Abstract:
Confederate memorialization is not limited to the United States. After the Civil War, thousands of former Confederates emigrated to Brazil where slavery continued. Santa Bárbara d’Oeste and Americana, in São Paulo State, long celebrated this Confederate heritage. Local memory politics, however, have become unsettled. This article examines local Black movement work to reconstitute collective meanings of the past and, in the process, understandings of racism. As activists reckoned with Brazil’s own Confederate and slavery legacies, they pursued heterogeneous anti-racist strategies: direct dialogue, protest, legislation and knowledge production. Employing a transnational critical race approach, I detail how Black community organizing refracted US racial pasts and presents through the immediate sociopolitical milieu as a tactical and rhetorical referent to justify anti-racist actions and articulate racism across temporal and spatial registers.