The help, unscripted: constructing the black revolutionary domestic in Afro-Brazilian media

This essay examines the representations of domestic workers in two sites of Afro-Brazilian media production, Race Magazine (Revista Raca) and the Dandaras radio program. Both the magazine and the radio show are made exclusively to represent black culture, social issues, and histories. In examining their coverage of Afro-Brazilian domestic workers, I argue that both vehicles create images of black revolutionary domestics by employing representational strategies to endow domestic workers with interiority and convey their subjectivity outside of the labels and assumptions of mainstream public culture, which positions black domestic workers as protagonists and agents of their own lives.