Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil / Edition 1

by Francine Winddance Twine

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813523651
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	10/01/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	1320L (what's this?)

About the Author

France Winddance Twine is an associate professor of international studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Vasalia: The Research Site
3 Mapping the Ideological Terrain of Racism: The Social, Sexual, Socioeconomic, and Semiotic Contours
4 Discourses in Defense of the Racial Democracy
5 Embranquecimento: Aesthetic Ideals and Resistance to Mesticagem
6 Memory: White Inflation and Willful Forgetting
7 Strategic Responses to Racism: Preserving White Supremacy
Appendix A: Interview Schedule
Appendix B: Biographical Data on Interviewees
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Karen Brodkin

Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks

This wonderfully engaging study explodes the myth of racial democracy in a pathbreaking analysis of Brazilian style.

Howard Winant

Howard Winant, author of Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons

Twine offers one of the most sophisticated analyses to date of the intransigence of Brazilian racism. Her nuanced account of the complex interplay of gender, race, and class is particularly exciting. This book will have a powerful impact not only on the field of Brazilian racial studies, but on the whole burgeoning literature on the African Diaspora.

George R. Andrews

George Reid Andrews, author of Blacks and Whites in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988

A revealing and sharply observed dissection of how racism works 'on the ground' in Brazil.