Fall 2005

ANT 391 • Brazil: Race in the Americas

Course Description

Focusing on the contemporary debate about race in Brazil, this course first contextualizes such debate by drawing attention to analogous discussions - academic and political - taking place in other nation-states of the Americas. United States, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Colombia, for example, will feature among the nations whose policies and practices related to race will be discussed. In the second half of the course, we will examine varied academic and activist perspectives on how Brazilian social relations conform to and depart from racialized patterns in the Americas. Multidisciplinary in its focus, this seminar seeks to elaborate a critique of hegemonic racial knowledge in Brazil based on which social justice can be achieved. In this sense, we will not only interrogate the class, gender, and sexuality dimensions of racial discourse and praxis, but also reflect on alternatives to existing racialized social hierarchies.

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