Abstract:

With the results of the 2018 research project entitled Black Movement in the Present Time as our main source, in this article we discuss aspects of performative and aesthetic practices used in the anti-racist struggle in Brazil in the 1970s and today. We developed the article in dialogue with the concept of the culture of anti-racist struggle, from which we understand that the struggle of the black movement generates new codes and cultural meanings and, therefore, is able to affect the subjectivities of different subjects, assuming a potential for re-education and enabling new practices in terms of race relations in Brazil.

Keywords:
Black Movement; Black Aesthetic; Antiracist Struggle Culture; Education

Resumo:

Utilizando como fontes, principalmente, os resultados produzidos em 2018, por meio do projeto de pesquisa intitulado Movimento Negro na Atualidade, neste artigo são discutidos aspectos de práticas performativas e estéticas utilizadas na luta antirracista no Brasil nos anos 1970 e na atualidade. O trabalho é desenvolvido em diálogo com o conceito de cultura de luta antirracista, a partir do qual compreende-se que a luta protagonizada pelo movimento negro gera novos códigos e significados culturais e, por isso, possui a capacidade de afetar as subjetividades de diferentes sujeitos, assumindo um potencial reeducador e possibilitando novas práticas diante do quadro das relações raciais no Brasil.

Palavras-chave:
Movimento Negro; Estética Negra; Cultura de Luta Antirracista; Educação

Résumé:

Utilisant principalement comme sources les résultats obtenus en 2018, dans le cadre du projet de recherche intitulé Mouvement noir au présent, nous abordons dans cet article les aspects des pratiques performatives et esthétiques utilisées dans la lutte antiraciste au Brésil dans les années 1970 et aujourd’hui. Nous développons l’article en dialogue avec le concept de culture de lutte antiraciste, à partir duquel nous comprenons que la lutte menée par le mouvement noir génère de nouveaux codes et significations culturelles et a donc la capacité d’affecter les subjectivités de différents rééducation potentielle et possibilité de nouvelles pratiques face aux relations raciales au Brésil.

Mots-clés:
Mouvement Noir; Esthétique Noire; Culture Antiraciste; Éducation

Introduction

Many authors, such as Florestan Fernandes (1965FERNANDES, Florestan. A integração do negro à sociedade de classes. São Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1965.), Carlos Hasenbalg (1979HASENBALG, Carlos. Discriminação e desigualdades raciais no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1979.) and a number of others have, since the 1950s, already problematized or even challenged the idea that Brazil is supposedly a racial democracy. This idea remains very strong in the Brazilian society since, according to Florestan Fernandes, the idea of racial democracy “[...] has become a form of mores, as some sociologists say, something untouchable, the touchstone of the ‘Brazilian contribution’ to the process of civilizing humanity” (Fernandes, 1989FERNANDES, Florestan. Significado do protesto negro. São Paulo: Cortez; Autores Associados, 1989., p. 13). In the aforementioned book, Significado do Protesto Negro (Meaning of Black Protest), Fernandes included as an appendix a homage to the black militant and intellectual José Correia Leite, founder and editor of one of the most important newspapers of the black press of São Paulo, O Clarim d’Alvorada (1924-1932), which helped him and provided him with so much information during his research in São Paulo beginning in the 1950s. Meanwhile, Carlos Hasenbalg, as Antônio Sérgio Guimarães reminds us, was close to several black Brazilian leaders, such as Maria Beatriz Nascimento, a black intellectual to whom he dedicated his doctoral dissertation with the following words: “Without the mediation of books, Maria Beatriz taught me the existential meaning of being black and being a woman in Brazil” (Guimarães, 2016GUIMARÃES, Antônio Sérgio A. O legado de Carlos Hasenbalg (1942-2014). Afro-Ásia, Salvador, n. 53, p. 277-290, 2016., p. 280). Hasenbalg was close to and also learned from Lélia Gonzalez, an intellectual, university professor and black leader and feminist, with whom he coauthored the book entitled Lugar de Negro (Place of Black People) in 1982, (Gonzalez; Hasenbalg, 1982GONZALEZ, Lélia; HASENBALG, Carlos. Lugar de negro. Rio de Janeiro: Marco Zero, 1982.). Black militants such as Correia Leite, Maria Beatriz Nascimento and Lélia Gonzalez, and many others, in the anti-racist struggle and in several cases in dialogue with white intellectuals, like Fernandes and Hasenbalg, for a long time have attempted to re-educate Brazilian society regarding race relations. The aforementioned examples reinforce the perspective expressed by Nilma Lino Gomes who, understanding the black movement as educational, claimed that

As it has been said in previous works, one of the main characteristics of the contemporary black movement in Brazil, which was constituted in the 1970s amidst struggles against the military and civil dictatorship of the day, is precisely the complaint that this idea of racial democracy is nothing but a myth. The huge racial inequality in almost every sector of our society, as shown in statistical data and diverse social indicators (Paixão; Carvano, 2008PAIXÃO, Marcelo; CARVANO, Luiz M. (Org.). Relatório anual das desigualdades raciais no Brasil; 2007-2008. Rio de Janeiro: Garamond Universitária, 2008.), has enabled the understanding of academics and militants that racism is an element that structures our social relationships and inequalities. One of the slogans most frequently found in documents produced by the black movement since the 1970s is “For an authentic racial democracy!” (Pereira, 2012PEREIRA, Amilcar A. “Por uma autêntica democracia racial!”: os movimentos negros nas escolas e nos currículos de história. Revista História Hoje, São Paulo, ANPUH, v. 1, n. 1, 2012.).

The complaint in the above slogan was fundamental because if the racial democracy were real, rather than a myth, the existence of a black movement in Brazil would make no sense. Many strategies in different areas have been used by black militants in their fight for a true racial democracy in our country since the 1970s. In this article, we have chosen to discuss, based on an understanding of performance in the broadest sense, some aspects of performative and aesthetic practices used in the struggle against racism in Brazil in the 1970s and today. It is not today that, according to the young black rapper Djonga, on his latest album, many black people have decided not “to sit still” and have opted, in the struggle against racism, to “be an aesthetic being”, as we will see below.

As sources for this article, we will mainly use data produced and interviews¹⁴ 1 The oral history interviews conducted in 2018 and cited in the present article were recorded by Amilcar Araujo Pereira, Amauri Mendes Pereira, Jorge Lucas Maia e Thayara C. Silva de Lima, within the Brazilian Black Movement Today research project, conducted by the Research and Study Group on Anti-racist Education (Gepear-UFRJ), coordinated by Professor Dr. Amilcar Araujo Pereira, with funding from the Baobá - Racial Equality Fund. We would like to thank Cristina Lopes and Selma Moreira for making this field study possible through their actions alongside Baobá. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who contributed suggestions to improve this article, and to the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) for its support through financing obtained from the Universal Public Notice of 2016. held during the Black Movement Today research project, which was conducted throughout 2018. The aim of that research was to understand specific points of the black movement in Brazil today in this historic moment that we are experiencing. For this purpose, the study was structured into two phases. The first involved the domestic circulation of a digital form to be completed by subjects understood to be engaged in the anti-racist struggle, either individually or collectively. To distribute the questionnaire, we used a digital platform that would allow it to be distributed through social media, e-mails and instant messenger applications. We received 261 completed forms between March and June of 2018.

Following an analysis of the data from the digital questionnaires. Twenty-six of the people who completed and forwarded it to us were selected for an interview in the second phase of the study. In this second phase, which also took place in 2018, we conducted the oral history interviews with black militants in seven different cities of the five regions of Brazil, affording our study a national scope. These interviews basically concentrated on three core axes: life story, involvement in the anti-racist struggle of the subjects or their institutions, and perceptions of the black movement today. We will base our ensuing perceptions regarding the Brazilian black movement on our analysis of this group of sources as well as some excerpts from interviews with black leaders all over the country in the 2000s (Alberti; Pereira, 2007ALBERTI, Verena; PEREIRA, Amilcar A. (Org.) Histórias do movimento negro no Brasil: depoimentos ao CPDOC. Rio de Janeiro: CPDOC-FGV; Pallas, 2007.). Before analyzing the sources mentioned above, we understand that it is necessary to present some of the theoretical perspectives with which we have engaged in dialogue in our studies.

The Anti-racist Struggle Culture

Amilcar Cabral, author/revolutionary, is known for his leadership in the process of liberating Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. These countries, dominated by Portugal since 1915, won their independence in 1973 due to the actions of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Recognized by Paulo Freire as the pedagogue of the revolution, Cabral, in addition to the armed struggle, understood the need to use the weapon of theory so that anti-colonial pretentions could be achieved successfully. Because of this theoretical impulse, Cabral left us a rich work that discussed, among many other things, the needs of society on the road to becoming an independent country. One of Cabral’s perceptions regarding this process can be found in his maxim: “The struggle for freedom is not only a cultural fact, but also a factor of culture” (Cabral, 1974, p. 137). In short, this sentence expresses the author’s ideas on the role that culture plays in the struggle for freedom.

However, before venturing further into this idea, the author warns us of the need to become familiar with the concept of culture that he adopted to think of the fight for freedom:

The author presents to us the struggle as a cultural factor and, therefore, one of the manifestations through which culture, the dynamic synthesis of society, is manifested. However, beyond this, Cabral also believes that struggle produces culture. It should be highlighted that both the culture and cultural manifestations to which the author refers are not fixed in time. On the contrary, from the dimension of the struggle as a factor of culture, we understand that they influence and are influenced by other groups, resignify perspectives in the tension between continuity and change, and are moved in historical processes in light of the possibilities and contingencies with which they have to deal in time and space. Once a struggle to achieve a concrete goal begins, its own dynamic requires a series of transformations that will shape its identities and subjectivities and create the phenomenon that we refer to here as a struggle culture. Demonstrating through a specific example how negotiations of subjectivities take place and how they influence political choices, Bhabha (1998BHABHA, Homi K. O local da cultura. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 1998., p. 55-56) proposes the following reflection:

We assume here that what the author understands when referring to hegemony has to do with the transformations in identity promoted through negotiations that lead to dialoguing on differences, creating this “in-between space” in which it is possible to change oneself through a real demand. These transformations generate new signs and make way for a new culture, always in the tension between continuity and change. In his work, The Centrality of Culture, Stuart Hall discusses culture and its place in social structures more specifically:

In this sense, we understand here, as stated by Cabral, the political struggle - this social activity - as a producer of a new series of dialogues, meanings and practices. According to Hall, it is these systems or codes of meaning that, taken together, constitute cultures and give meaning to our actions (Hall, 1997, p. 16). In short, from transformations negotiated between identities and subjectivities due to the political struggle, a new culture is produced, here referred as a struggle culture. Once inspired by this struggle culture, with its new codes of negotiated meanings, individuals (not necessarily members of social movements, but people who are in touch with the struggle culture and join a specific political struggle) will guide its agency and performance in the sense of seeking to construct a new society.

Cabral, in a perspective similar to the one that would later be constructed by Hall, informs us of the existence of different levels of culture. Understanding level of culture here not as the amount of culture gained or accumulated in a scholarly sense, or of high culture, but rather as the degree of exposure to what we are calling struggle culture, Cabral tells us that:

In the following excerpt from his book The Wretched of the Earth, originally published in 1961 and also included in the context of the struggle for national freedom on the African continent, Frantz Fanon, when describing society in the process of maturity of the national conscience, allows us to glimpse the process by which individuals contact the struggle culture, which mobilizes them for the clash:

Understanding struggle culture is a crucial point for the development of the proposed article, as our hypothesis is that the anti-racist struggle undertaken by the black movement also generates new codes and meanings, thereby producing an anti-racist struggle culture. This culture has the ability to affect subjectivities, assuming a blatant educator/reeducator potential, thus enabling new practices in the context of race relations in Brazil (Lima, 2018LIMA, Thayara C. S. A Cultura de luta antirracista e as potencialidades do contato entre docentes de História e o movimento negro para a implementação da Lei 10.639/03. 2018. Dissertação (Mestrado em Educação) - Programa de Pós-Graduação em Educação, Faculdade de Educação, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2018.).

Performance, Aesthetics and Narratives of the Black Movement

It has been common practice to understand and interpret the actions of the black movement throughout its history from its more structured and more institutional political articulations. Thus, we conceive the analysis of the historical phenomenon of the black social movement based on a more traditional political structure, in which it is possible to perceive a stricto sensu form of political militancy as a protagonist in the analysis of raising awareness in and reeducating new subjects.

The times we live in, however, retain important specific characteristics. In her essay A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway warns us, among other things, of the role that information technologies have played in the structure that the author refers to as the informatics of domination. The text was originally published in 1985 and calls our attention to the fundamental transformations in the structure of a world, “[...] so intimately restructured through the social relations of science and technology” (Haraway, 2000HARAWAY, Donna. Manifesto ciborgue: ciência, tecnologia e feminismo-socialista no final do século XX. In: SILVA, Tomaz Tadeu da (Org.). Antropologia do ciborgue. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2000. P. 37-129. , p. 67). The author was clearly referring, at the time of writing, to technologies that were different from those we handle today. Nevertheless, we understand here that both technological innovations and structures of domination have continued to develop further in the three and a half decades since the essay was written.

Today, this process allows us to glimpse yet another side of the issue. While these technologies occupy a special place in the structuring and renewal of the dynamics of power, it is also clear that, through them, new forms of action and performance that promote the potential to circulate polyphonic narratives emerge and are disseminated, especially those of race, gender and sexuality.

An important characteristic of the anti-racist struggle culture is that, as it affects subjects through contact, in negotiations and production of “in-between” spaces (Bhabha, 1998BHABHA, Homi K. O local da cultura. Belo Horizonte: Ed. UFMG, 1998.), it encounters a vigorous means of circulation through the narratives of the black movement, a group that is fundamentally a producer and carrier of codes and signs of the anti-racist struggle culture in Brazil. Thinking about this culture also enables the construction of a new understanding of the dimensions of action of the black social movement today. If we have, so far, based our analyses on a more institutionalized perception of the black movement, it is worth reflecting on what we understand as the black movement nowadays.

One of the main characteristics that we have observed through contact with today’s black movement was its capillarity. Our interviewees, from the north to the south of the country, showed in their interviews how they perceived the occurrence of this phenomenon:

This excerpt of the interview with Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, a university professor and black militant in the Federal District, is important because it helps us to understand the plurality of fronts on which the black movement has been active all over the country. This plurality is evidently the result of a series of factors. These include, as the interviewee suggests, the struggles of previous black movements, demonstrating that each process, despite the specifics of its own time, is also the fruit of continuities and accumulations as well as discontinuities and changes. Another factor that we consider fundamental when it comes to analyzing this process is the new technologies that give a voice to polyphonic narratives, enabling and creating spaces for a variety of debates and the anti-racist struggle culture, promoting diversification in a wide variety of subjects. We perceived a phenomenon of which the image that the interviewee Nina Fola from Porto Alegre presented to us was certainly a consequence: “The black movement is a great thing, even if a little misshapen, and there really are fronts that attack, because we have many things to attack”. This statement was backed up by another interviewee, Patrícia Xavier: “I think the black movement has this institutional aspect and another aspect, which is that of black people moving, which is this capillarity of fronts”¹⁶ 3 Patrícia Xavier and Nina Fola were interviewed on 21 June 2018, in the dean’s office at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre. . Understanding the term used by Patrícia, “black people moving”, in the light of what Nilma Lino Gomes says in her book The Educator Black Movement (O Movimento Negro Educador), we further the idea that the anti-racist struggle culture that emerged from the black movement has been increasingly extended beyond the institutional instances of the movement:

For Luana Teófilo, founder of the Efigênias collective and the Afro-Brazilian Consumer Board, for instance, the black movement could be understood today in three layers:

From Luana’s perceptions we can see the first layer, which the interviewee claims to be the most institutional, entities that have existed for some time and can be considered traditional in the black movement. Regarding the other layers, the interviewee highlights non-participation in organized structures, a factor previously mentioned by Ana Flávia when reflecting on the effervescence of anti-racist collectives, groups and actions in Brasília.

What we have referred to here as the capillarity of the black movement today, understood as one of the main characteristics of the black movement in the context in which we live, is characterized by three main factors: the great diversity of fronts on which it operates; its non-institutionalized nature; and, finally, its ability to affect diverse subjects in different spaces, disseminating the anti-racist struggle culture and acting as a kind of anti-racist infiltration, where each subject takes his actions and anti-racist drive to the spaces he occupies. According to Nilma Lino Gomes (2017GOMES, Nilma Lino. O Movimento Negro educador: saberes construídos nas lutas por emancipação. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017., p. 75):

We understand that this capillarity has gone in the direction of which Ana Flávia Magalhães speaks:

In our analysis, based on this context of profound changes in the form of relationships between people and between people and the world, we replaced a paradigm in which being a protagonist in the circulation of anti-racist struggle culture occurred, especially from a stricto sensu political militancy, with a new paradigm. In this new paradigm, the diverse and different narratives produced by the black movement in its plurality take a prominent place. It is precisely in the midst of the circulation of these various narratives that we decided to highlight in this article what we call the aesthetic narrative of the black movement.

We use the term aesthetic narrative as a kind of provocation. When we think of a narrative, its oral or written forms immediately spring to mind. In these dimensions, the narrative triggers events, arguments or facts to form a totality: the story that one intends to tell. On the other hand, we have aesthetics, considered here in the sense of aesthetics of the body. Even occupying such a central position in the eyes of black youth, aesthetics is recurrently understood as futile, and in some sectors of the social movement it is considered an alleged form of political emptiness. When addressing these two ideas, we suggest understanding aesthetics as a political composition that takes on the contours of a narrative, as the act of preparing self-presentation implies deciding on objects, colors and hair with specific signs to constitute a whole. Provocation means thinking of aesthetic elements listed as arguments, while we think of the final product, which is the body aesthetics, as a narrative made up of these diverse arguments. Therefore, it is possible to parade this aesthetic argument, even in spaces where oral and written narratives do not belong, enabling the circulation of the arguments/objects and their signs.

Body Aesthetics and the Black Movement Today

When we work with the idea of aesthetic narratives, it is necessary to show that we are speaking of a body aesthetics that refers to the construction of the look and strategies of self-presentation triggered by the black population that has already had, to some extent, contact with the anti-racist struggle culture. This body aesthetics is “[...] understood as the assemblage made through industrial objects removed from the market and to which a meaning of its own is assigned”¹⁸ 5 The relationships between the aesthetics of black youth and the market requires further reflection. This relationship could be the subject of a future text reflecting on assemblage in the creation of a whole market to produce objects to feed black aesthetics based on key factors such as afro-entrepreneurship and Black Money. (Mizrahi, 2015MIZRAHI, Mylene. Cabelos Ambiguos: beleza, poder de compra e “raça” no Brasil urbano. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, São Paulo, v. 30, n. 89, p. 31-47, out. 2015., p. 32).

In her article Cabelos Ambíguos: Beleza, poder de compra e ‘raça’ no Brasil urbano (Ambiguous Hair: Beauty, purchase power and ‘race’ in urban Brazil), Milene Mizrahi reflects on the female body aesthetics in the funk world of Rio de Janeiro. We find there a series of key factors that allow us to reflect on the body aesthetics constructed by today’s black youth. One of the first keys triggered is the images on which the social perception of productions in this funk world of Rio de Janeiro is based: “[...] indiscriminately understood as ‘poor’, its productions are often explained in terms of lack and absence, with regard to musical productions or the body aesthetics” (Mizrahi, 2015, p. 32). Here we can see the criticism of a perception of the funk aesthetics directly related to poverty and thus related to absence.

When thinking of a social perception of black aesthetics, we came up against a strong social imagination produced through iconographies of suffering in text books, in the construction of a caricatured stereotype or even in the valuing of an image of poverty related to representations of servitude, either of black people in the role of slaves or all sorts of underemployment and marginality. We can also list images of war, poverty and disease associated with the African continent.

It should be observed that these images have shaped and continue to shape not only the social perception of black youth, but also the acceptable aesthetic codes for the construction of their self-presentation. In her aforementioned text, Nilma Lino Gomes claims that these representations and discourses affect black bodies violently, often resulting in self-rejection and contributing to a “monoculture of the body and aesthetic taste” (Gomes, 2017, p. 78). When reflecting on her aesthetic presentation before contact with the black movement, the professor of History Teaching Practices at UNB, Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, provides us with a better understanding of these implicit codes for the construction of her self-presentation:

Valuing a black aesthetic is in fact nothing new in the black movement. The CCN (Black Culture Center) in Maranhão is, to this day, one of the main organizations of the Brazilian black movement outside of the Rio-São Paulo axis. Its creation is emblematic because it is also directly linked to the construction of a network of black organizations in the North and Northeast of the country, which was of great importance at the national level, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. The major leader in the creation process of the CCN was Mundinha Araújo¹⁹ 6 Maria Raimunda (Mundinha) Araújo was born in São Luís, on 8 January 1943. With a degree in social communication from the Federation of Higher Learning Institutions of Maranhão in 1975, Mundinha Araújo, as she is known, was a founder of the Center of Black Culture of Maranhão (CCN) in 1979. . One of Mundinha’s brothers, who had gone to study in Rio de Janeiro, returned to Maranhão on vacation in the late 1960s with big natural black hair and discoursing on the existence of racism. According to Mundinha, this was not a common sight in Maranhão. At the same time, Mundinha recounted in an interview she granted to Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Pereira in 2004, that Angela Davis was one of her role models: “Angela Davis was my inspiration²⁰ 7 The activist Angela Davis (1944) had big natural hair, which she wore as a kind of trademark. A feminist, student and later professor of philosophy, a follower of Herbert Marcuse and student of Jean Paul Sartre, in the 1960s she joined the Communist Party of the United States and the Black Panthers, short for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, founded in the United States in 1966 for the purpose of facing through armed combat the discrimination suffered by black people. . When I saw that woman with that big natural hair, and the Jackson Five, that whole family, I was enchanted²¹ 8 The musical group The Jackson Five, formed by five brothers, with Michael Jackson as the lead singer, was active from 1962 to 1990. Available at: <www.wikipedia.org>. Accessed on 23 July 2007. . I said: ‘Ah, I’m going to grow my hair like that’. That’s when I stopped putting cream on my hair. That was in 1967, 68, and I was already in the teaching profession and all that”. Mundinha Araujo became the first black woman in São Luís, Maranhão, to wear her hair naturally, the style famously known in Brazil as “black power”. Everything she went through in terms of discrimination because she chose this aesthetic and political style, according to her, was important, as it strengthened her desire to create a black organization in São Luís. Her account, in this sense, is poignant and deserves to be quoted at length:

The above quote is interesting in a number of senses, not only because it articulates the various influences, including those of a transnational nature that led the interviewee to build first what she called “my movement”, but mainly with regard to the aesthetic and political impact that a hair style can have even in a large city like São Luís, in Maranhão, in the late 1960s. It should be highlighted that Mundinha Araújo’s contact with what we refer to here as the anti-racist struggle culture also occurred in other ways not directly associated with aesthetic issues. These included reading books and reports on racism, contact with an old militant from the Union of Men of Color (UHC), Dr. Cesário Coimbra, a doctor in São Luís in the 1960s, and contact with black movement militants and organizations in other states (Pereira, 2013PEREIRA, Amilcar A. O mundo negro: relações raciais e a constituição do movimento negro no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas; FAPERJ, 2013., p. 128-129). The case of Mundinha Araújo in Maranhão in the 1960s and 1970s, with her initial and individual movement, “my movement” in her words, may be viewed as an example of constructing a racial identity largely aided by a black aesthetic narrative constituted in a political struggle and spurring her and others to create an important black movement organization in the Northeast of Brazil in the late 1970s. Another interesting fact in this regard is the support that Mundinha received from the theater group that she was a member of and people at the university, both spaces for the production of fundamental knowledge for constituting and divulging the anti-racist struggle culture. In the above quote, it should also be highlighted that assuming a black identity and growing her hair naturally and parading this aesthetic narrative through the streets of São Luís in Maranhão was a constant performative practice in the life of Mundinha, fundamental at the time for the production and circulation of the anti-racist struggle culture. In a social and political context like the one experienced by Mundinha, we understand that the preparation of her aesthetic narrative was already a political performance in itself. Throughout the country, black militants engaged in different performative practices in the 1970s, denouncing the so-called racial democracy and indulging in a wide range of anti-racist performances.

Another example of the performances of black militants in the days of the civil and military dictatorship also reveals the influence of the figure and thinking of Amilcar Cabral among the militants of the black movement that was politically organized in the mid-1970s in Brazil. The circulation of references for the production of the anti-racist struggle culture is old and demonstrated in the interview with Amauri Mendes Pereira²³ 10 Amauri was the founder of the Brazil-Africa Exchange Society (Sociedade de Intercâmbio Brasil-África (Sinba)) in 1974. He was also a writer and director of the Sinba journal, published by the society of that name from 1977 to 1980. He was involved in creating the United Black Movement (MNU) in São Paulo in 1978, and was a director of the Black Culture Research Institute (IPCN), founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1975, on two occasions: in the early 1980s and from 1992 and 1996, when he was elected president of the institute. The excerpt cited below is part of the oral history interview granted to Verena Alberti and Amilcar Araujo Pereira at the Center of Research and Documentation of Contemporary History of Brazil, established by the Getulio Vargas Foundation (CPDOC-FGV) between 31 October 2003 and 4 November 2004, and published in the book entitled Histórias do movimento negro no Brasil: statements made to the CPDOC (Alberti; Pereira, 2007). , in which he tells of one of the forms of his political performances at that time:

The political performances of the movement and its aesthetic narratives quite often dialogued directly with artistic manifestations, such as the theater. In São Paulo, one of the first organizations of the black movement created in the 1970s was the Black Culture and Art Center (Cecan), founded in the city in 1972. Thereza Santos, born in Rio de Janeiro in 1938, was one of its founders. In her autobiography, she tells how the organization emerged from a group invited to put on a play called E agora falamos... Nós (And now we speak… We do), which told the story of black people in Brazil, but from a black viewpoint. The play was written by Thereza and the black sociologist and activist Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira, in 1972. Thereza Santos had studied at the National Philosophy Faculty in Rio de Janeiro and been active at the Popular Culture Center (CPC) of the National Union of Students (UNE) until the end of the 1960s, when she was forced to flee Rio de Janeiro because she was a member of the Communist Party and had been interrogated for several days by officials from the Naval Information Center (Cenimar) because of her cultural activities to raise funds for the party. In São Paulo, Thereza met Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira, an intellectual and professor of social sciences at Universidade Federal de São Carlos. Regarding her relationship with Eduardo and the play written and performed only by black people, which ran at the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) and made such an impact on the black community in São Paulo, Thereza Santos said:

Cecan was one of the main bases in 1978 for the foundation of one of the principal organizations of the Brazilian black movement of the twentieth century, the United Black Movement (MNU). It was created in a public act on 7 July 1978, in a performative way on the steps of the Municipal Theater of São Paulo, with the presence of militants representing black organizations form other Brazilian states (Pereira, 2013PEREIRA, Amilcar A. O mundo negro: relações raciais e a constituição do movimento negro no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Pallas; FAPERJ, 2013.). Abdias do Nascimento²⁵ 12 Abdias do Nascimento (1914-2011) founded the Black Experimental Theater in 1944. In 1968, he went into exile in the United States because of the tough measures of the military government, which had been in power since 1964, and became a professor at several American universities. In 1981, he established the Afro-Brazilian Research and Study Institute at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in São Paulo. In exile, he became a friend of Leonel Brizola, with whom he founded the Democratic Workers’ Party (PDT) in May of 1980. He founded the PDT’s Black Movement Secretariat and was a federal deputy representing the state of Rio de Janeiro from 1983 to 1986, and a senator for that state from 1991 to 1992 and from 1997 to 1999. During the second government of Leonel Brizola in the state of Rio de Janeiro (1991-1995), he was in charge of the Extraordinary Secretariat for the Defense and promotion of Afro-Brazilian Populations (Sedepron), later known as Seafro. During the government of Anthony Garotinho (1999-2003), he was Secretary of Human Rights and Citizenship of Rio de Janeiro. Available at: <http://ipeafro.org.br/personalidades/abdias-nascimento/>. Accessed on 10 July 2019. , who in many interviews is treated by black militants as a true icon of the memory of the black movement in the twentieth century, was one of the black leaders who participated in the creation of the MNU in 1978. Long before this, however, in 1944, he had already led the creation of the Black Experimental Theater (TEN), which was the most important of the black organizations created in that historical context from the end of the New State dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas and the beginning of re-democratization. TEN became involved in the cultural environment, making diverse performances at the theater and society in general, and promoting literacy courses and other actions, according to Antônio Sérgio Guimarães:

In this respect, the fact that TEN organized the I and II National Black Convention two years in a row (1945 and 1946), in Rio and São Paulo may be highlighted. They proposed for the Constitution of 1946 that racial discrimination should be considered a crime against the nation. TEN also organized the I Black Brazilian Congress in 1950. Michael Hanchard claims that TEN was founded with the primary intention of being a theater production company, but took on other cultural and political functions soon after its inception and that “[...] in addition to conducting plays like Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1945) and Albert Camus’s Caligula (1949), TEN was also the driving force behind the journal Quilombo (1948-1950) and small-scale literacy campaigns and courses in ‘cultural initiation’ between 1944 and 1946” (Hanchard, 2001HANCHARD, Michael George. Orfeu e o poder: o movimento negro no Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo (1945-1988). Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2001., p. 129).

As we perceived, for a long time the aesthetic narrative and different political performances have been important strategies in the struggle of the black movement. What we can add regarding today in this analysis is the potential role of new technologies in the circulation of the aesthetic narratives of black people and, consequently, the anti-racist struggle culture that they carry and produce. One of our interviewees, Luana Teófilo, who has a degree in law and is the creator of the Efigênias Blog of the BAP Board and the Tira isso page, told us of what she calls the curly revolution and its impact on the consolidation of a market of products that value the aesthetics of afro hair and how black women perceive themselves:

From this excerpt it can be inferred that at least two great steps have been taken to strengthen the circulation of this aesthetic narrative of black people. The first has to do with facilitating access to technologies about caring for afro hair by sharing these technologies on the internet. This first step is added to a change in the market regarding the direction for the inclusion of black female consumers on the aesthetic and beauty market. This inclusion creates new products that are now appropriate for black people. There is make-up that is suitable for the tones of black skin and products that facilitate the use of technology to care for natural afro hair, to name a few.

The potential for the circulation of an aesthetic narrative is clearly shown in the excerpt from Luana’s interview. There we have black women making videos about looking after their appearance. Instead of reaching subjects only at the level of care technologies, they also exert an influence by encouraging new producers of racialized content. The process of raising awareness occurs very quickly and the creation and sharing of new codes of the anti-racist struggle culture affect a series of new subjects that otherwise would not have access to it.

Thinking about composing aesthetic narratives for black youth also means thinking about the widespread adherence of this youth to the anti-racist movement, albeit not through the traditional ways of political militancy. By making contact with these narratives and assuming a series of goals in this assemblage, such as braids, box braids, make-up, turbans, earrings, clothes made of material that conjure up visions of Africa other than famine and shortages, the subjects compose a self-representation added to the discursivities contained in these objects, which in some cases might even show signs of the anti-racial struggle from the moment they are produced. The aesthetic narratives are structured this way, loaded with power and the anti-racist struggle culture.

It is interesting to note that the aesthetic narratives prepared through contact with traditional or institutional forms of black militancy, as in the cases of Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto and Mundinha Araújo in different historical periods, are considered politicized. Nevertheless, some of the aesthetic narratives constructed today, based on other non-institutionalized black narratives, can be put in check by militants of the black movement, who consider them empty and/or depoliticized. The interview with Joana Machado, a militant at the Center for Black Defense and Studies of Pará State (CEDENPA), a traditional organization of the black movement in Pará, founded in 1990, shows a partial glimpse of this issue:

Unlike Joana, who regards stricto sensu political actions necessary for subjects with a certain aesthetics to be considered politicized, Mizrahi defends the extremely political nature that is found in the composition of the aesthetics itself. Explaining the paradigms on which her work is based, the author had this to say:

The author also presents a bibliographic discussion that endorses the non-superficiality of aesthetics. According to her:

It is not the case here of a deliberate attitude with a priori political intentions. Nevertheless, the taste and self-presentation that compose the aesthetic choice are also riddled with codes and meanings. Thus, looking at this aesthetics presented by black youth, simplifying it to a political versus an aesthetic opposition, crystalizes this narrative as simple taste, fashion, fads and aesthetic for the sake of aesthetics. This view also ends up endorsing the waste of an entire potential educator and reeducator contained in the narrative produced by the black population in aesthetics.

In a country where “Appreciations of race and color, especially, are not verbalized much in certain social contexts...” (Mizrahi, 2015MIZRAHI, Mylene. Cabelos Ambiguos: beleza, poder de compra e “raça” no Brasil urbano. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais, São Paulo, v. 30, n. 89, p. 31-47, out. 2015., p. 31), we consider the aesthetic narrative extremely powerful from the viewpoint of reeducation of race relations, as it is capable of parading a discourse without necessarily activating orally. It is a discourse loaded with anti-racist struggle culture and can therefore affect the subjects with its codes. The aesthetic narratives of black people have an impact. This is the impact that generates rejection and leads to racist manifestations. The episode recounted below by Luana helps us to understand a little better the scope of these impacts:

From this first excerpt of the case of Luana, a question emerges: Luana, clearly, was already black before this occurrence, so why did racism only rear its head after she box-braided her hair? What we have outlined here is an observation of the political and performative of this aesthetic narrative. As Mizrahi indicated above, appreciations of race and color are not often verbalized in some social contexts, and even though there may not be a priori a stricto sensu political intention, the aesthetic narrative in these cases breaks the silence in spaces of power and makes the anti-racist struggle culture circulate, promoting instability. It is no longer merely a case of being recognized as black, it is being recognized as black and carrying with you an entire aesthetic discursivity that destabilizes, even in silence. In this respect, when recounting the reports received on the Tira isso! page, a space on the internet created by Luana to publish reports of discrimination in the workplace, the interviewee had this to say:

In the case of Luana and many others, this aesthetic narrative leads to confrontation. Confrontation is often considered something to be avoided, although we also view it here as a form of dialogue. The instability that stems from confrontations is a major mobilizer of these subjectivities. Therefore, it has the potential to set them in motion, which may (or may not) lead to transformations through conflict. Removing subjects from their comfort zone and enabling contact with narratives laden with anti-racist struggle culture is a step on the road to transforming cultural codes.

As we draw to a close, we may return to the criticisms of Joana Machado regarding the possibility of depoliticizing the aesthetics of young black people today at Universidade Federal do Pará (UFPA). Joana thinks of the actions of blacks within the university linked to political perspectives of the left and highly traditional militancy. Meanwhile, Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, when reflecting on the impact of the presence of black students, laden with afro-futurist aesthetic in her classrooms and the university, has this to say:

Ana Flávia’s report indicates another possibility for political action of black aesthetics in university spaces. In this new reality, the educational character of the narrative aesthetics of the black movement can be seen. Ana Flávia draws our attention to the aesthetics linked to a model of political action that gives a voice to the idea of the circulation of anti-racist struggle culture and also demarcates perceptions regarding the transformation of the cultural codes that operate in that space. In the corridors of Brazilian universities, the sight of young black men and women has become increasingly common. Like Djonga, they are engaged in the struggle against racism to reeducate society and make the following decision: Yes, that is why I can’t sit still. So, my choice was to become an aesthetic being.

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