Paper short abstract:

In 2003 a law voted under the new government of President Lula made the teaching of African and African-Brazilian history in public education mandatory. This paper shows how a policy designed to break with discrimination seems to have paradoxically reinforced stereotypical representations of Africa.

Paper long abstract:

Within Latin America, Brazil is clearly one of the countries in which cultural forms related to Africa are most present in popular culture. However, this heritage and the many people related with it have always been subject to discrimination and knowledge of Africa itself remained outside of public attention. The law 10.639 on the mandatory teaching of African and African-Brazilian history and culture in primary and secondary education developed by President Lula's government responding to years of struggle by social movements confronts this paradox in an unprecedented move towards a politics of recognition. This paper argues that ten years after the law's creation, its effects have done little to change the place of an Africa so close and yet so far.Textbooks reduce African history to its mythical empires and confound colonial history with the institution of slavery, while mass media representations of the continent focus on tribal customs and wildlife. As a result, in spite of the importance of Africa in Brazil's current economic and foreign policy, the contemporary urban, cosmopolitan and socially, politically and culturally diverse Africa remains mostly unknown. This leads me to analyse some of the reasons for this outcome, but also to question if we are not facing the inherent effects of a politics of recognition.