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Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. By Livio Sansone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. viii, 248. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $18.95 paper.
This series of provocative and original essays concerning changing constructions of race in Brazil will generate considerable interest, reflection and debate. Situated at the nexus between the literature on race in Latin America and cultural studies work on the Black Diaspora, the text provides a wide-ranging account of Brazilian encounters with "black globalization." The author announces that one of the goals of the book involves investigating the "ethnicization of Brazil" (p. 4)-an increased interest in ethnic symbols and the promotion of Afro-Brazilian identities. However, Sansone argues that these trends have not led to racial polarization. Rather, they have been structured by specifically Brazilian forms of race relations characterized by fluid, situational identifications and the absence of solid, bounded identities. The title of the book suggests that in Brazil, being or becoming black does not mean belonging to an ethnic group.
Individual chapters treat a series of distinct...