Racial Revolutions

Since the 1970s there has been a dramatic rise in the Indian population in Brazil as increasing numbers of pardos-individuals of mixed African, European, and indigenous descent-have chosen to identify themselves as Indians. In Racial Revolutions, the first book-length study of racial formation in Brazil centred on Indianness, Jonathan W. Warren draws on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews to illuminate the discursive and material forces responsible for this resurgence in the population. The fact that a growing number of pardos are asserting Indian identities represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. The predominant trend for centuries had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favour of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors, including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity have prompted a reversal in the direction of racial goals and re-imaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognise and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group. Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation-building, and state violence.