Redemption of Cam, by painter Modesto Brocos, 1895, oil on canvas (199 x166cm).
Quilombism, transculturation, racial eugenics and "racial democracy" are some of the ideas addressed by Abdias Nascimento, Clóvis Moura and the documentary about Beatriz Nascimento, Orí, by Raquel Gerber (1989), dealing with the history, formation and effects of systematized necropolitics against black population. One of the structuring dimensions of racism present in the history of Brazil is the proposal to whiten the population, similar to Modesto Brocos' painting, Cam's redemption, exposed for the first time in 1895. According to Moura,
In fact, the occurrence of Brocos' painting is concomitant with the period mentioned by Moura, where the black slave is discarded by a workforce that would be the standard of a progressive worldview, leaving the black population to submit to the whitening process. . This perspective of white supremacy was also strongly supported by eugenic science, as reported by Moura when citing the importance of scientist Nina Rodrigues in confirming the figure of black people as inferior to white people.
Racial eugenics even more dramatically insularized the Brazilian black population into a social, political and economic apartheid, its effects can still be felt today in the broadest aspects of society, but particularly in the field of art, this clash appears to be on a trajectory of inversion of this perspective by some black artists and curators who fight for equity in the appreciation, exhibition and expansion of art collections by black artists in the country.
Exemplo disso é o trabalho da artista Rosana Paulino, que trabalha com os conceitos de eugenia e do racismo biológico em suas obras, a artista se apropria de imagens de mulheres negras, símbolos de um holocausto catastrófico desde os mares atlânticos até o interior das terras do Brasil. Rosana denuncia em sua arte o apagamento secular de uma cultura e um povo arrastado de suas terras, de suas riquezas por uma alucinação branca. Para Moura, o projeto de aniquilação racial funcionava pelas vias da aculturação de modo muito bem orquestrado, planejado de forma a narrar a vitória branca frente ao atraso do negro, segundo o autor,
For Abdias Nascimento, this same issue of historical erasure present in Rosana Paulino's work is configured as an act of resistance that needs to be thought of based on the premise of maintaining the capitalist system and its consequences of racial appeasement. In the author's words:
Nascimento aprofunda sua visão a respeito do racismo como um projeto de genocídio da população negra onde percebemos a ressonância de sua definição na obra (imagens 4 e 5) de Rosana Paulino ao abordar o racismo científico numa perspectiva que incorpora o massacre para revelá-lo no plano de suas imagens ressignificadas com silenciamentos em bocas costuradas, corpos torturados e maltratados pelo delírio da supremacia branca, o negro como cobaia sociológica. Abdias Nascimento define o racismo como:
The displacement that Rosana Paulino's work gives us dialogues with the perspective of Clóvis Moura and Abdias Nascimento and alerts us above all to the systemic continuity of the fascist itineraries that are outlined in contemporary Brazil, the relevance of their artistic proposal is a tear from the myth of racial democracy and an unavoidable and urgent denunciation of an immanent quilombism that highlights differences and subjugates the history of celebrating Brazil's history without black people.
In the video below, the artist talks about her work and the poetic stitching of memory around the erasure of history and the black body in Brazil.
To cite this page from the Sonhos entre Pedras website as a source for your research, use the text below: LIMA, André Luiz de Araújo. tears in the myth of racial democracy, 2023. Available at:<Rasgos no mito da democracia racial | Sonhos entre Pedras/> . Accessed on ...(insert date).
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