Radical Worlds: The Afro-Brazilian Experience

Throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the uses and meanings of "race," "color," and "racism" in Brazil underwent significant transformation in the national imagination, and thus reshaped the relationship that Brazilians had with democracy and citizenship. The implementation of affirmative action policies in the country's public universities and the growth of the relevance of Black intellectuals, artists and activists, in the academic world, in political parties, in the public sphere as well as in the art scene, shook the old myth of Brazilian racial democracy and changed how Brazil thought of itself. Brazil had been held up the world over, as an example of how racial harmony could give rise to ajoyful, mixed-race, pluralistic nation. But now Brazilians had to face the fact that they lived in a country of structural racism and extreme social inequality, where the majority of the population is black. The rise of the far right under the leadership of Bolsonaro-who represents the political alternative to white supremacy-has made the civil and popular movements organized by Afro-Brazilians even more relevant to the fate of democracy in Latin America.This dossier intends to offer a tiny picture of these changes. The interview with Sueli Carneiro, one of the most influential Black Brazilian feminist thinkers, by Daniela Vieira and Mariléa Almeida, brings attention toward the transformation that the civil and popular struggle of the Black Brazilian movement has brought to Brazilian society and the challenges still to be faced. Affirmative action policies, one of the pivotal triumphs of the Black Brazilian movement, are briefly analyzed in the Campos and Junior article, "One Policy, Two Contexts: Characteristics and Particularities of Brazilian Affirmative Action." This struggle could not have been imagined, nor possible, without the resilience of black youth from the peripheries of Brazilian metropolitan cities. The photo essay by award-winning cartoonist Marcelo D'Salete gives us a look into their everyday lives. In the last two decades, Afro-Brazilian arts and literature have blossomed in these same peripheries. However, the tradition of Afro-Brazilian letters goes back to the nineteenth century, as shown in the work of the father of Brazilian modern literature,Joaquim Machado de Assis. Sidney Chaloub reviews the latest English translation of his great oeuvre, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The elegant poetry of Eliana Marques join