Racial democracy crisis and the emergence of critical race and feminist theories in Brazilian criminology

Abstract

This article aims to understand the emergence of the academic field of critical studies on racism, and its intersectionality with gender and class in the last three decades, in Brazilian criminology. It identifies the core elements of a specific grammar on epistemological perspectives, academic agendas, and political solutions. At the same time, it points to the participation of new subjects, subjectivities, and relations of academic production and dissemination. It also explores the impact of the post-Durban Conference Era (2001) – the crisis of the ideology of racial democracy – on scientific production on inequality and the negative effects of the criminal justice system. It proposes an explanation for the changes in academic production stemming from the transformations of Brazilian public universities. We claim the importance of this epistemological and methodological renewal to address the inequalities of the criminal justice system: the incorporation of new concepts and perspectives such as genocide, whiteness, epistemicide, intersectionality, and necropolitics; the emphasis on the production of Black intellectuals, historically ignored by the academy, who thematised dimensions of racial violence from their experience and political struggle; the emergence of new research networks throughout Brazil and new profiles of researchers, an effect of racial diversity resulting from affirmative action in higher education; more dialogue between academic research and the demands of social movements; new social movements that actively used the media to confront police and prison violence.