Blackness Without Ethnicity

Drawing on fifteen years of research in Bahia, Rio, Suriname, and the Netherlands, Livio Sansone explores the very different ways that race and ethnicity are constructed in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. He compares Latin American conceptions of race to dominant notions of race that are defined by clearly identifiable balck-white ethnicities, formulations influenced by the United States and Western Europe. Sansone argues taht understanding more complex, ambiguous notions of  culture and identity will expand international discourse on race and move it away from American definitions that are not adequate to describe racial difference in other countries (as well as in the countries where the notions originated). He also explores the effects of globalization on constructions of race.