Blackness Without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil

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Blackness without Ethnicity draws on 15 years of Livio Sansone’s research in Bahia, Rio Suriname and Amsterdam. Sansone uses his findings to explore the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares these Latin American conceptions of race to dominant notions of race that are defined by a black-white polarity and clearly identifiable ethnicities, formulations he sees as highly influenced by the US and, to a lesser degree, western Europe. Sansone argues that understanding more complex and ambiguous notions of culture and identity will expand the international discourse on race and move it away from American-dominated notions that are not adequate to describe racial difference in other countries (and also in the countries where the notions originated). He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.