On this episode James talks with Erica Lorraine Williams, Assistant Professor at Spelman College and author of 'Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements.' They discuss Erica’s book, which explores how Brazil’s sex tourism industry affects Afro-Brazilian women’s lives in the Brazilian state of Bahia. They also look more broadly at how Afro-Brazilian women have been impacted by the election of president Jair Balsanaro, and the ways they have organized to resist this current regime.

You can learn more about Erica's book here: [https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/67nsg8gz9780252037931.html]

How Black Feminists Activists Are Resisting Brazil’s Conservative Turn

Billy-Ray Belcourt & Lehua M. Taitano in conversation, moderated by Afri-Indigenous Poet & CRG Research Scholar of the Arts & Humanities Initiative, Alan Pelaez Lopez

How can poetry interrupt settler futures? How do we honor indigiqueer loneliness? What does an indigiqueer future look like?

Billy-Ray Belcourt (he/him) is a writer and academic from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a Ph.D. candidate and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Department of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford and Wadham College. In the First Nations Youth category, Belcourt was awarded a 2019 Indspire Award, the highest honor the Indigenous community bestows on its own leaders.

Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island(WordTech Editions) and A Bell Made of Stones (TinFish Press). Her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two recent chapbooks of poetry and visual art: Sonoma (Dropleaf Press) and Capacity (a Hawai’i Review e-chap).

Indigiqueer Futures

The Center for Race and Gender (CRG) is an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley that fosters explorations of race, gender, and their intersections.

Indigiqueer Futures

Center for Race & Gender

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