Performing Epistemic Resistance: Countervisual Quilombismo and the Black Refusal of Archival Silences

This paper confronts the curated exclusion of Black, Indigenous, and Queer experiences through the analytic “countervisual quilombismo.” Through this concept, I propose a body-centered and visual methodology to rescue resistance from hegemonic narratives about the past. Focusing on Black and diasporic artist from Portugal, Brazil, and Angola, this paper examines the potential that performatic artistic interventions as a historical method. Against fixity of Portuguese colonial monuments erected in white space—where blackness is rendered into a “body out of place”—I examine how Black performing bodies offer a method of anti-colonial refusal of archival violence. Through their physical presence, Black artists, citizens, and performers disrupt curated narratives of imperial exceptionalism, refusing, through living bodies, produced silences.

Countervisual quilombismo excavates a Black, diasporic tradition of knowledge-as-praxis. This tradition was built around resistance to colonization and the creation of new communal spaces (the quilombo). This analysis draws on Beatriz Nascimento’s historicization of quilombos in Brazil as spaces of reconstitution, where life was made possible outside and before the narrative of enslavability. As Nascimento notes, a quilombo could be a space, a moment, or the fleeing body itself. Drawing on an intellectual tradition of Black knowledge as praxis—from Black feminism to Amílcar Cabral’s anti-colonial manifesto “the Weapon of Theory,” and linking it to Afro-Brazilian quilombismo, a movement of resistance through new histories and praxis—this paper examines how subjects who were historically marginalized by the archive, used their presence and performing bodies to expose archival silences and produce new possibilities for existence.