Communication theory from Améfrica Ladina: amefricanidade, Lélia Gonzalez, and Black decolonial approaches

ABSTRACT

In this article, I engage Black Brazilian feminist Lélia Gonzalez and her theory, amefricanidade (Amefricanity), to further our understandings of African communication. I argue that Gonzalez’s theory is important for communication studies to understand how Africanity culturally travels to and politically transforms in the Americas. As a Black decolonial theory, amefricanidade critiques U.S. imperialism as well as Brazilian coloniality from the vantage point of Black people in Latin America. It is also invested in Black transnational political and cultural solidarities that transcend colonial, cultural, linguistic, and material borders in the Americas that maintain white supremacy. As I explicate, amefricanidade provides a sophisticated framework to understand Black/African cultural communication through three key themes. I first focus on who is Black in the Americas, especially in Latin America. Then, I turn to Brazil to illustrate the relational meanings between Africanity/Blackness, latinidade, and whiteness. Finally, I center how Black cultures are expressed and exchanged as a political tool of Black reunification in the Western hemisphere.

KEYWORDS:

• amefricanidade
• Lélia Gonzalez
• decoloniality
• Black Brazilian feminism
• African communication

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the journal editor, guest editors, and anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback and support.

Notes

1 Bob Marley and the Wailers, “Is This Love?” track 3 on Kaya (London: Tuff Gong/Island, 1979); Gilberto Gil and Baiana System, Gil Baiana ao Vivo em Salvador (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Gege Produções, 2020).

2 Osmundo Pinho, “‘Fogo Na Babilônia’: Reggae, Black Counterculture, and Globalization in Brazil,” in Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization, ed. Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 195.

3 Ibid., 196.

4 Antonio Godi, “Reggae and Samba-Reggae in Bahia: A Case of Long-Distance Belonging,” in Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization, ed. Charles A. Perrone and Christopher Dunn (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 207–19.

5 Bryce Henson, “Stage of Exception: Carnaval, Political Violence, and Black Life,” in Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Cities, and Museums in the Tumult of Globalization, ed. Cameron McCarthy et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), 79–120; “Black Invisibility: Reframing Diasporic Visual Cultures and Racial Codes in Bahia,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 13, no. 3 (2020): 241–55.

6 Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Africa in Stereo: Modernism, Music, And Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Robin D. G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Manthia Diawara, “Afro-Kitsch,” in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1992), 285–91.

7 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 248–49.

8 Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1992), 21–33.

9 Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

10 Lélia Gonzalez, “A Categoria Político-Cultural de Amefricanidade,” Tempo Brasileiro 92/93 (1988): 69–82.

11 Cláudia Pons Cardoso, “Amefricanizando o Feminismo: O Pensamento de Lélia Gonzalez,” Estudos Feministas 22, no. 3 (2014): 969–70; For more on amefricanidade as a Black decolonial theory, see Sonia E. Alvarez and Kia Lilly Caldwell, “Promoting Feminist Amefricanidade: Bridging Black Feminist Cultures and Politics in the Americas,” Meridians 14, no. 1 (2016): v–xi.

12 James W. Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2009).

13 I am preserving the Brazilian Portuguese spelling of “Latinness” rather than the Spanish version, latinidad. I do this because this is the term Brazilians use. I also want to interrupt the way Brazil is ignored, and even excluded, from conversations around “Latinness” and Latin America. Part of this is the Hispanophone hegemony of Latin American Studies and Latina/o/x/e Studies. Another part is that Brazil often understands itself as having more in common with the United States and France than with Latin America. While I do not have space for this here, it merits asking the question: What would it mean to center Latinness in Brazil?

14 Carey, Communication as Culture.

15 Ibid., 15.

16 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

17 Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain, “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.

18 Ibid., 261.

19 Ibid., 263.

20 I would like to thank guest editor Jenna N. Hanchey for helping me flesh out this point. I would also like to add that we see this in the ways that Black Brazilians call certain Black cultural spaces “little Africas” to illustrate that Africa is not geographically fixed but fluid and mobile, moving with Black people across the Atlantic Ocean.

21 Cláudia Pons Cardoso, “Amefricanidade: Proposa Feminista Negra de Organização Política e Transformação Social,” LASA Forum 50, no. 3 (2019): 44–49; “Amefricanizando o Feminismo”; Keisha-Khan Perry and Edilza Sotero, “Amefricanidade: The Black Diaspora Feminism of Lélia Gonzalez,” LASA Forum 50, no. 3 (2019): 60–64.

22 Thules Pires, “Direitos Humanos e Améfrica Ladina: Por Uma Crítica Amefricana Ao Colonialismo Jurídico,” LASA Forum 50, no. 3 (2019): 70.

23 C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in The C. L. R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 390–404.

24 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”

25 Nelson Maldonado-Torres, “The Decolonial Turn,” in New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, ed. Juan Poblete (London: Routledge, 2018), 120.

26 See Agustin Laó-Montes, “Afro-Latinidades: Bridging Blackness and Latinidad,” in Technofutures: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies, ed. Nancy Raquel Mirabel and Agustin Laó-Montes (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007), 135.

27 Perry and Sotero, “Amefricanidade”; Alex Ratts, “As Amefricanas: Mulheres Negras e Feminismo Na Trajetória de Lélia Gonzalez,” Fazendo Gênero 9 (2010): 1–8, http://www.fg2010.wwc2017.eventos.dype.com.br/resources/anais/1278274787_ARQUIVO_Asamefricanas.pdf.

28 Osmundo Pinho, “Introduction,” LASA Forum 50, no. 3 (2019): 41–43.

29 “Livros e textos de Lélia Gonzalez,” Portal Geledés, December 21, 2015, https://www.geledes.org.br/livros-e-textos-de-lelia-gonzalez/.

30 Perry and Sotero, “Amefricanidade”; Alex Ratts and Flavia Rios, Lelia Gonzalez (São Paulo, Brazil: Selo Negro Edições, 2010).

31 Gabriela da Costa Gonçalves, “Lélia Gonzalez: A mulher que revolucionou o movimento negro,” Palmares Fundação Cultural, February 4, 2019, http://www.palmares.gov.br/?p=53181.

32 Pinho, “Introduction,” 41–42.

33 See Lélia Gonzalez, Por Um Feminismo Afro-Latino-Americano, ed. Flavia Rios and Márcia Lima (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Zahar Editores, 2020).

34 Alvarez and Caldwell, “Promoting Feminist Amefricanidade,” vi.

35 Lélia Gonzalez, Lélia Gonzalez: Primavera Para as Rosas Negras (Díaspora Africana: Editora Filhos da África, 2018); Por Um Feminismo Afro-Latino-Americano.

36 While Gonzalez does not mention Canada, I would argue that she does not conflate the United States with North America. She is specific in her critique of the United States. Her argument is similar to many Black Canadian studies scholars, who also critique the overrepresentation of the United States as “America.” This is best summed up in Rinaldo Walcott’s provocative question: “Black like who?” (Black Like Who? Writing • Black • Canada, 20th Anniversary ed. [Toronto, ONT: Insomniac Press, 2018]). That is, both Gonzalez and Walcott critique the hegemonic imperialism of the United States from their positions in Brazil and Canada, respectively.

37 Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Panaf Books, 1987). See also Cameron McCarthy et al., eds., Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (New York: Peter Lang, 2020).

38 Lélia Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” in Lélia Gonzalez: Primavera Para as Rosas Negras (Díaspora Africana: Editora Filhos da África, 2018), 329 emphasis added. All translations are the author’s.

39 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 329.

40 Paulo Mileno, “The Largest Black Nation outside Africa and Its Racist Politics,” Ufahamu 41, no. 1 (2018): xv–xxiii.

41 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 330.

42 A quick note is necessary here. Gonzalez did not invent the terms améfrica or améfricana/o. M. D. Magno coined “Améfrica Ladina” and influenced Gonzalez’s thinking (Améfrica Ladina: Introdução a Uma Abertura [Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Colégio Freduiano do Rio de Janeiro, 1980]). However, Gonzalez builds upon Magno’s work in her theory amefricanidade and magnifies it in a widely encompassing manner.

43 Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–45.

44 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 330 original emphases.

45 Ibid., 324.

46 Ibid., 321.

47 For a more extensive exploration of Brazilian structural racism, see Silvio Almeida, Racismo Estrutural (São Paulo, Brazil: Pólen Livros, 2019).

48 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 326.

49 Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and Jemima Pierre, “Special Section: Anthropology of White Supremacy,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (2020): 65 original emphasis.

50 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), xv.

51 John D. French, “The Missteps of Anti-Imperialist Reason: Bourdieu, Wacquant and Hanchard’s Orpheus and Power,” Theory, Culture & Society 17, no. 1 (2000): 122.

52 For example, see José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race / La Raza Cosmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); José Martí, Nuestra América (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Ediciones Cielonaranja, 2016); Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Winthrop R. Wright, Café Con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993).

53 Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 278.

54 Liv Sovik, Aqui Ninguém é Branco (São Paulo, Brazil: Aeroplano, 2009).

55 Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, 3. Let us also not forget how religion was the original justification for racism against African and Indigenous peoples on the charge that they did not accept God as their savior. This resulted in a subhuman existence in contrast to the Christian colonizers, enslavers, and missionaries. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”; Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

56 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 325.

57 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

58 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 321.

59 For scholarship on Latin American whitening, see Thomas E. Skidmore, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Barbara Weinstein, The Color of Modernity: São Paulo and the Making of Race and Nation in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Thayná de Aquino Moura, “Do preto ao branco: um estudo preliminar para compreender o processo de embranquecimento da música eletrônica” (Tese de Graduação, Universidade de Brasília, 2019), https://bdm.unb.br/handle/10483/26199; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

60 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “The Drama of Modernity: Color and Symbolic Exclusion in the Brazilian Telenovela,” in Black Brazil: Culture, Identity, and Social Mobilization, ed. Larry Crook and Randal Johnson (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1999), 339–61.

61 France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

62 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 326.

63 Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2005), 63 original emphases. Mignolo’s work on the difference between U.S. Latinx/e/a/os and Latin Americans also bears mention; he writes: “Thus, for the imperial imaginary, ‘Latin’ Americans are second-class Europeans while Latino/as in the US are second-class Americans. In short, ‘Latinidad,’ from its very inception in the nineteenth century, was an ideology for the colonization of being that Latino/as in the US are now clearly turning into a decolonizing project” (64 original emphasis).

64 Magno, “Améfrica Ladina.”

65 Pinho, “Introduction,” 42.

66 Pinho, “Introduction”; Pires, “Direitos Humanos e Améfrica Ladina”; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, rev. ed. (New York: Grove Press, 2008).

67 Kyle T. Mays, Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018), 11.

68 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.

69 To be clear, I see these practices working in tandem rather than in opposition of one another.

70 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 322.

71 Geneva Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1977), 3.

72 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 322.

73 Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin; Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America (London: Routledge, 1999); Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner, rev. ed. (Boston: Mariner Books, 2000).

74 Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin, 15.

75 See Armond Towns, “Paul Gilroy and Communication Studies,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, December 20, 2018, doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.611.

76 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

77 Jenny Sharpe, “Cartographies of Globalisation, Technologies of Gendered Subjectivities: The Dub Poetry of Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze,” Gender & History 15, no. 3 (2003): 440–59.

78 Flavia Rios, “Améfrica Ladina: The Conceptual Legacy of Lélia Gonzalez (1935–1994),” LASA Forum 50, no. 3 (2019): 75–79.

79 Gonzalez, “A Categoria Politíco-Cultural Da Amefricanidade,” 329.

80 Ibid.

81 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 227 original emphases.

82 James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture,” Black American Literature Forum 15, no. 4 (1981): 146–54.

83 Tina Campt and Deborah A. Thomas, “Gendering Diaspora: Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and Its Hegemonies,” Feminist Review 90, no. 1 (2008): 3.

84 Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin, 108.

85 Michael Hanchard, The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

86 Stuart Hall, “Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about ‘Race’?” in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 359–73.