The Brazil Institute invites you to a lecture by Professor Antônio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães.

Abstract

In the social sciences today, both as a result of collective mobilization, and developments in various theoretical fields, one cannot think of group formation regardless of their intersections with various dimensions of agency and determination. The thesis that I will develop in my lecture is that interactions between processes of class and race formations should be examined in their tensions with the more general framework of the process of national formation. I focus on how, in Brazil, the processes of racialization and class formation are confined by national belonging, and how the latter is made in relation to a certain ideal of social classes and the denegation of races. I operate to this end, in an original way, with the concepts of racialization, developed by Michael Banton, class formation (Adam Przeworski) and racial formation (Omi and Winnant).

Biography

Professor Guimarães, University of São Paulo, is currently the Visiting Simón Bolívar Professor for 2016-17 at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge.  

His areas of research include racial, national and class identities, black social movements, affirmative actions, and black intellectuals.

An extremely distinguished scholar, he has been awarded a number of prizes, including the Order of Scientific Merit of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Brazil in 2008, and he was President of the Brazilian Society of Sociology (from 1995 to 1997).

He has been a Visiting Professor at a number of institutions worldwide, such as Princeton University and Sciences Po Bordeaux.

His major publications include Imagens e identidades do trabalho (1995), Um sonho de classe – trabalhadores e formação de classe na Bahia dos anos 80 (1998), Preconceito e discriminação – queixas de ofensas e tratamento desigual dos negros no Brasil(1998), Racismo e anti-racismo no Brasil (1999), Tirando a Máscara. Ensaios sobre o racismo no Brasil (2000), Classes, raças e democracia (2002) and Preconceito racial: Modos, temas e tempos (2008).

This talk will be followed by a Q&A and wine.