The Tan from Ipanema: Freyre, Morenidade , and the Cult of the Body in Rio de Janeiro (original) (raw)
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Triumphant Miscegenation: Reflections on Beauty and Race In Brazil
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2007
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Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what the author calls Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” where embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features—including skin color, hair texture, and facial features—but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech commonly described as gíria (slang). Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.
Journal of Anthropological Research, 2018
Duress can be read as both warning and exhortation. Ann Laura Stoler has been a scholar of colonial and imperial studies for many years. This book brings together some of her previously published articles and her experiences doing research in France and the Middle East and provides a careful rethinking of what she calls imperial formations. What we call empires are highly adaptable forms of relations and technologies of rule that appear, disappear, and reemerge again and again in different contexts and times. Imperial formations are both durable and protean-characteristics that continue to surface, disappear, and resurface long after and seemingly independently of the span of a particular historical empire. "In an effort to press on the limits of the 'empire' concept, I use the term 'imperial formations'. .. to register the ongoing quality of processes of decimation, displacement, and reclamation that endure beyond the formal exclusions that legislate against equal opportunity, commensurate dignities, and equal rights. As an alternative to 'empire,' it is to signal the temporal stretch and recursive recalibrations to which we could be looking" (56). Stoler offers a critique of much of what has been taken for granted in colonial studies. Her interests lie "in the distributions of inequities that concepts condone, inscribe, and inhabit; in the challenges of writing new colonial histories that press on the present; and, not least, in unlearning what we imagine to know about colonial governance and why those understandings and misrecognitions should continue to concern us now" (8). Contrary to what is often assumed, concepts such as empire are fragile and misleading, full of messy accretions and ambiguities, always ready to morph into different contexts and uses. We are warned against assuming that imperial formations belong to a historical past only, or that contemporary imperial formations are somehow not imperial because they do not seem to exhibit the standard features of past empires. To illustrate this, Stoler interrogates the exceptional status accorded to Israel's relationship to the Palestinians. She also examines why French scholarship has been so
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