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 by taking flight to remote locales to form quilombos (Black encampments), where fugitives formed alternative social systems of Black life. Drawing on Black theory, diasporic cultural studies, feminist criticism, and Black intellectual thought in Brazil, this talk examines 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, against the backdrop of ongoing anti-Black racism, sexism, and class exploitation, the importance of ancestral knowledges, and diasporic cultural politics in the Americas.
Dr. Henson is an alum of the University of Illinois College of Media Institute of Communications Research (Ph.D.) and a past HRI Campus Fellow.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
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.