The 1990s marked a dramatic shift throughout Latin America from constitutions and state policies that hinged on ideas of colorblindness and mestizaje to targeted policies for black and indigenous peoples. This study analyzes the role black social movements played in this shift in Colombia and Brazil, two countries where the state adopted the most comprehensive reforms for black populations in the region. It also analyzes the impact of achieving such reforms on black movements' trajectories in the two countries. In so doing, I not only examine how black movements are shaped by the political context in which they emerge, but how they are able to reconfigure that political context in ways that ultimately reshape black movements themselves. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork including in-depth interviews, archival analysis, and ethnographic methods, this study reveals new ways of understanding ethno-racial politics in these countries and offers insights about the relationship between movements and the state, as well as contestation within movements. Further, in examining how black movements seize upon changes in the global political field, appropriate global discourses into local struggles, and build transnational alliances, this work also challenges us to integrate the constant interplay between global and local processes into our analyses, especially when our aim is to understand social movement dynamics in the Global South.

In the first part of the dissertation, I show how the rise of global policy norms around multiculturalism, and the Durban World Conference against Racism, provided political openings for black movements in Colombia and Brazil, respectively. However, I maintain that it was the interplay between such global factors and national political developments paired with strategic action by black movements that best explains states' adoption of these historic reforms. Even so, while both countries adopted policies for black populations beginning in the 1990s, the dominant discourse around black rights in Brazil centers on notions of "the right to equality" and inclusion, whereas black issues in Colombia are largely framed in terms of the "right to difference", culture, territory and autonomy. I suggest that these discursive differences have as much to do with how black populations were historically imagined by the state in the two cases, as they do with the different discursive tactics used by black movements when making demands on the state.

The second part examines the consequences of the shift to ethno-racial legislation on internal black movement dynamics in the two countries. More specifically, I analyze the nature of formal structures of political participation set up for black populations in response to movement pressure. I do this by examining how movement actors negotiate, inhabit and contest such spaces, revealing a reality of social movement institutionalization that is much more complex than the literature suggests. Whereas black movements in Brazil have been absorbed into mainstream politics within a relatively democratic state, black movements in Colombia have either been repressed violently or institutionalized into precarious alternative political structures leading to unique internal movement dynamics. In order to understand the relationship between structure and agency as well as ntional and international political processes in these two cases, I propose the conceptual framework of national and global political fields which I argue contributes both to the literature on race in Latin America and social movements.

This dissertation examines the ideas and practices of transnational solidarity against racial and imperial violence in the mid-20th century Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) world. In the decades following World War II, a national movement for Black self-determination was emerging in Brazil while the African colonies under Portuguese rule were at war for national independence. While scholars have largely characterized the relationships between these movements as symbolic or one-directional to the benefit of Brazilians, my dissertation highlights the importance of interpersonal and tangible encounters toward a mutual ideological exchange. I examine the ideas that emerged from several opportunities that – sometimes unintentionally – facilitated meetings between activist-intellectuals of the Brazilian Black Movement and the anticolonial revolutionaries of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cabo Verde. I draw on archived correspondences, press publications, organizational documents, memoirs, state surveillance documents, oral history interviews, and close readings of cultural and literary productions from Brazil, Portugal, and Cabo Verde to demonstrate how this network of activists and intellectuals shaped ideas about post-colonial subjectivity, language, cultural politics, and liberation. Ultimately, I argue that this network of intellectuals demonstrated a Black imperial double consciousness. This concept frames the dissertation by highlighting how this network of Black internationalists drew upon their shared history of Portuguese imperialism while also drawing on varied articulations of global blackness in order to produce the ideas that: animated their movements, shaped their language of solidarity, and reconfigured the terms of their international relations.Structured by interpersonal and tangible accounts of Black diasporic ideological exchange, each chapter of this project is organized around the conditions that made these transatlantic encounters possible. In Chapter 1, “Blackness, Africanity, and (Un)Learning Subjecthood,” I use a series of international education opportunities to offer insight into how these intellectuals co-constructed notions of blackness and Africanity as they formed bonds of solidarity. I argue that these young intellectuals both drew upon and challenged the racial logics of the Portuguese empire to produce a sense of shared identity and shared struggle. Chapter 2, “’The only language common to all’: Poesia Negra and Black Grammars of Solidarity,” analyzes the Antologia da Poesia Negra de Expressão Portuguesa [Anthology of Black Poetry in Portuguese] (1958), edited by the Angolan Mário Pinto de Andrade, and its circulation in a Brazilian network during the 1960s and 70s. I argue that these intellectuals used the poetic form to express a grammar of blackness that simultaneously drew upon and challenged the notion that they were bonded to one another as Portuguese-speaking subjects. In Chapter 3, “On a Global Stage: National Culture and the Cultural Politics of Independence,” I examine the ideas of cultural politics expressed by the Brazilian, Angolan, and Guinean presence at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977. By staging a conversation between two of these intellectuals, I argue that their understandings of nationalism and internationalism are shaped by the cultural politics derived from their specific struggle against Portuguese imperialism as well as the broader Pan-African cultural-political discourses. This project intervenes in the field of global Black studies by centering people and territories that use Portuguese as an official language, which challenges the existing emphasis on Anglophone and Francophone populations. Further, by emphasizing the encounters and interpersonal relationships which enabled the exchange of ideas, this project offers a materially-grounded reading of the Black diaspora that allows us to reflect on the possibilities of present-day transnational solidarity. Overall, this project furthers our understanding of the histories of Black internationalism, the conditions of possibility for transnational solidarity, and the lasting legacy of empire and the struggles against it.

This dissertation conducts a critical examination of narratives of racial democracy in Brazilian cultural production while re-centering sexuality and desire in its analysis. One of many national narratives of race mixture in Latin America, racial democracy in Brazil is the ideology that race does not inform social, political, or economic differences between racial groups on the basis of a centuries-long sexual and cultural miscegenation. While many attribute racial democracy’s ideological birth to Gilberto Freyre’s 1933 text, Casa-grande & senzala (translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves), this established principle of Brazilian nationalism was first articulated in literature and art of the nineteenth century’s romantic period. Cultural production in romanticism often depicted interracial unions between white men and black, indigenous, and mixed-race women as metonyms for ethno-racial and class conflict resolution. Nonetheless, little work has engaged the role of sexuality, sex, and desire in the construction of race-mixing ideology in Brazil since then, particularly as it appears in popular culture. While racial democracy promulgates equal inclusion of each race’s influence on the nation, the white minority’s control over national literature and popular culture keeps discursive power over this mixture as truism, one that evokes whiteness’ longings for an illusory past. These representations of history are re-worked in every era of Brazil’s re-invention as a modern nation. This dissertation chooses to analyze these re-worked histories in the media and genres considered most popular as enigmatic examples of the era in which they were produced: the novel in the First Republic (1889-1930), comedy film during the Vargas era (1930-1954), samba throughout the military dictatorship (1964-1985), and soap operas after re-democratization toward the end of the twentieth century. Pulling from Latin American cultural studies, black feminisms, black queer studies, and critical whiteness studies, the dissertation offers queer miscegenation as a mutable hermeneutic of cultural production to explain the racial and sexual abjection upon which racial democracy is founded.

Through archival work and close readings of Brazilian literature, film, music, and television, this dissertation is divided into four respective chapters. The first chapter, “Queer Miscegenation: Adolfo Caminha’s Bom-Crioulo and Re-reading the Revolt of the Lash,” engages engages Caminha’s allegorical novel as a national fiction at the height of late-nineteenth century literary and scientific naturalism. The homoeroticism in Bom-Crioulo literally and figuratively queers the interraciality common to national fictions by depicting the rise and fall of a relationship between an enslaved black man impressed into the Brazilian Navy and a white immigrant cabin-boy. As the novel’s use of racial science suggests the untenable survival of abject social actors like blacks and queers, I develop the concept of queer miscegenation to show how the characters seek to achieve belonging to the nation through race mixture and their imminent failure. Meanwhile, the novel serves as a script to re-read the history of the 1910 Revolt of the Lash as the press and state projected a racial-sexual degeneration onto the mostly black mutineers protesting the continuation of slavery-like conditions in the navy. The second chapter, “Gilberto Freyre, Oscarito, and Grande Otelo: Colonial Gestures and Race Play in the Chanchadas,” builds on interracial desire between men in the first chapter as a spectacle for whiteness. Focusing on comedy films, or chanchadas, during the Vargas Era (1930-1954) featuring the white-black comedy duo, Oscarito and Grande Otelo, the sadomasochism of slapstick comedy and its racial gestures harkens back to the slavocratic patriarchy described by the contemporaneous theories expounded by Gilberto Freyre. Interracial homoerotic play in the chanchadas and Freyre serve as a space of Brazilian (male) sexual and racial formation considered foundational to Brazil’s modernity.

The latter half of the dissertation envisions how interracial desires, like queer miscegenation, explored in the first two chapters are incarnated within single bodies and their negotiations with whiteness. The third chapter, titled “The Drag of Mestiça Nationalism: Performing Africanity in the Samba of Clara Nunes,” explores the samba career of singer Clara Nunes and how the military dictatorship of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s and its institutionalization of ethnic Africanity as foundational to racial democracy came to be reflected in her aesthetic. I use the language of drag to show how, as a white woman, she visually and sonically blackened herself to present as a mixed-race (mestiça) woman through her folklorization of Afro-Brazilian religions and the racial-sexual tropes of spiritual miscegenation. The final chapter, titled “Slavery’s Seductions: Reproducibility and Queer Consumptions in Xica da Silva,” examines how the global hit soap opera, Xica da Silva (1996-1997), firmly planted interracial sexual desire in Brazil’s history in Brazil’s return to democracy post-dictatorship. Re-fashioning the mythicized history of Chica da Silva, an enslaved mixed-race woman who gains freedom and status through an affair with her master, this chapter considers the various racial and sexually queer circumstances of not only this relationship’s recitation on television but the protagonist’s body and her marketing to Brazil and the outside world at the end of the twentieth century.

Thinking specifically about how elite white cultural producers and whiteness-as-paradigm direct the cultural narrative through their performances of blackness as queer and historically inert, this study shows how racial democracy—and the whiteness that drives it—shifts over time. Representations of and a desire for history effectively enact a national project toward modernity. While racial democracy’s provenance intimates interracial heterosexual sex, whiteness’ choreographed performances of an unsophisticated, unchanging blackness strip it of historical mobility and allude its contributions to Brazilian identity to be strictly sexual and abject. Whiteness’ desire for history to secure progress thus coincides with its desire for blackness and queers the national project of racial democracy.

This is an Afrofeminist Cultural Studies analysis of blackness and belonging in Denmark. The study is situated within African Diaspora Studies, specifically the theoretical branches in and of Europe. Simultaneously constructed as marginal to hegemonic Europeanness and dominant conceptions of blackness, I seek to carve out space for Afropean and European Black perspectives. With attention to genealogical distinctions between European-based Afrofeminisms and Black Feminisms of the USA, this dissertation is a contribution to a grounded theory of blackness in a larger European context. Specifically, this is a step towards writing the much under-theorized conditions of the African diasporas in the Nordics into the archives (McEachrane 2016).The study centers first-person narratives. I focus on first-generation African diaspora Dan-ish people, i.e., those with experiences of being raised and socialized in Denmark while Black as the first in a family. Situation myself as a researcher within this very life experience, I examine how others have navigated that experience before the era of the Internet and with a scarcity of racial mirroring. But particularly, I examine the condition of being racialized as Black in an alleged post-racial European context, dominated by a ‘raceless’ discourse of Denmark and its ‘other’ (El-Tayeb 2011; Boulila 2019). And more precisely within a regional discourse of Nordic Exceptionalism (Habel 2011). Positioned as apparently a paradox within an exclusive nationalist narrative, Afropean existence becomes unspeakable and Black Danish people constructed as always already foreigners, having just arrived. Part of the Black Danish experience, as across the Nordic region, is thus characterized by a lack of language to name one’s reality (Adeniji 2016; Diallo 2022). And importantly, a language to understand and resist racism, and to develop a political consciousness (Essed 1991; Kelekay 2019). I analyze how these circumstances affect Black Danish people’s subjectivity. The study’s first chapter builds on a reading of Crucian-Danish Victor Cornelins’ autobiography From St. Croix to Nakskov from 1976. This is supplemented by material from the Nakskov Local History Archives in Denmark. Here, I offer feminist analyses centered in African diasporic care and consideration of historical representations of blackness in Denmark as well as archival silences. Reading Cornelins as an early theorist of blackness in Denmark, the contours of a primary formative condition emerge: racial isolation. The second and third chapters are based on original data from semi-structured interviews during a seven-month stay in Copenhagen in 2020-2021. The second chapter sketches out the scattered collective of a post-WWII generation of so-called ‘brown babies.’ Being of Black American and white German parentage, thousands of individuals were deemed ‘better off’ outside of Germany due to their blackness and ‘mixedness.’ At the beginning of a post-racial discourse in Europe and a decolonization moment globally, a generation of ‘brown’ children were adopted into the intimate sphere of the post-racial Danish nation-state. An obscured, misrepresented part of Danish history, this chapter seeks to humanize people of this generation and identify their agency in constructing themselves as whole. The final chapter gives context to the current moment and growing up Black in Denmark. Imagined as outside of the Danish nation, yet also outside of dominant immigration discourse, analyzing the particularity of racialization as Black proves highly pertinent. The taxing reality of experiencing racism in a post-racialist culture become clear, especially the fact of being the only one in many social contexts. Yet this chapter also illuminates people’s ambivalence, disidentification, and dissociation from concepts of collective blackness or minoritarian solidarity. There is a complex relationship between assuming one’s own racialized social position as Black and understanding oneself as Danish. Black racial isolation runs through the three chapters as a common condition for African diasporic Danish people who have come of age in Denmark between 1905 and 2021. I therefore of-fer Black racial isolation as a core concept to better understand how Danish Black people make sense of themselves and their relationship to African diasporas and Black (political) collectivity. As a Black experience the Danish is version an articulation of racialization within a Westernized con-text historically shaped through binaries of Black/white. What sets this apart from other theorizations of blackness in the West, is that it experienced alone, rather than in community. My findings suggest that such isolation can results in internalization of binaries and a splitting of the self. In conclusion, I meditate on conditions for creating connection – with self and others – as a path to-ward sustainable, humanizing futures for Danish African diasporic blackness and belonging. As such, this dissertation contributes original, grounded theory of blackness, race, and racialization in Europe with deep appreciation for Afrofeminist and decolonial feminist genealogies from which this study could grow.