Book Projects
Longing for a Racial Democracy:
Race, Sex, and Popular Culture in Brazil
Like other ideologies of race mixture across Latin America, such as mestizaje, racial democracy functions as a national script of historically affable race mixture, which has been repeatedly produced and circulated in public discourse by the state, cultural producers, and everyday people. Argued on the basis of centuries of racial and cultural mixture during colonization and slavery, racial democracy in Brazil is the ideology that race neither informs social, political, or economic differences between racial groups nor one’s ability to socially ascend. While many attribute racial democracy’s ideological birth to Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 text, Casa-grande & senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves), this established principle of Brazilian racial harmony was first articulated in literature and visual art of the nineteenth century’s romantic period. Prior to the abolition of slavery in 1888, these articulations often depicted interracial unions between white men and black, indigenous, and mixed-race women as symbolic resolutions of ethno-racial and class conflict. Yet, little work has engaged the role of sexuality, sex, and desire in the construction of race-mixing ideology in Brazil particularly as it appears in cultural production.
Based on five years of archival research and close readings, my first book, Longing for a Racial Democracy: Interracial Intimacies and Popular Culture in Brazil re-centers sexuality, longing, and desire in its analysis of the narratives of racial democracy in Brazilian popular culture from the abolition of slavery in 1888 to the end of the Bolsonaro presidency in 2023. Situated in black queer studies, black diasporic feminisms, Latin American cultural studies, and affect studies, the book demonstrates the centrality of queerness and the abjection of blackness to narratives of racial democracy that reinforce white heteropatriarchy in Brazil. The book demonstrates how white creators reinscribe racial democracy discourse in popular culture while also centering the ways black cultural actors—performers, fictional characters, historical figures, as well as everyday consumers—resist or rework racial democracy to find belonging and pleasure. The book’s queer reading of well-known pieces of Brazilian literature, music, visual culture, and performance establishes how these interracial intimacies undergird racial democracy in popular culture and the potential for sensations of black liberation through resignification or inversion.
Still of actor Grande Otelo dressed in drag and actor Oscarito spoofing the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in the 1949 film, Carnaval no fogo. Photo credit: Atlântida Cinematográfica.
Photo of drag queen Andrezza Lamarck impersonating samba singer Clara Nunes during LGBTQ+ Pride in Salvador, Brazil, ca. 2010. Photo credit: Genilson Coutinho/Dois Terços.
Negotiating Diaspora:
Race, Modernity, and Cultural Resistance in the Luso-Atlantic
The argument of my second book project, Negotiating Diaspora: Race, Modernity, and Cultural Resistance in the Luso-Atlantic, expands on my previous research in African diaspora theory and black queer and feminist studies in the Portuguese-speaking world. My book looks at how white and black cultural producers in Brazil, Lusophone Africa, and Portugal have disputed the right to claim Africanity. I begin with showing how white writers, filmmakers, and musicians in the 1970s across the Luso-Atlantic world were deeply invested in the anti-colonial struggle in Portugal's remaining colonies on the African continent. Meanwhile, their novels, films, music, and interviews were largely dependent on a folkloric framing of Africa. Their rhetoric of a transatlantic, Lusophone racial democracy known as Lusotropicalism allowed them to stake a claim to African heritage and black popular culture via the historical intimacies of race mixture and shared colonization. The book further illustrates how these claims to Africanity by white cultural producers were representative of their collaborations with and cooptations of the writings of charismatic black African male leaders in Brazil and Lusophone Africa who, following in the footsteps of the Négritude movement, appealed to a shared African essence across the diaspora.
Negotiating Diaspora illustrates how these dynamics began to change in the 1990s with cultural interventions made by black women and black queer and trans writers, musicians, filmmakers, visual artists, and fashion designers coming into the mainstream. Challenging the imperialist erotic desire for African aesthetics through Africanity in the Luso-Atlantic world, these artists have re-negotiated the terms of relationality to make gender and sexuality central to understanding the African diaspora. In doing so, they effectively build networks with other black artists in the Portuguese-speaking world while also questioning the framework of the Luso-Atlantic as a colonial vestige. Supported by archival analysis, interviews, and close reading, the book addresses the linguistic debates of blackness and black study in the Lusophone world, of who has the right to cultural heritage in and beyond Western framings of the nation, and the fundamental role of gender and sexuality in a postcolonial, global modernity.
Photo on set of Angola's first feature film, Fez lá coragem, camarada (1977) by Ruy Duarte de Carvalho (far right). Source: Jornal de Angola, 2022.
Photo of performance at installation of Grada Kilomba's O Barco, Bienal de Artes Contemporâneas, Lisbon, Portugal, 2021. Photo credit: Bruno Simão.
Cover photo of mosaic at the base of monument to Agostinho Neto in Independence Square, Luanda, Angola.