An enduring puzzle of race relations in Brazil is that for most of the 20th century this topic was conspicuously absent from politics, in spite of deep-rooted inequalities between whites and non-whites. The ideology of "racial democracy" effectively depoliticised the issue until the late 1990s, when a wide-ranging programme of affirmative action policies for Afro-Brazilians was implemented. / Beginning with the idea that the myth of racial democracy functioned as an ideological hegemony in the Gramscian sense, this dissertation seeks to explain the process through which public policies ceased to reflect this hegemonic ideology, and instead began to represent a counterhegemonic project. Contrary to traditional Gramscian analysis, I argue that a counterhegemonic project can be defended not only by civil society actors, but also by the state, and that the relative strength of counterhegemonic actors is often influenced by transnational factors. Indeed, I argue that when civil society actors lack the necessary strength to reach a leadership position in civil society that can counter the hegemonic order, a counterhegemonic confluence of civil society, state and transnational actors can produce this change. / An analysis of the evolution of racial politics in Brazil since the return of democratic rule in the 1980s demonstrates that such a confluence did indeed take place in Brazil, culminating at the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001. A study of the implementation of admissions quotas for Afro-Brazilians in the state universities of Rio de Janeiro serves to confirm the importance of the contribution of the state and transnational actors, as well as to examine the limits of the confluence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.102219 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Treviño González, Mónica. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Political Science.) |
| Rights | © Mónica Treviño González, 2005 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002335808, proquestno: AAINR25270, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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