The Transnational Imagined Community of the Black Press of Sao Paulo and Chicago, 1900-1940s

• Autor(a) principal: Castro, Cristián
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/65450
• topic: black middle class; black press; Transnational History; Global History; Urban History; black modernity.; clase media negra; prensa negra; Historia Transnacional; Historia Global; Historia Urbana; modernidad negra.; classe média negra; imprensa negra; História Transnacional; História Global; História Urbana; modernidade negra.

This article explores the use of the concept of a transnational imagined community as a theoretical tool for the study of the black press of São Paulo and Chicago from 1900 to 1950. In doing so, I aim to connect the local with the global; associating the uniqueness of the historical trajectories of these specific Afro-descendant communities, to the commonalities of the struggles endured by members of the black Diaspora in the Americas. The paper’s macro-narrative is informed by the story of capitalism’s structural changes in the late 19th and early 20th century. These transformations provided the necessary socio- political conditions for the development of the black press; a press that aimed to articulate a counter-hegemonic discourse on race, different from the mainstream press, the ‘white men’s press’. At a micro-level this paper proposes the use of the black press in the Amercas as a door to understand how a fraction of the afro-descendant community in São Paulo and Chicago – namely the black middle class – negotiated race and citizenship through a complex process of national and transnational dialogue, both locally and globlly. Overall, despite the limitation of ‘the black press’ as a primary source due to its limited circulation and audience, the black press offers a unique opportunity to depict afro-descendants everyday urban life in two rapidly modernizing cities.