BRASA XVII Program
BRASA XVII Program
San Diego State University Hosts: Kristal Bivona, Erika Robb Larkins, and Flávia Soares, Behner Stiefel Center for
Brazilian Studies
Program Committee: Fabio de Sá e Silva (Chair), Kristal Bivona, Reighan Gillam, Rubia Valente
About BRASA
The Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) is an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars who support and
promote Brazilian studies in all fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences. BRASA is dedicated to the
promotion of Brazilian studies around the world, especially in the United States.
BRASA currently has over a thousand members in the United States, Brazil, Europe, and Latin America. The
organization is funded by membership as well as support from the School of Liberal Arts and the Stone Center for
Latin American Studies at Tulane University, the current site of the BRASA Secretariat.
To learn more about BRASA, visit our website www.brasa.org. To receive the BRASA Digest or communicate with
the Secretariat, send email [email protected]
BRASA Officers
Administrative Director: Claudia de Brito, Tulane University
Executive Director: Christopher Dunn, Tulane University
President: Sidney Chalhoub, Harvard University
Vice-President: Erika Robb Larkins, San Diego State University
Vice President-Elect: Fábio de Sá e Silva, University of Oklahoma
Executive Committee
The Brazil Initiation Scholarship (BIS) is a key component of BRASA’s mission to support Brazilian Studies around
the world and particular in the United States. BRASA invites applications from graduate students for a one-time
travel scholarship of $3000 to do exploratory research in Brazil or in the US. One student based in the US and one
student based in Brazil will be awarded. In 2023, BRASA awarded two Brazil Initiation Scholarships. Due to the
massive expansion of Tolman Awards, the committee suspended the scholarship in 2024.
Leonardo Derenze
M.A. candidate, Universidade de São Paulo
Project Title: “The Rise and Fall of the Brazilian Coffee Regime: A Political and Global History (1953-1958)”
Named for BRASA's founding president, the Jon M. Tolman Award is designed to assist graduate students with
conference-related expenses. In the past, BRASA has funded four awards. For the XVII Congress, BRASA awarded
travel grants for 40 graduate students, evenly divided between students based in Brazil and students based in the US.
Alex Minkin, “Negros e judeus em diálogo: Relações ‘raciais,’ políticas, religiosas e culturais”
Amália Coelho de Souza, “Las Artes de Si: Quilombos, Palenques, Cumbes e Marroons as Horizon Trough the
African American Arts”
Ana Carolina Assumpção, “Mulheres negras no front de políticas transformadoras”
Ana Luiza de Freitas Biazeto, “Reação e resistência: Imaginar futuros possíveis no Brasil e na diáspora africana”
Anna Caroline Teixeira Vertelo, “A sabedoria de Dona Sebastiana: Ervas e cura quilombola”
Bebel DeMoura Nilo, “Toca o nosso aí: An Exploration of Brazilian Music within the Racially Categorized U.S.
Music Market”
Bruna Silveira Martins de Oliveira, “Censorship and Freedom of Expression in Dispute: Brazil after Truth
Commissions”
Cody Case, “A Didá banda feminina: Afrofuturismo, empoderamento feminino, e samba-reggae”
Deborah Sandes de Almeida, “A atuação das Organizações Novo Mundo na expansão urbana de São Paulo”
Denise dos Santos Rodrigues, “Black City, White Privileges: Tourism, Contested Public Memory, and
Patrimonialization in the City of São Paulo”
Édina Aparecida da Silva Enevan, “A América Latina indígena na formação de professores de línguas no Brasil:
Encontros interculturais”
Eduarda Lira de Araujo, “Ecologias fugitivas: Espiritualidades afro-brasileiras e a perturbação do regime escravista
no fim do século XIX”
Emilly Pereira Chaves, “Podem as imagens educar? Uma discussão a partir de novos aportes metodológicos para o
uso de imagens/artes visuais como interlocutoras no contexto do ensino das ciências sociais no Brasil”
Erika Francelino Vieira, “To Whom Belongs the Land? Conflicts between Northeastern Workers and Indigenous
Peoples During the First Rubber Boom (1880-1920)”
Francianne dos Santos Velho, “Black Female Domestic Workers Self-Narratives: 'Faxina Boa' and 'Ela é só Babá' in
Brazilian Social Media.”
Gabriela Machado Bacelar Rodrigues, “Breaking with Homogeneities: Black Bodies, Regionalities and
Heteroidentification Procedures”
Gislene Ferreira dos Reis, “An Overview of the Research on Brazil's Affirmative Action Policies and How They
Affect the Labor Market”
Iale Camboim, “Performing (Im)possible Lives: Dissident Territorialities and the Fabulation of Queer Memories in
the Practices of Coletivo das Liliths in Salvador, Brazil”
Isabella Vilarinho Pereyra, “O golpe civil-militar e a Guerra Fria religiosa: Uma análise sobre a Cruzada do Rosário
em Família no Brasil (1962-1964)”
Ivo Antonio de Matos Cruz, “O resgate de Wahutedew’á e o reflorestar epistemológico: Uma análise do tempo em A
terra dos mil povos”
Jade Soares do Nascimento, “A Amefricanidade das vozes ancestrais na literatura brasileira”
Karyn Mota, “Representation of Black Masculinity in Conceição Evaristo's Canção para ninar menino grande”
Luana Barbosa da Silva, “‘Programado pra morrer nóis é’: Policiamento ostensivo e necropolítica contra a juventude
negra brasileira”
Luana Espig Regiani, “Indigenous Heritage in Brazil: Tava Guarani and Jesuit Mission in São Miguel das Missões”
Lucas Chiconi Balteiro, “To the Right: Neoliberalism, Urban Planning, and Far-Right in Tatuapé Region, in São
Paulo”
Madison Clark, “Re-examining the Confederados: Afro-Brazilian Response to Embranqueamento, 1865 to 1915”
Marcia Luiza Cruz Aguirre, “Distribuição regional do uso da terra implícito na produção e no comércio brasileiro”
Maria Vitória de Rezende Grisi, “Mapping Literary Spaces: An Analysis of O Quinze by Rachel de Queiroz Using
ArcGIS”
Marisol Fila, “O Menelick 2 Ato: Twenty-First Century Afro-Brazilian Art and Print Culture in Historical and
Transnational Dialogue”
Mateus Cunha da Silva, “O impacto do rap na memória coletiva negra e periférica brasileira”
Nathalia Pereira da Silva, “Tourism, Media, and White Subjectivity at Vale do Café’s Plantation Sites”
Parker Brookie, “Resilience in Rhinestones: Drag Performance and Testimony in the Installation Porta de Boate”
Paula Costa Nunes Carvalho, “Social Capital in Transnational Careers: Brazilian Popular Music Arrangers in the
United States (1965–1977)”
Paula Victoria Kupfer, “A Photographer in the Forest: Marc Ferrez, Temporality, and the Multi Centenarian
Jequitibá”
Paulo Ramos, “Corpos d’água (2019): An Exploration of Environmental Racism and the Black Woman's
Relationship with Water”
Priscila Oliveira dos Anjos, “Water Infrastructure and Access to Water in the South of Brazil”
Rayssa Duarte Marques Cabral, “Mulheres que narram com os outros: uma análise das narradoras de Quarenta dias
(2014) e Outros cantos (2016), de Maria Valéria Rezende”
Renata Monteiro Siqueira, “Sobre elegância e decadência: Urbanização e relações raciais no debate público sobre o
centro de São Paulo (1930-1950)”
Shirley Pimentel de Souza, “Infância quilombola: Uma experiência afro-diaspórica”
Thomaz Amancio, “Plantation and Frontier Nostalgia in Slvio Romero and Antonio Candido”
BIS/Tolman Prize Committee: Isis Barra Costa (Chair), Okezi Otovo, Carolina Timóteo de Oliveira
The Best Articles/Chapters BRASA Awards recognize the best scholarly articles and chapters published in edited
volumes in Brazilian Studies that contribute significantly to promoting an understanding of Brazil. Submissions may
be in English or Portuguese. BRASA awards article/chapter prizes on odd years, while the book prize is awarded on
even years to coincide with the biennial congress.
Humanities
Marc Hertzman, “Making Their Own Mahatma: Salvador’s Filhos de Gandhy and the Local History of a Global
Phenomenon.” In B. Bryce, & D. M. K. Sheinin (Eds.), Race and Transnationalism in the Americas (pp.
140-158). (Pitt Latin American Series). University of Pittsburgh Press. (awardee)
Jamie Lee Andreson, “African Territoriality in Brazilian Cultural Heritage Policies.” Journal of Africana
Religions (2022) 10 (2): 266–291. (honorable mention)
Social Sciences
David de Micheli, “Racial Classification and Political Identity Formation,” World Politics 73(1) 1–51, 2021.
(awardee)
Vanessa Castañeda, “Mucamas or Baianas? Black Female Empowerment and Cultural Representation in
Bahia,” The Latin Americanist 65(1), 9–34, 2021. (honorable mention)
The Roberto Reis BRASA Book Prize recognizes the best books in Brazilian Studies published in English that
contribute significantly to promoting an understanding of Brazil. BRASA awards two prizes for first monographs
and two for senior authors. The award honors Roberto Reis, one of the founders of BRASA, who was committed to
developing Brazilian Studies in the United States.
Anjuli Fahlberg. Activism Under Fire: The Politics of Non-Violence in Rio de Janeiro’s Gang Territories. Oxford
University Press, 2023.
Carolina Sá Carvalho. Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century
Latin America. Northwestern University Press, 2023.
Traces of the Unseen analyses photographic images and gazes to unravel the
interactions of modernization, environmental degradation, and institutionalized
violence across Brazilian hinterlands—from Canudos to Amazonia and beyond. This
rich and original treatment moves between a variety of inventive primary sources to
demonstrate the many roles of photographs and photography in the march of
capitalist modernization that swept through Latin America in the early-twentieth
century. The work deftly balances interdisciplinary theoretical engagements with
accessible historical narratives to demonstrate how nations, economies, and
technologies developed together and through interrelation. This book reminds us
how literary and media studies, and indeed the broader humanities, have much to
contribute to the most challenging political-environmental issues and debates of the
twenty-first century.
First Book Honorable Mentions
Courtney J. Campbell. Region out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968. University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2022.
Bryce Henson. Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil. University of Texas Press, 2024.
Katherine Jensen. The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil. University of Chicago Press,
2023.
Katherine Jensen's The Color of Asylum is an exceptionally captivating and timely
exploration of the complexities of asylum-seeking in Brazil. Skillfully combining
ethnography with a wealth of legal and archival materials, Jensen demonstrates how
anti-Black racism and the social construction of whiteness profoundly shape the
experiences of refugees arriving from other lands. Training her lens on the contrasting
experiences of two understudied groups-- Syrian and Congolese refugees-- she
exposes the paradoxes of Brazil's ostensibly open asylum policy, which in reality
reinforces entrenched racial logic and produces new forms of differential inclusion.
Taking readers deep into the asylum bureaucracy and the machinery of the racial state,
Jensen’s beautifully written study represents a major and much needed contribution to
scholarship on both race and immigration in Brazil.
Senior Author co-winners
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman. Second-Class Daughters: Black Brazilian Women and Informal Adoption as
Modern Slavery. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Hal Langfur. Adrift on an Inland Sea Misinformation and the Limits of Empire in the Brazilian Backlands. Stanford
University Press, 2023.
Adrift on an Inland Sea: Misinformation and the Limits of the Empire in the Brazilian
Backlands is a ground-breaking study that reframes the debates about the conditions
of knowledge and the reach of imperial power in the sertões, or backlands, of Brazil
in the eighteenth century. In this inspiring book, Hal Langfur brings to the fore a
multitude of voices, including those of Portuguese colonial administrators and, most
importantly, the voices of local populations whose presence in the archives is so
easily overlooked. From these multiple angles, Adrift on an Inland Sea underscores
the relentless efforts by the Portuguese crown to ascertain political, economic, and
military dominance in the backlands in face of often unsurmountable challenges
posed by competing goals from other actors. This book offers a profoundly
illuminating and innovative contribution to the field of colonial history.
Seth Garfield. Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant. University of North Carolina
Press, 2022.
Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant offers a bold,
meticulously researched, and beautifully written account of of the cultural, economic,
and environmental significance of guaraná fruit. By tracing guaraná’s history from its
mythical presence among Native Amazonians to its current industrial prominence as a
“soft drug” with nationalist undertones, Seth Garfield brings together a wide array of
periods, sources, fields, and debates, around a tropical commodity that encapsulates
the history of Brazil across centuries from the colonial period to the present. In
exploring guaraná’s presence in popular culture, scientific research, and its economic
potential, Garfield sheds light onto this plant’s surprisingly understudied history to
make the case for a renewed thematic and methodological approach to Brazilian
history. This is a captivating and compelling contribution to multiple fields of study.
Roberto Reis Book Prize Committee: Rebecca Atencio and Case Watkins (First Book); Benjamin Cowan and
Victoria Saramago (Senior Author)
James N. Green, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of Modern Latin American History and Professor of
Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
Green’s second monograph, We Cannot Remain Silent: Opposition to the Brazilian Military Dictatorship documents
the history of the grassroots, decentralized campaigns to denounce human rights violations in Brazil in the 1970s
and 80s. This book inspired the publication in English of a memoir about the political activities of Marcos Arruda,
an exiled former political prisoner and one of the leaders of the solidarity movement in the United States. In 2018,
Green published Exile within Exiles: Herbert Daniel, Gay Brazilian Revolutionary, which was simultaneously
released in Brazil. Stage director and playwright Zé Henrique de Paula’s musical, Codinome Daniel, based on the
book, debuted in São Paulo in 2024 in São Paulo. Jim is a rare US-based Brazlianist scholar whose work has had as
much of an impact in Brazil as it has in the US. All of his books and academic articles have been translated to
Portuguese and published in Brazil.
Jim’s contributions to BRASA are unparalleled. Elected to the Executive Committee in 1998, he was subsequently
elected to Vice President followed by a term as President between 2002-2004. During this time, he played a crucial
role in the restructuring and professionalization of BRASA. In 2015, he assumed the position of Executive Director,
overseeing BRASA during a period of expansion and heightened political engagement. In 2018, Jim co-founded
with Gladys Mitchell-Walthour the US Network for Democracy in Brazil, which brought together both scholars and
activists concerned with academic freedom and Brazil’s deteriorating democracy during the Bolsonaro presidency.
More recently, he was a co-founder and is currently the President of the Board of Directors of the Washington Brazil
Office, a non-partisan think-tank and advocacy organization that works with Brazilian social movements and NGOs
to facilitate a progressive international agenda on Brazil.
This Lifetime Achievement Award bestows a richly deserved honor upon a scholar, mentor and proponent of
Brazilian Studies throughout the world who has contributed so much to our collective understanding of the several
fields he has researched: human rights in Latin America and beyond; LGBTQ culture and movements; cultural and
transnational approaches to the understanding authoritarian military rule in Latin America; the contested uses of
urban space; and the study of Brazil in general.
Lifetime Contribution Award Committee: Amy Chazkel (Chair), Aldair Rodrigues, Rebecca Tarlau
April 3-6, 12:00-3:00, School of Art and Design, University Art Gallery, 4th floor Courtyard
Ynaê Lopes dos Santos is Professor of History of America at Universidade Federal Fluminense. She holds a BA,
MA and PhD in history from the University of São Paulo. Her research areas deal with the history of slavery in the
Americas, as well as the study of ethnic-racial relations in the American continent, the teaching of history of Africa,
and black issues in Brazil.
Flavia Rios is a Professor of Sociology at the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), Brazil. Her main interests are
Social Movements, Gender and racial inequalities, Democracy and political representation, State and Racial
Formation, Intersection Theories and Black Feminism, Anti-Racism, Brazil and Latin America.
Douglas Belchior is an educator, activist, and founder of UNEAFRO-Brasil Movement, an NGO that works to
empower black youth in Brazil. He is a consultant on racial justice, criminal justice, state violence, incarceration,
and drug policy issues for the Brazilian Fund for Human Rights, and has lectured on the history of social struggle,
race, and human rights.
Edilza Sotero holds a master's degree in Sociology from the University of São Paulo and a doctorate in Sociology
from the University of São Paulo. She is currently an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Education I at the
Federal University of Bahia. Her research focuses on the African diaspora, Afro-Brazilian and gender studies,
working mainly on the following themes: racial identities, political organization, inequalities and public policies.
Friday April 5, 3:00-6:00pm, Aztec Student Union Theatre
Screening of the film "Marte Um" (1h55m; directed by Gabriel Martins, Filmes de
Plástico, 2022) followed by a question and answer session with the diretor.
"Marte Um" was chosen to represent Brazil in the international competition for the
Oscar in 2022. Martins is considered one of the most important Brazilian directors
today, and his production company, Filmes de Plástico, is one of the most renowned
for producing successful films at international festivals. Synopsis: A middle-class
black family in Brazil deals with the election of a right-wing extremist president. A
mother believes she is cursed after an unexpected encounter, while her husband pins
all his hopes on his son's football career.