Abstract
In the mid-1970s, as Brazil’s dictatorship entered a period of decompression, a range of black activist organizations emerged across Brazil’s major cities, forming the basis of a new “black movement.” Breaking with longstanding attempts by earlier black thinkers to find the anti-racist potentials in national ideologies of racial inclusiveness, members of the emerging movimento negro denounced the dictatorship’s repressive use of ideas of racial harmony to silence race-based dissent and to maintain control over an essentially “colonized” black population. In so doing, members of this movement expressed the conviction that they were coming to true political consciousness—one that had eluded earlier generations of black thinkers, inhibiting effective political action. Yet even as participants in this moment in Brazilian black politics (and many subsequent scholars) stressed a break with the past—a transformation credited principally to an influx of foreign racial ideologies and politics—this paper demonstrates that the black politics of the 1970s and 80s also drew heavily on previous discourses and strategies of black activism in Brazil itself. This paper explores this moment in Brazilian black politics in three cities with distinct traditions of racial activism—Salvador da Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo—highlighting the important role of cross-regional borrowing in framing activists’ transformed political discourse. In so doing, the paper seeks to temper the aura of “exceptionalism” surrounding interpretations of this political moment, drawing connections with (and debts to) a longer history of black politics in Brazil.
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