GSSC Seminar Series
23 January 2024
Black Modernities, Aesthetics and Politics in Brazil - Center and Margins of National Thought (from the 19th to the 21st Century)
Allan Santos da Rosa (University of Sao Paulo / Mecila)
12:00-13:00
The meeting will deal with Brazilian political dilemmas and their relationship to the modern histories of other countries affected by the colonization and slavery. How do black aesthetics deal with the process of abolishing slavery? What are the fundamental pillars of Blackness and Whiteness in Brazilian imaginaries and histories? What are the gaps and movements of black protagonism between the official discourses of the eugenicist national whitening project and patronizing modernism, not only in Brazil but also in comparison with other places marked by the presence of black populations in the Americas and the Caribbean? How were the tactics, forms, aesthetic and political characteristics of black modernity conceived in the violence of the Republic that followed the colonial imperial catastrophes?
Allan Santos da Rosa holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in culture and education from USP. He is a fiction writer, a historian, and a capoeira practitioner of the Angola lineage. As a playwright, Santos da Rosa has written award-winning pieces for theatre companies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais. As an independent educator, he has organised educational courses in Afro-Atlantic aesthetics and politics for over a decade. He has held lectures, recitations, workshops, and debates in rodas (the circular capoeira formation), fairs, universities, libraries, and community centres in Cuba, Mozambique, the United States of America, Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Argentina. He is the author of the following books Balanço Afiado – Estética e Política em Jorge Ben (Sharp Swing – Aesthetics and Politics in Jorge Bem, 2023), Ninhos e Revides - Estéticas e Fundamentos, Lábias e Jogo de Corpo (Nests and fightbacks – Aesthetics and Fundamentals , Trickster Mouths and Body Games, 2022), Águas de Homens Pretos - Imaginário, Cisma e Cotidiano Ancestral (Waters of Black Men - Imaginary, Everyday Life and Ancestrality in São Paulo, 2021), Pedagoginga, Autonomia e Mocambagem (Pedagoginga, Autonomy e Marroonage – On Black Culture and Popular Education, 2 ed., 2019), Zumbi Assombra Quem? (Zumbi Haunts Who? 2017) and Reza de Mãe (Mother's Pray, 2016), among others.