Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil, and: Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown (review)

Poverty, race, and persistent inequality are major issues facing analysts of Brazilian politics and society. These two recent books take on these questions in interesting and often novel ways.

In Blackness Without Ethnicity, Livio Sansone offers an insightful take on one of the perennial questions of Brazilian studies: why have Afro-Brazilians failed to mobilize politically around race in any effective way, given the discrimination they suffer in Brazil’s economic and political systems? Sansone’s answer is that Afro-Brazilians cannot see themselves as a distinct community with a shared fate, given the incorporation of many typically “black” activities into the Brazilian national culture. (I thank John Fienno for help with this issue.) This has had the effect of delinking race and ethnicity and preventing effective political mobilization.

Brazilian life, Sansone argues, is divided into hard and soft “slices,” which deal with race very differently. In “hard” places, such as the work environment or certain types of courting activities, race has a major function in defining social roles in ways that make life more difficult for nonwhites. In “soft” places, race operates in such a way as to provide Afro-Brazilians with certain advantages, or at least very limited barriers to success (52–53). As a result, nonwhite Brazilians behave very differently in different types of places, highlighting or covering elements of the black body, for example, in order to achieve personal goals in public space. Afro-Brazilians engage in a series of both macro- and microlevel strategies, not just to get by but to succeed and become leaders in many different areas of Brazilian society. For Sansone, this argument aims to move the study of race in Brazil away from the bipolar model driven by U.S. and European models of race and ethnicity and toward a subtler and more nuanced model of racialized interactions that better describes social life in Brazil and much of the Americas.

This description of the book, however, does not do justice to the richness of the author’s argument. Drawing on data from interviews and ethnographic research in different parts of the Salvador metropolitan area, analyses of Afro-Brazilian social activities, and comparisons of the African diasporal communities in Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, and the Netherlands, Sansone illustrates Afro-Brazilians’ social strategies by showing how members of this group insert themselves simultaneously into Brazil’s national images and myths of race and into the broader “Black Atlantic” transnational community. The evidence presented in each of the main empirical chapters offers support for the author’s contentions.

Sansone makes an important theoretical contribution to the issue of race and political mobilization in Brazil that should open up considerable space not just for rethinking the role of race in Brazilian society, but also for understanding the political role of race in other contexts around the world. By decoupling race and ethnicity, Sansone uses Brazil to examine how different factors could lead to mobilization. The only downside to Sansone’s argument is that he could have defined ethnicity more clearly and elaborated more on his ideas about ethnicity in the context of existing debates about race, ethnicity, and nationality.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the broad examination of how individuals collectively live out racial and ethnic identities in different political contexts. Sansone compares black youth culture in Bahia and elements of black culture in Rio de Janeiro and Amsterdam, offering an invaluable picture of how groups without many resources or the means to travel extensively tap into a burgeoning global culture to transform the identity of their own social groups, as well as the political and...