Book Project

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.

Cover photo of mosaic at the base of monument to Agostinho Neto in Independence Square, Luanda, Angola.