Breaking the complicity between the aesthetic device and the colonial device: Afro-Brazilian art, Afro-descendant Black art (original) (raw)
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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.
Performance and Aesthetics in the Brazilian Black Movement Struggles to Re-Educate the Society
Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença, 2019
ABSTRACT: With the results of the 2018 research project entitled Black Movement in the Present Time as our main source, in this article we discuss aspects of performative and aesthetic practices used in the anti-racist struggle in Brazil in the 1970s and today. We developed the article in dialogue with the concept of the culture of anti-racist struggle, from which we understand that the struggle of the black movement generates new codes and cultural meanings and, therefore, is able to affect the subjectivities of different subjects, assuming a potential for re-education and enabling new practices in terms of race relations in Brazil. Keywords: Black Movement. Black Aesthetic. Antiracist Struggle Culture. Education. RESUMO: Utilizando como fontes, principalmente, os resultados produzidos em 2018, por meio do projeto de pesquisa intitulado Movimento Negro na Atualidade, neste artigo são discutidos aspectos de práticas performativas e estéticas utilizadas na luta antirracista no Brasil nos anos 1970 e na atualidade. O trabalho é desenvolvido em diálogo com o conceito de cultura de luta antirracista, a partir do qual compreende-se que a luta protagonizada pelo movimento negro gera novos códigos e significados culturais e, por isso, possui a capacidade de afetar as subjetividades de diferentes sujeitos, assumindo um potencial reeducador e possibilitando novas práticas diante do quadro das relações raciais no Brasil. Palavras-chave: Movimento Negro. Estética Negra. Cultura de Luta Antirracista. Educação.
Devouring Brazilian Modernism The Rise of Contemporary Indigenous Art
E-International Relations, 2022
I argue that, in addition to the important discussion about the cultural appropriation of elements of indigenous populations, it was the impossibility of indigenous self-representation due to elitist, racial and colonial issues that shaped the Brazilian avant-garde in the 1920s. Then, I aim to demonstrate how contemporary indigenous art is devouring, digesting, and regurgitating new ways of critical art in Brazil.
Brazilian Colonial Art and the Decolonization of Art History
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 2021
There are at least two ways to think about the term “Brazilian colonial art.” It can refer, in general, to the art produced in the region presently known as Brazil between 1500, when navigator Pedro Álvares Cabral claimed the coastal territory for the Lusitanian crown, and the country’s independence in the early 19th century. It can also refer, more specifically, to the artistic manifestations produced in certain Brazilian regions—most notably Bahia, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro—over the 18th century and first decades of the 19th century. In other words, while denotatively it corresponds to the art produced in the period during which Brazil was a colony, it can also work as a metonym valid to indicate particular temporal and geographical arcs within this period. The reasons for its widespread metonymical use are related, on the one hand, to the survival of a relatively large number of art objects and buildings produced in these arcs, but also to a judicative value: at least since the 1920s, artists, historians, and cultivated Brazilians have tended to regard Brazilian colonial art—in its more specific meaning—as the greatest cultural product of those centuries. In this sense, Brazilian colonial art is often identified with the Baroque—to the extent that the terms “Brazilian Baroque,” “Brazilian colonial art,” and even “barroco mineiro” (i.e., Baroque produced in the province of Minas Gerais) may be used interchangeably by some scholars and, even more so, the general public. The study of Brazilian colonial art is currently intermingled with the question of what should be understood as Brazil in the early modern period. Just like some 20th- and 21st-century scholars have been questioning, for example, the term “Italian Renaissance”—given the fact that Italy, as a political entity, did not exist until the 19th century—so have researchers problematized the concept of a unified term to designate the whole artistic production of the territory that would later become the Federative Republic of Brazil between the 16th and 19th centuries. This territory, moreover, encompassed a myriad of very different societies and languages originating from at least three different continents. Should the production, for example, of Tupi or Yoruba artworks be considered colonial? Or should they, instead, be understood as belonging to a distinctive path and independent art historical process? Is it viable to propose a transcultural academic approach without, at the same time, flattening the specificities and richness of the various societies that inhabited the territory? Recent scholarly work has been bringing together traditional historiographical references in Brazilian colonial art and perspectives from so-called “global art history.” These efforts have not only internationalized the field, but also made it multidisciplinary by combining researches in anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and art history.
The Laws of Image-Nation: Brazilian Racial Tropes and the Shadows of the Slave Quarters
Law and Critique volume, 2018
The commemorative edition of the 80th anniversary of Casa Grande & Senzala, the founding book of Brazilian modern sociology written by Gilberto Freyre and published in 2013, shows on its cover a glamorous ‘Casa Grande’ (Big House, the Lord’s house), lit like an architectural landmark, ready to serve as the set for a film or a TV soap opera. What happened to the ‘Senzala’ (the Slave Quarters) that appeared on the covers of the dozens of previous editions? This paper investigates, following some changes in Brazilian Visual Culture in the twentieth century, how such an astonishing disappearance could take place. The paper examines the image of the slave quarters as part of a racial trope: a foundational and colonial trope, one that is capable of institutionalizing subjects and producing a subaltern mode of subjectivity. It also explores connections between critical legal studies and visual and cultural studies to question how and why knowledge produced over the status, nature and function of images contributes to institute—and institutionalize subjectivity. In order to explain this disappearance we propose a legal-iconological experiment. We will enunciate, and attempt to enact, the Statute of Image-nation: the laws of the image that constitute subjectivity in Brazilian racial tropes. In doing so, we might be able to point out the ways in which law and image function together in institutionalizing subjectivity—and subjection.
Our Ghosts Have Come to Collect: Decolonial Turn in Contemporary Brazilian Art
2021
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