Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro Hardcover - 2016

From the rear cover

"Race and the Brazilian Body provides a useful and original contribution to the field of the study of race in urban Brazil. By analyzing the use of language and euphemism, Jennifer Roth-Gordon provides a crucial and heretofore missing component for understanding Brazilian cultural practices associated with race, color, and class. This is an excellent and important study that will be a much-needed addition to the current discussion."--Jan Hoffman French, author of Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil's Northeast

"Based on years of field work, this superb book is a complex and nuanced account of how race is produced, experienced, and denied in Rio de Janeiro, interweaving multiple sites of semiotic analysis from the sound of voices to the shape of the city on both small and large scales. The work sets a new standard for the ethnographic study of race and racialization."--Jane H. Hill, author of The Everyday Language of White Racism

"Poignant and pointed, this fascinating study delves into the everyday practices of racial identification in contemporary Brazil. Roth-Gordon shows how negotiations over strategic acts of self-positioning--amid discourses of "racial cordiality," class, and security--exacerbate the vulnerabilities of blackness and whiteness. Her sophisticated analysis provides important, fresh insights on Brazil's long-studied racial contradictions, with clear implications for how ordinary acts can reinforce or challenge broad structures of inequality anywhere."--Kristina Wirtz, author of Performing Afro-Cuba: Image, Voice, Spectacle in the Making of Race and History