# Other antiracist geographies: Decentred locations of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions

Federico Ferretti

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Federico Ferretti. Other antiracist geographies: Decentred locations of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2025, 10.1177/02637758251347805. hal-05094659

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**Prof FEDERICO FERRETTI – BA, MA, PhD**, Professore Ordinario di Geografia/Full
Professor of Geography, Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze
dell'Educazione “G.M. Bertin”, Studio 70, Via Filippo Re 6, 40126 Bologna, Italy
federico.ferretti6@unibo.it +39 051 2091609
https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/federico.ferretti6 ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5446-6522; Scopus ID:
55540917000; Web of Science ID: AAR-9553-2021; Google Scholar; ResearchGate;
Academia.edu; LinkedIn; CNPq-Lattes.

Other antiracist geographies: decentred locations of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions

Abstract: Based on original archival research, this paper discusses early transnational challenges to paternalistic views of 'racial democracy' that took place in Brazilian social sciences in the second half of the 20th century. It analyses the little-known but incredibly relevant work carried out with São Paulo Afro-Brazilian communities by Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide, critical sociologists who collaborated with anti-racist activists such as the inspirer of Quilombismo Abdias Nascimento. It first argues for the need of decentring antiracist geographies, considering voices outside the Anglosphere and thinking of alliances that acknowledge scholars' and activists' complex positionalities, including matters such as social origin and voluntary activist commitment at the level of the individual. Second, it contends that the biographical contexts of Fernandes, a political persecuted who remained true to his proletarian origins even as an established academic, show the insufficiency of mere theoretical work and the need that critical scholars actively engage with societal change. Fernandes and friends strove for a 'Second Abolition' to resolve matters with intersecting colonial, racial and class oppression that Brazilian history had left open after the formal Abolition of slavery in 1888. Their ideas and practices provide insights that can nourish current defiant, abolitionist and anti-racist geographies.

Keywords: Anti-racist Geographies; Luso-tropicalism; Activism; Quilombismo; Second Abolition

This paper addresses the anti-racist commitment of a network of Brazilian and international
scholars, of which the most representative was Florestan Fernandes (1920-1995), one of the
numerous intellectuals who were imprisoned, exiled or variously persecuted by the Brazilian
dictatorship of 1964-1985 (Sereza 2014). Considered today as a founder of Brazilian sociology,

F. Ferretti, 2025 “Other antiracist geographies: decentred positions of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions”, Environment and Planning D – Society and Space
https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251347805
Fernandes was also sensitive to spatial and geographical matters. He started his research on racial discrimination in São Paulo with French anti-racist sociologist Roger Bastide (1898-1974), whose Chair at the University of São Paulo (USP) was taken over by Fernandes when Bastide came back to France in 1954. Published in several versions (Merkel 2022), Bastide's and Fernandes's *Brancos e Negros em São Paulo* (Bastide and Fernandes 1959, hereafter B&N) was a milestone in dismissing Luso-Tropicalism, a theory that alleged the substantial harmony of racial relations in Brazilian histories following Gilberto Freyre's (1900-1987) work.

My argument is twofold. First, addressing Fernandes's and friends' studies on the failures of Brazilian Abolition and 'racial democracy' allows for decentring, pluralising and de-essentialising current anti-racist scholarship by considering voices outside the Anglosphere. It also helps acknowledging complex positionalities, including social origin and voluntary activist commitment to social causes. A white academic man who took distances from dominating ideas of 'whiteness', Fernandes was also a person coming from a very destitute family, a political persecuted and a principled activist who accepted to put his new social position at risk to remain true to his class of origin. This exposes the need to de-essentialise positionalities, considering individuals and their complex (including voluntarist) positionings before generalising collective categories in thinking of alliances across intersecting axes of social struggle. Additionally, studying Latin, Afro-descendent and Indigenous cultures in Brazil suggests ways to go beyond the prevailing Anglo-American centrism of scholarly debates, including in anti-racism. Like 'settler colonialism', a notion that Latin American scholars consider hardly applicable to their region (Zaragocin 2024), racial discrimination does not work in the same way everywhere, and the same can be said as for subversive alliances across class or colour lines.

Second, Fernandes's networks and biography gave substance to his theories, exposing the insufficiency of academic work and the need for wider militant engagement beyond campuses to face political and social challenges. Decolonially convinced that theories are always situated and cannot exist outside praxes (Mignolo and Walsh 2018), I extend defiant and antiracist geographical scholarship (Al-Bulushi 2022; Daley and Murrey 2022; Bledsoe 2015) by addressing Bastide's
and Fernandes’s contexts in addition to their original texts. To this end, I analyse Fernandes’s
multilingual archives, especially his correspondence, surviving at the University of São Carlos
(UFSCAR) and revealing Fernandes’s Brazilian and international networks on matters of race and
class activism. Like for other ‘Southern’ dissidents of his generation (Loureiro et al. 2021),
Fernandes’s works have been hitherto invisibilised by the linguistic and geographical eccentricity
of Brazilian scholarship. Additionally, I consider the police sources detailing Fernandes’s political
persecutions that survive in archives such as of DOPS (Departamento da Ordem Política e Social),
the infamous Brazilian political police that carefully watched ‘subversives’ from 1924 to 1982
under both ‘democracies’ and ‘dictatorships’, since 1964 alongside the SNI (Serviço Nacional de
Informações).

It is worth clarifying my use of terminology: in Brazil, there are complex discussions on the use
of terms about perceived or assigned racial identities such as *negr**, *pret**, *cabocl**, *pard**, *mulat**,
etc. due to specific histories of miscegenation (Bledsoe 2015). While Fernandes (1972) provided
exhaustive accounts of their uses and misuses in his day, I will not delve deeper in this discussion,
which would be hardly of interest for non-Lusophones. Yet, as translation should never be taken
for granted (Davies 2024), in translating textual citations I tried to stick to the intended meanings
while avoiding terms that are considered inappropriate for current English-speaking vocabularies.
For instance, expressions such as ‘*negros e mulatos*’ have been translated as ‘Black and Mixed-
Race people’. Anyway, it is worth noting for English-speaking readers that, in the lexicon of Afro-
descendent movements from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Latin America/Abya
Yala/Améfrica Ladina, the word *negr** is generally proudly claimed as a self-definition by the
interested subjects.

In the first part, I discuss why there is a need to decentralise critical studies in current scholarship
starting from antiracist and abolitionist geographies, including current debates on Black
Geographies in Brazil and elsewhere. In the second part, I address contexts and networks of
Fernandes and friends to understand the lived and concrete activist practices in which their ideas
closely correlating race and class were put into practices. In the third and fourth parts, I discuss
Fernandes’s critiques of the Brazilian ‘bourgeois’ revolution and the need for a ‘Second Abolition’.

## 1. Anti-racist, abolitionist and activist scholarship

In Black Geographies, after the seminal studies of Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods investigating the spatial dimensions of racial oppression (McKittrick and Woods 2007), authors such as Camilla Hawthorne (2019) stress the need for making alliances and thinking Black radical traditions beyond the Anglosphere (Hawthorne and Lewis 2023). Antiracism is considered as an urgent matter after the rising of movements such as Black Lives Matter and the outrage triggered worldwide by racialised police violence (Springer and White 2024). In the last couple of decades, antiracist geographers have highlighted that, while ‘old’ biological racism is now considered unacceptable, there has been ‘a shift away from explicit discourses of race to those of cultural difference’ (Nash 2003, 641). They refer to various forms of cultural essentialism, nationalism and xenophobia in which “‘culture” and “religion” have replaced “biology”’ (Mbembe 2017, 7), taking the place of ‘scientific’ racism and producing similar discriminatory and exclusionary effects.

Hence, the need for critical scholarship to ‘develop theoretically adequate and politically effective ways … to challenge cultural racism’ (Nash 2003, 643). Since the beginning of these debates, activism featured as a key practice in anti-racist agendas that shift ‘from academic ideas and disembodied categories to the lived realities of racism’ (Peake and Kobayashi 2002, 50). Importantly, this implies that ‘geographers and other social scientists step away from any claim to “scientific” neutrality, to take moral and therefore normative positions’ (Peake and Kobayashi 2002, 55) by proposing ‘anti-racist geographies’ in their institutions (Mahtani 2006). Yet, dialogues between scholarship and extra-academic activism to exit the ‘Ivory Tower’ instead of only challenging it from inside remains a matter to be further addressed.

Current efforts to promote antiracism also concern geographical education. In the UK, Steve Puttick and Amber Murrey argue for challenging the invisibilisation of race in geographical curricula, which can only foster ‘structural racism’ if one continues to neglect ‘Black and
decolonial geographies' (Puttick and Murrey 2020, 132). James Esson and Angela Last importantly claim that scholars must 'adopt an explicitly antiracist position' (Esson and Last 2020, 670) in their daily work. They contend that 'in a racist society it is not enough to be "not racist," we have to be "antiracist."' (Esson and Last 2020, 670). The case of Fernandes and friends provides powerful examples in this direction.

Works in the history of ideas are rediscovering scholars and activists whose criticisms to racial
capitalism contribute to current antiracist geographies even though they were not canonised
geographers (Planey 2023), which was clearly the case with Bastide and Fernandes. Historical
geographers deem central the reconstruction of the spaces of racially discriminated groups,
rescuing the forgotten memories of Blackness, including in European societies (Bressey 2009;
Hawthorne 2022), for current anti-racist purposes. While scholars acknowledge the need to de-
essentialise identities by arguing that 'there is nothing inherent ... about any given racialised
identity' (Currie 2022, 49), the fact that whiteness remains dominating in the academic world still
leads scholars to claim explicitly antiracism as an object of study for geography (Chioi 2018), to
be understood in its 'everywhere but different' (Nelson and Dunn 2017, 27) forms. As the
'plurality' (Bledsoe and Wright 2019) and 'creativity' (Noxolo 2024) of Black Geographies are
acknowledged as key resources towards geographies of justice, this paper matches ideas in
'extradisciplinary orientation' (Wright et al. 2024, 866) and the 'variety of methods' (Bledsoe
2021, 1013) that current Black Studies are assuming in plural ways.

These scholars consider ‘Black thoughts and praxes’ (Wright et al. 2024, 866) as grounds for
scholarly and activist contributions that go beyond mere matters with ‘race’, to foster epistemic
pluralism and collaborative practices towards broader programmes of justice. They argue that
scholarship should be inspired by ‘a Blackened consciousness, a way of seeing and knowing the
world informed by the condition and experiences of Black being [that] informs theory and praxis
and is theory-as-praxis’ (Wright et al. 2024, 869). Seemingly not so far from Fernades’ purposes
that research cannot be divorced from social realities and political action, this idea of Blackness is
strictly connected with class consciousness. According to Adam Bledsoe, in the movements that
pursued ‘a political struggle based on identity versus class [this] ultimately meant a preservation of the capitalist mode of production, which led to even further, more pernicious forms of segregation’, given that ‘capitalism requires racism’ (Bledsoe 2021, 1009). While Brazilian debates on Black Geographies are likewise vibrant (Santos 2022), the ontological negation of Black identities still characterises Brazilian societies, mostly ‘unable to understand, account for, or accept the existence of a Black subjectivity’ (Bledsoe 2015, 340) and autonomous agency—matters on which early works by Fernandes and friends can still provide insights as I detail below.

Recent works also rediscuss notions of racial capitalism, first introduced by early Black thinkers such as ‘Cedric Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Eric Williams’ and currently inspiring ‘alliances’ (Harris 2021, vii) across different disciplines. Scholars generally agree that racism does not only characterise one historical phase or specific variety of capitalism, as ‘all capitalism ... is constitutive of racial capitalism’ (Jenkins and Leroy 2021, 1), a matter that is more urgent than ever to address, including in Brazil (Ferreira 2022; Lixinski 2024). Racism is deemed a linchpin of capitalism and coloniality by most decolonial scholars, with special reference to internal colonialism and racist social relations in both ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ societies (Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Thus, these matters should not be confined in a wretched past, as ‘race is [still] decisive in the reproduction of the social relations of capital’ (Schwarz 2022, 3). Recently, new antiracist geographies have started their way under the name of Abolition Geography. Mostly focusing on the abolition of prisons as devices of racist social repression, these geographies share some points with Fernandes’ idea of a ‘Second Abolition’ as I discuss below.

Inspired by authors such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2017 and 2022), Abolition Geography stresses the need to produce ‘scholarship that is in conversation with and in service to social movements’ acknowledging an ‘antiracist and anticapitalist imperative’ (Hamlin 2023, 756). It goes beyond carceral issues by underpinning ‘other forms of social justice and liberation struggles’ (Hamlin 2023, 758) directly connected with broader activism beyond campus protests (Chavez-Norgaard et al. 2022). Abolition scholars are not satisfied with mere theory, as abolitionism should lead to ‘the destruction of the racial capitalist regime’ (Selman 2021, 31), which cannot be reformed but
only removed. Furthermore, abolitionism is applied to a plurality of authoritarian features of nation-states that critical scholars question, such as borders (Tazzioli 2023). For Gilmore, abolitionist geography starts by the idea that ‘freedom is a place’ to continue the ‘unfinished business of abolition’ (Gilmore 2018, 62) in current societies towards social justice, that is the same argument that Fernandes and Bastide made in the 1950s.

Abolition is likewise a theme of historical geographies and literatures investigating ‘the archive of abolitionist spatial practice’ (Schoolman 2014, 1) to best understand current societies. While several authors stress the importance of marronage in broader genealogies of freedom (Wiegmink 2002; Goffe 2024), current abolitionist and antiracist literatures highlight ‘the poverty of any understanding of racialisation and anti-racism that evades their uneven planetary dynamics and plural if interconnected stories’ (Bhandar and Toscano 2022, 2). This paper extends this invaluable scholarship by addressing contexts, histories and locations of antiracism beyond Anglo-centred views, responding to widespread scholarly calls to avoid depoliticization and to address racism as strictly linked with wider discriminations and class conflict. Yet, so-called ‘international’ literature still appears to be mostly reliant on cases located and notions elaborated in the Anglosphere, mainly in North America, which exposes the need to investigate other geographical and linguistic traditions, such as the pluralist and subversive Brazil of Florestan Fernandes and friends.

## 2. Life as theory, network as method

### Fernandes's contexts

Life and theory are strictly interconnected in trajectories such as those of Fernandes, whose intellectual career was marked by the explicit aim ‘to remain true to [his] class of origin’ (Cerqueira 2013, 11). That is, the poorest strata of São Paulo urban proletariat, as Fernandes repeatedly and proudly claimed in his numerous autobiographic interviews. Fernandes deemed this experience a resource for his successive research with Afro-Brazilian communities, given his familiarity with the most marginalised places of São Paulo such as the *cortiços*, buildings in which destitute families of Black, White and Mixed-Race people lived in collective rooms in conditions of

F. Ferretti, 2025 “Other antiracist geographies: decentred positions of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions”, Environment and Planning D – Society and Space

https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251347805
dramatic overcrowding. The son of a single woman who precariously earned her life as a cleaner, Fernandes had ‘to start working when he was six years old… performing petty tasks … to gain tips’ (Venceslau 1991) as a classic ‘*menino de rua*’ (Soares et al. 2021, 49). An anecdote from Fernandes’s recollections impressively exemplifies what these experiences meant as for shaping his personality and his moral reprobation of people abusing their social privileges. When he still was six: ‘One day, a lady wanted me to transport a box of mangoes from *Luz* Station to *Treze de Maio*<fnref n="1" /> street [3-4 kilometres walking]. Tell me if there is any humanity or Christian compassion in this’ (Venceslau 1991).

Importantly, these experiences blur Anglo-centred notions of ‘Black spaces’ and ‘White spaces’, as in Brazil there was not the same kind of spatial segregation as in North America or Austral Africa, especially in proletarian neighbourhoods. Although São Paulo is a specific case as Black people are a quite small minority of the population, unlike in Afro-Brazilian strongholds like Bahia, Fernandes’ biographical experience clearly suggested reflections on the intersections of race and class oppression that he would later discuss as a scholar. After having been a shoe-shiner in the streets, young Fernandes worked in ‘butcher, carpentry and tailor shops, bakeries, restaurants and bars’ (Venceslau 1991) and finally as a salesman for medical products. He acquired his intellectual training as a self-educated worker thanks to his passion for reading everything and everywhere, in all free moments, availing of the few existing public libraries, and prepared his university exams ‘studying in the buses’ (Soares et al. 2021, 63). It was in this proletarian environment that adolescent Fernandes was exposed to the socialist and anarchist ideas that widely circulated among São Paulo workers, and read ‘Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Bakunin, Proudhon’ (Cirqueira 2013, 26). Beyond these solid readings, Fernandes recollected the importance of growing up ‘in this human environment [of] widespread anarchism and socialism’. These ideas were represented by proletarian activists who were ‘very respectable, very worthwhile people’ (Soares et al. 2021, 77), which inspired the principled intransigence that Fernandes claimed all his life long as a scholar and an activist. In 1943, while he was already a USP student thanks to ‘Geography and Social Sciences’ (Cerqueira 2013, 11) programmes, welcoming workers

<footnote n="1">¹ Ironically, the date of the abolition of slavery in Brazil.</footnote>
in a cosmopolite environment that included lessons in ‘English, French, Italian and German’ (Cerquieira 2013, 31), Fernandes joined Trotskyist ‘Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR)’.

This first experience of militancy consolidated Fernandes’s wariness of academic opportunism, represented by student leaders who ‘accommodated themselves to the dictatorship [at that time Getúlio Vargas’s 1937-1945 *Estado Novo*]’ to ‘grab advantages’ (Soares et al. 2021, 50). Fernandes’s conscientisation about these matters was favoured by his nonconformism, which led him to refuse joining the official (Stalinist) Communist Party, being uncomfortable with its authoritarianism, ‘centralisation and discipline’ (Soares et al. 2021, 83). Yet, similar problems also existed in Trotskyist organisations, in which Fernandes refused blind obedience to Party leaders claiming that he ‘never embraced the Trotskyist fanaticism’ (Soares et al. 2021, 89). After few years, Fernandes decided to quit the PSR, believing that he would have been more useful to the socialist cause making ‘more solid works in the university’ (Venceslau 1991). In 1945, he was appointed as an assistant at USP, working with sociologists Fernando de Azevedo, Antônio Cândido and Bastide, a transnational scholar who taught at USP for almost two decades before coming back to France in 1954 (Peixoto 2000). Yet, Fernandes always claimed that ‘revolution cannot be made in universities’ as ‘the university is a conservative institution’ (Fernandes 1991, 54), and that intellectuals must maintain contact with grassroots movements for both ethical and political reasons. Eventually: ‘Intellectuals cannot dissociate themselves from concrete political praxes without losing a class perspective’ (Venceslau 1991).

Early in his academic career after the *Estado Novo*, Fernandes committed to political campaigns in defence of public education, in collaboration with critical intellectuals such as Darcy Ribeiro and Anísio Teixeira. Both based in Rio, these scholars corresponded with Fernandes, considering him the São Paulo referent for their work on educational reforms towards public and popular education that characterised the ‘democratic’ parenthesis of 1945-1964 in Brazil.<fnref n="2" /> Ribeiro especially insisted for involving Fernandes in the defence of public school as he could ‘not make

<footnote n="2">² Biblioteca Comunitária da Universidade Federal de São Carlos (hereafter UFSCAR), document 181115, Teixeira to Fernandes, 29 June 1955.</footnote>
without [Fernandes’s] help<fnref n="3" /> and advice on projects including the new law on education.<fnref n="4" /> After the 1964 coup, Ribeiro was exiled and continued corresponding with his ‘brother Florestan’<fnref n="5" /> from places such as Caracas and Lima. Indeed, for these intellectuals, educational and political projects were strictly connected. Fernandes explicitly claimed that workers needed ‘culture’ to take the control of the means of production, also arguing that the social contradictions that his research on racial discrimination highlighted could only be resolved through ‘educational processes’ (Fernandes 1991, 49). When a new dictatorship started in April 1964, the government was aware of the roles of critical intellectuals, who were exiled or variously persecuted since then.

## Political dissidence as creative intellectual practice

The police archives mentioned above show that Fernandes was watched since 1945, when he was filed as member of one ‘Radical Democratic Association’.<fnref n="6" /> In the early 1960s, his presence was noted in meetings in solidarity with ‘political exiles from Spain and Portugal’,<fnref n="7" /> then under the fascist regimes of respectively Franco and Salazar. In these years, police spies alleged Fernandes’s participation in communist activities funded by the Soviet Union. While this was arguably inaccurate information given the distance between Fernandes and Stalinist orthodoxy noted above, these arguments participated in the construction of the ‘enemy’ in the Cold War logics of pre-1964 Brazil (Motta 2022).

After the 1964 coup, police and military sources further revealed the zeal of functionaries in pleasing the ruling governments, as the reports on Fernandes suddenly assumed tones of explicit moral blame towards the watched scholar, who was depicted as an opportunist involved in ‘shameful affairs’ at USP, and ‘the mentor of all subversive activities in the Faculty’.<fnref n="8" /> In September 1964, Fernandes was already a leading academic and, although initially not implied in

<footnote n="3">³ UFSCAR, document 18380, Ribeiro to Fernandes, 8 April 1959.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ UFSCAR, document 182370, Ribeiro to Fernandes, 31 March 1860; document 181096, Ribeiro’s circular, 15 April 1960.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ UFSCAR, document 188201, Ribeiro to Fernandes, 24 April 1970.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Serviço Nacional de Informações [online through SIAN (Sistema de Informações do Arquivo Nacional) platform: https://sian.an.gov.br/] (hereafter SNI) 9038/81 1/1, 1945.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 12 January 1960.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 27 May 1964.</footnote>
political repression, he courageously wrote a public letter to the officers who were ‘investigating’ on ‘subversive activities’ at USP, defending academic freedom and the right of free speech. After this action, he was summoned to these officers for an interrogatory whose minutes contain telling statements on Fernandes’s intention to ‘become again a subversive [like under the *Estado Novo*] in case a totalitarian regime is established in Brazil’ and on his idea that, in a democratic state, all Parties have the right to exist, included ‘the Communist Party [then illegal]’.<fnref n="9" /> The parts of that dialogue in which Fernandes tried to explain the theoretical bases of ‘class struggle’<fnref n="10" /> to astonished investigators look like pieces of involuntary humour. The result was Fernandes’s detention under the charge of being an ‘active leftist’.<fnref n="11" />

Fernandes remained in prison only three days, after which his students publicly celebrated his liberation.<fnref n="12" /> Yet, the legal dispute between Fernandes and the government would end with consequences that were not in favour of the scholar. As Fernandes recollected, this was a logical result: ‘As I was implacable in my struggle, they were implacable in repression’ (Venceslau 1991). Ironically, Fernandes declined offers of the earliest clandestine anti-dictatorship groups to take ‘leadership of guerrilla’ (Venceslau 1991) as he was convinced that there were not the conditions for armed struggle in Brazil. This did not prevent him from being the object of a new request of ‘preventive detention’<fnref n="13" /> in March 1965 for having spread ‘subversive ideas’ among his students. Not enforced given that Fernandes was abroad for a very timely tour of conferences in Europe, the decision of arresting Fernandes was ruled out by the Supreme Federal Court in October 1965. In those years, Fernandes received numerous invitations to Europe, including by French scholars who had previously worked at USP such as geographer Pierre Monbeig.<fnref n="14" />

<footnote n="9">⁹ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 10 September 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 10 September 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 11 September 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² SNI 9038/81 1/1, 15 September 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ SNI 9038/81 1/1, 30 March 1965.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ UFSCAR, document 183089, Monbeig to Fernandes, 1 April 1966.</footnote>
Unsurprisingly, police records account for Fernandes’s further activism and participation in a Manifesto of intellectuals opposing the new totalitarian Constitution.<fnref n="15" /> New requests for arresting Fernandes were suspended by a *habeas corpus* decision that was reached with 7 votes against 6 at the Superior Military Tribunal.<fnref n="16" /> Likewise travelling among different North and South American countries, Fernandes’ student and future post-dictatorship president Fernando Henrique Cardoso hoped as well to ‘take advantage’<fnref n="17" /> of this decision, that was saluted by a concerned Bastide from Paris.<fnref n="18" /> Finally, the government decided that there was a better way to get rid of Fernandes, and placed him on compulsory retirement in 1969, on the bases of the new legislation against subversive activities in universities (ADUSP 1979). Then, Fernandes went to voluntary exile in Canada to seek new professional perspectives at the University of Toronto.

Later, this institution also hosted the most famous of Brazilian critical geographers, Milton Santos, who corresponded with Fernandes during his 1964-1977 exile to exchange contacts<fnref n="19" /> and to tell the difficulties of his ‘clandestine’ attempts to come back to Brazil with the help of common friends.<fnref n="20" /> Santos and Fernandes corresponded until the 1980s, when Santos suggested publishing anthological monographs on critical geographers in Fernandes’s collection *Grandes Cientistas Sociais*,<fnref n="21" /> a milestone in the history of Brazilian social sciences (Rodrigues 2018). Geography was finally represented by volumes on Max Sorre, Friedrich Ratzel and Elisée Reclus, this latter thanks to radical geographer Manuel Correia de Andrade, another political persecuted and a fan of the French anarchist geographer.<fnref n="22" />

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ SNI 111 22/85 1/1, 1967.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ SNI 9038/81 1/1, August 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ UFSCAR, document 181260, Cardoso to Fernandes, 29 August 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ UFSCAR, document 183068, Bastide to Fernandes, 22 August 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ UFSCAR, document 182980, Santos to Fernandes, 26 June 1971.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ UFSCAR, document 188285, Santos to Fernandes, 28 June 1976.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ UFFSCAR, document 188630, Santos to Fernandes, 21 May 1983.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² UFSCAR, document 185798, Andrade to Fernandes, 22 December 1983.</footnote>
Those who were not formally exiled but the facto emarginated faced the dilemma on whether staying in Brazil in ‘very bad conditions’<fnref n="23" /> or leaving, on which Fernandes lengthy corresponded with Cardoso and with his other student and collaborator, sociologist Octavio Ianni (1926-2004). Correspondences by members of the diasporic circuits of Latin American critical scholars to which Fernandes was fully committed (Costa and Soares 2023) expose their common efforts to address the challenges that their countries faced. Brazilian geographer Josué de Castro involved Fernandes in his transnational endeavours<fnref n="24" /> while Mexican sociologist Pablo González Casanova offered collaborations to Fernandes blaming the persecutions against ‘one of the most distinguished Latin American sociologists’,<fnref n="25" /> which affected likewise Ianni and Cardoso.<fnref n="26" /> From Venezuela, Orlando Albornoz announced his expulsion from the University of Caracas due to a ‘witch-hunt’ against political dissidents.<fnref n="27" /> Yet, in North America, Fernandes was disappointed by the sense of ‘uselessness’ that he felt in dealing with people who listened to Brazilian exiles without really understanding them. This also appeared in the bitter sarcasm of some letters that Fernandes received from feminist scholar Heleieth Saffioti, writing from Paris that she was hearing ‘eminent personalities [who] cheekily utter the worst idiocies about Brazil’.<fnref n="28" />

Uncomfortable with Anglo-American academic setups and still watched by Brazilian authorities during his North and South American scholarly journeys,<fnref n="29" /> Fernandes defined his exile experience as ‘making things you do not like to do in places where you do not want to stay’ (Rodrigues 2020, 63). Regardless the recommendations of his exile fellows and the concerns of friends such as Bastide for his own safety,<fnref n="30" /> Fernandes wanted to do something for his country and decided to come back to Brazil in 1972. As there was no space to operate, Fernandes recollected to have spent 1973 and 1974 ‘practically prisoner in [his] house’ until he had the occasion to resume his teaching when, in 1977, he was appointed ‘as a Professor by the PUC/SP [*Pontificia Universidade Católica*]’.

<footnote n="23">²³ UFSCAR, document 181381, Ianni to Fernandes, 26 October 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ UFSCAR, document 18860, Castro to Fernandes, 16 December 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ UFSCAR document 188203, Casanova to Fernandes, 23 August 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ UFSCAR document 181621 Casanova to Fernandes 19 September 1969.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ UFSCAR document 180547 Albornoz to Fernandes, 16 October 1965.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ UFSCAR, document 188106, Saffioti to Fernandes, 1 September 1970.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ SNI 5002371 1/1, 12 September 1972, X Congresso Latino-Americano de Sociologia. Santiago, Chile.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ UFSCAR document 183060, Bastide to Fernandes, 29 November 1971.</footnote>
*de São Paulo]*’ (Venceslau 1991), a private university in which political dissidents could find a
relative tolerance in the late years of the Brazilian dictatorship.

In these circumstances, Fernandes showed again his principled intransigence by rejecting work
offers richly funded by North American foundations, namely the CEBRAP (*Centro Brasileiro de
Análise e Planejamento*), connected with the Ford Foundation. Indeed, he considered
‘unacceptable to place his intelligence at the service of a USA project’ (Cerqueira 2013, 97) given
the support that the USA had given to the 1964 coup (Motta 2023). This way, he took distances
from friends such as Cardoso, one of the Brazilian progressive intellectuals who were attracted by
the sirens of North American foundations that wished to use their skills for enhancing liberal
agendas, which Lidiane Soares Rodrigues considers a clever operation of political influence
(Rodrigues 2020). While Barbara Freitag (2007) identifies more ‘radical’ and more ‘scholarly’
phases in Fernandes’s biography, the sources consulted for this work suggest rather the consistency
of his social engagement, which ceaselessly targeted a socialist transformation of society through
intellectual work. In the late 1970s, Fernandes was still watched by the DOPS, which recorded his
conference in Santos in 1978, in a gathering discussing ‘Amnesty’ and ‘Black Slavery’,<fnref n="31" /> to give
just an example of the numerous police folders that Fernandes’ ‘subversive’ activities still
nourished. This was also a consequence of his works on racial discrimination as I discuss in the
next section.

3.Shattering Luso-Tropicalism

*A fighting inquiry beyond 'participation'*

A key point of Fernandes’s trajectory was his principled antiracism, especially grounded in the
research project that he carried out with Bastide in the 1950s among São Paulo Afro-descendant
communities, which inspired his further writings on the subject. In the same years, Bastide could
finally left Fernandes ‘master of [his] Chair’<fnref n="32" /> at USP to move to Paris, where he became a leading

<footnote n="31">³¹ Arquivo de Estado de São Paulo, DOPS Santos, Prontuário 3307, 16 June 1978.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² UFSCAR, document 183079, Bastide to Fernandes [1954].</footnote>
figure of the Sixth Section of the *Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes* alongside famous names such as Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and Georges Gurvitch (Merkel 2022). The project was supported by UNESCO, where one of Bastide’s Brazilian acquaintances, Artur Ramos, had suggested to investigate the ‘colour prejudice’ (Maio 1999, 142) in Brazil before his premature death in 1949. Then, research on race contradictions in Brazil was entrusted to Bastide by UNESCO officer Alfred Métraux. The existing literature on this project generally acknowledges that its outcomes were more radical than its premises, based on the substantial belief that Brazil was a sort of racial ‘paradise’ where, as suggested by Freyre, the Portuguese had been more ‘humane’ colonisers than the others.

Miscegenation was then seen as a proof of ‘benevolence’ rather than prevarication or, in the words of Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Flávio Gomes, ‘hierarchy and violence’ (Schwarcz and Gomes 2018, 31). Despite having been Freyre’s French translator, Bastide became increasingly aware of the depth of lasting racial discriminations thanks to his acquaintance with Afro-Brazilian activists such as Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) who promoted the *Teatro Experimental do Negro*, a key step in Black conscientisation in Brazil, alongside the 1950 *Congresso do Negro Brasileiro*. This latter had ‘some impact’ (Maio 1999, 50) on attendees such as Bastide, in inspiring questionings of the optimistic views that circulated on the racial problem in Brazil. According to Ian Merkel, Fernandes considered ‘Freyre’s idyllic world shared by masters and slaves [as] not an exaggeration or a selective interpretation [but as] a lie’ (Merkel 2022, 173).

Hence, the importance of Bastide’s decision to appoint Fernandes as the ‘co-director of the work in the city of São Paulo’ (Maio and Galli 2011, 136). Involving someone who knew marginalised people for personal experience since his childhood was consistent with a method that, in his letters to Fernandes, Bastide defined as: ‘The participant observer, consisting in asking very few questions and letting people talk, to learn known and unknown things through random conversations’.<fnref n="33" /> While this discussion anticipated current concerns to decolonise fieldwork methodologies beyond mere participation (Radcliffe 2022), Merkel highlights the disagreements

<footnote n="33">³³ UFSCAR, document 183020, Bastide to Fernandes, 9 March 1957.</footnote>
that Bastide and Fernandes had during the project, as the French scholar was still conditioned by
his sympathy for the ‘Brazilian solution of racial mixing’ (Merkel 2022, 175), that he considered
as anyway better than the segregationist models then prevailing in the USA and elsewhere.

However, it is worth noting Bastide’s growing criticisms of Freyre’s models witnessed by his
letters to Fernandes in which he took some distance from his own translation of *Casa Grande e
Senzala* [*Masters and Slaves*, the most famous of Freyre’s works],<fnref n="34" /> clarifying his political
purposes of social equality, ‘for justice, against charity [and] paternalism’.<fnref n="35" /> Fernandes’s
recollections clarify how they reached an agreement to settle their initial divergences on whether
to focus more on integration or structural discrimination. They found common ground in working
on an innovative ‘continuum in which the intensity of discrimination could vary from zero to a
maximum of X. White and Black individuals could be placed in this continuum’ (Soares et al.
2022). This is a key and still neglected point of this project, as ideas of continuum and of individual
difference/agency in expressing opinions constitute a powerful alternative to essentialisations,
generalisations and binary or schematic classifications of undifferentiated ‘groups’.

The authors’ methodological explanation contained other innovative points such as their early
critique of quantitative approaches. Although not neglecting statistics, they adopted as main
method ‘direct observation … in workplaces and their surroundings’, based on ‘provocative
discussions’ (B&N 1959, 356), whose original transcriptions survive in Fernandes’s archives in
São Carlos.<fnref n="36" /> They also argued that fieldwork on discrimination could only be successful after
asking questions to both ‘Black and White people’ (B&N, xiv), and included observation of facts
related to daily life in São Paulo. Finally, as Merkel notes: ‘Bastide and Fernandes offered a
powerful sociological critique of Freyre. By insisting on the prevalence of “colour prejudice” and
even discrimination in São Paulo, they rejected Brazil’s self-representation as a racial democracy’
(Merkel 2022, 176). B&N had immediate political impacts, as the authors were congratulated by
Black leading activists who had been mainly approached ‘thanks to Bastide’s prestige’ (Soares et

<footnote n="34">³⁴ UFSCAR, document 182773, Bastide to Fernandes, 13 December 1952.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ UFSCAR, document 18269, Bastide to Fernandes, 26 April 1956.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ UFSCAR, document 184202, Entrevistas sobre relações raciais.</footnote>
al. 2022, 43) and lambasted by those who accused them to ‘introduce the racial problem in Brazil’
(Soares et al. 2022, 39), oddly implying that it was inexistent until that moment.

Fernandes innovated Brazilian sociology also providing an alternative to what Celso Furtado
defined as the model of the ‘sociologists good for mundane salons’.<fnref n="37" /> Since the 1950s, Fernandes
built his own sociological school after early works such as his dissertation on indigenous
Tupinamba histories, which falls outside the scope of this paper but was endorsed by nobody less
than Claude Lévi-Strauss.<fnref n="38" /> Fernandes’s ‘critical and militant sociology’ (Sereza 2014, 341) was
based on activism and voluntaristic political engagement. Scholars highlight that research
operations for B&N were agreed with ‘Black representatives’ (Sereza 2014, 342) and with a
‘female commission in charge of analysing the characteristics of colour prejudices in relations to
women’ (B&N, 1959, xiv). This exposes Fernandes’s use of empathy as the result of ‘deep
personal identification with the pain of workers and marginalised people’ (Sereza 2014, 343), and
all those who are subjected to ‘patriarchal domination’ (Sereza 2014, 352). Although matters with
women’s liberation were less visible in B&N than in the side debates that this project stimulated,
recognising the specificities of gender discriminations (Cruz 2018), they will be lengthier
addressed by Bastide editing a work that denounced the double exploitation that Black women
suffered in Latin America (Bastide 1974), which owed much to the B&N project.<fnref n="39" />

Blackness, classist societies and beyond

B&N was coauthored by Bastide and Fernandes, who clarified that the French was responsible for
chapters 3 and 4 on ‘colour prejudice’, and the Brazilian for the remainder, including the last
chapter on the struggles against this prejudice. In his foreword to the second edition, Fernandes
claimed that the outcomes of this work, that many people in Brazil and abroad had considered as
‘dangerous’, were being confirmed by ‘research ongoing in Southern Brazil’ (B&N, x) by Cardoso
and Ianni (Cardoso and Ianni 1960). These scholars confirmed how still widespread were ideas
that one could ‘maintain Black people in servile positions without running into moral blame’

<footnote n="37">³⁷ UFSCAR, document 180764, Furtado to Fernandes [1967].</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ UFSCAR, document 182714, Lévi-Strauss to Fernandes, 9 December 1952.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ UFSCAR, document 183061, Bastide to Fernandes, 10 November 1971.</footnote>
(B&N, x) due to the alleged benign nature of the social relations that had been traditionally established in Brazil. Fernandes’s key argument was instead that the new world ‘rising from the new egalitarian social order established with the Abolition [1888] and the Republic [1889]’ (B&N, x) still had to materialise after more than six decades. Hence, the need for a Second Abolition.

The authors of B&N were aware of the importance of geography and space while adopting what they defined an ‘ecologic method, based on the systematic study of neighbourhoods and cortiços’ (B&N, xiv) and all spaces and places of daily life to seize race and class divisions at different scales. This method implied seizing the very dynamisms of these spaces, as alongside the poorest areas they detected ‘some suburbs in which a middle class tends to slowly emerge over a lower class’ (B&N, xiv). They tried to make sense of the complex and changing relations of intersected class and race discrimination, which were likewise spatialised as the major ‘concentration of Black population’ (B&N, xv) was in the most disfavoured slums. Yet, as noted above, Brazil did not experience the same kind of spatial racial segregation as North America. On the one hand: ‘In the poor neighbourhoods, where the Whites live in promiscuity with the Blacks, there is such a mixture that any prejudice would be ridiculous. On our visits ... we had the opportunity to verify it: children play together, adults’ disputes are inexistent’ (B&N, 183). On the other, racial discrimination resurfaced in workplaces and spaces of public sociability, revealing the pervasiveness of race prejudices. Importantly, for Fernandes, these were at the same time a matter of class and a matter independent from class in changing times, places and contexts.

Fernandes’s first chapter started with a historical discussion on the continuity between colonial relations during the Portuguese domination and his day’s discriminations. He addressed the specificities of São Paulo’s urban industrial economy, which after formal abolition ‘favoured European immigrants and very rarely freed Black and Mixed-Race people’ (B&N, 40). In his critique of legal Abolition, Fernandes stressed the decisive role of subaltern agency and insurgence, noting that abolitionism, initially limited to intellectual circles, prompted ‘decisive actions in overthrowing the ruling regime’ (B&N, 46) when it affected the slaves’ *senzalas*. Hence,
the slavery plantation system as it characterised the Luso-tropical world in the modern epoch
(Wolford 2021) was already disorganised in 1888.

Yet, the very Abolition Law still protected the oppressors rather than the oppressed, whose
'spoliation' continued in the context of a 'theoretical freedom, without any guarantee' (B&N 1959,
47), including for Afro-descendants who were already formally free before Abolition (Fernandes
1972). Later commentators have nuanced Fernandes's emphasis on the difficulties that the
population of former slaves, hardly trained to enter a 'free' labour marked, encountered before
supposedly more 'competitive' European migrants, noting that most of these latter were not more
skilled (Andrews 1991). However, Fernandes's arguments on the frustrating results of Abolition
remain a powerful denunciation of what he called the failure of the 'bourgeois revolution' in Brazil.
That is, the shift from colonial/aristocratic to liberal/bourgeois rule, which had excluded not only
the industrial proletariat, but indigenous and Afro-descendent communities, which is today
acknowledged as internal colonialism.

As noted above, Fernandes stressed how race discrimination was only a factor, although a central
one, for the needs of a 'colonial economy' (B&N, 78) needing workforce for plantation whatever
could be their origin. For Fernandes, this retrospectively implied the need to morally justify this
situation by inventing some 'natural right' (B&N, 83) grounding white supremacy and later
industrial proletarisation, which transferred 'the tasks formerly carried out by slaves' (B&N 1959,
78) to White migrants. Yet, in São Paulo, racial and social stratifications overlapped and
intersected across complex lines, considering that all possible shades in skin colour produced by
miscegenation were constructed as racial categories in Brazil. These constructs were socially
inserted in a racial hierarchy ranging from 'very dark-skinned' to 'very light-skinned' Mixed-Race
people (*mulatos*), based on supposed scales of progressive whitening (*branqueamento*) associated
with social prestige—the opposite being often associated with shame. Fernandes noted that, at the
time of slavery, these scales did not determine automatically social positions. For instance,
children of enslaved mothers were automatically assigned to the mother's social status as a slave
even if they were 'almost white' (B&N 1959, 81), which generally meant that the father was some
white member of the master's family. Only out of the master's goodwill, and not in all cases, could some of these unrecognised children obtain liberation from slavery at their natural father's death.

This point importantly exposes the authors' position on miscegenation, which they considered as all but a marker of the alleged benevolence of 'good' Iberian colonisers in relation to 'evil' Anglo-Saxons evoked in Luso-tropicalist mythologies. Indeed, they considered this phenomenon as first due to the 'scarcity of white women' (B&N, 87) in early colonisation and to the actual obligation of enslaved women to satisfy the sexual appetites of the master family's males. This social differentiation was again marked by spaces: the *senzala* (slaves' house, near the masters' one) was defined by recollections of elderly slaves interviewed by Fernandes as a 'prison' (B&N, 87). Among the means for repressing slaves' agency, survivors mentioned 'the whip... inhumane labour' (B&N, 90) and practices ranging from separation between 'men and women ... children and mothers, regardless their feelings' (B&N, 97) to 'torture' (B&N, 110). In this far from irenic situation, colour started to be perceived as a double burden for Black and Mixed-Race people, who encountered increasing racial discrimination in addition to and sometimes independently from class subordination.

Thus, despite official post-Abolition attempts to include Afro-descendent people in Brazilian national myths and narratives, widespread racism continued to grow. This resulted in narratives related by Bastide's and Fernandes's interviewees, including all kind of deliria on white 'superiority', not excluded ideas that 'Black people were created by the Devil, not by God' (B&N, 144). Bastide's chapters confirmed that, to seek integration, former slaves had to accept subaltern positions, alongside the paternalist condescendence of Paulista bourgeois society. Bastide also worked in the neighbourhoods of (mostly proletarian) Syrian, Lebanese, Portuguese and Italian immigrants finding that racial prejudices had strong roots also in these groups, although the French scholar noted that this phenomenon was less visible 'in the hovels of the miserable areas' (B&N, 173), where wretched common conditions of life facilitated overtaking the colour barrier between former slaves and poor White migrants. Again, racial prejudices increased as European migrants climbed the social ladder, perceiving Afro-descendants as potential competitors.
As noted above, Bastide importantly acknowledged that these attitudes: ‘Vary from one individual to another, ranging from maximum prejudice to its total absence’ (B&N, 176). Yet, a key outcome of the entire project was that, although racial prejudices were intrinsically linked with slavery, colonialism and class oppression, one could identify ‘a colour prejudice independent from the class one’ (B&N, 178) in the several explicit and implicit colour lines (and related shades) that were well visible in São Paulo. This meant that not only the authors took distances from UNESCO illusions on ‘racial democracy’: they also rejected deterministic economic ideas (Marxist or otherwise) that argued that, eliminating class contradictions, the plague of racism would have automatically disappeared. For them, things were not so easy, as also the final Fernandes’ chapter on perspective antiracist activism demonstrated.

Following Bastide’s historical reconstruction of the post-Abolition attempts to build Black consciousness and activism, Fernandes noted how this increasing conscientisation was inspiring some Black pride among people who were less attracted by social models merely based on ‘looking like White people’ (B&N, 280), as activism suggested ‘feelings of autonomy ...and solidarity among people of the same colour’ (B&N, 288). In the 1950s, after the *Estado Novo* period that repressed all autonomous social movements in Brazil, the 1945-1964 ‘democratic’ window was characterised by reforms including the 1951 Alfonso Arinos Law which formally prohibited racial discrimination in all public places, constituting an important step towards the equality of civil rights for all Brazilians. Yet, Fernandes and Bastide immediately stressed the impossibility to ‘resolve a so complex problem with a so easy mean’ (B&N, 305).

They namely argued that this law would remain of little use if not accompanied by social transformations putting people on effective parity grounds and quoted sceptical comments from representatives of Afro-Brazilian communities who denounced that, after the Arinos Law, nothing had changed in their real life. Some interviewees argued that they still could not protest too vocally, to avoid being ‘considered and punished as Communists’ (B&N, 308). Like in numerous other situations, the presence of the Cold War enemy, that is international Communism, was a good
excuse to assign people to the box of ‘public enemies’ and repress them accordingly. This fully
applied to the ‘colour prejudice’ which, the authors argued, existed independently from the class
prejudices and affected all social classes, although in different degrees and in different ways.

Bastide and Fernades also tried to get international visibility for their work. They lengthily corresponded on Bastide's attempts to publish a French version of B&N with Paris *Présence africaine*, the prestigious journal and publishing house founded by Alioune Diop, which was a centre for international *Négritude* and decolonisation movements in the afterwar. Despite Diop's interest in contributions of Fernandes, Cardoso and Ianni for the journal<fnref n="40" /> and the support of Angolan intellectual and co-founder of anti-colonial MPLA Mário Pinto de Andrade, then Diop's collaborator in Paris, they could not provide the economic guarantees that the publisher requested.<fnref n="41" /> Yet, these attempts showed the insertion of this endeavour in transnational *Négritude* and anticolonial circuits, especially thanks to Bastide's Francophone networks. As for local impacts, one can guess that, for some years, the readers of these voluminous studies were not so numerous, also due to the dictatorship's censorship. However, Fernandes's works acquired more visibility since the 1980s, also thanks to his political commitment as I further discuss below.

**Beyond fieldwork and networking: continuing abolitionist engagements**

After B&N, Fernandes wrote several other texts on racial and social discrimination such as *A integração do Negro na sociedade de classe* (Fernandes 2008 – orig. 1964, one of the few Fernandes’s texts that were translated into English), which introduced a key point in the shift from scholarly analyses to political proposals. These had to start from the rising popularity of models such as the ‘rebel slave’ (Fernandes 2008, 34), which was serving as a powerful drive to inspire wider struggles for social justice. As former slaves ‘were excluded from the modern tendencies of capitalism’s expansion in São Paulo’ (Fernandes 2008, 72), the historical continuity of oppression implied the continuity of insurgency towards a ‘Second Abolition’ that should not be a concession

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ UFSCAR, document 183026, Bastide to Fernandes, 5 June 1964.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ UFSCAR, document 183024, Bastide to Fernandes, 15 July 1956.</footnote>
of the government or of (white) dominating classes, but the result of Afro-descendant people's
'struggle for freedom' (Fernandes 2008, 112) from below.

In these writings, Fernandes returned to the problems lived by 'Black people in the Whites' world'. He highlighted how Brazilian pre- and post-Abolition modernity excluded also destitute White people alongside indigenous and Afro-descendent people. This meant that, 'socially speaking, these people were not White ... and still today are not recognized as such' (Fernandes 1972, 14). This was not in contradiction with the idea that racialisation creates autonomous forms of discrimination, but rather a Fernandes's attempt to seize the complexity of past and present kinds of discrimination and domination in Brazil. These affected the same socio-spatially marginalized social strata from which Fernandes came, which led to Fernandes's questioning of his own 'whiteness'. Indeed, it was not by denying the existence of racial prejudices but only acknowledging the existence of a 'Brazilian racial dilemma' and its 'structural character' (Fernandes 1972, 105), which prefigurated current economic analyses of racial capitalism (Bledsoe et al. 2022) that one could address social inequalities.

Again, theory alone was insufficient: even while enjoying full academic recognition, Fernandes
continued working with activists and public actors engaging with racial problems in Brazil. This
was first shown by his correspondence with Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, an Afro-Brazilian scholar
and politician who was among the inspirers of the reforms mentioned above in the 1950s and was
likewise exiled after 1964. Guerreiro Ramos involved Fernandes in conferences such as the
*Congresso Nacional do Negro* in 1950⁴² and in the activities of the *Instituto Brasileiro de
Economia, Sociologia e Política* (IBESP), created in 1953, in which themes such as ‘socialism’<fnref n="43" />
were explicitly debated. However, Fernandes’s main interlocutor over Second Abolition matters
was arguably Abdias Nascimento, another scholar and activist proscribed by the military
dictatorship and who obtained public responsibilities after the return of ‘democracy’, becoming
the first Afro-Brazilian member of Parliament in the 1980s. According to the available

<footnote n="42">⁴² USFSCAR, document 180826, Guerreiro Ramos to Fernandes, 1 March 1950.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ UFSCAR, document 180827, Guerreiro Ramos to Fernandes, 18 May 1954.</footnote>
correspondence, the acquaintance between the two men started in the hardest years of the
dictatorship, when Nascimento and Fernandes, both exiled, exchanged messages of esteem and
Fernandes served as an academic referee for Nascimento's appointment to Buffalo University.<fnref n="44" />

Likewise interested in receiving news on North American Black movements by other exile
fellows,<fnref n="45" /> Fernandes lengthily discussed matters of Pan-Africanism with Nascimento. In 1974, this
latter wrote from Dar es Salaam, then one of the centres of intellectual decolonisation in Africa
which also welcomed Milton Santos (Ferretti 2020), where he was attending the 6th Pan-African
Congress. Nascimento shared with Fernandes his enthusiasm for this African journey (including
visits to Nigeria and Uganda) where he could 'finally come back to [his] roots, in a happy moment
for African history and the liberation of the entire continent',<fnref n="46" /> probably referring to the decisive
steps towards independence that were being done by former Portuguese colonies. Indeed, the
Mozambican anticolonial party Frelimo had its headquarters in Tanzania.

The emotional aspects of this struggle emerged in the foreword that Fernandes published for a key
Nascimento's work, *O genocidio do negro brasileiro* (2017, orig. 1977) in which, after declaring
that he sided with Nascimento in the 'same struggle', Fernandes sardonically stressed how, while
as a White man he was 'accused of moral and psychological identification with the Blacks',
Nascimento was 'a Black militant, so he cannot be accused by anybody' (Fernandes 2017, 17).
Thus, Fernandes took again personal distance from dominating models of whiteness beyond class-
first and race-first divides, to claim what is deemed today the epistemic plurality and complexity
of the Black field (Bledsoe 2021). If current Black scholarship considers 'within the realm of
possibility' the fact that 'a Black optic, similar to a theory or method, can be adopted—and,
particularly, by non-Black scholars' (Wright et al. 2024, 869), then Fernandes' and Bastide's
experiences can be in that realm. With all possible limits, the case of their voluntaristic
commitment to 'Black' causes opens non-identitarian windows in the anti-racist field.

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ UFSCAR, document 182164, Nascimento to Fernandes, 9 February 1972; document 183181, Nascimento to Fernandes, 20 April 1972.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ UFSCAR, document 181386, Ianni to Fernandes, 18 April 1967.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ UFSCAR, document 182028, Nascimento to Fernandes, 4 July 1974.</footnote>
A key aspect of Nascimento’s proposals was the notion of *Quilombismo*, an appraisal of the insurgent tradition of Brazilian Quilombos, which Nascimento considered as much more than mere groups of fugitive slaves, but as examples of ‘fraternal and free union, solidarity, living together ... a step in human and socio-political progress in terms of economic egalitarianism’ (Nascimento 2019, 264) and an example for a new socialist and cosmopolitan Pan-Africanism. Interested in the epics of Quilombo histories like Bastide, who published a work on ‘Black Americas’ (Bastide 1973) resuming some of Artur Ramos’s intellectual questionings,<fnref n="47" /> Fernandes strongly endorsed the idea of rediscovering ‘the direct action of Quilombos ... the liberation struggle of Black and Mixed-Race people from so many and so varied visible and invisible servitudes’ (Fernandes 2017, 18), that he did not hesitate to define a ‘genocide ... a shocking word for conservatives’ hypocrisy’, to which Abolition ‘failed to put an end’ (Fernandes 2017, 19).

While these elaborations anticipated current scholarship discussing marronage as the ground for wider notions of freedom (Bledsoe 2017; Roberts 2015), in late dictatorship and post-dictatorship years Fernandes collaborated with historian Clovis Moura. One of the first scholars, alongside Correia de Andrade (Ferretti 2019), who inaugurated historical studies on quilombos to rescue an insurgent tradition that had not been taken seriously by both liberal and Marxist historiography, Moura organised the earliest symposia on the famous Quilombo of Palmares, a sort of founding myth for current *quilombola* struggles.<fnref n="48" /> In the 1980s, Fernandes continued to reference his early research with Bastide for building new political agendas on a kind of democracy that he understood as ‘fusion of freedom and equality’ taking inspiration from the struggles of Black people alongside ‘the Indigenous, the pariahs of the land and the half-free super-exploited workers of the cities’ (Fernandes 1989a, 8). Yet, Fernandes bitterly noted how, almost four decades after that enquiry, the real social situation of marginalised and discriminated people had not significantly improved, and racism was far from disappear, even in leftist militant milieus.

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ UFSCAR, document 183068, Bastide to Fernandes, 22 August 1966.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ UFSCAR, document 181622, Moura to Fernandes, 21 October 1985.</footnote>
Back to Brazil in the late years of the dictatorship, Fernandes identified new hopes in the ‘great strike of the ABC [industrial periphery of São Paulo] steelworkers’, which ‘gave the first blows to the dictatorship’ (Venceslau 1991) and saluted the appearance of a disruptive phenomenon in Brazilian politics: the Workers’ Party (PT) and its leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Fernandes maintained an ambivalent relation with the PT. On the one hand, he supported it. On the other, he criticised its attitude to make interclass alliances while he would have preferred a clear class-struggle setup inserted in ‘a tradition that should be either anarchist or Marxist’ (Venceslau 1991). Yet, he accepted (with some reservations) Lula’s invitation to serve as a Member of Parliament since 1986, although Fernandes claimed until his late days that he ‘did never become a MP. [He] remained the same Florestan, doing activities in the Parliament’ and concluded that: ‘I am a socialist, thus I think that we should build a socialist society … to extinguish the factors that hinder the total development of the human being’ (Venceslau 1991).

Brazilian scholarship notes that, in addition to his scholarly work, it is also thanks to Fernandes’s personal presence in the post-dictatorship Constituent Assembly as a Member of Parliament that the Brazilian 1988 Constitution contains ‘a chapter dedicated to Black people’ (Soares et al. 2022, 36). Yet, even as a member of the Constituent Assembly, Fernandes warned on the insufficiency of formal democracy and traditional politics, given that Afro-Brazilians had to ‘make their collective emancipation by themselves’ (Fernandes 1989a, 23) and for themselves. He urged the PT to support social struggles from below rather than merely assuming a function of mediation and representation. Fernandes namely criticised celebrations such as the Abolition Day, commemorating the story of ‘a princess [Isabel] who signed a law extinguishing an institution that was already dead’ (Fernandes 1989a, 55), resulting in ‘anti-abolition’ (Fernandes 1989a, 77) rather than liberation processes.

Conversely, Fernandes deemed very significant that ‘the participation of socialists, communists and anarchists’ (Fernandes 1989a, 96) in the Afro-Brazilian movement was much more visible than some decades earlier, inspiring ‘a revolutionary radicality’ (Fernandes 1989a, 108) in these circuits. At the end, although not really aligned with his principles, his ‘constitutional’ engagement

F. Ferretti, 2025 “Other antiracist geographies: decentred positions of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions”, Environment and Planning D – Society and Space
https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251347805
was likely the most impactful of Fernandes’s political activities and favoured the popularisation
of his ideas. At least formally, the Brazilian Constitution grants the right to land for Afro-
descendent communities whose Quilombos are still fighting for social rights and dignity of
indigenous, racially discriminated and destitute people (Engle and Lixiski 2021; Ferretti 2024).
Yet, the PT is considered by current Brazilian scholarship to have failed in implementing
successful anti-racist policies once in power (Saad-Filho 2021). Racial capitalism is still at work
in Brazil (Ferreira 2022) and Black identities are rather memorialised than effectively taken
seriously (Bledsoe 2015), which renders still delusional the idea of ‘racial democracy’, an easy
slogan that hides a reality of lasting repression and racial and class discriminations. However, this
goes beyond the work of Fernandes, who quitted the Parliament in 1993 and passed away in 1995,
after having been an early critic of the contradictions of his own political field and of the
Constitution’s ‘unfinished business’ (Fernandes 1989b). Fernandes clearly saw the need to
continue fighting Eurocentrism alongside capitalism, a kind of consciousness for which his work
was appreciated by forerunners of decoloniality such as Aníbal Quijano (1996).

These lasting colonial relations and intersections of race and class led Fernandes to resume
historical socialist slogans that he rephrased with subtle humour in forms such as: ‘Proletarians of
all the world’s races, unite!’ (Fernandes 1989a, 12). In his late years, Fernandes continued to
express interest in decolonisation, cognizant of the works of Nascimento and Bastide among
Lusophone Africans who went back to Western Africa after Abolition<fnref n="49" /> and of anticolonial
activists from former Portuguese colonies such as the late Pinto de Andrade, who still wrote to
Fernandes from Mozambique in 1989 discussing decolonisation matters and evoking common
acquaintances such as Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, one of the intellectual heirs of Bastide in
Brazil.<fnref n="50" />

**Conclusion: for decentred antiracist geographies**

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ UFSCAR, document 183035, Bastide to Fernandes 22 August 1958.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ UFSCAR, document 186221, Pinto de Andrade to Fernandes, 10 August 1989.</footnote>
This paper has shown the need for diversifying our intellectual and political references to decentre, decolonise, pluralise and de-essentialise the fields of critical theory, especially anti-racist and decolonial geographies, beyond Anglo-American frameworks. Fernades's self-identification as non-merely a 'White person' in the sense of the oppressive 'whiteness' that characterised Brazilian histories leads to stress the need to avoid categorisations and essentializations of individuals and to also draw on individual agency and voluntarism while thinking of 'alliances', which matches and pushes further recent calls to avoid reductionist or essentialising views of Black Geographies as merely a matter with 'race' (Wright et al. 2024). This implies considering complex positionalities and voluntarism in making defiant intersections of abolitionist scholarly and political approaches to defeat racism, capitalism and patriarchy. That is, what Fernandes called a Second Abolition, starting from historical analyses and acknowledging the need for intersecting strategies of total liberation.

Born to a very destitute family and raised in a proletarian environment, Fernandes experienced personally (as very few 'prestigious' academics can claim to have done) wretched life conditions that facilitated crossing various colour lines and suggested complex approaches to socio-spatial marginalization. While exclusively intellectual work shows clear limits, and the persistence of anti-blackness in Brazil and elsewhere demonstrates that much work needs to be done, Fernandes' voluntarism expressed in an intransigent and principled truthfulness to his class of origin indicates ways to overcome the limits of the academy. In extreme circumstances, he eventually pushed this principledness to the point of losing his academic position instead of simply enjoying the privileges that his social ascension could have granted to him.

This leads to my second main argument: the consistency, or even consubstantiality, of theory and practice, that is exposed by my contextual reading of Fernandes's life, works and networks, is indispensable to understand and substantiate theoretical contributions overtaking at the same time racism and essentialism. These broader intellectual agendas should never lose contact with activism and social realities: for today social theorists, this indicates the need to challenge the Ivory Tower also from outside, to avoid remaining its prisoners.

F. Ferretti, 2025 “Other antiracist geographies: decentred positions of defiant activism, and Second Abolitions”, Environment and Planning D – Society and Space

https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251347805
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