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

Session Submission Type: Panel

Description for Program

Scholars of Brazil have prioritized Black knowledge production for its ability to map inequality across affective, geographic, and political lines and disrupt traditional narratives of race and nation in the region. Brazil’s Black intellectual tradition, however, demands to be interrogated beyond its traditional uses to make the nation more egalitarian. Spanning chronological and transnational contexts through underutilized primary sources, this panel debates how Africans and their descendants engaged the politics of Black knowledge production in Brazil. They dismantled nationalist and white/mestizo centered tropes of Blackness in the arts. Others established African-driven scholarly currents across the Black Atlantic, while a century prior, enslaved Muslims circulated creative ways of maintaining their intellectual pursuits. This panel calls for a decentering of whiteness and the struggle against white supremacy in Afro-Brazil, emphasizing Black ways of knowing and being in the world. In so doing, this panel generates more expansive readings of Black contributions to knowledge.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Cassie Osei, Bucknell University

Individual Presentations

• The Manuscript Cultures of Africans in 19th Century Brazil: Stories of Conversion, Resistance, and Healing - Gana Ndiaye, Yale University

• Abdias do Nascimento’s Folklore - Juan Suárez Ontaneda

• The Triangular Scholar: Anani Dzidzienyo’s Contributions to African, Black, and Latin American studies - Bright Gyamfi, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Ham’s Revenge: Theorizing Black Women’s History in Brazilian Archives - Cassie Osei, Bucknell University