White Space, Black Place: The Transnational Imagined Community of the Black Press in São Paulo and Chicago, 1900–50

Despite the vast comparative research on slavery between Brazil and the United States, little has been done to extend this comparative approach to the post-abolitionary period. This paper is part of a dissertation project that reevaluates the development of Black urban culture in Chicago and São Paulo through a transnational perspective. Focusing on the black press, or press published by both afro-descendants communities, this paper analyzes how African-Americans and Afro-Paulistas contested the spatial segregation policies emanated from the state through the construction of a transnational imagined community of the black press. In the case of Chicago, the Chicago Real Estate Board prohibited African Americans from using, occupying, buying, leasing, or receiving property in those areas. In São Paulo, the elite’s project to organize urban space in a changing society undergoing industrialization in the first decades of the twentieth-century was closely linked to sanitation. Both elites associated blacks to promiscuity and disease; consequently, the solution came from discriminating, classifying and controlling the population through the creation of specific legislation that would racialized space in the city. I argue that both afro-descendants communities were part of transnational imagined community that redefined modernity in their own terms: black modernity. This study is part of a growing body of research on transnational history. In using this new historiographical trend for the study on the social construction of race in the Americas, this project will contribute to future research on similar topics.