Cheryl Sterling

Can You Really See through a Squint? Theoretical Underpinnings in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy is read as an inversion of the colonial travel narrative, addressing the continued asymmetrical power relations between Europe and Africa. The paper posits Sissie, its focal character, as a site of theoretical transformations, engaging with issues of racial subjectivity, sexuality and political positionality in relation to the neo-colonial African state. It further argues that Aidoo situates a performative self in the text through an interrogatory narrative voice that succeeds in both deforming the novelistic pattern and participating in the critique of Western subjectivity and hegemonic feminist positioning, while inserting a resistant feminist ideology into Pan-Africanist discourse to re-envision the role of African women in Africa’s development.

Performing Bodies Performing Blackness Performing Self: The Quest for a Transformative Poiesis

The two epigrams above construct a modality for understanding the aesthetic signifiers in Afro-Brazilian theater. Like all discourses of the oppressed concerned with addressing social impediments, theatric arts become a venue in which to recognize race, debate racism, and reconfigure racial subjectivity and agency on the part of Afro-Brazilians. Transposing Franz Fanon’s amazingly satirical quip immediately forges a connection between the burden of blackness and the acknowledgement of the pigmentocracy within the national discourse. Juxtaposed against an immutable declaration such as, “Race is fate … it is destiny,” the signification of the negated Other is redressed within the received and perceived images of blackness and the metaphysical undergirding of Brazilian society by the Candomble religious matrix. In Yoruba cosmology, choice is the most important component of destiny. One is given a choice of heads in Orun’s realm of the unborn, and that choice is metaphorically linked to the effectuation of destiny. Personal agency begins in the spiritual, for that recreated or rebirthed essence becomes the actional human being in Aye. When metaphysical discourse enters into the realm of tangible space, it confronts ordinary, everyday social constructs and undergoes multiple levels of interpretation to engender understanding.

Aesthetically Black: The Articulation of Blackness in the Black Arts Movement and Quilombhoje

The Afro-Brazilian writers’ collective Quilombhoje marks a radical departure in the positionality of black writers in the Brazilian mindscape. As the collective formed to create works that both challenge the social marginalization of Afro-descended peoples and to give a venue and voice to artists who would never be recognized by the Brazilian literati, they open a space of freedom and fluidity of expression. Their expressivity, of course, first focuses on their blackness and the aesthetic foundation from which to derive a spectra of artistic production, particular to their imbrication of the personal and the political in the creation of art. They deliberately discard the models of aesthetic engagement that privilege “art for art’s sake” and reformulate it in the Du Boisian sense that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be” (par. 29). Du Bois advocates for a political art form, tying his concept of propaganda to the creation of beauty in truth and freedom. While Walter Benjamin (1969) critiques the attachment to the political in the reproductability of art (224), the Black Arts Movement (BAM) and Quilombhoje call for its intrinsic imbrication, likening artistic production to decolonizing strategies, in which a recuperated culture is seen as an essential factor in the substantial and psychological overthrow of dominant ideologies. Du Bois’s entwinement of art and politics generates a relational dynamic that lives in the works of these movements and overarches their conception of literary production, for the heightened consciousness that art produces animates the passions for political involvement.

Ritual Encounters and Performative Moments

Rituals are often seen as static forms of communal remembrances. Yielding to the onus of tradition and elements of cultural fixity, rituals are characterized by their attempts at reviving or vivifying the past, generating normative standards of conduct for individuals and their societies, while allowing for celebratory moments that access a shared reality (Myeroff 1984).1 Rituals reify social order, contends Nestor Garcia Canclini (2005), but they also impel transgressive movements (Hybrid 23). In the limits of hybridity, rituals occur and are perpetuated because the subject can only bear so much interlocution, negotiation, mixing, and transformation; but they may also signify the movement toward difference that society proscribes or incorporates as a new defining order (ibid. 23–24). I reposition the ritual contexts to examine them as part of organic, dynamic, evolutionary processes that draw on African traditions to construct Afro-Brazilian identity. Cultural reconversions happening through the hybridic, rhizomatic transposition of ritual forms, I contend, reassemble concepts of Africanness/blackness as markers and anchors for that identity. Ritual life is often conducted through both public and private performances. This chapter examines the dynamics at play in three annual public rituals in Salvador, known as the festas populares [the popular or public festivais]: the festa de Santa Barbara, the festa de Iemanja and the Lavagem do Bonfim.

Centering Blackness: Hip-Hop and the Outing of Marginality

Music permeates all life. It normalizes socialization processes. It reflects and refracts subjectivity and self-reflexivity, political processes, cultural injunctions and imperatives, social contradictions, and social change. Like most literary and performative artistic forms, it reorders existence and allows us to inhabit a different world through its imaginative cultural narratives. Complementarily, popular music, says George Lipsitz, is by nature dialogical. It embraces the past and allows for an ongoing interplay between history and the present, nurtured by the vision of the artist (Lipsitz, Time Passages 99). Since music crosses spatial and temporal boundaries, its dialogism is readily translocative in the ease and flexibility of its transposition from the global to the local context. In crossing global boundaries, music is reinvented in local spaces to reflect questions or definitions of cultural identity through its direct, experiential nature and its impact on the body, on levels of sociability, and on personal engagement. Turning the lens to black music styles, the global dissemination creates a polemic in understanding how music reshapes orthodoxies and constructs cultural narratives. While listened to and enjoyed, the social currency of black music is not necessarily inscribed on the black body. For as much as black musical traditions are found everywhere and have been co-opted into local contexts, acceptance of the black being (beyond the artists who create the music) is not a global phenomena.

Introduction: What Roots? Which Routes?

Issues of identity are considered part of the hallmark of modern consciousness. If we view modernity as the point from which to give voice to rupture and displacement, queries such as who am I? and where do I belong? arise out of the modern subject. This is why Paul Gilroy (1993 ) relocates the discourse of modernity to the triangular route of the slave trade, renaming it the black Atlantic. For who else but the enslaved Other (and their descendants) embodies this crisis of nonbelonging to the extent that it transcends existential angst to develop into new myth-making realities. This work’s engagement with Afro-Brazilians’ articulations of Africanness and blackness incorporates their quest for rootedness in Africa but also places them in the unified oeuvre of diaspora space that Gilroy reconceptualizes to include the history of enslavement, racism, and the engagement of black peoples with practices of nation building, citizenry, and modernization in the Western discourse of modernity.

Where Is Africa in the Nation? History as Transformative Praxis

For officialdom-Brazil of the past and the present, Africa and all beings and things that claim an African identity are relegated to the abyss and deemed unsuited for social and economic access and mobility. If not deemed peripheral, African cultural markers were modified, co-opted, and renamed to suit the prevailing myth of democracia racial. Through the process of “limpar o sangue” [cleaning the blood] (Mattoso 191), the deliberate choice of racial and cultural identification began. Choosing to forget one’s African ancestry insured access to power and prestige. Thus the elite erased blood ties to Africa, although the bloodlines carried visible markers. Participating in this erasure, blacks chose to marry progressively lighter-skinned individuals in order to “whiten” their descendants who, they hoped, would then gain access to social advantages. Given the pressure to whiten, identifying oneself as African/black and choosing a black identity stands as a revolutionary, subversive act aimed at challenging the national consciousness and the processes of power construction and consolidation. Since most Afro-Brazilians are of mixed heritage, the pivotal query is, How is this African and black identity constructed?

Conclusion: Uma Luta que Nos Transcende

At our historical juncture, we are faced with uncertainty in all our definitional constructs; these are the times in which grand narratives are debunked, totalizing designations are found wanting, and affiliations taken for granted are scrutinized based on their centrality to the definitions of position and power. In these times when negotiation, mutual imbrication, and ambivalence rule, why is it important to discuss Afro-Brazilian identity? In this era of globalization, just as separations elide due to the omnipresence of the internet, email, the media, and travel, they are reinforced by the major economic blocks, military might, and the lack of understanding of cultural difference. As we view the changing face of things and the increasing consumption of the materiality of the West, each day increases the distance between those included and those dispossessed. Religious and ethnic wars, battles over territory, and battles over oil are testaments to the contestations between hegemonic structures and the Others they have created. Whether identity is constructed by national discourse, state ideologies, and dominant paradigms, or asserted by the speaking self, depends on the ability of social, cultural, and political subjects to cohere voice and assert who they are. Thus, if we consider it retrogressive to speak of identity, then we cannot fully understand the potency of dissimilitude and the desire to construct subjectivity and cultural autonomy.

A Bença: The Blessings of the Bando de Teatro Olodum

This article centers on the major, self-identified Afro-Brazilian theater group in Salvador da Bahia, the Bando de Teatro Olodum. The Bando, it contends, establishes a performative trajectory from which to question and challenge the dominant esthetic signifiers in Brazilian society. It aims to realign the racial and cultural markers that define Africanness and blackness, regenerate affirmative constructs for both signifiers through its dramatic repertoire, and create alternative performative and esthetic forms that draw from the Candomblé religious matrix. The Bandos most recent play, A Bença, is the focus of analysis in its simultaneity as a hyper-visual homage to the elders and a metaphysical treatise on the vagaries of time. A Bença transforms the reality of aging into a surrealistic interpolation of Bantu spiritual conceptualizations of the circularity of time and the interrelation of the human and the ancestral. Ultimately, the Bando and the play transform notions as to what is theater in Brazil.