1st Edition

African Diaspora in Brazil History, Culture and Politics

Edited By Fassil Demissie Copyright 2014
    192 Pages
    by Routledge

    192 Pages 2 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The term 'Black Atlantic' was coined to describe the social, cultural and political space that emerged out of the experience of slavery, exile, oppression, exploitation and resistance. This volume seeks to recast a new map of the 'Black Atlantic' beyond the Anglophone Atlantic zone by focusing on Brazil as a social and cultural space born out of the Atlantic slave trade.

    The contributors draw from the recently reinvigorated scholarly debates which have shifted inquiry from the explicit study of cultural 'survival' and 'acculturation' towards an emphasis on placing Africans and their descendants at the center of their own histories. Going beyond the notion of cultural 'survival' or 'creolization', the contributors explore different sites of power and resistance, gendered cartographies, memory, and the various social and cultural networks and institutions that Africans and their descendants created and developed in Brazil. This book illuminates the linkages, networks, disjunctions, sense of collective consciousness, memory and cultural imagination among the African-descended populations in Brazil.

    This book was originally published as a special issue of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal. 

    1. Introduction Fassil Demissie

    2. Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil Julio Cesar de Tavares

    3. Retaking the Middle Passage: glimpses of a modern African diaspora in Brazil Wangui Kimari

    4. Afro-Brazilian poetry: a laboratory of identity Cyril Vettorato

    5. Blackness in movement: identifying with capoeira Angola in and out of Brazil Scott Head and Heloisa Gravina

    6. The jogo de capoeira and the fallacy of ‘creole’ cultural forms T.J. Desch Obi

    7. A Bença: The Blessings of the Bando de Teatro Olodum Cheryl Sterling

    8. Food and spirits: religion, gender, and identity in the ‘African’ cuisine of Northeast Brazil Allan Charles Dawson

    9. Black leaders and their concept of freedom in nineteenth century northeast Brazil Tshombe Miles

    10. The struggle for black land rights in Brazil: an insider's view on quilombos and the quilombo land movement Merle L. Bowen

    11. Race talk in a public high school in Salvador Bahia: discourses of power and resistance Jenifer Crawford-Lima, Jadiel Navarro Lima, Luís Carlos Ferreiro and Adilbênia Freire Machado

    Biography

    Fassil Demissie, Ph.D is a faculty member in the Department of Public Policy at DePaul University, USA. He is currently the Co-Editor of African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, and is the author of Colonial Architecture and Urbanism in Africa: Intertwined and Contested Histories (2012).