Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Yoruba Orthography
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
- 1 Two Faces of Racial Democracy
- 2 Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
- 3 Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
- 4 (Un)Broken Linkages
- 5 The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
- 6 Afro-Brazilian Carnival
- 7 Film and Fragmentation
- 8 Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
- 9 The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
- 10 (Un)Transgressed Tradition
- 11 Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
- 12 Quilombo without Frontiers
- 13 Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandão
- Conclusion: The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Introduction: Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Yoruba Orthography
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
- 1 Two Faces of Racial Democracy
- 2 Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
- 3 Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
- 4 (Un)Broken Linkages
- 5 The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
- 6 Afro-Brazilian Carnival
- 7 Film and Fragmentation
- 8 Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
- 9 The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
- 10 (Un)Transgressed Tradition
- 11 Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
- 12 Quilombo without Frontiers
- 13 Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandão
- Conclusion: The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Summary
I sing to Palmares without complex or jealousy of Virgil, Homer or Camões for my song is a cry of a people in plain struggle for freedom.
—Solano TrindadeBrazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory. It is a country that has been able to maintain fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy for many centuries. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of an exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power. A democracy that subjugates a section of the population by virtue of the color of their skin cannot be said to be in the interest of that segment of the population but the perpetrator of segregation and dehumanization. In Racism in a Racial Democracy, France Winddance Twine highlights the word shock as in the shock of racism, to problematize a dual feeling of action and nonaction on the part of Afro-Brazilians in the face of racism. She suggests that in order to contain the shock of racism, Afro-Brazilians have become silenced, coerced, and self-secluded. As a result, the more volatile act of challenging racism openly and directly is traded for “harmonious relations” thereby leaving white supremacy untouched. At work in this truism is what I call “vital force”: that ancestral strength and energy with which Afro-Brazilians cope and regenerate themselves through creative and cultural strategies that have their political implications even when they are not forcefully or apparently articulated.
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- Afro-BraziliansCultural Production in a Racial Democracy, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009