploratory essay…

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Unraveling the Concept of Race in Brazil: Issues for the Rio de Janeiro Cooperative Agreement Site

Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
Volume 30,  Issue 3, 1998 
Special Issue: HIV/AIDS Interventions For Out-of-Treatment Drug Users
pages 255-260
DOI: 10.1080/02791072.1998.10399700

Hilary L. Surratt
The Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies
University of Delaware

James A. Inciardi (1939-2009), Co-Director of the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies; Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
University of Delaware

Scholars throughout the Americas have spent much of the 20th century studying race and its meaning in Brazil. Racial identities in Brazil are dynamic concepts which can only be understood if situated and explored within the appropriate cultural context. Empirical evidence of the fluidity of racial identification quickly came to the authors’ attention within the context of a prevention initiative targeting segments of the Rio de Janeiro population at high risk for HIV/AIDS. Because the main objective of this program was to slow the spread of AIDS through an intervention designed to promote behavioral change, comparisons of client data at the baseline and follow-up assessments for the core of the analyses. Through quality control procedures used to link client information collected at different points in time, it was revealed that 106 clients, or 12.5% of the follow-up sample, had changed their racial self-identification. The authors’ attempts to engage project staff in a dialogue about the fluidity of racial identity among these clients have provided some insight into what might be called the “contextual redefinition” of race in Brazil. Within the framework of this study, the ramifications of this phenomenon are clear. Racial comparisons of HIV risk, sexual activity, drug use, and behavioral change, which are part and parcel of U.S.-based research, would appear to be of little utility in this setting.

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“Japanese in the Samba”: Japanese Brazilian Musical Citizenship, Racial Consciousness, and Transnational Migration

University of Pittsburgh
2008
213 pages

Shanna Lorenz, Assistant Professor of Music
Occidental College, Los Angeles, California

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

his doctoral dissertation is an ethnographic study of musical culture among Japanese Brazilians in São Paulo, Brazil. Specifically, the study explores how the musical culture of this community has changed in recent years as a result of the dekasegui movement, the migration of hundreds of thousands of Japanese Brazilians who have traveled to Japan since 1990 in search of work. In order to explore these questions, I conducted fieldwork between May and November of 2003 on three musical groups, Zhen Brasil, Ton Ton Mi, and Wadaiko Sho, each of which have found different ways to invoke, contest, and reinvent their Brazilian and Japanese musical heritages. By exploring these groups’ musical practices, texts, dance, costumes, and discourses of self-definition, this study offers insight into shifts in the ethnic self-definition and racial consciousness of the Japanese Brazilian community that have taken place as the result of face-to-face contact between Japanese Brazilians and Japanese under the conditions of contiguous globalization. This study contributes to our current understandings of the impact of circular forms of migration on the musical culture and ethnic identity of diasporic communities in the contemporary world.

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A Blunt Chief Justice Unafraid to Upset Brazil’s Status

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations.

But when the chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa, strides into the court, the other 10 excellencies brace themselves for whatever may come next.

In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug.

In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”

“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.”

His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination.

The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education…

…In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance.

As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea.

Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris…

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Who is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

University of Toronto Press
August 2013
272 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802095527
Cloth ISBN: 9780802098184

Edited by:

Maximilian C. Forte, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Who is an Indian? This is possibly the oldest question facing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and one with significant implications for decisions relating to resource distribution, conflicts over who gets to live where and for how long, and clashing principles of governance and law. For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?

This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: “Who Is an Indian?” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Chapter One: Inuitness and Territoriality in Canada / Donna Patrick (Carleton University, Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies)
• Chapter Two: Federally-Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts / Bonita Lawrence (York University, Equity Studies)
• Chapter Three: The Canary in the Coalmine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians / Eva Marie Garroutte (Boston College, Sociology) and C. Matthew Snipp (Stanford University, Sociology)
• Chapter Four : “This Sovereignty Thing”: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence / Julia Coates (University of California Davis, Native American Studies)
• Chapter Five: Locating Identity: The Role of Place in Costa Rican Chorotega Identity / Karen Stocker (California State University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Six: Carib Identity, Racial Politics, and the Problem of Indigenous Recognition in Trinidad and Tobago / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Seven: Encountering Indigeneity: The International Funding of Indigeneity in Peru / José Antonio Lucero (University of Washington, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)
• Chapter Eight: The Color of Race: Indians and Progress in a Center-Left Brazil / Jonathan Warren (University of Washington, International Studies, Chair of Latin American Studies)
• Conclusion: Seeing Beyond the State and Thinking beyond the State of Sight / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Contributors
• Index

Rethinking Race in Brazil

Journal of Latin American Studies
Volume 24, Number 1 (February, 1992)
pages 173-192

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenário

13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenário, organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President José Sarney.

This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro-Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration (Descomemoração) of the Centenary of Abolition’. The repudiation of the centenário suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological — are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?

In this article the main theories of race in Brazil are critically reviewed in the light of contemporary racial politics. I focus largely on postwar Brazilian racial theory, beginning with the pioneering UNESCO studies. This body of theory has exhibited considerable strengths in the past: it has been particularly effective in dismantling the myth of a non-racist national culture, in which ‘racial democracy’ flourished, and in challenging the role of various elites in maintaining these myths. These achievements, appreciable in the context of the analytical horizon imposed on critical social science by an anti-democratic (and indeed often dictatorial and brutal) regime, now exhibit some serious inadequacies when employed to explain current developments.

This article accepts many of the insights of the existing literature but rejects its limitations. Such a reinterpretation, I argue, sets the stage for a new approach, based on racial formation theory. This theory is outlined below, and it is suggested that it offers a more accurate view of the changing racial order in contemporary Brazil. Racial formation theory can respond both to ongoing racial inequalities and to the persistence of racial difference, as well as the new possibilities opened up by the transition to democracy; it can do this in ways in which the established approaches, despite their considerable merits, cannot…

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Study analyzes ambiguities in the works of Aluísio Azevedo

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP —The Mulatto, by Aluísio Azevedo, is a title that refers to the collective human state. It does not mention a character or a specific situation, but rather a human category that is very important for understanding the process of Brazil’s formation.

This analysis is presented by sociologist Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida in the book A realidade da ficção. Ambiguidades literárias e sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The reality of fiction. Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo), released by Alameda Casa Editorial on March 15. 

The starting point for this analysis is the second book published by Aluísio Azevedo, The Mulatto. The researcher analyzes the contradictions found in this book, as these contradictions marked the entire literary trajectory of the Maranhão author. Critics normally divide Azevedo’s work into two categories: engaged (or activist) romance, filled with social criticism, and feuilletonesque novels. 

“This ambiguity remains throughout the career of Aluísio. The writer himself made it clear in correspondence and newspaper texts that he was conscious of it and struggled with it. But I try to show that there is continuity in his works,” commented Estramanho de Almeida in an interview with Agência FAPESP…

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A Realidade da Ficção: Ambiguidades Literárias e Sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The Reality of Fiction: Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo)

Alameda Casa Editorial
2013-03-15
201 pages
ISBN: 978-85-7939-169-9
Format: 21.0 x 14.0 cm
In Portuguese

Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida, Professor of Sociology
Fundação Escola de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo (FESPSP)

Neste livro fica provado que ainda é possível produzir dissertações nos padrões de outros tempos, quando o trabalho acadêmico exigia o domínio da língua, ampla leitura, revisão inteligente do conjunto da obra do autor, enquadramento histórico-social.

Ressalta-se: nem a Literatura, nem a Sociologia foram ofendidas – o texto literário foi trabalhado como texto literário, a Sociologia de acordo com a sua própria especificidade. Mais ainda, o entrelaçamento da Sociologia com o sociopolítico, com a abordagem compreensiva das Ciências Sociais e com as Ciências Humanas (Literatura e Sociedade). Nesse ponto e vista cada vez mais abrangente, ocorre a relação entre pensamento social e a estrutura da sociedade brasileira do século XIX, quando analisa os seus “ismos” (naturalismo, positivismo, republicanismo, anticlericalismo, abolicionismo).

A esta síntese do trabalho de Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida deve-se agregar a feliz escolha (como convém) de epígrafe retirada da obra de Dercy Ribeiro: “Posto entre os dois mundos conflitantes – o do negro, que ele rechaça, e o do branco, que o rejeita – o mulato se humaniza no drama de ser dois, que é o ser ninguém”.

Trata-se, enfim, de uma bem feita e oportuna contribuição para o estudo da literatura e sociedade no Brasil.

In this book it is proved that it is still possible to produce dissertations standards of other times, when the academic work required mastery of the language, wide reading, smart revision of the whole work of the author, historical and social framework.

We emphasize: neither literature nor sociology were offended – the literary text was worked as a literary text, Sociology according to its own specificity. Moreover, the intertwining of Sociology with the sociopolitical, with the comprehensive approach of the Social Sciences and the Humanities (Literature and Society). At this point and looking increasingly comprehensive, is the relationship between thought and social structure of the Brazilian society of the nineteenth century, when considering their “isms” (naturalism, positivism, republicanism, anticlericalism, abolitionism).

The synthesis of this work Estramanho Rodrigo de Almeida should be added the happy choice (as it should be) an epigraph taken from the work of Dercy Ribeiro: “Tour between the two conflicting worlds – that of the black, which he rejects, and white, the rejects – the mulatto humanizes the drama to be two, which is to be one.”

It is, in short, a well made and timely contribution to the study of literature and society in Brazil.

Empathetic eye

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – In 1865, an expedition led by Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Harvard University travelled around Brazil for 15 months to study the country. Among the voluntary collectors that participated in the expedition was a 23 year old medical student, William James (1842-1910), who would later become one of the most influential American thinkers, known mainly as one of the creators of pragmatic philosophy. 

Organized by professor Maria Helena Toledo Machado of the History Department of Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences School (FFLCH), the book Brazil through the eyes of William James covers  the large volume of writing and drawings produced by the young James during the expedition. Unlike the travel logs typical of the period, the material left by James reveals a sensitive and empathetic traveler with unique perspectives on the nature and society of Brazil.

The book was launched on April 7 at the USP’s Maria Antônia University Center, during the opening of the exhibition Rastros e raças de Louis Agassiz: fotografia, corpo e ciência (Traces of Louis Agassiz: photography, body and science), a collection of a series of photographs obtained during the expedition on Brazilian racial types…

…James’ perspective also significantly contrasts with the bias expressed by the expedition. Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, intended to collect fish specimen and data on their geographic distribution in Brazil, with a view to contesting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he opposed.

During the trip – known as the Thayer Expedition because it was financed by magnate Nathaniel Thayer-, Agassiz became interested in studying the population, taking the initiative to document Brazilian racial types through photography with a view evaluating the results of miscegenation. The work is one of the main photographic registers of Brazil in the 19th century.

“Agassiz was a creationist and the scientific and racial focus of the expedition is a bit backwards. But this did not affect James’ perspective. Highly sensitive, he developed what I would characterize as empathy, which would be manifested throughout his work. He shows a great capacity to understand the world from the other’s perspective. Instead of the paternalistic and pious approach common among other travelers of the time, he got involved with people and managed to understand the profound differences of this unfamiliar society,” affirms Machado.

Miscegenation

According to the historian, the position James exhibited in his expedition diaries are reflected throughout the life of the thinker. Later, he would fight against imperialism, defend Darwinism, become a follower of relativism – which garnered much criticism – and would develop the notion of stream of consciousness.

“All these ideas are coherent to his manner of approaching reality, manifested during his time in Brazil. In his writings, he deconstructs the exotic perspective, the incomprehensible other, the foreigner alienated from the codes of local social life,” says Machado…

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