XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Transmediatic Futurity: Queer Black Embodiment in Negrum3

• In Event: Towards a Transartistic Commons in Brazil

Abstract

Negrum3 (2018), Diego Paulino’s short film, operates as a transmediatic manifest on queer Blackness in São Paulo. This paper will study how Paulino’s aesthetic application of Afrofuturism leads to political declarations regarding the daily existence and daily resistances of queer Black Brazilians. Applying various transmediatic strategies, Paulino produced a hybrid documentary/ oneiric hallucination examining a multiplicity of embodiments that entail trans lives and queer futurity. The film reads like media art in its tactical formal applications with the effect of questioning processes of racialization, power structures and intersectional gender studies. The film contextualizes the Afrofuturism concept to Brazil, working as a capsule to examine how forces of racism and patriarchy—essential for processes of colonization—persist. Nevertheless, it also works as a transmedia investigation of agency and empowerment.

Author

• Alessandra Santos, University of British Columbia