| In recent years Brazil has expanded its "South-South" engagement with African countries, especially under the presidency of Lula (2003-2010). Many regard Brazil as emerging "donor" that claims to practice development cooperation differently than traditional "donors". It claims to carry out "solidarity cooperation" and to respect the sovereignty of its partners. It emphasizes commonalities with recipient countries (e.g., historical) as a shared basis for cooperation. Using qualitative methods, including four months of ethnographic fieldwork at the newly created federal University of International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (Unilab), as a particular instantiation of Brazilian South-South Cooperation, this dissertation explores how the official rhetoric is put into practice.;The findings are twofold: first, they show that Unilab founders rely on discourses of solidarity, history and integration to justify the creation of the university. These discourses create an image of a supposedly dialogical and mutually beneficial relationship across a historically and developmentally homogenous community of Portuguese-speaking countries and people. This allows the Brazilian government to reconcile conflicting domestic demands and foreign policy interests, but constructs "Africa" as "underdeveloped" and "historical" other. Second, the everyday making of Unilab, through university policies, structures and routines, is shaped by competing and often contradictory interpretations of these discourses. In addition, Unilab actors are positioned differently. Many of them struggle against shifting yet dominating Brazil-centered conceptualizations of Unilab. They form political alliances (professors) and social networks (students) along these different positions to increase their capacity to influence institutional directions and deal with the consequences they produce.;Taken together, the discursive constructions and positioned struggles result in the realities of Unilab-in-practice for African students and professors, which reflect more the socioeconomic and sociopolitical inequalities of the powerfully racialized class hierarchies prevalent in Brazilian society than Unilab's (and Brazilian South-South Cooperation model's) proclaimed solidarity cooperation. Over time, Unilab increasingly serves Brazilian (domestic) interests and sidelines the South-South Cooperation objectives. This reduces "Africa" (and Unilab's African professors and students) to icons of Brazil's internal conflicts over state approaches to race, rather than to foster the kinds of dialogical relationships and the sort of solidarity it claims to provide. |
