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
Preface
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
This book synthesizes my research, over the years, in the “Land of Carnival” and the “Racial Paradise,” as Brazil is often commercially and exotically marketed to the rest of the world. My curiosity about Brazil started in 1982 while I was an exchange student in São Paulo. While I valued the opportunity of studying with Brazilians and being able to use the language of Luís de Camões, Machado de Assis, and José Craveirinha with such ease and facility, I was appalled by the absence of Afro-Brazilians on the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) campus, where I was with six other students from Nigeria. That was my first lesson in racial exclusion. Young and naive though we were at the time, it did not take us long to understand that we were privileged to be studying at that foremost Latin American university. Whenever we met Afro-Brazilians working in menial positions on or off campus, we were often asked questions such as “Are you diplomats?” “How did you get into USP?” “Are you on scholarship?” It was inconceivable to them that Afro-Brazilians could afford a university education or would have the intellectual preparation to sit with other Brazilians in an academic setting. To our amazement at the time, even almost one hundred years after abolition, the psychology of slavery was still very much alive in the minds of many. We could see other faces of color in the classroom, especially the Japanese, but blackness was an anomaly.
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- Afro-BraziliansCultural Production in a Racial Democracy, pp. ix - xPublisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009