This introductory survey explores the Afro-Brazilian experience in this multi-racial society of majority African descent. Ranked fifth in the world in total population, Brazil has the largest number of people of African descent to be found outside of the continent of Africa. Afro-Brazilians long constituted the majority of the population and even today forty eight percent of Brazilians declare themselves to be of non-white descent of one sort or another. Moreover, African culture, music, and religiosity have long played a fundamental role in defining Brazilian society and culture.
In the late sixteenth century, Brazil was the pioneer in implanting a system of plantation agriculture based on African slavery. Over the next three hundred years, Brazil imported more Africans as slaves than any other region in the western hemisphere. It was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888, a full twenty-five years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. Despite slavery, however, Brazil never established a system of legal segregation like the United States. Indeed, Brazilians have long prided themselves for the absence of racial polarization in their society. Many have even claimed, over the years, that their country was a "racial democracy" although universities and the government have recently turned to support policies of affirmative action.
A brief historical introduction is followed by a primary focus on issues of color, culture, and racial identity in twentieth century Brazil. It will examine the peculiarities of Brazilian racism such as the celebration of miscegenation, the concept of "whitening," and the "myth of racial democracy." It will also explore forms of Afro-Brazilian influence (religious, musical, and cultural), power, and resistance. Particular emphasis is placed, throughout, on the wonderful variety of musical genres associated with the Afro-Brazilian inheritance, whether as aesthetic accomplishment, a form the narrating of the history of Africans and their descendants in Brazil, or as a source of commentary on the social and racial realities of the country.
The Brazilian case will be compared throughout with the Afro-North American experience in the bi-racial majority-white United States. The course seeks to foster, above all, a dialogue between Afro-North American and Afro-Brazilian experience and perspectives. It does so by placing both within a broad and comprehensive vision of the African New World diaspora.
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