XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Ancestralidade: Black Study in Brazil

Session Submission Type: Complete Panel

Abstract

In this panel we are interested in studying the strategic uses of the ancestralidade, focusing on Black Brazilian art and praxes that deploy the term conceptually and on the level of form. In recent years, ancestralidade has arisen as a key nexus for thinking about Black identification as well as aesthetics and poetics in Brazil. The term performs various and divergent kinds of political work—both consolidating the resistance of blackness to cultural assimilation, and, in proposing a genealogical model for cultural inquiry, problematizing the fixity of identity and subjecthood. Ancestrality poses culture, education, language, narration, expressivity, inheritance, kinship, and memory in terms of what, in a North American Black tradition that offers numerous comparative parallels, Nathaniel Mackey has called an “insistent previousness evading each and every natal occasion” (Bedouin Hornbook (1986), 34). Or, as Conceição Evaristo has written of her own initiation into a Black history of inscription: “Perhaps the first graphic sign that was presented to me as writing, came from an old gesture of my mother. Ancestral, who knows? Since from whom would she have inherited that teaching, if not from her folks, the even older?” (Representações Performáticas Brasileiras (2007), 16). In light of this thought of Black historicity as recursion, we ask, how has ancestrality been generative in contesting paradigms of assimilation and national unity in Black Brazilian art and cultural production? What kinds of racial and cultural identification does it fortify and what does it put into question? Why might Brazil be a particularly important and strategic site for the thought of ancestrality? This panel will help us build connections between Black Studies and contemporary Black Brazilian thought by considering how race has been reconceptualized since redemocratization (and, as ancestrality suggests, prior to it) through writing and thinking at the intersections of Black thought and ancestrality in culture and politics.

Sub Unit

• XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Escrevivência as a Theory of Diasporic Cultural Inheritance - William Mullaney, Princeton University

• The Space of Ancestralidade - Carlos Colmenares Gil, Indiana University - Bloomington

• A Amefricanidade das Vozes Ancestrais na Literatura Brasileira - Jade Soares do Nascimento, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ

• On the Reverbivocovisual: Ricardo Aleixo’s Poetics of the Black Concrete - Jane Kassavin, University of Southern California

Chair

• William Mullaney, Princeton University

Session Organizer

• Jane Kassavin, University of Southern California