|
Product Description
Based on spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Jennifer Roth-Gordon shows how racial ideas permeate the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents across race and class lines. Race and the Brazilian Body weaves together the experiences of these two groups to explore what the author calls Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” where embedded structural racism that privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features—including skin color, hair texture, and facial features—but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech commonly described as gíria (slang).
Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.
Vivid scenes from daily interactions illustrate how implicit social and racial imperatives encourage individuals to invest in and display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), avoid blackness (a preference challenged by rappers and hip-hop fans), and “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences). Roth-Gordon suggests that it is through this unspoken racial etiquette that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon; who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls; and who merits the rights of citizenship.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication: Essential Readings, 2nd Edition
- Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America: A Reader in the Social Anthropology of Middle and South America
- The Mystery of Samba : Popular Music and National Identity in Brazil
- White Middle-Class Men in Rio de Janeiro: The Making of a Dominant Subject (Latin American Gender and Sexualities)
- Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia
- River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil
- Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Sign, Storage, Transmission)
- Singing for the Dead: The Politics of Indigenous Revival in Mexico
- Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes (Worlds of Desire: The Chicago Series on Sexuality, Gender, and Culture)
- Language, Capitalism, Colonialism: Toward a Critical History
*If this is not the "Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 23, 2024 12:00 +08.