Black invisibility: reframing diasporic visual cultures and racial codes in Bahia

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Black invisibility to examine Afro-diasporic visual cultures that are grounded in Black people’s material conditions. As a conceptual and empirical tool, it turns to the Black subjects and their visual representations that remain invisible by diasporic yearnings for an essentialist African in conjunction with societies’ dependence upon race as a visual signifier to naturalize ideologies and structures of racial, classed, and gendered domination. This reroutes diasporic connectivities to particular conditions, spaces, and politics of Black people that must contend with both Black people’s conditions and the processes that emerge from the exigencies of Black sociopolitical life. To do so, this article analyzes performance artist Tiago Sant’ana’s ‘Apagamento #1’ and Baiana System’s ‘Invisível’ in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a city acclaimed for its ‘authentic’ African culturalisms and supposedly romantic race relations. Both Sant’ana and Baiana System illustrate how Black invisibility uses visual cultures to deconstruct and critique the master codes of race in the diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual cultures
• Bahia
• racialization
• Baiana System
• Tiago Sant’ana

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A note on nomenclature is necessary. Salvador is the capital city of the state of Bahia. What is often referred to Bahia is often in reference to the Reconcâvo region, which surrounds the Bay of All Saints. In common parlance, most people and things from Salvador are just called Bahian, a practice I also use here. I do maintain the distinction between the city of Salvador and the state of Bahia.

2 In this article, I capitalize Black to refer to a racial group the same way that we would Asian, Latinx, etc as they are a specific ethnoracial group. According to those reasons, I do not capitalize white because they are not a specific ethnoracial group. See also Kimberle Crenshaw’s first footnote in ‘Mapping the Margins’ (1991).

3 While he did not coin the term ‘racial democracy’, Gilberto Freyre is deemed the architect of its framework. In Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Society (1986), he argues that Brazil is a racially mixed society. In Freyre’s mind, this made the Portuguese the superior colonizer vis-à-vis his Spanish and English counterparts. This produced a large mestiçx/a/o population. As a result, everyone is racially mixed, culturally hybrid, and supposedly void of racial prejudice. What Mercury and Jackson do is recreate the African cultures that eventually get subsumed into the Brazilian metarace.

4 What Diawara refers to is the depoliticization of negritude. When negritude arose, it was responding to African decolonization, Caribbean political uprisings, and US African Americans’ internal colonization within the US. Negritude provided an ideological means by which Blacks dispersed across the globe could identify with one another and politically mobilize. It was both cultural and political. Diawara critiques how Black Power movements begun to focus primarily on culture, especially around ideas of identity and ethnicity, and lost much of its political currency.

5 The cultural work of Ilê Aiyê is no doubt important to Salvador da Bahia and much of the diaspora. Black people embracing their African roots, heritage, and ancestry is no doubt a strong contrast to Western representations that conflate African diasporic history with the transatlantic slave trade, still riding the Hegelian train that Africa has no culture or history of its own. On their website, they note that they give ‘homage to African countries and Black Brazilian revolts that contribute to fortifying the process of Black ethnic identity and self-esteem’. While this is no doubt powerful, it creates a binary between those who have found their way back to a mystical Africa and those who still bear the brunt of antiblack racism, sexism, and classism. This line of thinking returns the question of race and racism back onto the individual rather than the social, the political, and the structural.

6 Salvador has long been a key site of anthropological inquiry that have sought to understand why Bahia has maintained and preserved their African traditions and cultures unlike other locales in the Americas. This ranges from Western anthropologists such as Melville Herskovits, Ruth Landes, and Roger Bastide, to local intellectuals, such as Edison Carneiro and Artur Ramos. Various strands of this inquiry argue that Bahia has no race problem because the city is predominantly Black and have access to their ethnic heritage. Others also argue that Bahia, as the epicenter of Brazilian slavery, is exemplary of Brazil’s racial democracy mythos where the plantation was the site of a benign and egalitarian libidinal economy that transcended racial prejudice and difference.

7 Postcolonial cultural studies scholar Cameron McCarthy formulates his use of ‘non-synchrony’ as where race, class, and gender constitute endogamous frictions. He advances ‘the position that individuals or groups, in their relation to economic, political, and cultural institutions such as schools do not share identical consciousness, nor express the same interests, needs, or desires’ (66). Here, McCarthy’s work is relevant to explain the socioeconomic, however small or large they may be, and cultural divisions between the hypervisible Afro-diasporic cultural performers that Jackson and Mercury embrace and those who are invisible in relation to those forms of diasporic cultural exceptionalism.