Afro-Brazilian citizenship and the politics of history

Abstract

The politics of race, citizenship, and history have long been intertwined in Brazil. After the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888, Brazilian governments attempted to relegate blackness and Afro-Brazilian people to Brazil’s past, through policies of immigration andmixture explicitly focused on branqueamento (whitening) (Cunha 1985; Schwarcz 1999; Skidmore 1993). In the mid-twentieth century, branqueamentowaned, as major Brazilian intellectuals and governing institutions fostered an ideology of ‘racial democracy’ – or harmonious racial mixture – as the depoliticizing, and supposedly deracializing cornerstone of Brazilian nationalism (Andrews 1996; Guimarães 2001; Hanchard 1994; Seyferth 1996). And in the early twenty-first century, both branqueamento and racial democracy have lost the hegemony they once held as ideologies linking race, citizenship, history, and the future of Brazil. Though long present, Afro-Brazilian activism gained force on the national scene after the end of the military regime in 1985 and celebrations marking the centenary of the abolition of slavery in 1988. New laws aimed at redressing racial inequality were placed on the books, communities identifying as quilombolas (maroon-descended) began to proliferate in the rural interior, and politicized Afro-Brazilian identified popular culture came to enjoy wide national appeal. Each year more of the population identifies as black (Guimarães 2012; Telles 2006) and few national political figures speak publicly of racial democracy – or of whitening. The politics of race, citizenship, and history in Brazil were and are intertwined, but in surprising and fast-changing ways. This special issue of African and Black Diaspora: an International Journal features articles by leading scholars conducting research on these transforming relations among history, race, and citizenship in Brazil. We bring together these articles – by anthropologists, political scientists, and historians, from Brazil, Canada, and the United States, and joining ethnographic and archival research – in the hope of helping shape the contours of future scholarly research on race politics in Brazil. The literature on race, history, and citizenship in Brazil is vast, but it is marked by key concerns that we hope to illuminate in new ways in this special issue. For the last few decades, much of the Brazilian literature on race has focused on contentious debates over new laws and institutional initiatives aimed at redressing Brazil’s racial inequality. Those debates have centered, to a large degree, on the ways in which these new initiatives might reshape a Brazilian racial order that was often extolled for its ambiguity during the twentieth century. The essays gathered here engage these contentious debates, but we approach them laterally. Together, these articles show how recent changes to ethnoracial identification and race politics in Brazil result less from changes to the law than from