Braz. political sci. rev.2024;18(3):e0003.
Between Mirrors, Medusas and the Mass Media: Race, Resentment and Status Panic in Brazilian Cultural Backlash
DOI: 10.1590/1981-3821202400030007
Regarding one of the founders of Political Communication in Brazil, this praise may seem only a protocol compliment. But the recently published book ‘Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil’, by Mauro Porto, a professor and researcher at Tulane University, in New Orleans, is both an urgent and welcome work. The book is pedagogic regarding the differences of class, race and geographic origin in Brazil, and serves as a document both for national researchers and for foreign Brazilianist colleagues. His refined discussion about the resurgence of conservatism and the far right in Brazil in the last decade is part of the best traditions of Brazilian social thought and conjuncture analysis at one time, and combines critical whiteness studies with Marxist and Weberian theoretical frameworks in a particularly successful way, not to mention the scathing critique of contemporary definitions of middle-class politics.
The book comprises two case studies, both anchored in textual analyses, one of them concerning the telenovela ‘Cheias de Charme’, aired by Rede Globo between April and September 2012, which featured three maids as protagonists, two of whom were white and one was black. The other one had to do with the coverage of ‘Veja’ magazine, one of the most widely circulated weekly news magazines in Brazil and of great political importance, about the affirmative action policies that allowed black people to access public universities in Brazil. These are two cases, by the way, not only exemplary, but very much opportune, since both the legislation that guarantees labor rights to domestic workers, and the so-called ‘Quotas Law’, which established racial and social affirmative action mechanisms to enter federal universities, completed their first decade in 2022.
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