Emergent Quilombos

How disenfranchised Black Brazilians use hip-hop to reinvigorate the Black radical tradition. Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, is a predominantly Black city. The local art, food, and dance are closely linked to the population’s African roots. Yet many Black Brazilian residents are politically and economically disenfranchised. Bryce Henson details a culture of resistance and activism that has emerged in response, expressed through hip-hop and the social relations surrounding it. Based on years of ethnographic research, Emergent Quilombos illuminates how Black hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens and alternative social, cultural, and political systems that serve Black people. These artists valorize and empower marginalized Black peoples through song, aesthetics, media, visual art, and community action that emphasize diasporic connections, ancestrality, and Black identifications in opposition to the anti-Black Brazilian nation. In the process, Henson argues, the Salvador hip-hop scene has reinvigorated and reterritorialized a critical legacy of Black politicocultural resistance: quilombos, maroon communities of Black fugitives who refused slavery as a way of life, gathered away from the spaces of their oppression, protected their communities, and nurtured Black life in all its possibilities.

The urgency and complexity of contemporary social justice issues facing the world today mean that activists, scholars, and storytellers need a readily available compendium of cutting-edge scholarship on media and social justice. The Oxford Handbook of Media and Social Justice gathers over forty leading scholars and presents a state-of-the-art systematic overview of media and social justice. Representing leading voices across positionalities and perspectives, geographies and generations, meta-theories and methods, and issues and identities, the Handbook explores intersecting identities, social structures, and power networks within media ownership, representation, selection, uses, effects, networks, and social transformation. These theories, methods, and practices expose media and digital divides, polarization, marginalization, exclusion, alienation, invisibilities, stigma, and trivializations. Yet, they also showcase how individuals and communities also have agency through refusal and resistance. Each of the 32 chapters includes a brief history, key concepts, contemporary debates and dialogues, and future directions, and the volume concludes with reflections on resistances, reckoning, and reparative justice. Connecting critical media scholarship with intersectional feminism, postcolonial/anticolonial theory, Indigenous approaches, queer theory, diaspora studies, and environmental justice frameworks, the Handbook re-envisions the role of media and technology with an inclusive trauma-informed approach to scholarship that is essential for the future of this research.

Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil brings together some of the best scholars in the world working on the history of quilombos (maroon societies) in Brazil from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Over 40 percent of the total volume of captive Africans arrived in Brazil during a 400-year period of legal and contraband transatlantic slaving. If slavery penetrated every aspect of Brazilian life, so did resistance—and co-existence with it—in the form of small to large-scale quilombos. Palmares and the other quilombos built an exciting history of freedom. Yet, it is a history filled with traps and surprises, advances and setbacks, conflict and commitments, while advancing their immediate interests and more ambitious projects of liberty. These events and many others are part of the history told in this book.

Asking what it means to be quilombola (descendants of African slaves) in the twenty-first century, Kenny illustrates how heritage and identity do not simply exist, but are continually being constructed to reflect particular historical circumstances. The book includes supplementary exercises that encourage readers to make connections between the case study at hand, their own heritage, and heritage-making efforts in other parts of the world.

Under a provision in the Brazilian constitution, rural black communities identified as the modern descendants of quilombos—runaway slave communities—are promised land rights as a form of reparations for the historic exclusion of blacks from land ownership. The quilombo provision has been hailed as a success for black rights; however, rights for quilombolas are highly controversial and, in many cases, have led to violent land conflicts. Although thousands of rural black communities have been legally recognized, only a handful have received the rights they were promised. Conflict over quilombola rights is widespread and carries important consequences for race relations and political representations of blackness in twenty-first century Brazil. Drawing on a year of field research in a quilombola community, Elizabeth Farfán-Santos explores how quilombo recognition has significantly affected the everyday lives of those who experience the often-complicated political process. Questions of identity, race, and entitlement play out against a community’s struggle to prove its historical authenticity—and to gain the land and rights they need to survive. This work not only demonstrates the lived experience of a new, particular form of blackness in Brazil, but also shows how blackness is being mobilized and reimagined to gain social rights and political recognition. Black Bodies, Black Rights thus represents an important contribution to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of Afro-Latino studies.

"Based on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and historical research, Deeply Rooted in the Present illustrates the processes that contribute to making cultural identity, and the ways in which memories, knowledge, and experience are made into heritage. Using a quilombola community (descendants of enslaved Africans) in Northeast Brazil as a case study, Kenny asks what it means to be a quilombola in the 21st century. In the process, she demonstrates how heritage and identity do not simply exist, but are continually being made and remade according to the social, cultural and political needs of the present. The book includes an appendix of supplementary exercises that encourage readers to make connections between the case study at hand, their own heritage, and heritage making efforts in other parts of the world."--

A comprehensive history of the 17th century maroon nation, Brazil's Quilombo dos Palmares, with chapters relating Palmares to modern Brazil.

Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Today the country is one of the most dangerous in the world in which to be a reporter. In Surviving Mexico, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks. Amid the crackdown on drug cartels, overall violence in Mexico has increased, and journalists covering the conflict have grown more vulnerable. But it is not just criminal groups that want reporters out of the way. Government forces also attack journalists in order to shield corrupt authorities and the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting. Meanwhile some news organizations, enriched by their ties to corrupt government officials and criminal groups, fail to support their employees. In some cases, journalists must wait for a “green light” to publish not from their editors but from organized crime groups. Despite seemingly insurmountable constraints, journalists have turned to one another and to their communities to resist pressures and create their own networks of resilience. Drawing on a decade of rigorous research in Mexico, González de Bustamante and Relly explain how journalists have become their own activists and how they hold those in power accountable.