Negotiating essentialised cultural and gendered differences in a global world: brazilians in London

Abstract

In the last decades, transnational scholars have analysed the role of social ties in producing connections linking people in different places of the world within a context of intense mobility of people and goods in the so-called ‘mobile era’. In discussions of ethnicity, nationality and the formation of ‘ethnic community’ abroad, transnational studies, nevertheless, often far too easily celebrate the ‘ethnic commonality’ constituting ties of affinity based on shared cultural experience. Yet, there is a lack of understanding of the transnationalist migratory experience in relation to colonial legacies and to the multiple distinctions existing among and between migrants. In this article I contribute to the discussion on transnational experience by demonstrating how Brazilians in London are constantly resignifying and negotiating essentialised and stigmatised representations of cultural differences, intersected with gender and ‘race’, when speaking about and interacting with each other as well to western European/British people. The findings are result of a mixed methods approach, which combines ethnography in places of leisure frequented by Brazilians in London, generated over 18 months (from July 2013 to January 2015), as well as 33 in-depth interviews with Brazilians in London.