Constellations of Inequality: Space, Race & Utopia in Brazil by Sean T. Mitchell (review)

On the northeastern tip of Brazil's mainland, just a few kilometers across the water from the capital city of São Luís (Maranhão), lies a municipality called Alcântara, a place where Brazilian state sovereignty gets very blurry. Alcântara is home to a space base used to launch satellite rockets—used, that is, by the Brazilian air force, by private Brazilian aeronautic companies, and by the Ukrainian government—groups with diverging aspirations for Brazil's future. (Brazil ended its partnership with Ukraine, but, as of a March 18th, 2019 agreement between Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro, it has authorized the U.S. to launch vehicles from the base). More interesting still is the historical and present-day relationship between the base and the rural, maritime Afro-Brazilian villages—now called quilombolos—that live in close proximity to it, some of which were displaced onto government-designed agrovilas during the early days of the base's construction. This is the ethnographic milieu that Sean Mitchel keeps squarely within his frame throughout this insightful book.

Mitchell's objective is to show how the tensions and alliances among the base's various stakeholder groups are shaped by Brazil's broader history of racial and class inequality. In fact, his main object of study is the subjectivization of inequality per se, a topic that leads Mitchell to enter important debates in anthropology (on the so-called "ontological turn"), Brazilian studies (on the apparent lack of cross-class racial solidarities), and Western Marxism (on E.P. Tompson's thesis concerning the contingent emergence of class consciousness). Mitchell proves a good guide to these debates—his discussions are succinct, but meaty—and the positions he stakes out are clear and well-supported by his empirical material.

Linking Mitchell's engagements in these debates are several broad claims about the transformation of inequality's reckoning in Brazil, claims that revolve around two concepts: mimetic convergence and complementary hierarchy. Mimetic convergence refers to a framework for reckoning inequality in the present by plotting differences along a utopic trajectory in which those differences fade away. During much of the twentieth century, racial inequalities were imagined through a utopia of whitening. Inequalities between Brazil and the global north were similarly subject to ideas about Brazilian science and economy catching up, an aspiration that satellite rocket development helped to sustain. The neoliberal 1990s disrupted these utopias, ushering in a new era in which inequalities could be read in terms of non-convergent futures. The rural Afro-Brazilian communities surrounding the base adopted a new (post-convergent) model of ethno-racial advancement as quilombolas (maroon communities) whose Afro-Brazilian identity and communal land ownership came to justify their struggles against displacement by an expanding base. The military nationalists in the Brazilian air force regard the quilombola identity as a fiction drummed up by foreign NGOs who would use these communities to impede Brazilian sovereignty. For the same reason, they and others circulate conspiracy theories of U.S. involvement in the disastrous explosion of Brazil's VLS rocket (August 22nd, 2003).

Mitchel offers the term "complementary hierarchy" to denote another way of reckoning differences through an ideology of interdependence that "sustains inequalities through relations and conceptions of unequal reciprocity between the poor and rich . . ." including patron-client relations and Brazil's classical model of the three complementary races (16). This too, he argues, has been declining since the 1990s, perhaps owing to thirteen years of progressive policies under the Workers' Party (2003–2016), as well as the proliferation of rights-based social mobilization (e.g. quilombola activism) during this period.

These two categories are useful for understanding this epochal shift in the reckoning of inequality in Brazil and elsewhere. But Mitchell draws these categories as broad as he does not only to illuminate such shifts but to allow for synchronic comparison of variants within these categories, such that he can, for instance, attend to the coexistence among different types of mimetic convergence...