Mixed Race Studies

A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960–1980

Duke University Press
2007
256 pages
29 illus., 8 tables, 1 map
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4081-2 
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4060-7

Jeffrey Lesser, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In A Discontented Diaspora, Jeffrey Lesser investigates broad questions of ethnicity, the nature of diasporic identity, and Brazilian culture. He does so by exploring particular experiences of young Japanese Brazilians who came of age in São Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s, an intensely authoritarian period of military rule. The most populous city in Brazil, São Paulo was also the world’s largest “Japanese” city outside of Japan by 1960. Believing that their own regional identity should be the national one, residents of São Paulo constantly discussed the relationship between Brazilianness and Japaneseness. As second-generation Nikkei (Brazilians of Japanese descent) moved from the agricultural countryside of their immigrant parents into various urban professions, they became the “best Brazilians” in terms of their ability to modernize the country and the “worst Brazilians” because they were believed to be the least likely to fulfill the cultural dream of whitening. Lesser analyzes how Nikkei both resisted and conformed to others’ perceptions of their identity as they struggled to define and claim their own ethnicity within São Paulo during the military dictatorship.

Lesser draws on a wide range of sources, including films, oral histories, wanted posters, advertisements, newspapers, photographs, police reports, government records, and diplomatic correspondence. He focuses on two particular cultural arenas—erotic cinema and political militancy—which highlight the ways that Japanese Brazilians imagined themselves to be Brazilian. As he explains, young Nikkei were sure that their participation in these two realms would be recognized for its Brazilianness. They were mistaken. Whether joining banned political movements, training as guerrilla fighters, or acting in erotic films, the subjects of A Discontented Diaspora militantly asserted their Brazilianness only to find that doing so reinforced their minority status.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations and Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue: The Limits of Flexibility
• Introduction: The Pacific Rim in the Atlantic World
• 1. Brazil’s Japan: Film and the Space of Ethnicity, 1960-1970
• 2. Beautiful Bodies and (Dis)Appearing Identities: Contesting Images of Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity, 1970-1980
• 3. Machine Guns and Honest Faces: Japanese-Brazilian Ethnicity and Armed Struggle, 1964-1980
• 4. Two Deaths Remembered
• 5. How Shizuo Osawa Became Mario the Jap
• Epilogue: Diaspora and Its Discontents
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index

Chocolate and Corn Flour: History, Race, and Place in the Making of “Black” Mexico

Duke University Press
April 2012
292 pages
43 photographs, 2 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5132-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5121-4

Laura A. Lewis, Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics
University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

Located on Mexico’s Pacific coast in a historically black part of the Costa Chica region, the town of San Nicolás has been identified as a center of Afromexican culture by Mexican cultural authorities, journalists, activists, and foreign anthropologists. The majority of the town’s residents, however, call themselves morenos (black-Indians). In Chocolate and Corn Flour, Laura A. Lewis explores the history and contemporary culture of San Nicolás, focusing on the ways in which local inhabitants experience and understand race, blackness, and indigeneity, as well as on the cultural values that outsiders place on the community and its residents.

Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork, Lewis offers a richly detailed and subtle ethnography of the lives and stories of the people of San Nicolás, as well as of community residents who have migrated to the United States. San Nicoladenses, she finds, have complex attitudes toward blackness—both their own and as a racial and cultural category. They neither consider themselves part of an African diaspora nor do they deny their heritage. Rather, they acknowledge their hybridity and choose to identify most deeply with their community.

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial

Duke University Press
November 2012
256 pages
20 photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5277-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5292-1

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communication
University of Washington

Representations of multiracial Americans, especially those with one black and one white parent, appear everywhere in contemporary culture, from reality shows to presidential politics. Some depict multiracial individuals as being mired in painful confusion; others equate them with progress, as the embodiment of a postracial utopia. In Transcending Blackness, Ralina L. Joseph critiques both depictions as being rooted in—and still defined by—the racist notion that Blackness is a deficit that must be overcome.

Analyzing emblematic representations of multiracial figures in popular culture—Jennifer Beals’s character in the The L Word; the protagonist in Danny Senza’s novel, Caucasia; the title character in the independent film, Mixing Nia; and contestants in a controversial episode of the reality show, America’s Next Top Model, who had to “switch ethnicities” for a photo shoot—Joseph identifies the persistance of two widespread stereotypes about mixed-race African Americans: “new millennium mulattas” and “exceptional multiracials.” The former inscribes the multiracial African American as a tragic figure whose Blackness predestines them for misfortune; the latter rewards mixed-race African Americans with success for erasing their Blackness. Addressing questions of authenticity, sexuality, and privilege, Transcending Blackness refutes that idea that in American society, race no longer matters.

Table of Contents

• Preface. From Biracial to Multiracial to Mixed-Race to Critical Mixed-Race Studies
• Introduction. Reading Mixed-Race African American Representations in the New Millennium
• Part I: The New Millennium Mulatta
  • 1. The Bad Race Girl: Jennifer Beals on The L Word, the Race Card, and the Punishment of Mixed-Race Blackness
  • 2. The Sad Race Girl: Passing and the New Millennium Mulatta in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Part II: The Exceptional Multiracial
  • 3. Transitioning to the Exceptional Multiracial: Escaping Tragedy through Black Transcendence in Mixing Nia
  • 4. Recursive Racial Transformation: Selling the Exceptional Multiracial on America’s Next Top Model
• Conclusion. Racist Jokes and the Exceptional Multiracial, or Why Transcending Blackness Is a Terrible Proposition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948

Duke University Press
2003
320 pages
Illustrations: 9 b&w photos, 5 maps
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3092-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3080-6

Nancy P. Appelbaum, Associate Professor of History
Binghamton University, State University of New York

Colombia’s western Coffee Region is renowned for the whiteness of its inhabitants, who are often described as respectable pioneer families who domesticated a wild frontier and planted coffee on the forested slopes of the Andes. Some local inhabitants, however, tell a different tale—of white migrants rapaciously usurping the lands of indigenous and black communities. Muddied Waters examines both of these legends, showing how local communities, settlers, speculators, and politicians struggled over jurisdictional boundaries and the privatization of communal lands in the creation of the Coffee Region. Viewing the emergence of this region from the perspective of Riosucio, a multiracial town within it, Nancy P. Appelbaum reveals the contingent and contested nature of Colombia’s racialized regional identities.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian elite intellectuals, Appelbaum contends, mapped race onto their mountainous topography by defining regions in racial terms. They privileged certain places and inhabitants as white and modern and denigrated others as racially inferior and backward. Inhabitants of Riosucio, however, elaborated local narratives about their mestizo and indigenous identities that contested the white mystique of the Coffee Region. Ongoing violent conflicts over land and politics, Appelbaum finds, continue to shape local debates over history and identity. Drawing on archival and published sources complemented by oral history, Muddied Waters vividly illustrates the relationship of mythmaking and racial inequality to regionalism and frontier colonization in postcolonial Latin America.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Riosucio: Race, Colonization, Region, and Community
• Part 1. Country of Regions, 1946-1886
  • 1. Beauty and the Beast: Antioquia and Cauca
  • 2. Accompanied by Progress: Cauca Intermediaries and Antioqueno Migration
  • 3. By Consent of the Indigenas: Riosucios Indigenous Communities
• Part 2. The White Republic, 1886-1930
  • 4. Regenerating Riosucio: Regeneration and the Transition to Conservative Rule
  • 5. Regenerating Conflict: Riosucios Indigenas in the White Republic
  • 6. Riosucio on the Margins of the Model Department
• Part 3. Remembering Race, Region, and Community
  • 7. Remembering Riosucio: Imagining a Mestizo Community
  • 8. Remembering San Lorenzo: Imagining an Indigenous Community
• Conclusion: Reimagining Region and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

Duke University Press
October 2012
280 pages
5 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5344-7
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5329-4

Anne Pollock, Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

In Medicating Race, Anne Pollock traces the intersecting discourses of race, pharmaceuticals, and heart disease in the United States over the past century, from the founding of cardiology through the FDA’s approval of BiDil, the first drug sanctioned for use in a specific race. She examines wide-ranging aspects of the dynamic interplay of race and heart disease: articulations, among the founders of American cardiology, of heart disease as a modern, and therefore white, illness; constructions of “normal” populations in epidemiological research, including the influential Framingham Heart Study; debates about the distinctiveness African American hypertension, which turn on disparate yet intersecting arguments about genetic legacies of slavery and the comparative efficacy of generic drugs; and physician advocacy for the urgent needs of black patients on professional, scientific, and social justice grounds. Ultimately, Pollock insists that those grappling with the meaning of racialized medical technologies must consider not only the troubled history of race and biomedicine but also its fraught yet vital present. Medical treatment should be seen as a site of, rather than an alternative to, political and social contestation. The aim of scholarly analysis should not be to settle matters of race and genetics, but to hold medicine more broadly accountable to truth and justice.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Racial Preoccupations and Early Cardiology
• 2. Making Normal Populations and Making Difference in the Framingham and Jackson Heart Studies
• 3. The Durability of African American Hypertension as a Disease Category
• 4. The Slavery Hypothesis beyond Genetic Determinism
• 5. Thiazide Diuretics as a Nexus of Associations: Racialized, Proven, Old, Cheap
• 6. BiDil: Medicating the Intersection of Race and Heart Failure
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States

Duke University Press
2009
408 pages
19 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4440-7
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4426-1

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship
• 2. Maxixe’s Travels: Cultural Exchange and Erasure
• 3. Playing Politics: Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro
• 4. Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic
• 5. Another “Global Vision”: (Trans)Nationalism in the Sao Paulo Black Press
• 6. Black Mothers, Citizen Sons
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index

Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Duke University Press
2012
400 pages
71 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5085-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5067-5

Edited by:

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies
Duke University

Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or “snapshots,” highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
• 1. “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler
• 2. “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill
• 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach
  • Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney
• 5. Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman
• 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein
  • Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” / Suzanne Schneider
• 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace
  • Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 9. “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford
  • Snapshot 4. The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith

Duke University Press
2011
328 pages
58 illus., including 18 color plates
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4799-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4782-8

Cherise Smith, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Univerity of Texas, Austin

The artists Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, Anna Deavere Smith, and Nikki S. Lee have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed. Cherise Smith analyzes their complex engagements with issues of identity through close readings of a significant performance, or series of performances, by each artist. She examines Piper’s public embodiment of the Mythic Being, a working-class black man, during the early 1970s; Antin’s full-time existence as the fictitious black ballerina Eleanora Antinova for several weeks in 1981; and Smith’s shifting among more than twenty characters of different ages and racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds in Twilight: Los Angeles. She also considers Lee’s performances of membership in cultural groups—including swing dancers, hip-hop devotees, skateboarders, drag queens, and yuppies—in her Projects series (1997–2001). The author historicizes the politics of identity by exploring each performance in relation to the discourses prevalent in the United States at the time of its development. She is attentive to how the artists manipulated clothing, mannerisms, voice, and other signs to negotiate their assumed identities. Cherise Smith argues that by drawing on conventions such as passing, blackface, minstrelsy, cross-dressing, and drag, they highlighted the constructedness and fluidity of identity and identifications. Enacting Others provides a provocative account of how race informs contemporary art and feminist performance practices.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States

Duke University Press
2010
584 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4558-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4572-5

Edited by:

Miriam Jiménez Román, Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
New York University

Juan Flores, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• I. Historical Background before 1900
  • The Earliest Africans in North America / Peter H. Wood
  • Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans of the Southwest / Jack D. Forbes
  • Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola / Virginia Meacham Gould
  • Afro-Cubans in Tampa / Susan D. Greenbaum
  • Excerpt from Pulling the Muse from the Drum / Adrian Castro
• II. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges / Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg / Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
  • Invoking Arturo Schomburg’s Legacy in Philadelphia / Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
• III. Afro-Latin@s on the Color Line
  • Black Cuban, Black American / Evelio Grillo
  • A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches / Jesus Colon
  • Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City / Nancy Raquel Mirabel
  • An Uneven Playing Field: Afro-Latinos in Major League Baseball / Adrian Burgos Jr.
  • Changing Identities: An Afro-Latino Family Portrait / Gabriel Haslip-Viera
  • Eso era tremendo!: An Afro-Cuban Musician Remembers / Graciela Perez Gutierrez
• IV. Roots of Salsa: Afro-Latin@ Popular Music
  • From “Indianola” to “Ño Colá”: The Strange Career of the Afro-Puerto Rican Musician / Ruth Glasser
  • Excerpt from cu/bop / Louis Reyes Rivera
  • Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean / Jairo Moreno
  • Contesting that Damned Mambo: Arsenio Rodriguez and the People of El Barrio and the Bronx in the 1950s / David F. Garcia
  • Boogaloo and Latin Soul / Juan Flores
  • Excerpt from the salsa of bethesda fountain / Tato Laviera
• V. Black Latin@ Sixties
  • Hair Conking: Buy Black / Carlos Cooks
  • Carlos A. Cooks: Dominican Garveyite in Harlem / Pedro R. Rivera
  • Down These Mean Streets / Piri Thomas
  • African Things / Victor Hernandez Cruz
  • Black Notes and “You Do Something to Me” / Sandra Maria Esteves
  • Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger / Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman
  • Excerpt from Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger / Felipe Luciano
  • The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City / Marta Moreno Vega
  • Reflections and Lived Experiences of Afro-Latin@ Religiosity / Luis Barrios
  • Discovering Myself / Un Testimonio / Josefina Baez
• VI. Afro-Latinas
  • The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society / Angela Jorge
  • Something Latino Was Up with Us / Spring Redd
  • Excerpt from Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises / Mariposa (María Teresa Fernandez)
  • Latinegras: Desired Women—Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives / Marta I. Cruz-Janzen
  • Letter to a Friend / Nilaja Sun
  • Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects / Ana M. Lara
  • The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo / Marianela Medrano
• VII. Public Images and (Mis)Representations
  • Notes on Eusebia Cosme and Juano Hernandez / Miriam Jimenez Roman
  • Desde el Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latino Community / Carlos Flores
  • Displaying Identity: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C. / Ginetta E. B. Candelario
  • Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and Lucecita Benítez / Yeidy M. Rivero
  • Can BET Make You Black? Remixing and Reshaping Latin@s on Black Entertainment Television / Ejima Baker
  • The Afro-Latino Connection: Can this group be the bridge to a broadbased Black-Hispanic alliance? / Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille
• VIII. Afro-Latin@s in the Hip Hop Zone
  • Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad / Raquel Z. Rivera
  • Chicano Rap Roots: Afro-Mexico and Black-Brown Cultural Exchange / Pancho McFarland
  • The Rise and Fall of Reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderon and Beyond / Wayne Marshall
  • Do Platanos Go wit’ Collard Greens? / David Lamb
  • Divas Don’t Yield / Sofia Quintero
• IX. Living Afro-Latinidads
  • An Afro-Latina’s Quest for Inclusion / Yvette Modestin
  • Retracing Migration: From Samana to New York and Back Again / Ryan Mann-Hamilton
  • Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States / Vielka Cecilia Hoy
  • We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduran Garifuna / Aida Lambert
  • Profile of an Afro-Latina: Black, Mexican, Both / Maria Rosario Jackson
  • Enrique Patterson: Black Cuban Intellectual in Cuban Miami / Antonio Lopez
  • Reflections about Race by a Negrito Acomplejao / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity / Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Nigger-Reecan Blues / Willie Perdomo
• X. Afro-Latin@s: Present and Future Tenses
  • How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans / John R. Logan
  • Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preferences for Whiteness / William A. Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton
  • Brown Like Me? / Ed Morales
  • Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico / Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project
  • Mexican Ways, African Roots / Lisa Hoppenjans and Ted Richardson
  • Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace / Tanya Kateri Hernandez
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions
  • Afro-Latinism in United States Society: A Commentary / James Jennings
• Sources and Permissions
• Contributors
• Index

Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil

Duke University Press
1999
232 pages
9 tables
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-2272-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-2252-8

Edited by

Michael Hanchard, Professor of Political Science and African American Studies
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Bringing together U.S. and Brazilian scholars, as well as Afro-Brazilian political activists, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil represents a significant advance in understanding the complexities of racial difference in contemporary Brazilian society. While previous scholarship on this subject has been largely confined to quantitative and statistical research, editor Michael Hanchard presents a qualitative perspective from a variety of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and cultural theory.

The contributors to Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil examine such topics as the legacy of slavery and its abolition, the historical impact of social movements, race-related violence, and the role of Afro-Brazilian activists in negotiating the cultural politics surrounding the issue of Brazilian national identity. These essays also provide comparisons of racial discrimination in the United States and Brazil, as well as an analysis of residential segregation in urban centers and its affect on the mobilization of blacks and browns. With a focus on racialized constructions of class and gender and sexuality, Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil reorients the direction of Brazilian studies, providing new insights into Brazilian culture, politics, and race relations.

This volume will be of importance to a wide cross section of scholars engaged with Brazil in particular, and Latin American studies in general. It will also appeal to those invested in the larger issues of political and social movements centered on the issue of race.

Table of Contents

• Introduction / Michael Hanchard
• Free African Brazilians and the State in Slavery Times / Richard Graham
• Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil / Michael Hanchard
• Ethnic Boundaries and Political Mobilization among African Brazilians: Comparisons with the U.S. Case / Edward E. Telles
• Racial Democracy and Racial Identity: Comparing the United States and Brazil / Howard Winant
• Miguel Reale and the Impact of Conservative Modernization on Brazilian Race Relations / Michael Mitchell
• Women and Racial Inequality at Work in Brazil / Peggy A. Lovell
• Notes on Racial and Political Inequality in Brazil / Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Valle Silva
• The Black Movement and Political Parties: A Challenging Alliance / Benedita da Silva
• My Conscience, My Struggle / Thereza Santos
• Blacks and Political Power / Ivanir dos Santos
• Contributors
• Index