Du Bois Visiting Scholar Lecture: Heitor Guimarães
Du Bois Visiting Scholar Lecture: Heitor Guimarães In-Person
"Dark Labor in the Amazon: a Du Boisian analysis of modern slavery under Volkswagen in Brazil (1974-1986)"
In his Black Reconstruction, Du Bois described the bonded forms of work performed by non-white people around the world as a "dark and vast sea of human labor". In this talk, I build on Du Bois's framework to propose the concept of dark labor as an analytical device for making sense of the unfree, socially invisible forms of labor that underlie capitalist society. In order to demonstrate the dialectical entanglement between dark labor and free labor in capitalist wealth production, I offer an account of how these two were imbricated in the slavery-like regime practiced by Volkswagen in its cattle ranch in Pará, Brazil, between 1974 and 1986 in the wake of the Brazilian authoritarian project to occupy the Amazon rainforest.
Bio:
Heitor Guimarães is a Fall 2025 Visiting Scholar in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies in UMass Amherst and a Master 's student in the Philosophy Department of the State University of Campinas in Brazil.
Location: W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Floor 22, Room 2220, Du Bois Center
- Date:
- Thursday, December 4, 2025
- Time:
- 12:00pm - 1:00pm
- Time Zone:
- Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
- Location:
- W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Room 2220 (Floor 22)
- Audience:
- Alumni Faculty General Public Graduate Students Library Donors Staff Undergraduates
- Categories:
- Lectures W. E. B. Du Bois Center
