Overview

An examination of how racial and gender hierarchies are intertwined in Brazil

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9781592133512

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Reviews

This is an extremely thoughtful and challenging study of the overlapping and often confusing histories of identity, race, and gender in Brazil...This book has considerable appeal as history and theory...Highly Recommended. Choice More persuasive...is Larkin Nascimento's informative account of the myriad institutional forms through which Afro-Brazilians mobilized over the course of the 1900s very few of whom called for a return to their African heritage...Also useful is a chapter on the psychology of Brazilian racism. Journal of Latin American Studies This book presents the reader with new and original scholarship both in comparative racial studies and comparative feminist thought. Nascimento also presents an incalculable historical analysis of the growth and dynamic nature of the Afro-Brazilian protest movement in the twentieth-century. J. Michael Turner, Hunter College The book is explicitly devoted to making a huge theoretical and historical review of the position of black people in Brazil, as well as of their fights for justice and recognition, and in this it has been particularly successful. Placing herself on these crossroads, blessed by Esu, the author produces an intellectual position complimented by her political engagement, and makes a political statement by means of her intellectual criticism. This intellectual enterprise is of great importance at this moment when Brazil is undergoing unprecedented progressive polarization regarding the implementation of affirmative action policies. The European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Elisa Larkin Nascimento's work is part of a new generation of thought on Brazilian blacks that does not forget to criticize European universalism or to question the presumptions of whiteness. Placing the issue of identity at the center of her analysis, she is adamant: Identity takes its place not only in theory but also in concrete social reality. And it is precisely the demonstration of this point that The Sorcery of Color offers us. Here is described the refusal of African descendant identity to be dissolved by the provisions of inculcation into cultural homogeneity. It is a book to be read, indeed, as a political warning against procedures of racism that are grounded in an invisible ethnic oneness that, while pretending to accept differences, always goes back to the standards of idolatry of the absolute West implied in the white paradigm. Muniz Sodre, President, National Library of Brazil

Author Information

Elisa Larkin Nascimento is Director of IPEAFRO Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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