The Laws of Image-Nation: Brazilian Racial Tropes and the Shadows of the Slave Quarters (original) (raw)
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Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 2020
In this article, we intend to talk about the representation of black people in Brazilian cinema, pointing out how hegemonic images of Brazilian cinema corroborate the structural racism of our society, analyzing films (and other visual narratives) from the 2000s, a period considered the "Resumption of Brazilian Cinema". Cinema produced by black directors emerges as counter-narratives, deepening the way in which Brazilian cinema represents the racial issue in Brazil in a stereotyped way. To think about this structural racism in the field of cinema we will deepen the concept of racial anthropophagy (Amparo, 2018; Paixão, 2015) a kind of aesthetic of the flesh, in which the image of the "other" (the black or black) is appropriate and devoured in the name of art. We will also seek to dialogue with black feminism in Brazil, emphasizing the specificity of this field and discussing image production around black women in Brazil.
Deconstructing invisibility: race and politics of visual culture in Brazil
African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal / Vol. 3, No. 2, July 2010, 137146, 2010
This paper aims to discuss race relations and power-building in Brazil. It is well known that the Iberian colonizers developed special ways of imposing their supremacy, dissimulating the skin color standards to provoke some type of beliefs about shade stratification among African descendents, indigenous and mixed-race people. For the first time in South America there are deconstructive projects of that colonial paradigm still alive and strongly embedded in the media landscape. However, new identity politics and attitudes have been emerging amidst this old social cognition. This paper will discuss some speculative thoughts and power-building scenarios on new representations and struggles derived from these lived forms that are emerging in the new racial formations in Latin America. The question is: what will nation-building in the midst of this changing imagery be like? This paper proposes that a civic pedagogy is the only answer to rendering this phenomenon visible.
Fetishes and Monuments: Afro‐Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century by Roger Sansi
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2008
have been redefined as territories of Afro-Brazilian culture, semi-public spaces becoming places of mediation through which the axé (power, vital force) is transformed into a 'cultural value'. He insists that objects of cultural value must be known, seen, and reproduced, but in Candomblé you are not allowed to see or depict these objects. The question, therefore, is how to transform secret values into cultural values so that they become public. Sansi defines this process as the outcome of extended interaction between intellectuals and Candomblé leaders during the course of a century. Anthropologists, writers, and painters, some of whom became practitioners (and vice versa), combined the changing attitudes of both those in power and practitioners, including a definite hierarchy in which Candomblé Ketu is the accepted model, emphasizing its 'pure African' cults, while all other manifestations are neglected or even rejected. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on modern art and Afro-Brazilian culture. During the Vargas regime's search for nationalism, 'progress' and an 'authentic' Brazilian culture emerged. The popular became exotic and was given a political role. During the dictatorship, artistic elites were recognized and acknowledged as representing Afro-Brazilian art, corresponding to the accepted Candomblé houses. All others were considered as mere 'popular' artists who created works for tourists. Sansi stresses the contradiction between the innovations of contemporary modern art and the standard, hierarchic, 'traditional' concept of Afro-Brazilian art. The Orixás of Tororó exemplifies the complexity of these changes. This is a public monument, the purpose of which was to glorify African-Brazilian culture but at the same time symbolize the secret world of the orixás and the axé. Pentecostals' recent attacks see the monument and Candomblé as fetishism, the devil's work, and attempt to shake the perception of Candomblé as symbolizing national identity. The concluding chapter, 'Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian culture', claims that while Candomblé has now attained official recognition, religious people who once were its practitioners dispute its credibility when they turn to Protestantism. Sansi concludes that the Afro-Brazilian cultural renaissance is characterized by the 'objectification of new, unprecedented cultural values attached to objects' (p. 188). Values have changed and will continue to change, opening a route to new conflicts and transformations of values. Book reviews 175
The Journal of Pan African Studies, 2012
This article explores the works of writers who are innovative and traditional at the same time with a keen eye on the "universal" to reach towards humanism via Paulo Colina, Salgado Maranhão, and Márcio Barbosa. Hence, their comparative commonality within the trope of "interfacial archetypes" is conceived since all these cultural producers choose the urban setting for their imaginative works even when their subject matter transcends a fixed setting and includes a traditional or rural setting. The choice between the urban and the rural is a false option for the exigency of modernity and postmodernity demands that even the "rural" become subject to the critique of "primitivism" and "exoticism" that is usually associated with subaltern and indigenous societies. The very urban nature of slavery in Brazil especially in the geo-economics and politics of Coffee in São Paulo, Sugarcane in the Northeast, and Gold in Minas Gerais, ensured the post-emancipation location of African descendants in the urban areas. Even with the effects of labor migration from "arid" to "greener" pastures, such as from the Northeast to the South, did not have a significant economic reconfiguration or betterment of life as these "migrant populations" were contained within a space that is now known as favela [Slum]-a space that may be seen as both private and public. Within this shifting space and location, African cultures and religions survived in Brazil to the extent that the relics take on their own identity with universal ethos-hence the interfacial connections between the ancestral, the urban, and the human condition. This essay was originally part of the book, Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy (2009) which partly explains the 1987-2003 references, the period wherein Afro-Brazilian cultural production was at its best due to the centennial celebration of the abolition of slavery (1888) in Brazil in 1988 that allowed Afro-Brazilian artistic and cultural production to flourish.
"Look, Blackness in Brazil: disrupting the grotesquerie of Racial representation..."
This article experiments with collage to explore the visual representation of blacks and blackness in Brazilian media, popular culture and politics, examining how these representations constitute statements regarding dynamics of racial domination. The work proposes that the introduction of disruptive elements into the very images that objectify the black body could create the necessary conditions for a valuable criticism of how blacks and blackness are disposed within the nation's formation. The articulation with black studies in visual culture and performance, black feminism, African diaspora and post-colonial theories intends to develop analytical frames to examine the interconnection between the representational process of 'stereotyping', symbolic violence and anti-black ideologies in the context of the national formation narratives. Methodologically, the articulation of these fields of inquiry intends to provide tools able to highlight and disrupt the regimes of racial representation circulating in Brazilian popular culture.
Racism and Racial Surveillance. Modernity Matters, 2021
There is no physical violence that is not accompanied by symbolic violence. Studying the history of Afro-Brazilian art requires entangling yourself in centuries-old continuums of histories of symbolic and physical violence. It also provides a chance to clearly discern not only the “dialectic of coloni- zation,” which São Paulo playwright and theatre director José Fernando Peixoto de Azevedo mentions in the epigraph, but also the very “dialectic of enlightenment,” which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sought to describe as Europe burned in flames in the first half of the 1940s (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1986). The history of Brazilian Afro-descendant Black art is a history that involves traumatic repetitions of violence that were often glossed over as “conquests of civilisation.” In this history, science, aca- demia and the entire cultural field are presented as a structural part of the colonial system.
Our Ghosts Have Come to Collect: Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Brazilian Art
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This text expands, deepens and comments on the essay "As Práticas Artísticas Contemporâneas no Contexto Ibero-Americano e o Pensamento Pós-Colonial e Decolonial" (Contemporary Artistic Practices in the Ibero-American Context and Postcolonial and Decolonial Thought; Sales & Cabrera, 2020), where we comment on the work of the artists Yonamine, Grada Kilomba, Jota Mombaça, and Daniela Ortiz. In the text cited, we work on the problematic discussion around the emergence of a field of thought called "post-colonial" and a decolonial project and how poetic practices interested in the discussion around the colonial legacy are configured in the Ibero-American space. From a historical approach, we try to understand how postcolonial studies produce influence in Brazil and the decolonial turn and thought consolidated in Latin America to understand how to produce responses from the Brazilian art field to decolonization issues. In postcolonial studies and the decolonial project, the decolonization of art is related to the questioning of a Eurocentric thought matrix from its racialized and subalternized world representation schemes deeply related to the performative character of the one who narrates. In other words, the decolonization of art and thought, and the ways of being and existing in the world, are not dissociated from the emergence of artists, writers, and intellectuals. These intellectuals dispute the right to self-representation, selfpresentation, and the creation of non-colonial narratives and images or those who stand completely outside the Eurocentric imaginary and worldview. This text establishes a deep interest in the Brazilian context, appropriating the important discussion around the constitution of a decolonial field of thought, analyzing the work of contemporary Brazilian artists such as
Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, vol. 26, 2024
Having premiered in 2005, the film Quanto Vale Ou É Por Quilo? is Sérgio Bianchi’s creative adaptation of Machado de Assis’ short story “Pai Contra Mãe” (published in Relíquias da Casa Velha, 1906). In the film, Bianchi unravels two parallel plots, each taking place in a different historical period. In this paper, I will address the relationship between Sérgio Bianchi’s film and Machado de Assis’ short story, focusing on the material elements that create a symbolic portal between the world of Machado and that of Bianchi. I am especially interested in how artifacts of the pre-abolition society are paralleled by artifacts in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. These relationships, which emerge through my reading of Bianchi’s film, complicate common ideas about historical continuities and ruptures in everyday life in that city. I argue that these objects are themselves interpreters of Brazil in the sense that they create, organize, and transform meaning around them. I find, in particular, an engagement between the rope of the short story and the police cars of the film, pointing toward a critique of the police apparatus as an afterlife of slavery, but also a controversial and complex critique of the “nonprofit economy” and the maintenance of structural inequalities. These networks of meaning, I propose, only become entirely visible once we understand Bianchi’s film as a mode of dialogue with Machado de Assis’ story.
Revista Intercom, 2020
This paper intends to present the process of construction of an analytical method used to study archive images when used in contemporary films. Our purpose is to show the development of this particular research field, the way we analyze these archives from the moment they were made to their reutilization years later, the links between the documents, the challenges we faced along the way and the particularities of Brazil's archival situation. To establish the practical use of this method we chose to analyze the domestic images that were shot during Brazil's militar dictatorship and the way they are used in the film "Que bom te ver viva" (Lúcia Murat, 1989).