XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

On the Reverbivocovisual: Ricardo Aleixo’s Poetics of the Black Concrete

• In Event: Ancestralidade: Black Study in Brazil

Abstract

This paper will analyze the work of the contemporary poet Ricardo Aleixo, specifically with regards to his theorization and reassessment of the legacy and inheritance of concrete poetics both in Brazil and beyond. The São Paulo based Noigandres poets famously defined concrete poetry as “Tension of word-things in space-time” in the nineteen-fifties, speaking to the poem’s “objective” nature in the double sense: both the attempt to transform the poem into object and to eliminate any subjective or lyric elements. Departing from this tendency's lasting effect in Brazilian literary and cultural studies, this paper foregrounds the necessity of analyzing the resonances of this commodity and object-oriented poetics in terms of the history of race, blackness, and the Atlantic slave trade in Brazil and beyond. Following theorists Fred Moten’s famous reading of the “resistance of the object” and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s philosophy of "the analytics of raciality" in Brazil and beyond, this paper suggests that Aleixo’s work is not only “inspired” by Brazilian concretism but transmedially theorizes the relationship between objecthood, performance, and embodiment with a focus on the intersection between concretism and Black Brazilian poetry and art. Specifically I will read Aleixo’s performance of the “Poemanto," and the accompanying written poem “Ensaio para escrever com um corpo" as critiquing Brazilian concretism’s aesthetics of the “object” by advancing an experimental poetics of embodiment and vocality that question the limits of objectivity, legibility, and representation with regards to questions of racial democracy, blackness, and ancestrality in Brazil and beyond.

Author

• Jane Kassavin, University of Southern California