Blackness Without Ethnicity draws on fifteen years of his 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 dominate 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.Introduction: An Afro-Latin Paradox? Ambiguous Ethnic Lines, Sharp Class Divisions, and a Vital Black Culture Negro Parents, Black Children: Work, Color, and Generational Differences From Africa to Afro: Uses and Abuses of Africa in Brazil The Local and Global in Today's Afro-Bahia Funk in Bahia and Rio: Local Versions of a Global Phenomena The Internationalization of Black Culture: A Comparison of Lower-Class Youth in Brazil and the Netherlands The Place of Brazil in the Black Atlantic
'Streets ahead of what is currently being published in the field.' - Paul Gilroy, Yale University
'Ground-breaking work' - Ed Telles, UCLA
Sansone's book offers a fresh, unique, insightful, and highly controversial perspective... Taken together, the essays make a stron. case against the analytical ethno-centrism that characterizes much comparative work on race in Brazil. - Mara Loveman, American Journal of Sociology
LIVIO SANSONE is Vice Director of the Centro de Estudos Afro-Asiaticos at the Universidade Candido Mendes in Brazil. This is the largest researclҬ