Luisa Farah Schwartzman | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Papers by Luisa Farah Schwartzman
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2021
ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of ‘culture’ in newspaper articles on mul... more ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of ‘culture’ in newspaper articles on multiculturalism in Canada and on racial democracy in Brazil from the 1950s to the 2010s. In the 1950s and 1960s, discourse on racial democracy in Brazil and multiculturalism in Canada relied on an idea of ‘culture’ akin to the notion of ‘civilization,’ i.e., an explicit recognition of the existence and particularity of the dominant language and religion and its location in dominant institutions, but often supported by an ethnocentric perspective. Since the 1980s, discourse on racial democracy and multiculturalism in the two newspapers increasingly discussed the topic of racism, but the idea of ‘culture’ has become associated with embodied characteristics of people of color, while the practices imposed by dominant institutions have become invisible or understood as universal. While race scholars suggest that we abandon the language of ‘culture’ to lay bare the reality of racism and social inequality, I argue that anti-racist agendas should also make visible the ongoing existence of culturally assimilationist practices and institutions and their colonial roots.
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2018
Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are... more Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less "modern" than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of "immigrant integration" to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national "imagined community," constructed as "mixed-race," and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) "modernity." The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.
Antipode
While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion... more While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion, nationality, particular group membership, and political opinion—Haitians’ ongoing racialised persecution and denial of refuge across the Americas reveals the failures of this framework. Drawing on academic literature, documentary evidence, and primary sources, we analyse the racial and neocolonial logics constituting Haitians’ experiences at home and as migrants through the Americas. Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as nodes of migration trajectories, we argue that Haitians confront a “hemispheric frontier regime”. Unlike a single border that impedes passage, this multilayered frontier regime constantly uproots Haitians, even while states evade their responsibilities vis‐à‐vis asylum seekers. Over time, mutually reinforcing frontier logics of policing, dispossession, extraction, and empire at various scales—urban, domestic, transnational—structure Haitians’ and other migrants’ ...
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020
This paper analyses the relationships between “race” and violent victimization, and between “race... more This paper analyses the relationships between “race” and violent victimization, and between “race” and support for violent practices of social control in Brazil, using nationally representative survey data. I start from the premise that “race” is a set of relational practices rather than bounded “racial groups”. I operationalize this relational understanding of “race” methodologically by triangulating three measures of “race” – self-identified “census race”, interviewer-identified skin colour, and racial composition of the municipality – in conjunction with measures of class, gender and space. I find that whiter geographic spaces have lower overall levels of violent victimization, but that interviewer-identified darker-skinned individuals are disproportionately victimized in these whiter geographic spaces. Controlling for other variables, self-identified census race is not correlated with violent victimization. I find that public support for violent practices can best be understood by considering people’s simultaneous relationships to race, gender, class and spatial categories and hierarchies.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2012
Multicultural policies have been spreading around the world. How does implementation of multicult... more Multicultural policies have been spreading around the world. How does implementation of multicultural polices affect local ideas about race, inequality and multiculturalism? This paper investigates this issue with respect to affirmative action policies in Brazilian universities. Our interviews with university administrators and university students indicate that, when implemented in Brazil, affirmative action acquires class-based justifications, and ideas about racial diversity are replaced by ideas about class diversity. Our findings suggest that, differently from what some analysts have argued, affirmative action is not necessarily associated with postmodern concerns and identities: In Brazil, it is mostly associated with a modern discourse in which class cleavages are still very salient and the state plays a significant role in addressing inequalities.
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2018
Author(s): Schwartzman, Luisa Farah | Abstract: Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and No... more Author(s): Schwartzman, Luisa Farah | Abstract: Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.
Political Power and Social Theory, 2021
Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the ensla... more Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans as a founding moment in the making of today's racial hierarchies. Yet their narrative of this initial moment often mischaracterizes early European states, erases Indigenous and African states, and naturalizes racial group belonging. Such practices are counterproductive to the antiracist project. Following the lead of decolonial scholarship, much recent work by historians has sought to recover and reconstruct the institutions, social structures, and agency of African and Indigenous peoples, as well as revisit assumptions about European power, institutions, and agency in their historical encounters with their continental “others.” I highlight the potential of this approach for sociologists of “race” by narrating two significant historical events in the making of the modern Atlantic world: the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, and the transatlantic enslavement of subjects of the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo (in today's Angola) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I analyze how particular European, Indigenous, and African actors made decisions in the context of their own and others' historically situated and dynamic political and social structures. I read these historical events through the lens of decolonial scholarship, and sociological literatures on group-making, state formation, and the emergence of capitalism, to make sense of the violent social process that led to the breakup of African, Indigenous, and European political and social structures and the making of colonial and racially hierarchical social structures in the Atlantic world.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2021
In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of 'culture' in newspaper articles on multicultura... more In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of 'culture' in newspaper articles on multiculturalism in Canada and on racial democracy in Brazil from the 1950s to the 2010s. In the 1950s and 60s, discourse on racial democracy in Brazil and multiculturalism in Canada relied on an idea of “culture” akin to the notion of “civilization,” i.e., an explicit recognition of the existence and particularity of the dominant language and religion and its location in dominant institutions, but often supported by an ethnocentric perspective. Since the 1980s, discourse on racial democracy and multiculturalism in the two newspapers increasingly discussed the topic of racism, but the idea of “culture” has become associated with embodied characteristics of people of color, while the practices imposed by dominant institutions has become invisible or understood as universal. While race scholars suggest that we abandon the language of “culture” to lay bare the reality of racism and social inequality, I argue that anti-racist agendas should also make visible the ongoing existence of culturally assimilationist practices and institutions and their colonial roots.
This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the ... more This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the start of the new millennium up to recent years. After an overview of the existing policies in public universities, we explain these patterns based on an analysis of the processes internal and external to the universities. Although these policies were initially thought of as racial quotas, class-based criteria have predominated, while the racial criteria became relatively circumscribed. Within the institutions, affirmative action brought new concerns about how to support and retain low-income students, as well as a discussion about racism, although the latter remains controversial.
This study examines how immigrant parents' geographic origins correspond to their adult children'... more This study examines how immigrant parents' geographic origins correspond to their adult children's ethnic and racial self-classification; whether discrepancies are associated with socioeconomic status; and the implications of these patterns for assessing socioeconomic inequality. Using linked British census data, we identify immigrants' children in 1971 and examine how they ethnically/racially self-classify in 2001. We find that fluidity in classification varies across groups, but higher educational attainment is consistently associated with less white British classification. Therefore, grouping immigrants' children by ethnic/racial self-classification underestimates socioeconomic disadvantage for these groups. However, grouping by parental birthplace overlooks variation in racialization and disadvantage among children of immigrants from the same country of origin. Since World War II, Europe and North America have experienced vastly increased immigration, particularly from less developed parts of the world. [Minor typographical changes have been made to this article since it was first published.] 1 We thank Bronwyn Dobchuk and Maureen Mendoza for helping us with the literature review for this paper. We thank Irene Bloemraad (and other members of the Berkeley Migration Group), Jeffrey Reitz, Mary Campbell, and Yuri Takhteyev for their feedback at different stages of the writing process. We also thank the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) and staff of the ONS Virtual Microdata Lab in London, especially Julian Bux-ton, Christopher Marshall, and Neil Smith for access to and assistance with the Longitudinal Study (LS) data used in this paper. All remaining errors are ours alone.
This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citi... more This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of 'persons with a migration background' is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves.
This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the... more This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the first Brazilian universities to adopt race-based quotas for admissions, interpret racial categories used as eligibility criteria. Considering the perspectives of students is important to understand the workings of affirmative action policies because UERJ's quotas require applicants to classify themselves. Students' interpretations of those categories often diverge from the interpretations intended by people who shaped the policy. Students' perspectives are formed by everyday experiences with categorisation and by their self-assessment as legitimate beneficiaries of quotas. In contrast, the policies were designed according to a new racial project, where black consciousness-raising and statistics played an important role.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2021
ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of ‘culture’ in newspaper articles on mul... more ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of ‘culture’ in newspaper articles on multiculturalism in Canada and on racial democracy in Brazil from the 1950s to the 2010s. In the 1950s and 1960s, discourse on racial democracy in Brazil and multiculturalism in Canada relied on an idea of ‘culture’ akin to the notion of ‘civilization,’ i.e., an explicit recognition of the existence and particularity of the dominant language and religion and its location in dominant institutions, but often supported by an ethnocentric perspective. Since the 1980s, discourse on racial democracy and multiculturalism in the two newspapers increasingly discussed the topic of racism, but the idea of ‘culture’ has become associated with embodied characteristics of people of color, while the practices imposed by dominant institutions have become invisible or understood as universal. While race scholars suggest that we abandon the language of ‘culture’ to lay bare the reality of racism and social inequality, I argue that anti-racist agendas should also make visible the ongoing existence of culturally assimilationist practices and institutions and their colonial roots.
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2018
Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are... more Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less "modern" than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of "immigrant integration" to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national "imagined community," constructed as "mixed-race," and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) "modernity." The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.
Antipode
While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion... more While international asylum law includes race as the first protected category—followed by religion, nationality, particular group membership, and political opinion—Haitians’ ongoing racialised persecution and denial of refuge across the Americas reveals the failures of this framework. Drawing on academic literature, documentary evidence, and primary sources, we analyse the racial and neocolonial logics constituting Haitians’ experiences at home and as migrants through the Americas. Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as nodes of migration trajectories, we argue that Haitians confront a “hemispheric frontier regime”. Unlike a single border that impedes passage, this multilayered frontier regime constantly uproots Haitians, even while states evade their responsibilities vis‐à‐vis asylum seekers. Over time, mutually reinforcing frontier logics of policing, dispossession, extraction, and empire at various scales—urban, domestic, transnational—structure Haitians’ and other migrants’ ...
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020
This paper analyses the relationships between “race” and violent victimization, and between “race... more This paper analyses the relationships between “race” and violent victimization, and between “race” and support for violent practices of social control in Brazil, using nationally representative survey data. I start from the premise that “race” is a set of relational practices rather than bounded “racial groups”. I operationalize this relational understanding of “race” methodologically by triangulating three measures of “race” – self-identified “census race”, interviewer-identified skin colour, and racial composition of the municipality – in conjunction with measures of class, gender and space. I find that whiter geographic spaces have lower overall levels of violent victimization, but that interviewer-identified darker-skinned individuals are disproportionately victimized in these whiter geographic spaces. Controlling for other variables, self-identified census race is not correlated with violent victimization. I find that public support for violent practices can best be understood by considering people’s simultaneous relationships to race, gender, class and spatial categories and hierarchies.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2012
Multicultural policies have been spreading around the world. How does implementation of multicult... more Multicultural policies have been spreading around the world. How does implementation of multicultural polices affect local ideas about race, inequality and multiculturalism? This paper investigates this issue with respect to affirmative action policies in Brazilian universities. Our interviews with university administrators and university students indicate that, when implemented in Brazil, affirmative action acquires class-based justifications, and ideas about racial diversity are replaced by ideas about class diversity. Our findings suggest that, differently from what some analysts have argued, affirmative action is not necessarily associated with postmodern concerns and identities: In Brazil, it is mostly associated with a modern discourse in which class cleavages are still very salient and the state plays a significant role in addressing inequalities.
Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2018
Author(s): Schwartzman, Luisa Farah | Abstract: Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and No... more Author(s): Schwartzman, Luisa Farah | Abstract: Studies of immigrant integration in Europe and North America generally assume that immigrants are less white and considered less “modern” than the nationals of the countries where they arrive. In this essay, my purpose is to examine what happens when we apply the idea of “immigrant integration” to European immigrants who arrived in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. These immigrants and their descendants have faced a contradiction between integrating into a national “imagined community,” constructed as “mixed-race,” and participating in local, national and global projects of (white) “modernity.” The paper explores how this contradiction was historically constructed in Brazil, how some Brazilians of European descent resolved it, and how we can think of the relationship between race, modernity, nationhood and immigrant integration from a more global perspective.
Political Power and Social Theory, 2021
Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the ensla... more Race scholars often refer to the colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and the enslavement of Africans as a founding moment in the making of today's racial hierarchies. Yet their narrative of this initial moment often mischaracterizes early European states, erases Indigenous and African states, and naturalizes racial group belonging. Such practices are counterproductive to the antiracist project. Following the lead of decolonial scholarship, much recent work by historians has sought to recover and reconstruct the institutions, social structures, and agency of African and Indigenous peoples, as well as revisit assumptions about European power, institutions, and agency in their historical encounters with their continental “others.” I highlight the potential of this approach for sociologists of “race” by narrating two significant historical events in the making of the modern Atlantic world: the conquest of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, and the transatlantic enslavement of subjects of the kingdoms of Kongo and Ndongo (in today's Angola) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I analyze how particular European, Indigenous, and African actors made decisions in the context of their own and others' historically situated and dynamic political and social structures. I read these historical events through the lens of decolonial scholarship, and sociological literatures on group-making, state formation, and the emergence of capitalism, to make sense of the violent social process that led to the breakup of African, Indigenous, and European political and social structures and the making of colonial and racially hierarchical social structures in the Atlantic world.
Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2021
In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of 'culture' in newspaper articles on multicultura... more In this paper, I examine the shifting meanings of 'culture' in newspaper articles on multiculturalism in Canada and on racial democracy in Brazil from the 1950s to the 2010s. In the 1950s and 60s, discourse on racial democracy in Brazil and multiculturalism in Canada relied on an idea of “culture” akin to the notion of “civilization,” i.e., an explicit recognition of the existence and particularity of the dominant language and religion and its location in dominant institutions, but often supported by an ethnocentric perspective. Since the 1980s, discourse on racial democracy and multiculturalism in the two newspapers increasingly discussed the topic of racism, but the idea of “culture” has become associated with embodied characteristics of people of color, while the practices imposed by dominant institutions has become invisible or understood as universal. While race scholars suggest that we abandon the language of “culture” to lay bare the reality of racism and social inequality, I argue that anti-racist agendas should also make visible the ongoing existence of culturally assimilationist practices and institutions and their colonial roots.
This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the ... more This paper examines how affirmative action in Brazilian public universities has evolved from the start of the new millennium up to recent years. After an overview of the existing policies in public universities, we explain these patterns based on an analysis of the processes internal and external to the universities. Although these policies were initially thought of as racial quotas, class-based criteria have predominated, while the racial criteria became relatively circumscribed. Within the institutions, affirmative action brought new concerns about how to support and retain low-income students, as well as a discussion about racism, although the latter remains controversial.
This study examines how immigrant parents' geographic origins correspond to their adult children'... more This study examines how immigrant parents' geographic origins correspond to their adult children's ethnic and racial self-classification; whether discrepancies are associated with socioeconomic status; and the implications of these patterns for assessing socioeconomic inequality. Using linked British census data, we identify immigrants' children in 1971 and examine how they ethnically/racially self-classify in 2001. We find that fluidity in classification varies across groups, but higher educational attainment is consistently associated with less white British classification. Therefore, grouping immigrants' children by ethnic/racial self-classification underestimates socioeconomic disadvantage for these groups. However, grouping by parental birthplace overlooks variation in racialization and disadvantage among children of immigrants from the same country of origin. Since World War II, Europe and North America have experienced vastly increased immigration, particularly from less developed parts of the world. [Minor typographical changes have been made to this article since it was first published.] 1 We thank Bronwyn Dobchuk and Maureen Mendoza for helping us with the literature review for this paper. We thank Irene Bloemraad (and other members of the Berkeley Migration Group), Jeffrey Reitz, Mary Campbell, and Yuri Takhteyev for their feedback at different stages of the writing process. We also thank the UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) and staff of the ONS Virtual Microdata Lab in London, especially Julian Bux-ton, Christopher Marshall, and Neil Smith for access to and assistance with the Longitudinal Study (LS) data used in this paper. All remaining errors are ours alone.
This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citi... more This article addresses the question of how and in what terms states constitute ethnicity and citizenship around statistical categories when these categories lack explicitly ethnic principles of classification. It does so based on a qualitative content analysis of the way that the German statistical category of 'persons with a migration background' is deployed in parliamentary debates on education. We argue that state actors in organized politics, who are embedded in Germany's national cultural repertoire and integration policy repertoire, transform this nuanced statistical category into a homogenized social category that is defined in terms of language, class and exclusion from the imagined national community. Our findings demonstrate that, in order to understand how the state uses statistics to draw boundaries within a society, it is necessary to go beyond the content of statistical categories themselves.
This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the... more This paper investigates how students at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), one of the first Brazilian universities to adopt race-based quotas for admissions, interpret racial categories used as eligibility criteria. Considering the perspectives of students is important to understand the workings of affirmative action policies because UERJ's quotas require applicants to classify themselves. Students' interpretations of those categories often diverge from the interpretations intended by people who shaped the policy. Students' perspectives are formed by everyday experiences with categorisation and by their self-assessment as legitimate beneficiaries of quotas. In contrast, the policies were designed according to a new racial project, where black consciousness-raising and statistics played an important role.