The book covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the sixteenth century to the present day, integrating history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies.

This volume covers the gamut of inter-ethnic experiences throughout the Portuguese-speaking world, from the 16th century to the present day, integrating history, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies.

This is the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on the increasingly important and controversial subject of race relations in Brazil. North American scholars of race relations frequently turn to Brazil for comparisons, since its history has many key similarities to that of the United States. Brazilians have commonly compared themselves with North Americans, and have traditionally argued that race relations in Brazil are far more harmonious because the country encourages race mixture rather than formal or informal segregation. More recently, however, scholars have challenged this national myth, seeking to show that race relations are characterized by exclusion, not inclusion, and that fair-skinned Brazilians continue to be privileged and hold a disproportionate share of wealth and power. In this sociological and demographic study, Edward Telles seeks to understand the reality of race in Brazil and how well it squares with these traditional and revisionist views of race relations. He shows that both schools have it partly right--that there is far more miscegenation in Brazil than in the United States--but that exclusion remains a serious problem. He blends his demographic analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, history, and political theory to try to "understand" the enigma of Brazilian race relations--how inclusiveness can coexist with exclusiveness. The book also seeks to understand some of the political pathologies of buying too readily into unexamined ideas about race relations. In the end, Telles contends, the traditional myth that Brazil had harmonious race relations compared with the United States encouraged the government to do almost nothing to address its shortcomings.

This book explores the significance of gender in shaping the Portuguese-speaking world from the Middle Ages to the present. Sixteen scholars from disciplines including history, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, literature and cultural studies analyse different configurations and literary representations of women's rights and patriarchal constraints. Unstable constructions of masculinity, femininity, queer, homosexual, bisexual, and transgender identities and behaviours are placed in historical context. The volume pioneers in gendering the Portuguese expansion in Africa, Asia, and the New World and pays particular attention to an inclusive account of indigenous agencies. Contributors are: Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, Vanda Anastácio, Francisco Bethencourt, Dorothée Boulanger, Rosa Maria dos Santos Capelão, Maria Judite Mário Chipenembe, Gily Coene, Philip J. Havik, Ben James, Anna M. Klobucka, Chia Longman, Amélia Polónia, Ana Maria S. A. Rodrigues, Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, Ana Cristina Santos, and João Paulo Silvestre.

Modern perceptions of race across much of the Global South are indebted to the Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre, who in works such as The Masters and the Slaves claimed that Portuguese colonialism produced exceptionally benign and tolerant race relations. This volume radically reinterprets Freyre’s Luso-tropicalist arguments and critically engages with the historical complexity of racial concepts and practices in the Portuguese-speaking world. Encompassing Brazil as well as Portuguese-speaking societies in Africa, Asia, and even Portugal itself, it places an interdisciplinary group of scholars in conversation to challenge the conventional understanding of twentieth-century racialization, proffering new insights into such controversial topics as human plasticity, racial amalgamation, and the tropes and proxies of whiteness.

This book addresses different dimensions of cosmopolitanism in the Portuguese-speaking world which have caused much debate, such as migration and globalisation. The volume includes contributions from leading specialists in History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Anthropology and Political Sciences. It focuses on specific processes in Brazil, Portugal, West Africa, Angola, and other parts of the world, from the sixteenth century to the present. Central topics are intercontinental trading elites, the cultural impact of forced and voluntary migration, the republic of letters, the possibilities created by freemasonry and liberalism, the adaptation of the Azorean Holy Ghost Feast to the United States, international links of conservative politicians, the international projection of the new Angolan elite, architecture and urban planning. Contributors are: Vanda Anastácio, Cátia Antunes, Paulo Arruda, Francisco Bethencourt, Toby Green, Philip J. Havik, David R. M. Irving, João Leal, Giovanni Leoni, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, António Costa Pinto, and Phillip Rothwell.

Situates the cultures of Portuguese-speaking Africa within the postcolonial, global era.

A groundbreaking history of racism Racisms is the first comprehensive history of racism, from the Crusades to the twentieth century. Demonstrating that there is not one continuous tradition of racism, Francisco Bethencourt shows that racism preceded any theories of race and must be viewed within the prism and context of social hierarchies and local conditions. In this richly illustrated book, Bethencourt argues that in its various aspects, all racism has been triggered by political projects monopolizing specific economic and social resources. Racisms focuses on the Western world, but opens comparative views on ethnic discrimination and segregation in Asia and Africa. Bethencourt looks at different forms of racism, and explores instances of enslavement, forced migration, and ethnic cleansing, while analyzing how practices of discrimination and segregation were defended. This is a major interdisciplinary work that moves away from ideas of linear or innate racism and recasts our understanding of interethnic relations.

Developing the concept of 'disobedient knowledge', this book provides new perspectives on activism and everyday struggles against racism and bordering. Drawing on empirical material from distinct contexts in Northern, Western and Southern Europe, the chapters explore how different kinds of (b)orders are challenged and possibly also maintained in everyday antiracism, activism and struggles against borders. The book examines resistance and disobedience in relation to borders, social orders, conventional practices and hegemonic discourses. It underscores the importance of studying racism and bordering as intertwined phenomena. With a focus on the historical layers of resistance, disobedient practices and ways of building shared struggles, the book provides invaluable knowledge about postcolonial Europe and its future possibilities.

Finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize A Best Translation of the Year at World Literature Today That Hair is a family album of sorts that touches upon the universal subjects of racism, feminism, colonialism, immigration, identity and memory. “The story of my curly hair,” says Mila, the narrator of Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s autobiographically inspired tragicomedy, “intersects with the story of at least two countries and, by extension, the underlying story of the relations among several continents: a geopolitics.” Mila is the Luanda-born daughter of a black Angolan mother and a white Portuguese father. She arrives in Lisbon at the tender age of three, and feels like an outsider from the jump. Through the lens of young Mila’s indomitably curly hair, her story interweaves memories of childhood and adolescence, family lore spanning four generations, and present-day reflections on the internal and external tensions of a European and African identity. In layered and luscious prose, That Hair enriches and deepens a global conversation, challenging in necessary ways our understanding of racism, feminism, and the double inheritance of colonialism, not yet fifty years removed from Angola’s independence. It’s the story of coming of age as a black woman in a nation at the edge of Europe that is also rapidly changing, of being considered an outsider in one’s own country, and the impossibility of “returning” to a homeland one doesn’t in fact know.