Antiracist Discourse In Brazil

Antiracist Discourse in Brazil: From Abolition to Affirmative Action follows Teun A. van Dijk’s earlier studies on racist discourse in Europe, the USA, and Latin America. This book focuses on antiracist discourse, focusing on the history of the discourse against slavery and racism and in favor of abolition and affirmative action in Brazil. After a theoretical chapter on antiracism and antiracist discourse, the author studies Jesuit texts of the 17th and 18th century criticizing the abuses against slaves and the texts of black and white writers in the 19th century advocating abolition. The author analyzes discourses of 20th century scholars, journalists, and activists who explicitly combat prevalent international eugenicist and racist ideologies as well as post-abolition discrimination of black people all while challenging the dominant myth of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy.’ After the historical study of these antiracist discourses, this book offers a detailed case study of contemporary debates on affirmative action in Brazilian parliament.

Antiracism is a global and historical social movement of resistance and solidarity, yet there have been relatively few books focusing on it as a subject in its own right. After his earlier books on racist discourse, Teun A. van Dijk provides a theory of antiracism along with a history of discourse against slavery, racism and antisemitism. He first develops a multidisciplinary theory of antiracism, highlighting especially the role of discourse and cognition as forms of resistance and solidarity. He then covers the history of antiracist discourse, including antislavery and abolition discourse between the 16th and 19th century, antiracist discourse by white and black authors until the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter, and Jewish critical analysis of antisemitic ideas and discourse since the early 19th century. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how racism and antisemitism have been critically analysed and resisted in antislavery and antiracist discourse.

All scholarly books are engagements with the existing literature, often the published scholarly work of one established discipline. This book originated with modest objectives, to produce a work that would be in conversation with the literature of international relations even though not of relevance only to that field. The professed goal of international relations is international peace. The ethical lens of pondering the best means to achieve world peace is used to filter media content in the field of multiculturalism and anti-racism. Although there has been little work on the impact of racial difference on the contours of contemporary international order, there has been a sizeable body of research intended to abolish the credibility of pseudo-scientific racism. Such racism has provided the ideological foundation and justification for imperialism, colonialism, the holocaust, and apartheid. Race has been debunked as a myth. Because of this, racism - the ideology bred of human classification according to racial difference - has been found to be intellectually and morally barren. But the need to communicate egalitarian and scientific sentiments remains. The contributors to this volume consider five questions: How does the literature on antiracism improve our understanding of conflict resolution? How does the analysis of the media's role in racist and anti-racist discourses improve the process of theorizing on hate and war propaganda? How can research on anti-racist discourse improve UN peacekeeping? What implications does this subject have for theory-building and cultural diversity? How and why should the literature on anti-racism expand research in international relations? This is a unique, worthwhile framework for cross-disciplinary research in race and intellectual consensus and conflict.

With new momentum, the Brazilian black movement is working to bring attention to and change the situation of structural racism in Brazil. Black consciousness advocates are challenging Afro-Brazilians to define themselves and politically organize around being black, and more Afro-Brazilians are increasingly doing so. Other segments of the Brazilian black movement are working to influence legislation and implement formal mechanisms that aim to promote racial equality, including Affirmative Action Racial Verification Committees. For advocates of these committees, one needs to be phenotypically black enough to be a more likely target of racism to qualify for Affirmative Action programs. Paradoxically, individuals are told to identify as black but only some people are considered black enough to benefit from these policies. Afro-Brazilians are presented with a whole range of identity choices, from how to classify oneself, to whether one votes for political candidates based on shared racial experiences. Between Brown and Black argues that Afro-Brazilian activists’ continued exploration of blackness confronts anti-blackness while complicating understandings of what it means to be black. Blending linguistic and ethnographic accounts, this book raises complex questions about current black struggles in Brazil and beyond, including the black movements’ political initiatives and antiracist agenda.

​This book assesses the nature and extent of the project of deracialisation required to counter the contemporary dynamics of racialisation across four varieties of modernity: Sweden, South Africa, Brazil and the UK, based on original research on each of the four country contexts. Since racism began to be recognised or identified as a problem, an assemblage of supra-national initiatives have been devised in the name of combatting, dismantling or reducing it. There has been a recent shift whereby such supra-national bodies move toward embedding strategies against racism within the framework of human rights and devolving such responsibility to other bodies at a national level. The authors bring together a team of international experts in this field, in order to compare the priorities and effectiveness of current strategic approaches in each national context, examining their relationalities and connecting these cases within a joint theoretical and methodological framework. Thus, this book contributes to theoretical knowledge on racialisation and deracialisation, produce a new data set on contemporary interventions and institutions and establish new principles and practice for national projects of deracialisation and anti-racism, building on cross-national learning.

Reimagining Black Difference and Politics in Brazil examines Black Brazilian political struggle and the predicaments it faces in a time characterized by the increasing institutionalization of ethno-racial policies and black participation in policy orchestration. Greater public debate and policy attention to racial inequality suggests the attenuation of racial democracy and positive miscegenation as hegemonic ideologies of the Brazilian nation-state. However, the colorblind and post-racial logics of mixture and racial democracy, especially the denial and/or minimization of racism as a problem, maintain a strong grip on public thinking, social action, and institutional practices. Through a focus on the epistemic dimensions of black struggles and the anti-racist pluri-cultural efforts that have been put into action by activists, scholars, and organizations over the past decade, Alexandre Emboaba Da Costa analyzes the ways in which these politics negotiate as well as seek to go beyond the delimited understandings of racial difference, belonging, and citizenship that shape the contemporary politics of inclusion.

‘No Laughing Matter: Race Joking and Resistance in Brazilian Social Media’ examines the social phenomenon of construction and dissemination of colonial-like racist discourses fostered against upwardly-mobile black women through disparagement humour on social media platforms, adopting a fresh and innovative perspective. In this book, Luiz Valério P. Trindade explores the idea that disparagement humour might not be as exempt of social impact as the jokers might believe, and that, in fact, this kind of humour reveals the hidden facet of deep-seated colonial ideologies still present in Brazilian society despite being hailed as a unique model of a post-racial society. The author argues that these ideologies establish and naturalise superior social positions and symbolic privileges to whites while undermining and delegitimising black women’s upward social mobility. Social media platforms enable the proponents of these beliefs not only to engage in the practice of online hate speech but also to attract a considerable number of like-minded people, creating a long-lasting echo chamber effect in the cyberspace. This way, they manage to amplify the reach and reverberation of their racist discourses in the online environment in ways not commonly seen in Brazilian offline social contexts. This monograph is of great interest and relevance to students, scholars, and researchers across a variety of disciplines, most notably Critical Race Studies, Media Communication Studies and Critical Humour Studies, and also academics in other areas such as Critical Discourse Analysis, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine asks why Brazilians, particularly Afro-Brazilians, continue to have faith in Brazil's "racial democracy" in the face of pervasive racism in all spheres of Brazilian life. Through a detailed ethnography, Twine provides a cultural analysis of the everyday discursive and material practices that sustain and naturalize white supremacy. This is the first ethnographic study of racism in southeastern Brazil to place the practices of upwardly mobile Afro-Brazilians at the center of analysis. Based on extensive field research and more than fifty life histories with Afro- and Euro-Brazilians, this book analyzes how Brazilians conceptualize and respond to racial disparities. Twine illuminates the obstacles Brazilian activists face when attempting to generate grassroots support for an antiracist movement among the majority of working class Brazilians. Anyone interested in racism and antiracism in Latin America will find this book compelling.