Mixed Race Studies

Using Brazil’s Racial Continuum to Examine the Short-Term Effects of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

The Journal of Human Resources
Volume 47, Number 3 (Summer 2012)
pages 754-784

Andrew M. Francis, Assistant Professor of Economics
Emory University

Maria Tannuri-Pianto, Professor of Economics
University of Brasilia

In 2004, the University of Brasilia established racial quotas. We find that quotas raised the proportion of black students, and that displacing applicants were from lower socioeconomic status families than displaced applicants. The evidence suggests that racial quotas did not reduce the preuniversity effort of applicants or students. Additionally, there may have been modest racial disparities in college academic performance among students in selective departments, though the policy did not impact these. The findings also suggest that racial quotas induced some individuals to misrepresent their racial identity but inspired other individuals, especially the darkest-skinned, to consider themselves black.

…Theoretical research explores the relationship between preferences in admissions and preuniversity investments (Fryer and Loury 2005a; Fryer, Loury, and Yuret 2008; Holzer and Neumark 2000). Changes in admissions standards might relocate some individuals who otherwise would have had little chance of selection to the margin of selection, thereby inspiring effort. Alternatively, changes in admissions standards might relocate some individuals who otherwise would have been at the margin of selection to an intra-marginal position, thus reducing effort. Essentially, these studies maintain that affirmative action has a theoretically ambiguous effect on effort. This is largely an open question empirically. Ferman and Assunção (2005) use data from Brazil to study the issue. They find that black secondary school students who resided in states with a university with racial quotas had lower scores on a proficiency exam, which they argue indicates that racial quotas lowered effort. Nevertheless, Ferman and Assunção (2005) are unable to identify which students applied to college and which did not. The estimates are rather large given that the average black secondary school student would have had only a small chance of admission. Moreover, self-reported racial identity may be correlated with the adoption of quotas making the results challenging to interpret. This paper aims to build on this work by focusing on applicants and students, employing multiple measures of effort, and using both selfreported and non-self-reported race/skin tone.

Second, this paper contributes to the literature on race and skin shade. A number of papers demonstrate the significance of skin tone—beyond the influence of race—in education, employment, and family (Bodenhorn 2006; Goldsmith, Hamilton, and Darity 2006, 2007; Hersch 2006; Rangel 2007). For example, using survey data from the US, Goldsmith, Hamilton, and Darity (2007) find evidence consistent with the notion that the interracial and intraracial wage gap increases as the skin tone of the black worker darkens. Analogously, Hersch (2006) finds evidence that black Americans with lighter skin tone tend to have higher educational attainment than those with darker skin tone. Allowing the possibility that the policy might impact applicants and students of different skin tone in different ways, this paper estimates separate effects by selfreported race/skin tone (branco, pardo, preto) and by skin tone quintile derived from photo ratings.

Lastly, this paper contributes to the literature on identity. A growing body of literature analyzes the construction of identity and the role of identity in behavior (Akerlof and Kranton 2000, 2002; Austen-Smith and Fryer 2005; Darity, Dietrich, and Hamilton 2005; Darity, Mason, and Stewart 2006; Francis 2008; Fryer et al. 2008; Golash-Boza and Darity 2008; Ruebeck, Averett, and Bodenhorn 2009). To explain a wide range of behaviors and outcomes, Akerlof and Kranton (2000) propose a model where utility is a function of identity, the actions taken by the individual, and the actions taken by others. Darity, Mason, and Stewart (2006) develop a game theoretic model to study the relationship between racial identity formation and interracial disparities in outcomes. Exploring the construction of identity empirically, Darity, Dietrich, and Hamilton (2005) report that despite high African-descended population shares in some Latin American countries, Latinos living in the US largely demonstrate a preference for selfidentifying as white and an aversion to self-identifying as black. They emphasize that racial selfidentification involves choice and suggest that future research on race and social outcomes treat race as an endogenous variable. Theories of identity are complex and challenging to test. This paper is one of the few to study the construction of racial identity in the context of a relatively simple policy change. Isolating one dimension of the dynamic forces that shape identity, this paper offers evidence that racial identity may respond to the incentives created by an affirmative action policy…

Read or purchase the article here.

Black and white student ruling in a land of rainbows

University World News
Issue 224, 2012-06-03

Chrissie Long

While there appears to be little question that Brazil’s black community has been at a disadvantage regarding degree attainment, a ruling by the country’s top court upholding affirmative action in universities has sparked debate over whether the initiative will have positive outcomes for race relations.

Some say the impasse lies in socio-economics – not in skin colour – and affirmative action will create a dichotomy in a country where none existed previously. Others believe race quotas in universities are essential for equity.

“It is true that darker-coloured Brazilians are underrepresented in the most prestigious universities and courses. Yet people are excluded from excellent schools in Brazil by their poverty, not their race,” said Peter Fry, a British-born anthropologist and professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro…

…Race definitions are alien

Brazil has the largest number of African descendents of all countries outside the continent.

Approximately 45% of Brazil’s 191 million people consider themselves African Brazilian. Most arrived on slave ships between the 16th and 19th centuries and, over the course of the past 500 years, gradually became part of Brazilian society and the Brazilian identity.

The standard definition of ‘black’ and ‘white’ never existed in Brazil like it has in North American or European cultures, says Brazilian historian at Colorado College Professor Peter Blasenheim.

Due to generations of mixed-race marriages, Brazilians have always considered themselves more of a rainbow, where racial distinctions blur, making skin colour a complicated issue…

Race quotas in universities

Reginald Daniel, a professor of sociology at the University of California – Santa Barbara, reports that this variation in skin colour has already complicated the quota system in Brazil’s universities.

According to a January article in The Economist, two identical twins applied to the Universidade de Brasilia (UnB): one was classified as black, the other as white.

Daniel said UnB began requiring that photographs be reviewed by a commission after situations in which students who appeared white claimed African descent. When this became controversial, UnB began using interviews instead of photographs.

Rio de Janeiro State University, which was one of the first institutions of higher education to adopt a quota system, relied on self-classification but removed ‘pardo’, or brown, from the options so that students either had to select white ‘branco’ or black, ‘negro’…

Read the entire article here.

Brazilian Miscegenation: Disease as Social Metaphor

2012 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
San Francisco, California May 23-26, 2012
23 pages

Okezi T. Otovo, Assistant Professor of History
University of Vermont

Brazilian medicine of the 19th and early 20th centuries had a peculiar cultural relationship to disease. Certain debates consistently recurred as disease experts typically argued that Brazil was uniquely prone to higher manifestations of particular diseases or that its cultural and social milieu (or the deficiency thereof) gave universal diseases distinctive local contours – making certain diseases exceptionally Brazilian. Many considered disease to be one of the most critical issues facing Brazilian society, and disease was wrapped up in strange and often unexpected ways with intellectual and cultural understandings of Brazilian nationality. Disease became a way of understanding Brazil itself, as it was considered either the cause or effect of social phenomena as well as the expression of various “truths” or “problems” of class, race, and gender. As one prominent physician proclaimed, the entire nation of Brazil was a “vast hospital” where epidemic and endemic disease were the rule rather than the exception.

One of the most fascinating sites for analyzing these trends is the cultural history of syphilis between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, a period of great transition in which the end of slavery and empire triggered new anxieties about Brazil’s ranking amongst so-called “civilized” nations. Transmission of syphilis emerged as a major medical concern at the time as the disease was labeled a significant cause of Brazilian degeneracy, compromising the future of both nation and nationality. According to leading physicians, syphilis—like tuberculosis, Chagas disease, and alcoholism—was a disease that weakened the race and prevented Brazil from achieving its full economic potential. Physicians also worried that certain Brazilian traditions, such as the widespread use of black wet-nurses to nourish infants, contributed to the spread of syphilis and thus to the larger crisis of degeneracy. Domestic servitude and syphilis became intertwined in a certain medical dialogue that reflected changing debates about race, nation, and “progress.”

Among domestics, the figure of the black wet-nurse, the mãe preta or literally the “black mother,” is an iconic character in Brazil. This cultural veneration of the mãe preta, however, only dates back to the early 20th century when she became a folkloric symbol of harmonious and intimate relationships between white and black Brazilians. In the 1800s, at least in medical discourse, the wet-nurse was a more sinister figure whose ignorance and irresponsibility threatened the health of the infants in her care and whose transmission of syphilis through breast milk caused their premature deaths. This version of the wet-nurse as contagion did not completely disappear with the dawn of the new century; it existed alongside the newly created figure of the beloved wet-nurse of old. Yet her contagions in 20th century literature were much more likely to be expressed in cultural terms, rather than in racial ones. That is, whatever deficiencies or diseases she represented were the result of social problems rather than her African heritage. Brazilian intellectualism was by then emerging from the pessimistic trap of climatic and racial determinism and reaching a more optimistic consensus. Physicians increasingly agreed that the “problematic” demographics and racially-integrated social relations of which the wet-nurse was a part did not necessarily doom the nation to incurable backwardness.

Physicians never argued that wet-nursing was the sole or even the primary cause of syphilis in Brazil although they did consider wet-nursing to be one of the principal methods of transmission to children. By the late 19th century, prominent physicians at Brazil’s two medical schools—in Bahia and in Rio de Janeiro—identified high infant mortality rates as a major impediment to national “progress” and urged governmental action. This article examines broad Brazilian patterns, while emphasizing the state of Bahia from which the majority of evidence for this analysis is taken. The rising concern over the supposed dangers of wet-nursing was one element of this new attention to infant health, yet the alarm over wet-nursing as a mode of transmitting syphilis, in particular, held greater significance as it united various intellectual strains on race, gender, sexuality, and nation. The heightened medical interest in syphilis and servitude reflected tensions related to political and social change in the late 19th century and to Brazil’s long-standing anxieties over race. Brazilian slavery’s slow death was finally complete in 1888 and the monarchy fell apart soon after, leaving intellectuals and politicians to ponder how the new Brazil could take its rightful place amongst the community of modern 20th century nations without the institution of slavery which had organized social, political, productive, and even familial relations for centuries. During this period, and well into the 20th century, intellectuals produced a wealth of medical scholarship, social science, and political treatises analyzing the contemporary state of Brazilian “civilization” and prescribing measures that would ensure a stronger nation in the future, populated by a supposedly better class of Brazilians. The issue of race was at the center of all of these debates as it was at the center of medical discourse about syphilis and servitude.

By the early 20th century, Brazilian intellectuals, including physicians, had reached a uniquely Brazilian “solution” to their racial anxieties in the face of universally negative assessments of the political and economic potential of predominantly black and mixed-race tropical nations. According to these new homegrown theories, Brazil’s racial composition may have created certain social complications, such as the prominence of diseases like syphilis, but it should not be considered an insurmountable obstacle if the nation could “whiten” itself both biologically and culturally. Renowned scholar Gilberto Freyre, and others, went even further than this already optimistic assessment by asserting that biological and cultural miscegenation was Brazil’s distinguishing feature and that each “primordial” race had made significant contributions to the national “character.” Freyre’s ideas are treated in detail at the end of this analysis because his highly influential work posited that the enslaved black wet-nurses and nursemaids of the colonial and imperial periods were principle characters in Brazil’s historical narrative: maternal figures that culturally and biologically united the descendants of the slave masters and the descendants of the slaves. Freyre’s arguments best illustrate this new faith in Brazil’s potential. Rather than being plagued by some inherent weakness or “mestiço degeneracy” as 19th century intellectualism claimed, Brazil’s cultural and racial hybridity embodied the best of diverse elements. This type of theorizing was clear in medical discourse as well, but none of it meant that physicians abandoned the notion that there was a problematic side to their blended society. Caregivers could still be incompetent, servants sexually promiscuous, and all disease-ridden.

With a spate of new literature, the medical understanding of syphilis was color-coded in novel ways in the early years of the new century, as experts began to see the disease as a result of a uniquely Brazilian hypersexuality that resulted from historical and contemporary race relations. While the wet-nurse became an important symbol of Brazilian cultural miscegenation, syphilis was implicated in the nation’s biological miscegenation. Miscegenation, therefore, was ironically both an asset to Brazil’s cultural development and a symptom of the excessive sexuality that kept Brazil behind more “civilized” nations. The concern over race and servitude took on an updated medicalized tone in the early 20th century, turning away from the explicitly racist 19th century theories and embracing more modern ways of thinking about social “problems” and degeneracy through disease. Thus, despite Brazilian medicine’s adoption of many French medical theories, this history of the domestic servitude, syphilis, and medical discourse is fundamentally Brazilian and not simply the story of the transfer of medical ideas and racial theories across national borders. Through debates about syphilis, public health, and family welfare, experts theorized about what the reorganization of society post-slavery and empire and the assumed loosening of deeply entrenched hierarchies would mean in medical terms for Brazilian development…

Read the entire paper here.

The Great Seducer: writings on Gilberto Freyre, from 1945 until today (O Grande Sedutor: escritos sobre Gilberto Freyre de 1945 até hoje)

Cassará Publishing House (Blog)
2011
724 pages
16 X 23 cm
ISBN: 978-85-64892-01-9

Edson Nery da Fonseca, Professor Emeritus
University of Brasilia

The book is the result of more than sixty years of study and research and offers a unique and intimate not only on the thought of Freyre, but also about his personal life. Over 135 papers that comprise the collection of articles and essays, Nery da Fonseca presents the genesis of the thought of Gilberto Freyre, identifying intellectuals and artists in a variety of chains, with which Freyre dialogued lifelong and tells stories and curious details . In addition, summarizes the main features, but also sheds new perspectives and points out aspects little or nothing known about the author’s thought of Casa-Grande & Senzala. The work is aimed at all interested in the work of Freyre, but also to all those who appreciate the art of writing.

Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory

Left Coast Press
March 2007
276 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-59874-278-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59874-279-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9
eBook Rental (180 Days) ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9

Edited by

Charles Stewart
Department of Anthropology
University College London

Social scientists have used the term “Creolization” to evoke cultural fusion and the emergence of new cultures across the globe. However, the term has been under-theorized and tends to be used as a simple synonym for “mixture” or “hybridity.” In this volume, by contrast, renowned scholars give the term historical and theoretical specificity by examining the very different domains and circumstances in which the process takes place. Elucidating the concept in this way not only uncovers a remarkable history, it also re-opens the term for new theoretical use. It illuminates an ill-understood idea, explores how the term has operated and signified in different disciplines, times, and places, and indicates new areas of study for a dynamic and fascinating process.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, Charles Stewart
• 1. Creole Discourse in Colonial Spanish America, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
• 2. Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance, Joyce Chaplin
• 3. The ‘C-Word’, Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics, Stephan Palmié
• 4.Creole Linguistics from its Beginnings, Through Schuchardt, To the Present Day, Philip Baker and Peter Mühlhäusler
• 5. From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde, Miguel Vale de Almeida
• 6. Indian-Oceanic Creolizations:Processes and Practices of Creolization on Réunion Island, Françoise Vergès
• 7. Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius, Thomas Hylland Eriksen
• 8. Is There a Model in the Muddle? ‘Creolization’ in African Americanist History and Anthropology, Stephan Palmié
• 9. Adapting to Inequality: Negotiating Japanese Identity in Contexts of Return, Joshua Roth
• 10. The Créolité Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy, Mary Gallagher
• 11. Creolization Moments, Aisha Khan

Beyond Fixed or Fluid: Degrees of Fluidity in Racial Identification in Latin America

The Project on Ethnicity and Race in Latin America
Princeton University
2012-05-23
60 pages

Edward E. Telles, Professor of Sociology
Princeton University

Tianna S. Paschel, Post Doctoral Fellow (Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science as of July 2012)
Department of Political Science
University of Chicago

Com­par­a­tive research on race and eth­nic­ity has often turned to Latin Amer­ica where racial iden­tity is seen as fluid. Using nation­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive data from the 2010 America’s Barom­e­ter, we exam­ined the extent to which skin color, nation, class and region shape who iden­ti­fies as black or mulato in Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, Colom­bia and the Domini­can Repub­lic. While racial cat­e­gories over­lap sig­nif­i­cantly, skin color largely deter­mines both black and mulatto self-identification in all five coun­tries although its effect varies con­sid­er­ably. We dis­cov­ered dis­tinc­tive pat­terns in racial flu­id­ity, in how color shapes racial clas­si­fi­ca­tion, in the fre­quency of black and mixed-race cat­e­gories, and in the influ­ence of sta­tus and region on racial clas­si­fi­ca­tion. We sug­gest that these pat­terns are related to nation­al­ist nar­ra­tives, state poli­cies and black move­ment orga­niz­ing. These find­ings chal­lenge widely held assump­tions about race rela­tions in Latin Amer­ica, sug­gest­ing rather that unique national his­to­ries have given way to dif­fer­ent sys­tems of race clas­si­fi­ca­tion in each coun­try. We advance the con­cept of racial schemas and vis­cos­ity to bet­ter under­stand these differences.

Read the entire paper here.

Kept in, kept out: the Formation of Racial Identity in Brazil, 1930-1937

Simon Fraser University
November 1996
95 pages

Veronica Armstrong

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Latin American Studies Program

This thesis examines the roles of historian Gilberto Freyre and the Sao Paulo black press in the formation of racial identity in Brazil in Casa Grande e Senzala. published in 1933, Freyre presented a hypothesis of Brazilian national identity based on positive interpretations of slavery and miscegenation. His emphasis on racial harmony met with the approval of Getúlio Vargas, a president intent on the unification of Brazilian society. With Vargas’ backing, racial democracy became Brazilian national identity. Supporters included the black press which welcomed an idea that brought blacks into definitions of Brazilianness. Yet, blacks were embracing an interpretation of Brazilian identity that would replace a growing black racial awareness. Reasons for the undermining of black racial consciousness and the enshrining of racial democracy as Brazilian national identity emerge in an overview of shifts occurring during the first decades of the twentieth century.  The forces of mass immigration, negative evaluations of Brazil by scientific racism, and the nation-building politics of Vargas affected the elite minority and the poverty-stricken majority of Brazilians, but in differing ways. For while economic stability and national pride were the goals of the former, research suggests that survival was the paramount aim of the latter. Addressing the needs of both groups, the adoption of racial democracy as national ideology in the late 1930s maintained elite privilege, defused the potential of racial unrest, and promised social mobility to the masses.

Benefits to the largely-black masses, however, had strings attached. Social mobility depended on their acting “white” and becoming “white” through miscegenation. In the face of desperate poverty, blacks had few options and assimilation seemed a way to move beyond their low socio-economic status. Furthermore, contrasts with American segregation convinced black writers that battling discrimination had to be secondary to the economic survival of their community. The thesis concludes by seeking to explain the paradox of a society characterised by many foreigners and most Brazilians as a racial paradise from the 1930s to the 1970s even though Brazilian reality evinces gross inequality between the small Europeanised elite and the large black and mixed-race underclass.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Approval
• Abstract
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction Kept in, Kept out: The Question of Brazilianness and Black Solidarity 1930-1937
  • The search for national identity
  • Brazilianness vs. Blackness
• Chapter 1. Ideology and Identity.
  • The dawning of a new era of national thought
  • A historic moment
  • Whitening
  • A New Era
• Chapter 2. Race
  • Miscegenation and Racial Terminology
  • Racial Democracy: Theory and Revision
• Chapter 3. The Making of a Cultural Hero
  • Freyre: the child and the man
  • Freye’s “Old Social Order”
  • Casa Grande e Senzala
  • Freyre, the Intellectual
  • Freyre, Father of National Identity
• Chapter 4. The Politics of Identity
  • The Black Press in Brazil
  • The Meaning of Language
  • From the mulato to the black press
  • The Black Press: an alternative path
  • Assimilation vs. segregation
  • A Frente Negra
• Chapter 5. Only we, the Negros of Brazil, know what it is to feel colour prejudice
  • AVoz da Raça
• Conclusion: We are Brazilian
  • Intellectuals and Ideology
  • Searching for identity
• Epilogue
• Bibliography

Read the entire thesis here.

Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century

Berghahn Books
2007
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-363-3
Paberback ISBN: ISBN 978-1-84545-711-2

Roger Sansi, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology
Goldsmith’s College, London

One hundred years ago in Brazil the rituals of Candomblé were feared as sorcery and persecuted as crime. Its cult objects were fearsome fetishes. Nowadays, they are Afro-Brazilian cultural works of art, objects of museum display and public monuments. Focusing on the particular histories of objects, images, spaces and persons who embodied it, this book portrays the historical journey from weapons of sorcery looted by the police, to hidden living stones, to public works of art attacked by religious fanatics that see them as images of the Devil, former sorcerers who have become artists, writers, and philosophers. Addressing this history as a journey of objectification and appropriation, the author offers a fresh, unconventional, and illuminating look at questions of syncretism, hybridity and cultural resistance in Brazil and in the Black Atlantic in general.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Culture and Objectification in the Black Rome
• 1. ‘Making the Saint’: Spirits, Shrines and Syncretism in Candomblé
• 2. From Sorcery to Civilisation: The Objectification of Afro-Brazilian Culture
• 3. From Informants to Scholars: Appropriating Afro-Brazilian Culture
• 4. From Weapons of Crime to Jewels of the Crown: Candomblé in Museums
• 5. From the Shanties to the Mansions: Candomblé as National Heritage
• 6. Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia
• 7. Authenticity and Commodification in Afro-Brazilian Art
• 8. Candomblé as Public Art: The Orixás of Tororó
• 9. Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian Culture
• Bibliography
• Index

Introduction

Salvador da Bahia, once the colonial capital of Brazil, is nowadays the capital of Afro-Brazilian culture. Some tourist brochures call it the ‘Black Rome’, ‘the biggest inheritor of African traditions out of Africa’, and ‘Cradle and home of African descendent traditions (including samba, capoeira and Candomblé)’. Candomblé in particular is often presented as the heart of this Afro-Brazilian culture.

The origin of the term ‘Candomblé is unknown, it seems to have appeared in Bahia in the first half of the nineteenth century in reference to parties of slaves and freed slaves (sometimes in the plural, Candomblés), and also in connection with the practice of sorcery (feitigaria). Some sources presumed that these activities had an African origin; the newspapers often complained about the noise of drums at Candomblé parties, and the charlatanism of the sorcerers; but from very early on, people of all social groups, origins and races came to the parties and made use of sorcery. For the editor of a newspaper in 1868, ‘these absurd Candomblés are so rooted, that I do no longer admire seeing Black people involved, when White people are the more passionate devotees of the cause’.

Of course, few among the white or almost white upper classes would publicly acknowledge their participation: to do so would be an embarrassment. Now and then the police disbanded the Candomblés and the sorcerers were put on trial, their instruments confiscated as ‘weapons of sorcery’. Nonetheless, it seems that Candomblé was never just an exclusive, secretive and resistant African affair: the sorcerers often had powerful patrons, people from across Bahian society took part in it. In fact, the sorcery of Candomblé was seen by many as the hidden force dominating the city, and writers like Marques or Joao do Rio affirm that ‘we are all ruled by the sorcerer’.

But when newspapers today talk about Candomblé, they do not denounce evil sorcery and outrageous parties. Instead, Candomblé is praised as African religion and cultural heritage. The objects of Candomblé are presented in museums as works of art. Participating in Candomblé is not an indignity, but something to be proud of. Intellectuals and politicians make their attendance at and even their participation in its rituals, both public and official. Gilberto Gil, musician and Minister of Culture, is also a ‘lord’ (ogan) in a Candomblé house.

How did Candomblé go from Sorcery to National Heritage? How did Candomblé become ‘Culture’? This question has not been properly addressed until now. Since its very origin, the literature on Candomblé has been obsessed with demonstrating the African origins and continuities of its rituals and myths. This tradition of studies, what I will call ‘Afro-Brazilianism’, has built an image of Candomblé as a ‘microcosmic Africa’ (Bastide 1978c), where the philosophical and artistic essences of the continent are preserved.

In recent decades Afro-Brazilianism has been severely criticised by social scientists interested in racial politics, who have argued that Afro-Brazilian culture is an ‘invented tradition’, and Afro-Brazilianist discourse a form of domination by the Brazilian elites over the black populations of Brazil. In transforming Candomblé into folklore, Afro-Brazilianism has imposed a ‘culturalism1 more concerned with the protection of an objectified cultural heritage than with racial politics. In Hanchard’s terms Afro-Brazilian culture has been ‘reified’: ‘culture becomes a thing, not a deeply political process.’

This book starts trom a different point: the question is not if this culture is ‘authentic’ or a ‘fiction’, but how Candomblé has become Afro-Brazilian culture. Encompassing these two discourses, we will see how Afro-Brazilian culture is neither a repressed essence nor an invention, but the outcome of a dialectical process of exchange between the leaders of Candomblé and a cultural elite of writers, artists and anthropologists in Bahia. In this dialectical process the cultural and artistic values of national and international anthropologists, intellectuals and artists have been synthesised with the religious values of Candomblé, generating an unprecedented objectification: ‘Afro-Brazilian culture’. At the same time, the leaders of Candomblé have recognised their own practice as ‘Culture’, and have become the subjects of their own objectification.

The impasse between affirmative and critical views on Afro-Brazilian culture is a result of their rigid and incompatible notions of ‘culture’. For the Afro-Brazilianist tradition, African culture is an original, unchanging ‘system of representations’ that has resisted slavery, and which is ritually re-enacted in Candomblé. For its critics, this notion of ‘culture’ is a fixed image, a false projection of imperialist reason: Afro-Brazilian culture is just a masquerade that hides the racial inequalities of Brazil.

But a culture is neither a fixed ‘system of representations’ nor a rigid ideological projection. Cultures are always in construction: they are not immanent and self-contained, but transient and relative historical formations. And yet, this does not mean that they are just artificial and false constructions. After all, what is the problem with ‘culture becoming a thing’? Cultures are indeed the result of histories of objectification—processes of recognition of identity and alterity. But processes of objectification cannot be reduced to reification. Objectification does not preclude politics, but in many ways it is the precondition of any meaningful social action: it is precisely because culture is objectified that it can be discussed, used and appropriated by social actors.

This book will describe this process neither as resistance nor masquerade, but as a historical transformation of practices, values and discourses: a cultural history. On the one hand, it is unquestionable that many African traditions are present in Candomblé; nevertheless it is also true that its ritual practices have incorporated the history of Brazil in what has been called ‘syncretism’. On the other hand, intellectuals have objectified Candomblé as Afro-Brazilian culture. But this objectification is not just an ideological fixed image, a reification: it has been actively appropriated by the people of Candomblé, who have assumed the discourses and practices of Afro-Brazilian culture as their own. This process of appropriation can be understood in very similar terms to religious syncretism; in a way it has been a ‘syncretism of Culture’.

Before going any further, I will explain in more detail what I mean by ‘Culture’ and ‘objectification’, and how the Afro-Brazilian case can offer a particular perspective on a more universal cultural process of our time: the appropriation of ‘Culture’…

…The solution to the ‘Negro problem’ for this elite was the ‘whitening’ of Brazil (Skidmore 1995). Deploying in a very particular way the eugenic theories of their time, they thought that by increasing European immigration Brazil would progressively eliminate its majority of Black people (Moritz-Schwartz 1993). Blacks and mulattos, as degenerate races, would inevitably die out, unless they improved their ‘weak’ blood with the powerful new ‘stocks’ of Europeans that were arriving en masse in Brazil. But in Bahia there was no significant influx of European immigrants. There was no work for them: nourishing agriculture, and later industry, were concentrated in the south, around Sao Paulo. Bahia remained poor and Black, lost in its past, with a dormant economy, a provincial life and a small population until the 1940s. This is the period that Gil and Riserio (1988) have called a ‘hundred years of solitude’, beginning with the end of the slave trade. In this ‘decadent’ context, after three brilliant centuries of international exchange of people and things, Bahians were left to themselves: there was no substantial immigration or change in Bahia’s population, and a very specific local culture progressively took hold. Bahian society was extremely traditional, and marked by the cultural history of its overwhelming majority of African descendants…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Triangular Mirrors and Moving Colonialisms

Etnográfica
Volume 6, Number 1 (2002)
pages 127-140

Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese & Brazilian Studies
Brown University

Though there does not exist an undifferentiated colonialism category because of specificities relating to historical time conjunctions, the interfacing of such conjunctions with metropolitan projects, and the modalities of contesting colonial hegemonies and transformations in the structural/institutional relations between (ex)colonial and (ex)colonised, there is, however, the exigency for an ongoing contemplation and analysis of the reflections and refractions in the mirrors of empire and colonialism. By focussing on contradictions that characterize present-day relations between African countries and Brazil, there is the possibility for unraveling inter/intra colonial/ racial contradictions and how they impact on structures of power. Brazil, because of the widely recognized and increasingly proclaimed “africaness” becomes a mirror that simultaneously reflects and refracts multiple images of colonialism, race and empire.

Why is Brazil in this discussion, especially in view of the fact that my concerns pertain to colonialism and decolonization in Africa in the post-World War II period? Is there an implicit suggestion that there is a colonial tinge about Brazil’s African relations? Could it actually be the case that specific Brazilian articulations have veered in the direction of “colonialist” practices/perceptions? What, after all, constitutes colonialism?

For the purposes of this discussion I do not propose to offer (an)other definition for colonialism, nor do I propose to use “postcolonialism” as an analytical or descriptive concept save to note, following McClintock, that the term postcolonial suggests or imposes a certain linearity, a centering of colonialism (Euro) as the actual starting point of the life and development of societies and political economies of those areas that became entangled with or ensnared into European expansion overseas, and the creation of “colonial” models of life and governance in these sites. Postcoloniality suggests a terminal point in a process whereas, in fact, the consequences of colonialism spawned in conjunction with or opposition to specific local patterns of behavior do not simply melt away. Postcolonial sounds less confrontational than neo-colonial and appears to privilege cultural and literary constructions, highlighting formalistic processes of decolonization (flag, national anthem, heads of station). Further, it does not interrogate the continuity of the political culture and political economy constructed and left as a legacy by colonialism (see McClintock 1995).

Focussing on Brazilian-African relations offers the distinct advantage of (re)visiting Brazil’s own efforts at carving out a niche for the country, drawing upon specific historical, cultural, economic and political assests presented as a demonstration of the possibilities of South-South relations rendered even more manifest because of Brazil’s bona fides as an ex-colony – one inextricably linked to “Africa” and African polities seeking new modalities of change and development in the “post-independence” or decolonized new age…

…It is at this point that local, national and international images and perspectives jostle one another for attention in our (re)considerations of empire and end of empire. These discussions then cannot be demarcated by any specific ending of the empire because of the co-existence of past mirrors. Not that all of Africa is directly engaged with Brazil to the same extent or with equal intensity. In the following pages, an effort is made to analyze the multiple dimensions of Brazil-Africa relations without necessarily privileging the Portuguese connection but without loosing sight of its fundamentality for both Brazil and Africa. The role of race, specifically how race manifests itself in international relations – with specific reference to the representations of African-American concerns – provides a mirror for Brazil-Africa relations. Hence the attention paid to USA/Afro USA in this essay…

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Race Matters: Race, Telenovela Representation, and Discourse in Contemporary Brazil

University of Iowa
May 2010
193 pages

Samantha Nogueira Joyce

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Communication Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

In Race Matters: Race, Telenovela Representation, and Discourse in Contemporary Brazil, I investigate the primetime telenovela Duas Caras (2008), examining how different factors such as narrative, audience reaction, as well as media criticism and commentary played a dynamic role in creating a meta-discourse about race in contemporary Brazil. In a larger sense, I examine how the social discourse about contemporary race relations and racism in that country were circulated, constructed and reconstructed during the time the program aired. Additionally, I explore the role of the media, particularly the telenovela, in debunking the idea that Brazil is a racial democracy. Secondly, the research incorporates the Brazilian notion that telenovelas are “open texts”, meaning they are co-authored by a variety of industrial, creative, cultural and social actors, into a methodological approach that expands the traditional idea of textual analysis. In addition to reading the telenovela text itself, this study investigates the production process, audience responses and broader media coverage. Thus, the public discourse about the telenovelas is a key part of the text itself.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. RACE MATTERS: RACE, TELENOVELA REPRESENTATION, AND DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • “Data” (Textual) Analysis
  • Cultural Value
  • Literature Review
  • Brazilian Television History
  • Soap Operas Vs Telenovelas: ‘Distant Relatives’
  • The Centrality of Telenovelas
  • Audience, Democratic Participation and Publis Spheres
  • Entertainment-Education
  • Ethical Dilemas
  • Conclusions: Current Reality, Future Possibilities
  • Outline of Chapters
• II. BLACK FLOWS: DUAS CARAS, THE LEGACY OF WHITENING AND RACIAL DEMOCRACY IDEOLOGY IN BRAZIL
  • Race and Raça. The United States and Brazil: Similar History, Disparate Outcomes
  • The Culteral Role of Narratives of Cross-Racial Love
  • The Black Movement in Brazil
  • Affirmative Action Policies, Quotas and Racial Identity In Brazil
  • Conclusions
• III. “MY LITTLE WHITEY”. “MY BIG, DELICIOUS NEGRO”. TELENOVELAS, DUAS CARAS, AND THE REPRESENTATION OF RACE
  • Brazilian Blacks and TV
  • Historical Uses of Racial Stereotypes. American and Brazilian TV
  • Representing Contradicions: Evilásio’s Case
  • From a Traditionally “White Priviledged” Space to “Multicolored Duas Caras”
  • Duas Caras, Ratings, Racism and Public Pressure
  • My Little Whitey and My Big Delicious Negro
• IV. DEU NO BLOGÃO! (“IT WAS IN THE BIG BLOG!”). WRITING A TELENOVELA, A BLOG, AND A METADISCOURSE
  • Mãe Setembrina
  • The Barretos
  • The Role of Ratings: IBOPE
  • Conclusions
• V. DUAS CARAS AS A NEW APPROACH TO SOCIAL MERCHANDIZING
  • The Social Merchandising Approach
  • E-E and SM: Similarities and Disparities
  • Emotional Involvement and Personal Agendas
  • Duas Caras as the “Future of E-E”
  • Racial Matters as a “Social Good”
  • E-E, SM and the Importance of Celebrity
  • Conclusions
• VI. CONCLUSIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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