Afro-Brazilian Citizenship and the Politics of The Past and Future

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

After abolition in 1888, Brazilian elites attempted to relegate blackness and Afro-Brazilian people to Brazil’s past, through explicit policies of branqueamento, or whitening. Today, during a period of Afro-Brazilian activism that emerged nationally with the end of a military regime in 1985 and the centenary of abolition, each new national survey shows more of the population identifying as black. Through historical and ethnographic research, these papers investigate the juridical, material, political, and discursive causes and consequences Brazil’s changing national trajectories of racialization. Together, they shed new light on the linked politics of race, citizenship, history, and the future in Brazil.

Sub Track

• Afro-Latin/Indigenous Peoples

Session Organizer

• Sean T Mitchell, Rutgers University, Newark

Chair

• Merle L Bowen, University of Illinois

Individual Presentations

• Race, Inequality and the Emergence of Ethnoracial Citizenship in Contemporary Brazil - Sean T Mitchell, Rutgers University, Newark

• Who Owns Paradise? Afro-Brazilians and Ethnic Tourism in Brazil’s Quilombos - Merle L Bowen, University of Illinois

• Quilombolas and Citizens: National Projects and the Right to Land in Brazil - Sandro J Silva, Brazilian Anthropologist Association

• Reaching for Blackness: the Material Stakes of Race in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil - LaShandra Sullivan, Reed College

Discussant

• Kim D Butler, Rutgers University