Identities in Flux

Race, Migration, and Citizenship in Brazil

By Niyi Afolabi

Subjects: Latin American Studies, Black Studies, Cultural Studies, History, Literature, Postcolonial Studies
Series: SUNY series, Afro-Latinx Futures
Paperback : 9781438482507, 296 pages, July 2021
Hardcover : 9781438482491, 296 pages, February 2021

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Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Afro-Brazilian Diaspora: From Slavery to Migrating Identities

2. Zumbi dos Palmares: Relocating History, Film, and Print

3. Xica da Silva: Sexualized and Miscegenated Body Politics

4. Manuel Querino: African Contributions to Brazil

5. Jorge Amado's Poetic License: Fictionalizing History

6. Black Orpheus: Regeneration of Greco-Yoruba Mythologies

7. City of God: The Ghettoization of Violence

Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Reevaluates the significance of iconic Afro-Brazilian figures, from slavery to post-abolition.

Description

Drawing on historical and cultural approaches to race relations, Identities in Flux examines iconic Afro-Brazilian figures and theorizes how they have been appropriated to either support or contest a utopian vision of multiculturalism. Zumbi dos Palmares, the leader of a runaway slave community in the seventeenth century, is shown not as an anti-Brazilian rebel but as a symbol of Black consciousness and anti-colonial resistance. Xica da Silva, an eighteenth-century mixed-race enslaved woman who "married" her master and has been seen as a licentious mulatta, questions gendered stereotypes of so-called racial democracy. Manuel Querino, whose ethnographic studies have been ignored and virtually unknown for much of the twentieth century, is put on par with more widely known African American trailblazers such as W. E. B. Du Bois. Niyi Afolabi draws out the intermingling influences of Yoruba and Classical Greek mythologies in Brazilian representations of the carnivalesque Black Orpheus, while his analysis of City of God focuses on the growing centrality of the ghetto, or favela, as a theme and producer of culture in the early twenty-first-century Brazilian urban scene. Ultimately, Afolabi argues, the identities of these figures are not fixed, but rather inhabit a fluid terrain of ideological and political struggle, challenging the idealistic notion that racial hybridity has eliminated racial discrimination in Brazil.

Niyi Afolabi is Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author and editor of many books, including Ilê Aiyê in Brazil and the Reinvention of Africa and Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy.