Dorothy Porter and the creation of a bibliographic field about Black People in Brazil and the United States (1943-1978)

This article presents a historical analysis of the intellectual, cultural, and political exchanges between Brazilian and American bibliographers through the process of creating the ­­­Afro-Braziliana, a bibliography about Black people in Brazil compiled by the African-American librarian Dorothy Porter between 1943 and 1978. Through a socio-cultural history of the bibliographical practice, we examine Porter’s bibliography in relation to the theoretical tensions, narrative struggles, interpretive disagreements, and the contrasting readings that it motivated, both in its formation and in its reception. Our main hypothesis is that the problematics raised by the Afro-Braziliana have politically repositioned different understandings and narrative disputes of social categorization patterns of the racial systems attributed to Brazil and the United States.

Keywords:
bibliographies; Afro-Latin-American history; racism; racial democracy; knowledge