Few social facts demonstrate with such clarity the changes in the constitution and delineation of racial boundaries in contemporary Brazil as the progressive disuse of the category of mulatto as a form of social classification. Indeed, today’s mixed-race people are not like the mulattoes of the past. The categorization has lost much of that connotation of cultural and biological mediation between diverse worlds, of “miscegenation” as social intermediation between the so-called “whites” and “blacks,” a point of conciliation and fusion of extremes, a kind of racial non-place always slipping from rigid classifications and fixed meanings. Thus, while the mulattoes of yesterday could be defined as a specific, intermediate social group, neither black nor white, the current political and state uses of the category of mixed-race people tend to emphasize, not without controversy, Afro-descendant origin and belonging, and socioeconomic status similar to those classified as black. Unlike in the not-so-distant past, “mulattos” and “browns” are no longer fully interchangeable terms in Brazilian culture.
This work investigates this process, which I call the “mulatto death,” which does not simply correspond to the disuse of the category in the public sphere or its condemnation and prohibition by some sectors of society, but to the transformation of at least three important dimensions in recent decades: 1) the representation of the nation; 2) the way color groups and their boundaries are constructed; 3) the shared understandings about the form of sociability between groups defined as races. The uses of the mulatto category in Brazilian social history and the way in which its symbolic devaluation repositions the meaning of other color classifications will be observed to interpret the new meanings of race and color in contemporary Brazil.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI)
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