Blackness Without Ethnicity: Construction Race in Brazil

Drawing on 15 years of research in Brazil, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares the more fluid, complex contemporary Latin American conceptions of race to US and European notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable black-white ethnicities. Sansone argues that understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions that inadequately describe racial difference. He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.

Author Biography: Livio Sansone is Vice Director of Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos at Universidade Candido Mendes in Brazil.