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Sansone, Livio. Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 256 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $21.95.
Goldstein, Donna. Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index, 379 pp.; hardcover $60, paperback $24.95.
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 AfroBrazilians 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 racializecl interactions that better describes social life in Brazil and much of the Americas.
This description of the book, however,...