Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Brazil Initiative

Jaime Amparo Alves — Whitopia: Biopolitics of Lethal Democracy in the Multiracial Brazilian Polity

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

12:00pm – 1:30pm

Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer Street 

The talk situates the current "crisis" of Brazilian democracy within the longue durée of antiblack racism that marks Brazil's history. In dialogue with recent interventions on antiblackness (Vargas, 2018) and the Afterlife of Slavery (Hartman, 2007), Alves argues that Brazil is indeed a successful biopolitical experiment insofar as the promotion and securitization of white life is concerned. What are the everyday modes of sociability and state practices that produce Whitopia in a society imagined and celebrated as a multiracial community?

Jaime Amparo Alves is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara.