Repertórios de negritude: racismo, música e teoria racial

Abstract

The present investigation starts with a feeling: that when ialorixás and afro drummers from Maceió (AL) spoke of “blackness”, they weren’t referring to the same thing as hip-hop singers, samba, and reggae musicians from that same region (Marpin, 2018). Starting from this intuition, the research follow the similarities and singularities among those blacknesses, studying aesthetic, ethic and politic repertoires from musical movements from, in and for the periphery of Brazilian urban areas. From these identity repertoires conceived through a specific kind of cultural action, characteristic of ambiences and sociabilities in the making of black music, this work sets out to reflect on what the social sciences can do to help solve the question of the (in)definition of blackness. Apart from being a central political topic for Brazil – in its projection of a national self-image and, after the implementation of affirmative action in public universities, in its attempts to repair historical asymmetries dating from colonization’s massive and genocidal racial slavery regime – the question of blackness is also an enigma in the epistemological sense, given that there is a considerable amount of work regarding race, racism, blackness and correlate themes, but we are still far from a theoretical concept that offers parameters for knowing if we actually are talking about the same thing. In that sense, the sciences, and specifically the many schools of thought and perspectives in blackness studies, are in a very similar situation to those artists from the periphery of Alagoas’ capital. When facing the lack of consensus around theoretical conceptions, the first challenge is to formulate a concept with borders that are flexible enough to include all blacknesses, but not so flexible that it could lose its explanatory power. In response to such a challenge, I take racism as a lived experience, caused by the injunctions of the structure of societies marked by modernity/coloniality, as the basic and fundamental requisite to determine if someone is actually a black person. Starting from that premise, and articulating it with others drawn from Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Critical Realism, blackness is understood as a process that develops in the interface between three measures of the temporal density of practices: structure (racializing), identity (racial) and experience (racialized). Within this theoretical vortex, it became possible to investigate both the positionings of actors along the blackness continuum – ranging from affirmation, denial and abstention of the racial marker in the identity narrative of black people – and the various modes of existence of corporeality that can be described in four distinct dimensions of blackness repertoires: somatic, performatic, discursive and political. Given those inflections, It was possible to hear the polyphonies and propose a possible sketch for a theory of race that doesn’t abstain in the face of ever growing diversity, creativity and political innovation by black people.