XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The Space of Ancestralidade

• In Event: Ancestralidade: Black Study in Brazil

Abstract

In Towards a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva says: “Later accounts of European conquest would describe this political event as a moment in time, a fact of history. Nevertheless, Europe’s conquest of the American continent has been first and foremost a spatial, that is, a global event…”. With this in mind, I would like to read Ferreira da Silva’s work as emphasizing the fact that, by giving substantial philosophical and political priority to time, the conquest of space and the displacement of those who occupy it ends up reduced to a historical phenomenon. The reassertion of space in thought, and of black space, particularly,
would set the basis for a redefinition of history and critique that will be open to the disjointing of time that Ancestalidade enables. The idea here, rather than moving to the analysis of artworks, is to be able to think of a structure of reception of art that, as Ferreira da Silva’s work suggests, spatializes temporal categories, articulating a different gaze and a different relation to contemporary critical projects.

Author

• Carlos Colmenares Gil, Indiana University - Bloomington