What’s Behind Decolonial Movements in Brazil?

Does art imitate life or does life imitate art? Well, both are true, simultaneously. Although these events are recent, they are the result of a long process of racial literacy in Brazil, something that is much more advanced in this country compared to the rest of Latin America. Racial literacy is the awareness of how race relations structure our societies. It’s a perception of history that is difficult to disseminate for historical reasons, such as Luso-tropicalist propaganda (the idea that Portuguese colonialism was benevolent) or racial democracy (the fact that racism allegedly does not exist in Brazil, since the country is multicultural and mixed-race).

However, it has been several decades since Black theorists, writers, and other thinkers in Brazil have published important critical works. They disproved these fallacies, influenced the Brazilian social imagination and helped to build and recognize Black identity in the country.

From 1944 to 1961, the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), founded by Abdias Nascimento and Maria de Lourdes Vale do Nascimento, performed several productions on broad themes, guided by a pulsating Black consciousness. In the 1970s, several Black political mobilization groups emerged, such as the Centro de Cultura e Arte Negra (Cecan), developed by Thereza Santos, in 1971; the Fundação da Federação das Entidades Afro-brasileiras do Estado de São Paulo, in 1976, and the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) and the Festival Comunitário Negro Zumbi (FECONEZU), all in 1978. In 1995, Maria Lucia da Silva opened the AMMA Psiquê e Negritude Institute, the first organization to connect psychological and political practice through race relations. And these are just a few examples.

Philosopher and anthropologist Lélia Gonzales (1935-94) was part of some of these movements. She published several essays in which she denounced the intersection of racism and sexism, criticized the spread of the idea of racial democracy, and theorized Amefricanidade — African heritage of the Americas. Historian, poet and activist Beatriz Nascimento (1942-95) intensively researched the history and culture of Brazilian quilombos. She contextualized quilombos as “alternative social systems organized by Black people”, originating in Africa. For Beatriz Nascimento, “the quilombo is the space we occupy; it is us, it is the moment of historical reclaiming”(1). Another important contribution to the formation of Black consciousness in Brazil was the work of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Neusa Santos Souza (1948-2008). In Tornar-se Negro (1983), Neusa explains that the discovery of being Black is also the experience of committing to reclaiming one’s history and recreating oneself in one’s own potential. For her, “being Black is not a given condition, a priori. It is a becoming”(2), an eminently political task that contests the doctrine that upwardly mobile Black people must become a caricature of whiteness, and the trap of reserving anti-racist work exclusively for them.

All of these thinkers and many more are the people who influenced the racial literacy that today informs many Brazilian artists, curators, writers, academics, and artistic directors. Without them, we would not have had Black curators in the last two editions of the São Paulo Biennial, for example. However, what surprised me most was finding this literacy outside of creative-academic circles — both in politics and on the streets. And it has also been intersected by gender issues.

It’s no coincidence that despite Brazil having been under a far-right government for four years, Bolsonaro has been banned from running for office again, while Erika Hilton, a Black trans woman, is one of the country’s most popular politicians. Or that my friend, after coffee, took me to Afrocentric restaurants and bookstores. Places that as a person of African descent I had the unique opportunity to visit, because as I was told: in times of neoliberalism we also need to protect our communities from gentrification, not only materially, but intellectually.

It is also no coincidence that the process of racial literacy in Brazil has been accompanied by decades of left-wing governments in the country, by social changes in the US and Europe, and by the national – and international – art market always thirsty for the latest “novelty”. Just to give you a reference: in “2023, the art market in Brazil reached an estimated total value of approximately R$2.9 billion (USD 580 million), a growth of 21% compared to the previous year” (3). Does the economy imitate art or does art imitate the economy? Well, both things are true – simultaneously.

Will Furtado is Editor-in-Chief of C&AL.

Translation: Zoë Perry

1 Maria Beatriz Nascimento, Beatriz Nascimento, Quilombola e Intelectual: possibilidades nos dias da destruição. São Paulo: Editora Filhos da África, 2018, p. 352.

2 Neusa Santos Souza, Tornar-se negro: Ou as vicissitudes da identidade do negro brasileiro em ascensão social. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2021, p. 115.

3 Associação Brasileira de Arte Contemporânea; Agência Brasileira de Promoções de Exportações e Investimentos, 7ª pesquisa setorial do mercado de arte no Brasil. São Paulo: Act Editora, p. 10.