The image of Escrava Anastacia is a powerful one. The young girl’s blue eyes stare like sentinels from behind a gold face mask, one that clings to her head and covers her mouth like a muzzle. A gold collar coils around her throat.
Religion preserved the black identity in Brazil. In a country dominated by slavery — with about 4 million Africans imported to the nation by the 19th century — Rachel Elizabeth Harding said it was the birth of Afro-Brazilian religions in a time of dehumanization and oppression that helped blacks in Brazil keep hold of their traditions and their sense of self.
Burdick, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University, will examine devotions to and meanings of Anastacia, as well as what continues to be deep racial inequality in Brazil, in a lecture titled “Racial Inequality and Religious Belief in Brazil: The Mysterious Case of Slave Anastacia” at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy.
Standing under a photograph that he took of a shirtless, 15-year-old street kid high on industrial glue, National Geographic photographer Tyrone Turner recalled the destitution that he encountered while photographing the lives of “glue kids” in northeastern Brazil in the late 1990s.
At 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater, award-winning National Geographic photographer Tyrone Turner will begin this week’s theme of “Brazil: A Rising Superpower” by looking back on his journey through Brazil with photos that not only show the beauty throughout the South American country, but also its history from the people on whose backs it was built.
The phrase “black theology” appeared in the national conversation during the 2008 presidential race, when a video clip of President Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, began to circulate. The video showed Wright delivering a sermon to his congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, at one point shouting “God damn America.” What resulted was a barrage of attacks on the would-be president and his pastor.
“For those who were beginning to open themselves up to the idea of a President Obama, this strange black theology and this barely understood black church was most unwelcome in the new post-racial America some believed had suddenly emerged,” said the Rev. Raphael Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
The Chautauquan Daily 