XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Last year I died, but this year I won’t: Breathing Brazilian black hope into global pandemics of COVID, racism, and neofascism

• In Event: Skeptical Hope: Performing Beyond The Pink Tide and Neofascism in Brazil

Abstract

During the 2020 global COVID pandemic, Brazilian hip-hop artist Emicida released the documentary AmarElo – It’s All for Yesterday on Netflix. Combining footage of the debut show of the album AmarElo in the historical Theatro Municipal with a tour de force through Black culture in Brazil, the documentary highlighted key Black personalities from Brazil’s past and present. This paper explores how, at the same time as the 2019 AmarElo show performed an utopic manifesto of Black and queer possibility under the roof of the highly elitist Theatro Municipal, the Netflix documentary engendered a nostalgic space of digital embodied agglomeration and celebration during a deadly pandemic significantly worsened by white supremacist neofascist regimes. The documentary intricately overlaps complicated performances of hope and hopelessness in Brazil: the history of slavery and racism; the long tradition of violent joy in Black music; the clash between the decades-long strengthening of antiracist policies and the rapid rise of white supremacist neofascism; the complicated legacies of the Theatro Municipal and of Netflix as performance platforms. Emicida’s performance of Black utopia allowed for an unmasked breathing space to be streamed to millions of Brazilians forcefully quarantined and crushed under multiple layers of hopelessness, and created in performance a space for Black hope that drew from the countries’ past to stream a uniquely Brazilian performance of hope to the world.

Author

• Marcos Davi Silva Steuernagel, The New School