Racial Revolutions: Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in Brazil

Jonathan Warren has written a provocative, no-holds-barred appeal to incorporate Brazil’s eastern Indians into scholarship about race and antiracist activism. Racial Revolutions is not about Amazonian Indians or international indigenous movement politics. Nor is it a book about history or historical explanations. Instead, it focuses on newly recognized indigenous groups in a region of Brazil believed for many years to have no Indian population. Until the late 1970s, the assumption was that descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of the eastern and northeastern regions of Brazil had been assimilated into the local peasantry. Warren devotes all but the final chapter of the book to answering the question, “Why has there been an indigenous resurgence in eastern Brazil?” Based on structured interviews conducted in three Minas Gerais indigenous rural communities and a neighborhood in Belo Horizonte, as well as previous research conducted in a small town in the state of Rio de...