This talk examines the most famous Brazilian rap group Racionais Mc’s artistic production in order to explore their poetically crafted understanding of how people of African descent experience and negotiate their existence in Brazil.

This talk is a part of "Perspectivas Modernas: Latin America," a series co-sponsored by the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC), the UNM Department of History, the UNM Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII), and the UNM Center for the Southwest.

Paulo Dutra is the author of a short story collection Aversão oficial: resumida (2018) and of a poetry collection Ablliterações (2019, semifinalist in the 2020 Oceanos Prize). He specializes in the intersections of race and artistic and cultural production in Luso-Brazilian/ Latin-American context. His scholarly work on Don Quijote, race in Machado de Assis’s works, and Racionais Mc’s’s rap music has appeared in journals and book chapters in Brazil,Argentina and the United States.