Diasporic identities: Indians, blacks and immigrants

On one hand, it is stated that the crisis of identities marks the end of the twentieth century. On the other, one sees the resurgence of identities as essential principles of personal life and social mobilization in the era of globalization. Instead of stable and well-defined identities, we now see the emergence of multiple unstable identities that often have no defined geographical references. The reinvention of the differences inherent to the globalized era takes place on several levels. Locally, sometimes it is translated by the exacerbation of particularisms of identity. Identity processes marked by hybridisms that are never fully cohesive or uniform, fragmented, discontinuous, unique amalgams of multiple identity spaces arise. There is a clear shift from deterritorialized identities to hybrids of multiterritoriality. Diasporic identities present themselves as a kind of laboratory of postmodern socio-spatial experiences that co-exist alongside the fragility of national states, economic fluidity, and cultural hybridity. Forged diasporic identities in Brazil allow a reinterpretation of Brazilian social and cultural history. The delicate and slick concept of diaspora, considers looking in proceduralist and situational analysis, the agency, involving the african-Brazilian and Amerindian populations. The history of African descent and indigenous Brazilians, seen in this perspective considers the socio-political events, cultural venues, mergers, fissions, the displacements, the starting territories and arrival, the variables that mark the individuals in action before, during and after being integrated to a particular territory, allowing to clarify the conditions of how identities are appropriated and reappropriated by groups that are in diasporic conditions. The imposed diaspora resulting from the processes of colonization and slavery were long seen as part of a single diaspora, the black diaspora. But in Brazil, like the Africans, indigenous people have often seen themselves as a function of the specificity of their contact histories, in a diasporic situation. This is the case, undoubtedly, of the Indians of the NE. Deprived of rights and living in diasporic situation in their own land, the Indians are confined on Indian Reservations, or are in a colonialist manner transformed into squatters or even led to several internal migration. Some migrate to big cities such as the Pankararu of São Paulo, in a clear diasporic identity situation. African Returnees, Afro-Brazilians and Amerindians in Brazil find themselves in occupied land, shaped by the colonial machine that redefined their fates as slaves, assimilated, colonized subject, subordinate, acculturated, debased and exploited. The present course, therefore, intends to approach these different Diasporas and the resulting processes of identity.