SPPO graduate student, Henrique Yagui Takahasi, has been awarded a Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme Graduate Team Fellowship for the year 2021-2022. 

Henrique will be using the fellowship to work on his project, Racial Entanglements: Orientalism & Anti-Blackness in Brazil. The project explores the social tensions between two racialized communities in Brazil -- the Black and the Asian. This relationship is presented through the process of extinction of the Afro-Brazilian memory in the "Bairro da Liberdade" São Paulo city. The region's name "Liberdade" occurred after Francisco José das Chagas's (Chaguinhas) execution, an Afro-Brazilian soldier, in a public plaza in 1821. As a consequence of his martyrdom, he became the symbol of Afro-Brazilian resistance against the colonial presence in that region. The first wave of Asian immigrants arrived at Bairro da Liberdade in 1912 -- nearly a century after Chaguinha's execution. With the arrival of more Asian immigrants, this area would be denominated by the city administration as the "Oriental Neighborhood," comprising the world's largest community of ethnic Japanese outside of Japan. In 2018, the former state governor Márcio França, allied with the Asian business elites of the region, decreed a law stating that the name of the neighborhood's subway station would change from "Liberdade" to "Japão-Liberdade”. This symbolic act illustrates the importance of researching this region's construction of the neighborhood's identity and memory through the convergence and shared histories between Black and Asian communities. 

The Graduate Team Fellowship program brings together eight graduate students from across the College of Arts and Sciences whose projects match with the focus area for that year (Extinction/Imagination in AY21-22) and awards each student a year-long fellowship. The program provides an opportunity for the fellows to gain valuable cross-disciplinary mentorship and to identify and apply for additional sources of extramural support as their scholarship develops.

The Department would like to congratulate Henrique on this wonderful recognition!