An African/Nigerian-American Studying Black-White Couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro

2016 ◽  
pp. 123-138
Author(s):  
Chinyere Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
White Couples

Boundaries of Blackness

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-94
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Group Identity ◽  
Black Identity ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
Black Culture ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
White Couples

Chapter 2 shows how blacks in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro understand their position within the boundaries of black racial categorization. I analyze how and why they consider themselves black and examine ethnoracial congruency between their black identity and their white partners' assessment of their blackness. I find more ethnoracial congruency between black-white couples in Los Angeles than in Rio de Janeiro. Contrary to many scholars of Brazil, I find that black spouses have a sense of group identity in which they understand blacks as part of their imagined community; this, along with ancestry, physical appearance, and official documentation comprise their black identity. In Los Angeles, black respondents articulated a stronger sense of groupness and perceived history and resistance as elements tying them to other blacks. However, they saw class distinctions, immigrant ancestry, and less fluency in black culture as putting them on the margins of blackness. White husbands and wives understood their black husbands and wives as existing at the margins of what it means to be black in both Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. However, they failed to recognize the importance of groupness to their black spouses.

RACIAL ‘BOUNDARY-POLICING’

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
White Couples ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Gender Boundaries

AbstractAs people who cross racial boundaries in the family formation process, the experiences of interracial couples can actually reveal the nature of racial boundaries within and across societies. I draw on in-depth qualitative interviews with eighty-seven respondents in interracial Black and White couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro to compare perceptions of public stigmatization by outsiders, a term I call “boundary-policing.” I find that couples in Los Angeles perceive gendered, Black individuals as perpetrators of this boundary-policing. In Rio de Janeiro, couples perceive regionalized and classed, White perpetrators. These findings suggest that in the United States and Brazil, racial boundaries are intertwined with class and gender boundaries to shape negotiation of boundary-policing in the two contexts. This analysis builds on previous studies of ethnoracial boundaries by showing how individuals reinforce and negotiate them through interpersonal relations. It demonstrates the similarities and differences in the negotiation and reinforcement of racial boundaries in the two sites.

scholarly journals ALGUM LUGAR, DE PALOMA VIDAL: DESLOCAMENTO, ESTRANHAMENTO E MELANCOLIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 327-352
Author(s):  
Ana Maria Lisboa de Mello
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro

São recorrentes, no romance brasileiro contemporâneo, sobretudo a partir da década de 1990, deslocamentos e mudanças espaciais de personagens que, situados temporariamente em outros países e culturas, enfrentam a solidão, o estranhamento e empreendem a busca de si mesmos. Nessa perspectiva, analisamos o romance Algum lugar (2009), de Paloma Vidal. A protagonista e seu companheiro deslocam-se do Rio de Janeiro para cumprir estágio de pesquisa em Los Angeles. A cidade norte-americana, com grandes avenidas, vazias de pessoas, e supremacia do automóvel, mostra-se hostil, semelhante ao “não-lugar”, caracterizado por Marc Augé. A cidade é o retrato de um mundo que se tornou hostil ao convívio humano; a configuração da cidade suprime a possibilidade do encontro, fato que dilacera o indivíduo, cada vez mais só, exilado de si mesmo, dividido entre o sonho e a realidade devoradora e habitado por uma falta indefinida, um vazio existencial.

“A Fly in the Buttermilk”

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-180
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Family Members ◽  
White Family ◽  
White Families ◽  
Racial Boundaries ◽  
Domestic Migration ◽  
White Couples ◽  
The Family

This chapter compares the discursive strategies that black-white couples and their families drew on to navigate the integration of black spouses into white extended families. White Carioca families engaged in more openly racist opposition, racist humor, and/or indirect insults to express discomfort with blacks marrying into the family. In an “irony of opposition,” past race-mixing in Carioca white families did not shield black spouses from these sentiments. This countered the myth of racial democracy in which color is not an impediment to interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, Carioca respondents were less likely to report resistance in white families than Angelino couples. U.S. couples' higher rates of domestic migration resulted in less integration of black spouses into white family life than among Brazilian couples, whose tight-knit family relationships led to black spouses' greater incorporation. Los Angeles couples understood white family members as using the discourse of “expressing concerns” about the relationship, then moving to more overt discouragement of marrying black partners. Couples understood this “expressing concern” discourse as an attempt at social desirability on the part of white family members, emblematic of U.S. “color-blind” racism.This chapter shows how intermarriage can leave white supremacy, anti-blackness, and racial boundaries intact within the family.

Pentecostalism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Funding Sources ◽  
Independent Churches ◽  
Religious Landscape

Pentecostalism has grown rapidly in Brazil over the last century. It has changed the country’s religious landscape and has been most successful in poor, urban areas, the same areas in Rio de Janeiro where the Comando Vermelho flourishes. In the city’s favelas, Pentecostalism is now the most widely practiced religion; it is the faith of the killable people. Though Pentecostal Christianity started in the early 1900s in Los Angeles and was brought to Brazil by missionaries, it spread largely by empowering local pastors and independent churches and has few ties to foreign churches or funding sources.

scholarly journals ESTILOS ARQUITETÔNICOS EM ESPAÇOS CEMITERIAIS: CONTRIBUIÇÃO AOS ESTUDOS DE ARQUEOLOGIA FUNERÁRIA

2020 ◽  
Vol II (5) ◽  
pp. 107-141
Author(s):  
Stela Glaucia Alves Barthel ◽  
Ana Catarina Peregrino Torres Ramos ◽  
Viviane M. Cavalcanti Castro
Keyword(s):  
Socioeconomic Status ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Purchasing Power ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Architectural Styles ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

Cemeteries are socially constructed spaces, understood as museum spaces and have examples of art and architecture that show the changes that occur in societies. The tumular architecture, object and research source of funeral archaeology, takes into account its conceptual and typological progression over time. This article examines architectural styles in seven cemeteries of three cities abroad and two Brazilian cities. Père Lachaise in Paris, Forest Lawn Memorial Park Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles and La Recoleta cemetery in Buenos Aires were analyzed. In Rio de Janeiro, the cemetery São João Batista and in Recife three cemeteries: the Lord Bom Jesus of Redemption - cemetery of Santo Amaro, the cemetery of the English and the Bom Jesus of Arraial, the Cemetery of Casa Amarela. The approach is related to cemiterial studies with the interface of funeral archaeology and tumular architecture. Forty jazigos were analyzed, including some architectural styles. This work raised the characteristics of these deposits, defining the styles employed, showing the relationship between styles and purchasing power with the use of materials and techniques corresponding to the socioeconomic status of the owners of the deposits.

Boundaries of Love

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chinyere K. Osuji
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Race And Ethnicity ◽  
White Women ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Interracial Couples ◽  
White Couples

How do interracial couples negotiate ethnoracial boundaries? Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage from the United States to Brazil takes a novel approach to answering this question by examining how contemporary black-white couples make sense of ethnoracial boundaries in their lives. Based on over 100 qualitative interviews with husbands and wives in black-white couples in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Boundaries of Love unpacks the cultural repertoires of race-mixing in these two post-Atlantic slavery societies and shows how different approaches to race mixture - celebrated in Brazil versus illegal for much of U.S. history - influence the meanings that contemporary interracial couples give to their lives and social interactions. Employing an innovative “critical constructivist” approach to race and ethnicity, Boundaries of Love compares the experiences of couples involving black men and white women with those of black women with white men in these two diverse, multicultural settings. It reveals the influence of ethnoracial boundaries on: dating preferences throughout the life course in their “romantic career;” comparisons between their own racial identity and how their spouse sees their blackness or whiteness; how parents identify their children and its implications for affirmative action eligibility; how white families handle the introduction of a black in-law; and the compromises couples make spending time together in public. Through its fresh qualitative comparative approach, Boundaries of Love provides a unique perspective on racial dynamics in the United States and Brazil and clearly illuminates the familiar adage that race is a social construction.

scholarly journals Resenha de Do samba ao funk do Jorjão: ritmos, mitos e ledos enganos no enredo de um samba chamado Brasil, de Spirito Santo (Rio de Janeiro: Escola Sesc de Ensino Médio, 2016)

Opus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 248
Author(s):  
Carlos Palombini
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Rio De Janeiro

A segunda edição, revista e ampliada, do livro de Spirito Santo, Do samba ao funk do Jorjão: ritmos, mitos e ledos enganos no enredo de um samba chamado Brasil, foi lançada pela Escola Sesc de Ensino Médio em agosto de 2016. Através do trabalho de campo e da pesquisa histórica, o autor enlaça, em sete capítulos e um epílogo, diversas linhas evolutivas para tramar a história do samba em perspectiva afro-diaspórica. O “funk do Jorjão” do título remete ao episódio do Carnaval de 1997 em que o mestre de bateria Jorge de Oliveira inseriu uma batida derivada de uma faixa instrumental de electro de Los Angeles em repetições do estribilho do samba-enredo da Unidos do Viradouro. Tal fato ilustra a tese principal do livro: o samba resulta da “hibridização de formas musicais africanas no contexto da diáspora negra nas Américas”. O autor identifica quatro levas sucessivas de escolas de samba: as “escolas matriz” do Estácio e da Mangueira; as “escolas rurais” do Império Serrano e da Portela; as “escolas tijucanas”, dentre as quais o Salgueiro; e as “escolas suburbanas” da Mocidade Independente, da Grande Rio, da Beija-Flor, da Caprichosos de Pilares e da União da Ilha. Em meio a descrições musicais, organológicas, iconográficas e coreográficas informadas pela geografia cultural, Spirito Santo contesta vários mitos — o da hegemonia das culturas yoruba e fon, o da casa de tia Ciata enquanto berço do samba, o da trirracialidade musical — para denunciar o racismo estrutural da historiografia da música brasileira.

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