Blessed Anastacia

In an innovative anthropological account Burdick examines how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of black identity.
This text describes how popular Christianity confronts everyday racism and contributes to the formation of racial identity. Most explanations of the weakness of Brazil's black movement focus on Brazilian blacks' weak ethnic identity. John Burdick challenges this view by revealing, after three years of field research and a hundred in-depth interviews, the multi-layered reality of black consciousness in popular Christianity. Burdick looks at how religious practices, race consciousness and collective political action interact in urban Brazil.