Edited by Larry Crook and Randal Johnson
Black Brazil
Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization
1999
412 pp., ill., bibl., index
0-87903-087-9 Paper $25.95 Available Now. Latin American Studies, Vol. 86

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This collection of essays brings together diverse perspectives on multiple dimensions of Afro-Brazilian culture, with a common focus on the construction of identities and the ways grassroots cultural expressions are linked to social organization and mobilization. All of the contributors—scholars, politicians, and cultural activists—share a concern with locating black Brazil in its historic and contemporary social and cultural realities. From the variety of voices, discourses, and styles, focusing on an underlying theme, there emerges a clear pattern of arguments about the perpetuation of racial discrimination in Brazil and the ongoing forms of struggle and resistance against it. “The twenty essays in this stimulating and instructive collection cover a wide range of social and cultural topics, some of them politically loaded, presented from a variety of scholarly and ideological perspectives. Black Brazil takes up, in effect, where such insightful studies as Thomas Skidmore's Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought and Michael Hanchard's Orpheus and Power: The “Movimento Negro” of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 1945–1988 leave off. . . . the volume gives voice not only to scholars but also to activists in the Black Consciousness Movement. Black Brazil will appeal to social scientists and humanists from a number of disciplines as well as to the nonspecialist interested in culture and race relations in the Americas and beyond.” —Russell G. Hamilton, Vanderbilt University “Offers a rich variety of penetrating views on a subject of growing interest to readers in many disciplines.” —Thomas Skidmore, Brown University “This collection not only legitimizes the relevance of Afro-Brazilians and their culture in the humanities and social sciences, it equally provides new research directions in Brazilian and African Diaspora Studies as contributors grapple with the persistence of racism in a culturally diverse, rich, yet contradictory country.” —Research in African Literatures “. . . this edited collection merits praise for its thorough and comprehensive overview of the culture and lives of Brazilians, who, in North American terminology are ‘black.' To its credit . . . Black Brazil ranges widely, covering topics from racial identity to the Africa-Brazil connection, to religion, popular culture, and the media.” —Luso-Brazilian Review