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Racial Entanglements: Orientalism & Anti-Blackness in Brazil
Thu, February 17, 8:00 to 9:30am, Virtual Building, VR109Abstract
Racial Entanglements: Orientalism & Anti-Blackness in Brazil explores the social tensions between two racialized communities in Brazil -- the Black and the Asian. This relationship is presented through the process of extinction of an Afro-Brazilian historical site: the "Bairro da Liberdade" [Neighborhood of Liberty] in São Paulo city. Brazil has an essential role in the discussions of Blackness and Yellowness in the diasporic Americas. It is the country with the largest concentration of African (West and Central Africa) and Asian (Japanese) diaspora globally, holding the "Bairro da Liberdade" [Neighborhood of Liberty] as its convergence point.
This project engages in an interdisciplinary debate through three central points: 1) a genealogy of racial relations between Black and Yellow communities in that aforementioned region in São Paulo; 2) an ethnographic analysis of the neighborhood identifying historical sites related to the Afro-Brazilian community (e.g., Black Catholic Churches) and the Asian community (e.g., Asian Cultural Associations); and 3) the investigation about the orientalist and anti-black policies instituted by city counselors and the state governor of the region. Therefore, this project aims to characterize the Afro-Brazilian historical memory within this neighborhood and its confluences with and divergences from the local Asian community through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews by focusing on the "Bairro da Liberdade'' as a microcosm of the myth of racial democracy, where Afro-Brazilian memory was extinguished for the sake of the consolidation of an Asian 'foreign' memory.