(Re)Considering Blackness in Contemporary Afro-Brazilian (Con)Texts critically interrogates the issue of Blackness in Brazil under the lens of cultural studies - broadly defined to include utterances on transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. From a multidisciplinary perspective, this collection of scholarly articles queries the notions of national and racial identity and ambivalence, through critical analysis of contemporary (mid-twentieth century to the present) Brazilian cultural materiality, including literature, religion, film/video and theatrical production, and cultural anthropological manifestations. The book's purpose is to understand how multiethnic nations, such as Brazil, negotiate issues of Blackness in contemporary contexts. All of the contributing authors are leading Brazilian scholars in the areas of race, gender, theatre, music, literature, film, and religion studies. By concentrating on how these disciplines and ideologies relate to matters concerning Blackness in the construction of identities in Brazil, this book will be of significant value to scholars in the areas of Brazilian studies, Latin American studies, interdisciplinary studies, cultural studies, and African Diaspora studies.

Brazil’s Black population, one of the oldest and largest in the Americas, mobilized a vibrant antiracism movement from grassroots origins when the country transitioned from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s. Campaigning for political equality after centuries of deeply engrained racial hierarchies, African-descended groups have been working to unlock democratic spaces that were previously closed to them. Using the city of Salvador as a case study, Kwame Dixon tracks the emergence of Black civil society groups and their political projects: claiming new citizenship rights, testing new anti-discrimination and affirmative action measures, reclaiming rural and urban land, and increasing political representation. This book is one of the first to explore how Afro-Brazilians have influenced politics and democratic institutions in the contemporary period. Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

An interdisciplinary study on the myth of racial democracy in Brazil through the prism of producers of Afro-Brazilian culture.

Why and how has race become a central aspect of politics during this century? This book addresses this pressing question by comparing South African apartheid and resistance to it, the United States Jim Crow law and protests against it, and the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. Anthony Marx argues that these divergent experiences had roots in the history of slavery, colonialism, miscegenation and culture, but were fundamentally shaped by impediments and efforts to build national unity. In South Africa and the United States, ethnic or regional conflicts among whites were resolved by unifying whites and excluding blacks, while Brazil's longer established national unity required no such legal racial crutch. Race was thus central to projects of nation-building, and nationalism shaped uses of race. Professor Marx extends this argument to explain popular protest and the current salience of issues of race.

During the first half of the twentieth century, both countries witnessed the advance of capitalism, translated into an aggressive police of development, with the exploitation of minerals, construction of railways and roads, urbanization and industrialization. Along with the economic development, Brazilian and South African society tried to take control of their society, meaning to control the population in order to maintain the status quo. For that end, racial definitions, classifications, theories and policies were fundamental. As the features of South African politics and policies of racial segregation emerged with new colors for the world after the end of the Apartheid regime, given the testimonies, the released documents and the new analysis, Brazilians have been pushed to face the problem of racial exclusion, unmasking its image as a “racial paradise” under the lights of new studies as well. Elaine Rocha uses novels published in both countries between 1912 and 1953 as a window from were one could see how cultural perceptions, policies and of racial differentiation were reflected in the everyday life. The analysis of the literary content, plus the authors’ biographies, political ideologies and the problems they were facing and interacting, together with their intentions of affecting the lives of the readers with the tragedy they illustrated in their novels claiming for a change in the real world.