The Luso-Brazilian Forum proposes a non-guaranteed session on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to Afro-Brazil as a topic of study and as an epistemological category. The panelists will address this theme through varied disciplinary frameworks as they consider literary, cultural, and linguistic production from the late nineteenth century to the present. Questions of intersectionality, ancestrality, appropriation, and innovation guide these presentations, allowing panelists to comment on the ways that Afro-Brazil has emerged as theory, method, and subject for scholars in Brazil, the United States, and beyond. The interdisciplinary composition of this panel, with perspectives from musicology, translation studies, literary studies, geography, linguistics, and trans studies, will underscore the centrality of Afro-Brazil as theory and method. The interventions offered in this session will offer insights into how thinking Afro-Brazil can dialogue with and contribute to broader comparative studies of Blackness, race, and Afro-diasporic experiences and expressions.

The session will allow scholars of music, literature, and language to approach Afro-Brazil from varied interdisciplinary and comparative perspectives. In doing so, they will highlight contributions of musicians, writers, and people who have historically been marginalized in Brazil and within Brazilian studies, including Black artists and writers, women, and trans people. These panelists engage with ideas of intersectionality as posited by Kimberlé Crenshaw within the US legal field and, more critically for their subjects and areas of study, Lélia Gonzalez and her concept of an “Amefrican” feminism that recognizes the specificity and overlapping forms of oppression of being an Afro-descendant woman in the Americas. Gonzalez’s work has been gaining more traction outside of Brazil lately, with the 2020 convention of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) on “Améfrica Ladina”, a term proposed by Gonzalez. Relatedly, the philosophical writings on race from Sueli Carneiro, who was awarded LASA’s 2021 Kalman Silvert Award for contributions to the understanding of Latin America; Denise Ferreira da Silva; and Djamila Ribeiro, whose landmark 2017 book Lugar de fala has been translated into English as Where We Stand, inform the panelists’ analysis of music, literature, and culture. These papers build on existing scholarship about Afro-Brazilian music by Marc Gidal and Danielle N. Boaz; studies of Afro-Brazilian literature by Emanuelle Oliveira-Montes, Niyi Afolabi, and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, who organized a new collection of Afro-Brazilian stories translated into English; and studies on race, language, and everyday life from linguistic anthropologists like Jennifer Roth-Gordon. The session will build on this scholarship through case studies of musicians, editorial projects, novels, and television series that integrate theoretical perspectives from musicology, translation studies, racialized geographies, trans studies, and linguistic anthropology to broaden our understanding of how to think Afro-Brazil.

The session will consist of four presentations of 12 to 14-minutes each, allowing for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion at the end of the session. The session presider will keep introductions short and carefully track the time to ensure this period of conversation. The presentations are organized chronologically, beginning with Felipe Vieira’s analysis of how Henrique Alves de Mesquita introduced Afro-Brazilian rhythms and instruments into his nineteenth-century musical compositions which, in turn, transformed concepts of national music. The next presenter, Marília Leite, will consider how the previously unpublished diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus, an Afro-Brazilian writer from the mid-twentieth century, have been edited for a twenty-first-century readership, using the concept of “pretuguês” as valorized by Gonzalez to address the complexities of language, race, and editorial decisions. Ícaro Carvalho will continue the focus on literature by analyzing contemporary novels of Jeferson Tenório, Geovanni Martins, and José Falero as representing racialized spaces in geographer Milton Santos' concept that emphasizes continuity with architectural hierarchies of enslavement. The final panelist, Andraya Yearwood, turns her attention to a linguistic analysis of drag performances in a contemporary television show to consider how Blackness and transness manifest in everyday practices of language. These panelists include scholars from the United States and Brazil at diverse ranks, including a master’s student, Ph.D. candidates, and early career scholars. The disciplinary backgrounds of the panelists also vary from musicology to literary studies to linguistic anthropology. These approaches to thinking about Afro-Brazil reveal the vibrancy of the field as they aim to further how the experiences in Brazil could further to global constructs and understandings of race and Blackness.