Samba: subversão viva. Estética e pulsão face à morte

Abstract

The central hypothesis of this dissertation stems from the reflection on samba as what remained “from the process of colonization/enslavement” of Black and poor peoples in Brazil, understood here as a strategy of subversion. The research aims to investigate, based on the relationship between art and psychoanalysis, the perspective of these remains through the Freudian reading of the concept of fantasy and his work with the dimension of the poet, articulating it with the Lacanian concept of the subversion of the subject. To explore this scenario, we draw upon Lélia Gonzalez’s (2020) premise, “Trash will speak and freely”, to think about how this trash also operates in an aesthetic dimension of pleasure, supported by Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). We address the theme of the history of samba, carnival, and the samba schools in order to arrive at Joãosinho Trinta and the perspective of his 1988 parade “Rats and Vultures, Leave My Fantasy Alone.” In this parade, he works with this dimension of trash and confirms our direction, pointing to the fact that something remained of a speech that they tried to dominate and which finds expression in popular cultures and, here, more specifically, in the context of samba and carnival. We outline a study with multiple references and Black authors, such as Neusa Santos, Frantz Fanon, Grada Kilomba, and Isildinha Baptista Nogueira, to think about the convergence of art and psychoanalysis as a calling forth of a subject and their creations. We take trash here as an aesthetic object, one that escapes the domain inscribed by the process of enslavement as the objet a. Lélia’s (2020) premise—that the Black person is the trash of society—set us to work in interrogating what has escaped the process of domination and abduction of these bodies, this remainder that is not reducible to the field of language, but operates within the logic of the signifier.It is through this approach—of the Black person structuring the social bond with what escapes as the objet a—that we can reflect on the ongoing project of genocide against these peoples, and on what Black people do with what remains from the statistics and the historical scarcity of rights to which they are subjected. We also deepen these solutions through the lens of the life drive/death drive conflict, here within the specific framework of the universe of samba. The discussion we develop thus points to another view of art, not necessarily anchored in traditional and Eurocentric themes, but grounded in the daily subversions of a people who sing.