The Negation and Reassertion of Black Geographies in Brazil (original) (raw)
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This article centers attention on race, place, and space as co- produced concepts that reveal much about both how racial ideology operates and is constituted in contemporary Brazil. In Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, the ethno-racial order constructs the region as devoid of colonized people and consummately available for capital-intensive agribusiness production. Land protests in Mato Grosso do Sul by black and indigenous activists undermine popular fantasies of racial harmony embedded in Brazilian-ness. The regional variation of the latter denies the historical and contemporary presence of black Brazilians in narratives of the state’s founding and contemporary status as a ‘frontier’. This article argues that we may consider ‘coming out’ moments by blacks in the state as defiant counters, revealing identification processes that undermine the denial of full recognition of blacks as citizens.
This paper will examine these racial formation processes by situating the spaces and places poor blacks congregate US and Brazil within the global racial regime of domination, in which carcerality plays a central role (Alves 2012, 2016). I will draw from the literature of African Diaspora as an analytical framework articulated by Alves (2012, 2016) as he extends the work of Joy James, Katherine McKittrick, Jared Sexton, Paul Gilroy, Henri Lefebvre and others. The literature on black genocide is essential to suggest a “supra-national geography of death” (Vargas, 2010, as cited in Alves, 2012) and geography of resistance forged by people living under a racial regime of terror (Gilroy, 1993, as cited in Alves, 2012). The spatialized nature of antiblackness is what I am primary concerned as is circulates across oceans and large land masses to establish a global white supremacy can be easily located within different territories where black life is in a permanent state of siege, whether in Brazil, the United States or elsewhere. In Brazil and the US, statistics illustrate the deadly consequences of these economies of violence. They have evinced a historical pattern of black vulnerability to death energized by state technologies of confinement such as racial segregation, police violence and mass incarceration (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2007; James, 1996; Nascimento, 1989; Russell-Brown, 1998; Silva, 1998; Vargas, 2010 as cited in Alves, 2012). Conceiving the African Diaspora as mutually constituted through death, space and resistance is to account for its ghastly, yet, promising outcome: the anti-black project that constitute the nation state also provide the context in which a transnational black politics may emerge (Alves, 2016). It is both theoretically and politically relevant to reclaim black urban life and to account for a transnational black subjectivity produced in such deathly spatialities, since if blacks are always and already marked as socially dead (Sexton, 2011; Wilderson, 2003). Drawing on these insights, let me offer then a conceptualization of the African Diaspora we can speak of “black spatialities”, I am also referring to the geographies of death generated by the state—such as the prison, the favela, the cemetery, the (necro)polis—which have profoundly shaped black urban lives (Alves, 2012; Mbembe, 2003; McKittrick, 2006). In discussing black bodies and blackness, I want to continuously articulate that nothing can relate to blackness and if therefore outside of relation to humanity and possibility, at least in this current historical epoch. Nothing protects blacks at the end of the day against anti-blackness, as the social and economic indicators objectively prove that life changes are related to once racial positionalities and that the closer you are to blackness the greater level of disadvantages (Paixao, 2010; Telles, 2006; Winant, 2001, as cited in Vargas, 2012). Therefore, we should view the deteriorating boundaries between geo-political borders as one planetary system as they are woven together not by different racial formations separated by space and place but as bounded by ontologies and material structures that shape and over-determine the experience of black bodies on the planet.
"Look, Blackness in Brazil: disrupting the grotesquerie of Racial representation..."
This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of blacks and blackness in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blacks and blackness are disposed within the nation's formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of 'stereotyping', symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.
2020
How does settler colonialism’s logic of elimination work in Brazil? Starting with a brief history of miscegenation as assimilation/elimination, this article addresses this question through the experiences of one urban Indigenous group (Aldeia Maracanã) and one urban Afro-descendant quilombo (Sacopã) in Rio de Janeiro. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017, it traces the continuities of settler colonialism in independent Brazil, including the multicultural turn of the 1988 Constitution. I centre the lived experiences and struggles of the two groups, whose intersecting politics are caught within the inescapability of being ‘within Empire’ while having to imagine a politics outside of it (Simpson 2014). I then contribute to Settler Colonial Theory from this perspective, challenging its land-labour binary, for Black and Indigenous peoples have both been affected by processes of elimination, dispossession, labour exploitation, and exclusion (racism). Moreover, miscegenation/assimilation has not been merely ‘a kind of death’, as Patrick Wolfe has portrayed it (Wolfe, 2006). Miscegenation has also functioned as the space from which Indigenous and Black peoples have resurged, survived, and thrived. When we engage critically with the political options available to these groups under settler colonialism, we are pushed to ask: What does it mean to talk about de-colonization in Brazil?
THE BODY, THE HOUSE AND THE CITY: THE TERRITORIALITIES OF BLACK WOMEN IN BRAZIL
Revista Brasileira de Estudos Urbanos e Regionais, 2021
This article presents a discussion on the relationship between territoriality and intersectionality based on the experience of Black Brazilian women throughout the historical process that has triggered a long trajectory of struggle against racism and sexism. Bibliographical and documentary research has been used in order to discuss the territories of the body, the house and the city, understood as spaces of oppression and resistance. While these analytical categories have received considerable attention, especially within the Black feminist movement itself, few studies have explicitly or thoroughly addressed the relationship between intersectionality and territoriality based on an expanded conception of territory that goes from the body through to the city. Reflecting upon these concepts as a collective unit and through a multi-scalar perspective may help to provide greater visibility to the protagonist spaces of Black Brazilian women in their struggle for reparation, recognition and the right to exist.
In Brazil, the legal, political, and civil status of the Afro-descendant population in the post-abolition period has long been a topic of conflict and controversy. Public policies relating to access to land, for example, have skewed the concentration of real estate – in both physical and symbolic terms – in favor of certain segments of the population and to the detriment of others who have nevertheless frequently attempted to subscribe to the so-called ‘whitening’ (Europeanization) of the nation. In this article, I trace the trajectory which has carried quilombolas (maroons: the descendants of self-liberated African slaves) of the north of the state of Espírito Santo to a position of publicly affirming their rights to both identity and territory by making land claims against other agents in the public sphere. I seek to identify the contexts of the formation of these assertions of agency in the midst of multiple rural and quilombola identities in order to identify how quilombolas have asserted their relational differences vis-à-vis all other social groups.
HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRAZIL AND THEIR ANCESTRAL IDENTITY (Atena Editora)
HISTORY OF BLACK PEOPLE IN BRAZIL AND THEIR ANCESTRAL IDENTITY (Atena Editora), 2023
The construction of "ethnic-racial" identity as a social process is crossed by a wide range of factors that condition or permanently transform it. This article aims to carry out an analysis of the political and cultural factors that conditioned the construction of the identity of the black population in rural and urban areas after the emergence of the Constitution, but through a deconstructionist exercise of essentialist approaches to ethnicity. The article analyzes how the mechanisms have been of political inclusion from the top down, but with processes of social organization. On the other hand, it analyzes the way in which black identity has emerged in urban centers and areas and their areas of influence, where there is cultural syncretism and its traditions reinventing urban cultural dynamics. A relationship of black alterity, in which representations play between black and non-black individuals. The article also reflects criticism on the role of academic research on "ethnic-racial" social movements and the discourses that are built around this type of social mobilization.