HYBRID: Field Station Bahia: the Transnational Making of Afro-Brazilian Studies: 1935-1967

This event is organised by UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre

Field Station Bahia: E. Franklin Frazier, Lorenzo Turner, Frances and Melville Herskovits in Brazil - the Transnational Making of Afro-Brazilian Studies: 1935-1967

This talk is a reading of the making of Afro-Brazilian studies, and, to a lesser extent, African studies in the US and Brazil, through the interrelated trajectory of four scholars – to Franklin, Lorenzo and Melville ought to be added Frances Shapiro Herskovits, who was much more than an assistant to her husband and an anthropologist in her own rights. First Sansone follows the trajectory of the four scholars as regards Brazil. Second, their fieldwork style and methodology will be compared, enhancing difference, but also a few important similarities. Third, Sansone deals with that which follows from their visit in Brazil and especially Bahia in the period until 1967 – when Frances comes back.

About the speaker:

Professor Livio Sansone
Livio Sansone (Palermo, Italy, 1956) got his PhD from the University of Amsterdam (1992). Sansone has been living in Brazil since 1992, where he is full professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He is the head of the Factory of Ideas Program – an advanced international course in ethnic and African studies – and coordinates the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Heritage. He has published extensively on youth culture, ethnicity, inequalities, international transit of ideas of race and antiracism, anthropology and colonialism, globalization and heritage with research based in the UK, Holland, Suriname, Brazil, Italy and, recently, Cape Verde, Senegal, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. His best known book in English is Blackness Without Ethnicity. Creating Race in Brazil (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Other more recent articles in English are available in the on-line journals Vibrant, Codesria Bulletin, Historia, Ciencias, Saude - Manguinhos, Berose and Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports. Over the last few years his research has been on the circulation of ideas of race and emancipation between Southern Europe, Africa and Latin America, the influence of Cesare Lombroso’s ideas in Latin America, the transnational making of Afro-Brazilian anthropology in the 1940’s and the role of Lorenzo Turner, E. Franklin Frazier and Frances & Melville Herskovits, and the trajectory of Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane. In 2019 he held the conference at the opening of the academic year of the Eduardo Mondlane University in Maputo, Mozambique.