We are pleased to announce the 32th session of the CLACS Faculty Working Group on Racisms in Comparative Perspective. Barbara Weinstein (NYU) will join us to discuss her book, The Color of Modernity. Benno Alves, a Brazilian scholar visiting NYU this semester will be her discussant. Barbara chose Chapter 3 of her book for you to read.
In this new/old political context, discussions about race and racisms have exploded. Postraciality and the multicultural rights frame are being challenged at the core and more intensely than ever before, glimpses of proto-fascist policies and actions are on the rise. As a working group which is part of the larger Red de Investigacion Accion Antiracista en las Americas (RAIAR), we want to continue contributing to the debate on how best to fight against this emergent racist/classist backlash. The analysis of race and racism in the Americas being done by our presenters since 2010 when Carmen Medeiros and I started the group, becomes urgent.
About the speaker:
Barbara Weinstein's research has focused on postcolonial Latin America, particularly Brazil. Her courses and publications explore questions of labor, gender, race, and political economy in regions as diverse as the Amazon, with the world's largest rainforest, and the state of São Paulo, Latin America’s leading industrial center. Weinstein’s most recent book -- The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Duke University Press, 2015)--considers a period in Brazilian history when the state of São Paulo emerged as the nation’s dominant economic center and political force. Tracing elite and scholarly discourses in this period, she explores the way in which paulistas (natives of São Paulo), deploying highly racialized discourses, constructed a notion of São Paulo exceptionalism that produced a hierarchical, almost imperial view of the region’s position within the Brazilian nation. A principal objective of this study is to illuminate the processes by which modernity in Brazil became “racialized” and identified with “whiteness” even as elites proclaimed their nation to be a racial democracy. Weinstein earned her undergraduate degree at Princeton University and her PhD at Yale University. Before moving to NYU, she was on the faculty at Stony Brook University and the University of Maryland, and she has also taught as a Fulbright lecturer at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brazil) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2010-11 she was a resident fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Other fellowships include awards from the Fulbright-Hays Program, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2007, she served as president of the American Historical Association.
This event is free and open to the public.
Working Group: Racisms in Comparative Perspective Session 32
