Racialisation and racial formation in urban spaces^*

* This paper is a revised and reduced version of a text published in Tempo Social (June 2016) in Portuguese. I would like to thank those who offered comments at those events, mainly the comments by Peter Burke, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Monica Moreno, and Peter Wade, and my colleagues in this panel. The paper was rewritten during my time as the Simón Bolívar Professor at the University of Cambridge (Michaelmas 2016 and Lent 2017).

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I try to clarify the notions of racialisation and racial formation and how they operate in the framework of nation states like Brazil. My main argument is that these processes are always constrained by the formation of social classes and national cultural repertoires even if transnational forces are important in nurturing them. I conclude by making a preliminary effort to unravel mechanisms and institutions which allow these processes of racialisation and racial formation to form part of the daily lives of black Brazilians in the context of class-structured urban spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialisation
• racial formation
• class formation
• Brazil
• national formation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

* This paper is a revised and reduced version of a text published in Tempo Social (June 2016) in Portuguese. I would like to thank those who offered comments at those events, mainly the comments by Peter Burke, Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, Monica Moreno, and Peter Wade, and my colleagues in this panel. The paper was rewritten during my time as the Simón Bolívar Professor at the University of Cambridge (Michaelmas 2016 and Lent 2017).

1 A Voz da Raça (The Voice of the Race), the tabloid of the Frente Negra Brasileira (Brazilian Black Front), was published from 1933 to 1936. Unlike other black newspapers, like the Clarim da Alvorada, the Voz was politically aligned with the integralist right of the period, and sympathizer of the European fascist movement.