Coloniality of Migration & Moving Difference: Brazilians in London & Africans in São Paulo
Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, this presentation examines how Brazilian colonial and post-colonial histories and legacies differentially shape the migration experiences of Brazilians in London and Sub-Saharan Africans in São Paulo. It argues that critically interrogating how the constitution of the so-called Global Colonial World continues to influence the experiences of contemporary individuals on the move—or those striving for mobility—can help us challenge homogenising categories of “the migrant,” including categories such as the transnational migrant and the “modern slave.”
By the time slavery was abolished in Brazil, in 1888, 4.9 million Africans had been forcibly taken to Brazil as slaves. After abolition, Brazil embarked on a whitening project – influenced by eugenic racial assumptions – which incentivised European immigration as way to ‘civilise’ the new nation by ‘improving’ its mixed ‘blood’. This new population of European (and Japanese) migrants was concentrated almost entirely in the south and south-east of Brazil, regions that, since independence, had acquired the central position in the national economy, especially with the production of coffee and, later, industrialisation. At the same time, anti-African immigration acts were imposed in the country, while the formerly enslaved and their descendants have been marginalised both in the configuration of urban space and in the labour market, dealing with daily exclusion, discrimination, degradation and state violence. Today, moving geographically ruptured the racial privilege of many lighter skinned and white middle-class Brazilians (decedents of Europeans) in London, who had never previously felt it possible that they would be perceived as a de-valued inferior Other, as a ‘social problem’. For them, being positioned as a ‘migrant’ implied the possibility of experiencing classed, ‘racial’ and social degradation. Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africans in Brazil face daily harassment, racial attacks, poverty and exploitative work despite Brazil’s current progressive asylum and immigration legislation.
Speaker: Angelo Martins Junior, Assistant Professor in Sociology , Birmingham University
Dr Angelo Martins Junior is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Department of Social Policy, Sociology & Criminology, University of Birmingham, where he is currently Co-Director of the Institute for Research into International Migration & Superdiversity (IRiS). He undertakes ethnographic research in the areas of difference, intersectionality, social inequalities and decolonial sociological approaches to contribute to debates on Migration, as well as on ‘Modern Slavery’. Angelo has carried out extensive research on how differences of ‘race’, class and gender, rooted in colonial histories, are constantly being re-created and negotiated in the everyday making of inequalities faced by marginalised and criminalised populations (i.e migrants, informal workers, and sex workers) experiencing various forms of precariousness, inequality, exploitation and violence in Brazil, Europe, and Western Africa. Author of Lives in Motions (WhyteTracks, 2014) and Moving Difference: Brazilians in London (Routledge, 2020).
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