Terms of inclusion: Black activism and the cultural conditions for citizenship in a multi -racial Brazil, 1920–1982

This dissertation charts the changing terms through which black activists in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia defined their multi-racial nation, and their own citizenship within it, between 1920 and 1980. For much of the 20th century, scholarly and popular discussions about Brazil\u27s racial inclusiveness have been framed in terms of racial democracy ---the idea that Brazil\u27s extensive racial mixture, and its open embrace of its African heritage, were evidence of a unique form of racial harmony. Whether celebrating this racial democracy, or, more recently, denouncing it as a myth that debilitated distinctly black identities and politics, observers have typically understood racial democracy as an unchanging, uniform dynamic since the early decades of the century. This dissertation argues that racial democracy, as conceived in these debates, is but one iteration of a longer set of interactions between black activists and national elites about the terms of citizenship in a multi-racial nation. The writings of black activists themselves provide a rich and understudied record of this history, and reveal much that is left out in standard accounts of racial thought in Brazil. People of color used changing terms and concepts to frame their citizenship over the course of the 20th century---not just racial democracy, which itself had many manifestations, but also racial fraternity and self-determination. These concepts encoded specific kinds of claims to citizenship that varied substantially over time and region. Moreover, the dissertation shows, terms like racial democracy or fraternity were neither uniformly enabling nor oppressive; rather, they were complex, many-voiced discourses that allowed black activists as well as their elite interlocutors to understand, borrow, re-define, and deploy each other\u27s arguments about race, national identity, and Africanness to varied political purposes. By analyzing black activists\u27 own words and concepts throughout the 20 th century, the dissertation seeks to place the politics of ideas (and ideals) of race and race relations back into their proper historical contexts