As part of the Speaker Series for the Department of History, Jerry Davila will be giving a talk on Thursday, April 11, 3:30pm in room 255 Old Horticulture. Davila is a Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“Race Mixture in the Land of the Future”
The decolonization of West African nations reignited connections across the Atlantic world that had been severed under colonialism. In Brazil, the renewal of these connections was seen as an opportunity to define a sphere of political and economic influence that would drive its development as an industrializing future world power. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian government and Brazilian intellectuals pursued opportunities across the Atlantic by promoting Brazil as a racially mixed and racially democratic nation. Dávila examines these crossings to understand dynamics of racial identity expressed in the experiences of Brazilians sojourning in West Africa.