Internationalization of Higher Education For Development Blackness and Postcolonial Solidarity in Africa-Brazil Relations

Internationalization of
Higher Education for Development
i
New Directions in Comparative and International Education
Edited by Stephen Carney, Irving Epstein and Daniel Friedrich
This series aims to extend the traditional discourse within the field of
Comparative and International Education by providing a forum for creative
experimentation and exploration of alternative perspectives. As such, the series
welcomes scholarly work focusing on themes that have been under-researched
and under-theorized in the field but whose importance is easily discernible.
It supports works in which theoretical grounding is centred in knowledge
traditions that come from the Global South, encouraging those who work from
intellectual horizons alternative to the dominant discourse. The series takes an
innovative approach to challenging the dominant traditions and orientations of
the field, encouraging interdisciplinarity, methodological experimentation, and
engagement with relevant leading theorists.
Also available in the series
Resonances of El Chavo del Ocho in Latin American Childhood, Schooling,

and Societies, edited by Daniel Friedrich and Erica Colmenares
Affect Theory and Comparative Education Discourse, Irving Epstein
Forthcoming in the series
Education in Radical Uncertainty, Stephen Carney and Ulla Ambrosius Madsen
ii
Internationalization of Higher
Education for Development
Blackness and Postcolonial
Solidarity in Africa–Brazil Relations
Susanne Ress
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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Copyright © Susanne Ress, 2019
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iv
To Ursula Ache (my maternal grandmother)
and Bettina Bruchholz (my mother)
v
vi
Contents
List of Illustrations viii

List of Abbreviations ix
Acknowledgements x
Series Editors’ Foreword xii
Introduction 1
1 Portuguese Colonialism and its Aftermath 21
2 Internationalization of Higher Education for Development 33
3 Racialization Through Time, Space and Rank 47
4 Solidarity and Blackness in the Institutional Unfolding of UNILAB 61
5 Historical Consciousness 75
6 Producing, Performing and Evading Integration 99
7 International Students’ Lives 123
Conclusion 147
Appendix I 159
Appendix II 161
References 163
Index 177
vii
Illustrations
Figures
0.1 UNILAB campus in Redenção, Ceará 2

3.1 Monument in Redenção 48
3.2 Mural of freed slave, titled ‘Liberty Started Here’ 48
6.1 Student chairs organized in rows 106
6.2 Seating chart agronomy in 2012 (classroom observations,
1 October 2012) 108
6.3 Seating chart agronomy in 2013 (classroom observations,
19 February 2013) 109
6.4 Seating chart engineering (classroom observations, 5 March 2013) 110
6.5 Seating chart teacher education (classroom observations,
18 January 2013) 111
6.6 Model of the university restaurant 117
8.1 Someone makes a second entrance 152
Tables
2.1 GER in relation to GER by region 34

2.2 Number of stipends by type and nationality (January 2013) 43
2.3 Anticipated institutes and disciplines 44
4.1 Student enrolment by country, over time 69
5.1 General education courses 76
7.1 Sample timetable of third trimester education 136
viii
Abbreviations
CPLP Community of Portuguese-language Countries
PROUNI Programme of University for All
REUNI Programme of Restructuring and Expansion of Federal

Universities
SHC Society, History and Culture of Lusophone Spaces (course in the

general curriculum)
TI Intercultural Topics (course in the general curriculum)
UNIAM University of Amazonian Integration
UNILA Federal University of Latin American Integration
UNILAB University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian

Lusophony
ix
Acknowledgements
I thank all the many people who have made this book possible. My first thanks
goes to those, who engaged with my ideas and whose ideas have relentlessly
challenged mine, time and again, to reroute the analysis of events. Any
misrepresentations that still linger in the text are entirely my fault and in no way
due to anything on their part. I thank Miriam Thangaraj and Nancy Kendall,
with whom I share a deep friendship that hopefully will last forever. I thank
Miriam Thangaraj in particular, our conversations over the years and her insights
into the subject have been absolutely essential to pulling the themes of the book
together. I am deeply indebted to her intellectually thorough yet loving
willingness to call out the very last of my assumptions.
I also thank Upenyu Majee, Miye Tom, Jasmin Blanks, Lesley Bartlett, Rebecca
Tarlau and Tristan McCowan (colleagues from the comparative and international
education community), Gay Seidman (sociology professor at the University of
Wisconsin) and Alex Shankland, Katia Taela, and Lida Cabral (Institute of
Development Studies at the University of Sussex) for introducing me to critical
theories in development and education. I thank my colleagues at Humboldt-
Universität Berlin (Florian Waldow, Nadine Bernhard, Vera Centeno and
Kathleen Falkenberg) for pushing me to refine my conceptualization of race. I
thank Tom Popkewitz in particular for his merciless and unwithering
intervention, and Ebony Flowers for making me understand and write texts in a
way that opened an entirely new world for me. Although our companionship did
not withstand the test of time, hopefully she knows how incredibly grateful I am
for her intervention. Most importantly, I thank UNILAB students and professors
for allowing me to partake in their lives and the early days of this university,
which set out to provide a different kind of education.
Friends and family, people who hold me in place, Heiko, Kilian and Antonia
Ress are the centre of the universe for me. I thank Heiko for sticking with me
even when I wanted to leave. I thank him for his endless support and patience
over more than fifteen years of marriage, and for not doubting me even when I
doubted myself. On top of that, he seemed never to get tired of covering for me
in the bits and bobs of home making, placing food on my desk, and giving me
time to write. He holds me in place. He moves me along when I am incapable of
x
Acknowledgements xi
moving along myself. Kilian and Antonia are the best people who ever happened
to me. Without them I am nothing. They too hold me in place with their hugs
and kisses and their many stories, which hopefully remain as imaginative as ever.
Bettina and Hans-Peter Bruchholz (my parents), who have accepted the fact that
I am a notorious know-it-all, loving me nonetheless. Axel Bruchholz and Rüdiger
Hendel (my brothers) for being who they are with their diametrically opposing
outlooks on life. Peggie Hansen, the world’s best day-care mom. Tomas, Gabriel
and Ceci, for holding Nancy in place and for the friendship of our families. Ligia
Regina Sansigolo Kerr and Carl Kendall for extending the comforts of their
home in Fortaleza.
The research has been supported financially by the following departments
and programs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison: Department of
Educational Policy Studies, Development Studies Program, Department of Latin
American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies, and the Program of Global Studies.
External funding has been provided by: Comparative and International
Education Society, Brazilian Studies Association, Mellon Foundation, and the
German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD).
Series Editors’ Foreword
The field of comparative and international education requires its researchers,

teachers and students to examine educational issues, policies and practices in
ways that extend beyond the immediate contexts with which they are most
accustomed. To do so means that one must constantly embrace engagement with
the unfamiliar, a task that can be daunting because authority within academic
disciplines and fields of study is often constructed according to convention at
the expense of imagination and creativity. Comparative and international
education as an academic field is rich and eclectic, with a long tradition of
theoretical and methodological diversity as well as an openness to innovation
and experimentation. However, as it is not immune to the conformist – especially
disciplinary – pressures that give academic scholarship much of its legitimacy,
we believe it important to highlight the importance of research and writing that
is creative, thought-provoking and, where necessary, transgressive. This series
offers comparative and international educators and scholars the space to extend
the boundaries of the field, encouraging them to investigate the ways in which
under-appreciated social thought and theories may be applied to comparative
work and educational concerns in new and exciting ways. It especially welcomes
scholarly work that focuses upon themes that have been under-researched and
under-theorized but whose importance is easily discernible. It further supports
work whose theoretical grounding is centred in knowledge traditions that come
from the Global South and welcomes perspectives including those that are
associated with post-foundational theorizing, non-Western epistemologies and
performative approaches to working with educational problems and challenges.
In these ways, this series provides a space for alternative thinking about the role
of comparative research in reimagining the social.
Internationalization of Higher Education for Development: Blackness and Post-
colonial Solidarity in Africa–Brazil Relations is the third volume in the New
Directions in Comparative and International Education series and its presence
accentuates the scope and purpose of the series in important and compelling
ways. Susanne Ress explores the contours of South–South international higher
education relations with a sensitivity and intimacy that is unique, grounded in
substantive ethnographic work completed over a number of years. Studies
xii
Series Editors’ Foreword xiii
addressing issues of political economy and their effect upon the international
education landscape are numerous within the field, although most emphasize
the ways in which Global North institutions impact students who come to study
from Global South countries. Many of these studies tend to be empirically
grounded rather than theoretically robust, and few approach issues of identity,
power, and marginalization with Dr. Ress’s degree of insight.
It is especially significant that her analysis involves the effects of problematic
constructions of ‘the other’ for both Brazilians and African students who come to
study at the University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony
(UNILAB). Her use of theory to help her readers better situate and appreciate the
reasons why the Brazilian project has become problematic for all of the
educational actors involved raises larger questions about the global meaning of
international development. But above all, it is her discussion of race from the
perspective of critical black studies and its application to the Brazilian context
that marks this study as being ground-breaking. This critical lens on race is used
to do more than supplement or displace conventional critiques of international
education development efforts. Instead, its presentation is interwoven into an
analysis of Brazilian political and social relations that elucidates the ways in
which the colonial mindset continues to impact international development
practice. For all of these reasons, we believe that this work can serve as a future
model for scholars interested in expanding the boundaries of comparative and
international education research.
Irving Epstein, Stephen Carney and Daniel Friedrich

xiv
Introduction
Students from African countries have long been going to Europe and North
America for their university education. Lately, they have also been turning more
and more to Latin America for their studies. Moreover, in recent decades, higher
education as a mechanism for development has re-entered international policy
debates, and internationalization plays a considerable role in these debates
(Mihut, Altbach and de Wit 2017). Middle powers like Brazil, with global
aspirations, rely on educational exchange for domestic development and as a
diplomatic strategy for building alliances across the Global South (Abdenur
2015). In addition, Brazilians claim that they practise international development
cooperation differently, based on solidarity, mutual benefit and with respect to
sovereignty. Although South–South relations have always been a part of the
international development landscape, they have been largely under-studied.
Current shifts towards a multipolar world demand that we pay more attention to
players like Brazil in the arena of international development education.
This study chronicles the beginnings of an international university –
University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony
(Universidade da Integração Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-Brasileira, or
UNILAB) – located in the rural interior in Northeast Brazil. UNILAB is a
government-funded university and one of many Brazilian South–South
cooperation projects (Milani 2015). Figure 0.1 shows the main campus of the
university. Initiated in 2008 under the presidency of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva
(2003–10), the Brazilian government entrusted the university with bringing
together students from Brazil, Mozambique, São Tomé e Príncipe, Angola, Cape
Verde, Guinea Bissau and East Timor to foster cultural and educational
integration. The government at the time imagined integration as a means by
which to strengthen Africa–Brazil relations and to support domestic and
international development. By April 2015, approximately 30 per cent of
UNILAB’s nearly 3,000 undergraduate students were international students, of
whom the majority (approx. 90 per cent) came from African countries.1
1
2 Internationalization of Higher Education for Development
Figure 0.1 UNILAB campus in Redenção, Ceará.
I became interested in UNILAB after years of studying critical literatures on

development. These readings made me painfully aware of the colonial legacy
and current limitations of North–South development relations. For centuries,
Western-centric notions have portrayed Africa as underdeveloped and backward
(Ferguson 2006). European colonial powers relied on these representations to
justify the exploitation of the continent’s human and natural resources through
triangular trade regimes fuelled by transatlantic slavery and the plantation
economy in the Americas, followed by colonization of African territories in the
aftermath of the Berlin Conference in 1884–5. After the Second World War,
African anti-colonial movements demanded the independence of countries,
which European governments granted reluctantly and not without violence.
Today, political and economic dependencies persist, maintained by uneven flows
of global capital and (human) resources, shaped by political conditionalities and
capital-intensive debt regimes as well as being perpetuated through theories of
cultural and economic modernization. Until now, development regimes have
arguably resulted more often in benefits for so-called donor countries than in
lasting improvements for so-called recipient countries.
As these historical entanglements have become widely dismantled, critical
scholarship has given way to a deep suspicion of international development
efforts. The impression even arises that the international community might be
Introduction 3
eager to abandon these efforts altogether, although no adequate form of

redistribution has ever been achieved.2 The mounting criticism of North–South
relations created an opening in which South–South relations appeared as a more
egalitarian alternative.3 Coupled with the Brazilian government’s claim that it
pursues solidarity cooperation (a slogan reminiscent of the Non-Alignment
Movement,4 which left me nostalgic for my socialist childhood), this rhetoric
prompted me to examine South–South cooperation as a ‘site of possibilities’; that
is, places, situations and practices that would lean towards more equitable
solutions in development cooperation. I wanted to see how the Brazilian
discourse of South–South solidarity was put into practice. I was particularly
interested to explore to what extent international students from African countries
felt that claims of solidarity were being realized.
The political idea of Africa–Brazil relations under the Lula presidency was
radically new in its decolonizing vision.5 The claim of solidarity with African
countries coincided with a remarkable shift in state discourses from ‘racial
democracy’ to ‘affirmative action’ (Htun 2004). At the beginning of the 2000s,
after decades of holding on to the false perception that socioeconomic disparities
were not also racial disparities, the Brazilian government introduced a number
of affirmative action policies to democratize access to public employment and
higher education (Paschel 2016). Reforms included a change to the national
curriculum mandating the teaching of the history and culture of Africa and the
Afro-Brazilian diaspora at all levels of education. The aim was to acknowledge
the economic role of enslaved labour in the emergence of the Brazilian nation-
state, and to value the African heritage in Brazilian culture. Lula himself
celebrated South–South cooperation as a form of redemption, a promise to
repay the historical debt of slavery. After his seventh visit to African countries in
2007, he said: ‘We have to overcome the cruel past of slavery, which has made us
unhappy on both sides of the Atlantic. We have this historical bond.’6 During one
of his frequent visits to the university, in 2013 Lula da Silva stressed that UNILAB
was an effort to develop the rural interior and to pay Brazil’s dividend to Africa
and Afro-descendants even if it could only be a small token of appreciation.7
Overall, Lula’s efforts to revitalize Africa–Brazil connections carried a strong
symbolic value for Afro-Brazilian movements as they struggle to establish
blackness as a meaningful political basis for emancipatory claims (Paschel 2016;
Silvério 2017).
The creation of UNILAB marked an innovative stride of inclusive
development in four ways, if not five: domestically it promised to redress non-
white underrepresentation in higher education and to support under-resourced
rural regions; internationally it fostered alliances across Southern countries and

strengthened the role of the post-colony in global politics.8 And fifth, UNILAB
founders had a vision for the role of higher education in development that is
profoundly different from most accounts on global higher education, one that
does not begin with ‘world-class’ or ‘privatization’ narratives. Instead, founders
hoped to build a public university that would transfer state resources directly to
historically disadvantaged populations in Brazil and African countries. What is
more, UNILAB proposed a model of knowledge sharing that underscored
collective efforts and aimed to inspire local solutions for local problems, for
instance in the fields of agro-ecology, popular education and sustainable energies.
However, in spite of UNILAB’s unifying approach, university actors – students,
professors and administrators – had many different, sometimes contradictory
ideas about the enactment of solidarity. Furthermore, they had to confront the
realities of sedimented structures of domination, shortage of resources, and
deeply engrained sentiments regarding the inferiority of black9 people as they
endeavoured to put the utopian vision into practice.10 Consequently, rather than
providing a sweeping account of a ‘site of possibilities’, this study describes a
much more ambiguous set of relations.
To examine the everyday practices of Brazilian South–South cooperation, I
conducted ethnographic fieldwork organized into repeated visits to Ceará
between 2012 and 2015. The research included hundreds of hours of observation
in classrooms, on campus and in the local community.11 I carried out numerous
formal and informal conversations to learn about students’, professors’ and
administrators’ experiences.12 Repeated visits and long-term observations
allowed me to follow the intense negotiations and shifting power constellations
among professors, of whom many also held administrative positions. I witnessed
the challenges that professors faced as they were trying to prepare syllabi and
course materials that would be meaningful to all the students in their classrooms.
I saw students from African countries – many came to Brazil in pursuit of better
futures – struggle to find and afford housing in a small, rural town that was not
prepared for their arrival. I watched the emergence of intercultural friendships
and support networks as race, class, gender, language, nationality and other
forms of differentiation were shaping social relations. In the end, it became clear
that tremendous struggles over racialized disparities in Brazilian higher
education were at the core of UNILAB’s ambiguities. On the one hand, these
struggles are not surprising given the hyper-inequalities in terms of law, wealth,
access to opportunities and cultural discrimination that affect Brazilians the
most, who are perceived to comply the least with the racial mixedness considered
Introduction 5
to be the Brazilian norm (Telles 2004).13 On the other hand, this meant that the
kind of solidarity and integration the Brazilian government had envisioned
when creating the university, while never completely absent, happened in ways
that were reflective of the powerfully racialized class hierarchies inherited from
Portuguese colonialism and still prevalent in Brazilian society today.
When I began this research, I did not anticipate that race would be at the core
of understanding Brazilian South–South cooperation. I certainly did not want to
write about it out of fear to essentialize Brazil by reducing UNILAB to a
discussion on culture, a racializing gesture by itself as it relegates potential
variations between North–South and South–South development relations to the
realm of cultural differences and thus beyond the possibility of reason.14 But
mostly, I had convinced myself that conceptualizing Africa–Brazil relations
through the analytical lens of race would readily accept the presumption of
ontological difference, a logic by which humans are sorted into hierarchies of
belonging via the faculty of vision. I had to figure out new aspects of my
positionality before I realized that excluding race from the inquiry became
possible only because my situated imagination enabled me to envision solidarity
as something that exists outside and beyond racialism. In other words, I
conceptualized solidarity as an object of knowledge that is analytically distinct
from race. Yet, the data refused to fit this distinction. Only after reconsidering
events within registers of critical black studies, the contours of the stories
recounted here emerged.
So far, critical development studies have treated race, taken as an object of
knowledge, primarily as a cultural phenomenon, casting it as an unintended
consequence of otherwise technologically brilliant and benign development
interventions. According to this logic, development as a discursive regime
constructs postcolonial subjects as those who inhabit ethnicity and tradition,
busying themselves only with the ethnographic particularities of their very local
circumstances. Development experts, on the other hand, have been viewed as
imbued with reason, capable of objective knowledge and universal insights that
benefit everyone, including postcolonial subjects.15 Although the racializing
gesture performed by such binary constructions has been acknowledged,16
racism and racial inequality continue to be seen mostly as expressions of
local power relations in the context of underdevelopment. Such analyses,
however, fall flat because they miss that the very idea of reason presupposes
the existence of an ontologically different, unreasonable other. By bringing
critical black studies’ theorizations of race and blackness to bear on the
understanding of UNILAB, this study illuminates that development efforts
(in education and elsewhere) most of the time gloss over the fact that the
possibility to think in racial terms was foundational to conceiving notions of
reason in the first place.
Taking note of race – in theory and in practice – can never, so it seems, fully
escape essentialism. It can never fully evade the possibility of re-inscribing the
difference that it claims to write against. At the same time, circumstances were
infinitely more complex. Sedimented assemblages of forces that called on
categories of difference – expressions of belonging or not, such as nationality,
religion, gender, language, class and otherwise – constantly folded into each
other to the extent that they could no longer be disentangled. Even as it appeared
as the most generative analytical category, race is but one of many fault lines of
difference that overlapped, intersected and intermeshed in expected and
unexpected ways in the making of UNILAB. To understand Brazilian South–
South cooperation thus requires an approach that unearths the workings of
assemblages, how they shape and are shaped by official rhetoric, and how they
then, in turn, mould and are moulded by everyday struggles over influence,
survival and wellbeing in the rural interior of Northeast Brazil.
Racializing assemblages
This study’s thinking with race, as an analytical lens, is deeply indebted to

Alexander Weheliye’s (2014) intellectual project of disarticulating the notion of
the human from the occidental/heteronormative/white Man, which since the
Enlightenment has constructed himself as the universal norm of what it means
to be human. According to Weheliye, race must be placed front and centre in
understanding systems of oppression not ‘as a biological or cultural classification
but as a set of socio-political processes of differentiation and hierarchization,
which are projected onto the putatively biological human body’ (5). In his theory
of racializing assemblages,17 Weheliye describes race and racism as the mundane
inscription of difference into human flesh. Racializing assemblages are
sedimented power structures solidified by real historical events (e.g., segregated
colonial schooling) over time, and which require the constant re-articulation
via ‘institutions, discourses, practices, desires, infrastructures, languages,
technologies, sciences, economies, dreams, and cultural artifacts’ (3) to bar non-
white subjects from the category of the human. These sedimentations are neither
fully determined (or fixed) nor are they indefinitely fluid as though they were
forever free-floating and unpredictable. Rather, frames of reference that draw on
Introduction 7
the past – such as the Brazilian government’s recourse to slavery – do not escape
the mournful meaning inherited from colonialism/slavery even as they promise
to usher in another future.
Building on critical black feminist studies, especially Hortense Spiller and Sylvia
Wynter, Weheliye offers a profound critique of biopolitical conceptualizations of
what it means to be human. He shows with great eloquence and rigorous attention
to detail (leaving no stone unturned) how the concepts of ‘bare life’ and ‘biopolitics’
function as racializing assemblages. According to Weheliye, Foucault and Agamben
identify the Third Reich and Nazi racism as analytical starting points from which to
infer the theory of society as a biopolitical apparatus according to which the exercise
of state power is defined as taking hold of the biological health of the national
population – make live and let die. Both authors identify the Nazi death camps
as a prime case of disciplinary power. Agamben disavows racialization, whereas
Foucault places race and ethnicity ‘always already beyond the administrative,
ideological, and conceptual precincts of Europe’ (62), locating the unethical practice
of mundane and structural racism in an always already primitive elsewhere. What
is more, racism figures prominently only in Society must be Defended Lectures at
the Collège de France, 1975–76, whereas in the rest of Foucault’s work racism as
an object of knowledge is mostly absent except for the use of ‘ethnic racism’ as an
ominous point of comparison for biopolitics.18 In other words, Foucault’s and
Agamben’s analyses miss (or push to the side) that racism precedes biopolitical
conceptions of difference. As the idea of race, as a sedimented assemblage, according
to Weheliye, has become pinioned to human physiology over time, the possibility of
theorizing the biological as political already represents a racializing assemblage.
Weheliye strongly critiques Agamben’s and Foucault’s use of Nazi racism as
‘the apex in the telos of modern racializing assemblages’ (59) as they bracket
different forms of genocide – indigenous genocide, racialized indentured
servitude, racial slavery – which preceded the Third Reich historically and served
as laboratories for the sort of power later to be perfected in the death camps.
Why is it that colonialism is allowed to remain in the shadows in Foucault and
Agamben’s analyses? Rather than casting the Nazi death camps as the case that
represents them all (to which all other cases must be compared), the concentration
camps, the colonial outposts, and the slave plantations should be seen as: ‘three
of many relay points in the weave of modern politics, which are neither
exceptional nor comparable, but simply relational’ (37). Foucault’s and Agamben’s
conceptualizations of biopolitics miss how violent systems of subjugation
(colonial systems of exploitation, transatlantic slave trade, plantation regimes,
the industrial-prison complex, torture, rape, murder) imposed the distinction
between humans and non-humans upon the natural fact of physical variation,
into a quasi-biological phenomenon of visual distinction (‘hieroglyphics of the
flesh’ – ‘cultural seeing by skin color’ Spillers 2007, cited in Weheliye 2014: 40),
allowing bare life and biopolitics discourse to imagine an indivisible biological
substance anterior to racialization.
Perhaps placing racism outside the confines of Europe is not a ‘mistake’,
accidently performed by biopolitical discourses? Perhaps it is the condition of the
possibility of conjuring biopolitics as a theoretical framing for notions of society
from a post-war European perspective? Continental French philosophical
thought’s disregard of racism and racialization – and its simultaneous self-regard
as critical scholarship – repeats the dehumanization of those perceived to be
other as it has been performed by European Enlightenment thinkers of the
eighteenth century (Wischmann 2018). Fatima El-Tayeb’s scholarship provides a
clue in this direction. In European Others (2011), she chronicles how the
geopolitical identity of Europe (and Germany) as the continent of purity and
reason hinges on excising race as always already happening in the ‘philosophical,
geographical, and political quicksand of an unspecified elsewhere’ (Weheliye
2014: 58). Mirroring Weheliye’s deconstruction of Foucauldian analysis, El-Tayeb
captures how this sees ‘Europeans possessing the (visual) marker of Otherness
[as] eternal newcomers, forever suspended in time, forever “just arriving,” defined
by a static foreignness overriding both individual experiences and historical facts’
(2011: xxv). According to El-Tayeb, the Second World War, particularly the
Holocaust, ended the innocence of Western modernity. Afterwards, the European
West was faced with the task to recover and modify the Enlightenment project to
re-establish itself as the universal norm (i.e. human rights, 8). I am intrigued by
this curious conjuncture of events by which one situated set of ideas (biopolitics,
governmentality), which happened to offer redemption for the no longer
innocent/pure Europe by casting the Third Reich and Nazi death camps (the
cause of impurity) as the apex of a new form of reasoning (biopolitics), which, as
a logic, has gained sufficient traction to order human interrelations in spaces from
the prison, hospital, schools and including in the university classroom. To provide
only anecdotal evidence, students conversant in Foucauldian vernacular (by
virtue of their university education) have found a new way to evade classroom
discussions by marking them out as ‘new forms of governmentality’. One need not
wonder anymore about the intricacies of race or gender or class (and otherwise)
as governmentality provides a new form of reasoning about state power. Nowadays
everything can be interpreted as power in service of the state. Everything
individuals do, how they feel, and make sense is read within the logic of biopolitics.
Introduction 9
Just as minoritized traditions of thought are making headway into the university,
they are divested of their voices since the subject, who would have formerly
carried this voice, has become suspect. While the idea that teaching serves
governmentality should not be readily discarded, the possibility of the (in)ability
to master biopolitics-speech is remaking the terrain of the classroom in its own
way, as we speak. It remains to be seen what principles emerge by which to cut
reason from unreason (Popkewitz 1998) once teachers, who were trained in the
language of governmentality, arrive in schools.
But let’s return to the discussion at hand. What if Weheliye’s analysis holds?
What if El-Tayeb’s analysis holds? What if both analyses read together suggest
that Foucault’s marred use of racism is not a slippage, not a lapse of the lazy
mind, not an epiphenomenon, but foundational to his argument as it imparts the
dishonoured idea of Europeanness with new meaning, one that rectifies past
wrongs by showing how it had overcome history and by anticipating a future in
which Europe projects itself once again as the universal norm; resurrected as the
centre of reason, calculability and rationality? The idea of past wrongs being
overcome is central to postmodern, European understandings of diversity. The
Brazilian government’s reliance on the historical connection between African
countries and Brazil aiming to repay the debt of slavery via South–South
cooperation represents a similar gesture. From the perspective of the Brazilian
government, this framing posited a reinterpretation of the past to alter social
and geopolitical relations in the present. It projects Brazil into a multicultural
future. However, it also assigns students and faculty, who bare the mark of
colonial racism inscribed in flesh, the subject position of ‘former slave’. It places
them forever in the past yet simultaneously calling on them to serve as an icon
of Brazil’s future.
The use of race as an analytical lens in this study refuses to gloss over the
colonial origin of the very possibility to think with race because ‘[t]o think about
the danger of what is useful, is not to think that the dangerous thing doesn’t exist’
(Spivak 1993: 11). To describe Brazilian South–South cooperation in a way that
does not re-affirm the status of non-white subjects as beyond the grasp of the
human requires that the subject (people of colour) be disarticulated analytically
from the object of knowledge (race). Deploying race as an analytical lens does
not foreclose any singular meaning of this category. It does, however, treat the
idea of race as an empirical question, one that needs unpacking of the multiplicity
of meanings as the grand narrative of solidarity between people bound by
history unfolds. Rather than taking race for granted, this study aims to observe
when, where and how it emerges as an idea, and what functions are performed
by the idea. My analyses bring insights from critical black studies’ theorizations
of race and blackness to bear on the understanding of the UNILAB project in
its multidimensional potentialities, good and bad. They point to the colonial
core of UNILAB’s founding narrative showing how it reverberates in the
everyday experiences of international students without immediately betraying
the university’s decolonizing potential. The study destabilizes binary perceptions
of race as either cultural or biological system of classification by showing that it
appears as a frame of reference by which students and professors make sense of
the university, as a political technology, and as a subject position that defies
singular meanings as it travels across times and spaces with international student
mobility offering yet another moment of reinterpretation.
Race as blackness
The government placed UNILAB’s first campus in Redenção in the state of

Ceará because Redenção was the first Brazilian town to legally abolish slavery in
1883. This choice of location supported the South–South cooperation narrative
of redeeming a historical debt. It also signalled the cultural, political, social and
developmental affinities between Africa and Brazil, which, according to official
justifications, ensued from the history of slavery. Yet, rarely do Brazilians
originating from Ceará perceive themselves as Afro-descendants or embrace
these affinities (Miles 2002). Compared to other states like Bahia, Maranhão, Rio
de Janeiro, Minas Gerais or Pernambuco, Ceará was not a large slave-holding
enclave. After abolition, Brazilian elites (including those in Ceará) promoted the
ideology of racial democracy and miscegenation, neglecting the African heritage
in Brazilian culture. Over time, the ethno-racial-cultural mixing of African,
European and Indigenous populations blurred the distinctiveness of any one
group’s phenotypical appearance, to the extent that scholars would come to
claim that there were few blacks in Ceará (Girão 1962, cited in Miles 2002: 5).
This perception persists today. During a birthday party, in 2012, in a wealthy
apartment complex by the Atlantic Ocean in Fortaleza, Ceará’s capital, a guest
expressed interest in my research. As I explained the university’s official purpose
of co-educating Brazilian students and students from African countries in the
name of solidarity, he responded in surprise: ‘There are no blacks in Ceará,’ in
spite of the presence of three women who would be widely considered black in
the sociocultural context of Brazil. It turned out the women were from Bahia and
had come to Ceará for work.
Introduction 11
In the Cearense imagination, a person perceived to be black is always already

placed elsewhere. This particular narration of blackness shaped people’s reactions
to the arrival of international students in Redenção. People relied on perceptions
of differences in appearance and cultural repertoire (e.g., language, clothing) to
identify individuals as either Brazilian or foreign, almost automatically
subsuming those whom they perceived to be black under the category of the
latter. Professora Lourdes’, a (self-identified) black Brazilian professor, experience
provides proof: 19
Since I got here I have already had many identities, Cape Verdean, São Tomensean,
Mozambican. . . . One day I went to a beauty parlour. As I arrived, the girl called
into the back: ‘One of the Africans is here’.
Fieldnotes, 14 February 2013
Often enough (though certainly not always) these perceptions triggered

xenophobic reactions to international students similar to those experienced by
Joanna, a student in her late twenties from Guinea Bissau. Mockingly, she acted
out the story of how in a supermarket a child would step in front of her saying:
‘I don’t like you, my dad doesn’t like you, you cannot walk in these streets’
(fieldnotes, 3 February 2013). What bothered Joanna the most was that the
mother neither apologized nor did she encourage the child to make amends.
Joanna was resigned. She felt sorry for the child, who must have learned
such views from someone. From micro-aggressions to outright hostility,
discrimination is part of African students’ everyday experiences in Brazil
(Malomalo Fonseca and Badi 2015). Neusa Maria Mendes de Gusmão exposes
the torn condition of being simultaneously foreign and African that gives way to
such discrimination:
To accept the Other for being foreign, and, at the same time, to negate him/her
for being black implies to recognize the student’s presence coming from another
country but also points to the significance of race in Brazilian reality, being seen
through the color of one’s skin and through the relations that allow one to be
called Other, Brazilian or foreign, however, black.
2011: 194, emphasis original
The rather widespread practice of labelling international students generically as

‘African’ regardless of their diverse social, ethnic, racial, national, linguistic and
other backgrounds paired with a simplistic and folkloric notion of Africa, which
is common among many Brazilians (Subuhana 2009), performs a homogenizing
gesture. It represents a way of making the international students the same while
keeping them at arm’s length as guests, who will leave eventually. In the context
of Ceará, many people assume that if someone looks different, s/he must be
coming from somewhere else. International students are perceived to be black
and thus foreign. They are made black through the racializing gaze of the
Brazilian imaginary, which tends to ‘think itself as white’ (de Gusmão 2011: 192).
Gusmão’s assertion might be controversial since many Brazilians do not think of
themselves as either black or white. Generally, they consider themselves to be of
mixed race. Yet, Gusmão’s recourse to whiteness does not displace mixedness. It
just shifts the tone since both perform the same function. Both carry a notion of
national purity (‘white’ in the European and ‘mixed’ in the Brazilian sense), an
invention that facilitated the emergence of nation-states during the nineteenth
century (Europe) and at the turn of the twentieth century (Brazil). ‘Mixed’ is an
expression within the racializing assemblage of racial democracy that carries the
incitement for whitening achievable through racial mixing as a kind of racial
purification, which simultaneously desires and derides the racial other as a
symbol of nationhood (Pravaz 2012).
Traces can be found in the genealogy of Brazilian understandings of race and
culture embedded in the notion of ‘cordiality’ – the cultural inability to distinguish
between private and public spheres, causing one to constantly intervene in the other
– discussed by the Brazilian historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in Raízes do Brasil,
which first appeared in 1936, as well as in Gilberto Freyre’s Sobrados e Mucambos
published the same year. Most contemporary interpretations of Brazilian cordiality
attribute the concept to Holanda but rely on a Freyrean interpretation (de Castro
Rocha 2000). Whereas for Holanda cordiality was not an exclusively Brazilian
characteristic but a structural trait of societies that do not establish clear boundaries
between public and private spheres of society, Freyre portrayed cordiality as a
uniquely Brazilian trait embedded in historical processes of mestiçagem
(miscegenation), which was first articulated as an ideal by the German historian Karl
Friedrich von Martius. In his 1840 monograph, How the History of Brazil Should Be
Written, von Martius described the encounter between Portuguese, Indigenous and
African peoples in productive terms, while clearly delineating a leading role for the
Portuguese:‘Portuguese blood, in a powerful river, should absorb the small tributaries
of the Native and African Races’ (de Castro Rocha 2000: 77). For Martius, who has
most probably been influenced by the Germanic strain of eugenic thought that
marshalled genetic-hereditary rather than environmental explanations for variations
in humans (Cleminson 2016), miscegenation was above all a racial phenomenon.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Brazilian scientists subscribed to the idea
that Caucasians are inherently superior to non-white people, proposing policies
Introduction 13
of whitening as a solution (Schwarcz 1999). Brazilian politicians and elites

subsequently promoted European immigration to replace slave labour and
heralded miscegenation to alter what they perceived as biological degeneracy in
the Brazilian populace. Race mixture became a central feature of Brazilian
national identity, later purportedly wrested, however, from the biological
determinism of eugenic viewpoints and handed over to anti-racist sociological
analysis by Gilberto Freyre. Freyre has been widely credited with fully developing
the idea of racial democracy that dominated Brazilian race thinking from the
1930s to the early 1990s. Freyre claimed that Brazilian society was unique for its
smooth blending of European, Indian and African people and cultures and free
of the anti-black racism that affected the rest of the world. In Case Grande e
Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves [1933] 1986), he characterized the extended
patriarchic family of the plantations (latifundios) in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries as a cauldron for interracial mixing that harmonized differences and
diluted conflicts, thus enabling extraordinary assimilation, creating a new
Brazilian people. Freyre’s doctrine of Lusotropicalism was later deployed by the
Portuguese to justify the colonization of African territories. The Portuguese
constructed themselves as benign colonizers and the only Europeans to create a
civilization in the tropics, an accomplishment attributable above all to their
racial tolerance.20 Ironically, Freyre’s anti-racist vision of miscegenation was
contingent upon the process of whitening as developed by the earlier generation.
Freyre acknowledged that miscegenation could only occur in modern times
because of the population’s belief in white supremacist ideology of whitening.
According to this popular notion, ordinary black Brazilians believed their
greatest chance for escaping poverty was to marry whites and lighter-skinned
mulattos. However, Freyre generally downplayed whitening and focused rather
on miscegenation’s effects of diffusing racial differences (Telles 2004).
In other words, upon arrival in Brazil, international students stepped onto the
Lusotropical grid of intelligibility that conceptualizes race as skin colour, quasi-
biologically, with blackness as a deviation from the norm. While Weheliye made
clear that race must be taken as an object of knowledge, Michelle Wright’s Physics
of Blackness (2015) blazes the trail for understanding blackness as a multi-linear
and multi-dimensional phenomenon. Most discourses on blackness in the
United States and the Caribbean rely on the history of the Middle Passage, by
which slavery has become the defining moment for black collective identities.
However, understandings of blackness bound to Middle Passage narratives
are rather exclusive, as they do not represent those who are not meaningfully
linked to Middle Passage black communities, such as people of colour in the
European context (El-Tayeb 2011). Wright finds Middle Passage narratives

limiting in another sense. It makes blackness tangible only in relation to
whiteness. To overcome the limitations, Wright proposes to rethink blackness
as a multidimensional and multilinear phenomenon with the Middle Passage
epistemology being but one form through which to make sense of black
identity.
To illustrate what she means by unthinking the linearity of the Middle Passage
epistemology, Wright draws on the writings of James Arthur Baldwin. Baldwin
(1924–1987) was an American novelist and social critic. In his writings he
explored the intricacies of racial, sexual and class distinctions in Western
societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century North America. Wright
comments on Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son (1955) to explain the entwinement
of epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes:
Baldwin recounts a year in New Jersey in which the unbearable limits placed on
his spacetime – where he is allowed to be and when, and for how long – lead to
the famous encounter that shows him that his very life is at stake if he does not
escape these environs. Walking in and sitting down at a ‘whites only’ diner, he
waits for the inevitable rejection from the waitress. When she does indeed tell
him that they ‘don’t serve Negroes here,’ he hurls a glass at her and runs out in
front of the angry white patrons and staff: ‘I could not get over two facts, both
equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been
murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw
nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and
not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my
own heart.’
Wright 2015: 119
The array of responses from which Baldwin could have picked in the moment is
neither limited to a singular response (i.e., anti-racism) nor is it infinite, given
the confines of legal segregation at the time. Rather than confining Baldwin’s
account to Middle Passage logic (linearly and alone), Wright accounts for
epiphenomenal time in the form of the choice, which transcends the confines of
the Middle Passage epistemology, as it does not cast Baldwin’s reasoning in
opposition to anti-black racism (fear of death, killable other, hence object) but as
a human response (not wanting to kill, personhood, hence subject). Imaginaries
of blackness contain a multiplicity of meanings, none of which is exclusive but
instead intersects and overlaps, shaped, however, by when and where blackness
is being imagined, defined, and performed. Multi-dimensional and multi-linear
constructions of race and/or as blackness foreclose the possibility of a singular
Introduction 15
meaning or binary constructions (solely in opposition to whiteness). Instead

they open up space for inclusive and non-hierarchical understandings that
locate black collectives simultaneously in history and in the specific moment of
‘the now’ (14) in which blackness is being imagined. Wright’s conceptualization
of the now in which blackness defies any singular meaning relates to Weheliye’s
focus on assemblages in that the now can also be understood as a racializing
assemblage that jells in a matter of seconds, relying on the faculty of the senses,
rendering a person and/or situation other. Yet, it is in the eye of the observer that
a non-white subject becomes other, objectified and racialized, whereas the
subject maintains choices that often escape the narrow confines of any observer’s
perception. In the context of UNILAB, international students could never really
escape the racializing constructions of their subject positions. They had to
navigate the discursive grid of Lusotropical imaginations of racial and cultural
diversity, which they did by asserting their rightful belonging in the spaces of
UNILAB.
Outline
The Brazilian government under the Lula administration imagined UNILAB as

the beacon of Africa–Brazil relations. It promised national development through
the interiorization of public higher education, Afro-Brazilian emancipation, and
internationalization of higher education as a soft-power tool to form South–
South alliances. But the everyday making of the university also produces tensions
not the least because the founding narrative relies on racializing construction of
international students. In the following chapters, I examine how ideas of blackness
and racialization shape the everyday practices of Brazilian South–South
cooperation at UNILAB. In Chapter 1, I provide an overview on Portuguese
colonialism and postcolonial education landscapes in Lusophone countries to
contextualize UNILAB’s founding mythology of shared history and cultural
affinity. In Chapter 2, I describe the developmental contours that link the
internationalization and interiorization mandates of the university. Chapters 1
and 2 together provide basic information on the South–South cooperation
narrative that subsequently leads to the tensions that faculty and students had
to navigate in their everyday interactions. Chapter 3 outlines the abolitionist
narrative and critically reflects on how it imposes itself on the diverse histories of
African countries where anti-colonial, independence narratives were far more
significant in configuring autonomous political and racialized identities. It
problematizes the Middle Passage narrative by providing alternative

interpretations from a multi-dimensional perspective. In Chapter 4, I illustrate
the struggles of Afro-Brazilian activist professors to establish blackness as a
legitimate political category in the context of UNILAB and Brazil more broadly.
I show that Afro-Brazilian activist professors mobilize an understanding of
blackness that instrumentalizes the presence of students and faculty from African
countries, the latter questioning the subject positions that the abolitionist
narrative assigns them with. Chapter 5 examines the ways in which professors
aim to foster in their students a historical consciousness. It delves into the
curriculum and moves into classrooms examining various messages on history,
society and cultures embedded in the general curriculum. Together with Chapter
6, it looks at social interactions on campus in relation to the messages students
receive through teaching. Chapter 7 focuses on students’ social relations outside
the university and how they are shaped by race vis-à-vis solidarity. Chapter 8
draws the several themes together and closes with thoughts on thinking critically
with race as an analytical lens in international development education.
Notes
1 Fieldwork began when the first campus was inaugurated in Redenção in 2011. By the
end of 2015, UNILAB had three campuses, two in Ceará and one in Bahia. It
enrolled 2,666 undergraduate students: 73 per cent of them were Brazilian and the
27 per cent of international students came from Guinea Bissau, Angola,
Mozambique, São Tomé e Principe, Cape Verde and East Timor. It employed 173
professors, 87 per cent of them Brazilian and 13 per cent non-Brazilian (two from
each of the countries of Angola and Guinea Bissau, and one each from Peru, Cape
Verde, Congo, Costa Rica, Gabon, Mozambique and Portugal). It offered seven
undergraduate disciplines including agronomy, engineering of sustainable energies,
public administration, nursing, social sciences and humanities, teacher education in
maths and science, and pedagogy. The students were organized into classes by
cohorts according to date of entry and discipline (e.g., autumn 2012, agronomy). For
the most part students stayed together in these disciplinary cohorts throughout their
studies. Teaching lasted three regular trimesters, and an additional fourth trimester
was reserved for cultural activities and extra-curricular learning.
2 During the post-war era, when modernization theories postulated an economic and
cultural convergence between the so-called ‘First’ and ‘Third World’, it was assumed
that so-called ‘developing countries’ were indeed developing. Development
discourses, projects and practices promised that these countries would eventually
Introduction 17
‘catch up’, transitioning to models of society found in the so-called developed

countries. This constituted a temporalized differentiation of countries and world
regions. It is now well established that the wholesale transition is not actually what
happens. Instead, traditional elements that used to characterize ‘backward’ regions
endure alongside adopted and appropriated elements of modernity. Critical scholars
and development practitioners have thus come to the conclusion that spatial
variations – alternative modernities – explain persisting divergences (Ferguson 2006:
176–93). The thought that different world regions might never converge in their
economic viability could suggest, deceivingly, that any effort in this regard would be
futile.
3 Gita Steiner-Khamsi (2009) provides a critical discussion to whether South–South
cooperation is indeed an alternative or rather a continuation of North–South
development relations.
4 Following the Bandung Conference in 1955, leaders of the ‘Third World’ formed the
Non-Alignment Movement in 1961. Principles such as non-intervention, non-
interference and equal treatment provided the basis for South–South state relations.
Controlling the production of knowledge, including knowledge about the ostensible
other, was governing technology in the hands of Global North powers to maintain
the subordination of countries in the Global South (Grovogui 2001). Alongside
geopolitical objectives, the alliance aimed to cooperate in education and exchange
knowledge to enhance human capital as well as to counter-weight neo-colonial
knowledge production on their behalf (Abdenur 2002).
5 The Brazilian government has relied on the rhetoric of the historical bond between
Africa and Brazil already during the 1960s and 1970s (Dávila 2010). The main
difference in Lula’s politics is that they are combined explicitly with measures to
mediate the socioeconomic, cultural, and political discrimination of Afro-Brazilians
through affirmative action policies rather than under the ideological banner of racial
democracy.
6 Cited in Barbosa, Narciso and Biancalana 2009, p. 72.
7 Fieldnotes, 1 March 2013. See also Document no. 31 for similar comments during
the inauguration of UNILAB’s campus in Bahia.
8 Burges (2005) analysed Brazilian foreign policy under the Lula da Silva government
through a postcolonial lens. He argued that Lula da Silva continued the foreign
policy of his predecessor Henrique Fernando Cardoso (1995–2002), who sought to
reverse Brazil’s economic dependency on countries of the northern hemisphere by
emphasizing trade relations with southern partners, but that Lula da Silva went
beyond mere politico-economic measures. Burges linked Lula da Silva’s foreign
policy to Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial text Black Skin White Mask (1967 [1952]), in
which Fanon eloquently deciphers the psychological effects of colonization as
cultural inferiority complex that manifests in the psyche of the colonized. According
to Burges, Lula da Silva’s foreign policy represented an attempt to transform the
colonizer/colonized dichotomy and to instil in Brazilians a sense of national pride

and emancipation.
9 Translating ethno-racial categories from Portuguese to English is complicated.
Therefore, a word on terminology: the Brazilian census distinguishes between branco
(white), pardo (mixed-race or brown), preto (black, referring to the darkest
Brazilians), amarelo (yellow) and indígena (indigenous). Furthermore, in everyday
vernacular, Brazilians use mulata (mulatto, especially for women) and mestiço
(mestizo) to refer to a person’s mixedness. Brazilians increasingly also use the term
negro, especially if they are politically aware, which also translates to black. It
includes both pretos and pardos (Paschel 2016). Classifying populations by race,
through censuses or otherwise, naturalizes lines of difference – such as who is
perceived to be black or white – while these are de facto sociohistorical categories
that are ‘cultural impositions upon the natural fact of physical variation among
human beings’ (Loveman 2014: xiii). Throughout the following pages, the terms
black, white, non-black, non-white and mixed, are used only if pertinent for the
argument whilst making every effort to do so not only for those, who are frequently
called upon to represent the concept of race.
10 Motter and Gandin (2016) and McCowan (2016b) have also discussed the
ambiguities of Brazilian inter-regional universities (including UNILAB and
UNILA). The authors emphasize challenges of governance and implementation,
whereas my analyses focus on the discursive constructions of international students
as Brazil’s racial other to legitimize the creation of the university. I borrowed the
notion of ‘utopia’ from Motter and Gandin (2016).
11 Classroom observations are detailed in Appendix I. I further conducted over 400
hours of observations on-campus (e.g., during general assemblies, faculty meetings,
in library, hallways, university restaurant) and off-campus (e.g., at bus stops or in the
market square), during activities organized and supported by the university (e.g.,
artistic performances, sports events) as well as outside the purview of the university
including informal gatherings in students’ homes and in town, at birthday parties,
and during church services. I also conducted repeated and in-depth interviews with
twenty-four professors, twenty students, and five administrators (including in 2013 a
thirty-minute interview with Paulo Speller, UNILAB’s first dean (reitor)). To get a
sense of UNILAB’s self-representation, I collected official documents (including the
founding document) and website contents that were designed to promote the
university.
12 This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in Redenção and Acarape (Ceará). I
conducted 137 hours of participatory observation in classrooms in which I observed
twenty-five professors (out of eighty-five) across sixteen classes; that is, different
cohorts in different disciplines, nocturnal as well as diurnal (see Appendix I for
details). At the beginning, I visited a range of classrooms to gain an overview on
Introduction 19
contents and classroom relationships. Later, I concentrated on courses included in

the mandatory general curriculum that covered the history, society and culture of
Lusophone spaces, university life, introduction to research, and the Portuguese
language (87 per cent). The general curriculum was designed to foster students’
intercultural capacities and historical knowledges. I anticipated that much of the
work of building Africa–Brazil relations would be performed in these classroom
spaces. The analyses reference twenty-eight hours of classroom observations in
Society, History and Culture in Lusophone Spaces (SHC), forty-eight hours in
Intercultural Topics in Lusophone Spaces (TI) classrooms, and forty-six hours in
Insertion into University Life (VU) classrooms across cohorts and disciplines.
13 Perceptions of race and related material consequences are highly complex in the
Brazilian context. In the public opinion, the idea persists that there are no or very
few racial disparities in terms of socioeconomic and cultural status. Meanwhile, vast
research has shown that Brazilians indeed judge by an intricate matrix whether a
person is black, and that these judgments have real material consequences. Bailey,
Loveman and Muniz (2013) compared self- versus interviewer-rated measures of
perceived blackness in a large sample study. They could prove that degrees of
inequality between white and non-white Brazilians varied differently depending on
the measure of blackness. Socioeconomic inequality was less pronounced when it
was calculated using self-rated measures of blackness. It was graver when calculated
using interviewer-rated measures. In addition, the authors showed that the
discrimination against non-white Brazilians was even stronger in the higher
socioeconomic strata, preventing black Brazilians from access to management
positions, for instance.
14 The idea of reason emerged from Enlightenment philosophers, most notably
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Wilhelm von
Humboldt (1767–1835) whose ideas continue to be foundational to the field of
education (Wischmann 2018), understood education as the operation by which
rational subjects were formed to benefit humankind, the society, and themselves by
becoming better versions of themselves. Achille Mbembe (2018) provides a
masterful discussion of how the discourse of race emerged from this period in
which science, philosophy and other disciplines, and social debates, constructed
differences between people. This was driven by capitalist exploitation and the
unwillingness to live with the unfamiliar. Simultaneously the unfamiliar provided
the lens through which European thinkers identified themselves as the norm,
establishing the logic of racial thinking, which persists in many modes of thinking
about identity and belonging.
15 For critical accounts of this logic see Ferguson (1994) and Escobar (1995).
16 For discussions of racialization in the name of progress see for example Kothari
(2006) and Wilson (2012).
17 Assemblages ‘constitute continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of

spasmodic networks between different entities (content) and their articulation
within “acts and statements” (expression)’ (Weheliye 2014: 46). Assemblages
comprise various elements, which become elements of this very assemblage only in
as far as they are co-constituted in relational connectivity.
18 Weheliye points out that this absence becomes even more pronounced if one
considers the unacknowledged influence of the Black Panther Party (BPP),
especially George Jackson and Angela Davis, on Foucault’s work in this period.
19 Most proper names in this work are pseudonyms with the exception of Mr Lula da
Silva (Brazil’s president, 2003–10), Mr Speller (first dean, 2011–13), and Mrs Gomes
(second dean, 2013–14). I consider their statements and actions to be public and not
representative of their opinions as private individuals. Otherwise, I use pseudonyms
to protect the anonymity of individuals, who participated in the research. In some
case this also required modifying other markers of their identity, such as changing
disciplinary fields, gender etc.
20 Freyre believed that the Portuguese possessed a high degree of plasticity that enabled
them to conform to and blend with other societies and cultures, especially in
comparison with the cultural rigidness, seclusion and self-reliance found among
other Europeans. Ruled by the Moors for more than 500 years, the Portuguese had
developed a culture that was accustomed to and welcomed darker-skinned peoples,
Freyre alleged. Indeed, miscegenation with the Moors had long been practised in
Portugal (Telles 2004).
1
Portuguese Colonialism and its Aftermath
The Portuguese Colonial Empire, also referred to as the Portuguese Overseas

Territories (Ultramar Português), was the oldest colonial empire and also lasted
the longest. It began in 1415 with the capture of Ceuta (the North African
territory that is today Spain) and ended with officially granting sovereignty to
East Timor in 2002. It spanned many parts of the world, which now belong to
fifty-three countries. Despite its longevity, the Portuguese Colonial Empire had
been semi-peripheral, at once far-reaching yet always incomplete compared to
the British Commonwealth and the French Colonial Empire. The Portuguese
were less interested in establishing bureaucratic, state-like infrastructures than in
finding navigation routes and building ports for trade and extraction of natural
resources. In fact, as a small country, Portugal had lacked the capacity to effectively
colonize the territories it occupied in political and economic terms. The irony is
that Portugal held on to its colonies longer than any other country, in part because
it depended on them economically and because they contributed to the country’s
pride and national identity (Sousa Santos 2002). The colonial period under
Portuguese rule shaped the education systems of Brazil, Mozambique, São Tomé
e Príncipe, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and East Timor.
Like other forms of colonial occupation in conjunction with exploitive
regimes of the transatlantic slave trade and the plantation economy, Portuguese
colonialism laid the foundation for the classification and hierarchization of
people based on cultural and racial differentiation. Later this formed the base for
the myth of harmonious racial mixing so foundational to Brazilian national
identity. While in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe – most notably in
Germany – ‘the cult of unmixed origin’ (Mbembe 2017: 58) proved vital for
emergent nationalisms, in Brazil the ideology of racial democracy served the
same purpose (Silva and Paixão 2014). Throughout the twentieth century,
Brazilian political and economic elites denied or understated that stark racial
inequalities lurked underneath the national narrative of racial democracy.
National discourses shifted only at the turn of the twenty-first century when the
21
government began to implement affirmative action policies because of domestic

pressure (Paschel 2010) and to preserve its international image (Htun 2004). The
legacies of Portuguese colonialism and ideologies of cultural superiority, which
have been developed through scientific exchange with European thinkers,
shaped the cultural and economic fabric of contemporary Brazilian society.
Portuguese colonialism
In the early fifteenth century, Portuguese sailors explored the coasts of Africa
and the Atlantic archipelagos in search of sea routes for the spice trade. They
reached Madeira in 1420, the Azores in 1427, Cape Verde in 1445, the Gulf of
Guinea in 1460 and São Tomé e Príncipe in the early 1470s. In 1488, Bartolomeu
Dias sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and in 1498 Vasco da Gama reached
India. By 1506, Ilha de Moçambique in the north of Mozambique had become a
strategic port on the way to Asia. In 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral landed on the
shores of what is today Brazil. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese
had built a web of naval outposts that ran along the coasts of Africa, the Middle
East, and South and Southeast Asia. These routes connected Portugal’s capital
Lisbon to the furthest corners of the colonial world and their wealth. The Atlantic
economic system centred on the production of cash crops and colonial produce
to be sold in Europe. The Portuguese traded in sugar, gold, tobacco, coffee and
wheat for the mainland, and soon their cargo included humans reduced to slaves
(Page and Sonnenberg 2003).
From the seventeenth century onwards, the Portuguese Empire was under
constant attack from its European rivals (the Dutch Republic, England and
France). These attacks strained the small country to the extent that it became
incapable of defending its overstretched networks of trading posts. After the
Dutch-Portuguese colonial wars (1602–63) the Portuguese had to give up their
trade monopoly in the Indian Ocean. In turn, the Dutch gave up their rights in
the Americas, which made Brazil into Portugal’s most valuable colony. In 1807,
during the Napoleonic Wars, the French invaded Portugal. The Portuguese royal
family fled to Brazil and established Rio de Janeiro as the de facto capital of
Portugal. The Portuguese created the institutional infrastructure that Brazil
needed to function as an independent state. They also allowed Brazil to trade
with other countries at will. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, King John VI of
Portugal raised the de jure status of Brazil to an equal and integral part of the
United Kingdom of Portugal, which included Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve.
Portuguese Colonialism and its Aftermath 23
The King hoped that he could maintain the capital in Brazil and allay Brazilian
fears of becoming a colony once again. However, in 1820 a constitutionalist
reform movement in Portugal demanded that the King return from Brazil. He
nominated his son Dom Pedro I as regent to govern Brazil in his place. Soon
after, the Brazilians began to fight against the Portuguese. African slaves and
freed people, who in many cases were freed intentionally so they could be
enlisted as soldiers, fought on both sides. In September 1822, Dom Pedro I
declared Brazil’s independence from Portugal. He became the Emperor of Brazil
and reigned until 1889.
The colonial economy relied heavily on forced labour originally provided by
Indigenous people. Many of them had died by the middle of the sixteenth
century due to European diseases and atrocious working conditions. To account
for the loss in the labour force, the Portuguese expanded the practice of trading
humans as slaves that was already common in Iberia and the Caribbean during
the fifteenth century, bringing men, women and children from Africa under
the dehumanizing trade regime of the Atlantic economic system. Portuguese
territories such as Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe (a set of islands off the
west coast of Africa) served as strategic ports for the triangular trade between
Africa, the Americas and Europe. According to some estimates, between 1519
and 1867, 11.6 million Africans were brought to the Americas. About one-third
of them went to Brazil (Behrendt 1999; Lovejoy 2011). Brazil abolished slavery
only in 1888.
After the abolition of slavery, the loss of its Brazilian territories, and following
the Berlin Conference in 1884–5, the Portuguese intensified the colonization of
African territories. They pressed into the hinterlands of the naval outposts of
their trade routes expanding them into country-sized territories. They started
establishing settler colonies, most notably in what today are Angola, Mozambique
and Guinea Bissau. The Portuguese monopolized the entire mostly agrarian-
based colonial economy and its trading activities. They controlled prices of raw
materials (e.g., cash crops) by holding them below market prices and used the
territories as markets for goods manufactured in Portugal. The mainland’s
economy strongly depended on the colonies to balance the Crown’s chronic
deficit in terms of trade. At the same time, the Portuguese refused to even
minimally industrialize colonial territories, and thus reproduced the agrarian
monopoly that characterized Portugal’s economic systems at that time. They
introduced new social hierarchies and systematically discriminated against local
populations. To fuel the colonial economy, as in Brazil, they forced local
populations to work not as slaves, but under equally repressive compulsory
labour requirements. The Portuguese established social categories that

distinguished between ‘civilized’ and ‘non-civilized’ people. The latter was
reserved for the local population. Those who fell into this category had no civil
rights unless they abandoned their cultures, religions and languages. Only then
could they potentially become assimilados (assimilated, a category between
civilized and non-civilized). This status however was rarely conceded.
During the 1960s, rising global anticolonial sentiments and decolonization
demands forced Portugal to revise its colonial policies and introduce reforms. As
part of these reforms, the Portuguese officially banished compulsory labour, but
worker exploitation nonetheless continued. Black African workers were paid
much less than urban, mostly white workers. Even as the Portuguese began to fill
positions in the colonial administration with assimilados and began hiring
African troops (to fight armed resistances), they kept local groups’ professional
statuses below the statuses of those of Portuguese descent, thus maintaining a
two-tiered hierarchy in the entire workforce of the colonial economy.
Portuguese reform efforts also targeted the mainland’s constitution. In this
new constitution, the Portuguese re-labelled their overseas territories into
autonomous provinces rather than colonies to bestow on them the appearance
of politically independent entities. The provinces, however, were neither allowed
to maintain diplomatic ties with other foreign powers nor enforce laws or elect
their own governments. In 1961, Portugal granted citizenship to local populations
in the colonies, including the right to vote. This right, however, was dependent
on a person’s ability to read and write the Portuguese language. Very few people
qualified (e.g., 1 per cent in Mozambique and 3 per cent in Angola at that time),
in large part because the Portuguese had no interest in providing local
populations with even a basic education. Ultimately, the reforms changed the
appearance rather than the substance of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. While
seemingly eager to let the provinces appear autonomous the Portuguese de facto
continued the domination and exploitation of these territories until 1975.
At a time when other European powers had at least begun to cede to
anticolonial demands for independence (though not without violence and war),
the Portuguese dismissed requests for peaceful transition made by liberation
movements in their colonies (i.e., MPLA, PAIGC, MLSTP, FRELIMO).1
Instead, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, who had come to power in Portugal through
a coup d’état in 1926, extended his authoritarian regime into the colonies and
increased military presence. The Portuguese reasserted their colonizing efforts
by deploying large contingents of troops to ‘defend’ the provinces against the
insurgence of liberation movements. The Portuguese also concentrated local
populations in reservation-like, military-controlled villages, and removed

peasants and semi-nomadic pastoralists from their homes, placing them in
settlements. Basil Davidson described Portugal’s practices against independence
movements as ‘colonial warfare on a rising scale of destruction of people and
property, and an ever-greater dislocation of social life’ (1974: 19). The Portuguese
backed their colonial activities through references to the ideology of
Lusotropicalism borrowed from Brazilian social theory. Drawing on this
ideology, the Portuguese could herald their colonial extension as a civilizing
mission as the mixing of races allegedly contributed to the assimilation of
Africans bringing them closer to the perceived ideal of Europeanness. Only after
thirteen years of ferocious anti-colonial wars, at the end of Salazar’s military
dictatorship in 1974, did African national liberation movements succeed. The
countries gained independence 150 years after Brazil; São Tomé e Principe in
1972, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau in 1974, Cape Verde in 1975. East
Timor was also granted independence in 1975 but within ten days Indonesia
invaded the country and occupied it until 2002.
Portuguese colonialism, along with the transatlantic slave trade, produced
different realities in the Americas and on the African continent. In Brazil, it
created the racialized foundation of a nation. In Africa, the growing need for
slave labour disrupted societies and shaped new global socio-economic relations.
The continent’s diverse nineteenth-century experiences of missionaries and
early settler colonialism, and twentieth-century experiences of widespread
bureaucratically-enforced colonialism following the transatlantic slave trade,
deeply transformed African societies and cultures, crafting new nation-states
and reshaping the role of Africa as the producer of raw materials and markets for
European and American goods. For a long time, Brazil presented itself as a
(much desired) extension of Portugal, mostly in cultural but also in economic,
social and political terms. At the national level, Brazil constructed itself as close
to Europe, which it saw as the beacon of modernity. It purported a political
stance of non-interference refraining from openly opposing late Portuguese
colonialism (Abdenur and Rampini 2015). In the international arena, Brazil
never voted publicly against Portuguese colonialism. Brazilian police even raided
the FRELIMO office in Rio de Janeiro in 1964 (Taela 2017). Surprisingly though,
the government was quick to officially recognize the newly independent African
countries, even being the first to do so in the case of Angola. Four years later,
Petrobrás, a large Brazilian petroleum company, started its operations in Angola,
which underscores Brazil’s overall ambiguous role in Portuguese colonialism
(Ribeiro 2011).
Postcolonial education in the Lusophone world
In Brazil, Catholic mission schools (run by Jesuits) dominated the colonial

education system beginning in the sixteenth century. Until the twentieth century,
Brazil was a very large, mostly rural country that depended primarily on
agricultural production consisting of a mostly unskilled, but continually
increasing, labour force of slaves, former slaves and immigrants. Like the
Portuguese colonizers that came before, the independent Brazilian state showed
little interest in expanding educational opportunities into rural areas, or indeed,
for former slaves and the poor in the cities. The dominant classes increasingly
feared that freedmen would gradually earn the minimum income that was
required to earn the right to vote (Bethell 2000). In response, the government
established a law that made literacy a new requirement for voter registration. In
1889, six decades after independence, only 20 per cent of the population could
read and write. When the government finally began to expand the public
education system, triggered by a period of rapid economic growth during the
1930s, it focused first on post-secondary education, neglecting primary and
secondary education. This resulted in a small number of internationally
renowned public universities and relatively low-quality public primary and
secondary education, characterized by low enrolment and high drop-out and
repetition rates. At the same time, private education expanded for the wealthy.
It was not until the mid-1990s that reforms started to take place at lower
levels of public education when Brazil’s growing industries required better-
educated workers. To meet the demands, government (at state and federal level)
reintroduced performance tests of schools to monitor educational quality: they
also increased overall funding and redistributed federal funds towards
municipalities where education was underfunded. As a result, more students
enrolled and more students actually completed primary and secondary levels of
education. Between 1980 and 2000, school enrolment for children aged 7–14
grew from 80.9 per cent to 96.4 per cent. For youths aged 15–17, the rate rose
from 49.7 per cent to 83 per cent. Illiteracy rates decreased to the extent that it
became mostly a phenomenon among older generations (De Castro and Tiezzi
2004; Castro 2004).
In Lusophone African countries, postcolonial education emerged precisely as
these countries became the locations of brutal and bloody proxy wars for the
Cold War. When colonial occupation of African territories finally ended in the
mid-1970s, the majority of Portuguese settlers fled the colonies, migrating to
Europe (e.g., Portugal) and the Americas (e.g., the US and Brazil). When they
left, they took with them almost the entire professional capacity because, as in
Brazil, the Portuguese had only minimally invested in educating the local
population. Education under colonial rule was highly segregated. In urban areas,
private and government schools served the settlers and assimilados, whereas
local and rural students attended Catholic mission schools built with the primary
purpose to ‘civilize’ the ‘barbarian’ natives. Consequently, illiteracy was extremely
high and educational structures were virtually non-existent (Ferreira 1974). This
was especially true in Mozambique and Angola – caught between ideological
frontiers as their own aspirations for (socialist) self-determination were
perceived as a threat by Western ‘liberal’ powers, which led the countries into
brutal ‘civil wars’ (a term often deemed misleading) given the global circumstances
of the Cold War. These wars lasted until the early 1990s when the fall of the
Berlin Wall shifted global power dynamics yet again. They destroyed most of the
educational infrastructures, which the independence movements had built as a
mechanism to mobilize local populations against Portuguese colonialism.
Mozambique, as a case study, serves to illuminate the dynamics of post-
colonial education in Portuguese-language African countries. In Mozambique,
the anti-colonial war began in 1964 and ended with a ceasefire in 1974.
Throughout, education across all levels played a vital role. FRELIMO leaders
were highly educated. Most of them had studied abroad (Englund 2002; Hall and
Young 1997; Johnston 1990; Silva 2001). They aimed to educate a politically
conscious ‘new man’ (homen novo) able and willing to support the revolutionary
struggles. FRELIMO leaders focused on the provision of basic education in
areas liberated during the anti-colonial war, in part to inform the local population
of the purpose of the war and to secure effective participation. Between 1969
and 1972, FRELIMO established about 160 primary schools that served about
20,000 to 30,000 students. FRELIMO also invested in higher levels of education
to form a cadre of highly trained professionals. By 1974, the movement supported
500 secondary and seventy post-secondary students in institutions abroad (e.g.,
South Africa, former East Germany). During summer breaks, (post-)secondary
students returned to the liberated areas to teach adult literacy. Despite these
resounding successes at expanding educational opportunity during anti-colonial
wartime, the existence of FRELIMO schools was precarious. They had to
relocate often or stop entirely at times. Still, the provision of education secured
the movement’s popular base (Johnston 1990).
After independence, FRELIMO developed a national strategy and doubled
primary enrolment between 1975 and 1979, without ever achieving universal
coverage. The implantation of education policies was partial and hasty. The
system lacked adequate infrastructure, teachers were ill-prepared, and students’

academic performances were low. Drop-out and repetition rates were high. To
address these issues, FRELIMO began to rationalize education. It shifted the
focus from adult education (alphabetization for broader segments of society) to
secondary and vocational education. The goal was to train an educated workforce
to spur industrialization. From the perspective of the FRELIMO leadership, this
strategy was considered more conducive to economic growth and national
prosperity than teaching peasants how to read and write. This shift was in line
with modernization theories (heralded on both ends of the socialist–capitalist
spectrum), which viewed subsistence farming and traditional agricultural
production as backward and prone to continued underdevelopment.
Consequently, by 1982, adult education massively declined and secondary
education for appropriately-aged students expanded (Johnston 1990).
In 1983, the civil war gained momentum and brought Mozambique’s
education system into complete disarray. RENAMO (Mozambican National
Resistance (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana)) was founded in 1975 as an
anti-Communist political organization (and represents until today FRELIMO’s
most ardent rival). RENAMO frequently attacked rural communities, specifically
schools and health centres, as these were considered to be signs of (FRELIMO)
state influence. By 1985, 1,900 schools had closed and 5,000 teachers and 314,000
students were displaced. War-affected and unsafe roads had made teacher
mobility and the transportation of teaching materials impossible. Students and
teachers were kidnapped or harassed. Land mines posed deadly hazards and
prevented children from commuting daily to school. Government support
withered and enrolment rates declined, especially in rural areas, as traumatized
children and unemployed teachers retreated to urban areas, where primary
education subsequently expanded (Englund 2002). By 1990, more than 50 per
cent of Mozambique’s already partial primary school system was destroyed. In
1992, FRELIMO and RENAMO agreed to democratic elections (Castiano
1997; Johnston 1990). Since then, Mozambique has concentrated its efforts on
primary and adult education (MOE 1998). It has been able to steadily increase
enrolment and decrease illiteracy rates. Adult illiteracy declined from the former
72 per cent to about 47 per cent during the 1990s after opening up to bilateral
and international funding schemes provided by organizations such as the World
Bank and the IMF, which then subjected Mozambique to the conditionalities of
Structural Adjustment Programs (Francisco and Nhacune 2000).
As in Brazil and several African countries, Catholic mission schools
dominated East Timor’s formal education system during Portuguese colonialism.
Missionary education was made available to the small number of Portuguese

citizens, complying local elites, and assimilated mestizos. Similar to FRELIMO’s
pursuit of education, FRETILIN (Revolutionary Front of Independent East
Timor (Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente)) ran schools and
literacy programmes from their mountain and forest retreats throughout the
1970s. East Timor gained independence in 1974, which lasted for only ten days
before Indonesia foiled all efforts of self-determination. The Indonesian
government forcefully invaded East Timor, killing hundreds of thousands of
people, destroying livestock and crops, and building concentration camps. They
destroyed the former school system and banned the speaking of Portuguese,
introducing Bahasa Indonesia as the language of instruction in a compulsory
primary education system. During Indonesian occupation, the number of
schools expanded exponentially. By 1985, almost every village had a primary
school. By the 1990s, almost two-thirds of students were enrolled in primary
education. This expansion, however, was flawed. The quality of instruction was
low and transition into secondary and post-secondary education was limited.
The curriculum was centralized and focused primarily on the education of
Indonesian citizens as a means to control the local population (Millo and Barnett
2004; Nicolai 2004).
Indonesian occupation lasted for almost three decades before the Asian
economic crisis during the mid-1990s forced Indonesia to reconsider. In a
referendum in 1999, 78 per cent of the people in East Timor voted for
independence. The voting period and the Indonesian exodus afterwards were
accompanied by violent attacks on the East Timorese population by Indonesian
militias, resulting in the death of 1,500 people, the displacement of 250,000
people into West Timor, and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure,
including the school system. After a transition period under UN governance, in
which the Brazilian government played a key role as a UN consultant (Nieto
2012), East Timor became fully independent in May 2002. Young people played
an important role in the resistance against Indonesian occupation (Millo and
Barnett 2004). They resisted their teachers and organized public protests in the
months leading up to the popular consultation. Many of them were killed and
‘disappeared’ (Nicolai 2004). Subsequent international efforts focused on
education in refugee camps and the rehabilitation of the national (mostly
primary) education system, including the building of primary schools and
training teachers. The rebuilding was accompanied by much political debate,
which included disagreements over language policies (Millo and Barnett 2004).
Today, Portuguese and Tetum are the official languages. Curriculum policies
mandate Portuguese as a language of instruction from Grade 1 to 6 (Taylor-

Leech 2008). Throughout the Lusophone spaces, Portuguese colonialism,
independence wars and post-independence conflicts left insufficient educational
infrastructures behind. Even as education systems have systematically improved
since the mid-1990s, the countries continue to be characterized by equal and
insufficient educational structures.
During the twentieth century, Brazilian elites upheld the idea of racial
democracy portraying racial relations in Brazilian society as harmonious and
tolerant. They celebrated miscegenation and considered racial categories as fluid
along a colour-continuum (especially in comparison to segregation and colour-
line thinking in the US, cf. Lafer 2000) creating an anti-black racism that is more
determined by inclusive domination than by segregation, meanwhile obviating
the lack of economic integration of former slaves after the abolition of slavery.
Beginning in the early 1950s, social scientists began to systematically debunk the
racial democracy myth. Since then numerous studies have shown that nearly
every sphere of Brazilian life, including education, employment, income, housing,
health, mortality and exposure to police violence and incarceration are marked
by stark racial inequalities. Scholars have documented the unequal access to
economic and political opportunities and showed that on average, non-white
Brazilians were less educated and had lower levels of income than white
Brazilians (Hasenbalg and Silva 1988; Henriques 2001). Colour prejudice is
widespread (Lovell 1999).
Educational structures served to maintain these inequalities. Historically, the
educational system is two-tiered, combining private and public schools in an
inverse status position across different levels of education. At the primary and
secondary levels, upper-middle class and high-income families often can afford
better quality education (mostly private schools), whereas lower-middle class
and low-income families can access lower quality (mostly public) schools. In
contrast, at the tertiary level, public universities (federal and state institutions)
that do not charge tuition fees rank among the most elite in the country. Access
to these public universities has historically been limited through competitive
entrance examinations (vestibular). Better-educated students at the primary and
secondary level have been more likely to pass these examinations. Less-prepared
students have been left to the less competitive and mostly less prestigious private
universities, if not excluded altogether (McCowan 2007; Schwartzman and Paiva
2014). Long-standing patterns of racialized socio-economic inequalities have
thus led to the systematic exclusion of non-white students from higher education
(Bailey and Peria 2010). For instance, in 2006, 20 per cent of white college-age
students attended university, whereas less than 6 per cent of their non-white
peers were enrolled (Paixão and Carvano 2008).
Even though the creation of UNILAB serves many purposes, as we will see
in the next chapter, it was motived in large part by these inequalities. As a
development project, it contributes to domestic as much as to international
development, which, however, given the distinct narrative of transatlantic slavery
and abolition as the shared history of Lusophone spaces, provides the ground for
considerable tensions among the various actors involved in the everyday making
of the university.
Note
1 MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), FRELIMO (Frente de

Libertação de Moçambique), PAIGC (Partido Africano da Independencia da
Guiné e Cabo Verde), MLSTP (Movimento de Libertacção de São Tomé e Príncipe).
32
2
Internationalization of Higher Education

for Development
When UNILAB was created, the Brazilian government envisioned an

international university that simultaneously served domestic and international
development needs. It charged the university with the dual mandate of fostering
South–South cooperation through cultural and educational integration as well
as to democratize Brazilian higher education. UNILAB was to become a centre
for the production, exchange and dissemination of knowledge deemed relevant
for development as the following quote from the book published to commemorate
the university’s fifth anniversary shows (UNILAB 2013: 7):
The University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony

expands the provision of higher education in underserved regions. The university
seeks to build a historical and cultural bridge between Brazil and Portuguese-
language countries, especially in Africa, sharing innovative solutions for similar
historical processes. It also hopes to strengthen international networks respecting
the sovereignty of partnering countries, allowing the realization of actions and
interventions of technical, academic, scientific, cultural, and humanitarian
support.
UNILAB was written into law in 2008 and established in 2010 by the
Implementation Committee (Comissão de Implantação), which included
politicians, professors and university administrators. The founders designed a
university that, through its location, faculty, student population, curriculum and
extra-curricular activities, would become a state-of-the-art institution – not the
shiny, world-class university global policy makers might have had in mind
(Salmi 2009), but one that deliberately focuses on and addresses the needs of
students and communities in postcolonial contexts. By doing so, founders
hoped to accelerate innovation, economic growth and educational equality.
UNILAB should ultimately serve as a landmark of Brazilian development and
of South–South cooperation. Indeed, from the founders’ perspective, these
33
would be complementary interests, as the developmental needs of the Brazilian

Northeast and African countries were viewed as similar. In this chapter, I describe
the two cornerstones of UNILAB as a developmental university: the expansion
of public higher education into the rural interior of Brazil and the
internationalization of higher education for development.
Expanding higher education in the Lusophone world
UNILAB founders identified as a shared feature between the Brazilian Northeast

and partnering countries the lack of higher education and unevenly distributed
access. Table 2.1 shows that almost all of the countries from which UNILAB
students have come enrol fewer students in higher education than the average
gross enrolment ratio (GER) of their respective regions, with Cape Verde being
the only exception. By the early 2000s, the Brazilian higher education system had
more than 2,000 institutions and enrolled more than four million students. In
2005, the gross enrolment rate was 25 per cent, compared to 30 per cent in China,
44 per cent on average in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 89 per cent in
the US. Historically, Brazil’s higher education system has been greatly stratified
preventing the majority of college-age Brazilians from accessing public higher
Table 2.1 GER in relation to GER by region*
Latin America and Sub-Saharan East Asia and

the Caribbean Africa the Pacific
Regional 43.7% (2013) 8.2% (2013) 33% (2013)
Brazil 25.5% (2005)
Mozambique 5.2% (2013)
Angola 7.5% (2011)
São Tomé e Príncipe 7.7% (2012)
Guinea Bissau 2.6% (2006)
Cape Verde 22.9% (2006)
East Timor 17.7% (2010)
*Data source: UNESCO. (According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics the gross enrolment ratio (GER)
in tertiary education across all sexes represents the total enrolment within a country in tertiary education,
regardless of age and sex, expressed as a percentage of the population in the official age group corresponding
to this level of education, which usually includes the five year age group following on from secondary
education, for example for the age group of 18–24 years old in Brazil. The number of students studying abroad
is not reflected in this number.)
Internationalization of Higher Education for Development 35
education. Public universities provide free tuition and rank among the most elite
universities in the country. They provide the better part of graduate education
(82 per cent). Brazil also has a growing sector of private universities, which
provide most of the undergraduate education (72 per cent). Even though the
Brazilian higher education system has been established rather late (compared to
other countries in Latin America), it has been systematically expanded ever
since.
During the 1930s, the Brazilian government used funds secured from an
expanded tax-base to increase access to public higher education, in part to
accommodate the growing demands of the middle class (Schwartzman 2012).
Higher education, both private and public, continued to grow steadily under the
presidency of Getúlio Vargas (1945–64). The focus, however, like in early-
established professional schools, was mostly on teaching rather than research.
During the second half of the 1950s, students demanded the phasing out of
private institutions and the expansion of public higher education. During the
military dictatorship (1964–94), when public universities became a stronghold
of resistance against the regime, the government began to reform these
universities following the model of the US American research university,
introducing departments (rather than chairs), a credit system and the division
between basic and professional education (Durham 2004). The goal was to
stimulate research activities to spur national development and to improve the
quality of university instruction (Schwartzman 1997). In general, access to public
universities remained limited. They enrolled only 10 per cent of the eligible age
cohort. Meanwhile, the private sector expanded more rapidly maintaining its
focus on teaching rather than research. By the end of the 1970s, a three-tiered
Brazilian higher education system had emerged. It consisted of research-oriented,
yet exclusive, public universities; non-profit private universities, which aligned
their interests with the first-rate public institutions; and entrepreneurial private
universities without commitment to research or high-quality instruction (Durham
2004). The 1980s were marked by stagnation of the higher education sector
displaying high drop-out and repetition rates. Most of the demand for post-
secondary education was absorbed by private-sector night schools and vocational
courses with low admission requirements (De Castro and Tiezzi 2004). During the
1990s, the Brazilian government began to systematically invest in education across
all levels. It expanded access to primary and secondary education and improved
the quality of teaching. Subsequently, the pool of qualified applicants for higher
education increased, which required to further expand tertiary education to
accommodate the demand (Schwartzman 1997). As a consequence, the private
sector expanded even more rapidly, although unevenly across regions. Whereas in
the south of the country there are many private universities, public higher
education is almost the only option available in the Northeast of Brazil (Castro
2004). Already under Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazilian president from 1995
to 2003, the government aimed to expand the tertiary sector. Under Lula da Silva
these efforts continued and UNILAB emerged as part of them.
Reforms in African countries have similarly focused on the expansion of
higher education systems. Until 2009, Agostinho Neto University was the only
public university in Angola. By 2010, Angola had twenty-three institutions of
higher learning, seven public and sixteen private universities. In Mozambique,
until the mid-1990s, only three public institutions of higher learning existed in
the country – Eduardo Mondlane University, the Higher Educational Institute
and the Institute for International Relations. By 2010, Mozambique registered
twenty-one private and seventeen public institutions of higher learning. Most of
them are polytechnic and professional schools rather than full universities. Cape
Verde had no public university until 2006, when various post-secondary
institutes for professional training were combined to form the University of
Cape Verde. After that, the higher education sector expanded rapidly. By 2010 it
had one public and eight private institutions. Together they enrolled 10,000
students (about 2 per cent of the total population of 570,000), with private
institutions enrolling more students than the public university. As a consequence,
Cape Verde has a higher than average gross enrolment ratio compared to other
countries in the region. São Tome e Principe had no public university or institute
until the mid-1990s, thus students went abroad (e.g., Portugal) for their post-
secondary education. In 2005, the University Lusiada of São Tome e Principe
was created. By 2012, the country had two additional private universities for
professional training. Guinea Bissau has no public university, mostly due to
consistent political instability with constantly changing political regimes and
conflicts between opponents since independence. During the 1970s, the
government created eight professional faculties (institutes) to train students
in law, pedagogy, administration and medicine. In the 1990s, some private
institutions started operating in the country. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the
Guinea Bissau government, together with a private Portuguese university,
attempted to create a public university but failed (Langa 2013). In East Timor,
the first university was established under Indonesian rule in 1992. The National
University of East Timor officially opened on 17 November 2000 after great
efforts from East Timorese. It soon enrolled over 5,000 full-time students (Bollag
2001).
Despite the impressive expansion, the demand for higher education still far
exceeds the supply, besides the fact that expansion itself is often not sufficient to
guarantee equitable outcomes (McCowan 2016a). In most of the countries,
universities charge at least minimal fees. Given the accumulated costs of
secondary and tertiary education (i.e., fees, uniforms, transportation, housing,
loss of earnings while in education), many young people cannot afford to
participate in any form of formal advanced education. Even in countries where
public higher education is free of charge, access to universities is controlled by
competitive entrance examinations. As is the case in Brazil, upper-middle class
and high-income students are often better prepared and thus more likely to pass
these exams. As a consequence, in all of the countries the availability of higher
education is limited and access is restricted in ways that benefit socio-political
and socio-economic elites (McCowan 2004). The creation of a university like
UNILAB – publicly funded, enrolling underserved populations, and with the
explicit task to democratize access to public higher education – provides students
from both sides of the Atlantic with an opportunity they may not have had
otherwise. Before detailing the development framework of the university, I make
a brief excursus into Brazilian South–South cooperation more broadly.
Brazilian South–South cooperation
Much of the literature on Brazilian South–South cooperation has come out of

political sciences and international relations studies. This literature provides
primarily a macro-level perspective centring on Brazilian politics as an object of
knowledge. It portrays South–South cooperation mainly as a foreign affairs
strategy that builds on the intensification and diversification of modes of
exchange between Brazil and other Latin American countries, other countries of
the Community of Portuguese-language Countries (Comunidade dos Países da
Língua Portuguesa, CPLP) – including Lusophone countries in Africa, East
Timor and Portugal – as well as China and South Africa. Brazil pursues bilateral,
multilateral, subnational and informal cooperation agreements to enhance its
geopolitical potential and economic competitive advantage. Between 1999 and
2007, import and export relations between Brazil and African countries increased
by 45 per cent, with South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Angola as major trading
partners and Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Libya with smaller trading
capacities (Barbosa, Narciso and Biancalana 2009). The countries import raw
materials (e.g., sugarcane, beets) and basic manufactured goods (e.g., cars and
chickens) from Brazil. At the same time, Brazil invests in large-scale enterprises
including Petrobrás (gas), Medabil (construction materials) and Vale (mining)
companies that rely on the raw materials available in African countries.
The transfer of public policies (mainly in education, health, and agriculture),
especially since they have acquired an international reputation as ‘best practices’
(Morais de Sa e Silva 2005), is another important dimension of Brazilian South–
South cooperation. In the education sector, activities include alphabetization
programmes, collaboration between universities, international student scholarships,
professional training, institutional capacity building and engagement in multilateral
forums such as the India–Brazil–South Africa Forum (IBSA; Ullrich and Carrion
2013; Abdenur 2015; Milani et al. 2016). UNILAB, UNILA – the Federal University
of Latin American Integration (Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-
Americana) located in the southern city of Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná at the tri-national
border shared by Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay – and UNIAM – the University of
Amazonian Integration (Universidade de Integração da Amazônia) created in
Santarém – were born out of this foreign policy interest (Robertson 2010; Pinheiro
and Beshara 2012). Military interventions and the promotion of human rights, for
example, peacekeeping missions in Guinea Bissau, Haiti and East Timor (Nieto
2012; Abdenur and Neto 2013), represent other areas of Brazilian South–South
cooperation. Across these modes of engagement, Brazil enacts its role as global
middle power, undoubtedly pursuing geopolitical interests though not necessarily at
the expense of others (Almeida 2007). Strengthening South–South relations has
been a way for the Brazilian government to solicit other countries’ support, for
instance, for restructuring the UN Security Council so Brazil could gain a seat as a
permanent voting member (Christensen 2013).
South–South cooperation certainly represents a revived aspect of Brazil’s
emancipated foreign policy vis-à-vis the global north. Yet, some scholars refuse
to reduce South–South cooperation to a geopolitical one-way strategy in the
interest of Brazilian hegemony. It is as much about expressing a newly gained
self-confidence (Burges 2005) as it is about presenting southern countries with a
new partnership model. The Brazil that projects itself as an ‘emerging donor’
(Cesarino 2012) promises to practise development differently compared to
‘donors’ that have traditionally controlled the majority of aid (e.g., the US, UK,
Germany, France). It claims to reject imperialism and to respect the sovereignty
of its partners. As a reflection of this model, Brazil’s diplomacy towards its
southern partners employs a rhetoric that emphasizes ‘solidarity, no interference
in domestic issues of partner countries, demand-driven action, acknowledgement
of local experiences, no imposition of conditions, and no association with
commercial interests’ (ABC 2011, cited in Cabral et al. 2013: 3). Particularly in
the realm of internationalization, the newly-established universities of UNILAB
and UNILA resist commodification (compared to global higher education in
general, cf. Torres 2011). Instead, they focus on inclusive development by
expanding access to previously excluded populations, by offering courses that
inspire local solutions for local problems (e.g., agro-ecology, popular education,
sustainable energies), and by conceiving of new forms of knowledge delivery
(McCowan 2010, 2016b). They facilitate cultural, social and scientific exchange
between partnering countries through conviviality and solidarity, an effort that,
so Paulino Motter and Luis Armando Gandin (2016) argue, far exceeds any
political or economic interests the government otherwise has.
Nonetheless, Brazilian South–South cooperation is not without its perils.
Scholars have argued that many of the efforts are decentralized at best and often
fragmented or incoherent. A close look at the internal scope and politics of these
efforts reveals a multitude of organizations, policies, and political agendas that
form a complex social field in which actors compete for resources and political
traction to influence the directions of particular projects. Brazilian organizational
and professional development capacities are sometimes described as
unsustainable (cf. Milani et al. 2016). Projects face difficulties with Brazilian state
bureaucracy, which can result in delays of funds and lack of infrastructure
(Cesarino 2012). Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva (2005) describes a Brazilian
literacy programme in Mozambique as a ‘package delivery’ that was neither
adapted to the specificities of the Mozambican context (e.g., multilingual society)
nor did it incorporate Mozambican expertise and experiences (e.g., in adult
literacy education).1 It lacked Mozambican ownership and thus sustainability.
Project planning in Brazilian South–South cooperation is often relatively open-
ended, and implementation is slow and rather uneven. This supposedly provides
local actors with the time and space to adopt the ideas and secure financial
support as buy-in, meanwhile decentralizing the process and evading power
imbalances commonly associated with donor–recipient relations, which could
be interpreted as flexibility and signs of demand-drivenness (Cesarino 2012;
Carolini 2015). Morais, however, concludes that one should not romanticize
South–South relations as ‘horizontal and virtuous’ (2005: 7) since they are not
immune to the kinds of donor–recipient power asymmetries widely observed in
North–South development relations.
Shifting and competing political agendas shape the implementation of
projects and outcomes. Take, for example, the political and institutional landscape
of agricultural cooperation in African countries. It involves more than twenty
Brazilian organizations, most prominently EMBRAPA (a leading government-

funded institute that focuses on agricultural research) and the Ministry of
Agrarian Development (MDA). Both organizations have been key players in
determining domestic strategies for agricultural development (e.g., More Food,
Food Acquisition), which they have then rolled out into South–South cooperation
with support from the national development agency (ABC). According to
Cabral and her colleagues (2013), both organizations perpetuate divergent views
regarding the best strategy for agricultural development. While EMBRAPA has
been known to support large-scale agri-businesses, MDA has described itself as
the ministry of family farming. These polarized positions reflect different
ideological stances within Brazilian society. MDA has been responsive to social
movements’ demands (e.g., Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem
Terras)) to support the smallest and most disadvantaged farmers (e.g., women
farmers). In response, wealthier (family) plantation owners (latifundios) have
aligned themselves with organizations that lobby for large-scale farming.
This has resulted in a highly polarized field of socio-political forces within
Brazil, which, translated into South–South agricultural cooperation, has led to a
lack of explicit government policies that could bridge the different political
stances. In the end, putting the aspirational discourses of solidarity, integration
and cultural affinities into practice occurs in a highly fragmented terrain in
which divergent positions must be constantly negotiated. These negotiations are
fundamentally national in nature; that is, competing domestic ideologies and
political stances profoundly shape any given South–South project, or as Crain
Soudien rightly put it: ‘the politics of the local assert themselves, sometimes
imperceptibly, on the terrain of the interrelationship’ (2009: 237). Rather than
taking fragmentation as proof of virtuous flexibility, Brazilian South–South
engagements should better be conceptualized as power struggles in which the
agendas, experiences, and, indeed, the imaginaries of various local organizations
and individuals shape cooperation practices, potentially side-lining partner
interests.
The developmental university
Broadly speaking, Brazilian South–South cooperation is enmeshed in

geopolitical and economic interests and educational programmes are but one
mechanism through which to advance these interests. UNILAB, however, is
somewhat unique in this regard as it benefits the Brazilian public more directly
than purely international programmes by increasing the availability of higher

education in a previously underserved rural area of Brazil. This process is
also referred to as interiorization (interiorização, UNILAB 2010: 9) of public
higher education. When Lula da Silva came to power in 2003, he devised
programmes – the Programme of University for All (Programa Universidade
para Todos, PROUNI) in 2004 and the Programme of Restructuring and
Expansion of Federal Universities (Reestruturação e Expansão das Universidades,
REUNI) in 2007 – to expand public higher education as a means for social
justice and regional development. UNILAB (one of fourteen new campuses)
was created from REUNI funds in the rural interior of Ceará. The Diretrizes
Gerais, UNILAB’s founding document (2010) clearly links interiorization and
internationalization as the main purposes of the university:
The expansion of higher education in Brazil, from increased investment in

science, technology and culture to the number of federal institutions of higher
education . . . is a central axis of the educational policy of the Brazilian
government. In this sense . . . REUNI is one of the most important and innovative
programs aimed at recovering the public sense and social commitment for
higher education, given its orientation to expand quality and inclusion. . . . The
installation of UNILAB in the town of Redenção, in Ceará . . . [fulfils] the goals
of REUNI to promote the development of regions in need of institutions of
higher education – such as Maciço de Baturité. UNILAB [has to be understood]
in the context of internationalization of higher education in the light of the
government’s policy to encourage the creation of federal institutions capable to
promote South-South cooperation with scientific, cultural, social and
environmental responsibility. Actualizing [itself] in the perspective of solidarity
cooperation, [the university] values and supports the potential for collaboration
and learning between countries as part of Brazil’s growing effort to assume
commitments for international integration in higher education.
5–6, emphasis original
The statement highlights the founders’ vision of UNILAB as an international

university with global reach yet rooted in the developmental needs of a particular
(Brazilian) region. Paulo Speller, who participated in the implementation
committee and was later appointed as first dean, emphasized international
integration based on solidarity as one of the foundational aspects. When asked
what he understood as solidarity, he explained that solidarity cooperation takes
‘place between equals (se dá de igual para igual)’ (interview, 28 February 2013)
in an atmosphere of mutual respect. To create this vision, UNILAB founders
had to imagine Brazil’s northeast and the partnering countries, as similarly
underdeveloped and rural, in need of state intervention. According to the

founding document, Maciço de Baturité has a relatively low GDP per capita and
higher rates of extreme poverty and illiteracy than other regions. It is in need of
social services (e.g., social assistance and health) and educational opportunities
(e.g., higher education), both of which should be provided by the state: ‘Maciço
do Baturité/CE, where UNILAB will be installed, lacks scientific-academic
institutions and the presence of the federal government’ (UNILAB 2010: 22).
The same document frequently refers, much more abstractly, to similar issues in
African countries, including the lack of an ‘organized system of higher education’
(UNILAB 2010: 24). In response, the founders created a university they
imagined would cater to these development demands.
UNILAB is an attempt to strengthen development relations by building
direct relationships between actors from Brazil and Lusophone African countries.
This goal is evident in the inter-institutional partnership structures it creates.
Among other things, UNILAB established the PróReitoria de Relações
Institucionais (Dean of Institutional Relations, PROINST), which is responsible
for the initiation and coordination of cooperation with universities, networks
and institutions in CPLP countries. For example, in 2012 PROINST started
the Rede de Instituições Públicas de Educação Superior (Network of Public
Institutions of Higher Education, RIPES) to foster the exchange of knowledge
and the mobility of instructors, administrators and students across Lusophone
countries. The network’s activities include visits to institutions and partners of
higher education in Portugal, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Angola. Since
September 2014, UNILAB has taken part in the administrative council of the
Associação das Universidades de Língua Portuguesa (Association of Portuguese-
speaking Universities, AULP). It also has an office at the CPLP headquarters in
Lisbon and coordinates Brazil’s initiative for offering online university courses in
Mozambique (document, no. 23).
The inter-institutional activities show that, at least in theory, the Brazilian
government and the university administration are interested in creating an
inter-regional space of scientific integration (Robertson 2010). It should be
noted that these efforts should not be viewed as profit-driven in the same way as
many efforts by US or UK universities to attract foreign or online students. Thus,
the logic behind these internationalization efforts should not simply be read
through the neo-liberalization and commodification lens so often applied in the
Western-centric literature on internationalization of higher education (Majee
and Ress 2018). In fact, the recruitment of international students costs the
government money. As a public university, UNILAB charges no tuition to either
Brazilian or international students. In addition, eligible students can apply for

financial assistance in the form of different types of stipends. The housing
stipend (auxílio moradia) covered international students’ housing and other
living expenses. In 2013, the university paid R$380 (roughly US$130) per month
to students under this category. The installation stipend (auxílio instalação)
supported beneficiaries of the housing stipend to acquire furniture, appliances
and cookware. Students received this one-time stipend after providing receipts
as evidence of their purchases. The amounts reported ranged between R$400
(university documents) and R$780 (by students). The food stipend (auxílio
alimentação) supplemented the housing stipend with R$150 per month.
Furthermore, students could apply for transportation stipends (auxílio
transporte) ranging from R$60 to R$270 depending on the distance between
their home and the university. Brazilian students could apply for social assistance
stipends (auxílio sociale) up to the amount of R$380.
Table 2.2 provides an overview of the number of stipends by type and
nationality in relation to the total number of students. According to the statistical
information provided by the administration, by January 2013, 70 per cent of the
students received at least one type of stipend (703 out of 1,010 students). Nearly
all the international students (93 per cent, 190 out of 204) and one-third of the
Brazilian students (63 per cent, 513 out of 815) received some form of support.
East Timorese students received a reduced housing stipend (R$190) because
they also received a monthly stipend of US$500 (R$1,000) from their government.
The first cohort of Angolan students received only the housing stipends since
they also received support from the Angolan government.
Table 2.2 Number of stipends by type and nationality (January 2013)
Students Stipends Funded Housing Install. Food Transp. Social

Brazilian 815 513 63% 258 199 284 64 133
International 204 190 93% 190 165 114 0 0
Angola 25 17 68% 17 8 8
Cape Verde 23 22 96% 22 22 22
Guinea Bissau 58 58 100% 58 46 58
Mozambique 3 3 100% 3 2 3
São Tomé e 23 21 91% 21 20 21
Principe
East Timor 72 69 96% 69 67 2
Total 1,010 703 70%
This stipend system is not unique within the Brazilian public higher education
sector; however, the deliberate effort to recruit and support international
students through these mechanisms is not common at other federal universities.
The Brazilian government put real financial resources into students so that they
could complete their studies. Indeed, with the exception of the initial group of
Angolan students and East Timor students with support from their governments,
many of the international students who participated in the research could not
have afforded to study at UNILAB without this support. Most of the students
came from urban, middle-class families, in which family resources were severely
strained by sending the student to study abroad in Brazil.
UNILAB’s development orientation becomes most apparent in the initial
choices of disciplines, which included agronomy, public administration, natural
sciences, nursing and engineering of sustainable energies. These applied sciences
are traditionally associated with technical (as opposed to political or socio-
cultural) aspects of national development and international development aid.
Table 2.3 shows institutes (equivalent to colleges) and disciplines (equivalent to
departments) planned in 2010.
According to Professora Nascimento, a Brazilian professor and member of the
implementation committee, this developmental curriculum represented the
interests of Brazil and the partnering countries.2 Professor Torres, a Brazilian
professor involved in the implementation of institutional structures, described
agronomy’s focus on small-scale farming: ‘the peasant develops a small farm, which
leaves him more sustainable. It doesn’t mean he does not know how to work on a
large farm; he will work there, but our focus here is on rural development of small
farms’ (interview, 5 February 2013). The official purpose of agronomy is to educate
students in the ecologically and socially sustainable production of food. Other
Table 2.3 Anticipated institutes and disciplines (UNILAB 2010: 16)
Year Institute of Institute of Social Institute of Institute of Institute of

Agricultural and Human Teacher Health Technologies
Sciences Sciences Education Sciences
2011 Agronomy Public Natural Nursing Engineering
Administration Sciences of Energies
2012 Animal Science of Pedagogy Public Health Civil
Sciences Economics Engineering
2013 Agricultural Public Policies Social Medicine Computer
Engineering Sciences and Engineering
Humanities
course descriptions display similar developmental purposes. Engineering, for

example, focuses on sustainable energies that would use the resources and
technologies available in each country – falling in line with the trend of sustainability
in international development discourses. Public administration has been designed
to teach students about creating public policies that correspond with mechanisms
of participatory democracy, transparency and social inclusion – all assumed to be
the most appropriate, developmentalist approaches to governance. Nursing and
teacher eduaction in maths and sciences aims to train professionals in the areas of
education and health, in order to assure basic services in rural areas devoid of
social service infrastructure (UNILAB 2010: 15). Until today, these applied
disciplines represent the core of UNILAB teaching and the only ones that are
offered during the day as on-campus and full-time courses. Disciplines that
deviated from the developmental curriculum were added later as evening courses
that were to serve the adult and working populations of the region. These courses
also admitted international students.
UNILAB’s developmental purpose is linked to the Brazilian state’s provision
of social services, for example, healthcare (by promising to build a proper
hospital) and higher education (creating a public university that accepts students
free of charge), which would in turn, through the formation of locally
knowledgeable development professionals, lift Northeast Brazil and African
countries out of underdevelopment and into future prosperity.3 The goal is to
produce and disseminate knowledge that is applicable to existing situations and
problems in the countries involved. The students are the perceived carriers of
this knowledge; indeed, Brazilian and international students alike were viewed
as the people who would work with (and who may have been themselves) rural
peasants to develop their home countries. This notion of development is firmly
tied to the idea of the nation-state as the primary provider of development and
as the entity that needs to be developed in order to ensure prosperity for the
people. In fact, originally, UNILAB was envisioned as a multiparty, bilaterally-
arranged CPLP university. By 2015, many of these relations existed on paper as
written contracts and accords but had not materialized in terms of practised
cooperation. Apart from short visits, for example by a group of Mozambican
professors, and high-level administrators to partnering countries, limited
bilateral exchange of knowledge had occurred. The plan was also that
international students would receive additional funds from their respective
governments. In reality, only the East Timorese government (probably with
international financial support) and the Angolan government (only for the first
cohort of Angolan students) actually received this sort of financial assistance.
Portraying Northeast Brazil in terms of development needs reflects a

longstanding pattern of constructing the region as the Brazilian periphery in
relation to the country’s south (Weinstein 2015). In fact, that the region has
historically been perceived as culturally and economically backwards is what
enabled the relational construction of Africa as equally backward to begin with,
thus providing the grounds on which to reconcile domestic demands for
development with broader foreign affairs interests. Visits to partnering countries,
multinational meetings, and consultations with multilateral organizations
preceded the creation of UNILAB. The goal was to establish bilateral agreements
regarding the university, thus strengthening the relationship between
governments and increasing the visibility of the Lusophone region (writ large)
on the geopolitical and economic world map. In return, the Brazilian government
hoped that these countries and other potential southern partners would support
Brazil’s bid for global influence. In interviews with university administrators,
leaders (some of whom were government-appointed, high-profile politicians)
and professors, these broader geopolitical efforts were rarely mentioned. Instead
their interpretations centred on historical and cultural parallels, which in some
cases included the symbolic value of Brazil–Africa relations for broader national
efforts of Afro-Brazilian emancipation.
Chapters 1 and 2 provided the general lie of the land in terms of UNILAB’s
situatedness in history and in development discourses. Over the next chapters, I
examine more closely the discursive landscape of UNILAB, what kind of subject
positions it produces and how it shapes actors’ everyday interactions. I tease out
the tensions that arise in the making of this doubly purposed university showing
the many ways in which actors either evade or adapt to the various social, cultural
and economic realities of this particular project.
Notes
1 Michelle Morais de Sa e Silva (2005) studied the transfer of AlfaSol (Solidarity in

Literacy Program (Alfabetização Solidária)), an adult literacy programme.
2 Classroom observations, 16 January 2013.
3 Fieldnotes, 1 March 2013.
3
Racialization Through Time, Space and Rank
In the middle of the road stands a rectangular concrete monument, as tall as

three adults and as wide as the length of a medium-size car. The rectangle is
missing a portion of its upper left corner almost like a window through which
one sees the green hills surrounding Redenção and the sunny, blue sky. A large
chain is draped over the window. It is made from iron, and looks heavy, like an
anchor chain. The monument is decorated with a painting, exhibiting the
image of a woman. She is brown-skinned, naked, and has wavy hair. She sits
on her knees resting her buttocks on her heels. Her arms are stretched out away
from her body. One reaches toward the sky and the other toward the chain.
Her fingers are spread. She looks up. The background of the image is painted
light blue with a star-like, white shadow framing her body.
This image of a mulata displayed on the main road at the entrance of Redenção
is no coincidence (Figure 3.1). Related representations can be found all over the
town. In the central square in front of the church stands a statue that depicts a
male body with features similar to those of the woman. The man wears calf-
length trousers and is shirtless. He stands strongly with his legs slightly spread as
if to stabilize his posture. He holds his arms before his body. Two ends of a
broken chain hang loosely from his wrists. Wall paintings across town show
similar images (Figure 3.2).
The history of slavery, and more specifically of its abolition, is omnipresent in
Redenção. The Museu de Abolição (Museum of Abolition) is located across from
the campus. The road that separates the university from the museum is called
Avenida da Abolição (Avenue of Abolition). The museum is a fazenda (farm)
with the typical casa grande (main house, placed above ground) and senzala
(slave quarters, placed below ground), so vividly described by Freyre in Casa
Grande e Senzala ([1933] 1986). The museum’s exhibition displays machinery
used for sugar production and artefacts of daily life on the farm such as furniture
and pottery. The walls of the main house are filled with documents and newspaper
47
Figure 3.1 Monument in Redenção.
Figure 3.2 Mural of freed slave, titled ‘Liberty Started Here’.

Racialization Through Time, Space and Rank 49
articles that display the farm’s economic activities and describe Redenção’s
history. The walls of the slave quarters are covered with paintings of men and
women of African descent working at the sugar mill or held captive in shackles
and iron bands screwed to the wall, as though they belonged to the house like
artefacts rather than as human beings. One is left wondering why there are no
such paintings of Brazilians of European descent on the walls of the main house.
The monument, names and depictions commemorate Redenção’s role in
Brazilian history. Redenção was the first town to legally abolish slavery, in 1883,
five years before the country as a whole. Moreover, the mulata symbolizes
Lusotropicalism’s mythology of racial and cultural mixing as a ‘racially democratic’
(i.e., without racism) cornerstone of Brazilian nationhood. The mulata, an image
embodied also, for example, by samba dancers, represents a seemingly timeless yet
ambiguous icon of Brazilian national identity. She ‘came to figure as a sexy Brazilian
not only because she danced the samba (the Afro-Brazilian-turned-Brazilian art
form) but also because her skin color and other phenotypical characteristics
deemed archetypal, such as small nose, light-colored eyes, and wavy sometimes
straightened (not “kinky”) hair, were read as the perfect embodiment of mestiçagem,
a mixing that enabled the “whitening” of African traits (Pravaz 2012: 117). The
image of the ideal-type mulata reduces women of colour and their bodies to the
exoticism and eroticism of the colonizing gaze, writing them into the religious and
cultural history as the less desirable mythic figure of Brazilian national identity,
divested of properly belonging to the modernizing (i.e., Europeanizing, whitening)
Brazil of the twentieth century. Being recognized as mixed has its perils as well. It
superimposes an anti-African, anti-black identity, which denies participation of a
different kind as Professor Lourdes explained:
If you have an education system that denies a child her black identity, makes it
history-less by calling her ‘mulata, you are not black,’ while she is the descendent of
a black family. When I was young, I didn’t like to look in the mirror because I saw
something different than what I saw on TV or around me. I thought, no wonder
people don’t like me. I am so different. I had to learn to be proud to be black.
Interview, 11 February 2013
As an icon of national identity in conjunction with the racial democracy myth, the
mulata preserved racialized, gendered hierarchies. In the context of UNILAB, her
constant presence in front of the main building generated divergent responses
among students and faculty alternating between Ceará’s triumphant role in the
abolition of slavery heralded by the founding narrative and international students’
renunciation of the prescribed role to represent a narrative of Afro-Brazilian
emancipation.
Objects of intervention
Placing UNILAB in Redenção marked the beginning of a number of decisions

that linked the university’s development mandate to the history of the
transatlantic slave trade. In fact, UNILAB’s official representations are saturated
with references to history including in the Diretrizes Gerais (founding
document):
The installation of UNILAB in the town of Redenção, in Ceará, a national
landmark for pioneering the liberation of slaves . . . also points to the encounter
of Brazilian society with its history because it will become a center of research
and training for young Brazilians in interaction with students from countries
where Portuguese is also spoken.
UNILAB 2010: 5
At the beginning of 2011 and early 2012, UNILAB’s website featured a picture of
the monument described above. Today the website no longer displays this image.
It is decorated with an abstract 3D graphic ball made from colourful strips where
each one symbolized one of the participating countries Brazil, Mozambique, São
Tomé e Príncipe, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and East Timor. Whereas
the picture of the monument disappeared, the idea it represents remained. It
reappeared, again in a book published in 2013 to celebrate UNILAB’s fifth
anniversary in which various dignitaries took pride in Ceará’s heroic role in the
abolition of slavery.1 The State Governor of Ceará for instance said:
For us, people of Ceará, the installation of [UNILAB] makes us proud. There
were, in fact, reasons for this to occur. Ceará, everybody knows, anticipated the
movement of liberation of slaves during the 19th century. . . . It is therefore
natural that Brazil, extending its hand to the African people as a gesture of peace
and as an invitation for cooperation, happens in Ceará, more precisely the city of
Redenção, a pioneer town in the abolition of slave labor.
UNILAB 2013: 38
The campus names are also designed to reflect this positive image of Ceará’s role
in the abolition of slavery. The Campus da Liberdade (Campus of Liberty)
located in Redenção undeniably references abolition. The names of the other
two campuses refer to famous struggles for freedom. The Campus dos Palmares
(Campus of Palmares) in Acarape, which opened in 2013, alludes to maroon
communities, who made a living in the outskirts of urban centres and the back-
lands of Brazil during the nineteenth century. It references the powerful and
often-related mythology surrounding Zumbi, the leader of one such community
which was able to defend itself against the Portuguese for an extended period of
time before Zumbi was defeated in 1694–5. The Campus dos Malês (Campus of
Malês) established in 2013 in São Francisco do Conde in Bahia, commemorates
the insurgence of Islamic slaves in Salvador de Bahia in January 1835.
In 2015, the same small stand-up calendar with photographs and quotes
decorated almost every administrator’s desk. The photographs showed UNILAB
hallways and classrooms. The July sheet displayed a picture of Lula da Silva
during one of his frequent visits to the university, this time to the Campus of
Malês in Bahia on 13 May 2014. The image shows him surrounded by students
and then-dean Nilma Gomes. In the speech he gave that day to celebrate the
campus’ inauguration, he recalled:
UNILAB grew out of a dream that transformed into an extraordinary reality.

We wanted this university to be a humble gesture of appreciation for all those,
who left Africa against their will, submerged into this brutal form of human
domination that is, slavery, came to Brazil and contributed to make this a free
and sovereign nation.
This rhetoric emphasizes Ceará’s role and lauds the abolition movement in Brazil
as key to ending slavery. People can imagine the woman depicted in the
monument successfully escaping slavery through the green hills surrounding
Redenção. The broken chains highlight the struggle she has overcome. The
founders chose Redenção as the location for the first campus not because Ceará
was famous for its large slave-holding economy. If it were for that, other states,
for example Bahia (which became a campus location only in 2014), would have
been a better choice. The founders decided in favour of Ceará because the state
legally abolished slavery before any other state in Brazil. This choice drafts a very
particular narrative of slavery. It purports postcolonial development as post-
slavery emancipation. It further signposts the official government rhetoric
according to which Brazil accrued a historical debt from transatlantic slavery
that it hopes to settle at least symbolically through South–South cooperation
(Cicalo 2014; Cesarino 2017). Yet Tomas, a student from Guinea Bissau, walking
by the statue on the central square, once said: ‘All this talk about slavery. I am not
a slave. My ancestors were not slaves’ (fieldnotes, 10 January 2013). Many (though
certainly not all) professors and students from African countries refuted the
subject position of former slaves assigned to them by the founding narrative that
simultaneously celebrates Brazil’s overcoming of history and anticipation of a
future of Afro-Brazilian emancipation in which blackness no longer appears as
the marker of undesirability in Brazilian self-perception.
In an effort to reconcile domestic demands for development and foreign

policy interests, Northeast Brazil and Africa were transformed into ‘objectives of
intervention’ (Popkewitz 1998). The Brazilian government imagined UNILAB
into being through the rhetoric of underdevelopment and revisionist history,
which co-assign Northeast Brazil and Africa distinctive temporal (Povinelli
2011), spatial (Said 1978) and hierarchical places (Ferguson 2006) in the world.
The world, in this sense, ‘refers to a more encompassing categorical system within
which countries and geographical regions have their “places”, with a “place”
understood as both a location in space and a rank [and time] in a system of
social categories (as in the expression of “knowing your place”)’ (Ferguson 2006:
6). The developmental university legitimized with recourse to history co-
constructs Northeast Brazil and Africa as other in time (backward), space (rural)
and rank (underdeveloped).
This co-construction is imbued with misconceptions. While many Brazilian
students originating from Ceará might have had experiences that are in some
ways related to the presumed rural, small-scale agricultural lifestyles described
in the previous chapter, these assumptions are less true for international students.
Most of these international students come from urban centres. They belong to
urban, middle-class families. The students might not be the very wealthy
urbanites who can afford to study in Europe or North America, but they
have enough connections, and the social, political and financial capital that
come with it (Subuhana 2009), to learn about UNILAB, navigate the bureaucracy
and paperwork involved in applying and enrolling (e.g., passports), and in
some cases even securing government support. Despite the fact that these
students do not belong to the most elite families of their countries, they were
also not the students the Brazilian government had imagined. Many of them had
neither spent much time in rural areas nor did they expect to be involved in
‘development’ work (e.g., agriculture). Thus some of these students, when they
arrived in Redenção, were quite disappointed with the courses that were offered.
They would have preferred, instead, to study international relations or law, or at
least to learn English, in an effort to position themselves for international
careers.2
Many students, at UNILAB and elsewhere, view higher education as an
opportunity for global mobility. They are neither attached to their countries in
the ways the developmental architecture of the university assumes, nor do they
view their careers as spatially constrained. Thus, gaining expertise in rural
farming methods, for example, represents the opposite of the kinds of mobilities
they hope to create for themselves. When they spoke of development, the
students mostly referenced personal opportunities and opportunities for their

families rather than the national or communitarian model assumed by the
founding rhetoric of the university. In other words, the Brazilian government’s
developmental imagination did not comfortably map on to realities of most
international students.
In addition to the paradoxical construction of international students as rural
and nationally oriented in their developmentalist urges, the founders relied on
an image of Africa that emphasized the continent’s absences rather than
contemporary realities and offerings. While this is true for the Northeast as well,
the epistemological violence that had to be done to imagine Africa in this way
was much more acute. For example, the Diretrizes Gerais (UNILAB 2010)
highlights the lack of institutions of higher education in African countries and
the high rates of student mobility to other countries. While these observations
are warranted and supported by national, supranational and interregional data,
this particular narrative focuses mostly on establishing a deficit. The founders
had more to say about what ‘African states, societies, and economies are not’
(Mbembe 2001: 9), while showing little interest in what they actually are, centring
Brazil as a progressive nation, that intervenes in (and thus relies) on the non-
progressiveness of the partnering countries and their student populations. While
acknowledging the developmental needs of Brazilian regions such as the
Northeast, the ultimate lack of development is viewed as persisting elsewhere, in
Africa. Co-constituting Northeast Brazil and Africa as rural and underdeveloped
allows the central Brazilian government to step up as the provider of development,
ready and able to help remove these regions (in the broadest sense) from their
backward past into a (developed) future.
This resembles what Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) describes as the practice of
‘othering through time’. She explains that multiculturalism and the recognition
of cultural differences by governments often fail to improve the lives and
opportunities of subaltern groups and people who inhabit alternative social
worlds because neoliberal discourses have captured culture and transformed it
into a technique of governing difference in ways that preserve rather than alter
pre-existing, inequitable forms of social organization and distribution of goods.
This occurs by assigning not merely different times, but ‘different tenses’ to the
‘actions of different cultures’ (Povinelli 2011: 758), which creates a temporal
division between dominant cultures and others. Povinelli argues that the durative
present (being) belongs to the dominant culture – in this case, Brazil (or rather,
a Brazil that ‘thinks itself as white’ (Gusmão 2011: 192) and developed). Actions
within the dominant socio-cultural and politico-legal frame, as well as past
wrongs, are interpreted through the potentialities of future outcomes for the
dominant culture. This grants the dominant culture sovereign rights to define
the present and to anticipate the future expressed as the future anterior (will be).
Other social worlds are defined in the past perfect (were), which means their
present actions are interpreted through a historical lens. This temporal division
confines them to the past and leaves unrecognized their existence and their
needs in the present. It makes their future development conceivable only through
the future anterior (will be), already anticipated by the dominant culture. In the
case of UNILAB, the developmental curriculum predetermines international
students’ future as development workers, who will return to their home countries
carrying the expert knowledge imparted to them by Brazilian interventions.
Relating Povinelli’s argument to Edward Said’s (1978) seminal critique of
empire building as constant perpetuation of the Orient as the other reveals how
Northeast Brazil and Africa emerge as objects of intervention. The gesture of
othering through time is further accentuated in that the UNILAB-as-
development-project gets legitimized through a history constructed as shared,
which is not actually shared. Constituting Africa as the place from which slaves
originated (and from which they were extracted by colonial force) and Brazil as
the recipient and eventual abolisher of slavery afforded the founders the
possibility to imagine the transatlantic slave trade as a supposedly shared history,
a gesture that renders Africa in the past tense (Povinelli 2011). The founding
narrative positions Brazil as a postcolonial nation-state that successfully fought
against the cruelty of slavery (not usually narrated in relation to Brazilian
struggles for independence) and now celebrates its Africanness and the
mixedness of its cultures from a post-slavery stance. Africa cannot join in this
celebration since it cannot abolish its role as the source of slaves. The founding
mythology makes Africa’s varied nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial
experiences invisible. The experiences and relations of African states and people
in the present are subsumed into an imagined relationship of Africans out of
Africa in the past, and not as the current flow of people into Brazil for new
experiences and opportunities.
In effect, the focus on the history of slavery erased the part of history that is
actually more shared between countries – the history of Portuguese colonialism.
This erasure also expunged the basis for any sustained engagement with East
Timor – the country that sent the largest number of students at the time of the
research – whose history was dominated by Portuguese colonialism rather than
slavery. Indeed, the absence of a role for East Timor in the narrative of shared
basis for integration and cooperation indicates how much this particular
narrative of past, present and future (with slavery as its starting point of a linear
trajectory) dominates Brazil’s discourses of South–South cooperation.
In this particular construction of history, Brazil sets itself apart in time and
consequently reworks and reemploys the idea of the other as other in time. Africa
and subsequently students from African countries are made into historicized
icons (icons of Brazil’s slave-owning past) and ‘subjects of recognition . . . called to
present difference in a form that feels like difference but does not permit any real
difference to confront a normative world’ (Povinelli 2011: 31). Students from
African countries are called upon to signal difference in the celebration of Brazil’s
ethno-racial diversity. From a Brazilian perspective, this produces a vision of
internal development and increasing equity within the state, which is well aligned
with then-president Lula’s general efforts to overcome racialized inequalities. It
also expresses the desire for development as an attempt to overcome the wrongs of
the past, which further reconstructs Africa as a place that is always already in the
past and that has to be lifted out of this history through cooperation with the
always already present Brazil, and into an equally shared future. In the attempt to
fabricate a founding narrative for the university – that is, to rediscover the history
of slavery and postulate it as the new foundation of Brazil as a nation – the Brazilian
government collapsed complex histories into a simplified and historicized image
of Africa. This repeats the century-old colonial gesture of othering Africa and
Africans in new yet all too familiar ways in the name of development (Kothari
2006; Wilson 2012), this time in the name of Brazilian progress.
Unsettling UNILAB’s Middle Passage narrative
UNILAB’s founding mythology falls within a Middle Passage epistemology that

narrates development as post-slavery progress. But what are other possible
readings of the scenario, readings that are more akin to Wright’s notion of
multilinear and multidimensional interpellations of blackness? What other
questions can be asked? What other narratives emerge if one refuses to accept a
singular (linear only) reading? In this section, I suggest additional interpretations,
to tease other emancipation/progress/development narratives that articulate
themselves through notions of race and blackness.
The Brazilian government and UNILAB founders mobilized the transatlantic
slave trade to legitimize contemporary South–South cooperation with
Portuguese-language countries, especially in Africa, though the project also
depends on bilateral relations with East Timor. The narrow focus on transatlantic
slavery precludes any sustained engagement with East Timorese perspectives on

South–South cooperation because the history that can be conceptualized as
shared is Portuguese colonialism rather than slavery. Perhaps, more than
anything, having East Timorese students in the classrooms forced professors to
pause and rethink their approaches to the teaching of history since their presence
and perceptions did not smoothly align with UNILAB’s post-slavery imaginary.
This becomes apparent in the words of Professora Rocha, a Brazilian professor
in the humanities:
Regarding the work of UNILAB, integration, the countries have in common the
language and the weight of colonization. The dean said that we should think
about changing the name of UNILAB because it does not include the East
Timorese students. . . . The original proposal is contrary to colonization. We
cannot be the new colonizers. The students receive our culture and language, but
we need to be careful of Lusophony. Sometimes this is not discussed.
Interview, 4 March 2013
Older generations who went to school in East Timor under Indonesian rule,
including a small number of UNILAB students, perceived Portuguese as the
language of resistance rather than oppression (Taylor-Leech 2008; Macpherson
2011). Either way, for faculty, the presence of East Timorese students destabilized
the possibility of the Middle Passage epistemology and of Lusophony as shared
Portuguese language to function as binding elements across partnering countries
and their student populations.
The emphasis on the Middle Passage epistemology overpowers another facet
of Lusophone historical relations. Earlier I put forward a ‘Brazil that thinks itself
as white’ on par with Povinelli’s notion of a dominant culture as the culture that
has the sovereign right over defining the present. UNILAB-as-South-South-
project has been imagined from this position as racial redress, compelling at least
partial admission of guilt. A ‘Brazil that thinks itself as black’ – Afro-Brazilian
activism – however, is not conclusively locatable in the moment of abolition. First
of all, abolition did not mark the end of non-white Brazilians’ suffering. It merely
shifted relations of expropriation to exploitation. The racial democracy myth
obfuscated the fact that racial distinction provided the classificatory assemblage
to justify enormous socio-economic inequalities (hyper-inequality), which
disproportionately affect black Brazilians. Furthermore, Afro-Brazilian militants
rarely take abolition alone as the constitutive moment of the Contemporary Black
Movement (Movimento Negro Contemporânea). They name other sources of
inspiration as well, including the US civil rights movement, the literary movement
of Negritude, and, from the 1970s onwards, anti-colonial resistances in Angola,

Guinea Bissau and Mozambique (Pereira and Alberti 2007).
African independence movements, serving as a ‘projection screen’ (Waldow
2010) for a collective identity, inspired previously fragmented Brazilian resistance
groups against white superiority to form a more unified black movement. Self-
identified black militants witnessed (in solidarity) the anti-colonial struggles
and celebrated independences as a victory. More importantly, Africa provided a
venue for talking about blackness. Through the incorporation and celebration of
black (US) music and (African) cultural traditions from what is now Rwanda
and Burundi, for example during the 1975 carnival in Bahia, Afro-Brazilian
activists began to charter a broader discourse on blackness in the Brazilian
context. ‘[T]he discovery of Africa had an important function in the process of
the instrumentalization of militants because it amplified a conscience of its
proper origin and opened possibilities for action’ (Pereira and Alberti 2007: 2).
The notion of Africa as the origin, the ‘quintessential homeland of the diaspora
to Europe and the Americas . . . forever . . . a place of origin and purity’ (Vizcaya
2012: 919) is frequently mobilized by black collectives to interpolate a shared
identity. The idea of origin is itself problematic since it frequently serves as a
technology of distinction and subsequent mechanism of exclusion from within
collectives that position themselves as white, for example in Europe (El-Tayeb
2011) or black, for example in the US (Wright 2015). However, in the ideological
atmosphere of racial democracy, officially and in the public imaginary, non-
white Brazilians were denied the possibility of even relying on blackness as a
form of collective identity. Afro-Brazilian activists have been drawing on the
image of Africa’s fight for freedom to counteract the silence imposed on them by
the racial democracy myth (Agier 1995; Alberto 2005).
The now of UNILAB – imagined by its founders as spurring development
through the integration of countries and people bound by a single history – is in
fact an amalgamation of histories that, if viewed through multilinearity, reveals
many possible meanings of the university project. I am offering here a rather
schematic reading for analytical purposes (historians might disapprove) before
turning to how professors, students and administrators mobilized the various
meanings and made sense of them in the chapters to come. To the extent that
UNILAB had to be imagined first, as utopia sketched on paper, it has been
gathered from the emancipatory potentialities of abolition, emblematized by the
image of the mulata as the racial-democratic representation of Brazilian
modernization and displayed right in front of the university’s main entrance. It
has then been invested with a development logic – rational and technical,
undisturbed by its racializing beginnings, which, unlike the abolition narrative,

denies race its relevance. This rhetorical move also makes the socio-political
impacts of 1950s and 1960s anti-colonial movements, the Africa–Brazil
connection that might be even more meaningful, invisible.
In Brazil, Portuguese colonialism and slavery coincided. Brazil gained
independence in 1822 and abolished slavery in 1888. Hence, abolition can be
claimed as a national achievement. In African countries, bureaucratic and settler
colonialism gained pace around the time that slavery was abolished (1884–5
onwards). Angola, Mozambique and others won independence in the mid-1970s
together with East Timor; only the latter was immediately recolonized by
Indonesia. Why is it then that the founders imagined abolition – reified through
the choice of location and campus names and symbolically on its website – as the
constituting moment of UNILAB although colonialism so obviously seems to
be the history that is actually shared? Why not stage UNILAB against (in
opposition to) Portuguese colonialism more directly? Why is colonialism
afforded the possibility of staying in the shadows? While there are many potential
reasons (including current geopolitical interests), from the vantage point of
crafting a founding mythology, anti-colonialism does not lend itself
unambiguously to a narrative that portrays Brazil as the leader of the Lusophone
world. And why? First of all, it would neither allow the Brazilian government to
inject an alleged post-slavery emancipation agenda (and subsequently conceive
of Brazil as a post-racial/post-anti-blackness society), nor withstand closer
scrutiny of the solidarity terminology. Even though Afro-Brazilian militants
celebrated African nations’ independence as a victory, the Brazilian government
did not extend the same support. Apart from the mobilization of Lusotropicalism
to infamously defend Portuguese colonialism during the 1960s, Brazil
consistently sided with Portugal on colonial issues in the international arena,
which earned the government palpable distrust on the part of African countries
(Taela 2017).
***
Development efforts are often framed in technical terms but projects ultimately
survive and thrive because they serve political purposes (Ferguson 1994; Li
2007).3 UNILAB is no different. The Brazilian government promoted the
university as a project of joint development, but in the end, it serves broader
geopolitical purposes. In framing the university through the history of slavery,
the government takes first steps to recognize Afro-descendant rights domestically.
The astonishing absence of thinking with race from the development-oriented
curriculum is all the more surprising despite the founding narrative’s ostensibly
obvious association with abolition. By making UNILAB an international
development project in collaboration with African countries, pre-emptively
placing it under the aegis of abolition, I argue that the founders paid lip
service to, yet circumvented intentionally or unintentionally, the controversies
regarding affirmative action policies in Brazilian higher education, at least
initially. They bypassed the more complicated questions of redress and
redistribution, which an open discussion of racial justice would require.
Development (as a technical operation) rather than race (as sedimented relations
of power, globally) seemed to be at the centre of the university’s utopia. In
Chapter 4, I illustrate the tremendous efforts of Afro-Brazilian activists to turn
this developmental imaginary into an anti-racism agenda, one that acknowledges
blackness beyond the mere celebration of miscegenation in the context of
UNILAB’s institutional consolidation.
Notes
1 While Ceará was never a major slave-holding enclave freed people have long been
playing an important role in the state’s economy and society. Furthermore, to a large
extent, freed people and slaves themselves drove these anti-slavery efforts (Miles
2002; classroom observations, 18 February 2015). It is not without irony that
Cearense dignitaries take pride in the state’s role as it represents another form of
appropriating black people’s history.
2 Fieldnotes, 9 October 2012 and 11 July 2015
3 The post-structural and postcolonial literature exposes the power of development as
a discursive regime located in Western-centric notions of reason, progress and
modernization. Development discourses dissect and reconstitute local realties,
rendering them technical, amenable to expert solutions from the Global North (Li
2007). Meanwhile, it obfuscates colonial and neocolonial relations of expropriation,
exploitation and dispossession that are the root of impoverishment as they continue
to transfer human and natural resources from the periphery (at a global scale as well
as within countries) to the centre thereby enriching the latter. Development as a
discursive regime thus depoliticizes a set of relations, which are in fact deeply
political.
60
4
Solidarity and Blackness in the Institutional

Unfolding of UNILAB
As has been noted in the introduction, long-standing patterns of inequalities

based on racialized class distinctions have led to the systematic exclusion of
non-white students from Brazilian higher education. At the beginning of the
2000s, responding to sustained activism and in collaboration with social
movements (Martins, Medeiros and Nascimento 2004; Paschel 2016), the
government launched a number of reforms to combat these inequalities. It
aimed to democratize access by expanding private and public higher education
(i.e., PROUNI, REUNI). To further ensure greater access for non-white
students, the Supreme Court declared race-targeted quotas legal in 2012 and the
government made them mandatory for federal universities in 2013 (Schwartzman
and Paiva 2014). To target popular attitudes, Lula da Silva, as one of the first acts
of his presidency, sanctioned Law no. 10.639 in 2003. The law mandates the
teaching of the history and culture of Africa and the Afro-Brazilian diaspora at
all levels of education to enhance Brazilians’ historical knowledge and to reduce
prejudice against people of colour (Felipe and Teruya 2012). Taken together,
these policies represent a revolutionary shift in state discourses from racial
democracy to affirmative action (Htun 2004).
Brazil’s historical debt to Africa as the official justification for South–South
cooperation and the government’s endorsement of affirmative action policies
provided the discursive grounds for UNILAB to emerge as an Afro-Brazilian
university (Gomes and Vieira 2013). This, however, was not as straightforward as
it might seem since actors – the main focus here is on professors – imagined the
university’s purpose from different socio-historically positioned perspectives. In
this chapter, I describe the perspectives and explain how professors mobilized
their perspectives to influence the directions of the institution. I further show
how the arguments relied on notions of blackness in contradictory ways.
61
Everyday politicking
During fieldwork in 2012 and 2013, I sometimes wondered why UNILAB

seemingly prematurely admitted international students, before the infrastructure
was ready for the rapid increase in enrolment (e.g., dormitories, laboratories,
classroom), but I was assured repeatedly that UNILAB had to become an
empirical reality before the end of Lula da Silva’s second term (2010), otherwise,
one could not be sure whether the idea would survive a change in the country’s
political leadership. Consider the following scene:
On 1 March 2013, Lula da Silva visited UNILAB. In the evening of his visit, a
group of professors and administrators went to a nearby open-air bar to celebrate
the day. A band played live music. The singer proposed a toast. The audience,
composed of locals and university personnel, applauded enthusiastically. Dean
Speller shared an anecdote: ‘I called Lula’s office to invite him for awarding an
honorary doctorate (Doutor Honoris Causa). They said that fifteen other
universities wanted to award Lula the same title.’ The dean paused to give his
next words the deserved weight: ‘Tell him that UNILAB is calling and he will
come.’
Fieldnotes, 1 March 2013
In democracies around the world, political parties determine the directions of

countries by appointing party officials to ministries, resorts and all the way down
to the secretaries. Changes in political leadership often lead to the replacement
of these party officials. In Brazil, due to strongly opposing ideological views
about how to best govern Brazil and a notorious scarcity of resources, each
change in leadership could easily jeopardize any project conceived of by the
previous leadership. Since UNILAB was born out of Lula da Silva’s foreign
policy to match his domestic agenda, any president or party with a different
outlook could have prevented the creation of the university. Indeed, Dilma
Rousseff, who took office in 2011, reduced spending on South–South cooperation
(Marcondes and Mawdsley 2017).
Lula da Silva and the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) were central
to UNILAB’s emergence (interview, 16 February 2013). The Lula administration
together with Fernando Haddad, Minister of Education (2005–12) handpicked
Paulo Speller. He is a member of the Workers’ Party and one of Brazil’s development
volunteers (cooperantes). Cooperantes went into exile in Mozambique and Angola
after 1975 to flee from the military dictatorship (1964–85). They worked alongside
Russian and Cuban volunteers to transform the former colonies into independent
Solidarity and Blackness in the Institutional Unfolding of UNILAB 63
nation-states (Azevedo 2011, 2012). Speller worked in the Angolan and

Mozambican education sector at that time (interview, 28 February 2013). In the
context of UNILAB, Speller took part in the Implementation Committee since
2008 and was appointed as first temporary dean (Reitor Pro Tempore) from 2011
to 2013.1
According to Dean Speller, self-governance structures were left flexible,
initially, with the intention to solidify them from within once the university had
constituted itself.2 For example, he was appointed pro tempore with the
expectation that professors, students and administrators would eventually elect
a dean from within their ranks. The university statute (Estatuto) represents
another example. Institutional conversations concerning the statute began in
2010 and continued until 2013, when the document was finally approved on
22 March by the temporary university council (Conselho Superior Pro Tempore)
but only under the condition that it would be later reviewed and revised if
necessary (document, no. 40). Mr Speller interpreted this flexibility as the
condition for democratic engagement, providing professors and students with
the opportunity to participate in the institutionalization of the university.
Electing a dean and approving the statute are only two examples. Other
activities included writing course curricula, planning and building infrastructure,
administering student financial assistance and research funds, forming an ethics
committee, and determining institutional and departmental routines. The list
seems endless, and professors participated in all of these activities whilst
teaching, conducting research, publishing and devising community outreach
activities. Many professors aspired to occupy administrative posts (cargos)
including positions as vice deans, department chairs, programme managers and
committee members. The professors valued these posts because they associated
them with better salaries and career opportunities. By holding such posts,
professors negotiated and decided many aspects of institutional policies,
structures and daily routines. Moreover, professors held personal convictions,
situated imaginings, for themselves and for the university. These convictions
were informed (but not causally determined) by professors’ positions in the
Brazilian society and globally; that is, they reflected intersecting aspects of
professors’ personal, professional, political, economic and cultural positionalities
as well as their regional and national sense of belonging.
These positionalities also enhanced or limited the professors’ capacity to
influence the institutional politics. Professors with relevant connections to the
university leadership had greater access, which, however, could change over time
and shift depending on who was in power. Therefore, in order to pursue their
interests, professors had to forge alliances with like-minded colleagues, or, they
persuaded colleagues to organize into politically viable groups by convincing
them of their aspirations. Much of this forging and organizing occurred in
informal settings (e.g., hallways), or in the words of Professor Silva: ‘Here, the
politics are not in the official discourses or meetings. It is the interpersonal
relations between people that move things’ (interview, 9 July 2015). Then again,
these alliances did not form at random. Rather, they reflected the racializing
assemblages – force fields of political decision-making – that configure the
context of Brazil. It is precisely the hierarchization through mobile structures of
domination (race, gender etc.) that culminated in distinctive political perspectives,
which manifested themselves in the everyday politicking that had UNILAB’s
institutional consolidation as its object. At the same time, professors actively
drew on these perspectives to mobilize support for their respective agendas.
Affirmative action
After opening its doors in 2011, the university had to quickly expand its faculty
to accommodate a fast-growing student population. Between 2011 and 2015, the
number of professors grew from eighteen to 173, the majority of whom were
junior academics. Some were at the start of their academic careers and others
had transferred from private universities. They were looking for jobs in the
federal university system, which they hoped would offer relatively stable
employment and potential transfers to more desirable public universities. Many
professors focused their teaching mainly on professional skills and knowledge
relevant for employment. The South–South mandate tended to disappear from
their accounts, apart from a vague notion that underdevelopment is a common
condition of the Northeast and partnering countries, and which delivered
international students to their classrooms. Some of the professors stood out
from this seemingly disinterested majority by strongly supporting the idea of
local development. Many of them were born in Ceará. Just like Lula da Silva and
other politicians cited in university documentations, they considered the
creation of UNILAB a source of pride and means of emancipation. They were
mostly concerned with the technical (e.g., food production) and social (e.g.,
public health) development of the region (interviews, 5, 8, 15 and 21 February
2013). In the daily negotiations over the institutional consolidation, however,
they tended to side with the majority opinion or to forge singular alliances that
benefited them as individual researchers.
When it came to institutional direction, the majority of professors mobilized

a pragmatic perspective to advance their claims. For instance, in July 2015, a
relatively small group of professors, who were engaged in union work, called for
a faculty strike against Dilma Roussef ’s budget cuts. A large group of professors
strongly opposed the strike in the name of the ‘foreign students’, who had
supposedly nothing else to do in Redenção and who would miss classes and
learning opportunities (participatory observations, 30 June 2015). The group
that supported the strike discounted the reference to teaching, accusing their
opponents of trying to depoliticize negotiations over institutional directions.
Professor Pereira remarked that the strike-opposing group was using a ‘business
as usual’ approach as an excuse to avoid public debates over racialized inequalities
and to continue steering decisions through informal channels (e.g., personal
networks) instead of democratic means such as public assemblies and voting
(interview, 3 July 2015).
The criticisms concerning the lack of open engagement continued on various
occasions. Some professors complained that the majority of their colleagues
prioritized their academic careers over UNILAB’s political purposes. Professor
Santos said: ‘many just come here to stabilize their academic career and then
leave’ (interview, 15 February 2013). Other professors offered similar comments:
‘[They] only want to occupy cargo’ (fieldnotes, 13 July 2015) and ‘Some are here
only for [their] career. Not all talk about Africa and Brazil’ (interview, 16 February
2013). The criticisms frequently referenced racialized inequalities. For instance,
Professora Simone said: ‘they don’t even teach about Afro-Brazilian health
in nursing’. She continued: ‘we are the naughty ones (somos os chatos)’ for
continuously bringing up these questions (fieldnotes, 13 July 2015). The criticisms
should not be misread in a way that implies that professors, who uttered them,
were less concerned about their academic careers, far from it. Yet, it points
to a political perspective that is explicitly concerned with the remediation of
racism.
This assertion of Afro-descendant concerns is a novelty given Brazil’s
ideological legacy of racial democracy and the only recent turn to affirmative
action policies. It requires the sort of political activism that is apparent in the
words of Professora Lourdes, a self-identified Afro-Brazilian activist:
I understand the construction of my career as a collective trajectory. I have to
give back. That I am here is not an individual but a collective accomplishment. I
have to give back to the community. I have to accept this responsibility. I cannot
only say, look, I am here. When I heard about UNILAB in 2009, I already knew
I wanted to be here. I am coming out of the Black Movement. . . . For me
UNILAB is a political and pedagogic project, not a project of constructing a

new university.
The act of self-identification represents a political act because Brazilian society

is characterized by a colour-continuum and absence of clearly defined racial
groups. Loveman (1999) pointedly explains the conundrum:
‘Blacks’ are deprived not just of explicit causes against which ‘they’ might
mobilize, but of policies that would constitute ‘black’ as a meaningful category,
and from there possibly a meaningful group, in the first place. The challenge
confronting Afro-Brazilian activists (self-named) is not simply mobilization of a
given constituency the boundaries of which are known and unproblematically
recognized by all concerned: it is to create a constituency by actively drawing
‘racial’ boundaries.
915, emphasis original
In 2012 and 2013, this sort of Afro-Brazilian activism surfaced primarily in the
realm of teaching. For professors who supported the political cause, the mere
teaching of professional skills was not enough. They regarded students, Brazilians
and non-Brazilians alike, as historical subjects who needed to learn about the
discrimination of Afro-Brazilians, the systematic suppression of African heritage
in Brazilian cultures, and active resistances against such oppression. To briefly
state two examples: in class, Professor Rafael, a Brazilian professor in the
humanities, screened the movie Quilombo (Diegues 1984) about a seventeenth-
century settlement of escaped slaves and discussed the syncretism of religious
practices present in Brazil (classroom observations, 23 January 2013). Professora
Lourdes taught about slave revolts in Ceará (classroom observations, 18 February
2015).
By 2015, the group of politically active professors had grown into a publicly
outspoken alliance, which sought to steer institutional directions. This change
resulted in part from the rapid expansion of the student body and the subsequent
hiring of additional faculty, including professors to teach mandatory courses on
history, societies and cultures of Lusophone space. In addition to the disciplines
in applied sciences (discussed in Chapter 2), the university offered a required
general curriculum during the first and second trimester (discussed in detail in
Chapter 5). In the beginning, professors, who taught these courses and whose
disciplinary backgrounds were in anthropology, history, sociology and literature
did not have a departmental home within the development-oriented curriculum.
The university soon realized that in order to hire qualified faculty members and
to keep them they needed to create respective departments. At first, in the

opinion of Professor Martins, the administration was reluctant since the
professors’ request fell outside of the university’s immediate developmental
purpose (interview, 4 February 2013). In September 2012 (earlier than originally
planned), however, the administration established new disciplines in social
sciences and humanities (Bacharelado em Humanidades, BHU) as well as
languages and literatures (Letras) in the evening. These disciplines were mainly
designed to attract working adults of the local population and to serve as the
departmental homes for professors of anthropology, history, sociology and
literature, meanwhile international students also enrolled in these disciplines
(cf., classroom observations, 16 and 25 January 2013). Because the new
departments made additional use of the limited infrastructure and recruited a
new group of students, they quickly expanded. By March 2013, the evening
classes constituted the largest section on campus in terms of the number of
students and professors. This expansion also attracted a growing number of
professors sympathetic to Afro-Brazilian activism.
Afro-Brazilian activism gained additional momentum when the government
appointed Nilma Gomes as dean in the second half of 2013. A proponent of the
black movement and self-identified Afro-Brazilian activist, Gomes opposed
racialized inequalities in Brazilian education throughout her academic career,
focusing on the decolonization of knowledge and on teacher education to
transform society (cf. Gomes 2012). Through her initiatives, UNILAB
implemented institutional changes that put non-white professors into offices
and championed Afro-Brazilian interests overall. For example, in 2015 UNILAB
opened its third campus over 1,000 km away from Redenção in São Francisco de
Condo in Bahia. Bahia is often referred to as the most Afro-Brazilian of all
Brazilian states (de Santana Pinho 2010). Furthermore, the Institute of
Humanities and Letters (Instituto de Humanidades e Letras, IHL) was founded
to host BHU and Letters. In March 2015, pedagogy (Pedagogia) was added to
IHL. The official goal of the teaching was to overcome Eurocentric ways of
knowing the world and to preserve historically under-appreciated knowledges
and cultural practices derived from Brazil’s African cultural heritage. At the end
of 2014, Gomes left UNILAB because she was promoted into Dilma Roussef ’s
government as head of the Office of Promoting Racial Equality (Secretaria de
Políticas de Promoção da Igualdade Racial, SEPIR).
In their efforts to shape institutional directions according to Afro-Brazilian
objectives and in the interest of racial parity, professors solicited the support
from their non-Brazilian colleagues and international students. For example, in
July 2015 professors, students and administrators were called to democratically

elect the chair of the IHL department. The professor activists put forward a non-
Brazilian non-white professor in the hope this would encourage non-Brazilian
colleagues (and students) to vote in their favour (interview with non-Brazilian
candidate, 3 July 2015). The group further promoted the worldview of Ubuntu,
which means: ‘oneness of humanity, a collectivity, community and set of cultural
practices and spiritual values that seek respect and dignity for all humanity’
(Goduka 2000, cited in Assié-Lumumba 2017: 2) as their motto to invite
professors and students to join their camp. This form of presenting the group to
the UNILAB public advances a notion of blackness that has as its tenet shared
experiences of discrimination, thus transcending national boundaries in the
name of black solidarity. Afro-Brazilian activists did not intend to exclude non-
black professors and students from these struggles. On the contrary, the non-
Brazilian candidate proudly said of a Brazilian non-black professor, ‘Now she is
one of us. She supports our cause’ (fieldnotes, 14 July 2015). Yet, they clearly
campaigned for affirmative action policies that go beyond recognition and an
apolitical notion of development, building toward a transformative anti-racist
and decolonial agenda that directly challenges the effects of anti-black racism in
the Brazilian society (da Costa 2016).
South–South solidarity
A small group of Brazilian and non-Brazilian professors worried that UNILAB

would succumb to the domestic debates over affirmative action policies in
Brazilian higher education at the expense of South–South cooperation. They
were concerned that South–South efforts (e.g., inter-institutional relations)
would remain rather thin, existing only on paper in the form of signed agreements
without sustentative activities. Professor Santos mobilized history by giving it
his own situated twist, remarking to that effect: ‘Brazil was never a socialist
country. Countries with socialist traditions know what solidarity cooperation is.
Brazil was a land of slaves. How can you do solidarity cooperation if you don’t
have a history of what solidarity is?’ (interview, 22 February 2013). Non-Brazilian
professors feared that internationalization would not go beyond the admission
of international students, and even that might fade, as changes in admission
policies suggested.
Initially, UNILAB had planned to admit 50 per cent Brazilian and 50 per
cent international students as stated in the founding document: ‘In order to
achieve its proposal, half of the students will be selected from young people
living in Brazil; the other half will be selected from the Community of
Portuguese-speaking Countries, especially Africa’ (UNILAB 2010: 10). Table 4.1
shows the number of students by country accumulated over time. The numbers
include only students enrolled in on-campus, undergraduate courses. The
university had planned to offer 180 slots to each group, a total of 360 students,
during the first two rounds of admission in 2011 (MEC 2011). Between May
2011 and December 2012, the total number of enrolled students expanded from
179 to 964, which represents an increase of 229 per cent. Although expansion
slowed down afterwards, it remained high: 40 per cent in 2013 (1,352 in total)
and 52 per cent in 2014 (2,056 total). In line with the objective to expand higher
education mostly into the interior of the country, UNILAB gave preference to
Brazilian students from Redenção and surrounding municipalities (Acarape,
Aracoiaba, Aratuba, Barreira, Baturité, Capistrano, Guaramiranga, Itapiúna,
Mulungu, Ocara, Pacoti and Palmácia). It administered a bonus system that
added points to applicants’ secondary school grades if they came from the region
and had attended public secondary schools. By 2013, Brazilian students were
mostly local students with the exception of a very small group of students from
neighbouring states, for example from Paraíba and Fortaleza. Although the
proclaimed goal of parity in enrolment – 50 per cent Brazilian and 50 per cent
non-Brazilian students – has never been reached, international enrolment has
Table 4.1 Student enrolment by country, over time
Brazil Inter- Angola Cape Guinea Mozam- São East Total

national Verde Bissau bique Tomé e Timor
Principe
05/2011 141 38 12 3 18 1 1 3 179
09/2011 293 38* 12 3 18 1 1 3 331
09/2012 515 112 n/a** n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a 627
12/2012 805 159 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a 964
01/2013 815 195 19 22 58 3 21 72 1,010
06/2013 1,053 299 26 39 135 5 23 71 1,352
01/2014 1,171 376 32 50 181 12 29 72 1,547
08/2014 1,446 610 46 73 360 17 44 70 2,056
04/2018 2,942 1,034 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a 3,976
* No incoming international students.
** For cells designated n/a no data could be obtained.
been growing proportionally faster than the enrolment of Brazilian students, in

fact 1.5 times faster compared to national enrolment. While non-Brazilian
students constituted only 22 per cent (thirty-eight students) of the first cohort,
by August 2014 the international students share was at 29 per cent (610 of 2,056
students), of whom the majority (540 students, 86 per cent) came from African
countries and 70 students (11 per cent) came from East Timor.
The rapid growth in enrolment attests to UNILAB’s general commitment to
the expansion of higher education, but over the years it increasingly catered to
domestic development demands. In August 2014, anticipating a general
slowdown in enrolment justified through the lack of UNILAB infrastructure
(e.g., classrooms, dormitories) and national budget cuts, the administration
initiated a policy that capped international student enrolment at 20 per cent
rather than the original 50 per cent. At the time the policy took effect, international
students and faculty expected the actual international enrolment to turn out
even lower due to a build-in redistribution mechanism. The policy stipulated
that the 20 per cent of slots reserved for international students should be
distributed evenly across countries; that is, each country (excluding Brazil and
East Timor)3 was allotted the same number of slots for autumn 2014 (thirty-
three students per African country, a total of 165). Slots that could not be
allocated either due to ‘a lack of qualified candidates or withdrawal’ (document,
no. 35: 2) should be reassigned to Brazilian students. This mechanism did not
take application dynamics into account. It did not weigh the allocation of slots
against the number of applications by country, which by 2014 had proven to be
rather uneven. By and large, the demand on the part of students from Guinea
Bissau was the largest. The demand on the part of students from other African
countries was not only lower, it also consistently fell under the thirty-three slots
allotted by the policy.4 While the international students’ and the faculty’s
suspicion that international enrolment would fall even below 20 per cent did not
actually materialize (26 per cent in 2018), the policy ended previous dynamics
according to which international enrolment grew faster than national enrolment.
Understandably, this policy generated protests among South–South
cooperation-oriented professors and international students. Professor Silva
suspected that international student numbers were reduced to create quotas for
non-white Brazilian students (interview, 9 July 2015). Perhaps this was only an
individual suspicion – and yet during an interview, a Brazilian non-black
administrator, while suggestively waving his hand across the room (I assume he
was referring to the international students) remarked that racial quotas were of
little use for the selection of students since UNILAB ‘already admits so many
blacks’ (fieldnotes, 9 February 2013). The two comments, albeit stated

independently, read together highlight that the competing perspectives
circulating among professors (and administrators) mirrored the domestic
debates about whether affirmative action policies can actually serve to reverse
racialized educational inequalities. More generally, Brazilian academics, who
argue against quotas, refute that socio-economic inequality and race are related
issues. Instead, they uphold the idea of racial democracy because they believe
that affirmative action policies reinforce racialized inequalities by reproducing
an allegedly inexistent racialism. In contrast, academics who advocate for quotas
view Brazil as a nation of racial groups in conflict (Bailey and Peria 2010). Much
like UNILAB’s Afro-Brazilian activist professors, these academics advocate for
the right to be different and the explicit redress of racialized disadvantages. The
non-black administrator did not exactly argue against quotas, but he mobilized
the presence of the international students as an excuse to disregard Afro-
Brazilian concerns in the name of transnational blackness in a way that obscured
the racialized class structures of Brazilian society. This gesture not only
generalizes across non-white people, it also pitches a depoliticized perspective
against Afro-Brazilian political activism.
Some professors and international students (though certainly not all) refuted
both notions of blackness, homogenizing as they were across a multitude of
non-white collectives. Professor Martins said in this regard: ‘I don’t have a cargo
because I am black. They [referring to Afro-Brazilian activist professors] think I
don’t know that, but being black isn’t all that matters’ (interview, 7 July 2015).
Non-Brazilian professors wanted to be recognized first and foremost as
professors at a Brazilian federal university, not as foreign/Africans to legitimize
Brazilian South–South cooperation or as black to support Afro-Brazilian
activism. Instead many of them (though certainly not all), supported by very few
Brazilian professors, petitioned for South–South policies such as hiring
international faculty, taking non-Brazilian professors’ expertise into account in
institutional planning and promoting a transatlantic research agenda (interviews,
26 January, 4, 22 and 25 February 2013).
Professors made sense of UNILAB’s purpose from different perspectives to
mobilize the support they needed to further their professional and institutional
agendas. A majority considered neither South–South cooperation nor Afro-
Brazilian emancipation a priority. Many of them were of privileged socio-
economic backgrounds and would be considered white in the Brazilian contexts.
In contrast, activist professors leveraged the ‘symbolic value’ of UNILAB
(Silvério 2017) to lobby for Afro-Brazilian rights – for the recognition of
racialized inequalities and for the promotion of non-white professors to

administrative posts (cargos) as a form of racial redress. The majority of Brazilian
professors met this sort of activism with hesitation, if not outright resistance. For
instance, during a general faculty assembly in the context of the strike described
above, a Brazilian non-white professor took to the stage to advocate for solidarity
between groups in Brazilian higher education (including Indigenous, public
school and students of colour). In a matter of minutes, three-quarters of the
professors stood up and left the auditorium pouring into the hallway where they
engaged in quite agitated conversations (fieldnotes, 13 July 2015).
The professors’ divergent perspectives and the tensions between them were
symptomatic of ongoing domestic debates over access to (state) power. By
advocating for affirmative action policies in higher education and beyond, Afro-
Brazilian activists struggle to establish ‘blackness [as] a legitimate political
category’ (Paschel 2016: 13) to influence national policies towards improving the
circumstances of Afro-descendants in Brazil. Race thus surfaced as a political
issue in two ways: on the one hand, whether to cast the socio-economic
inequalities prevalent in Brazilian society in terms of racialized inequalities (as
opposed to class, for instance, intersectionality notwithstanding) constitutes a
much-debated issue in Brazilian higher education (Schwartzman and Paiva
2014). On the other hand, by 2015 (four years into the project), race had become
a main theme around which negotiations over UNILAB’s institutional directions
evolved. The idea of race had become a talking point, a governing technology so
to speak, that shaped UNILAB as policy in practice. This analysis is not to omit
that race as a ‘set of socio-political processes of differentiation and hierarchization’
(Weheliye 2014: 5) is always already there. Yet, issues of racism and racialization
had become spoken about more candidly (clearly an accomplishment of the
Afro-Brazilian activist professors’ doings), unlike in 2012 when they were still
addressed secretly. In 2012, some professors had decided, for instance, not to
propose a project designed to openly discuss the racial tensions embedded in the
UNILAB project. Instead, they preferred to pull me into private conversations
when they wanted to point out the racializing effects (and students’ experiences
with racism) of UNILAB’s construction of South–South solidarity.5
The founders envisioned abolition as the common past from which to build a
cultural and scientific bridge that would provide a shared pathway into the
future. As we saw, notions of history and perceptions of relevance are fragmented
at best, if not contradictory. The making of UNILAB can thus be understood as
an attempt to meld fragments into a project that would withstand the winds of
change in national leadership. With the general education curriculum, the
founders set aside space in which they imagined professors and students would
perform the necessary work to produce the coveted integration via historical
conscience and sociability, both of which carry racializing notions of the other.
University classrooms, like primary and secondary school classrooms, are
complex socio-political and socio-cultural spaces in which students receive
messages about the kind of knowledge that is valued and about themselves, for
instance whether they are considered knowers of their lives or mere recipients of
dominant cultural norms (Popkewitz 1998; Apple 1995; Ladson-Billing 1994).
These messages are not merely discursive practices but constitute the principles
of realities. In Chapters 5 and 6, I pay attention to these aspects of university life,
to continue examining notions of blackness as they percolate through ideas of
solidarity and integration.
Notes
1 His successors, Nilma Gomes (2013–14), Tomas Aroldo da Mota (2015–16) and
Anastácio de Queiroz Sousa (since 2017) were also appointed.
2 Interview, 28 February 2013 and fieldnotes, 28 January 2013.
3 The calculation did not include East Timor for two possible reasons: first, admission
procedures differed from those of the African countries as students received
government stipends and were admitted as cohort (rather than through individual
student applications), which was most likely considered as significant resources for
the students and, indirectly, the university. Second, because students were admitted
as cohort, the number of applications (and subsequent enrolment) did not grow as
consistently as the number of applications from other countries. This, however, does
not explain why the policy did not cap Brazilian enrolment.
4 People (including international students and faculty, and also my colleagues at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison) offered a variety of explanations for the disparities
including the following, listed in no particular order: a) the general lack of higher
education and overall political and economic instability in Guinea Bissau, b) the relative
geographical proximity to Brazil, which requires fewer resources for travel, c) the
already existing population of students from Guinea Bissau in Fortaleza, d) political
animosities on the part of other countries concerning Brazil’s leadership aspirations
(e.g., Mozambique, Angola), e) more attractive alternatives (e.g., South Africa in the case
of Mozambican students), and f) lack of resources on the part of students needed to
obtain necessary documents (e.g., passports). A Mozambican student, who lamented the
severe poverty among many of his friends, mentioned the latter point.
5 Fieldnotes, 25 September 2012.
74
5
Historical Consciousness
The formation of a national citizenry based on the political and moral principles
of a society is one of the main purposes of modern schooling. Ideal citizens
deploy reason and knowledge to pursue a balance between individual freedom
and the common good. The teaching of history is necessary to produce a
governable subject or ‘responsible citizen’ whose identity as well as present and
future actions are based on a shared historical narrative. Knowing history, that is,
developing a historical consciousness, is seen as a pedagogical technology that
links citizens’ thoughts and actions to a singular collective narrative that
encompasses past, present and future. The notion of a historical consciousness
emerged in the 1970s in the wake of the Holocaust against Jewish people under
the Nazi regime. Its historical urgency is best articulated by George Santayana’s
famous dictum: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat
it’ (cited in Friedrich 2010: 655). Scholars and educators often take for granted
that historical consciousness must be fostered in students in order to mould
them into ideal citizens. Meanwhile, an individual deemed to possess an
‘adequate’ historical consciousness is perceived as someone invested with the
attributes of an educated person. The philosophical implications of historical
consciousness – as a means of questioning subjectivity – can become clipped by
its pedagogical application, which can impose a progressive view of history that
discourages dissensus in favour of consensus, or what is defined as the norm with
regard to reasonable thought and action. What constitutes a historical
consciousness depends on the discursive specificities of each particular site
(Friedrich 2010). An analysis of how historical consciousness is translated into
different fields should pay close attention to how it negotiates diverse values and
rationalities. Is such diversity accepted as historically and geographically
produced or is it subsumed within a universalistic position that discourages
difference in the name of uniformity and progress?
Table 5.1 shows the courses included in UNILAB’s general curriculum, which
was designed to foster students’ intercultural capacities and historical knowledge.
75
Table 5.1 General education courses
Course name (in English) Course name 1st 2nd

(in Portuguese) Trimester Trimester
Reading and Producing Leitura e produção de texto I X
Texts I
Reading and Producing Leitura e produção de texto II X
Texts II
Society, History and Culture Sociedade, história e cultura X
in Lusophone Spaces (SHC) nos espaços lusófonos
Intercultural Topics in Tópicos de interculturalidades X
Lusophone Spaces (TI) nos espaços lusófonos
Initiation into Scientific Iniciação científico X
Thinking
Insertion into University Life Inserção à vida universitária X
(VU)
I observed general curriculum classrooms because I assumed that most of the

work to build solidarity and integration would be performed in these classroom
spaces. Indeed, in the founding document these three courses were originally
discussed as the courses in which students would receive fundamental
information about the ‘history, culture and socio-cultural identity of partner
countries’ to ‘stimulate them to share their own socio-cultural universe and to
get to know [each other] better’ and ultimately to ‘sensualize [the students] and
[let them] understand different realities and ways of living’ (UNILAB 2010: 34–
5). In this chapter I review the courses that were designed to teach about history,
society, and culture (SHC and TI). I examine professors’ pedagogical approaches
to the subject of history.
The focus on the general curriculum provides an interesting counterpart to
the applied science of the disciplinary curriculum described in Chapter 2.
Whereas the disciplinary courses concentrated on technical training, the general
courses emphasize the humanistic aspects of the undergraduate education
(interviews, 15 February and 5 March 2013). The courses’ official curriculum
(UNILAB 2010: 10) highlights the parallels in history and culture (e.g., language)
as the conditions for the possibility of South–South cooperation and integration.
Courses should examine the historical, cultural, geographical, climate, religious
and linguistic diversity of the various countries. They should discuss concepts
such as Lusotropicalism, Lusophony, interculturality and integration. Indeed,
many professors tackled these issues on a country-by-country basis and cast
Historical Consciousness 77
international diversities in celebratory terms. The idea of these courses

represented a radical break from previous ways of teaching the history of Africa–
Brazil relations and its repercussions in Brazilian schools. Throughout the
chapter I illustrate professors’ approaches in pedagogy and content as they
provide spaces (or not) for students to insert themselves into the imagined
decolonizing development project that is UNILAB.
Teaching history
According to the official outline (ementa),1 the course on society, history and
culture (SHC), taught during the first trimester, focuses on: ‘the world the
Europeans found: The organization of African and American societies before
the 21st century. The economic and cultural exchange in the colonial context –
the traffic of slaves, Indigenous people and negros in the construction of a Brazilian
nation, Pan-Africanism as struggle for liberation: the literature of resistance and
affirmation of negro identity. Postindependence: social conflicts, and politico-
cultural reordering.’ The course on intercultural topics (TI), taught during the
second trimester, explores: ‘the different temporalities of the colonial process, the
cultural practices, exchanges, and conflicts that occurred during contact, with
emphasis on the analysis of concrete manifestations that arose from the process
of occupation, from struggles of resistance until independence. It employs
historical–cultural texts that consider changes, continuities, and intermittencies
of beliefs and values within diverse societies’. The course outline includes a list of
readings (Appendix II includes the full list) that provides an indication of the
epistemological inclinations of the scholars who crafted the course descriptions.
The choice of texts exemplified UNILAB’s attempt to displace Europe as the sole
source of Brazilian modernity. As such, these courses aim to tackle what Madureira
calls the ‘main goal’ of postcolonial theory, which he described as the
reconsideration of the ‘history of slavery, racism and colonization from the
standpoint of those who endured its effects’ and to revise history from a position
of and ‘oriented toward the South’ (2008: 141). SHC and TI imagined the teaching
of history as a profound contestation of the underlying notion of the inferiority of
Africans and Afro-descendants and to replace it with the norm that Africans and
Afro-descendants in the (Brazilian) African diaspora are agents of their own lives
and histories. Wordings such as ‘indigenous’ [sic] and ‘Pan-Africanism as struggle
for liberation’ and references to the Movimento Negro indicate that the authors of
the outline viewed formerly colonized societies as spaces where everyday lives
and cultures are substantially shaped by struggles against dominance. By putting

wordings such as ‘different temporalities’ and ‘consider changes, continuities, and
intermittencies of beliefs and values within diverse societies’ on paper, they
displayed an understanding of culture as something fluid, ever produced and
reproduced in interactions between the oppressor and the oppressed (Young
2003). The authors (or rather, visionaries) emphasized the multitude of cultural
manifestations that resulted from colonial occupations and resistance(s) against
it. The wording such as ‘Brazilian nation’ and ‘Pan-Africanism’, as well as the choice
of scholars to read, which include North and South American as well as African
writers (e.g. from Cabral to Bernd to Anderson), further suggests that the courses
were meant to address these issues in reference to both sides of the Black Atlantic.
The Brazilian Northeast and Africa have long been entangled in the materialities
and representations of centre–peripheral differences. The Brazilian government,
Brazilian society and the world at large traditionally perceived them as
economically, socially and culturally underdeveloped, in short backward
(Weinstein 2015; Mbembe 2001). In the light of this context, the SHC and TI
descriptions represent an important and radical break with common
understandings of the students’ lives and cultures found elsewhere. It also
represents a radically different approach to understanding their lives as historically
linked across the Atlantic as a space of connections and routes so vividly described
by Paul Gilroy (1993), which by no means constituted mainstream discourse in
the Brazilian context. The suggested contents of SHC and TI comply with the
Brazilian Law 10.639 that was passed in January 2003. The law mandates the
teaching of the history and culture of Africa and African descendants at all levels
of education (da Costa 2014; Felipe and Teruya 2012). The course descriptions go
further in that they encourage the acknowledgement of students’ agency over
shaping their lives and experiences and the use of ideas that elevate them to agents
over their own histories. It seems that the descriptions were written in the hope
that students would gain an understanding of the emergence of social relations
(including race relations) in Brazil and elsewhere from a postcolonial perspective
(especially from the perspective of Brazilians of African descent as the use of the
term negro suggests) and be able to compare and contrast these perspectives to
the more common historical narratives of European intellectual, material and
overall imperial expansions. The hope was that students would appreciate the
mixedness of Brazilian culture from the vantage point of African ancestry and
acknowledge previous moments of transnational diasporic integration.
The SHC and TI course descriptions laid the ground for professors to develop
full syllabi. The outlines were meant to create a shared reading list and approach
to conceptualizing the courses. However, professors at different times exclaimed

that the descriptions were too broad and not specific enough. Professora Simona,
a Brazilian professor, responded amused when asked about her experiences with
the outline. She said: ‘The ementa is an elephant. I don’t know how to apply it
with the students’ (interview, 21 February 2013). Many professors struggled with
transforming the general outlines into syllabi. Some thought the readings were
too difficult for the students and others were uncertain about students’ prior
knowledge. The teaching of the emancipatory narrative proposed in the course
outlines often relied on simplified understandings of Black Atlantic relations.
Although, overall, the teaching covered a great variety of topics including African
philosophies, the triangular trade regime, or ethical issues of interculturality and
communitarian solidarity, individual professors frequently cut one or more
dimensions out of the picture to transport particular emancipatory perspectives
from which to inspire resistances against various notions of dominance.
The predicament was that the celebration of either national or racial cultural
diversities as the means to portray integration and solidarity to legitimize the
UNILAB project and Africa–Brazil relations more broadly masked the power
imbalances that de facto existed on campus and which did not fall neatly along
the one-dimensional national or racial identities that professors envisioned as
the base for social change. Professors often imagined fault lines of integration,
which thus needed to be overcome through the teaching of historical
consciousness, in ways that made sense from their own perspectives. They were
frequently able to relate only to fractions of students in their classrooms, which
was often a problem since UNILAB classrooms were highly diverse. Aspects of
Brazilian race relations were highly controversial. Moreover, they were often
discussed in ways that portrayed Africa as the source of slaves ultimately
bracketing the contemporary political, social, cultural and economic realities
actually experienced by international students in their home countries. Tensions
thus arose left and right causing students to disengage, if they had a chance at all
to participate in classroom discussions. The talking time was often controlled
and dominated by professors themselves leaving little room for debate.
Emancipation through culture
Many professors emphasized the interconnectedness of Lusophone countries

and people from a cultural perspective. They emphasized religion, identity and
language. Many of them focused on particular aspects, which often reflected
their own experiences. Take, for example, Professor Rafael, a Brazilian professor
of history. His focus was on religion. One day he showed students the movie
Quilombo, a celebration of Brazil’s most important maroon community and the
first ‘free republic of the Americas’, directed by Carlos Diegues (1984); briefly
summarized:
The movie depicts a group of slaves who revolted in 1650 and escaped to the
mountains to join the community of the Quilombos dos Palmares and their
leader, Ganga Zumba. Ganga Zumba and his people had been living in Palmares
for many years. Eventually the Portuguese persuaded them to leave. Ganga
Zumba wanted to capitulate but many people in Palmares disagreed. The warrior
Zumbi emerged from the disagreement. He demanded freedom and independence
and refused to compromise with the Portuguese. In 1864 Palmares came under
attack again and was ultimately defeated. Many people, including Zumbi, died.
Classroom observations, 22 January 2013
During the discussion afterwards, Professor Rafael repeatedly linked the movie
to the syncretism of Brazilian religious practices tracing the heritage of African
belief systems. He often proclaimed that: ‘We are all mixed. Religions are mixed’
(classroom observations, 23 January 2013). Professor Rafael encouraged students
to explore and value their (‘our’) African ancestry by discussion of, for example,
orixás (goddesses). Rather than portraying it as the religion of the colonial other
(African or Afro-Brazilian alike), as has historically been done, he highlighted it
as a shared heritage. Even though this approach to history and culture represented
an important discursive shift, international students often enough found the
assumed sharedness paradoxical. From their perspective, it seemed puzzling
since Professor Rafael’s approach was evidently Brazil-centred. It reflected
neither the diversity of religious practices in African countries in the past nor of
students’ spiritual belongings in the present.
Another example of the ambiguities that arose was a cultural approach to
history designed to inspire unity across postcolonial spaces. Professora Telma, a
Brazilian professor of sociology, taught about the history of colonialism as the
source of individual and collective identity formation. She was the only professor,
of those whom I observed, who addressed history from the perspective of
(de-)colonization rather than slavery. In one of the classes she discussed a text
called Atmospheric Violence and Subjective Violences by the Mozambican author
José Cabaço (2011), briefly summarized here:
Cabaço renarrates how his perceptions about the social order of the Mozambican
society – his social identity – changed while he grew up. When he was a child he
lived with his parents in the interior of Mozambique. They were of Portuguese
descent. For example, while branco [white] travellers frequently visited his parents’
house, indígenas [indigenous, locals, black] and assimilados [assimilated, mixed]
persons were never invited, nor did they solicit accommodation. The author
admits in the text that he did not question this racialized order (‘o meu mundo’
[my world], p. 215) at that time. As he grew older he started to understand that this
separation contradicted the Catholic values of conviviality and harmony under
which he was brought up. He started to revolt by reading and learning about ‘o
mundo-Outro’ [the world-Other] (p. 217) – the social, political and economic
realities of the local population in Mozambique. He realized that he had to break
with ‘his world’ and ultimately joined the war for Independence during the 1970s.
In her explanations, Professora Telma emphasized the cultural domination and

marginalization of the colonized by the colonizers. In other classes, Professora
Telma spoke about the formation of Brazilian identity underscoring
hierarchization and discrimination born out of the discursive and physical
violence of the Portuguese colonialism-slavery-war assemblage (classroom
observations, 21 January 2013). Foregrounding the formation of socio-cultural
identities through struggles for freedom and against oppression without
victimizing the formerly colonized, she emphasized students’ agency in forging
their own histories and futures. In her mind, colonization was still ongoing as
the cultures of the colonizer and the colonized have become ambiguously
intertwined over time. As she saw it, the only way to escape subjugation was
through knowing the history of cultural colonization. She placed the
responsibility to know this history firmly with her students.
Like Professor Rafael, Professora Telma’s explanations transported a particular,
and purportedly united, understanding of a ‘we’. It constituted the condition of
being postcolonial in the sense that southern countries and people have, over
time, formed hybrid identities due to oppressive histories such as transatlantic
slavery and colonization. Seen from this perspective, professors and students at
UNILAB are equals in the endeavour of asserting their emancipation by valuing
their social identities and southern epistemologies. Her approach is not as Brazil-
centred, since it takes as its starting point an imagined experience of shared
belonging to the formerly colonized. Professora Telma’s approach privileged
culture as a site of struggle without confronting other sustained structures of
difference and dominance. This resembled what Maher and Tetreault (1993)
described regarding the discussions of gender inequality in US college-
classrooms. They found that the positionalities of the professors influenced the
kinds of conversations in which teachers and students engaged. White-American

professors ‘privileged gender as the main category of analysis’ (123). The
conversations often did not confront racism and white privilege, whereas
African-American teachers discussed gender and race as inextricably linked.
Moreover, Professora Telma projected her own socio-historically positioned
understanding of culture sometimes (though not always) dismissing students’
perspectives for which the following conversation provides a particularly
striking example (classroom observations, 21 January 2013):
Professora [Sighs.]
One has to have hope.
Student
Hope stays with God.
Professora
No, God doesn’t do it. We do.
Student
The current generation is worse than other generations before.
Professora
Many leave Guinea Bissau to study. I hope they return. One has to hope that
soon it will be better.
Student
One has to go to church.
Professora
No, not church. One has to do something.
In this instance, Professora Telma cut short what could have been an interesting
conversation. She did not, however, take the time to acknowledge the student’s
way of seeing the world. She negated the student’s suggestion of how to foment
change. She was not the only one who rejected the idea of God. Other Brazilian
professors had a beef with God, and the Catholic Church in particular (classroom
observations, 21 and 29 January 2013), so it seemed, perhaps because the latter
– here I only speculate – was central to maintaining anti-black discourses in
Brazilian history. What was a situatedly informed opinion on the part of
Professora Telma, in the context of UNILAB the negation of the student’s
reference system was more than just an unfortunate teaching style lapse. It
denied the possibility of a diversity of epistemologies in her classroom. Since she
worked under the auspices of UNILAB’s original proposal, which included also
the idea of mutual respect, she could have used the student’s culture (i.e., religious
beliefs) as a vehicle for learning (Ladson-Billing 1995). For example, she could
have used this situation for an open debate about the role of values and beliefs
for the formation of identity on both sides of the Atlantic, and to ask for students’
personal experiences as postcolonial subjects. She could have reshaped the
conversation to talk about the role of religion in colonial and postcolonial
identity formation processes, the topic of her classrooms. Instead, she stated her
own view, negated the student’s different sense-making apparatus, and returned
to the conversation of the text that she had selected.
Although this is not only a matter of pedagogy but also a philosophical one (as
I will discuss in a moment), the pedagogies that I observed in general education
courses often seemed less transformative than the decolonial perspective of the
course outlines suggested. Many professors used professor-centred approaches
when teaching these matters. They often lectured and explained things in ways
that highlighted their expertise but left little room for open-ended questioning
and critical engagement on the part of the students. While, theoretically, professors
valued students’ contributions and frequently solicited them by calling on
students, they actually gave students very little space, or else, very controlled
space to share their opinions. When asked to explain their teaching practices,
professors justified them as acts of resistance that alternatingly wanted to ensure
equal participation and to defuse tensions that might arise from the topics at
hand. Professors often mobilized notions of colonial difference – Africaness or
identity – to produce the students as agents of a liberated future. Such a move
reinstated the students as unreasonable beings that must be controlled and
manicured rather than the postcolonial agents envisioned by the course outline.
Professors conflate critical/interpretive discourses with strategic ones as they
wished to position themselves as authoritative voices for change (Popkewitz
1998). For instance, Professora Telma’s rather authoritative views on what
constituted an appropriate interpretation, found expression also in her style of
conducting the classroom as the following observation illustrates:
It is 8:00am, Wednesday morning. Students are slowly trickling in. Some are busy
getting their stuff out or looking for one of the very few outlets to make sure their
laptop batteries last through class. Brazilian students occupy most of the front
rows and East Timorese students are sitting in the back with students from African
countries spreading mostly in the middle. Professora Telma arrives at 8:05. She
starts teaching immediately. First, she introduces todays’ text. Next, she orders
students to read the text out loud. She calls on the students chair-by-chair, row-by-
row asking each student to read a section of the text. After each section, she asks
the respective student to explain the writing. She barely waits for an answer before
explaining the section herself. Students seem to pay attention. They take notes and
underline passages in the text. I cannot help but wonder if they do so because they
know that sooner or later, Professora Telma will turn to them, in which case they
needed to know where to continue. Some students seem tired though, and some
others are distracted. After roughly thirty minutes students begin to get up
sporadically, leaving the room, and returning shortly thereafter; upon return,
performing all kinds of non-verbal communications across the room; some being
noisier than others. One can hear East Timorese students whisper to each other,
on which Professora Telma comments with a ‘psssst’. She does not, however, react
to the commotion caused by students leaving the room. After one hour of reading
in this fashion, the text is finished and she releases the students for a break but not
without saying: ‘Now we have heard about culture, resistance and persistence.
Everybody can reflect for him- or herself.’ After a twenty-minute break, the
scenario repeats itself in almost the same fashion. As students return, Professora
Telma starts immediately, demanding them to reflect on the text in writing. Some
students write while others talk quietly with their peers. After fifteen minutes of
mostly individual work, Professora Telma pulls out the class list to register students’
attendance. She calls each student by name in alphabetical order. The person she
calls must read their notes out loud, which some students do. Others just talk
about what they think. Again, Professora Telma comments on the contributions
one-by-one, elaborating their thoughts and connecting them back to the text.
Except for some scattered student questions the class passes without any open-
ended conversation between students and the professor.
Professora Telma fully controlled who talked, when and for how long. She did
not leave it up to the students to decide whether they wanted to speak. Instead
she called on them in ways that made their participation inevitable, but also
entirely structured by her. She relied on the technologies provided by the
classroom (chairs and rows, class list) to call on students, which allowed students
to predict their turn but also made it completely unavoidable. Professora Telma
occupied most of the talking-time space in class by providing extensive
elaborations on the text and students’ writing. Very rarely did she praise students
for their comments or prompt others to elaborate further. Despite the potentially
empowering content of her teaching, she pursued a rather professor-centred
approach, which cut the students short and limited their ability to engage with
the matters and each other. Professora Telma justified her style of teaching by
saying that one had to read scholarly texts line by line and explain it in the way
she did so students would be able to understand them. She insisted that students
simply could not process these types of text alone (interview, 29 January 2013).
After one of her classes, I asked some students what they thought they had
learned. José, a Mozambican student, responded: ‘This class is boring, just reading
and interpreting texts’ (classroom observations, 28 January 2013).
Although it was probably naïve on my part to assume that students would
walk away from one lesson filled with excitement about the emancipatory
potential of a text written in an abstract form, it nevertheless struck me how
disconnected they seemed to the issues discussed. Moreover, Professora Telma
frequently reprimanded the East Timorese students whispering ‘pssst’, whereas
she did not acknowledge the commotion caused by the students’ constant
coming and going. Again, this perception owes much to my own culturally
situated assumptions about what constitutes the correct proceedings of a
classroom. However, what I observed was that in many classrooms, East Timorese
students often relied on each other for translations.
The situation also shows that UNILAB professors, more generally, had their
own views (or, ‘own rebellions’, an expression that Sandra, a student from Cape
Verde, used), and as long as students followed their emancipation narratives,
they would acknowledge students’ contributions. Frequently professors
portrayed themselves as experts. Professors marked out the epistemological
territories, which they considered to be the correct path to a better future. ‘That
is, much of modern life is ordered through expert systems of knowledge that
discipline how people participate and act’ (Popkewitz 1998: 5). Such an
understanding of the role of history in the present is strongly related to
enlightenment teleologies of progress composed of a singular collective narrative,
which regards the learning of history – the development of a historical
consciousness – as the prime responsibility of an individual citizen. The idea that
history must be taught – a pedagogical gesture – rather than experienced or
lived not only disregards students’ prior knowledge, it also establishes a fault line
between those who know and those who do not know, which seemed to stand
diametrically opposed to the postcolonial aspiration of the general curriculum
idea. Moreover, foregrounding the postcolonial condition as a cultural construct,
as in the case of Porfessora Telma, fails to account for other forms of
hierarchization such as gender, class, nation and race or intersections of these.
Emancipation through race and blackness
Other professors developed courses that were clearly designed to celebrate the
Africanness of Brazilian culture and history. They regarded transatlantic slavery as
the source of persisting domination over non-white Brazilians and non-white

subjects in other parts of the world. From their perspective, the celebration of
cultural diversity as international diversity was insufficient as uneven race relations
in Brazilian society and a skewed perception of Africa also needed to be addressed.
For example, Professora Lourdes, professor of anthropology, was more responsive
to the uneven social positionings of economically and politically marginalized
individuals and groups. She took skin colour as an important starting point:
It depends on the way of thinking, but it is strongly linked to the question of

physical appearance because racism passes through my phenotype. Racism
depends on what one looks like. It doesn’t matter whether I have an Italian
grandmother, whether I am half European. For example, I hear a lot of
congratulation for being the first black Brazilian woman at UNILAB, but for me
that has another side. Why is it so amazing for me to be at UNILAB, if 50 per
cent of the Brazil’s population is black?
But she did not end there. In talking about these issues, Professora Lourdes
deliberately played with the two forms of the verb ‘to be’ in the Portuguese
language (ser and estar). Ser refers to an unconditioned state of being (e.g. Sou
mulher, I am a woman) whereas estar represents a temporary condition (e.g.
Estou trabalhando como professora, I am working as a professor). She questioned:
‘We are (somos) all equal, but are (estamos) we all equal?’ She shared some
personal experiences to underscore her commentaries. When she was still a
student, a branco student who was also a mother remarked that it was easier for
Professora Lourdes to study because she had no children. But Professora Lourdes
was poor, therefore she explained that their experiences could not be compared;
one would have to account for the intersectionality of being (estar) poor and
being (ser) black as well.
Like the African-American professors in the study by Maher and Tetreault
(1993), Professora Lourdes combined socio-economic inequality and racism in
her approaches to teaching the history of slavery. She maintained that a sole focus
on socio-economic inequality (i.e., class) erases race from history and disavows
the question of stereotyping and prejudice against non-white people. As a
consequence, experiences that were fundamentally different could unjustifiably
be charted as the same – for example, the question whether socio-economic
inequalities or cultural domination are experienced similarly, regardless of a
person’s race. Professor Rafael, Professora Telma and Professora Lourdes were
interested in the interpellation of collective identities. It is worth paying attention
to the nuances though. Professor Rafael emphasized the mixedness of the

Brazilian culture. He focused on the coalescing of cultural influences, whereas
Professora Lourdes, in her lessons (classroom observations, 19 February 2013)
and in conversations, emphasized the multidimensionality of race as it intersects
with gender, class and other aspects of a person’s life. Still, her approach can be
placed on a par with the one-sided emancipation narratives, because she imparts
blackness in meaning from a Brazil-centred perspective, which might celebrate
too easily the transnational reach as it does not acknowledge the political, classed
and gendered fragmentation and uneven social positionings across and within
student groups, aspects that I discuss in detail in Chapter 7.
Professor Franco, a professor of sociology, focused on teaching about African
history and the history of transatlantic slavery, which he linked to the construction
of Africa and Africans as inferior in Brazil and around the world. For example, he
screened the movie Brazil: An Inconvenient History (Grabsky 2001). This BBC
documentary recounts the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the role of
slaves in building the Brazilian economy. It focuses on the atrocities committed
against slaves and the hardship of slave work on plantations and in mines
(classroom observations, 29 January 2013). Professor Franco included a variety
of perspectives in his teaching, actively trying to establish a connection between
African history, European constructions of the presumed inferiority of people of
colour, and stereotyping in Brazil, as the following scene exemplifies:
‘How does the child learn about the image of Africa?’ Professor Franco changes
his voice and bends down pretending to be a child. ‘She will not ask his mother
to tell him about the image of Africa. The child learns it from the three images:
Tarzan, Tambor, Tanga. As Hegel said, Africa has no history. It is still in the stage
of infancy. This is a Eurocentric image of Africa.’ He continued in a way that
animated the students. He linked his explanations to what could potentially be
personal experiences of students. He did so rather sarcastically. ‘Do you know
the Tambor?’ Students start drumming on their tables. ‘The subject of Africa
cannot talk, can only drum. All Africans live in the forest. Even Brazilians (negro
and branco) understand when the Brazilian leaves Brazil and goes to another
country, the white Brazilian understands because he is not treated white.’
Professor Franco reversed other professors’ approaches that were characterized

by a Brazil-centred perspective in that he focused the content on Africa. He
intended to complexify students’ historical knowledge in general, ultimately
hoping that he would counter the stereotyped image of the continent. His
teaching was often very enthusiastic and he made a great effort to address all
students in his classroom. The following vignette is from a classroom composed

of roughly one-third each of students from Brazil, East Timor and African
countries:
Monday afternoon, in Redenção: students wander in and out of the classroom

greeting each other and interacting loosely while waiting for the professor. A
group of Brazilian female students watches a romantic movie on a laptop placed
on the professor’s desk (near an outlet). Another group of female students, two
from African countries and one from Brazil, sit by the window talking. Professor
Franco arrives at 2:15pm. He scolds the students that they should be reading the
text. He starts class by asking students to recall what they had learned about the
history of Africa. He first calls on a female student from East Timor, who does
not respond. He says: ‘Is there someone to help her? Does anyone want to help
her? Nobody wants to talk?’ Two male students, one from Brazil and one from
Guinea Bissau offer an answer. Professor Franco then lectures about Africa’s
precolonial history, frequently tying it in with discussions about racial prejudice
and stereotyping Africa. He supports his lecture with images (e.g. maps, cultural
artefacts, photographs). He often acts out his explanations in a comedian-kind of
way that makes the students laugh, for example by pretending to be an old man
who needs a cane to walk. Throughout the class, he asks open-ended questions
addressing no one specifically by saying, for example: ‘Who has never spoken in
my class? Who can help?’ He waits for only two to five seconds after his questions
before he draws on students’ answers to continue his explanations. Most of the
answers come from students from African countries. Once in a while, Professor
Franco calls on East Timorese students asking questions about their country and
its history (e.g. decolonization), which the students (mostly male) respond to
promptly. Brazilian students – almost all of them sit in the back of the room like
they almost always do in his class – rarely speak compared to the international
students. During class, students from East Timor and Brazil frequently leave the
room and return shortly thereafter. At some point a female Brazilian student
leaves, she says because she is not feeling well. Another Brazilian student follows
her. Professor Franco promptly calls on her to stop her. But when she points out
that she has to get her classmate to the nurse, he says: ‘okay, okay’, and lets her go.
Over and over, Professor Franco reminds the students to pay attention. When
they talk amongst themselves, he calls for them to focus on him, for example
saying: ‘alô’ [hello] before continuing his explanations. Thirty minutes before the
end of class, he shows a documentary. Many of the students seem tired. The
movie gets stuck after about fifteen minutes. Students gather their belongings and
start leaving, but Professor Franco is able to put it back on and students sit down
again. As Professor Franco walks out of the room, student conversations arise.
Three students from different countries leave, but as Professor Franco returns,
handing out copies of the text to read for next week, they come back again. When
the movie is finished, a male student from Angola applauds.
Professor Franco was an enthusiastic professor with a talent for acting, who
based his teaching mostly on lectures accompanied by comprehensive outlines
that he wrote on the board and erased while moving along. He was also a
demanding professor (much like Professora Telma), who expected the students
to pay attention and to provide answers to the questions he frequently asked.
Given Professor Franco’s enthusiastic style of teaching and constant attempt to
actively address prejudice and stereotyping, I was surprised at how calm, even
detached, students seemed. I had expected that his style and the materials that he
presented would generate much more debate, outrage, protest, critique or
sadness, but students were mostly quiet. Few of them took notes. Sometimes
they whispered with their neighbours or exchanged needed things such as
markers, erasers, copy money, texts, and so forth. Some frequently pulled out
their cell-phones, guarding them with their arms, typing away. Again, these
expectations probably have a lot to do with my own situatedly imagined ideas
about what constituted normal classroom proceedings. In his explanations,
Professor Franco assigned himself an important role in the fermentation of
social change. He described the classroom as a ‘zone of conflict’ (see also
interview with Professora Lourdes, 12 February 2013), which draws out parallels
to the ‘cultural wars’ described by Stanley Bailey and Michelle Peria (2010),
according to which two opposing views with regard to racialized relations clash
in the Brazilian academy. One side supports the view that quotas will re-entrench
racialized inequalities by reproducing an allegedly inexistent racialism. In
contrast, academics who advocate for quotas view Brazil as a nation of racial
groups in conflict. Professor Franco explains why this is (emphases are mine to
highlight his attempt to negotiate different outlooks on history):
What the professor does in class depends on his knowledge. My formation and
my experiences are from Africa. I try to find African literature. The other example
is slavery. What story will I tell – a production of knowledge from an African
perspective; not only from a European perspective? When it comes to talking
about responsibility, there is a revisionist perspective. They will say that we,
Africans, are responsible for the slave trade. We sold each other out. There is a lot
of exaggeration. When Africa started to decolonize, we gave all the guilt to
Europe. But there is a middle way for decolonization and slavery. There was a
small African elite. But the African people were colonized and enslaved. The elite
was the mediator. So what history will I tell? Students will be shocked that there
were African empires. I think in whatever course [referring to all disciplines

taught at UNILAB, including the applied sciences], we should bring an ethical
position. I didn’t come here to seed hate. This isn’t what I do. Being ethical is my
position. For example, if I teach black students, when they learn about the cruelty
of African enslavement, they revolt. They revolt against white students.
Professors, who think that being in a classroom is easy don’t know anything. The
classroom is a place of conflict and negotiation, conflicts over our representations,
conflicts over our bodies. We are different. We have to negotiate these things here.
In his response, Professor Franco highlighted the difficulties in teaching history.

He acknowledged the tensions that could potentially arise from his efforts, and
he has most likely experienced such tensions throughout his career. Therefore,
according to his explanation, his authoritarian style of teaching – a mixture of
animation, theatrical performance and high demand – is his response to the
potential tensions that he is concerned this subject matter would set off. To
underscore his point, he gave examples from his experiences throughout his
career as a professor. He shared how he felt that a student deliberately lied to
avoid conflict. According to Professor Franco, the student pretended to like
candomblé, but he did not actually like it. Other students, said Professor Franco,
tried deliberately to cause conflict. He gave an example of a Brazilian student
who said that Africans liked Brazil because everyone is a slave. Although these
are second-hand accounts which have probably passed through the whorls of
Professor Franco’s active and activist mind many times, they do serve to make
his teaching style plausible. Professor Franco is rigid in his teaching approach
and the intervals he assigns to student-talk as he feels he has to keep resentment
at bay and a check on hurtful speech.2 Professor Franco perceived educational
spaces as ‘zones of conflict’. He felt that he needed to control his classrooms to
contain conflict and prevent students from verbally abusing and emotionally
harming each other. Well aware that classroom conversations about racialized
inequality are not simple matters to discuss, Professor Franco carefully avoided
essentializing race and polarization among students. He tried to be attentive to
the multitude of experiences and positionalities present in every classroom. For
example, he created a ficha de identidate (identity sheet), which included the
name, age and nationality of each student in every course he taught. He explained
that this tool was a way of getting to know those in his classes, and for students
to get to know each other. In some important ways, Professor Franco and
Professora Telma’s approach, who also strictly controlled student-talk, were very
similar. Both centred historical knowledge in order for students to develop an
historical consciousness. But the approaches were also different in a very

important way. Professora Telma centred herself as the expert-knower, whereas
Professor Franco centred himself as the expert-doubter, who was experienced in
navigating classroom tensions. His goal was to establish trust among students
and in their relationship to him, for them to feel comfortable (enough) to
publicly express their opinions. Controlling student-talk is a way in which
teachers try to avoid topics that are either not intended by the curriculum or
could potentially cause conflict (Kendall 2012).
It could be argued that despite the prevailing professor-centred and at times
one-sided approaches to teaching, students would learn all of the aspects over
time. However, students were sorted into classes and thus usually benefited only
from one or maybe two of these perspectives at the time of the research.
Professors had brought with them their individual sedimented – sometimes
overly romantic, sometimes overly humdrum-pessimistic – perceptions of
either Africa or Brazil. Again, given the objective of this book, it is important to
note that various perceptions commingled across all sorts of fault lines of
difference. And yes, professors’ perceptions usually made sense when read within
their lived experiences. For example, it made sense for a professor to emphasize
and share his/her experiences of solidarity relations during anti-colonial
resistance movements when s/he was exiled in Mozambique during Brazil’s
military dictatorship. It made sense for a professor to share his own excitement
about the mixedness of African and Brazilian cultures, if it was perhaps
reminiscent of a time filled with emancipatory aspirations. And some had lived
in many different parts of the world, thus were perhaps more comfortable
with interculturality in general. Most professors, however, were new to the
idea of integration à la UNILAB and had as much to learn as their students.
Professor Antonio, a Brazilian professor, pointed out the lack of faculty training
in this regard:
We have difficulties that come from two fundamental aspects: first, the innovation
of UNILAB. There is no experience with this. We have not accumulated
knowledge how to create the dialogue about internationalization and integration.
Second, most of our professors are junior faculty. Many of them have very little
experience in teaching. In about four years this will be better. There is a fragility
of something new, a new idea, which is the idea of a university of international
integration. We professors have difficulties to construct a practice of classroom
that works the dialogue, to discuss the relation.
None of the professors whose classrooms I have described above were junior
faculty. All of them possessed extensive experience teaching at university level.
Therefore, Professor Antonio’s contention that teaching practices would simply
improve over time can be questioned. His remarks, however, clearly point to the
need for supporting and potentially training professors in developing pedagogical
approaches that are more in line with the university’s goals and the ementas’
promulgated ideals. The inability to successfully teach diverse classrooms (e.g.
regarding ethno-racial diversity) may not result from a lack of faculty intention,
or an inadequate ideology in support of diversity. Rather, it may have been
caused by the lack of training in critical pedagogy informed by culturally relevant
pedagogy (Sheets 2010) and the lack of opportunity to talk with other instructors
or develop a community of practice to support such pedagogical approaches
(Wenger 2000).
Although individual professors’ perspectives could (and most likely did)
become more integrated over time, at the time of the research, professors’
one-sided and authoritative approaches left students puzzled, as the following
excerpt from an interview with Rachel (Brazil) and Sandra (Cape Verde), the
more outspoken of the two (and one who would pass as mixed; more on this in
Chapter 7) shows (interview, 23 January 2013):
Sandra
Some professors push a lot the history of Africa. They forget Brazilian culture
and history. This is not good because it might lead to afastar (pushing away) of
Brazilian students. The professors keep explaining that they are also black.
They refer to cultural elements, for example Samba, which has African roots.
Professors also talk a lot about religion as well, for example Orixa. What is that?
I have not seen it in Cape Verde. That is Brazilian religion, Brazilian culture.3
Professors want to show us that we have things in common, that we all suffer
discrimination, but they don’t transfer it in a good way (não transmitem numa
maneira certa). They teach about suffering. Now students and people in the
community feel sorry for us (tem muita pena de nos). In class, professors always
ask: ‘Did you understand? Did you understand? Did you not understand?’ The
African professors got here already with their own revolta (rebellion). They
suffered a lot of discrimination in Brazil, but they have to clarify this. They have
to be careful not to push away the Brazilian or Afro-Brazilian students. There
are discussions about who suffered more, or who suffered less. Brazil has its
history of discrimination. They brought white people here to mix with the
blacks to eliminate (eliminar) the blacks, can you imagine!
Rachel [Nods mostly and listens to her friend.]

Sandra
At enrolment, I had to fill out my race, if I was white, or pardo, or black.
Rachel
That makes no sense, how would you know whether you are pardo, or black
[making a gesture with her right hand/finger across her lower left arm]. But
maybe it is because of the quotas.
Taina, a student from Angola, shared that together with her friends, they were
shocked when they learned about Lusotropicalism, and how it was used to justify
whitening policies. She said they had many heated debates (fieldnotes, 10 March
2013). These examples highlight that prejudice and misconceptions abounded,
including local Brazilians’ perception of international students as the subjects
of slavery. They also show that the students were confronted with many
contradictory messages, which they had to figure out themselves given that they
often had little space during classes to discuss these issues. I offer some
explanations on the why in Chapter 7, but the chance that these discussions
would happen across different nationalities outside of the classroom was also
rather slim because many students spend most of their time outside the
classroom (on- and off-campus) in groups of friends and peers from their own
countries, rather than in the mixed groups UNILAB founders had imagined.
There are many aspects of Africa–Brazil relations that professors did not
address. They often theorized and structured their syllabi around South–South
relations from the perspective of cultural practices, as opposed to global socio-
polito-historio-economic assemblages (including inter-racial tensions), within
which students had to organize their lives, and which shaped their everyday
experiences in- and outside of the classroom; that is, the daily routines and
realities of struggling for acceptance and sustained interactions with their peers
as opposed to officially staged encounters or the idealized relations of the
envisioned utopia. Yet, integration-work is hard work and professors’ efforts
should be acknowledged, even if they did not always accomplish what they set
out to do.
Dialogue across differences
Very few professors integrated their lessons across issues of race, culture, socio-
economic inequality and students’ global aspirations (a point to which I will
return in Chapter 7). In the spirit of Gloria Ladson-Billing’s seminal book The
Dreamkeepers (1994) in which she studied successful teachers of African-
American students, I questioned UNILAB students about their favourite
professors. In response, students usually pointed out professors who they thought
‘explained things well’ (interviews, 30 January and 1 February 2013). I heard and
saw other things in these professors’ classes, which resembled the four
characteristics of culturally relevant pedagogy developed by Ladson-Billing: 1)
teachers had a positive self-image and strongly identified with their profession,
2) they respected the students as competent learners and made their experiences
relevant for classroom learning, 3) they created a community of learners
without privileging particular groups of students, and 4) they underscored that
knowledge was flexible and could be challenged (1994: x–xi). Professors who
students described as successful encouraged open dialogue between professors
and students, and among students, built more explicitly on students’ prior
knowledge and, most importantly, allowed the complex social relations
(including tensions) that students experienced outside of the classroom to
inform the conversations as an important step toward addressing diversity in the
classroom (Ngo 2010). Maria, a student from Cape Verde, named Professora
Simona, a Brazilian professor of anthropology. She described her teaching style
in the following way:
After reading a text at home, Professora Simona asked us in class what we
understood. Everyone spoke about what they understood. She collected
vocabulary. The words, she put them on the board and explained them. For
example, the definition of culture, students had to write about culture. Then
students had to read it out loud. Students gave their ideas and Professora Simona
collected them on the board. At the end she synthesized the ideas. She gave her
interpretation. She jointed it with her knowledge. Ela não descartava a nossa
opinião (she did not disregard our opinion). We can construct our knowledge,
for example if she had given us a definition, we would not have had time to think
about it. She constructed an understanding, atravez do que ela pensava e que nos
tambem pensavamos, construimos um conhencimento (based on what she
thought and also what we thought, we constructed knowledge).
Taina valued the opportunity to contribute from her own understanding to the
creation of knowledge. She thought this kind of knowledge production was
more conducive to fostering integration, especially compared to more professor-
centred approaches from other classrooms. Professora Simona explained her
approach. According to her, many professors worry about teaching the students
about content, whereas she preferred to focus on the method of reading and
studying, which she found more important, otherwise ‘the university would pass
over the students rather than they pass through it’. Her objective was to encourage
students, to critically reflect on what they learned, about Lusophony, which also
manifested in the content of her teaching. Professora Simona focused on the
diversity and complexity of language. She engaged her students in critical
reflections on the meaning of Lusophony as the concept of shared language
resulting from Portuguese colonialism and slavery. She provided the students
with various texts about the diversity of Portuguese spoken throughout CPLP
countries. Professora Simona explained:
I would like my students to take a long critical reflection of Lusophone spaces.

We are trying to homogenize what is not homogenous. They are distinct societies,
with distinct histories and cultures. They have some things in common:
colonialism, not to negate. Cape Verde was a laboratory of slavery. People from
São Tomé e Principe, and Angola, all of them passed through Cape Verde
to be trained as slave-masters and slaves. I want students to think about the
relations that exist between them, between São Tomé e Principe, and Cape
Verde, Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, etc. Timor is new to me. I read a little bit
to understand the students’ background. Lusophony as an idea of integration
seems forced. What is interesting is that Timor used Portuguese as the language
of resistance. One student speaks Portuguese as a form of resistance against
Indonesian rule. Other students don’t embrace this. They are from another
generation.
Her explanation highlighted the complexities of cross-Atlantic cultural relations.

She linked colonialism to slavery and described African countries, and most
importantly the connections between students as contemporary people rather
than icons from the past or underdevelopment. She acknowledged that Brazil
benefited from slavery and that African cultures came into contact in new ways
through slavery on the way to Brazil. She criticized the idea of Lusophony
because she thought that it brushed over the cultural and linguistic diversities of
the students. She celebrates these differences as a shared point of integration.
Alda from Guinea Bissau referred to Professor Martins, a professor of
anthropology. His approach differed in that he strongly encouraged inter-student
dialogue and allowed students’ experiences to inform the conversations,
especially with regard to prejudice and stereotyping, but without alienating
Brazilian students. Consider the following classroom situation:
Professor Martins starts off the class by asking students to rearrange the chairs
into a circle so that they face each other before he screens Chimamanda Adichie’s
The Danger of a Single Story, her legendary TED talk on stereotyping. Professor
Martins follows up by asking students what they had understood or learned
from the speaker. Initially the room is quiet. Students do not talk, but Professor
Martins waits for what felt like two minutes, until someone finds the thoughts,
words and courage to respond. He lets the students talk until they are finished,
acknowledges what they say and when appropriate, links it back to the talk.
Afterwards, Professor Martins waits to see if someone else wants to add
something. In the moments that silence continues beyond the point of comfort
he says: ‘Does anyone want to say something?’ He looks around and waits. He
does not point out individual students (or groups of students) but provides time
to think. Almost a little bit like magic, students begin to talk and one-by-one,
they add their thoughts.
Classroom observations, 25 September 2012
What struck me most during this class was how students came to talk about
stereotypes and prejudice differently than in most of the other classes I observed,
exactly because of how Professor Martins did not overpower the conversation.
Because he provided a space deliberately designed to feel safe, these topics
developed from the discussion. Like Professor Franco, Professor Martins knew
about the potential of conflict between students. He accepted the responsibility
to address and transform it into a constructive conversation among students.
Still, he did not elevate himself into the position of authority by controlling most
of the talking-time space. Rather, he decentred himself, perhaps because he
conceptualized conflict not as a clash of forces but as the fight for harmony as his
following statement shows:
Harmony is a state of appearance, an invented peace. Harmony is a gift.
Equilibrium is just a moment. It is the present. One doesn’t repeat it. We fight for
equilibrium every moment. Equilibrium is an attitude. It is unstable. We invent it
every time again. Conflict isn’t always violent.
Virtually all professors considered teaching the history of Africa and African
descendants as crucial for the students’ ability to integrate across Lusophone
countries and cultures. Many professors highlighted the role of Africans (as
former slaves) in building the Brazilian economy and their struggles for freedom.
They celebrated the cultural characteristics and linguistic capital that slavery
built for Brazilians. Very few professors, however, incorporated teaching about
decolonization and the socio-cultural capital it had built for Africans, thus
breaking out of describing Africa’s history only in abstract and simplistic terms.
If they did, they were as likely to emphasize a one-sided narrative as their
colleagues. In Chapter 6, I continue examining the idea of integration in the
general education curriculum.
Notes
1 The ementa, which could best be described as a government approved standard

outline that presents a general description of the content and a list of readings,
provides the basis from which professors developed their courses. Ementas are
included in the Projecto Pedagógico do Curso (Pedagogical Course Project, PPC) of
each discipline offered at UNILAB, for example in the PPC of Agronomy (document,
no. 04).
2 See Cortese (2006), Crenshaw et al. (2018) and Matsuda (2018)
3 Agier (1995) explains that Afro-Brazilian movements have in part tried to formulate
rather rigorous positions on cultural practices to mobilize and solidify black
Brazilian communities. He wrote: ‘Through these stances, candomblé tries to
transform itself into a quasi-church (organised with hardened and classified rituals),
capable of competing on an equal footing with the Catholic church, or of responding
to aggression (and the competition) of new so-called “Protestant” churches. . . . It is
necessary, therefore, to overcome an old political inequality, embodied in the old
Christian adage which states that African cults cannot achieve the status of religion,
because they are too subjected to the “affairs of man” and, hence, can exist only as
magic (see Auge, 1982: 32). In this way political-religious discourses which publicly
condemn all forms of “syncretism” of candomblé and Catholicism are developed. In
opposition to the continuance of the “ancient accommodation”, established in times
of repression and fear, a return should be made to the “African matrix” and the cults
should “evolve without losing the essence” ’ (258).
98
6
Producing, Performing and Evading Integration
UNILAB’s tenet is development through integration. To this effect, the founders

envisioned the university as a place of cultural and humanistic education based
on ‘conviviality’ and ‘socio-cultural learning’ (UNILAB 2010: 10). The vision was
that students, who lived and learned together, would overcome their cultural
differences and evolve into a harmonious group. This idea entails a distinct
vision regarding the significance of everyday interactions, which resembled
what Elijah Anderson, in his remarkable ethnography on race relations in public
spaces in Philadelphia, called the sociability and civility of the ‘cosmopolitan
canopy’ (2011), which he described as follows:
In this relatively busy [mall], under a virtual cosmopolitan canopy, people are
encouraged to treat others with a certain level of civility or at least simply to
behave themselves. Within this canopy are smaller ones or even spontaneous
canopies, where instantaneous communities of diverse strangers emerge and
materialize. . . . At times, strangers may approach one another to talk, to laugh, to
joke, or to share a story here and there. Their trusting attitude can be infectious,
even spreading feelings of community across racial and ethnic lines.
15–16
In ways similar to the encounters described by Anderson, the founders assumed

that students, through sharing classroom and community spaces, would start
sharing cultural and social experiences. Through acts of shared living (convívio),
they would get to know each other and become acquaintances, if not friends, in
the words of Mr Speller:
If you leave your country, you don’t speak the language of the other country, what
is the first thing you do? When you meet someone who you identify with. . . Hi,
where are you from? Let’s go have a feijoada in my house on Saturday. This is the
same with Africans [sic]. It is the same with every nationality. Now, over time
integration will take place. What do you begin to see? A student from Guinea
Bissau dating a Brazilian woman. You begin to see a Cape Verdean going to a party
99
of forró, right? Dancing with a Mozambican, right? They are in the same classroom,
in the university restaurant, playing soccer, well, here integration will happen
socially, and we promote it with cultural, academic and gastronomic activities.
The founders aspired to create an ambience characterized by mutual recognition,

understanding and respect for cultural diversity. In line with the premise that
cultural sharing leads to fuller integration the administration invested significant
time, space and resources into extra-curricular activities. It thought that any
distance that might initially exist between students would be temporary and
present only at the beginning of a student’s time at UNILAB. The Office of
Student Affairs (Coordenação de Assuntos Estudantis, CAE), initiated, organized
and supported numerous sporting events, most notably soccer tournaments, to
celebrate various countries’ independences. The administration regarded
intramural sport activities and events as an important way to spur integration. It
provided sport and leisure time equipment, for example table tennis and table
soccer on campus. The university also encouraged cultural performances. The
Office for Outreach, Art and Culture (Pró-Reitoria de Extensão, Arte e Cultura,
PROEX) frequently organized events. Every Wednesday evening, the university
hosted movies, poetry sessions, dance and theatre performances in the
auditorium (Quarta Cultural). To give but a few examples: in March 2013, Quarta
Cultural featured the Cape Verdean rock band Primitive. In December 2014, it
screened O Emigrante (The Immigrant), a movie about two young men from
Angola, who visit Europe. In May 2015 it showed Negro lá Negro cá (Black Here
Black There), a movie created by a Brazilian student from Fortaleza which
critically reflects upon racism in Brazil. Moreover, Quarta Cultural was open to
the general public including the local population. Move (Movimenta), which
took place for the third time in January–February 2015 as a campus-wide event,
provides another example. It offered workshops (e.g., forró (local dance), music,
photography, capoeira), round table discussions as well as theatre and music
performances by students.
These cultural and athletic activities carry an image of sociability, an image of
UNILAB as a place where students could familiarize themselves with the habits
and customs of students from other countries. Following such familiarization,
deeper connections – including dating, regular socializing and interacting in
daily life – was expected to occur. This cultural connectivity would support and
build on the intellectual connectivity to be achieved in classrooms, resulting in a
deeper and more meaningful integration of Lusophone people. However, even as
Producing, Performing and Evading Integration 101
sections of the curriculum were tailored towards enhancing intercultural

learning, and professors deliberately encouraged cross-cultural interactions
(e.g., group work), which produced integration initially, the effects withered over
time. In those early days, the fact that integration did not materialize as hoped
caused anxiety in faculty and administrators, which set in motion a series of
surveillance strategies to supervise the movements of bodies in relation to each
other and across time and space. In this chapter, I will illustrate how integration
evolved only partially, in part because it ran counter to Brazilian sociability and
in part because, in its mandated forms, it did not reflect students’ lives outside
the university.
Teaching integration
In the previous chapter I described the curriculum that was dedicated to

intercultural learning anchored in learning about history. Another course,
Insertion into University Life (Inserção à vida universitária, VU), focused more
on contemporary issues including internationalization efforts. Originally
planned as a welcoming week for newly arrived students, the idea was that they
would receive information on Brazilian higher education, the mission and
structure of the UNILAB project, and the cultural contexts of the partnering
countries. Still in the planning process, the welcoming week was transformed
into a regular course taught over forty hours during the first trimester for which
students received grades. The idea was also that professors of social science
would teach VU, but it soon became the responsibility of each discipline (e.g.,
teacher education) and got assigned to the teaching load of professors, who
would otherwise teach physics, for example.
According to the course outline (ementa), VU teaches: ‘university and society;
university, interculturality, and life stories; tendencies in higher education:
internationalization and multilevel integration (local, regional, national and
international); higher education and multidimensional formation: formative
principles. Academic guidelines at UNILAB: teaching, research, and outreach.
University and the curriculum of the discipline. University and life trajectories’
(document, no. 04). In other words, VU was designed to accomplish two things:
first, to establish a link between the university’s mission of solidarity cooperation
and students’ educational trajectories and second, to inculcate students with
intercultural knowledge to generate mutual respect. Professora Cruz, a Brazilian
professor, put it this way: VU should encourage students to ‘think about each
other (se preocupar com o outro)’ (interview, 28 February 2013). VU lessons

addressed an assortment of topics including globalization, internationalization,
study abroad opportunities, Brazilian higher education, cultural differences,
interculturality, communality and life histories. One professor explained at
length the functioning of the library on campus. Classroom activities included
lectures (students sometimes referred to them as ‘slide-slide-slide’, which they
did not find particularly compelling), reading texts, open-ended discussions,
small group projects and student presentations.
Regarding the latter, students were almost always asked to present the culture
of their country. These were the so-called cultural maps (mapas culturais).
Through them students were expected to provide information on ‘1) popular
festivals, typical food, dances, music; 2) education, health, literature, handicrafts,
languages; 3) economy, livestock (breeding animals), agriculture, industry, local
currency; 4) religion, ethnicity, migration, politics’.1 For professors and students
alike, VU was a challenging course because it opened up more questions about
integration and how it was supposed to be practised – a touchy issue in the
context of Brazil’s ambiguous racial relations – than it provided answers. Most
often students were perceived as representatives of their countries ultimately
chartering a path to international integration. At the same time, VU was supposed
to pave the way for a shared understanding of the UNILAB project. Since it was
built on the assumption of students as representatives of their countries,
imagining UNILAB outside of this limiting frame was complicated, because
students’ subjectivities, the fragmentations and complexities of their lives did not
neatly fit into these simplified national categories. The following example from a
VU classroom clearly shows this dynamic. The classroom conversation centred
on students’ first impressions of Redenção and UNILAB. Many Brazilian
students had already spoken when Professora Carmen, a Brazilian professor,
pointed at a student from Guinea Bissau (classroom observation, 7 February
2013):
Professora
What was your first impression of Redenção and UNILAB?
Samir
I was excited but the housing situation is difficult.
Professora [breathes in abruptly and her words tumble]
Let’s not talk about housing. We are all in the same boat. Prices are rising. I am
lucky because I bought my land two years ago for R$100,000. Now land is
expensive. It is R$200,000. But what were your first impressions?
Professora Carmen worked hard to create a collegial and inclusive atmosphere

in her classrooms. In response to her question, the student expressed one of his
serious everyday concerns. Professora Carmen failed to acknowledge these
concerns by mobilizing her (privileged) financial situation and comparing it to
Samir’s. Yet, paying R$100,000 or R$200,000 is not the same as paying R$400 for
rent if your monthly stipend is R$380. In addition, Professora Carmen also
possessed the sort of financial stability necessary to accumulate even R$100,000,
whereas Samir had spent his entire savings to pay for his passage to Brazil. To
accumulate the amount necessary for the flight, he had to save up first. During
an interview he explained that he did not tell his family or friends about his
plans to study abroad until the day he left for Brazil. If others had known that he
was saving money for the flight, they would have asked to borrow some of it. His
sense of collective responsibility would not have allowed him to deny the
requests. This is not to suggest that all international students were poor and all
Brazilians were not. On the contrary, many local students came from low-income
families whereas many international students came from families that possessed
the social and political, if not financial, capital to send the student abroad.
Otherwise they would not have been in Redenção because the university (like
most of the partnering countries) did not support students’ travel. Yet, the
example serves to show the complexity of socio-economic conditions and social
relations that surrounded UNILAB and its students. It makes clear that in order
to build a truly shared understanding, these complexities needed to be addressed
including the intersection of uneven classed, racialized and gendered relations.
Alongside the cultural maps, students were also encouraged to reflect on their
lives in the form of the so-called life-project (projecto da vida), which should
include aspects of their life histories and plans they had for their (professional)
futures. Most professors left it to the students to decide whether they wanted to
talk, write, paint or otherwise perform on this topic. They were also careful to
inform the students that it was their lives and therefore their stories, which they
could share in any way they saw fit. Some professors worried that international
students’ lives were intimately shaped by poverty, instability, and war – aspects
that could not easily be shared in the public space of a classroom. Felicia, a
student from Guinea Bissau, agreed with these concerns. When asked what she
thought of the life-project exercise, she said: ‘my life before was complicated, it
makes you sad’ (fieldnotes, 18 February 2013). Sandra on the other hand, a
student from Cape Verde, saw the exercise as a good way for students to get to
know each other, if only it wasn’t graded (fieldnotes, 1 February 2013). Professors
usually did not express similar concerns regarding Brazilian students’ lives, with
few exceptions of professors who understood that poverty is filled with personal
stories including those of the Brazilian students.
SHC and TI focused mostly on the past of Lusophone relations, whereas
the future fell into the jurisdiction of VU. In the broader Brazilian context,
interiorization and internationalization of higher education were seen as
educational policies that would lead to the integration of the rural interior into
the (at that time) booming Brazilian economy, and that Brazilian students would
benefit from such integration by being exposed to global networks of production
and trade, education and cultures. The hope that students would grasp this logic
was a major objective of VU. The life-project located this vision of the future
within students’ lives. João, a Brazilian student from a neighbouring state,
explained: ‘In VU the student will get to know himself better. It helps to identify
myself, what I want to do in life. It helps the student to identify the project of the
professional life. . . . VU initiates introspection about professional life’ (interview,
2 February 2013). Whenever we spoke about UNILAB, it seemed that João was
wrestling with the idea of how to overcome poverty in his own life and in general
through the betterment of the self. His understanding resonates with what
Professora Mendes said when she clarified the life-project exercise to her students:
‘Life is a construction, a construction of ourselves. When we get to the end of
your studies [at UNILAB] . . . you will write a different life history. Why, because
of the experiences of these five years. You will be more mature’ (classroom
observation, 27 February 2013). On other occasions, Professora Mendes stressed
repeatedly that it was a person’s action of relating and helping (e.g., sharing fruit
from the countryside, collecting clothes for deserving families) that would
ultimately lead to a better life for everyone. To motivate students to work towards
a better future, she would, for example, remind them that: ‘suffering comes and
goes, difficulties come and go, when you enter the university, many of your
difficulties have already passed’ (classroom observation, 14 February 2013). The
idea that improvement dwells within the subject is contingent on the notion of
a reasonable person, who makes choices that benefit her. She is also a moral
person because she weighs her decisions against the needs of others. Locating
development (economic, cultural and otherwise) in the life of the individual (e.g.,
life-project) represents a mode through which to control the uncertainty and
unpredictability of the future. This mode depends on the possibility that life can
be indeed observed and rationally explained. Furthermore, asking students to
scrutinize their ideas of the future through introspection and in public constitutes
an act of surveillance that would eventually expose unduly misconceptions of, for
example, diversity and conviviality. As Popkewitz (2008) argues:
[B]iography in social time enables calculations and administration of reason

and the ‘reasonable person.’ Reason is both an object of public scrutiny and
a private inner mode of conduct to order everyday life. . . . The uncertainty
of the external world is given stability through the common rules and standards
of reason, which enables the individual to act with foresight and to plan
change.
28
The possibility of locating certainty within the individual as the locus of identity
and therefore projectable future rests on the Enlightenment invention of the self
as a certain kind of norm – reason, calculability, objectivity and rationality. This
norm, however, is only one side of a binary. The other side is the unreasonable
person through which the reasonable person is conceived. The condition of the
possibility of the reasonable self is the unreasonable self (Popkewitz 1998).
Everyone else, including the colonized, the underdeveloped, the women, the
poor, the insane, the black folks, is constructed as deviant from this norm. Hence,
the idea that an otherwise uncertain, unstable future can be pinned down
(stabilized) within a projectable life-story simultaneously resurrects the notion
of a subject incapable of planning. To secure the future of development through
integration, the technology of the life-project becomes a mechanism through
which to observe and order time. Professors often envisioned the future
for students from different countries differently. For Brazilian students, professors
emphasized that the university would open many opportunities, including
the chance to study abroad. Brazilian students were invited to apply for Science
without Borders (Ciências sem Fronteiras) or exchange programmes with
Portuguese universities. These students were seen as individuals, who would
forge their personal futures. International students, on the other hand, were
viewed as representatives of their countries. Their individual lives mattered in so
far as the symbolic value of their presence could be exploited for the benefit of
the Brazilian economy and geopolitical interests turning them into carriers of
knowledge deemed relevant to perform development work. The assumption that
international students would return to their countries after attending UNILAB
was widespread. For example, Brazilian professors would use it as an entry point
for conversation with international students. It also caused resentment among
some professors who understood that not all students wished to return – another
aspect that could not be easily shared in the classroom. Many of the international
students perceived their coming to Brazil as a ‘door to the world’, a sentiment
that they found frequently disappointed by the Brazil-centred approach to
development.
Performing integration in classrooms
On the campuses in Redenção and Acarape, classrooms range in size between

430ft2 (40m2) and 645ft2 (60m2). All the rooms have air-conditioning, a teacher’s
desk, whiteboards, a projector, and blinds at the windows. The floors and the
lower half of the walls are covered with glazed tiles. Fluorescent lamps provide
lighting from the ceiling which are in frequent use because the rooms either
have no outside windows or the blinds are shut to keep out the sun. Together
with the tiles, the rooms have a new but somewhat sterile feeling. All rooms are
equipped with individual student chairs each with a little desk and a rack for
bags underneath. As shown in Figure 6.1, they are organized in straight rows
until the arrival of the students, who frequently rearrange the chairs, pushing
them closer together or further apart, mostly the former, to be able to chat with
their friends during lessons.
Most of the rooms are big enough to accommodate twenty-five to thirty
students. Larger rooms are big enough for the students to spread out and to
increase or reduce the space between them. Some of the rooms, however, are
small and can feel cramped once everyone is in their seats. Students are organized
into classes by cohort and by discipline (e.g., agronomy September 2012).
According to Brazilian professors this reflects an arrangement that is common
in federal universities. There are roughly between twenty-five and thirty students
in a class, though demographics vary widely. Very few of the classes that I
Figure 6.1 Student chairs organized in rows.

observed had students from all nationalities. In most classes, Brazilian students
represented the majority, whereas international student numbers could range
between five per cent and two-thirds in individual classes.
In fall 2012 and spring 2013, I accompanied one agronomy class for extended
periods of time. In 2012, shortly after they had begun their studies, I spent a full
week with them, accompanying them to all their classes, on trips to the farm and
to the laboratories in Fortaleza, and to lunch. In 2013, I observed a full TI
trimester. Out of thirty students, approximately one-third came from East Timor,
one-third from Brazil and one-third from African countries including Angola,
Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and São Tomé e Principe. Fall 2012 was the only time,
that I know off, when UNILAB received a large cohort of East Timorese
students. In both trimesters, the class had been assigned one of the large
classrooms. In 2013, I also accompanied an engineering class with similar
demographics to compare what I saw.
In the autumn of 2012, students’ interactions seemed fluid, propounding few
national boundaries (boundaries between men and women, however, existed in
almost all classrooms I observed). There were significant verbal, gestural and
material exchanges. For instance, students greeted each other, sometimes even
from across the room if one was late, to the dismay of the professors. If students
needed to take copies of an assigned reading, someone (one female Brazilian
student in particular) would collect money from everyone and run to the copy
shop on campus. Another Brazilian student, Tamara, brought vegetables from her
garden and shared them with her East Timorese colleagues, whom she also invited
to meet her family. A group of East Timorese students went to Tamara’s house
where they stayed overnight in a tent, a courtesy she would also later extend to me.
On the morning of the day that I accompanied the class to the university-
owned farm, we gathered in the university courtyard waiting for the bus to
arrive. Students spread around a number of tables, separated by gender but
mixed by nationality, for instance a group of two Brazilian students and one
student each from Cape Verde, Angola and East Timor, almost all of them
women, shared one table. A group of male students included one student each
from Guinea Bissau and Brazil and four from East Timor. Once at the farm, the
students walked around in similar constellations looking at a lake and the
beautiful tropical flora. They stayed together during lunch and retreated tiredly
into their seats on the bus at the end of the day (fieldnotes, 2 October 2010). The
visit to the laboratories at the Federal University of Ceará (Universidade Federal
de Ceará, UFC) unfolded in much the same way, this time looking at equipment
for botanical experiments (fieldnotes, 9 October 2012). Some of these fluid
interactions and exchanges turned into stable relationships, for example between
Robinho from Guinea Bissau and Valentim from East Timor, who were still
friends when I returned in 2015. Some students flirted across nationalities,
which sometimes turned into long-term relationships that were still ongoing in
2013. Overall, it seemed that the students were enjoying each other’s company or
at least not thinking negatively about it.
Students carried on their social intermingling in the classroom. Figure 6.2
shows one of the seating charts, which I recorded similarly in almost every
classroom I observed. The scribbled horizontal line at the top represents the
whiteboard. Crosses represent women and carets represent men. East Timorese
students are depicted with two dots and students from African countries with
one dot. Brazilian students are depicted without dots. This diagram shows
students sitting close together in the middle of the room (remember, they are in
a large classroom with plenty of room to spread). Except for the slight
concentration of women to the left, no particular grouping of any nationality can
be discerned (classroom observations, 1 October 2012).
Figure 6.2 Seating chart agronomy (classroom observations, 1 October 2012).

When I recorded the chart, I did not know that the students had been paired
to help each other, especially with language issues, otherwise I might have been
less surprised about the changes I found in 2013. Figure 6.3 shows a chart that
reveals a different pattern. In 2013, the students were no longer concentrated in
the middle of the room, nor did they mix across nationalities. Instead they spread
out, making full use of the space (again, a large room). At the front of the room
(left side) sat a group of female and male students from East Timor. On the other
side of the room (front, right side) sat two female students from different African
countries. At the back of the room (right side) sat a group of Brazilian students
of both sexes. International mingling was going on only in two cases: at the front
(middle) and the back (left side) of the room two groups composed of male
students from African countries and East Timor sat together.
Between January and March 2013, I recorded the students’ seating
arrangements many times, and I kept seeing similar things. Students sat together
by nationality and gender in ways that resulted in distinct and rather homogenous
groups. When I showed one of the diagrams to an agronomy student, he could
Figure 6.3 Seating chart agronomy (classroom observations, 19 February 2013).

tell me exactly which cross or caret represented which student in his class. I take
this as an indication that these seating arrangements changed little between
courses. Over time, students organized themselves into largely nationality-based
groups. Their likelihood to segregate by gender decreased slightly (especially if
trumped by nationality) whereas the significance of country-specific separation
increased noticeably. In the words of Sandra, a student from Cape Verde, six
months after the initially assigned integration: ‘nobody goes around anymore
with their partners’ (interview, 23 January 2013), and Rachel, a Brazilian student
added: ‘but we still help them with their language’ (ibid.).
This particular agronomy class was not the only one in which students
organized into national groups. I found similar patterns of students’ seating
arrangements in other classrooms (across disciplines and with different
demographics). Take, for example, the engineering class that entered UNILAB
in January 2013 (Figure 6.4). Of the thirty students, about 50 per cent came from
Brazil and 50 per cent came from Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea Bissau.
Students from African countries sat to the left. Brazilian students sat to the right
near and around the aisle (scribbled vertical line). Sitting there had its advantages,
Figure 6.4 Seating chart engineering (classroom observations, 5 March 2013).

since it provided students with easy access to the door at the end of the aisle
(located at the bottom of the vertical scribbled line). This way they could easily
leave the room without having to push aside or climb over chairs in this otherwise
crowded room.
The seating arrangements of students in a teacher education class show that
the formation of groups by nationality did not merely run between Brazilian and
international students, but between students from different African countries as
well (Figure 6.5). The class was composed almost entirely of students from East
Timor except for five students, three of them from São Tome e Principe, one
from Angola and one from Guinea Bissau. The circles in the diagram highlight
that the five African students sat separately, sorted by nationality, with plenty of
space between them so that they could not (and did not) interact during class. I
also rarely saw them interact during break. Instead, Joanna for example would
hang out with her friend and roommate Felicia, also from Guinea Bissau, who
studied nursing in the room next door. This is not to suggest that students
from different African countries should somehow naturally become friends –
imagining their social relations in this manner would render them other within
Figure 6.5 Seating chart teacher education (classroom observations, 18 January 2013).
the ethno-racial order of things – still, it serves to highlight the nationalized and
gendered fault lines of integration in classrooms.
Professors frequently tried to counter-steer these tendencies, for example by
insisting that students worked in groups which included someone from each
nationality present in the class (e.g., student projects, fieldnotes, 16 January
2013). When left to their own decision-making, however, students returned to
their preferred group settings. The group constellations changed very little over
time. The reasons for this persistence can be found mostly outside the university
where students, particularly international students, had to rely on ‘networks of
survival and wellbeing’ to navigate the socio-economic (resources) and
educational (workload) circumstance of life in Redenção. The groups were not
fully segregated. Students could and frequently did cross national boundaries.
Acts of sociability, verbal and non-verbal (e.g., greetings, nodding, slight raising
of the hand, or tapping of the shoulder), even material exchanges (e.g., treats,
pens, sharing screens and access to laptops) were the order of the day. Still,
students within groups interacted more frequently with each other and these
interactions lasted longer than their interactions with students from other
groups. Because these groups remained relatively stable over time, they noticeably
shaped classroom interactions (i.e., instructions, group work, and breaks).
Like the everyday politicking described in Chapter 4, in classrooms too,
information was often transmitted and conditions were negotiated through
informal channels of communication. For instance, professors repeated their
explanations or described scholarship opportunities and application processes
in greater detail to groups composed primarily of Brazilian students that
gathered around their desk at the beginning or end of class. In one instance that
I observed, a Brazilian professor explained homework. A Brazilian student stood
up in the middle of the explanation walking towards the professor’s desk asking
for additional clarification. The professor did not hesitate to offer individualized
advice (classroom observation, 26 February 2013). Everyone else remained
seated. Often there was informal chatting, which professors would sometimes
join. Brazilian students used these moments to solicit off-task information, for
example about how the university operates and its opportunities, which would
have been relevant information for everyone in the class. For instance, the class
was tasked with reading a text out loud. Luis (a Brazilian student) engaged
Professora Mendes (a Brazilian professor) in a quick conversation on research
assistantships (bolsa), in which he gained clarification while Gustavo, a student
from Guinea Bissau, was reading:
Professora Mendes
Don’t just enter bolsa for the money. You will have to work a lot.
Luis
Can I have auxilio [stipend] and bolsa, or only one?
Professora Mendes
You can have both.
Luis
When I got here I asked about auxilio tranasporte, but I haven’t received
anything. Do you know anything about it?
Professora Mendes
No, I don’t.
Luis
Can I have more than one bolsa?
Professora Mendes
No, you can have only one bolsa. Even professors cannot have more than one
bolsa. If you do this and it comes out, you will have to return the money.
Afterwards, Professora Mendes returned her attention to the class. Not that the
professors would not have shared the same information with everyone, but
international students found themselves in an unfamiliar setting. They were less
inclined to approach professors in such an informal manner, as they were less
used to treading the boundaries between playing and teaching in this unfamiliar
environment. They did not always feel confident about whether they knew the
rules of Brazilian sociability. Sometimes they even felt as though professors
slighted them. For example, the classroom situation above continued by moving
into the discussion of the text. Professora Mendes solicited students’ opinions.
Two students from Guinea Bissau shared their thoughts with little reaction from
the professor. It seemed as though she had difficulty in understanding what the
students were saying since she had yet to become familiar with the nuances in
pronunciation and dialects. This was further complicated by the constant
buzzing of the air conditioning as well as the Brazilian students’ chatter. For the
rest of the lesson she did not return to them, instead she focused on the Brazilian
students. International students could also not be completely sure whether their
actions would be treated with the same level of acceptance as those of their
Brazilian peers. I witnessed more than once that Brazilian professors were more
at ease when debating with Brazilian students (even calling them to order) than
they seemed to be in interactions with international students.
To attribute these interactions to racism or xenophobia (as ingrained in practice)

would be premature. They are rather expressions of Brazilian sociability. However,
sociability in the Brazilian contexts functions as an ordering principle, which holds
racial distinctions (economically, politically, culturally and before the law) in place.
Sociable acts are expressions of fraternization, which serve to maintain distinctive
groups in the social fabric of Brazil. In the words of Michel Agier (1995: 251):
[S]ocial customs and ways of self-presenting and relating to others. These

customs and ways are expressed outwardly with embraces, hands on other’s
shoulders, the attribution of loving nicknames, the use of diminutives,
congratulations, flattery, and other forms of enchanting interpersonal relations.
These manners attempt to, and usually succeed in, eliminating the effects
(tensions and conflicts) of social differences and domination in public
domain.
The self-selection of students into distinct groups, based for example on ethno-
racial identifications, is common in educational settings characterized by
diversity (Ngo 2010). In VU, diversity has been conceptualized foremost as
existing between national cultures (Afro-Brazilian activist interventions
notwithstanding). This particular notion of diversity captures the classificatory
assemblages that govern students’ lives only partially. It leaves aside aspects of
their positionality (i.e., racial distinctions) that were perhaps even more salient
in their experiences of social relations on campus, in Redenção, and Brazilian
society at large. Although the teaching of history and cultural diversity was at the
core of the general curriculum, in practice the courses often fell short of
providing the space that was needed for critical reflections to build deeper
connections among students. Such gaps between ideals and actual classroom
practices are common experiences of diverse classrooms and have been found
for gender (Zittleman and Sadker 2010) and multicultural diversity (Ngo 2010)
elsewhere. Nonetheless, given UNILAB’s premise of joint development through
solidarity and integration, professors registered its absence with consternation.2
Their worries motivated them to monitor the movements of students in relation
to each other intensely.
Evading integration
Students’ self-selection into homogenous groups was not limited to the

classrooms. It continued in other campus spaces such as the university restaurant
(restaurante universitário, RU). The RU is a separate building nestled at the

middle level of a three-tiered terrace structure of buildings, between the
administrative and the teaching blocks on the Redenção campus. It is a large
open hall with a ticket counter at the entrance and a food counter at the rear end
of the hall. The walls are perforated allowing for free flow of fresh air, which
along with two gigantic ceiling fans makes the hall a sociable and bracing space
where students can meet away from the blistering midday heat. The restaurant
was open for lunch from 11.30 am to 1.30 pm and for dinner from 5.30 pm to
7.30 pm on weekdays. On Saturdays it was open for lunch but closed for dinner,
and on Sundays it was closed. Students had to pay for their meals but prices were
affordable. Students considered them less pricy than the food sold at numerous
carts across town. For students, each meal would cost R$1.10 (about U$0.30),
R$1.60 for administrators and R$2.20 for professors. At every meal, students
could choose between rice, beans, pasta, vegetables, salad, fruit and juice. The
meat varied between beef and chicken. Students and professors sometimes
complained about the quality of the latter. In general, the food was plentiful. It
was certainly one of the ways that the university supported the students
financially. Many of them ate regularly at the RU.
At the time of the research in 2013, the university had only one such restaurant
on the campus in Redenção. The process of opening another RU on the campus
in Acarape had been repeatedly delayed and only completed with a final push
just in time before the visit of Lula da Silva in February 2013. Since the number
of newly admitted students grew constantly at fast pace, it soon outgrew the size
of the RU. The restaurant was often overcrowded and students had to negotiate
their way through the throng at every meal. By 2013 and still continuing in 2015,
it was common for the queue of students to extend far outside. Sometimes
students had to wait thirty or forty minutes to get their food.
The RU is an important social space. Even as the RU provides an environment
where students can meet outside the externally-determined demographic
structures of their classrooms, it is still an on-campus space (in contrast to
students’ apartments). It thus falls under the jurisdiction of the university where
students’ social relations are subject to surveillance of the space (much less
though in 2015). Professors, administrators and researchers frequently judged
students’ behaviour based on their conception of what constitutes successful
integration; that is, the spatial mixing of bodies equipped with divergent
characteristics. They screened the room to discern whether integration was
indeed occurring or not. Since UNILAB was still small (roughly 3,000 students
at the time of research), professors knew many of the students individually.
But beyond that they relied on their senses to register instantly the progression
of integration. Because of who was perceived as belonging to either group
of students by virtue of a gaze situated in the Brazilian (Cearensean) socio-
cultural imaginary, degrees of perceived Africanness often formed the basis
of this judgement. It almost goes without saying that the purported ability to
judge based on sensual information was an illusion which often failed
the observer as it got frequently ruptured when a person’s features seemed to
adhere to the principles of one group while in fact the person belonged
to another.
International students, on the other hand, behaved in the RU in ways that
enabled them to create safe spaces where they could escape, temporarily and
however imperfectly, the disciplining function of the gaze. Sometimes students
would sit together with their classmates, but usually they shared their meals with
friends and peers from their respective countries. The separation between men
and women was less pronounced. Even if classmates stood together in the queue,
one could see them break up and join their country groups almost always after
fetching their trays of food. This was almost always the case when students did
not come directly from class. For example, Patricia (Brazilian) and Sandra (Cape
Verdean) belonged to the same agronomy class. During our interview they
claimed to be friends. During lunch, however, I often saw Patricia sitting together
with Brazilian students from other classes, whereas Sandra joined students from
Cape Verde. Likewise, students from East Timor and Guinea Bissau shared
respective tables.
Acts of sociability, similar to those in classrooms, like joking, playing tricks,
shaking hands, nodding, eye contact, and stopping and approaching someone
for a brief chat were always going on, across all nationalities. The socializing was
particularly pronounced on Saturdays, when the RU was less crowded and
students had more time. However, these acts were mostly limited to the waiting
in the queue, whereas when the time came to choose a table, even students, who
were conversing before, retreated to one of their country’s tables. Figure 6.6
shows a model of the RU. It depicts the ticket and food counter, the tables and
chairs, and the queue line. It also indicates some tables that were informally
designated for students from certain countries. East Timorese students usually
occupied the tables in the far-right corner from the ticket counter, whereas
students from Guinea Bissau sat to the left of the food counter. Cape Verdean
students seemed to favour (and had established for themselves over time) the
corner right next to the ticket counter. In any of these cases, picking these
tables offered a number of advantages, as these areas were located in the
Figure 6.6 Model of the university restaurant.
periphery of the RU. From there, students could overlook the hall. They also
avoided the crowded middle section where tables and chairs were placed so
close to each other that they left little room for manoeuvring trays, bodies
and backpacks. After some time of frequenting the same tables repeatedly,
students would know where to find their friends and peers. I also felt that
I should not sit at a designated table if I had no business with the respective
students. Also the other way around, when my computer cable broke midway
through fieldwork (a precious item since it could not be replaced without going
to Fortaleza, which amounted to a full day of absence from the field), I knew
where to look for an East Timorese student, who had been pointed out to me by
Tiago, a student from Guinea Bissau, for using the same type of computer. This
shows that these groups, by virtue of forming networks with other groups,
granted access to resources.
Meeting in the same place around the same time every day during the busy
routines of the day afforded the international students a sense of comfort in an
environment that constantly called on them to represent the vision of the
university (and its failings). Country-specific groups provided a source of
familiarity in what was otherwise an unfamiliar environment for many of the
international students. Students did not have to request membership to sit with
their peers because they belonged. They also did not have to explain themselves,
their doings and motivations, or their accents. To put it differently, they could
engage with others by drawing on a familiar set of norms and beliefs, just like
back home. This is not to imply that these groups were perfectly harmonious, to
the contrary. Personal quarrels and fault lines of difference (e.g., gender, ethnicity,
religion or language) caused tensions within a group as much as they did across
them. It meant, however, that students populated a space in which they could use
their languages (e.g., Cape Verdean creole) without having to feel that they were
violating the tenets of integration in the terms of sociability. They could sit and
eat as they liked, not like in their apartments, of course, as the RU was still a
public space, but in ways that felt familiar. International students who often felt
marginalized by their Brazilian peers described their tables as zones of comfort,
a small oasis in which they could somewhat let down their guard. By joining
these tables, students created spaces for themselves, where they could hide from
the rhetoric of integration, which marked them as racialized other, for as long as
it took to eat lunch or dinner. Ninho, a student from São Tomé e Principe,
concurred with this view saying:
I don’t get the fuss about [integration]. All students have one thing in common.
They want to be comfortable. They want to be with someone who is equal, who
is like them. They look for conversations where they don’t have to worry about
language, whether they speak too fast or whether they know the right words.
They want camaraderie.
Every day of the week, international students shared their meals in the RU,
sat near each other in classrooms, sought out each other’s companionship
in hallways, walked together in groups in the streets of Redenção, and
spent weekends in each other’s homes, whenever possible, to create zones
of comfort. Their tables, chairs and houses resembled the spaces that
Rebekah Nathan (2005: 63) described for minority students in a large US
university:
[M]inority ethnic clubs, dorms and student unions have a clear meaning. Ethnic-
based groups are often clouded by perceptions that they . . . remove their
members from the mainstream and surround them with people of the same
background. [Instead] people of color are already heavily involved in interethnic
and interracial relationships on campus. In fact, most of their . . . personal
networks included people, who were ethnically different from them. Under these
circumstances, an ethnic-based club . . . is better understood as a needed respite
from difference, a chance to rest comfortably with others who share similar
experiences in the world.
The groups that students had in mind when speaking of comfort and camaraderie
were not forcefully mixed. Instead, they emerged from a sense of familiarity,
which students often found within groups of their countries. These groups were
also social networks within which students exchanged resources and lent each
other support navigating the exigencies of living and studying in Redenção. As
such these groups functioned in parallel to Brazilian networks, which Brazilian
students accessed by virtue of Brazilian forms of sociability. Interactions and
exchanges between international and Brazilian group settings, on the other
hand, were less frequent than between the various international groups. Brazilian
students were more in control of UNILAB spaces, which afforded them greater
capacity to control the course of action. As a more general characteristic of
Brazilian society, people maintain distinctive groups through sociability (as
networks of interaction and verbal/non-verbal communication), which also
leads to social and ethno-racial segregation due to divergences in the availability
of resources and connections (Agier 1995; Bichir and Marques 2012). Students’
social interrelations outside the university unfolded in much the same way with
analogous effects, as I will discuss in Chapter 7.
Something else was going on as well. The tables (like other social space shared
by the groups) became places where students would talk about many things,
including their misgivings. Sometimes they would complain about what they
perceived as rudeness on the part of Brazilians. Tiago once said: ‘In Guinea
Bissau, we don’t kiss in public.’ Ramon, for example, explained: ‘In Guinea Bissau
one has to respect older people even if they are not part of your family. I have to
listen to elders and respond. I have to speak slowly. I have to ask for forgiveness
if I did something wrong. We go visit them. We greet them in the streets. Here
they don’t greet you. One has to get used to it’ (fieldnotes, 7 February 2013). On
another occasion, Joanna insisted: ‘In Guinea Bissau we take you in. We show
you around and tell you what we expect. We teach our children how to behave.
Here they don’t do that. Here they don’t explain the rules’ (fieldnotes, 3 March
2013). At the same time, whenever a conversation turned to how Brazilians were
different, students were quick to assure that they respected those differences.
Ramon for example added: ‘I respect everyone, not only older people.’ Students’
complaints can be read in multiple ways. They are expressions of international
students’ uncertainties with Brazilian sociability. They functioned to set the

respective groups apart from the rest to create a shared sense of belonging while
highlighting students’ intercultural awareness. They also displayed the students
as morally upright people, which, perhaps, students felt inclined to do to counter-
act disparaging rhetorics circulating at the university. For instance, a Brazilian
professor once tried to convince me that all students from Guinea Bissau were
drug traffickers (interview, 10 July 2015), a gesture of difference despite frequent
claims to sameness between non-white subjects. The sense that students needed
to escape became clear when I saw Tomas to pierce or ‘jump the line (furar a fila)’
(fieldnotes, 30 January 2013). Jumping the queue was the common but contested
practice in the RU of giving money to a friend, who would then buy the food
ticket and wait in line until it reached the food counter, at which moment
the student, who had originated the jumping, joined the friend. On that day, I
said to Tomas in a jest: ‘This is not integration.’ He got upset and answered: ‘I just
come here to eat. We are all human. We all have to eat.’ In his response, he
simultaneously subverted the act of surveillance and asserted his rightful
belonging in the space.
International students’ behaviour in the RU disrupted official assumptions
about how they should be acting. It ruptured the very notion of integration.
While official rhetoric assigned the presence of international students an iconic
meaning, the lived realities of UNILAB-in-practice were informed much more
by negotiations over these meanings. As student numbers kept growing and as
students got to know each other better, the effects of self-selection withered. By
2015, social relations in public spaces like the RU had become much less tense.
Students who had been at UNILAB since 2012, national denominations
notwithstanding, shared meals with students from across countries more
frequently, particularly in contrast to newly arriving cohorts. I can only assume
that these changes occurred because of the efforts people made during everyday
conviviality in this relatively small university and town such as the actions of
Professor Bob:
In lunch line, I watched Professor Bob as he was talking with three Brazilian
students (male, engineering) sitting at a table where he passed by. He did the
same with international students (male, Guinea Bissau) at another table. He
greeted Fabio, a student from East Timor, in much the same way. He spoke with
them all. He asked them about their days and made jokes. They were laughing
together. When we sat down to eat, a female Brazilian student stopped by the
table, exchanging a few words with Professor Bob. Meanwhile, he waved at

another table filled with three agronomy students. They waved back.
The crowdedness of the RU was a time and place where people would engage
with each other more easily. Even if students preferred to sit with friends and
peers from their respective countries, they still had to navigate the hall on a daily
basis. The space between tables and chairs was limited. The students carried trays
packed full of food, silverware, a cup, and sometimes an orange in severe danger
of rolling off the tray. They also carried backpacks, not to mention personal
accessories such as handbags, cell phones or motorcycle helmets. Just like in
classrooms, students navigated the crowdedness with a civility that matches
Anderson’s description of interactions under the cosmopolitan canopies of the
mall in Philadelphia. Sometimes students talked to each other, sometimes they
mocked each other, and sometimes they ignored each other. However, over time,
a certain familiarity arose, and interactions seemed to be more at ease. This
attests to the fact that the original idea of integration through conviviality took
hold indeed, clearly an accomplishment of the students’ and professors’ doings.
Perhaps, the students had got to know each other well, beyond the parameters of
artificially fabricated integration. By 2015, Pedro (Brazil) and Duarte (Guinea
Bissau) confirmed that the coexistence (conviver) had improved measurably
since 2013. They also agreed that the ability to integrate across nationalities and
the willingness to sustain these interactions beyond brief encounters were
dependent almost entirely on individuals. Yet, it was uncertain whether this
willingness could be accounted for by choice alone, as degrees of blackness in
combination with socio-economic factors shaped how students could move
about spaces, and to what extent their movements were observed and policed by
others. This caused international students to continue seeking out spaces of
comfort and respite from the racializing gaze of the many observing eyes on
campus, and which ultimately entrenched self-selection in students’ communal
relations to which I will turn next.
Notes
1 Classroom observation, 26 February 2013.

2 Interviews, 8, 11, 16, 19, 21 and 25 February 2013.
122
7
International Students’ Lives
We just finished eating. The smell of cooking is still in the air. Music plays.
Cars drive by. We are in Joanna and Felicia’s bedroom. The door is shut. We
are hiding from the outside world. At first, I wasn’t sure whether I should sit
down on the bed, but Felicia sensed my hesitation and assured me that it was
okay. She even suggested lying down. As I come to rest on the bed, I start to
relax. Joanna dances with the music. Felicia sits next to me. She brushes my
blonde hair with long strokes while looking me in the eyes. The kindness of
her caring and the intimacy of the bedroom seduce me into letting go of the
ethnographer’s gaze. For now, there is only music. Felicia speaks into this
moment of ease. ‘Esta cor não presta.’ [This colour is useless.] She moves her
fingers up and down her forearm. ‘Coisas pretas são coisas que jogamos
fora.’ [Black things are things we throw out.] I can feel the tears rising in my
eyes. ‘Why?’ ‘Deus é branco.’ [God is white.]
Felicia and Joanna, both from Guinea Bissau, shared a one-bedroom apartment.
According to Vigh (2006) the interpretative conflation of blackness with
instability, conflict and decline (or, according to Felicia, waste) was common
among youth in Bissau City, where Felicia was from. Nevertheless, when she
spoke these words in the privacy of her bedroom, it startled me. Two years into
her studies at UNILAB that was how she felt about the colour of her skin. Her
words were filled with resignation, if not despair. By then, I wondered, should
these feelings not have been reshaped, if not vanished, had UNILAB actualized
its potentialities of solidarity cooperation? Something was happening, or better
put, something was not happening that could have disrupted Felicia’s diminishing
sense of self.
In many African countries, whether Portuguese-speaking or not, young
people like Felicia (late teens to late twenties) came of age at times when national
elites, multilateral organizations and First and Second World donor countries
123
promised progress and development for everyone. In reality, young people often
witnessed and survived political instability, proxy hot wars, internal armed
conflicts, and economic decline (Ferguson 2006). Many of them are aware of the
contradictory conditions of their lives. They realize their marginality and limited
ability to participate in global modernity (Bordonaro 2007; Dureau 2013). Still,
they dream about better lives and actively engage in forging them (Vigh 2006).
Like many young people around the world, young Africans turn to education for
future opportunities. Education has become ‘a way of doing or perceiving life, a
way of being in the world and coming to know it’ (Stambach and Hall 2016: 23).
It provides a cultural repertoire that affords young people symbols, perceptions,
and attitudes to make sense of the world and their lives within.1
International student mobility entails, in many ways, the culmination of these
promises. International mobility can offer students access to university education
or a better quality thereof (King and Raghuram 2013). They can acquire what are
perceived to be valuable credentials (Beck 2008) and provide financial support
to their families from afar (de Haas 2010).2 Apart from these material
opportunities, the physical act of moving between places also has a symbolic
meaning (Cresswell 2006). Like participating in schooling in general,
international migration for educational purposes (and otherwise) allows youth
from African countries to imagine their escape from marginality.
International students at UNILAB imagined their stories of coming to Brazil as
stories of global belonging, cosmopolitan mobility and participation in modernity.
However, their lives in Redenção bore little resemblance to their expectations – this
sense of disillusionment is common in accounts of international students’
experiences elsewhere (including students from African countries in other Brazilian
universities, Gusmão 2011). International students reported difficulties in adapting
to Brazilian society. Their lives displayed a high level of segregation from the lives of
Brazilian students. Furthermore, segregation was not merely determined by student
nationality. It also ran along racial and economic lines. Among the students with
whom I worked, segregation boundaries were strongest for international students
with darker skin and limited funds. These segregation patterns reflected the
intersecting, intermeshing and interlinking grid of social divisions in which social
markers, such as race, class and gender characterize the powerfully racialized class
hierarchy prevalent in Brazilian society (Bailey, Loveman and Muniz 2013).
This was surprising, given UNILAB’s emphasis on solidarity cooperation. As
I have described throughout, founders had distinct visions regarding the
university’s purpose. They believed that students, over time, would develop a
dialogical relationship through living and studying together. In this chapter I
International Students’ Lives 125
share international students’ aspirations. I describe their daily lives and how they
relied mostly on students from their home country to meet the demands of
survival and ensure their own wellbeing. Following the nomenclature suggested
by Hendrickson, Rosen and Aune (2011), I refer to these relationships as co-
national networks compared to multi-national networks. International students’
experiences starkly contrasted with the university’s mandate of cultural
integration and solidarity, and cut against the aspirations students had imagined
for themselves before their arrival at UNILAB.
During fieldwork I interacted with over 100 students. In terms of students
from African countries, many of them came from Guinea Bissau, which was by
and large the country that ‘sent’3 the most students (60 per cent, n=386, of the 650
foreign students by April 2015). As I have already explained in Chapter 4, the
number of students who came from the various countries varied significantly. At
the beginning of 2013, the largest group of international students came from East
Timor, followed by the group of students from Guinea Bissau, which by August
2013 surpassed the group of East Timorese students in numbers. Other countries
like Angola and Mozambique ‘sent’ significantly fewer students. The interactions
with students resulted in countless conversations, including seventeen formal
interviews and many hours of participatory observation in and outside of
classroom, on and off campus. My analysis draws from all of these interactions,
but it is narrated primarily through the experiences of thirteen students.
Let me briefly introduce these students in no particular order.
Felicia is a nursing student in her mid-twenties from Bissau City, Guinea
Bissau. She is the mother of a three-year-old daughter, whom she left with her
mother in Guinea Bissau. She receives a housing stipend as well as some additional
support from her family. She says that her personal story is too sad to share.
Also from Bissau City, Guinea Bissau is Joanna, a student in her late twenties
who began her studies in teacher education but later switched to social sciences.
She receives a housing stipend and recently also acquired a small study-work
allowance. About her personal life before coming to Brazil, she only shared that
she had been enrolled in typing and accounting classes in Bissau City. In 2015,
she gave birth to a son.
Alda is another student from Guinea Bissau. In 2012 she shared an apartment
with Felicia and Joanna. She is in her early twenties. She later moved in with her
boyfriend in Redenção.
José is an engineering student from Maputo, Mozambique who says he is
nineteen years old but seems older considering the experiences he shared about
his life. He receives a housing stipend along with a monthly allowance of R$100
from his mother who works for UNICEF; recently he started working as a
research assistant. Of Mozambican-Portuguese decent, he comes from a middle-
class family and attended private school. Before coming to Brazil, he was enrolled
in computer classes in Maputo.
Sandro is a humanities student in his mid-twenties from Mozambique. He
receives a housing stipend as well as support from his family, although he says
they are poor.
Robinho is a twenty-year-old agronomy student from Guinea Bissau. He
receives a housing stipend as well as sporadic familial support. He comes from
what in the Euro-American context would be considered a patchwork family
and has nine siblings. Back in Guinea Bissau, he lived mostly with his father, a
shoemaker and tailor, and was able to attend a private school that employed his
father to make uniforms. Robinho stressed repeatedly, like many of the
international students, how he felt responsible for his family. His father had
prepared him to go abroad in the future. Robinho was hoping to be able to
support his siblings’ education by paying their school fees.
Valentim is a student from East Timor. He is in his mid-twenties and studies
agronomy. He receives a 50 per cent UNILAB stipend along with a US$500
stipend from the East Timor government. Like most students from his country,
he was recruited into UNILAB via the National University of East Timor in Díli.
Robinho and Valentim said they were friends.
Duarte is a 28-year-old student from Bissau City, Guinea Bissau, who
originally studied nursing but switched to public administration. He receives a
housing stipend. Back home he ran his deceased father’s driving service in order
to support his family and was unable to attend university. He has a four-year-old
son, who lives with his mother in Guinea Bissau.
Tiago is a public administration student from Bissau City, Guinea Bissau in
his late twenties. He receives a UNILAB stipend and a research assistantship,
and has also taught English and worked at a local pizzeria. Orphaned at a young
age, he was raised by extended family and has a cousin living in Europe. He said
he would like the mother of his young daughter to join him in Brazil to study,
and he later managed to move her to the country. Tiago and Duarte were both
students of the first cohort, UNILAB pioneers so to speak.
Tamara is a 22-year-old agronomy student from Fortaleza, Brazil. She receives
a social stipend and worked as a research assistant. She lives with her mother and
her younger sister in Guaramrange (approximately an hour’s journey each way
by bus), where they moved a year ago to have access to better schools. Her
stepfather passed away about a year ago.
Sandra is a twenty-year-old agronomy student from Cape Verde, who

receives a housing stipend as well as familial support. Her parents are farmers
but also work for the city; her mother lived in Italy before marrying Sandra’s
father. Before coming to Brazil, Sandra worked as a teacher and as a domestic
employee.
A 22-year-old from Fortaleza, Brazil, Patricia began her studies in agronomy
but later switched to engineering. She receives a transportation and food stipend.
Her parents were originally from rural Ceará; her mother was a homemaker
while her father owned a company that made spectacle lenses. Sandra and
Patricia said they were friends.
Levin is a Brazilian engineering student in his mid-twenties from Redenção.
He receives a social stipend as well as reliable support from his family. His father
is a police officer and his mother owns a school-transport company.
João is a 24-year-old public administration student from the Brazilian state of
Paraíba. He receives a social stipend. His father works as a custodian/domestic
worker while his mother stopped working thirty years ago due to a back injury.
João began working at the age of twelve in construction, small commerce and
teaching, and was able to pay for his own education ever since.
Networks of everyday survival and wellbeing
International students’ experiences were strongly shaped by their social

positioning in Brazilian society and globally. Their socio-economic situation,
their nationality and their bodily characteristics influenced their social
interactions. In turn, they drew on their positionalities to make sense of the
university. International students relied mostly on co-national networks to
access and share the resources necessary to meet the demands of daily survival,
wellbeing and studying in Redenção. In these networks, they connected and
reconnected (if they knew each other from before) with colleagues from their
home countries. They created mutually beneficial, at times gendered, relations to
exchange goods (e.g., internet access), money (e.g., copy or lunch money) and
services (e.g., cooking, running errands), and to lend each other material (e.g.,
housing) and emotional (e.g., friendship) support. These networks played a key
role in students’ initial introduction to UNILAB, and continued to play a key
role in most students’ lives throughout their time at the university. As such, they
both contributed to the segregation patterns described in the previous chapter
and to the students’ successful navigation and completing of their studies.
Although the administration advertised UNILAB through a variety of

channels, it ultimately relied primarily on word-of-mouth for student
recruitment. An administrator of the Communication Office (Assessoria de
Comunicação) explained that the university used radio announcements, flyers
and posters for recruitment. In some cases, they contacted secondary schools
and other educational institutions with which they had been able to establish
connections. He also said that they encouraged international students to make
UNILAB known to their friends. UNILAB provided flyers to students – in
colour as well as in black-and-white (documents, no. 10, no. 11) in case they
‘didn’t have colour printers’, he commented – to distribute among their informal
networks (fieldnotes, 5 March 2013). As intended, international students
reported they had seen the advertisements and learned about UNILAB through
social connections. José explained: ‘I want more students from Mozambique to
come. I called my mom, who promised to contact somebody at a radio station’
(interview, 22 February 2013). Robinho remembered that he heard about the
university from his dad, who knew about it from somebody who worked for the
Brazilian embassy (fieldnotes, 27 January 2013). Duarte recalled that he found
out about the university almost by accident. He had planned to apply for a tourist
visa, when a friend at the Brazilian embassy told him about a new university that
would provide scholarships for international students. Other students conveyed
similar stories. Some said they heard about it from friends and family members
in Fortaleza. According to Duarte, there were about 1,000 students from Guinea
Bissau in Fortaleza, who were studying there mostly at private universities
(fieldnotes, 21 September 2012). As such, the recruiting of students from abroad
followed network patterns commonly found in migrant communities for whom
interpersonal bonds between migrants, former migrants and non-migrants back
home facilitated international mobility and helped newcomers to integrate into
the host society (de Haas 2010; Massey, Arango, Hugo, Kouaouci, Pellegrino and
Taylor 1993; Toma and Vause 2014). Similar patterns have been described for
international student communities in other parts of the world (Collins 2008;
Hendrickson, Rosen and Aune 2011). The recruiting of international students
through co-national networks would play a role in what would later manifest
itself as segregated housing and sharing of resources once students arrived in
Redenção.
Housing represented the area where international students relied most
heavily on co-national networks. Because Redenção is a rather small town, it was
not prepared to absorb the growing influx of students and professors. The
growing demand, however, motivated quite a number of private individuals to
make housing available to students. Some simply rented apartments and houses
they owned without much improvement of the infrastructure. Others renovated
their apartments and then rented them. One person in particular undertook
large-scale construction projects that resulted in completely new apartment
buildings. Still, rents were rising and placed significant constraints on students’
financial resources. Therefore, where students rented and with whom they shared
apartments often depended on their financial situation. Students with limited
funds tried to avoid the new buildings because owners rented the apartments at
high prices to maximize their profits. But students with limited financial means
also preferred to live with people they knew would support them if they faced
extreme financial difficulties (e.g., their roommates would lend them money
while they waited for their stipend cheque).
In its original proposal (UNILAB 2010), the university promised to provide
housing to international students. A large poster hanging above the reception
desk at the entrance of the Redenção campus as well as in planning documents
(document, no. 12) provided by the Dean of Planning Office (Pró-Reitoria de
Planjemanto, PP) widely announced the provision of student dormitories. The
construction of these dormitories started immediately after the opening of the
university. Arranging building materials, equipment, workers and construction
experts, however, proved challenging in the rural interior of Ceará, as a
representative of PP explained (interview, 5 March 2013). On top of that, such
large-scale construction projects take time.4 Brazilian South–South cooperation
projects often had to set priorities in order to deal with these constraints. In the
case of UNILAB, the dormitories had not been completed by August 2015.
Meanwhile teaching began and international students started to arrive.
To remedy the lack of dormitories, the administration placed the first cohort
of foreign students in a number of apartments. All of them were located in the
same building west of the Praça (the central square of town). As a result, all
thirty-eight incoming African students lived in the same building. The
administration also provided furniture (e.g., chairs, beds and tables) and
appliances (e.g., stoves and fridges). The apartments consisted of a gated patio in
the front, a living room, two bedrooms separated by a bathroom, and a kitchen
that opened onto a patio at the back. A long narrow hallway connected the rooms
to the patios. This layout is typical for apartments and houses in Ceará. It allows
air to flow from the front to the back, an important feature in a region with a
year-round high temperature of 80°F (27°C). The apartments were in good
condition, which was by no means the case with all the apartments available in
and around Redenção. The apartments had white-tiled floors and walls, so that
they could be easily maintained. The electricity allowed for the reliable operation
of a stove, a fridge, a TV and the occasional laptop. Altogether, the apartments
were functional but small for up to for six people to share. In response to the
crowded conditions of university-organized housing, the first cohort of students
soon started to rent houses and apartments on their own. They did so in groups
of people from the same country. In September 2012, I visited one of these first
apartments. At the time, three men from Guinea Bissau lived there. Three of the
original six students had moved to an apartment on the east side of town.
Likewise, a group of eight male and female students from Angola, who also
belonged to the first cohort, had moved to the east side. They shared a house split
into two apartments; the men lived upstairs and the women downstairs.
Finding housing was the first and main obstacle for newly arriving students.
To resolve the problem of coming to a new town with limited, and often very
expensive, housing options, they relied on co-national networks, like international
students elsewhere (Hendrickson, Rosen and Aune 2011; Subuhana 2007). Tiago,
who lived in the east side apartment, regularly hosted calouros (freshmen) when
they arrived. José and Sandro shared an apartment. East Timorese students
shared housing as well. They often rented a house together as a large group. For
example, a group of thirteen students shared a house with three bedrooms, one
bathroom, a small kitchen and two living rooms. In this house, women and men
lived in gender-designated bedrooms (fieldnotes, 2 February 2013).
One evening I met Esperança, whose brother studied in Fortaleza. She
explained that she was looking for a new apartment because she needed space
for herself and her younger cousin, who would soon arrive (fieldnotes, 7 October
2012). When I met Esperança for the first time, she shared an apartment with
Joanna, Felicia and Alda, all four from Guinea Bissau. They sublet the apartment
from a first-cohort student, also from Guinea Bissau, who had moved to a bigger
house. The women had arrived in Redenção in summer 2012, as part of the
second cohort. At first they lived in a building outside of town, which they
described as having been in very bad condition. Rain would enter through the
roof so they had to move (fieldnotes, 3 February 2013). The apartment they
sublet, however, had no appliances or furniture (unlike the first-cohort
apartments). Therefore, in 2012 they relied heavily on a group of first-cohort
male students from Guinea Bissau (e.g., Duarte). Later, UNILAB provided
allowances for appliances, but as was often the case the payment was delayed.
In spring 2013, when I met them again, the women’s housing situation was
about to change again. Esperança had moved out into one of the new apartment
buildings in November 2012, which I assume was made possible by the funds she
received ‘vez em quando’ (from time to time) from her family in addition to the
housing stipend (fieldnotes, 7 October 2012). Alda moved in with her boyfriend,
just a few days before the student from whom Joanna had sublet their apartment
reclaimed it. Without any prior notice, he asked them to leave. At this time, the
women did not have funds available beyond to their stipends. Given the lack of
affordable apartments in Redenção, Joanna and Felicia passed a very stressful two
weeks, on top of their studying responsibilities (too often, professors forget that
they meet students only in their classrooms missing the complexities of everyday
life outside) before they were able to rent a one-bedroom apartment with an
open kitchen living space and small bathroom, roughly 300ft2 (30m2) for R$400
(U$115), raised later to R$500 (U$144). By 2015, the two women had moved
again, this time out of Redenção to the neighbouring town of Acarape. There they
rented separate apartments at half the cost of what they had paid in Redenção.
Felicia’s apartment was of similar size and with similar amenities to the one she’d
left. It costs R$250 (U$72). Joanna’s was slightly larger. She sublet the living room
to another student. International students constantly worried about housing for
themselves, their peers and family from their country. They moved often because
they were either moved out of their apartments or because other options were
more affordable. Financial resources were a constant concern, on the one hand
because of limited resources but also to spend as little as possible on housing in
order to afford other necessities (e.g., computers for studying) or to support their
families back home. Whenever possible, students worked (as research assistants,
waiters, English teachers) to supplement their stipend.
I am unsure to what extent the search for housing was influenced by the
Brazilian population’s prejudices against international students. From what I
have heard, I assume that most of the attitudes students encountered were
determined by the tight housing market and negotiations over money, rather
than racialized or xenophobic discrimination. Whatever the motives, they
resulted in sometimes rather paradoxical engagements between international
students and the local population. These encounters also revealed the tensions
inherent in UNILAB as a domestic and international development project.
Students often considered who was in need, or more in need, than others. José
explained:
Brazilians think we take their opportunities. Many here need money. The money
isn’t enough to maintain themselves. They say the money we receive should be
invested in Brazilian students. If we have sufficient education, if we are middle-
class . . . here in town, they think that Africans have much money because they
are here. For example, I wanted to look at an apartment. I was on the phone with
the owner. He said the apartment was R$200. We agreed that I would look at it.
When I got there, he asked me whether I was Brazilian or African, because I
speak Portuguese well. I said I was African. Then he said the price would be
different. Instead of R$200, I would have to pay R$400.
Finding housing and other socio-economic challenges are common experiences
of international students (Hendrickson, Rosen and Aune 2011; Pedro 2000;
Robertson, Line, Jones and Thomas 2010; Smith and Khawaja 2011). Perhaps the
students perceived it as particularly daunting in Redenção because UNILAB
was such a new university and both the university and Redenção received a large
number of international students in a rather short period of time, while lacking
the capacity to absorb this growth. During my first visit in September 2012, a
large number of foreign students (about 120) had just arrived on campus. The
country, the town, the housing, the university, their colleagues, everything was
new and very few structures or systems were in place to support them. There
seemed to be a lot of tension and anxiety in the air.
Besides housing, students needed resources to meet the daily demands of
living and studying in the new environment of Redenção. Many international
students relied on housing and other stipends as their main source of funding.
The stipend, however, was tight and often insufficient to cover all the expenses of
the students, let alone breathing space for other activities (e.g., trips to Fortaleza).
To bridge the gap between the stipend and actual costs, students with little or no
outside sources of funding again found themselves largely drawing on co-
national networks to meet these demands. Rarely, it seemed, did they share
resources across multi-national networks. As José’s comment above suggests, the
lack of engagement could perhaps be explained by the fact that the local Brazilian
population also had only limited resources. International students often
interpreted it as discrimination and lack of integration to air their grievances
and frustrations with their precarious situations.
Life in Redenção was not cheap. Common costs faced by students included
housing, water and energy, food, clothing and study materials, including
photocopying fees. Apart from the stipend for which they could apply, students
had to have proof of financial support from their families, other benefactors or
the government as part of their visa requirements. Initially, UNILAB was
founded on the assumption that, because the university was supposed to be built
in partnership with other countries, these governments would largely provide
support for their students. In reality, however, only the first cohort of Angolan
students and the large (and by 2015 still only) cohort of students from East
Timor received monthly support from their governments. Very few of the other
students could count on regular payments other than the stipends, because, as is
common among families with migratory aspirations around the world, their
proof of support was often a reflection of the short-term pooling of extended
family resources in a bank account, not a long-term source of funding for their
daily needs (Mazzucato 2009). Some students received irregular payments from
a benefactor or family members or knew people whom they could contact if
needed. A significant number of students, however, had no outside source of
support at all. Even those who economized could run short of money at the end
of the month. This meant that international students commonly depended on
university-based, co-national networks to eat and cover other essential expenses
for at least a few days each month, just like Brazilian students would rely on their
families for support.
To make financial matters worse, it was often hard to predict when exactly the
Brazilian government scholarship would be deposited in students’ bank accounts.
During the last days of each month and into the first days of the next, students
talked more about money and their lack of it than at any other time. Most were
down to their very last few cents and people would spend time checking their
accounts, constantly talking to friends about whether the stipends had arrived or
not. This took up students’ time. It also wore on them psychologically. On one
such morning, I met Tiago on campus. He said he wanted to go to the bank
during the lunch break. I met him again in the afternoon. He reported that the
money had not been deposited in his account, so he would continue checking.
The moment the money arrived one could feel the wave of relief that washed
over the campus. Sometimes I speculated whether their concerns regarding the
arrival of money, which they generally withdrew from their accounts all at once,
were related to the fact that they would have to wait in the queue that formed in
front of the one bank in town – an image associated with poverty in the region
as locals benefiting from social welfare contributions (e.g., bolsa familia) formed
exactly such a queue.
International students complained about the unpredictability of the
scholarship. Some of them thought that the administration held the money back
on purpose. They criticized the administration for ‘lack of integration’. Since it
took me some time to decipher what was actually going on, I found myself
mumbling things about the ‘lack of integration’ too. The university had little
control over when funds were released. It depended on the Ministry of Education
and the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) for its budget. The official regulation
was that the government organizations could deposit the funds within ‘cinco dias
úteis’ (five workdays) of each month. This meant that the exact date when
UNILAB received its funds and the transfer of the money into students’ accounts
could possibly fluctuate by up to a week each month, which made it unpredictable
in the perceptions of the students, who frequently ran out of money before the
end of the month. From the perspective of the Ministry and the administration
(and some of the Brazilian professors), these were regular federal funding
processes. From the perspective of the international students, however, it forced
some of them to go days without money. Very poor Brazilian students, for
example Tamara, whose stipend was the main source of income for her mother
and brother, or João without any support from family, were faced with similar
problems. The instability caused by these delays was a greater source of anxiety
and bitterness among students and one of the aspects that hindered integration
across national student groups.
Anxieties caused by depleted resources were serious. Students most often
relied on co-national networks to address them, not because these networks had
the greatest resources but because other networks did not appear open to them.
One evening I had a conversation near the campus copy shop with Duarte. We
were talking about his family and life back in Guinea Bissau, when a female
student approached him. She said something in Creole. Duarte pulled some
coins from his pocket, briefly checked the amount and gave it to her. They
exchanged a few more sentences before she left. Duarte explained: ‘She needed
money for copying. She will give it back tomorrow. I know her. She is from
Guinea Bissau’ (fieldnotes, 8 October 2012). From other conversations I knew
that money was an issue for Duarte. He wanted to buy a computer but the
scholarship was not enough to save up for it. Like other students, he had spent all
of his savings on travelling to Brazil. Still, when the students asked him, he helped
out. He did so both because he felt he could trust them to return the money and
because he knew that at other times he might have to ask the same of them.
Duarte and the two other students who lived in the same apartment, together
with Joanna, Felicia, Esperança and Alda, who at least at the beginning relied on
them, often split costs for food, particularly at weekends, when the university
restaurant was closed. They bought groceries and cooked together (fieldnotes,
7 October 2012). When I visited one of their apartments students also shared
their food with me and felt obliged to apologize if they weren’t able to provide
any. During these visits I saw how Joanna and Felicia quite frequently called
students from Guinea Bissau off the street to come upstairs and offer them
food and/or companionship. Some of these students had just arrived and were
still waiting for the first payment of their stipends, which had been delayed for
almost two months due to bureaucratic processes. Robinho acknowledged that

money could be short at the end of the month. He said, however, that he was not
very concerned because he could rely on a number of sources for support, mostly
his dad and co-national friends in Redenção (fieldnotes, 27 January 2013).
A key point for readers is that in matters of daily survival, safety and well-being,
international students turned almost entirely to networks of students from their
own country, which is similar to what Maundeni (2001) reported about a
community of international students from African countries in Britain. UNILAB’s
structures, including the housing and funding insecurities that students regularly
faced, made these networks essential for most students’ survival, and the university
did not view such networks as problematic: in fact, creating networks with people
from one’s own home country was viewed as the first step of integration, as Mr.
Speller repeatedly argued. The founders, in particular, assumed that over time these
co-national interactions would become more open. What they may not have fully
understood was that these networks were not a step towards later networks; in
most cases, they defined the intimate spaces and people with whom students
interacted throughout their time at UNILAB. For many international students,
co-national networks were the spaces in which they felt they could ask for, and
receive, support for basic necessities. Even when they moved outside of co-national
networks for support, they relied mostly on other international students.
Sharing resources in multi-national networks
Like international students elsewhere, matters of daily survival and maintaining

the home and body (cooking, cleaning, etc.), and being able to borrow small
sums for essential activities were generally handled within co-national networks
(Hendrickson, Rosen and Aune 2011; Subuhana 2007, 2009). Sometimes the
support to meet the demands of daily survival involved other international
students. Valentim, the student from East Timor, told me that he had bought
lunch tickets for his friends and classmates at various times. In general, however,
multi-national interactions were more common in study-related issues. Students
attended classes by courses (agronomy, engineering etc.) and cohorts (e.g. first
cohort enrolled in May 2011). Therefore, students from one country often
belonged to different classes. Since students from each country were fragmented
by cohort and by course, cohorts and classes were usually multi-national.
The internet was often one of the students’ greatest concerns with regard to
studying. They used it for completing writing tasks and research. UNILAB
provided free Wi-Fi for students on campus. The university also had a computer
lab and additional computers in the library. Theoretically, it seemed that students
had plenty of time between and after classes to work on the computers and use
the internet. Formal instruction, however, was very time-consuming and highly
monitored, as professors were required to take attendance. Students spent six to
eight hours per day, four to five days a week, in class. In addition, they participated
in practical lessons in laboratories, schools, and on the university farm once or
twice a week. Table 7.1 shows Joanna’s schedule of the third trimester teacher
education course to provide an example of the time demands placed on students
by formal instruction.
UNILAB students had a heavy schedule.5 In addition, they faced other
challenges. They had to go to the Universidade Federal de Ceará (Federal
University of Ceará, UFC) in Fortaleza for laboratory lessons because the
facilities in Redenção had not been built. The trip took one-and-a-half hours
by bus each way. The university farm was located about forty-five minutes
away from campus. Even with transportation provided by the administration,
on field/laboratory days students spent up to ten hours on the road. As a
result, students spent up to forty hours per week inside classrooms or otherwise
involved in structured educational activities, where professors diligently
registered their attendance. On top of that, they had to master unfamiliarly
high reading loads, complete group work, research information, prepare
presentations, write essays and study for tests. However, the internet was slow
and the computer facilities often overcrowded because all students wanted to
Table 7.1 Sample timetable of third trimester teacher education
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

8am– Physics II Origin of School Origin of Mathematics Chemistry
10am Life and visits and Life and II Lab in
Evolution Student Evolution Fortaleza
10am– Chemistry I Physics II Teacher Origin of
12pm Training Life and
Evolution
12pm– Lunch break
2pm
2pm– Mathematics Mathematics School Chemistry Pedagogical Chemistry
4pm II II visits and I Practice Lab in
4pm– Astronomy Student Astronomy Fortaleza
6pm Teacher
Training
use them at the same time. International students in particular, relied on the
internet for communication with their families and friends all around the world
(fieldnotes, 22 February 2013).
Given students’ extensive classroom/field schedules, internet hours on campus
were actually often not flexible enough to give students enough time to complete
their work. Very few students had laptops and even fewer had internet at their
apartments. Therefore, during weekends and in the evenings, when the library
facilities were closed and for group projects, students would visit each other to
work together, to use laptops and the internet. On a Thursday evening I met
Joanna on Santa Rita Street. I asked where she was going. Pointing eastward she
responded: ‘Vou a casa dos meninos timorenses’ (I am going to the house of the
Timor boys). She was referring to the East Timorese students, who were in her
teacher education class. She explained that the professor had assigned a group
project on which they needed to work together. It required them to research
information online, and unlike Joanna, the East Timorese students had laptops
and internet connectivity in their home. Though networks for academic support
were less nationally focused than housing networks, students still expressed the
most comfort when talking about working with students from their home
countries. Rarely did international students rely on Brazilian students for these
issues and activities, unless professors assigned students to group projects.
Otherwise, international students felt there was a social distance between them
and their Brazilian colleagues.
The ability to pass (or not)
As in other parts of the world, international students at UNILAB reported

difficulties in adapting to local cultures. They reported feelings of alienation,
which they often interpreted as ‘lack of integration’ and sometimes ‘racism’ to
express their frustrations. Like Lee and Rice (2007), I argue, however, that not all
of international students’ experiences can be explained (away) as adjustment
difficulties. Instead, some of their frustrations and seeming reluctance to
integrate (like at the RU) should be understood as a response to their social
positionings. It was with regard to studying – home assignments, exam
preparation and interactions in classrooms – that international students reported
experiences of discrimination the most. They said that Brazilian students seldom
offered, actively pursued, or followed through with study-related support, even
when they were required to do so by professors. Observing spaces in and outside
the classrooms, I found Brazilian students to be cheerful and lightly

communicative (e.g., they would smile and greet each other) but not engaging at
a deeper level with their international colleagues. Scholars have argued that
joviality and laughter were subtle but common mechanisms in Brazilian society
to mask and deny racist sentiments, practices and structures (Dahia 2008;
DaMatta 2001; Martins 2008). Consider Alda’s experiences:
The hall between classrooms is noisy. It is filled with students. They play games
and talk. Until recently, there were less than 100 night students. Now there are
200. The noise can make you dizzy. It is also comforting. A single person is less
noticeable. Alda certainly appreciates it. She stands by the fountain together with
friends, her back to the wall. The women talk. Alda enjoys their companionship
just a little longer before she has to go to class.
It is Alda’s second trimester. She is the only student from an African country in
her class. When she came to UNILAB, she was excited to study and to learn about
Brazil. She felt shy and stayed quiet at first, but she wanted to know about her
classmates. She used to come early and enter class right after dinner. She would sit
in her chair in the middle of the room and eagerly await her classmates, hoping to
have a few moments to chat before class started. After a few weeks she realized
that they wouldn’t talk to her unless she approached them first. They would talk a
lot though amongst themselves. They could be quite chatty. They filled the room
with jokes and laughter, but they didn’t involve her in the conversations unless the
professor told them to do so. Alda felt invisible in her chair in the middle of the
room, surrounded by people who would greet her but not talk to her.
Today is Wednesday, Alda’s favourite day because of Professor Martins. Her
eyes travel across the hall. As she spots the professor, she briefly smiles at her
friends and follows him to class. At the door she pauses just enough to take a deep
breath and look around. Her classmates are their chatty selves, squeezed behind a
few laptops. Music plays. It stops as soon as the professor enters. Somebody greets
Alda. Alda nods back. She moves towards the chair by the wall under the window.
She no longer sits in the middle. At the beginning she wanted to be noticed, but
now she hopes nobody talks to her. It makes her feel exposed. She just wants to
listen to Professor Martins before she can return to her friends in the hall.
Fieldnotes, 19 January 2013; interview, 30 January 30, 2013
This scene is representative of numerous stories I heard from international

students, who often reported that they did not feel welcomed by Brazilian
students within their classrooms. Duarte said that he did not like doing
presentations. A tall man, in moments of confidence he stood upright and had a
strong presence. It was hard to see why he might have issues with presentations,
as he seemed well spoken when talking with his friends. On campus, however, he
often wore his hat pulled low over his eyes to protect them from the sun and
perhaps the sight of others. He kept his shoulders low and bent his back as
though to appear smaller. When I asked why he did not like presentations he
said: ‘My colleagues don’t understand what I say,’ referring to his accent, which
was unfamiliar to many Brazilian students (fieldnotes, 1 October 2012). There
seemed to be an unspoken demand in these settings for Brazilian Portuguese. As
in other Brazilian universities, professors at UNILAB based students’ academic
performance on their mastery of (Brazilian/academic) Portuguese (Castanheira,
Street and Carvalho 2015). The request of Brazilian Portuguese seemed an odd
demand, given that UNILAB was supposed to be a space of integration and
partnership among Lusophone countries, all of which have distinct forms of the
Portuguese language (Ribeiro 2011). However, judgement of language use and
abilities represents a practice of discrimination that can reflect underlying racist
sentiments not only in Brazil but also in the US (Lewis 2003).
International students further reported that Brazilian students seemed to lack
interest in assisting them with academic matters such as tutoring and exam
preparation. One day, Tiago and I had lunch. He pointed to a Brazilian student
in line saying: ‘This guy, he is very good at maths. He is willing to help. He explains
things to us. Others don’t like to help.’ Without specifying, who ‘us’ was, Tiago
continued that he would meet with this student in the afternoon to go over
maths problems (fieldnotes, 9 February 2013). This incident stood out for Tiago
because it seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Felicia, who often
worried about her academic performance, described a more common scenario.
We were sitting on the balcony of her apartment together with Joanna. Felicia
had an exam coming up for which she wanted to study with two of her Brazilian
classmates. She had planned to go over to their houses. Felicia seemed anxious.
When I pointed it out, she explained herself:
Felicia
We had already set a date to study last week, but they didn’t come.
Joanna
They don’t want to study with us. They are racist.
Susanne
Why? What if they don’t want to study because they are not sure if they can
explain things? [Silence.]
Felicia
Like Professor Martins says, we have to go into ourselves. We have to listen
inside to find an answer. (Fieldnotes, 3 March 2013)
Felicia left the apartment soon after the conversation. Not twenty minutes later she
returned. Neither of the women was home. I believe that neither Joanna nor I were
entirely wrong in explaining the situation. My comment was motivated by Tiago’s
hint at how the student who was willing to help was also good in maths. Many of
the Brazilian students were first generation college students (UNILAB 2013).
Many of them came from public schools, which perhaps had not prepared them
sufficiently for university learning (Schwartzman 2009). It seemed plausible to
assume that some Brazilian students did not study with their international peers
because they did not feel prepared enough to do so. Joanna’s comment, on the
other hand, was motivated by her experiences inside classes and what she knew
from Felicia about her efforts to work with these particular classmates. Both
repeatedly described their difficulties of finding Brazilian students to work with
them unless the professor assigned students to groups. Even this did not always
work. Students would find strategies to avoid close cooperation (e.g., do group
work on their own). Scholars have identified similar patterns of aversion regarding
study-related issues in the US between mainstream and racially minoritized
students (Abad-Merino, Newheiser, Dovidio, Tabernero and Gonzáles 2013).
Similar patterns of international students in the US have also been reported
(Brown and Jones 2013; Leong and Ward 2000), which supports UNILAB
students’ argument that racial differences play a role in their narrowed opportunities
to partner with Brazilian students on study issues – the one area in which
international students expressed repeated interest in wanting to integrate. Brazilian
scholars who have conducted research on students from African countries at other
universities have found similar racializing trends in the relationships between
students (de Gusmão 2011; Malomalo, Fonseca and Badi 2015; Subuhana 2009).
The discussion of school-related relationships between Brazilian and
international students provides an entry into how the co-national networks and
multi-national interactions among students reflected both UNILAB realities to
support students’ integration and the racializing fabric of social relations in the
context of Brazil. Like social relations in general and elsewhere in the world, these
network boundaries were rather fluid constellations, but not for all students equally
(Twine 1997; Telles 2004). Subtle mechanisms, such as laughter (Dahia 2008;
DaMatta 2001; Martins 2008), perceptions about language (Castanheira, Street and
Carvalho 2015; Lewis 2003), silence (Sheriff 2000) or ‘not helping out’ (Abad-
Merino et al. 2013), and not least the uneven distribution of resources allowed
some of the students to cross social boundaries with more ease than others.
Ultimately, international students with limited financial resources seemed to be
the least likely to cross social boundaries as examples in this chapter have shown.
José and Sandro’s experiences, however, provide a glimpse into dynamics of

another kind. The student cohort from Mozambique was much smaller compared
to other groups. Therefore, students could rely less on co-national networks for
support and depended more than other students on multi-national networks to
meet daily demands. José and Sandro shared an apartment. Both had at least some
financial support and thus did not depend entirely on the housing stipend. They
got along well according to José. The difference between them though was that
José was of mixed Mozambican-Portuguese descent, whereas Sandro’s parents
were from Mozambique and he was black. In my participatory observations on
and off campus, I rarely saw them together. At the beginning of my fieldwork in
the autumn of 2012, after both of them had just arrived, I met Sandro wandering
about town. He told me that he enjoyed conversing with the women at the market
because it allowed him to practise the local accent, which he wished to adopt. He
was proud to report that he already could ‘roll the r’ like they did, which was
understandable given the emphasis often placed on language. As fieldwork went
on, my encounters with him grew fewer and further apart. In contrast, I frequently
met José, especially at weekends. He would sit with students from Cape Verde and
São Tome e Principe by one of the kiosks on the Praça or go to parties.6 José said
that he often played cards or soccer with his friends from these countries. He also
dated a student from Cape Verde, and he frequently interacted with Brazilian
students, especially his classmates, in and outside of class. José explained once that
he thought that Brazilians did not necessarily identify him as African because of
his appearance and because of his rather Portuguese accent (interview, 22 February
2013). A comment by Sandra further illustrates the dynamic. She reflected on what
had happened to an international peer (but not herself):
Susanne
Have you experienced racism?
Sandra
I have not experienced racism except for one incident on the bus. A woman
entered. The seat beside Camilla was empty. So the woman sat there. When
another seat became empty, she switched places. I don’t know what the
woman was thinking, whether it was racist or not. People here don’t perceive
me as African. As long as I don’t talk they think I am Brazilian. (Interview,
1 February 2013)
During this conversation, Sandra implied that she had doubts about whether the
woman’s action was motivated by racism. It was remarkable, though, that Sandra
did not recount something about herself when asked about racism. Instead she
described a scene that she had witnessed with her peers, whose skin was of a
darker colour. Like José, Sandra believed that Brazilians did not readily identify
her as African. She felt that they would let her pass, or that she would be able to
pass as Brazilian. For Sandro and Camilla this option was not as readily available.
The social relations that I have been describing provide a rather clear
indication that financial resources played a significant role in students’ ability to
move across social boundaries. Many thought that East Timorese students were
not very integrated. On the campus in Acarape, from which students had to take
the bus to return to Redenção for lunch, a group of male students from East
Timor frequently gathered apart from other students for reasons that could not
be easily discerned (fieldnotes, 18 February 2013). Perhaps they gathered as a
group of friends with whom they felt comfortable (like the constellations I have
described regarding the RU). In addition, they generally needed to rely much
less on networking activities as they had more resources than any other group of
students. They received a stipend of R$1,000 (US$500) in addition to the
(reduced, 50 per cent) stipend for housing. In the context of rural Ceará and the
contexts where most international students came from, this government stipend
was exceptionally high. I am not trying to suggest that East Timorese students
should be resented for their financial stability, only that the funds they had
available ‘torpedoed’ them outside any frame of reference in comparison to the
general student population.7 At the same time, East Timorese students were
called out the most when it came to describing any perceived lack of integration
(in addition to the constantly recurring discriminatory gesture of referring to
seemingly all international students as ‘the Africans’, only to then quickly add
and ‘East Timor, of course’). When East Timorese students were called upon, it
almost always happened in ways that referenced them as a group, and almost
always in referring to them as a country rather than individual students.
In the Brazilian context, people’s ability to move freely across social boundaries
is often associated with the funds that people have available, a racializing
assemblage in Weheliye’s words (2014), which functions socially in ways that are
sometimes referred to as a ‘whitening’ capacity of resources (Schwartzman 2007).
Resources (i.e., social, cultural, political and economic capital (Bartlett 2007))
and the perceived and/or assumed appearance of affluence all played a role in
shaping (but never fully determining) students’ ability to pass as mixed, hence
Brazilian or not. It facilitates social mobility and more fluid social relationships.
For instance, Levin was convinced that Brazilians were ‘more integrated’ with
East Timorese students than international students (interview, 7 February 2013).
Tamara, also a Brazilian student, confirmed Levin’s claim saying that she was
friends mostly with students from East Timor in her rather diverse agronomy
classroom (interview, 25 January 2013). In contrast, I felt that international
students generally interacted more and in a more sustained manner with East
Timorese students than with Brazilian students. This conclusion owes much to
my observations of sustained friendship, for example between Valentim and
Robinho, and Joanna’s mostly working but also sociable relationship with her
classmates. Relationships like these seemed to give way to other kinds of
encounters. One day, for example, a group of male students from East Timor
came to campus with their hair braided in cornrows (fieldnotes, 4 March 2013).
In general, exchanges of resources of all sorts gave way to other relationships,
much like Mr. Speller had envisioned, with one important twist. Rather than
assumed cultural parallels or the much-heralded equality between partners, it
was the challenges students faced due to financial hardship and a lack of
infrastructure in the rural interior of Northeast Brazil that encouraged integration.
Opportunities to balance inequalities led in some cases to strong relationships.
These were generally clustered networks, however; there were also individuals
(students, professors, administrators, people in the community), who made it
clear through their actions that they welcomed and provided solidarity
opportunities. On the other hand, there were also moments when international
students could not hide from the spectre of race. I witnessed one of these
moments, when Tiago and I had a drink at one of the kiosks on the Praça in
Redenção. When it was time to pay, both of us walked up to the stand, Tiago
stood in front of me, a little to the right, as I waited for my turn to pay the kiosk’s
owner hissed at Tiago saying: ‘10 dollars’. In an effort of fraternization with me, he
turned to me with a proud smile on his face and reached out to take my money. I
am still puzzled how Tiago was able to walk away without commenting on the
situation. Just like the incident with the girl in the supermarket, which I described
in the introduction, where Joanna also did not comment much. This was not the
first time that I witnessed such a moment. I had seen similar things happen
before in the US and Germany, but it startled me much like Felicia’s comment at
the beginning of this chapter. Anderson refers to moments like these as ‘nigger
moments’ (2011), the moment in a person of colour’s life when she cannot escape
the haunting of history’s shadow. According to Anderson, these moments are
always moments of shock, often perceived as deeply humiliating.
UNILAB’s international students’ experiences are shared with international
students in other parts of the world. These issues represented sources of stress
that contributed to feelings of isolation and uncertainty.8 In light of UNILAB’s
original proposal of solidarity cooperation and integration, international

students’ experiences of socio-cultural, if not racialized, exclusion and economic
marginalization (due to personal circumstance and UNILAB’s complex funding
mechanism), seemed particularly disturbing. Regardless of the educational
opportunities UNILAB provided to these students, their daily experiences often
cut, for some more and for others less, against their aspirations and the
possibilities they had imagined before coming to Brazil. Duarte said that
sometimes he was unsure whether coming to UNILAB was the right choice. He
said: ‘Maybe life here is not much better than it was in Guinea Bissau’ (fieldnotes,
23 September 2012). He came because he saw Brazil as an opportunity to migrate
further north. Like many young people of his generation (Bordonaro 2007;
Ferguson 2006), he wanted to leave Africa. He said if one would send twenty
Boeings to Guinea Bissau and make a radio announcement that those who
wanted to leave could, twenty Boeings would not be enough. Much of his
aspirations involved some sort of migration fantasy for himself or about others
who had successfully migrated to North America or Europe. Returning to
Guinea Bissau was almost not an option, except perhaps to work for an NGO.
Besides his disciplinary studies, he wanted to learn to speak English and French
because these languages would be most helpful in transnational careers
(including working for transnational NGOs in Guinea Bissau). Duarte thought
a lot about home, his son and his country. He regretted that the stipend was not
sufficient to support his family, but he hoped that in the future he would be able
to make a difference through his education.
Joanna provided another example. She was a very perceptive woman, who
valued her independence. When she came to UNILAB, she left behind a busy
life filled with studying, working and socializing. More than once she made it
clear that she was not convinced that UNILAB and Redenção represented an
improvement over what she had left. One day she was getting ready for church.
She stood before her closet and looked at her wardrobe. She pulled out one piece
after another and put it back again. She turned to me saying:
Back in Guinea Bissau I had things. I had beautiful things, good clothes. I left it
all behind because I thought I was coming into the world. Now I am here. I wish
I had brought more clothes!
Redenção was a small town with few stores. They offered limited clothing and
accessories and given the experience with Tiago I can only speculate that not
all store-owners would receive her with hospitality. Redenção was not very
cosmopolitan, in a sense. An aspiring woman like Joanna, who was used to living
in the capital, able to create her own opportunities and seize them, could well be
disappointed. In addition, she had to fend off intimate advances from Brazilian
men, which were reminiscent of the sexualization of African female slaves
during Portuguese colonialism that represented the abusive underbelly of
Freyre’s Lusotropicalism. One night when we were cooking we heard a car sound
its horn outside the apartment. Joanna waved it aside and did not say much
except that the man driving it had been following her around. She and Felicia did
not like going to the Praça in the evenings like other students. Hearing the car
horn, it dawned on me that they were avoiding insinuating offers. Joanna had a
boyfriend in Fortaleza, whom she visited on weekends and holidays. Sometimes
he visited her in Redenção. When she started to receive a small study-work
allowance from UNILAB, she went to Fortaleza more frequently. Of all things,
Joanna said that she had hoped to find love, which showed that her expectations
about what could be gained in Brazil and what could not, had markedly shifted
compared to her imagined aspirations.
Other students seemed less pessimistic, but they too sometimes struggled
with making sense of their lives in Redenção. Robinho on various occasions told
me how much he cared for his father, who had prepared him for the possibility
that one day he could leave Guinea Bissau. Robinho had to prepare his own
meals and wash his clothes, usually women’s work, because according to his
father he needed to be able to care for himself. He hoped that one day he would
be able to provide for his family the way his father was currently providing
for him. Robinho regarded studying at UNILAB as an opportunity and a
responsibility. He aspired to live up to it, especially to make his father proud. He
did not find it easy, but he worked hard to be a good student. Back in Guinea
Bissau, he said, he had not cared much about school. He had trained to be a
soccer player, maybe in Europe. Now he concentrated on education. By
concentrating and doing his best to succeed, he felt that he was fulfilling his
obligations to his family, and that in turn he would be able to relieve his father of
some family obligations when he graduated. He viewed UNILAB as a possibility
through which to fulfil these goals, but he no longer viewed UNILAB as a place
in which he would have or make cosmopolitan connections.
This speaks both to the kinds of families and communities from which
international students came (families who were imagining and preparing their
children for lives outside of their home country), and to the pressures and new
experiences that most of the students had: the pressures of taking full advantage of
the UNILAB opportunity so that they could in turn improve (or at least stabilize)
their families’ lives, which again was not unique, but rather represented common
migration fantasies among African youth (Bordonaro 2006, 2009; Ferguson 2006)
and within migrant communities (de Haas 2010; Massey et al. 1993; Toma and
Vause 2014). Still, this was not an easy responsibility, and at UNILAB in particular,
it brought along the need to deal with disappointed aspirations.
Notes
1 As development schemes have transformed people’s livelihoods and propelled them

into global capitalism (Katz 2004), participation in formal schooling exposes them
to the discursive regime of modernization and progress (Kendall 2007). Formal
schooling thus becomes a métier in which young people learn about their place in
the world (Serpell 1993; Varenne and McDermott 1998), through which they can
envision change (Bajaj 2010), and imagine themselves as modern (Bordonaro 2007;
Stambach 2000).
2 International student mobility also (re)produces social inequalities. I do not pursue
this aspect since the focus is on the symbolic meaning of student migration. Waters
(2012) and Findlay et al. (2012) offer compelling critiques.
3 I put ‘sent’ in quotation marks because the majority of students funded their travel
and organized their enrolment with UNILAB individually. Except for students from
East Timor and the first cohort of students from Angola, students generally did not
receive financial support from their respective governments.
4 Cesarino (2013) also described that projects in agricultural cooperation often had to
operate under infrastructural (e.g., lack thereof) and bureaucratic constraints (e.g.,
delay of funding).
5 In an American university this kind of schedule would be unheard of. Formal
instruction at the undergraduate level does not usually exceed three to four hours
a day. More time is dedicated to independent study, research, etc. than to class
instruction.
6 Fieldnotes, 2 February 2013.
7 By the time this research ended, there had been no other East Timor cohort funded
in similar ways so far (although rumours suggested that there will be a new cohort
after the first cohort students receive their degrees, which seems to indicate a
sustained interest on the part of the East Timor government and the international
community in Brazil–East Timor relationships).
8 Brown and Jones 2013; Gusmão 2011; Fincher and Shaw 2011; Hendrickson, Rosen
and Aune 2011; Malomalo, Badi and Fonseca 2015; Sherry, Thomas and Chui 2010;
Smith and Khawaja 2011.
8
Conclusion
I began this study with the aim to examine Brazilian South–South cooperation
discourses and practices as sites of possibilities where international development
relations would lean towards more equitable solutions. I was especially interested
in the experiences of international students from African countries and whether
they thought that Brazilian claims of solidarity had been realized. UNILAB is
unique in that it had been envisioned to spur international as well as domestic
development. Even though the combination of these efforts stays true to claims
of mutual benefits (in contrast to the often one-sided, benevolent gesture of
North–South ‘aid’ relations), the close study of the university revealed the
ambivalences embedded in the project.
In the early days, Dean Speller expressed on various occasions his general
optimism about the university’s progress with regard to solidarity and
integration.1 Brazilian-activist professors disagreed. They thought that
conversations about cultural diversity and integration happened because they
were comfortable. Conversations about inequality and racism, on the other
hand, did not happen because they were uncomfortable.2 Non-Brazilian
professors from African countries also disagreed. They felt the presence of
international students and their own were instrumentalized to legitimize the
project. At the same time, their expertise was frequently side-lined in the
consolidation of the institution. They also believed that some of the policies did
not reflect international students’ realities.3 For instance, the university initially
required international students to do an internship in their home countries
before they could complete their degree. Many of the international students,
however, did not anticipate returning home. Rather, they planned to stay in
Brazil or, in some cases, migrate further north.4 Overall, non-Brazilian professors
feared that the South–South mandate would crumble under the pressures of
domestic debates on affirmative action policies. At first, many international
students regarded UNILAB as an opportunity to access higher education. Not
all of them remained certain in light of the difficulties they faced in terms of the
147
anti-black/anti-African sentiments, the lack of resources and future perspectives

they encounter in Redenção. In addition, administrators, professors, fellow
students and ethnographers frequently called on them to represent the cultural
integration fostered presumably by UNILAB. Especially in the beginning
(2011–13) their every move was monitored. Yet, in classrooms they had very
little space to express their thoughts, especially when their opinions did not
comply with professors’ perceptions of development or postcolonial/post-slavery
emancipation.
The founding narrative’s emphasis on the history of the transatlantic slave
trade and Ceará’s ostensibly heroic role in the abolition of slavery sits at the
centre of these tensions. To pose as a project of development through integration
and based on solidarity, UNILAB founders relied on the distinctive combination
of a nation-state-centred understanding of cultural diversity and a Middle
Passage interpellation of (Brazilian) racial diversity. Students from different
national backgrounds were perceived to be culturally dissimilar. In teaching
lessons (i.e., cultural maps) and extra-curricular activities (i.e., independence
celebrations) they were asked to share information about their countries and
‘their cultures’. The founders had assumed that by doing so, students would
become acquainted with each other’s differences. Brazilian students in particular
would grow more tolerant of Brazilian Africanness thus developing a
multicultural attitude with regard to the racial diversity in their own country. No
matter how international students approached the idea of culture, their thoughts
and actions were always already interpreted within a racializing frame of
understanding difference.
The omnipresent reference to history scaffolded international students’
subjectivities, locking them into the position of ‘former slave’. Whatever their
sense of belonging, from the perspective of the founding narrative their
experiences could only be made tangible within a Middle Passage logic that
privileges transatlantic slavery as the constitutive moment of black collectives in
the Americas.5 The founding narrative performed its function to legitimize the
university because UNILAB founders imagined international students’
positionalities in ways that represented all of the project’s dimensions.
International students embodied the South–South mandate because they came
from countries located in the Global South. The founders were able to picture
the students in the role of development workers for the kinds of agriculture-
based, state-driven development program they had envisioned for Northeast
Brazil because they imagined Africa as equally rural. And most profoundly, the
presence of international students could symbolize Afro-Brazilian emancipation
Conclusion 149
because the founding narrative constructed international students as racially

similar. Yet, in the socio-cultural context of Ceará (and Brazil more broadly),
where many aspire to a certain kind of mixedness, blackness is connoted
negatively. The relative ease with which some of the international students could
cross social boundaries if they could pass as mixed – recall José and Sandro’s
experiences – shows how engrained distinct ideas of racial identities are in the
Brazilian socio-cultural imagination.
The parallels between the dynamics observed in international students’
experiences and Weheliye and El-Taybe’s critical analyses of racializing
assemblages in the European context are striking. They reveal how foundational
the presupposed existence of an ontological (a priori excluded) other is to an
exalting logic, which constructs itself as the universal norm capable of imparting
moralizing lessons. Caught between the utopian vision of a university of
solidarity and integration, Brazilian socio-cultural realties, and their own
aspirations, international students had to learn how to navigate social boundaries
that are policed in particular ways – forms of sociability, for instance – which
rely on the fine-grained sensibilities of the human capacity to judge relational
interactions in a nanosecond. For example, it had not been clear to me why
international students preferred to gather around one of the two kiosks on the
central square in Redenção until I saw the owner’s hostile reaction towards Tiago
masked as playfulness and suggestive of fraternization towards me. Similar
gestures of discrimination and exclusion happen every day in many different
ways (not only in Brazil), with devastating emotional and material effects for
those targeted as not belonging.
In their everyday efforts to ensure survival, well-being, educational success,
and to cope with the psychological harm imposed on them by anti-black/anti-
African sentiments, students found material and emotional support in networks
of students from their home countries. In these networks, they were able to
exchange resources and carve out zones of comfort, which provided them with
much needed respite from the towering demand for integration. At the same
time, the perseverance of co-national groups strongly indicated that powerful
racialization forged violently through Portuguese colonialism and transatlantic
slavery, is not a thing of the past. Rather the past lingers in the present, as it is
re-articulated through images and imaginations that rest on the presumption of
racial turned cultural difference. By no means should colonial and slavery pasts
be silenced. To the contrary, they should be brought to the fore in their full
brutality, noting, however, that the effects cannot be simply undone. In 2018 at
the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the annual book fair in Germany, Achille Mbembe
commented on the return of stolen art to the African continent. To assume the
possibility of ‘returning’ creates the illusion that Europe could rid itself of the
guilt of the past, while leaving persisting misrepresentations of ‘Africa’
unaddressed.
Race, development and Afro-Brazilian emancipation
Enlightenment thinkers established the Cartesian ‘Rational Man’ as the universal

norm of what it meant to be human. The idea of development rests on this
racializing assemblage, which imparts Man with reason by placing all others (the
colonized, the colonized subjects, women, the poor, the insane, the child) outside
of reason. Only through education (or development) could a temporarily
immature and impulsive child (or the colonized, child-like subject bound by
tradition and culture) turn into a disciplined, cultivated and modern person
capable of contemplating the world as secular, measurable and calculable.
Enlightenment thinkers conjured their visions of the world in concert with
colonizing endeavours disguised as discoveries in the name of scientific progress.
Colonialism, indigenous genocide, and slavery have assembled the terrific
technologies of dehumanization and expropriation that pinion difference – the
gulf between reason and unreason – to human physiology – the unspecified
spatio-temporal elsewhere of the flesh. At the same time eugenic theories of the
different races were invented, which subsequently provide the ideological frame
to justify even further colonization in the name of the ‘civilizing missions’. The
colonizer is perceived to have a mind, and a free will, whereas the colonized are
perceived to have a body that can be readily exploited and tortured for the
benefit of the master. The idea of national belonging reified through notions of
shared origin and racial purity becomes foundational to the emergence of
European nation-states. Over time, colonialism and the invention of race retreat
into the shadows of history to hide the monstrous nature of the European
cultural condition and sustain the myth of European universalism.6
As European colonies in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere become
independent nation-states, they must create their own idea of national purity,
which they can only assert through the cultural codes of the colonizer (Madureira
2005). However, as in the case of Brazil, the post-colony has been invaded and
adulterated by the colonizers. It thus must come to grips with its own racial
impurity as it violates the European ideal. Inspired by European thinkers, who
had a central part in proposing miscegenation as the Brazilian ideal (de Castro
Conclusion 151
Rocha 2000), cultural and political elites devised ways in which to cast racial
mixture as cultural purity, one prominent example being Freyre’s Lusotropicalism
([1933] 1986). Since it was hardly possible to rely on the external, non-European
other (as was the case for European notions of national identity),7 ‘the native’ and
‘the slave’ were constructed as internal colonial others of the Brazilian nation
(Madureira 2005; Cesarino 2017). ‘The white Portuguese and the primitive
natives arise together simultaneously divided and united by two powerful
instruments of western rationality: the state and racism’ (de Souza Santos 2002:
30). Brazilian elites and intellectuals appropriated the idea of national purity
placing mixedness at the center of Brazilian national identity. This nation-state
rhetoric deliberately relied on and accepted that black and Indigenous
populations would be idealized (and instrumentalized) in cultural terms while
being relegated to the margins economically.
Just as Europe (especially Germany), entrenched in the Second World War-
based on ideologies of racial purity, loses its legitimacy, postcolonial countries in
Latin America (especially Brazil) began to portray themselves in terms of an
alternative modernity. They subsequently acquire an allure for Europeans – in
the case of Brazil exemplarily described by Stefan Zweig8 – as they celebrate
cultural diversity and hybrid forms of identity. The post-colony, one could say,
anticipates European multiculturalism. Without overriding old narratives of
national belonging, racism against the physiological repertoire becomes racism
against the cultural repertoire of the colonial other. The idea of culture is also
bestowed on Europe’s internal other racialized through governing technologies
such as ableism, sexism, antisemitism, migration linked to integration narratives
that the subjects thus addressed in perpetual motion, forever arriving. A Europe
that portrays itself as ethnically diverse but racially similar; that is, white. Legacies
of colonialism and slavery, which have pinioned notions of unreason to human
physiology, retreat into the shadows of history. The Holocaust becomes the
(exclusive) apex from which to construct a shared historical consciousness, a
new logic by which to imagine the future as the idea of past wrongs that have
been overcome.
The Brazilian government’s recourse to transatlantic slavery and abolition
represents a similar gesture. It projects Brazil into a multicultural future, one that
acknowledges racial diversity. Figure 8.1 shows a mural in Redenção. The picture
was taken in 2015. The mural displays a very familiar figure in a new garment,
adorned with colourful bunting. This mural did not exist when I left Redenção
in 2013. When I saw the painting in 2015, I could not help but smile since it so
obviously revealed both, the paradox of UNILAB and its decolonizing potential.
Figure 8.1 Someone makes a second entrance.
Was she the same person as the one on the monument in front of the university?
Or maybe this colourful painting represents her multicultural self? What does it
mean: local celebration of Africanness, multiculturalness? Some UNILAB
professors shared their joy about the movements of African pride that had
formed among students since 2013. Some students had joined groups called
Crespas e Cacheados (Curly and Curly – in the case of Brazilian students), and
Afro UNILAB (in the case of African students). Although the divide between
the co-national networks persisted, studying at UNILAB most likely has
contributed its share to the students openly presenting their racial identity.
Perhaps it provided a somewhat transformative experience after all inspired by
the Brazilian idea of South–South solidarity. At least I would like to believe that.
Thinking and writing with race critically
Critical feminist scholars have long challenged social theories’ claims of

objectivity and universality that authorize what counts as official knowledge
(reason) while discrediting minoritized traditions of thought as ethnographic
Conclusion 153
instances (culture, unreason). Yet, incorporating critical feminist perspectives

into the canon of social sciences tends to lock individuals and collectives into
fixed identities based on the homogenizing gesture of presumed belongings to
one or multiple oppressed groups. It has been assumed, for example, that only
women of colour could truly know the experiences of women of colour. Marcel
Stoetzler and Nira Yuval-Davis (2002) marked out imagination as the principle
that stands between the experiences of socially positioned individuals and/or
collectives and the production of knowledge from these positions to destabilize
essentializing perceptions of knowledge production.
UNILAB’s references to history to usher in another, multicultural, future
performs a homogenizing gesture towards international students as it locks
them into Middle Passage interpellations of black subjectivity. To imagine that
international students retrace all of their actions, thoughts and feelings to this
particular narrative is misleading. Instead, they draw on a rich repertoire of
memories and experiences, many of which cannot be fully captured by a singular
frame of reference. Combining linear and epiphenomenal understandings of
subjectivity are useful here (Wright 2015). Linear notions of space and time
reflect the conventional understanding of history as a series of events, advancing
through time and space, with a definite starting point somewhere in the past,
and from which this series unfolds as a chain of causes and effects, one event
being predicted by the one that came before. In contrast, an epiphenomenal
understanding does not preclude nonlinear multiplied meanings in a given
moment. It allows for certain unpredictability, which retains an element of
choice on the part of the subject. All knowledge is socio-historically situated yet
co-authored through dialogical relations in the realm of the social that always
already occurs in the present moment, in the now where ‘experience, made by
the senses and mediated through the faculties of the intellect and the imagination,
produces knowledge as well as imaginings, and along with them meanings,
values, visions, goals’ (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis 2002: 326). Imaginings precede
knowledge. They are constituted and shaped but not predictably determined by
positionality, while being mobile, at times condensing, at times evaporating,
depending on the unfolding of the moment.
When writing the book began, I initially experienced great anxiety in
transforming people and their doings into analytical categories. The responsibility
of a representation that neither essentializes nor denies people’s experiences led
me to search for a theoretical and ethical lens that would carry me through the
process. Various heuristics to conceptualize social relations and race informed
my analyses. These heuristics were in constant dialogue, destabilizing
assumptions that would otherwise go uncontested. Throughout the process I

committed myself to the rooting and shifting of positionings within the various
ways of imagining UNILAB. In the beginning, when writing seemed nearly
impossible, Lynda Barry’s unique technique of writing an image (2008) was
particularly helpful to me. Ebony Flowers, one of her students, further developed
this approach into a technique of creative writing for scholarly purposes, which
she taught as writing sessions in the Image Lab at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison. The two scholar-artist activists showed me how to bring embodied
field-memories to life in written form. They also made me aware that writing
always entails an element of inventing. As Lila Abu-Lughod said, ‘ethnographic
representations are always “partial truths”. What is needed is a recognition that
they are also positioned truths’ (1991: 469). ‘What [ethnographers] write are
fictions (which does not mean they are fictitious)’ (473). I have witnessed the
events that are shared in this book. In this sense they are true. My interpretations,
however, have undergone various rounds of re-routing, of re-imagining
UNILAB on my part. Two moments should be emphasized. When I first began
writing in 2014, I refused to take race in whatever fashion into account. My own
situatedly imagined ideal of UNILAB as solidarity had clouded my
understanding. It was mainly due to interventions by UNILAB students and
professors that I slowly was able to see beyond my own aspirational imagination.
Duarte, whom we have met many times, told me in week one of my first round
of fieldwork: ‘They are all racist’ (fieldnotes, 19 September 2012). At that time, I
was completely perplexed. How could ‘they’, referring to the Brazilian students
and professors, be ‘racist’ if they cooperated with African countries and were
surrounded by students from these countries?
The second moment occurred when I began to write the book after having
returned from the US to Germany and spending time with German colleagues
discussing parts of my work repeatedly. Because of their own situatedly imagined
ideas, they pushed me to refine my conceptualizations of race. Critical black
studies provided a sophisticated and rigorous theorization – disruptive of
mainstream discourses – of the role that race, racism and racialization play for
human relations writ large. I have learned that dialogue, across disciplinary fields
and epistemologies, is the most important way to prevent singular interpretation
of events, as they are always infinitely more complex than any singular
interpretation would capture. All knowledge is socio-historically situated, even
big narratives of difference, for instance, and solidarity. Interpretations are
matters of where, when, and how they are imagined. They depend on the
epiphenomenal wirings of particular moments. Therefore, it is important to
Conclusion 155
contextualize research, contextualize subjectivities, triangulate multiple

resources, monitor symbolic values and to allow the research to be informed by
criteria of ethical value (Few, Stephens and Rouse-Annett 2003).
For many of the students whose stories are depicted in this book, life is
complicated and filled with sorrows. In April 2014, international students went
on strike. Some of them camped out on the campus in Redenção. They protested
against another delay of their stipends. Some of them had lost their apartments
because they were not able to pay rent on time. A day later we found ourselves
joking in the lunch queue how someone should be doing research on jumping
the line. Everyone was laughing although students rarely perceived the act of
jumping as ‘funny’. Yet the joke brightened our day. I am not sure whether the
small delights are enough to counter-balance the bigger issues, probably not.
Still, relationships emerged and withered. Students watched out for each other
on their way home from parties and in public spaces. The days were filled with
studying, eating, dancing, disputing and reconciliation. Sometimes babies were
born. Life was going on under the radar of the big narratives of solidarity and
integration although students bore the many little and not so little cuts produced
by these narratives.
To conclude, admittedly, some of this study’s findings are uncomfortable.
They make us painfully aware of the limits of blackness and other forms of
identification, and, more precisely, the limits of envisioning difference as a form
of resistance against the ongoing delegitimization and disenfranchisement of
positionalities other than the occidental/white/heterosexual norm. What for
some is the emancipatory assertion of an African diasporic identity, amounts for
others to the denial of participation in a supposedly joint development endeavour.
All the while (state) power remains elsewhere as the right-wing backlash against
racial redress in Brazilian politics (and other parts of the world) since the 2016
have been showing. Nonetheless, the findings point to the need for educational
scholarship to engage much more deeply in the conceptualization of race as an
analytical lens. Such engagement must transcend understandings of race as a
colour-line (or even colour continuum), which locks people into singularized
identities that are solely defined in opposition to anti-black racism (as is often
the case in Anglo-American scholarship), or an unrelenting racelessness/colour
blindness, which makes processes of racial thinking and its effects invisible (as is
often the case in European scholarship).
Ethnographic observations are paramount to disentangling the many
situatedly imagined meanings of race and/or as blackness and the functions they
perform in the now of the lived moment. Applying a subjectivist lens illuminates
that the racializing assemblage of Man is alive and well in the realm of educational
reasoning (qua development and otherwise), including in modes of educational
cooperation initially imagined as a more egalitarian alternative in international
development relations. However, to register the emancipatory potentials of these
alternatives requires a much deeper engagement with various traditions of
thought for one to rectify the misgivings of the other. Such engagement must go
beyond paying lip service to the cause, as it often results in writing-off minoritized
traditions in a footnote.9 It is insufficient to problematize the Enlightenment
foundations of education research and practice by demanding (in an alleged
gesture of solidarity) the abandonment of the subject in order to destabilize the
idea of reason. Privileging a certain kind of thinking with power as structure of
dominance (classed, racialized, gendered, and otherwise), on the other hand, is
similarly limiting since it either divests subjects of agency (assuming that
everything is determined by structure) or scaffolds agency prematurely as
resistance. It potentially relocates the subject into an assemblage that reinstates
difference un-problematized. Scholars in education research should not accept
the confines set by any single logic to denounce the racial order of things. Instead,
scholars should perform a solidary gesture of a different kind: one that
acknowledges the vanguard radicalism of black (also critical ethnic, Indigenous,
queer, and disability)10 studies that has and continues to profoundly disrupt
theory. A multi-dimensional and multi-linear reading of race across (sub-)
disciplinary fields should thus be a primary concern in education theory and
practice.
Notes
1 Interview, 28 February 2013; fieldnotes, 28 January 2013.

2 Interview, 11 February 2013.
3 Fieldnotes, 28 January 2013.
4 It quickly became clear as well that UNILAB lacked the necessary connections with
potential institutions and/or employers that would provide the international
students with internship opportunities, thus making the request unattainable for
most students.
5 In 2015 there were some indications that this might change over time, at least to
some extent, as students formed closer relationships with university staff, professors
and their Brazilian peers. In 2018, there are some indications that UNILAB’s
international mandate might vanish indeed. Just like the photo of the monument in
front of the university, which at first proudly announced the historicized narrative,
Conclusion 157
was deleted from the website, detailed reporting of student numbers and national
origin under the ‘UNILAB in Numbers’ section on the website has also disappeared.
6 See Fanon (1967); Weheliye (2014); Mbembe (2017).
7 See El-Tayeb (2011); also Edward Said’s vanguard study Orientalism (1978).
8 Zweig found a romantic and pathos filled dream landscape in Brazil. The book A
Land of the Future ([1914] 2013) collects his impression of Brazil from 1936 and
describes a country in stark contrast to the war filled and fascistic ruled Europe.
Zweig paints a now utopian looking picture of a mystical world on the other side of
the ocean. For Zweig, Brazil was not constricted by past traditions and had all the
potential of the future in its hands.
9 In Habeas Viscus, Weheliye problematizes the dismissal of black feminist scholarship
(most notably Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers) performed by Foucauldian
notions of ‘biopolitics’ and Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’, with multiple effects. First,
it fails to acknowledge the scholars’ vanguard deconstructions of Man as the norm
(that which disciplines humanity into humans, not-quite-humans and non-humans).
Second, it places non-white subjects again beyond the grasp of the human by
obfuscating how race has been pinioned to human physiology (through violence and
surveillance) and thus denying ‘how the politicization of the biological always
already represents a racializing assemblage’ (2014: 12).
10 I deliberately exclude postcolonial studies from this list because of a growing
suspicion, which I cannot yet name. Postcolonial studies have been the epicentre of
intellectual exertions of provincializing Europe in global historiography and science.
This book’s critical analysis is in fact deeply indebted to their radical successes,
which have only begun to take hold in the field of Comparative and International
Education. Yet, it seems to me that postcolonial thought of a certain (elitist) kind has
recently been growing into a poster-child mobilized by those who wish to present
themselves as tolerant in the face of difference, whereas other non-dominant
traditions continue to be relegated to the realm of ethnographic instances.
158
Appendix I
Professor Gender Course Time of Hours in Hours in Hours p. Total

Observ. Fall 2012 Spring Professors
2013
Non-Brazilian Male GE Night 3 3 6
Brazilian Male GE Night 4 4
Brazilian Female GE Night 4 4
Brazilian Male GE Night 2 2 22
Brazilian Male GE Day 2 2

Brazilian Female GE Day 2 2 4
Non-Brazilian Male GE Day 18 18
Brazilian Female GE Day 8 8
Brazilian Female GE Day 6 14 20
Non-Brazilian Male GE Day 4 4 8 104
Brazilian Female Agronomy Day 3 3

Brazilian Male Agronomy Day 2 2
Brazilian Female Agronomy Day 2 2
Brazilian Female Engineering Day 2 2
Brazilian Male Engineering Day 2 2 11
137
159
160
Appendix II
Author Portuguese Title (as in PPC) English Title Year

Society, History and Culture of Lusophone Spaces
Anderson, Nação e Consciência Imagined communities 1999 Basic
Benedict Nacional
Appiah, Kwame Na Casa de Meu Pai. A África My father’s house. 1997 Basic
Anthony na filosofia da cultura Africa in the
philosophy of culture
Bernd, Zilá A Questão da Negritude The Question of 1984 Basic
Negritude
Bhabha, O Local da Cultura The Location of 2001 Basic
Homi, K. Culture
Brunschwig, A Partilha da África Negra The partition of black 1971 Basic
Henri Africa
Cabral, Amílcar A Arma da Teoria. Unidade The weapon of theory. 1978 Basic
e Luta I Unity and struggle I
Carrilho, Maria Sociologia da Negritude Sociology of Negritude 1976 Basic
Decraene, Pan-Africanismo Pan-Africanism 1962 Supp.
Phillipe
Dossiê Brasil/ Os Condenados da Terra The wretched of the 1993 Supp.
Africa earth
Feliciano, José Antropologia Econômica dos Economic 1988 Supp.
Thonga do Sul de anthropology of
Moçambique. Thonga of southern
Mozambique.
FRELIMO História de Moçambique History of 1971 Supp.
Mozambique
Fry, Peter Moçambique. Ensaios. Mozambique. Trails. 2001 Supp.
Hall, Stuart A Identidade cultural na Questions of cultural 2004 Supp.
pós-modernidade identity
(Continued)
161
162 Appendix II
Author Portuguese Title (as in PPC) English Title Year

Topics of Interculturality in Lusophone Spaces
Anderson, Nação e Consciência Nacional Imagined communities 1999 Basic
Benedict
Appiah, Kwame Na Casa de Meu Pai. A África My father’s house. 1997 Basic
Anthony na filosofia da cultura Africa in the
philosophy of culture
Bhabha, O Local da Cultura The location of culture 2001 Basic
Homi K.
Bosi, Alfredo Dialética da Colonização Dialectics of 1992 Basic
colonization
Cabral, Amílcar A Arma da Teoria. Unidade e The weapon of theory. 1978 Basic
Luta I Unity and struggle I
Craveirinha, Obra Poética Poetry work 2002 Basic
José
Eagleton, Terry A Ideia de Cultura The idea of culture 2005 Basic
Fanon, Frantz Os Condenados da Terra The wretched of the n/a Basic
earth
Ferreira, Literaturas Africanas de African literatures in 1987 Basic
Manuel Expressão Portuguesa Portuguese
Hamilton, Literatura Africana. Literatura African literature. 1984 Basic
Russel Necessária Necessary literature.
Santilli, Maria Estórias Africanas: história e African stories: history 1985 Basic
antologia and anthology
Hall, Stuart A Identidade cultural na Questions of cultural 2004 Supp.
pós-modernidade identity
Hall, Stuart Da diáspora: Identidades e Cultural identity and 2006 Supp.
mediações culturais diaspora
Lopes, Moçambicanismos Mozambicanisms 2002 Supp.
Armando J.
Margarido, Estudos sobre Literaturas das Studies of literatures of 1980 Supp.
Alfredo Nações Africanas de Língua African nations of
Portuguesa. Portuguese language
Matusse, A. Construção da Imagem de Construction of 1998 Supp.
Moçambicanidade em José Images of
Craveirinha, Mia Couto e Mozambicanicity in
Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa José Craveirinha, Mia
Couto and Ungulani
Ba Ka Khosa.
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176
Index
Page number in bold refer to figures, page numbers in italic refer to tables.
abolition, of slavery, 10, 23, 31, 47–59, 72, Alberti, V., 57

148, 151 Alda (Guinea Bissau student), 95–6, 125,
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 154 130–1, 134
Acarape, 50–1, 106 alienation, 137–46
access, 36 alliance building, 1
higher education, 35–7, 35, 61 Anderson, Elijah, 99, 121, 143
reforms, 61 Angola, 23, 24, 25, 27
uneven, 35 Agostinho Neto University, 36
universities, 30–1 anti-colonial resistances, 57
administrative posts, 63 gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35
affirmative action policies, 22, 59, 61, 64–8, independence, 58
68, 71 student numbers, 125
Africa anti-black identity, 49
anti-colonial movements, 2 anti-colonialism, 57, 58
Brazil’s historical debt to, 61 Antonio, Professor, 91, 92
conception of, 52–5 Associação das Universidades de Língua
discovery of, 57 Portuguesa, 42
historical entanglements, 2–3 Aune, K., 125
independence movements, 57
modernization, 2 Bahia, 67
postcolonial education, 26–8 Baldwin, James Arthur, 14–15
Western-centric portrayals, 2 Bandung Conference, 17 n.4, 17 n.5
Africa–Brazil relations, 1, 3, 5, 17 n.5, 79, 93 bare life, 7
African cultural heritage, 67, 80 Barry, Lynda, 154
African diasporic identity, 155 belonging, 116, 124
African pride movements, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of, 27
Africanness, 54, 83, 116, 148 bilateral agreements, 46
Afro-Brazilian biopolitics, 7–8, 9, 157 n.9
activism, 65–8, 71–2, 147 Black Panther Party, 20 n.18
diaspora, 3, 61 black subjectivity, 153
emancipation, 150–2 blackness, 5–6, 10–15, 19 n.13, 51, 55, 57,
movements, 3, 97 n.3 68, 71–2
Afro-Brazilian movements, 97 n.3 and historical consciousness, 85–93
Afro-descendant rights, 58 limits of, 155
Agamben, Giorgio, 7–8 multidimensional and multilinear, 14,
agency, 78, 156 55
Agier, Michel, 97 n.3, 114 Bob, Professor, 120–1
Agostinho Neto University, Angola, 36 Brazil
agricultural cooperation, 146 n.4 African heritage, 3
agricultural development, 40 on colonial issues, 58
177
178 Index
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35 colonial other, the, 151

international development colonialism, 95, 150
cooperation, 1 colonization, 81
national identity, 21, 49, 151 colour-continuum, 66
racial relations, 30 Communication Office, 128
role in Portuguese colonialism, 25 Community of Portuguese-language
solidarity cooperation, 3 Countries, 37
Brazil: An Inconvenient History (BBC community outreach activities, 63
documentary), 87 community spaces, 99–101
Brazil–Africa relations, 46 complaints, student, 119–20
Brazilian sociability, 113–14 co-national networks, 125, 127–35, 141,
Brazilian students, 69–70, 138–40, 148 149–50, 152
bureaucracy, 52 conflict, 90
Burundi, 57 conviviality, 99, 104, 121
cordiality, 12
Cabaço, José, 80–1 creation, UNILAB of, university of, 33–4,
Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 22, 40 41, 62–3, 64
camaraderie, 119 critical black studies, 5–6, 10, 154
campuses, 1, 2, 10, 16 n.1, 50–1, 67 critical development studies, 5
capacity building, 38 critical feminist perspectives, 152–3
Cape Verde, 23, 25 cultural differences, 5
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35, 36 cultural diversity, 100, 114, 148
University of Cape Verde, 36 cultural domination, 81
capitalism, 146 n.1 cultural performances, 100
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 36 cultural sharing, 100
Carmen, Professora, 102–3 culture, 151
Catholic mission schools, 26, 27 and historical consciousness, 79–85
Ceará, 10–12, 41, 49, 51, 52, 59 n.1 socio-historical understanding,
centre–peripheral differences, 78 82–3
Cesarino, L., 38–9, 51, 146 n.4, 151 as a vehicle for learning, 82–3
citizens and citizenship, 75 curriculum, 66–7, 72–3, 75–6, 76
civilizing missions, 150
class sizes, 106–7 da Gama, Vasco, 22
classificatory assemblages, 114 Davidson, Basil, 25
classroom observations, 18 n.11 decision-making, 64
classroom tensions, 90–1 decolonization, 24, 96
classrooms, 99 decolonizing potential, 10, 151–2
chairs, 106, 106 dehumanization, 150
features, 106 demand-driven action, 37–40
group constellations, 110–12 departments, 67
integration performance, 106–14, 106, development
108, 109, 110, 111 power as a discursive regime, 59 n.3
seating arrangements, 108–12, 108, and race, 150–2
109, 110, 111 through integration, 57–8, 99–101, 105,
size, 106–7 148
collaboration, 41, 59 development discourses, 16–17 n.2,
collective identity, 86–7 59 n.3
colonial difference, 83 development orientation, 44–6, 58–9
colonial economy, 23–4 development relations, 5
Index 179
development volunteers (cooperantes), Fanon, Franz, 17–18 n.8

62–3 farm, university, 107
developmental curriculum, 54, 59 Federal University of Ceará, 107–8, 133–4,
developmental imagination, 53 136
Diegues, Carlos, 80 Federal University of Latin American
difference Integration, 38
dialogue across, 93–7 fees, 37
fault lines of, 6, 91, 118 Felicia (Guinea Bissau student), 103,
discrimination, 131–2, 149 123–4, 125, 130–1, 134, 139–40
disillusionment, 124 Flowers, Ebony, 154
dispossession, 59 n.3 foreign policy, 17–18 n.8, 37–40, 62
diversity, 100, 104, 114, 148, 151–2 Fortaleza, 10, 128
dominant culture, 54 Foucault, Michel, 7–8, 9, 20 n.18
Duarte (Guinea Bissau student), 121, 126, founding document, 41, 42, 50, 53, 68–9
128, 134, 138–9, 144 founding mythology, 54, 148–9
Dutch-Portuguese colonial wars (1602– unsettling, 55–8
63), 22 Franco, Professor, 87–91, 96
Frankfurter Buchmesse, 149–50
East Timor, 28–9, 36, 54, 55, 56, 73 n.3 FRELIMO, 27–8
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35 French Colonial Empire, 21
independence, 58 FRETILIN, 29–30
Indonesian occupation, 30 Freyre, Gilberto, 12, 13, 20 n.20, 145, 151
peacekeeping missions, 38 funding, 37, 41
student integration, 141–3 funding insecurities, international
student numbers, 125 students, 132–5
Eduardo Mondlane University,
Mozambique, 36 Gandin, Luis Armando, 18 n.10, 39
education, 146 n.1 gender inequality, 81–2
importance, 124 genocide, 7
postcolonial, 26–31 geographical regions, places, 52
educational exchange, 1 geopolitical identity, 8
educational system, 30–1 Germany, 21, 151, 154–5
El-Tayeb, Fatima, 8–9, 149 Gilroy, Paul, 78
emancipation/progress/development Gomes, Nilma, 51, 67
narratives, 55–8, 85 governance structures, 63
EMBRAPA, 40 governmentality, 8–9
enrolments, international students, 68–71, gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35–6, 35
69 group constellations, 110–12
Esperança (Guinea Bissau student), 130–1, Guinea Bissau, 23, 25, 36, 144
134 anti-colonial resistances, 57
ethnographic representations, 154 gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35
ethno-racial identifications, 18 n.9, 114 peacekeeping missions, 38
Europe, 151 student demand, 70, 73 n.4
European universalism, 150 student numbers, 125
Europeanness, 8–9, 25 Gusmão, Neusa Maria Mendes de, 11, 12
exchange programmes, 105
exclusion, 57, 61, 149 Haddad, Fernando, 62
exploitation, 59 n.3 Hegel, Friedrich, 19 n.14
expropriation, relations of, 59 n.3 Hendrickson, B., 125
180 Index
heuristics, 153–4 inclusive development, 3–4

hierarchization, 85 independence, 23, 25
higher education independence movements, 57
access, 3, 35–7, 35, 61 inequality, 147
demand, 37 gender, 81–2
expansion, 35–7, 35, 41, 70 patterns of, 61
and global mobility, 52–3 racial, 5, 21–2, 30, 71–2
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35–6, 35 socio-economic, 71, 86–7
historical consciousness information sharing, 112–13
and blackness, 85–93 infrastructure, 70
and culture, 79–85 Insertion into University Life course (VU),
definition, 75 101–5
developing, 75–96 Institute of Humanities and Letters, 67
and differences, 93–7 institutional consolidation, 64
history teaching, 77–9 institutional direction, 65
and race, 85–93 institutional policies, 63
shared, 151 institutional politics, 63–4
historical relations, 55–8 institutional structures, 44–5, 44
history integration, 56, 73, 76, 99–121, 147, 148
construction of, 53–5 development through, 57–8, 99–101,
course descriptions, 78–9 105, 148
cultural approach, 79–85 educational policies, 104
difficulties in teaching, 90 evading, 114–21, 117
historical debt, 3, 10, 51, 61 and financial resources, 141–3
importance, 96 lack of, 133–4, 137–46
omnipresent reference to, 148 performance, 106–14, 106, 108, 109,
progressive view of, 75 110, 111
references to, 50 student interactions, 107–8
shared, 56, 58 successful, 115–16
syllabi, 79 teaching, 101–5
teaching of, 77–9, 114 through conviviality, 121
Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de, 12 interconnectedness, emphasis on, 79–80
Holocaust, 75, 151 intercultural topics, 77
housing, 128–32 interculturality, 76
human rights, 38 inter-institutional activities, 42–3
humanistic education, 99 inter-institutional relations, 68–73
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 19 n.14 interiorization, 41, 104
international development cooperation, 1
identity, 11, 83 international mandate, 156–7 n.5
African diasporic, 155 international policy debates, 1
anti-black, 49 international students, 1
Brazilian national, 21, 49, 151 acceptance, 113
collective, 86–7 aspirations, 144–6
negro, 77 backgrounds, 123–4
socio-cultural, 81 co-national networks, 127–35, 141,
illiteracy rates, 26, 27 149–50
Implementation Committee (Comissão de conversation entry points, 105
Implantação), 33, 63 disillusionment, 124
impoverishment, 59 n.3 enrolments, 68–71, 69
Index 181
evading integration, 114–21, 117 Lourdes, Professora, 49, 65–6, 86–7, 89

feelings of alienation, 137–46 Loveman, M., 19 n.13, 66
financial resources, 141–3 Lula da Silva, Luiz, 3, 17–18 n.8, 36, 41, 55,
funding insecurities, 132–5 61, 64
housing, 128–32 Lusophony, 76
internship, 147, 156 n.4 Lusotropicalism, 13, 25, 76, 151
lives, 123–46
marginality, 124 McCowan, T., 18 n.10
marginalization, 118 Maciço de Baturité, 42
mobility, 124 Madureira, L., 77
prejudices against, 131–2 Maher, F.A., 81–2, 86
professors’ interactions with, 113–14 marginalization, 118
recruitment, 128 Maria (Cape Verde student), 94
relationships with Brazilian students, maroon communities, 50–1, 80
138–40 Martins, Professor, 67, 71, 95–6
resource sharing, 134–5, 135–7 Martius, Karl Friedrich von, 12
and social boundaries, 149 Maundeni, T., 134
social positioning, 127 Mbembe, Achille, 19 n.14, 149–50
strike, 155 Mendes, Professora, 104, 112–13
internationalization, 1, 42–3, 104 methodology, 4–6, 18 n.11, 18–19 n.12, 125
internet, 135–6, 136–7 Middle Passage narratives, 13–15, 148, 153
interpersonal bonds, 128 unsettling, 55–8
interpersonal relations, 64 migrant communities, 128
Ministry of Agrarian Development, 40
Joanna (Guinea Bissau student), 11, 125, Ministry of Education, 133–4
130–1, 139–40, 143, 144–5 miscegenation, 10, 12–13, 20 n.20, 30,
João (Brazilian student), 104, 123, 127 150–1
John VI, King of Portugal, 22–3 mobility, 52–3
joint development, 58 international student, 124
José (Mozambican student), 85, 125–6, modernity, 124
129, 132, 134, 137, 141 modernization theories, 16–17 n.2
Morais de Sa e Silva, Michelle, 39
Kant, Immanuel, 19 n.14 Motter, Paulino, 18 n.10, 39
knowledge Movimento Negro, 77–8
decolonization of, 67 Mozambique, 23, 24, 25
exchange, 42 anti-colonial resistances, 57
frame of reference, 153 anti-colonial war, 27
production, 94–5 civil war, 28
sharing, 4 Eduardo Mondlane University, 36
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35
Ladson-Billing, Gloria, 93–4 independence, 27, 58
language use, judgement of, 139, 140 literacy programme, 39
laughter, 138, 140 postcolonial education, 26–8
Law no. 10.639, 61 student numbers, 125
Lee, J., 137 mulata, 49, 57
Levin (Brazilian student), 127 multiculturalness, 152
liberation, anti-colonial movements, 24–7 multilinearity, 57
life-project exercise, 103–4 multi-national interactions, 135–7
literacy programme, Mozambique, 39 multi-national networks, 125
182 Index
Museu de Abolição (Museum of postcolonial studies, 157 n.10

Abolition), 47, 49 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 53–5
mutual recognition, 100 private education, 26
private universities, 36
Nascimento, Professora, 44 professors, 16 n.1, 63–4, 64–5, 115–16
Nathan, Rebekah, 118–19 Afro-Brazilian activism, 65–8, 71–2,
national curriculum, 3 147
national identity, Brazil, 21, 49, 151 experience, 91–2
national purity, 150–1 financial situation, 103
Nazi racism, 7 information sharing, 112–13
negotiation, negotiating, 4, 44, 63–5, 72, 89, interactions with international
112, 120, 131 students, 113–14
Negritude, 57 lack of training, 91
negro identity, 77 non-Brazilian, 71, 147
neocolonial relations, 59 n.3 politically active, 67–8
nigger moments, 143 positionalities, 81–2
Ninho (São Tomé e Principe student), 118 students on, 94–7
Non-Alignment Movement, 3, 17 n.4 syllabi development, 79
North–South relations, 3 Programme of Restructuring and
Expansion of Federal Universities,
objectives of intervention, 52–5 41
Office for Outreach, Art and Culture, 100 Programme of University for All, 41
Office of Promoting Racial Equality, 67 PróReitoria de Relações Institucionais, 42
Office of Student Affairs, 100 pseudonyms, 20 n.19
official representations, 50 public policies, transfer of, 38
open engagement, lack of, 65
othering, through time, 53–4 queue jumping, 120
Otherness, 8 Quilombo (film), 66, 80
Pan-Africanism, 77, 78 race, 19 n.13, 58–9, 72, 150–2

Patricia (Brazilian student), 116, 127 as an analytical lens, 5–6, 6–15
peacekeeping missions, 38 and blackness, 5–6
pedagogies, 67, 83–5, 87–93, 94–7 as blackness, 10–15
Pedro (Brazilan student), 121 critical development studies and, 5–6
Pedro I, King of Portugal, 23 heuristics, 153–4
Pereira, A.A., 57 and historical consciousness, 85–93
Pereira, Professor, 65 multidimensionality, 87
political agendas, 39–40 South–South cooperation and, 5
political parties, 62 writing about, 152–6
politicking, everyday, 64, 112 race relations, 79
Popkewitz, T.S., 104–5 race-targeted quotas, 61
Portuguese Colonial Empire, 21 Rachel (Brazilian student), 92–3, 110
Portuguese colonialism, 21–5, 54, 58, 95, racial categories, 30
149 racial democracy, 10, 12, 21–2, 30, 49, 56,
aftermath, 26–31 57, 65–6, 71
shared experience, 56 racial differentiation, 21
Portuguese language, 19 n.12, 24, 27, 56, racial disparities, 4–5, 19 n.13
86, 139 racial diversity, 151–2
Portuguese Overseas Territories, 21 racial inequality, 5, 21–2, 30, 65, 71–2
Index 183
racial parity, 67 Science without Borders (Ciências sem

racial quotas, 70–1 Fronteiras), 105
racial redress, 56 segregation patterns, 114–21, 117, 127
racialization, 47–59, 48, 72 self-governance structures, 63
interventions, 50–5 shared understanding, 102, 103
racializing assemblages, 6–10, 12, 20 n.17, Silva, Professor, 64
149, 150–2, 156 Simona, Professora, 79, 94–5
racializing constructions, 15 slave trade, 23, 54, 87, 148, 149–50
racializing gaze, 12 slavery, 9, 10, 23, 25, 30, 47, 49, 51, 58, 85–6,
racism, 5, 6, 7–8, 11, 72, 86–7, 138–9, 95, 145
141–2, 147, 151 sociability, 99–101, 118, 119, 120, 149
Rafael, Professor, 66, 80, 86–7 social boundaries, 149
reasonable self, the, 105 crossing, 142–3
Redenção, 10, 47, 48, 49, 50, 106, 110–12, social intermingling, 107–8
115, 119, 128–32, 144–5, 149, 151–2, social networks, 119
152 social positioning, 137–8
religious practices, 80 social relations, 120–1, 140
RENAMO, 28 social services, healthcare, 45
resource sharing, 132 social space, 114–21, 117
respect, 100 socio-cultural capital, 96
REUNI, 41 socio-cultural identity, 81
Rice, C., 137 socio-cultural learning, 99
Rio de Janeiro, 22 socio-economic challenges, 132
Robinho (Guinea Bissau student), 108, socio-economic inequality, 71, 86–7
126, 128, 134, 143, 145 solidarity cooperation, 3, 68–73, 124–5, 147
Rocha, Professora, 56 Soudien, Crain, 40
role, 15 Sousa Santos, B. de, 151
Rosen, D., 125 South–South cooperation, 3, 9, 34, 37–40,
Roussef, Dilma, 65, 67 76, 147
rudeness, 119 agricultural cooperation, 40
Rwanda, 57 dangers, 39
implementation, 39–40
Said, Edward, 54 justification, 61
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira, 24 legitimization, 55–6
Salvador de Bahia, 51 race and, 5
Samir (Guinea Bissau student), 102–3 South–South solidarity, 68–73
Sandra (Cape Verde student), 85, 92–3, Speller, Paulo, 41, 63, 99–100, 143, 147
103–4, 110, 116, 127, 129, 141–2 Spiller, Hortense, 7
Sandro (Mozambican student), 126, 141 Spivak, G.C., 9
Santayana, George, 75 sporting events, 100
Santos, Professor, 65, 68 Stambach, A., 124
São Francisco do Conde, 51, 67 stipend system, 42–3, 43–4, 43, 132–5,
São Tomé e Principe, 23, 25 141–2
gross enrolment ratio (GER), 35 Stoetzler, Marcel, 153
University Lusiada of São Tome e strikes
Principe, 36 2014, 155
schedule, students, 136–7 2015, 65, 72
scholarship opportunities, 112 student interactions, 107–8
school enrolments, 26 evading integration, 114–21, 117
184 Index
student numbers, 16 n.1, 125 timetables, 136, 136

student presentations, 102–4 Tomas (Guinea Bissau student), 51, 120
student recruitment, 128 Torres, Professor, 44
students, 1
agency, 78 Ubuntu worldview, 68
Brazilian, 69–70, 138–40, 148 UN Security Council, 38
conflict, 90 underdevelopment, 64
group constellations, 110–12 universities, access, 30–1
misgivings, 119–20 University Lusiada of São Tome e
mobility, 52–3 Principe, São Tome e Principe, 36
motivation, 104 University of Amazonian Integration,
participation, 84 38
place of origin, 1 University of Cape Verde, 36
positionality, 114 university restaurant, 114–21, 117
on professors, 94–7 university statute, 63
racial quotas, 70–1 US civil rights movement, 56
schedule, 136–7
stipends, 43–4, 43, 132–5, 141–2 Valentim (East Timor student), 108, 126,
and teaching practices, 92–3 135, 143
view of development, 52–3 Vigh, H., 123
See also international students vision, 33–4, 41–2, 57–8, 72–3
subjectivity, frame of reference, 153
Supreme Court, 61 website, 50
Weheliye, Alexander, 6–10, 13, 20 n.18,
Taina (Angolan student), 93, 94–5 149, 157 n.9
Tamara (Brazilian student), 107, 126 welcoming week, 101–5
teacher education, 67 whiteness, 12
teaching practices, 83–5, 87–93, 94–7 whitening, 49, 142–3
Telma, Professora, 80–5, 86–7, 89, 91 Wi-Fi, 136
temporary university council (Conselho Workers’ Party (Partido dos
Superior Pro Tempore), 63 Trabalhadores), 62
tensions, 131–2 Wright, Michelle, 13–15, 55
terminology, ethno-racial categories, 18 n.9 Wynter, Sylvia, 7
Tetreault, M.K., 81–2, 86
Third Reich, 7, 8 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 153
Tiago (Guinea Bissau student), 126, 129,
132–3, 139–40, 143 Zumbi, 50–1
time, othering through, 53–4 Zweig, Stefan, 151, 157 n.8
185
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List of Illustrations viii

0.1 UNILAB campus in Redenção, Ceará 2

2.1 GER in relation to GER by region 34

CPLP Community of Portuguese-language Countries

PROUNI Programme of University for All

REUNI Programme of Restructuring and Expansion of Federal

SHC Society, History and Culture of Lusophone Spaces (course in the

TI Intercultural Topics (course in the general curriculum)

UNIAM University of Amazonian Integration

UNILA Federal University of Latin American Integration

UNILAB University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian

The ﬁeld of comparative and international education requires its researchers,

Irving Epstein, Stephen Carney and Daniel Friedrich

Figure 0.1 UNILAB campus in Redenção, Ceará.

I became interested in UNILAB after years of studying critical literatures on

eager to abandon these eﬀorts altogether, although no adequate form of

rural regions; internationally it fostered alliances across Southern countries and

This study’s thinking with race, as an analytical lens, is deeply indebted to

The government placed UNILAB’s ﬁrst campus in Redenção in the state of

In the Cearense imagination, a person perceived to be black is always already

Often enough (though certainly not always) these perceptions triggered

The rather widespread practice of labelling international students generically as

of whitening as a solution (Schwarcz 1999). Brazilian politicians and elites

European context (El-Tayeb 2011). Wright ﬁnds Middle Passage narratives

meaning or binary constructions (solely in opposition to whiteness). Instead

The Brazilian government under the Lula administration imagined UNILAB as

problematizes the Middle Passage narrative by providing alternative

‘catch up’, transitioning to models of society found in the so-called developed

colonizer/colonized dichotomy and to instil in Brazilians a sense of national pride

contents and classroom relationships. Later, I concentrated on courses included in

17 Assemblages ‘constitute continuously shifting relational totalities comprised of

Portuguese Colonialism and its Aftermath

The Portuguese Colonial Empire, also referred to as the Portuguese Overseas

government began to implement aﬃrmative action policies because of domestic

labour requirements. The Portuguese established social categories that

populations in reservation-like, military-controlled villages, and removed

Postcolonial education in the Lusophone world

In Brazil, Catholic mission schools (run by Jesuits) dominated the colonial

system lacked adequate infrastructure, teachers were ill-prepared, and students’

Missionary education was made available to the small number of Portuguese

mandate Portuguese as a language of instruction from Grade 1 to 6 (Taylor-

1 MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), FRELIMO (Frente de

Internationalization of Higher Education

When UNILAB was created, the Brazilian government envisioned an

The University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony

would be complementary interests, as the developmental needs of the Brazilian

Expanding higher education in the Lusophone world

UNILAB founders identiﬁed as a shared feature between the Brazilian Northeast

Table 2.1 GER in relation to GER by region*

Latin America and Sub-Saharan East Asia and