Description:

Throughout the academic year, the Center for Latinx Digital Media invites you to a series of weekly seminars held over Zoom on Thursdays. You can now register (click here) to the next seminar of the Fall 2021 quarter, happening next Thursday, October 21 at 12-1 PM US CT. Professor Mauro P. Porto (Tulane University) will give a presentation entitled “Whiteness and the rise of the far right in Brazil: Affirmative action and middle-class backlash in the newsmagazine Veja.”

Abstract: The presentation analyzes news coverage of Affirmative Action in higher education (or racial quotas) by the magazine Veja, Brazil’s leading print media outlet, from 2006 to 2012. The presentation analyzes how Veja adopted whiteness as an ideological perspective, disseminating resentment about racial quotas among its readers. Such resentment contributed to establish a status panic in the overwhelmingly white middle class, which in turn played a significant role in the rise of the far-right in Brazil.

Mauro Porto is Associate Professor of Communication at Tulane University. He studies political communication and is the author of Media Power and Democratization in Brazil: TV Globo and the Dilemmas of Political Accountability (Routledge, 2012). Porto is currently working on a book about the media and the rise of the far-right in Brazil.

This event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, the Center for Global Culture and Communication, the Department of Communication Studies, the Department of Radio/Television/Film, the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, and the Latina and Latino Studies Program.