Remember the Mapping Stereotypes Project and the Afrographique project? (The former maps popular national stereotypes from around the world, while the latter turns any set of data about the continent into a graphic, including a series of maps.) A reader of this blog points us towards this “map” of stereotypes that’s been circulating online among Brazilians.

Here’s a translation for those who don’t speak Portuguese.

Canada: polar bears
USA: fat people
Central America: Pirates of the Caribbean
South America: llamas, stash, humble people, us (Brazil)
Greenland: Wally’s house
Europe: mustache, pasta, money
Africa: The Clone (Brazilian telenovela), desert, kuduro, “I like to move it” (Madagascar, the movie)
Middle East: Mohamed
Central Asia: bin Laden
China: many people and a lot of rice
India: cows
South East Asia: Rambo
Japan: weird people
Australia: weird animals

* Thanks to Tom for the translation.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.