Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Yoruba Orthography
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
- 1 Two Faces of Racial Democracy
- 2 Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
- 3 Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
- 4 (Un)Broken Linkages
- 5 The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
- 6 Afro-Brazilian Carnival
- 7 Film and Fragmentation
- 8 Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
- 9 The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
- 10 (Un)Transgressed Tradition
- 11 Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
- 12 Quilombo without Frontiers
- 13 Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandão
- Conclusion: The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
11 - Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Yoruba Orthography
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
- 1 Two Faces of Racial Democracy
- 2 Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
- 3 Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
- 4 (Un)Broken Linkages
- 5 The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
- 6 Afro-Brazilian Carnival
- 7 Film and Fragmentation
- 8 Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
- 9 The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
- 10 (Un)Transgressed Tradition
- 11 Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
- 12 Quilombo without Frontiers
- 13 Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandão
- Conclusion: The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora
Summary
The question of Africans' participation in Brazil is first and foremost a question of citizenship. The abolition of slavery did little or nothing to return the citizenship that the regime of chattel slavery stole from us along with our very humanity. On the contrary, the living conditions imposed on African Brazilians after the “Golden Law” of abolition stripped us of our citizenship for the second time. And since the Eurocentric elites could not tolerate the idea of a nation composed in its majority of blacks, they arranged for the arrival of immigrants recruited in Europe.
—Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin NascimentoThe notions of nation and citizenship are by nature complex since what constitutes each of these communities is defined equally by sociopolitical, cultural, and historical values that cannot be separated from the legacies of struggles to assert ownership, freedom, and eligibility to share in the distribution of national resources and benefits. The zero-sum political scenario is particularly informative to understand societies and peoples that have been historically oppressed and marginalized, such as inhabitants of the former colonies and their shifting conditions from the enslaved to the “emancipated” or from the colonized to the “postcolonial.” As the above quote by Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Nascimento affirms, the challenge for Brazil as a miscegenational society is less to ensure some form of participation by blacks in the society than to make “citizenship” an equitable right available to all those who participated in making Brazil a great nation through their travails, toils, and suffering over many years of enslavement.
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- Information
- Afro-BraziliansCultural Production in a Racial Democracy, pp. 267 - 301Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009