This event is part of the Interseminars event series for “Collisions Across Color Lines.” Supported by the Mellon Foundation.
Throughout Brazil’s history, countless Black people refused the terms, conditions, and lifeways of enslavement. Many bravely escaped inhumane spaces of confinement and took flight to remote locales so that they may form quilombos (Black encampments), often in hard-to-reach hillside areas. More than just spaces of refuge and rest, these quilombos were established in pursuit of Black freedom. There, Black fugitives formed alternative social systems of Black life that simply were impermissible in Brazil. Drawing on Black theory, diasporic cultural studies, feminist criticism, and Black intellectual thought in Brazil, this book draws on extensive ethnographic research to examine how poor and working-class Black communities in Salvador da Bahia, widely viewed as Brazil’s most African city, continue to recreate the quilombo model in the contemporary conjuncture. The discussion will revolve around why the quilombo model remains relevant today against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Black racism, sexism, and class exploitation, the importance of ancestral knowledges, diasporic cultural politics in the Americas, and emergent modes of Black life and community formation outside of inclusion/exclusion paradigms.
Dr. Bryce Henson is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and an Africana Studies Program Affiliate at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil (2023) and a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (2020). Last year, he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil.
