Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (American Encounters/Global Interactions) - Softcover

Seigel, Micol

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822344408 ISBN 13: 9780822344407

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2009

Synopsis

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

""Uneven Encounters" is a very important contribution not only to the transnational study of racial formation but to the very definition of what transnational scholarship should be."--Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, author of "The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of ""Development"

About the Author:

Micol Seigel is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Program in American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0822344408
• ISBN 13: 9780822344407
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 408