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Category: Conviviality and Inequality

Conviviality and Inequality

When Conviviality Hides Inequality. Lélia Gonzalez on Brazilian Racial Democracy

By Rúrion Melo. The idea of racial democracy, also known as the myth of racial democracy, is not just a mistaken belief. In fact, it encompasses a set of mechanisms that regulate social practices, power relations, forms of social interaction, and collective thinking within a historically established system of ethnic-racial domination. Based on Lélia Gonzalez’s analysis, we will investigate which social actions concretize, support, and at the same time hinder the perception of everyday racism. How can we explain the widespread acceptance and propagation of the myth of racial democracy? And what does the myth of racial democracy hide, apart from what it reveals? The purpose of this text is to understand the paradigmatic issue of Brazilian racial democracy by assuming indirectly the conceptual framework of the relationship between conviviality and inequality. How does conviviality hide inequalities?

Conviviality and Inequality

The Porous and the Pure: An Artifactual History of Ties Between Asia, Europe, and Latin America

By Ajay Gandhi. This essay uses three kinds of artifacts to frame connections between Asia, Europe, and Latin America, between the 1500s and the present. These items – simultaneously tangible things and symbolic projections – plot a method and chronology of entanglement. The first are precious-metal decorations made in Goa, on India’s western coast, for Portuguese patrons. A second is a 17th-century painting of a young slave from India taken to the Netherlands. The third artifact is the spider’s web, and the Caribbean folk figure of the Anansi spider. Such artifacts can be read through purity and silence, as well as porosity and convergence. In this itinerary of artifacts, we begin with a social imaginary that is determined and untainted, and move to conditions that are fluid and open-ended.