{"id":27288,"date":"2013-01-04T18:36:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-04T18:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=27288"},"modified":"2013-01-04T20:07:28","modified_gmt":"2013-01-04T20:07:28","slug":"denying-brazil-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=27288","title":{"rendered":"Denying Brazil (Review)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Denying Brazil (Review)<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

African Film Festival: More than just a festival<\/a>
\nEssays & Articles
\n2002<\/p>\n

John D. H. Downing<\/a><\/strong>, Professor Emeritus of International Communication
\nSouthern Illinois University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The documentary, Denying Brazil<\/a><\/em>, is a plain-speaking and fascinating unmasking of the white racism endemic in Brazilian television\u2019s most popular genre, which in the USA we would call the soap opera, but which throughout Latin America is known as the telenovela<\/a>.
\n\u00a0
\nThe telenovela is more than a soap opera. It has a centrality in everyday life in much of Latin America way beyond its cousin in the USA. At times a series will comment very directly on current events, rather like the special \u201cWest Wing\u201d episode produced after 9\/11<\/a>. People are glued to the set across social classes, the audience includes lots of men as well as women \u2014 and we\u2019re talking prime time, not daytime. Telenovelas are not only amazingly prominent, but also have a format different to soap operas. Soaps usually run once a week and often for years on end, whereas telenovelas run every weekday night for some months and then come to a final climax.<\/p>\n

The genre is now worldwide. Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, in particular, but also other Latin American countries even export their telenovelas quite successfully around the world. Exclusive US rights to the plot-concept of Colombia\u2019s hugely popular \u201cUgly Betty (Betty La Fea)\u201d were not long ago sold for serious money. In other words, when we\u2019re talking telenovelas, we\u2019re talking about something ultra high profile.<\/p>\n

So how they portray\u2014 or don\u2019t\u2014 people of color is a really big deal in our multi-colored hemisphere. There have been some hard-hitting documentaries on racism in US media, such as the late Marlon Riggs\u2019<\/a> Ethnic Notions<\/em> and Color Adjustment<\/em>, and Deborah Gee\u2019s Slaying The Dragon<\/em>. In Denying Brazil <\/em>Brazilian director Joel Zito Ara\u00fajo<\/a> zeroes in on the very same issue: persistent white racism in media, with Brazilian telenovelas \u2014 usually acknowledged as the best there are in Latin America \u2014 in close-up…<\/p>\n

…To properly grasp the documentary\u2019s message, one needs to take a step back and understand the way race works in Brazil and many Latin American nations. In the USA for most purposes, there is a binary code \u2014 one is either black or white, however light-skinned. In much of Latin America, however, the code that dominates is one which puts value on the lightness of skin color, the nearness to being white.
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\nThis code obviously still prizes being white as the index of both beauty and intelligence, and disfavors being black as signifying unattractiveness and stupidity, but there is no fixed In-Out as there is in the USA. There is instead a microscopically detailed ladder of racial acceptability, where the more you can \u201cwhiten\u201d yourself the better things get for you. It is referred to as branqueamento<\/em> in Portuguese, blanqueamiento<\/em> in Spanish and can be translated to whitening in English.
\n\u00a0
\nOver the past hundred years this different system has permitted many Latin American commentators to claim that racism is peculiar to the USA, and that Brazil, for instance, is a \u201cracial democracy<\/a>\u201d or that Venezuela is a \u201ccoffee-colored\u201d country where lots of folk are at least a little mixed in origin, so being lack doesn\u2019t matter. Denying Brazil<\/em> rips the mask off this comforting myth…<\/p>\n

Read the entire review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Denying Brazil (Review) African Film Festival: More than just a festival Essays & Articles 2002 John D. H. Downing, Professor Emeritus of International Communication Southern Illinois University The documentary, Denying Brazil, is a plain-speaking and fascinating unmasking of the white racism endemic in Brazilian television\u2019s most popular genre, which in the USA we would call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,83,21,8],"tags":[13268,13267,10694,13269],"class_list":["post-27288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-book-reviews","category-brazil","category-latincarib","category-media-archive","tag-african-film-festival","tag-african-film-festival-more-than-just-a-festival","tag-joel-zito-araujo","tag-john-d-h-downing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}