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2012 24: 3Cultural DynamicsJoão H. Costa Vargas

critical black Brazilian studiesGendered antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging

  

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Gendered antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging critical black Brazilian studies

João H. Costa VargasUniversity of Texas at Austin, USA

AbstractA new generation of black Brazilian scholar-activists is asking critical questions about the polity’s nature and process. No longer restricted to Brazilian white-dominated, Eurocentric academic canons and rituals, these black voices, rooted in collective efforts aimed against ubiquitous and persistent gendered antiblack discriminatory practices, challenge the social world’s cognitive and political machinery. Sônia Santos, Jaime Alves, Luciane Rocha, and Maria Andrea Soares zero in on black experiences that consistently reveal a structure of antiblack antagonisms. Their analyses suggest the imminently corrupt character of the dominant Brazilian social and ideological project. Whether the project can be reformed, or whether it should be destroyed and replaced depends on how we read and how far we are willing to take each analysis.

Keywordsblack diaspora, Brazil, gendered antiblackness, violence

Sônia Santos, Jaime Alves, Luciane Rocha, and Maria Andrea Soares, the authors of the essays in this volume, provide suggestive insights about the gendered experiences of blacks and blackness in Brazil. The writings are compelling because of the dense ethno-graphic materials they present and analyze. As well, these essays’ importance lies in the litany of heuristic propositions, hypotheses, and political and aesthetic projects they gen-erate. They speak of black life and social death as intermingled strands of diasporic geographies. And they embrace and draw from the seemingly difficult, if not impossible, positions of gendered blackness, thus revealing both dystopian and cautiously hopeful scenarios. These essays are as much about black subjection as they are about black objection to subjection (Moten, 2003).

Corresponding author:João H. Costa Vargas, African and African Diaspora Studies Department, University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712, USA.Email: costavargas@mail.utexas.edu

452808 CDY24110.1177/0921374012452808Cultural DynamicsVargas2012

Article

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4 Cultural Dynamics 24(1)

Between the no longer and the not yet, caught in this uncertain yet potentially trans-formative moment, this new generation of black Brazilian scholar-activists is asking critical questions about the polity’s nature and process. No longer restricted to Brazilian white-dominated, Eurocentric academic canons and rituals, these black voices, rooted in collective efforts aimed against ubiquitous and persistent gendered antiblack dis-criminatory practices, challenge the social world’s cognitive and political machinery. In dialogue with, and/or opposing Brazilian state institutions and the premises and prac-tices of civil society, Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares zero in on black experiences that consistently reveal a structure of antiblack antagonisms. The black social world is a world under war.

This new generation builds from the insights of Abdias do Nascimento and Lélia Gonzalez, among many other black Brazilian critics. Although these emerging authors express themselves in English and are deeply immersed in various black feminist cur-rents, they develop a set of analytical strategies that de-center the Anglophone-dominant perspectives on the black diaspora and on black feminisms. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in and about black Brazilian social dynamics, they focus specifically on black women’s reproductive health, black youth practices that reclaim urban spatial-ity, black mothers’ experiences of violence, and representation of blacks and blackness in popular culture. Yet, producing an articulated set of pressing insights, the writers point to related components of the polity’s antiblack foundation. Although none of the authors says it explicitly, their analyses suggest the immanently corrupt character of the domi-nant Brazilian social and ideological project: from the perspective of the Afrodescended, Brazil is a fraud. Whether the project can be reformed, or whether it should be destroyed and replaced depends on how we read and how far we are willing to take each analysis.

One of the experiences the black Brazilian authors in this volume have in common is immersion in and active engagement with black diaspora perspectives within and outside the Brazilian nation state. In various degrees identified with the (rather ostentatiously) self-described Austin School of Black Diaspora studies (Gordon, 2006), Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares inhabit and willingly theorize from an outsider-within standpoint, whether they find themselves in Brazil, the United States, or elsewhere. Black individu-als produce heightened social dissonance in white canonical spaces of academia and administration, including government- and non-government-sponsored events and initia-tives, universities, conferences, and well-regarded public forums. Variations of gender, color, and social class impact the dissonance level. At the level of analysis, the dissonant quality of the authors’ standpoints means that their works are not yet accepted as legiti-mate representations of Brazilian and black diaspora processes. In Brazil and the United States, even though these authors are always under the suspicion that is cast on any black intellectual, the suspicion they experience is compounded by their transnationality. All of which is to say that, while the ‘no longer’ is certainly palpable, the ‘not yet’ suggests a scenario of integration and respect that is, at best, a long shot. The authors’ professional experiences are themselves evidence of a diasporic structure of antiblack dispositions. To make matters even more complex and embattled, it is quite apparent that non-blacks do not exclusively enact such antiblack dispositions.

Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares refuse to ask the utterly misinformed, laced with bad faith, and downright irresponsible question about whether gendered antiblackness is

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relevant. Rather, the authors in this special issue, directly or by implication, query: how is gendered antiblackness manifested in civil society and state practices? This important question leads to the central, critical inquiry: can the Brazilian polis integrate blacks? Speculating along these lines, one can propose: if the polis is not able to integrate blacks as de facto, full citizens, then the polis, from a black standpoint, is an impossible project and event. The chronos of integration––elapsed time, imagined time, experienced time––is an impossible chronos. It ensues that the gendered black subject is an impossible subject, one whose impossible gender, impossible blackness, impossible being, inhabits the very impossible co-ordinates of time and space that make the nation possible. The nation is possible because the gendered black subject, qua subject, qua citizen, is an oxymoron. Always already, thus timeless, thus outside of the linearity of time, the impossible black subject occupies the zones of death. It is not accidental that, in Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares’s writings, death is such a prominent event––always present as a possibility, as experience, as representation, as repetition, almost banal. That we, at times, still become enraged by the seemingly needless death of a black person––although it would be a stretch to say we are surprised––suggests that, in some powerful, though not always transparent ways, blacks long for acceptance and inclusion. Whether acceptance and inclusion are attainable and realistic goals depends on one’s position on antiblackness: is it destructi-ble, or at least controllable? And if so, how? And who can and should be involved in the process?

To engage with these questions is to cut through thick and deep layers of a dominant cognitive machine that suggests a fundamentally divergent scenario, structured around a set of related and hegemonic narratives: the Brazilian nation is all-embracing; anti-black racism, when and if exists, can be, will be, and is already waning; and the present economic boom, managed by competent, unusually popular left-wing administrators (Presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff paradigmatically symbolizing the moment) will lift all boats, including that of the Afrodescended. Such cognitive apparatus expresses and reaffirms a mythical ontology that welcomes blackness, accepts, seeks, and already embodies miscegenation and social harmony. The superhuman, all-loving, cosmic, con-fident social figure that embodies this ideological machine is a cyborg. This cyborg requires and enacts the magical elimination of blacks––magical because elimination is presented as its precise opposite: as benevolent amalgamation. This cyborg, as seduc-tive as it appears, needs to be destroyed because its desire for mixture, as Abdias do Nascimento would say, is a technology of massacre. The optimistic national project and its attendant ontology, I hear the authors in this volume suggesting, are deceptive inas-much as they consistently produce black social death.

In the essays that follow, the intersections between gendered blackness and contested geographies are a key analytical challenge. The recognition that such intersections are at the crux of a black diasporic condition and process––that of the embattled black presence in nation states of the Americas––figure prominently in each of the authors’ explorations of political constraints and possibilities concerning Brazilian world cities. As Soares’s analysis of visual representations of blackness indicates, to speak of the embattled black presence is to engage with the dominant white gaze. A gaze that demands control, dis-tance, separation. A gaze that is threatened by the prospect of being seen, which means the prospect of having its vantage point challenged, its privileges questioned, its purity

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negated. Based on Frantz Fanon’s analysis of black ontology (1967: 110), we can sur-mise that the gendered black body must be gendered and black in relation to white gaze (itself always already gendered and racialized). The reverse, though, is not true. In the case of the black body gendered as male, Fanon concludes that ‘[t]he black man has no ontological resistance in the eye of the white man’. In other words, the white gaze, and the gendered white being, is not dependent on the black gaze. Indeed, the white gaze, and therefore the white being, depends on the assumption that, while it sees, captures, and objectifies––‘Look, a Negro[/Negress]’––it is shielded from blackness.

The essays by Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares engage a lingering problem affecting Brazilian society: what is the place of blacks and blackness in the national imaginary, political arenas, and urban landscapes? While there may be a place for blackness in the realms of representation and performance (for example, as ritual, as consumption, as fear, as desire, as ontological opposite), at times celebrated, at times negated, often both, the question about the place of blacks––as bodies, communities, and land––is complex, and because it invites us to contend with the actual results of social representations and practices, perhaps more urgent.

The distinction between blackness and blacks is of course an analytical strategy that has little analogy to experience: it would be a challenge to identify the manifestation of one without the impact of the other. Emphasis on the split, however, allows for an exami-nation of a founding contradiction of Brazilian social relations and representations, namely, the simultaneous negation of the relevance of race in general, and blackness in particular, and the hyperconsciousness of race, and blackness specifically, as normative parameters from which behavior, representations, and institutional arrangements draw.

Relational analyses of gendered antiblackness

In a black diasporic perspective, the grammar of antiblackness structures the social and cognitive worlds in ways that allow for parallels, connections, and analogies across boundaries of time and geography (Barlow, 2003; Harrison 2002; Robinson, 2000; Winant, 2001). In the specific case of critical studies on Brazilian social relations, Angela Gilliam (2001), Michael Hanchard (2003), Sonia Santos (2008), Keisha-Khan Perry (2009), Jaime Alves (2009), and Luciane Rocha (2010), among others, have emphasized their similarities vis-à-vis other nation and empire states (Jung, 2011), rather than the commonly assumed Brazilian social architecture’s sui generis character. This is not to negate Brazilian social relations’ specificities; rather, it is to analyze those unique traits in the context of an overriding diasporic antiblackness that structures social worlds in particular yet related manners. A glance at social and official economic indicators, in the United States and in Brazil, suffices to conclude that, local inflections notwithstanding, in both places life chances in the spheres of work, housing, criminal justice, and health are correlated to one’s racial positionality (Paixão, 2010; Telles, 2006; Winant, 2001), and that the closer one is to blackness, with variations according to the ways gender articulates with race, the greater the level of disadvantages. Greater disparities exist between blacks and non-blacks, rather than within racial groups, a pattern indicative of a diasporic antiblack structure of gendered racial antagonism (Harrison 2002; Hartman,

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1997, 2007; Wilderson 2010). Exploring the implications of a diasporic perspective that centers antiblackness, Jared Sexton (2010: 47) writes:

If the oppression of nonblack people of color in, and perhaps beyond, the United States seems conditional to the historic instances and functions at a more restricted empirical scope, antiblackness seems invariant and limitless (which does not mean that the former is somehow negligible and short-lived or that the latter is exhausting and unchanging). If pursued with some consistency, the sort of comparative analysis outlined above would likely impact the formulation of political strategy and modify the demeanor of our political culture. In fact, it might denature the comparative instinct altogether in favor of a relational analysis more adequate to the task.

Variations of a relational analysis structure Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares’s essays. Relational analyses build from the facts of transnational gendered blackness and examine its local manifestations. Stressing antiblackness, this perspective specifies white suprem-acy by rendering it a historical discourse of power that depends on the association between blackness, on the one hand, and non-humanity, exclusion, abhorrence, on the other. When reflecting on the constitution and effects of gendered white supremacist racial hierarchies, blackness, and black bodies gain central––not total––relevance as demarcating zones of death from which dominant and subordinated groups are constituted (Sexton, 2010: 48). The white supremacist continuum of relative belonging becomes one that stresses black exclusion as the paradigmatic exclusion. A field of continuities, rather than ruptures, defines the black diaspora and its nation states.

As the essays by Santos and Rocha more pointedly remark, the gendered aspects of antiblackness constitute a significant thread of diasporic networks. Hortense Spillers, for example (2003: 214–15), advances that the gendered dynamics specific to the survivors of the so-called ‘middle passage’ are necessarily related, but yet not reducible to the dominant gender norms that overdetermine non-blacks. The argument goes as follows. A suspension of gender distinctions preceded, and an overriding violence imposed on black bodies defined, the black presence in the diaspora. Gender norms thus constitute an embattled field that, on the one hand, is heavily impacted by standards of hegemonic respectability, and on the other provides various possibilities that, as they question normalized expecta-tions of gendered social performance, impact structures of race and gender.

A critical reading of slavery’s afterlife means bringing social structures of the past, not as an unchanging same, but as symbolic reservoir whose energy dissipates into contempo-rary formations of race and gender. Taking into account the past in the present, and thus the present as reanimation and modification of the past, the following heuristic proposi-tions emerge out of the essays. (Notice how they engage and thus necessarily modify, dis-locate, a diasporic dialogue that has tended to be Anglophone and centered in experiences of black writers and communities in English-speaking states.) First, as Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares suggest, placed outside of the normatized female and male gender sym-bology, the black female and male inhabit no predetermined social field (Spillers, 2003: 228). This is not to negate the obvious: black bodies are overdetermined by continuing violence (Hartman, 1997: 86). This violence expresses and reproduces a plethora of ‘controlling images’ (Collins, 1991). To emphasize social forces that subjugate bodies according to ever-shifting, yet constraining, gender norms is to recognize the ways in

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which controlling images function as stereotypes that are both imposed and resisted. The ‘Mammy’, the ‘welfare mother’, and the ‘criminal blackman’ (Russell, 1998), for example, generate expectations about a person’s nature and behavior based on his or her assumed race, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, to oppose such expectations is to, forcefully, craft alternative sets of assumptions and conduct. And this constitutes the second heuristic proposition emerging out of the essays: as much as black bodies are subjected to dehumani-zation, they also perform counter-narratives that, although not always effective in negating the imposed norms, nevertheless suggest possibilities beyond the material and symbolic confines of gendered antiblackness. Such confines are not just about one’s body and behav-ior; they produce spatial and therefore political boundaries. Which is to say, the performa-tive possibilities announced in this volume’s essays are as much about psychic survival as they are about symbolic reconfiguration and political experimentation.

Brazil in the diaspora, the diaspora in Brazil

Currently, many urban conglomerates in Brazil can be examined as terrains of possibili-ties within, in spite of, and as a symptom of overwhelming antiblack processes. Dense and complex black social networks are juxtaposed to land that has been, perhaps even more so in the last few years, a battleground between competing social projects (e.g. Carril, 2006). Historical black geographies––evidence of an actual apartheid (Oliveira, 2007; Rolnik 1989) defined by violence, exclusion, and the disproportionate presence of black people––have become the main focus of unprecedented police and military occupation. To annihilate the drug trafficking gangs ensconced in those areas is the official objective.

Brazil, more broadly, constitutes an interesting case given the current economic con-text marked by inflation control, minimum wage increase, and public policies, such as the Bolsa Família (Family Stipend) that were effective in transferring income to impov-erished families. Given that blacks––who in Brazil include blacks and browns (negros e pardos, in Portuguese) according to the census––are disproportionately represented among the poor, is it small wonder that they were the main beneficiaries of such redis-tributive policies. Yet, a critical focus on gendered antiblackness makes possible to raise questions about the viability of the black presence in Brazil even in a context of apparent black social uplift. For instance: in 2007, in 26 of 27 Brazilian states, the rate of mortality by homicide for black men was greater than the rate for white men, and the asymmetry had exponential magnitude: in the state of Paraíba, for example, it was 1,181.4 percent higher; 806.9 percent higher in Pernambuco. In the state of Rio, that rate was 130.0 per-cent higher for blacks than it was for whites (Paixão, 2010: 255, 256). More telling, perhaps, is what is called ‘homicide by legal intervention’, that is, homicides committed by individuals working for the state, especially the police. Notwithstanding the docu-mented underreporting patterns regarding such homicides, between 2001 and 2007, blacks accounted for 61.7 per cent of their total, 64.5 per cent for 2007 (Paixão, 2010: 259). Blacks are overrepresented in rates of violent death, preventable death by disease, blocked access to health care, and other indicators suggesting long-standing patterns of exclusion (Paixão, 2010: chs 2, 4). One hypothesis that emerges out of the works by Santos, Alves, Rocha, and Soares is that, whereas currently blacks experience unprec-edented economic gains, they are also disproportionately victimized by state neglect

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(in the spheres of education and health, for example) and, more pointedly, violence. While economic uplift suggests a degree of assimilation into an expanding consumer market, state neglect and violence indicate a structural, long-duration antiblack disposi-tion that calls into question the possibility of full black integration and citizenship. In debate is whether, and to what degree, black life is viable in the Brazilian polity.

Setting up the world stage

To contextualize the problems the essays in this volume address, let us briefly focus on Rio de Janeiro’s recent events. Alves is the only author in this collection whose research is not primarily based in Rio. Yet his insights on São Paulo’s struggles over territory sug-gest a macabre cornucopia of parallels and continuities.

Following the infamous massacre of 2007 in the Complexo do Alemão, a working class, mostly black area in the city’s northwest, when 19 people were killed in a single police operation, the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region witnessed an unprecedented wave of violent, apparently coordinated acts of defiance against the state and civil society. Burning of buses, trucks, and passenger cars; shootings of police officers, including the downing of a police helicopter in Morro dos Macacos in October 2009 (22 people were killed in that operation); and even bombings in tourist areas (Salles, 2007)––all have marked the city as the national stage on which Brazil’s emerging modernizing project is tested.

On 2 October 2009, Rio was announced as the 2016 Olympic Games host. Responding to the security concerns voiced during the host-city selection process, Rio state’s gover-nor, Sérgio Cabral, signaled his resolve to assure social control by hiring Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s former mayor, as the Games’ security advisor. While Giuliani drew much of his municipal and national approval from his zero-tolerance stance on crime, it is also well known that, among the city’s black population, few administrators have surpassed his level of disapproval (Powell, 2007). The brutality the New York Police Department employed on members of disadvantaged communities, and especially the black, were notoriously exemplified in Amadou Diallo’s murder: in 1999, in the Bronx, he was shot at 41 times by four plain-clothes officers. Earlier, in 1997, Abner Louima was brutalized and sodomized with a broken handle of a bathroom plunger by police officers in Brooklyn. That Diallo was a Guinean immigrant, and Louima is origi-nally from Haiti, suggest deep and broad diasporic resonances. These resonances reaf-firm the necessary place the Brazilian nation state occupies in these webs of gendered inflections of race, impacting and impacted by struggles over rights to the city and, ulti-mately, land ownership.

Many of the Brazilian marines employed in the police operations in Rio and other Brazilian cities are Haiti veterans. Brazil leads the military component of the United Nations Stabilizing Mission in Haiti, in operation since 2004. Military missions not unlike those employed in Rio have killed dozens of Haitian persons on several occasions. For example, on 6 July 2005 at least 26 people were killed in a successful assassination attempt on Emmanuel ‘Dred’ Wilmer, also known as Dread Wilme, and four of his clos-est followers. Wilme was openly hostile to the UN military occupation of his country and opposed the ouster of the constitutional president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (US Labor and

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Human Rights Delegation, 2005). The significance of these diasporic events cannot be overstated; they suggest lines of continuity between territories separated by geographical distance, but brought closer due to the frequent utilization of police-military occupation and pacifying tactics against civilians, the familiar sites of black exclusion from the nation state, and the almost expected overrepresentation of black bodies as the victims of lethal violence. Rather than diasporic comparisons, then, what the violent struggles in Rio suggest is a deep, ongoing, and revealing set of relations between the ways in which gendered antiblackness becomes manifested in and through so-called pacification mis-sions. Rio becomes interesting not because it is unique, but because it offers a variation of a repressive apparatus that is diasporic in its reach and effects.

In Rio de Janeiro, this five-year sequence of frequent deadly confrontations offers a window into a historical pattern of longer duration, dating back to at least the establish-ment of similar informal settlement at the turn of the 20th century (Moreira, 2006; Perlman, 2009). The essays in this volume remind us that blackness plays a central role in defining the scope, lethality, and prolonged intensity of such conflicts––conflicts that are as much about taking control of embattled territories as they are about carrying out on Rio’s city spaces a national modernizing project that seems to have little, if any, tolerance for autonomous black land control and, ultimately, autonomous, black political agency.

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Biographical Note

João H. Costa Vargas teaches Black Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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