“I Thought I Was Going to Die like Him”: Racial Authoritarianism and the Afterlife of George Floyd in the United States and Brazil

Abstract

This paper offers a brief yet comprehensive comparative analysis of historical and contemporary racial authoritarian violence in the United States and Brazil. Utilizing Black feminist historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s theorization of the “afterlife of slavery” and Michael Dawson’s linked fate, I examine how the processes of racialization and the racial logics of subordination have and continue to shape the contours of Black life in the United States and in Brazil. Moreover, in this work, I interrogate the afterlife of George Floyd and the afterlives of Black Brazilian victims and survivors of racial authoritarian violence; the political, transnational, and symbolic impacts of Floyd’s death; and Diasporic understandings of linked fate on racial authoritarian violence between Black communities in the United States and in Brazil.