Jhader Cerqueira do Carmo is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the University of Brasília (Brazil) and Vinícius Venancio is a substitute professor of Anthropology at the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil). Together, they share their experiences of teaching and translating articles on race and international relations at the University of Brasília, and they introduce the Laboratory of Afrocentric Studies in International Relations (LACRI) project.
“Vou aprender a ler para ensinar meus camaradas.”
Language and culture, in all parts, shape how we see ourselves, others, the context we live in, and the world outside the window. As children we learn our mother-tongue, thereby also learning about our culture, which helps us make sense of our environment. As we grow older, maintaining a connection with a foreign language and its culture may help us engage with different ways of understanding the world. People who speak multiple languages will tend to notice and describe reality in new and unique ways, making it their own and enabling them to share their perspectives through translation.
Translation as a Bridge: Navigating Identity, Differences, and Connections
Translation can serve as a bridge to connect peoples and places, as it is about identity and the dynamics of differences – the link between ourselves and others; between me and you. It is a necessary step not only to get a broader understanding of the world and others, but to also understand oneself.
Language use changes and develops over time and language is often shaped by politics, social or interpersonal contexts, as well as by power structures. For example, since the Middle Ages, several different linguistic standards from Arabic have tried to unify and find common ground as the Pan-Arab world’s official language. In modern times, history says that the European diplomacy system became formalised through French. But as the British Empire grew, and later the United States gained ascendancy as a worldwide power, English became the most globally recognised language.
Challenging the Eurocentric Foundations in International Relations Theory
There has been ongoing debate around International Relations (IR) as a discipline, and its roots and inheritance from European, and Anglo-Saxon ways of reasoning and thinking. This has both produced and reinforced how IR defines and understands the world, using its own language and methods to determine what counts as ‘International’ and what (or who) should exist in that framework. In other words, what type of ethic is applied if an event concerning peoples and countries looks a certain way or are in a certain environment – determined by an identity (self) or a difference (other) through the lens of International Relations shaped by European-English personification. For example, such uneven treatment determines whose lives will be protected, and who’s will not, as in Atlantic slavery, wars and the lack of international intervention – as current and ongoing genocides have shown.
These principles are often reinforced when IR becomes International Relations Theory (IRT). IRT epistemology was built on an ambiguous notion of being a global ‘science’ of ‘high’ politics, creating spaces of inclusion, marginalisation and exclusion. In reality and practice, the mainstream theories in international studies have focused on a very small part of the world, while the larger portion of the world has been undervalued, denied and erased.
Rethinking Academic English for Specific Purposes (ESP)
It is not only in the IR ‘science’, but also in the production of ‘theoretical, formal, academic, and scientific’ knowledge in the West that follows such a pattern which is reflective of European and US-American identities. This portrayal is white, upper-middle class, cisgender, male, heteronormative, and formally educated. Within this context, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (which encompasses methods of teaching, learning, and speaking English that is different from school English, for instance, informal English, African-American English (AAE), and EGP (English for General Purposes, usually first taught to non-English speakers)) has become a lingua franca to speak, and in many cases, knowing English increases your chances of being heard in the academic world.
ESP was a product of Western internationalisation of science, trade and technology, when communication within specific groups or areas required more complex and specialised vocabulary.
However, this linguistic specialisation tends to enforce gatekeeping and contributes to global inequalities. It reflects and reproduces what the US-American sociologist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1925) termed as the ‘global colour line’, a white supremacist structure which divides the world based on a racial-ethnic hierarchy. Even in contemporary global politics, non-white populations and countries live in ‘shadows’ of imperial and colonial powers, as these historical frameworks still continue to shape the world and its institutions.
What is LACRI?
At the Universidade de Brasília (University of Brasília, Brazil), LACRI (an acronym for Laboratório de Estudos Afrocentrados em Relações Internacionais – Laboratory of Afrocentric Studies in IR) advocates for a human rights and social justice mandate in racial analysis as another way of experiencing and understanding the IR landscape, primarily from a non-white perspective.
LACRI is dedicated to retelling stories that reflect our identity as non-white internationalists. This is mainly by providing a safe and caring space for non-white undergraduate students who have just started at university. We, as early-career young scholars, joined forces on this project to provide some literature on race, racism, and blackness in IR. This included a lecture in an undergraduate elective course on Race, African Diaspora and IR, as well as organising debates, workshops and seminars.
LACRI’s logo is a Sankofa, which portrays a traditional sign of the Akan people (from Western Africa). This symbol can appear as a winged animal, usually a bird, with its toes pointing forward and its head looking backward as it would catch an egg on its backbones.This image expresses the act of living in the present by looking at the past, thereby learning from our ancestors in order to gaze into the future. The word ‘Sankofa’ can be translated as ‘going back to the past to retell the present and to build the future’.
We worked for free, facing this ‘giant elephant in the room’ in confronting the unspoken but ever-present challenge: there being a high expectation that you have to show up knowing how to speak English right away on any IR course in order to understand most of the content and to discuss in the classroom. So, under LACRI’s mandate, we began to translate essential papers on race, racism and IR into Brazilian Portuguese.
We believed that these translations should remain contextual and transcultural above all, instead of being just faithful to the original texts (as authors and other pre-eminent postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Spivak, Sonia Alvarez, Claudia Lima Costa and Patricia Hill Collins have argued). To achieve this, we invited the students to learn more about the authors’ biographical background, and the historical contexts in which the original articles were produced.
In addition to having a good foreign language proficiency, translation requires a deep knowledge and understanding of what is being translated. Translation is also about trying to build bridges between spoken and written language, between what people say, and what we hear, and between what we write and what others understand from what we have written. To do this, we have to think globally and correctionally. Translation, in this context, serves as cultural translocation, creating a collective space where personal experience meets international contexts. By translating essential texts about race, racism and IR, into Brazilian Portuguese, LACRI students (who are mostly non-white) could begin to think and engage more fully with the discipline’s main theoretical and socio-political problems. By viewing these topics through a racial lens, and resorting to non-white Brazilian references (often dismissed as non-IR work), students began to feel empowered in their career as internationalists.
Through this process of making connections, the students are contributing to international relations’ raw material. While translating the texts, individuals were able to clearly recognise the power imbalances in access to education, and within the IR field and world politics.
This mode of translating also resulted in our own identity building as non-white internationalists. On reading each paper, we would discuss how essential racial analysis was to empirical research in International Relations Theory (IRT).
We Began to See Ourselves in the Texts
This recognition was not only deeply connected to our international positionally, but also to our interconnected personal experiences – thus, we began to see ourselves in these texts. You can see the full list of LACRI/UnB’s translated texts in this document and read about the original translation project (Translations in Race and International Relations) on this website. Some papers played a vital role at this collective experience, like: Your Work Is Not International Relations by Amal Abu-Bakare, From the Everyday to IR: In Defence of the Strategic Use of the R-word by Olivia Rutazibwa, and the paper, Race and racism in international relations: retrieving a scholarly inheritance by Robbie Shilliam (and many others who wrote that piece collectively).
By thinking globally and inter-connectedly, we made several updates and linguistic conversions, by writing in footnotes on names, places and institutions that either do not exist anymore, or did not have the ‘right’, or do not have direct equivalents in Brazilian Portuguese for reflecting our ways of experiencing the world. We could brief you with many cases of how that process came into fruition, as each writing shows a particular subjectivity, and so does every translation.
A good example of this is with Worlds of Colour (1925) by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois which was particularly challenging. In Brazil, he is better known as a prominent Black sociologist. Nevertheless, we came to an emancipating comprehension that he was actually an US African-American internationalist who spent much of his life travelling across the world. Having experienced two world wars, his writings, such as Worlds of Colour, deeply touch relations between American states across different eras. This piece could serve as an introductory reference to IR.
Similarly, references by political scientist Sankaran Krishina (for example in Race and Amnesia and the Education of International Relations) who often include Hindi discussions in their writings, were also demanding tasks. International relations theorist and law expert, Siba Grovogui encouraged us to draw connections between the likely experiences of an African person in an Indian context by being considered an untouchable/Dalit person (as Siba’s father would say) to the feeling of being called out as a ‘preto’ in the Brazilian Portuguese linguistic context. ‘Preto’, refers to dark skin Black people in Brazil, but can also be used as a racist slur.
This process is captured by the term ‘norm against noticing’, which describes how social institutions work through implicit means, producing material outcomes which make people’s oppression invisible. It creates an atmosphere which discourages people from questioning and denouncing (racial, gender, class) prejudice, because any differences will be ultimately denied or dismissed.
In his paper, ’The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’ political scientist Robert Vitalis quotes US-American novelist Toni Morrison’s ‘norm against noticing’ (from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, her literary criticism work published in 1992). At first, we found it familiar. In her books, Toni challenges societal norms, particularly those related to race, gender, and sexuality. Robert referenced her term to criticise the pragmatic and systematic erasure of African-American presence in the US international relations history.
According to Robert Vitalis, IR discipline was conceived as ‘colour blind’ to race. In our discussions at LACRI, we as non-white Brazilians recognise the phenomenon as being the same as us experiencing ‘racismo por denegação’ or ‘racismo à brasileira’ (denial racism or Brazilian racism), a concept introduced by Lélia Gonzalez – a Brazilian Black feminist and intellectual.
Translating Race in IR: Our Collective Journey to Empowerment
The students at LACRI embraced this literature on race and racism in IR, using it to produce original analysis and insights. Some critics might say we took a conservative position in terms of retrieving or revisiting IR’s English language inheritance. However, in our experience, the endeavour has been important in changing and shifting mindsets on racial studies in IR, moving beyond being seen as only an elective part of an IRT curriculum, or even something new to the discipline, or even more problematically, as being only a ‘Negro problem’. These translations are part of a collective effort to retell the story of IR through a different linguistic and conceptual lens.
In the opening quote of this blog, we referenced the lyrics from a song named Massemba, written by Brazilian artist, Roberto Mendes. The lyrics say, “I am going to learn how to read so I can teach my buddies”. The song’s title ‘Massemba, comes from Kimbundu, a Central African language which influenced the formation of Brazilian Portuguese. It means ‘umbigada’ (belly button blow), a dance in which people press their bellies together showing collective unity and strength.
Through our work at LACRI and by reflecting on these lyrics, we are highlighting and demonstrating how access to education, through the translation and transcultural method, represents a collective project for non-white communities in Brazil. From this perspective, intellectual self-emancipation becomes a way to ensure that knowledge is accessible to all: to me, to you, and to everyone.
This piece was requested by the Global Souths Hub team after hearing Jhader’s and Vinícius’ presentation at the British International Studies Association (BISA) 2025 virtual conference.
About Jhader Cerqueira do Carmo
Jhader Cerqueira do Carmo is a PhD candidate in International Relations at Universidade de Brasília (Brazil). He holds an MSc in International Relations (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil) and a Bachelor degree in Foreign Languages Applied to International Negotiations (Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Ilhéus, Brazil). He was a scholarship holder (2016-2018) at the Erasmus Mundus Gender and Women’s Studies consortium (GEMMA), at Universidad de Granada (Spain) and Università di Bologna (Italy). He is interested in topics such as IRT, identity/difference, gender, other-feminisms, race/racism, subaltern studies, development, translation and narratology. He worked as an Assistant Coordinator in LACRI/UnB.
About Vinícius Venancio
Vinícius Venancio holds a PhD (2024) in Social Anthropology from the University of Brasília. He is currently a substitute professor of Anthropology at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Federal University of Goiás (FCS/UFG). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in 2024. His current research focuses on racial vernaculars and female migration between Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.
