Abdias do Nascimento’s Folklore

• In Event: (Re)presenting Afro-Brazil: Contesting National Narratives and Centering Transnational Circuits of Black Knowledge Production

Description for Program

In the preface to the Teatro Experimental do Negro’s (TEN) most well-known anthology of plays, Dramas para Negros e Prólogo para Brancos (1961), Abdias do Nascimento established the adjective “folclórico” as an antithesis to the mode of representing Blackness he was laboring with his thespian troupe. In the stage directions for Nascimento’s landmark play Sortilégio, published in Dramas, the author indicates that “a naturalist transposition would only harm the play which neither pretends to bring into the scene a photographic representation of macumba or candomblé, nor a simple folkloric representation of Black rituals” (161).1 While theorizing “folclórico” as the antithesis of his project, Nascimento cites scholars like Fernando Ortiz (Cuba), Roger Bastide (France and Brazil), or Francisco Elías de Tejada (Spain), all White intellectuals working from the discipline of folklore, to sustain his vision of Black representation. In this presentation, I examine Nascimento’s engagement with the discipline of folklore and the emergence of the signifier “folclórico” in his writings as a method to trace how he developed a theory of Black performances. In addition to the network of White intellectuals he cites in Dramas, I examine his correspondence and artistic collaborations as well with Black intellectuals (albeit with different racial positionalities) working inside folklore in Brazil, like Abigail Moura, Mercedes Baptista, and Edson Carneiro. By examining the engagement between Nascimento and intellectuals of folklore, the field that most abundantly published about Afro-descendant communities throughout the Americas during the mid-twentieth century, we can gain a new understanding of the networks that influenced how Blackness emerged in his performances.

Author

• Juan Suárez Ontaneda