From the Editors

Erratum: As a result of a most regrettable series of production errors in Race/Ethnicity 4:1 (Autumn 2010), a significant paragraph was omitted from Lorraine Leu’s article, Performing Race and Gender in Brazil: Karim Ainouz’s Madame Satã (2002). The omission begins on the bottom of page 84 and continues through to page 85. Here follows the complete section, produced in its entirety as it should have been presented originally. Our apologies to Dr. Leu and to our readers:

There are three moments in the film when João performs feminized versions of whiteness, blackness and mulataness that are particularly eloquent as regards the constructed character of both race and gender. They also speak to the importance of appearance in traditional Brazilian racial taxonomy, as noted previously with regard to enthusiasm for the whitening ideal. Peter Fry has commented that the tendency to use the term “appearance” instead of “race” in Brazil is particularly appropriate, given the way in which “race” is socially and historically defined there in different ways in different places (2005, 184, 190). Indeed, João appears able to take on and deploy racial identities at will in these three performances. The first takes place in a cabaret outside of Lapa where he works backstage. Opening the film is a shot of João’s gaze as he sings in French, followed by that of the white, male patrons of the cabaret. We are momentarily misled into thinking that he is performing for them, but it is soon revealed that the performer on stage is white and female. João is enthralled by her performance, and he mimes the words of the song she sings and mimics her bodily gestures offstage. Close-ups emphasize that her body is the object both of João’s gaze and the bar’s clientele, but their receptions of her performance differ radically. The performance is a recycling of the story of Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights, a story that in its original version concerned itself in part with how the survival of nation was ensured through erotic encounters (Ouyang, 2003). It has been recounted and adapted many times in Western music, literature and film, and in the latter has given rise to a whole genre of Hollywood B films based on exotic fantasy. Its performance here recalls patriarchal fetishization, shifting the mulata obsession to an orientalist fantasy of the other. João does not, therefore, engage in just a performance of whiteness, as represented in the cabaret singer, Vitória, but in a performance of whiteness performing orientalism. João’s palimpsestic performance of her performance of the sexualized, exotic other both queers it and invests it with a further racialized dimension. In so doing João momentarily acknowledges and transforms the cultural logic of imperialist heteronormativity. He disrupts the expectations of the genre, at the same time as he brings further ideologies and discourses surrounding race and gender in Brazil to bear upon it.

Wherever food is produced, picked, processed, packed, or purveyed, low-wage workers of color predominate in the hard, dangerous jobs that feed the world. Cheap labor and rampant exploitation of food workers within a toxic framework of abiding racial structures span the global community. And wherever food is sought by those who can least afford it, those same racial structures prevent or prohibit access to decent, nutritious, and affordable food. If all people are to be well fed with good, healthy, and affordable food, there can be no avoidance of addressing the fundamental structural racism at the heart of the food system. In short, race and food are inextricably related.

A just food movement must be grounded within the framework of racial justice. It must be organized with the leadership of farmers and food workers of color—immigrants, refugees, and African Americans who are the mainstay workforce of the food system and, concurrently, among the most vulnerable of food consumers. Countless low-wage food workers and consumers of color, in short, cannot afford or do not have access to decent, affordable food, while producers of color struggle to keep their land and market their production.

The U...