Afro-Brazilian citizenship and the politics of history

The politics of race, citizenship, and history have long been intertwined in Brazil. After the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888, Brazilian governments attempted to relegate blackness and Afro-Brazilian people to Brazil’s past, through policies of immigration and mixture explicitly focused on branqueamento (whitening) (Cunha 1985; Schwarcz 1999; Skidmore 1993). In the mid-twentieth century, branqueamento waned, as major Brazilian intellectuals and governing institutions fostered an ideology of ‘racial democracy’ – or harmonious racial mixture – as the depoliticizing, and supposedly deracializing cornerstone of Brazilian nationalism (Andrews 1996; Guimarães 2001; Hanchard 1994; Seyferth 1996). And in the early twenty-first century, both branqueamento and racial democracy have lost the hegemony they once held as ideologies linking race, citizenship, history, and the future of Brazil.

Though long present, Afro-Brazilian activism gained force on the national scene after the end of the military regime in 1985 and celebrations marking the centenary of the abolition of slavery in 1988. New laws aimed at redressing racial inequality were placed on the books, communities identifying as quilombolas (maroon-descended) began to proliferate in the rural interior, and politicized Afro-Brazilian identified popular culture came to enjoy wide national appeal. Each year more of the population identifies as black (Guimarães 2012; Telles 2006) and few national political figures speak publicly of racial democracy – or of whitening. The politics of race, citizenship, and history in Brazil were and are intertwined, but in surprising and fast-changing ways.

This special issue of African and Black Diaspora: an International Journal features articles by leading scholars conducting research on these transforming relations among history, race, and citizenship in Brazil. We bring together these articles – by anthropologists, political scientists, and historians, from Brazil, Canada, and the United States, and joining ethnographic and archival research – in the hope of helping shape the contours of future scholarly research on race politics in Brazil.

The literature on race, history, and citizenship in Brazil is vast, but it is marked by key concerns that we hope to illuminate in new ways in this special issue. For the last few decades, much of the Brazilian literature on race has focused on contentious debates over new laws and institutional initiatives aimed at redressing Brazil’s racial inequality. Those debates have centered, to a large degree, on the ways in which these new initiatives might reshape a Brazilian racial order that was often extolled for its ambiguity during the twentieth century. The essays gathered here engage these contentious debates, but we approach them laterally. Together, these articles show how recent changes to ethnoracial identification and race politics in Brazil result less from changes to the law than from broader changing political-economic circumstances – at local, global, and national scales – and, most importantly, from the work of Afro-Brazilian activists themselves. Moreover, as the historical papers in this collection show, today’s Afro-Brazilian activism has longstanding roots in Brazil’s nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as earlier movements were obscured and suppressed by reigning national ideologies and institutions. By demonstrating the multitude of contemporary and historical forces impacting Brazil’s race politics in the twenty-first century, we add to an emerging body of scholarship that shows law to be only one force among many others influencing changing constructions of race (Arruti 2006; French 2009), and we aim to help move scholarship away from a singular juridical emphasis that has at times impeded deeper understanding.

While much work by Brazilians has focused on the meanings and effects of new laws, Anglophone scholars have long been fascinated by the twentieth century myth of Brazilian ‘racial democracy’. While in the mid-twentieth century, many Anglophone scholars hoped that ‘racial democracy’s’ fuzzy boundaries might provide a model to be emulated by societies segregated by a sharply-drawn ‘color line’ – as Du Bois called it (1903, vii) – in recent decades, the myth of ‘racial democracy’ has undergone frequent Anglophone scholarly debunking (on this change, see, Hellwig 1992; Mitchell, Blanchette, and Silva, n.d.; Sansone 2003). Exciting recent scholarship has drawn attention to contemporary struggles by black activists to oppose the myth’s ongoing salience by challenging racialized dispossession and subjugation (Perry 2013; Smith 2016; Vargas 2010; Williams 2013). Again, the articles gathered here approach this question from the side. These works consider the myth of racial democracy from many angles, but we are less concerned with debunking the myth (a task that has been ably carried out by many scholars) than with examining how racial democracy has come to compete with emerging models of race-based activism, cultural production, and national belonging. And although it is only in recent decades that Afro-Brazilian activism has become well-known globally, such activism has deep roots in long remembered Brazilian conflicts and traditions.

Race politics and the legacies of ‘whitening’

Through ethnographic research in regions poorly represented in the Anglophone literature – the northeastern state of Maranhão and central-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul – the first two articles in the collection examine Brazil’s longstanding legacy of whitening and trace new forms of Afro-Brazilian political assertion. In, Whitening and Racial Ambiguity: Racialization and Ethnoracial Citizenship in Contemporary Brazil, Sean T. Mitchell draws on ethnographic research on the mobilization of quilombo (maroon-descended) communities and their conflicts with the hub of Brazil’s satellite launch program, in Maranhão, to investigate the meanings of forms of ‘everyday whitening’ – individual and familial strategies of whitening that have long outlasted the national project of branqueamento. Mitchell argues that the invisibility of that whitening, or a tendency to confuse it with ‘ambiguity’, has muddled debates over race and the law in contemporary Brazil.

LaShandra Sullivan’s article, Black Invisibility on a Brazilian ‘Frontier’: Land and Identity in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, also takes up the lingering social power of whitening, as well as the myth of racial democracy, but from a different angle. Sullivan charts people’s experiences of ‘coming out’ as black in a region often cast as a ‘frontier’ devoid of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilians. Through careful ethnography and analysis, the article demonstrates how such assertions of blackness, in a place where its absence is often asserted, have emerged in the context of intense land conflict, and reveal changing forms of citizenship, racial identification, and political protest in early twenty-first century Mato Grosso do Sul and Brazil.

The rise of quilombo movements

Joining ethnographic with historical work, the articles by Sandro José da Silva and by Flávio Gomes and Daniela Yabeta give specific focus to the politics of contemporary quilombo formation that are touched upon in the articles by Mitchell and Sullivan. Because of pressure from black movements, Brazil’s constitution of 1988 included a clause that required the state to grant inalienable land rights (propriedade definitiva) to remanescentes das comunidades dos quilombos – literally, remnants of escaped-slave communities. Since then, many communities in Brazil have come to identify as quilombo communities. As Silva and Gomes and Yabeta show, however, quilombo formation and identification preexist and greatly exceed the incentives provided by that constitutional clause.

Silva’s article, Quilombolas and Citizens: National Projects and the Right to Land in Brazil, is an ethnographic exploration of the conflicts between Afro-Brazilian communities and Italian immigrant-descended communities in the north of Espírito Santo state. Showing us how these conflicts have changed as their protagonists have moved through diverse historical moments and institutions (including the Catholic Church, Rural Workers’ Unions, local and federal government offices, the Landless Worker’s Movement, and the contemporary Quilombo movement), Silva provides a profound analysis of the sociopolitical roots of contemporary quilombo identification. Gomes and Yabeta’s, Other Legacies, Patrimonies, and Memories of Emancipation: Peasantry, Quilombolas, and Citizenship in Brazil (19th –21st Centuries), innovatively joins archival and ethnographic research to show how the nineteenth century history of quilombolas on the island of Marambaia, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, nourishes and shapes the struggle for land rights and recognition by today’s residents of the island. The article demonstrates the fundamental linkages between struggles during the nineteenth century and contemporary race politics in Brazil.

The objectification, commercialization, and politicization of culture

The article by Merle L. Bowen, Who Owns Paradise? Afro-Brazilians and Ethnic Tourism in Brazil’s Quilombos, continues the analysis of Brazil’s quilombola communities. Rather than explore the links between contemporary and historical political struggles, however, or the impact of changing legal regimes, Bowen examines quilombo communities in the current context of global neoliberal political economy. Through a series of case studies in Bahia and São Paulo states, she examines the ways some communities have attempted to sell culture on global markets through ethnic tourism, while situated in local economies that offer little demand for those communities’ labor. By codifying and claiming intellectual property rights to their unique customs and practices, some quilombo communities have challenged the Brazilian state’s highly discriminatory incorporation of Afro-Brazilian culture into the nation-state. Yet Bowen finds that ethnic tourism does not offer a model for equitable development for most quilombo communities.

In Masquerading Africa in the Carnival of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil 1895–1905, Kim D. Butler also examines how Afro-Brazilian culture is objectified for different audiences. However, here the emphasis is not commercial, but festive and political. Butler shows how during the height of Brazilian ‘whitening’ ideology, in the decades after abolition, Bahian Carnival clubs drew on African and Afro-Brazilian motifs to develop a specifically Bahian variant of an emerging global pan-Africanism. Although these clubs were banned in 1905, Butler shows how they laid some of the groundwork for Afro-Brazilian cultural expression and political protest, which the articles gathered here show to be flourishing more than a century later.

We hope that readers will enjoy the articles in this special issue, each of which, we believe, makes a significant contribution to the literature on Afro-Brazilian politics and culture. We also give special thanks to Ronald William Bailey and the Department of African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for providing generous support that has made this project possible. We hope that these essays together demonstrate how disputes over race and citizenship in Brazil’s present are linked both to conflicts in the past and to visions of Brazil’s future, and at the same time inspire additional ethnographic and historical research along these lines.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.