Quilombolas and Racial Justice in Brazil
Articles
“Fraudulent” Identities: The Politics of Defining Quilombo Descendants in Brazil
This article analyzes the role of historians and anthropologists in the conceptualization of “quilombo,” past and present, in Brazil. The validity of the new political identity, remanescente de quilombo (quilombo descendant), has been contested by the popular media as a “fraudulent” identity used by black communities to obtain land rights. While the term quilombo was used by the Portuguese Crown to refer to three or more fugitive slaves in hiding, quilombo descendants have been defined beyond the limits of simply the ancestors of fugitive slaves. I argue that when it comes to quilombo descendants obtaining actual rights they are often dismissed as frauds until proven authentic. Their authenticity depends not only on their ability to perform and describe the ancestral history of their community, but more importantly, in their ability to tell a specific history of their past as it has been written and incorporated into the Brazilian national imaginary.
Quilombolismo: Fighting and Dying for Rights
Do Nascimento stood before his colleagues and called Brazilian abolition as “cruel a crime” as slavery; in doing so, he challenged a room of activists, community leaders, and intellectuals to focus on action over theory, social practice over political rhetoric. In this article, I illustrate how the Brazilian government is tribalizing its black communities by recycling an outdated story of what it meant to be black in colonial Brazil as a means for distributing rights. Supported by the right to self-identify, black Brazilians have been given the opportunity to identify as the descendants of fugitive slaves. While this right comes with several social benefits, it also comes at a social cost. The transformation of the once historical “quilombo” into a new political category has led to new stereotypes, misunderstandings, and violent land conflicts in Brazil.