Diasporic Connections: How Afro-Brazilians Use African American Culture to Challenge Racial Exceptionalism

Reighan Gillam shows how Afro-Brazilians draw on African American history and culture to argue that Brazil is typical, not exceptional, emphasizing common experiences across the African diaspora. There is a common narrative of Brazilian racial exceptionalism—that Brazilian society is more racially harmonious than other multiracial countries or, more simply, that Brazil is less racist than the United States. Many Brazilians even point to anti-Black violence in the United States to exceptionalize their own country, minimizing the structural barriers facing Afro-Brazilians and the degree to which racial inequality and prejudice permeate Brazilian society. Reighan Gillam offers a new perspective by showing how Afro-Brazilians draw on African American history and culture to argue that Brazil is typical, not exceptional, emphasizing common experiences across the African diaspora. Diasporic Connections explores how Afro-Brazilians find parallels with African Americans in performance, films, print culture, and everyday conversation. Gillam considers cases such as a staging of Katori Hall’s play The Mountaintop and the appearance of Black Power figures at lectures and in films. She examines how Afro-Brazilian activists seek to instill the energy of the Black freedom struggle into local social movements, underscoring that lessons from the United States are applicable to Brazil while insisting on their own agency. Discussions of Black representation on television, the visibility of mixed-race people, and the shared experiences of Black women across national boundaries all call Brazilian exceptionalism into question. Based on textual analysis, ethnography, and close interpretation of key works, this book highlights how Afro-Brazilians reframe Brazil’s racial politics as unexceptional and reveals the surprising ways that diasporic ties are forged.