Settler colonialism and/in (urban) Brazil: black and indigenous resistances to the logic of elimination

Abstract

ABSTRACT How does elimination work in Brazil? After a brief history of miscegenation as assimilation/elimination, this article addresses this question through the experiences of one urban indigenous group (Aldeia Maracanã) and one urban Afro-descendant quilombo (Sacopã) in Rio de Janeiro. Based on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017, the article traces the continuities of settler colonialism in independent Brazil, including the multicultural turn of the 1988 Constitution. I centre the lived experiences and struggles of the two groups, whose intersecting politics are caught within the inescapability of being ‘within Empire’ while having to imagine a politics outside of it (Simpson 2014). I then contribute to Settler Colonial Theory from this perspective, challenging its land-labour binary, for Black and Indigenous peoples have both been affected by processes of elimination, dispossession, labour exploitation, and exclusion (racism). Moreover, miscegenation/assimilation has not been merely ‘a kind of death’, as Patrick Wolfe has portrayed it (Wolfe, 2006). Miscegenation has also functioned as the space from which indigenous and black peoples have resurged, survived, and thrived. When we engage critically with the political options available to these groups within settler colonialism, we are forced to ask: What does it mean to talk about de-colonisation in Brazil?