Black Ghosts in the Afro-Pampas: Haunting and Folklorisation in Aldo Locatelli’s “Negrinho do Pastoreio” Paintings

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how Blackness as spectre – a deathly presence – underlies contemporary life in the Pampas through artistic representations of the “Negrinho do Pastoreio” folktale in the work of Italian-Brazilian painter Aldo Locatelli (Bergamo, 1915 – Porto Alegre, 1962). These pieces folklorise Blackness and fix Black haunting in the Pampas through visual motifs of placelessness, timelessness, suffering, “martyrdom”, flight, and resurrection. The tropes and folklorisation itself confine and consign the Black population to the region’s distant past, denying contemporary existence, subjectivity, and agency in the present. This study forms part of a larger project engaging literature, iconography, and oral testimony in a racialised re-reading of the Platine Region. This racial-spatial project investigates the place of Blackness in the real and imagined transnational Pampas. While cultural hegemony in the Region predicates itself upon spatial and temporal displacement of its Black population, my work probes and contests this historical assertion precisely by locating Blackness in the region, in what I envision as a real and imagined space: what I call the “Afro-Pampas”.

Keywords:

• Visual culture
• Afro-Pampas
• Oliveira Silveira
• Negrinho do Pastoreio
• Aldo Locatelli

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The “Negrinho do Pastoreio” legend is also referred to as “Negrito Pastor” or “Negrito del Pastoreo” in Uruguay and Argentina. I refer to the character from the legend throughout this piece as “Negrinho”, rather than resorting to the English translation of the character’s name or that of the legend.

2 An entire edition of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (January–March 2017) focused on Blackness and tourism throughout the African diaspora, and included texts devoted to South America. As Edmund Gordon has indicated, “The diasporic framework places seemingly disparate processes of racial formation in dialogue, enabling us to recognise and articulate how race operates locally and globally” (2007, 94).

3 The 2010 national census in Argentina places the Afro-Argentine population at less than 1%. Just as in the case of Uruguay, qualitative evidence suggests a much higher percentage in those regions bordering Brazil. See Jorgelina Hiba’s 2017 article regarding Afro-descendancy in Entre Ríos.

4 In the context of Black women’s relationship to the city of São Paulo, Jaime Amparo Alves describes their rupture from the city as “an ontological condition of placelessness that renders their bodies as special objects of racial violence” (2018, 46).

5 Personal communications, Porto Alegre, 2015.

6 Historian Eduardo Palermo’s Tierra esclavizada: El norte uruguayo en la primera mitad del siglo 19 (2013) offers an example of recent advances in the historiography of international slave fugitivity during the period.

7 While I have begun to explore how Black gauchos and Afro-descendants in the Platine Region have problematised folklorisation of Blacks generally and Negrinho do Pastoreio specifically, further explorations of this problematic will emerge in my upcoming dissertation proposal and as a chapter in the dissertation itself.

8 The chiripá and levitón refer to traditional gaucho clothing popularised beginning in the seventeenth century. The chiripá, a triangular-shaped shawl worn around the waist, facilitates horseback riding. The levitón, a thick frock coat, would come in use during colder and windier months on the Pampas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan B. Morrison

Ryan B. Morrison is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the poetry and lifework of Afro-gaucho poet Oliveira Silveira, transnationalism and Border Studies as applied to the Pampas of southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, Blackness at borders, ethnography, and popular culture.