The Continuities of Beatriz Nascimento’s Black Radical Thought

This post is part of our roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea.

It is not a stretch to say that the release of The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento is a watershed moment in Black Studies, namely for us in the Global North. Throughout her life, Nascimento provided important theoretical contributions to the intersections of race, class, and gender oppression in Brazil; the Atlantic as a transformative space of possibility; the spiritual and geographic connections between the Americas and Africa; and her incessant emphasis on the continuities of both structural gendered anti-Black racism and Black people’s affirmation of Black life, Black cultures, and Black spaces in search of collective liberation. And she did so from the non-Anglophone South Black Atlantic. Now, her incredible gifts come to us in ways that should trouble and expand Black Studies for years to come. It seems inevitable that many will now see her contributions with equal gravitas to those like Angela Y. Davis, Claudia Jones, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, W.E.B. Du Bois, Audre Lorde, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Turé, and bell hooks.

Beyond Nascimento’s work, we should be attentive to the contributions of the editors: Christen A. Smith, Bethânia Gomes (Nascimento’s daughter), and Archie Davies. Together, they have done extraordinary work to not only translate Nascimento (never a simple or straightforward feat—see Davies’ “A Note on Translation”) but to also provide, what British cultural studies scholars like to call, a “conjunctural analysis” of her, the conditions in which she wrote, her historical antecedents, and her political positions within relations of power and struggles for liberation. But truly, the editors take after Nascimento’s insistence on continuities. Nascimento herself writes: “How are we to explain such a process, historically, if we do not attend to its own dynamics, and to its differentiation across time?” (189). So while Nascimento focused on the continuities of quilombos, the editors focus on the ongoing continuities of Nascimento and her Black radical thought. Along those lines, I wish to pursue this continuity by briefly situating this book and the editors within a legacy of those who have taken up Nascimento’s work since her premature death in 1995.

With great clarity, I remember the first time I encountered Nascimento’s Black radical thought, namely around quilombos. It was the 2015 Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) when Christen A. Smith presented “Refuge, the Black Body and Black Atlantic Visions: The Legacy of Beatriz Nascimento.” Immediately, I knew I had to read Nascimento’s work. I scoured the internet and saw that only three US university libraries had even a print copy of her 1985 pioneering article “O conceito de quilombo e a resistência cultural negra” in the journal Revista Afrodiaspora. One was at Stanford University, and I asked a friend, who was a graduate student there, if they could locate it, scan it, and send it to me. I cannot express the sheer amount of joy I felt when I received Nascimento’s article and was able to read her theorizations on the quilombo as a mode of Black cultural resistance. Indisputably, this article, and her work more broadly, fundamentally redirected my own thinking, research, and politics around Blackness, history, diaspora, and belonging.

Despite how profoundly this article changed my world, I was in the last stages of writing my dissertation, an ethnographic study on the Bahian hip-hop movement in Salvador da Bahia and its diasporic cultural and political circuits in the city’s marginalized communities. It was too late to drastically change the dissertation. Still, I was drawn to Nascimento’s concept of the quilombo as an alternative social system that Black people develop as processes and assemblies of action, protection, and collective liberation. For me, it is paramount to understand not only how Black people conceptualize and imagine quilombos as assemblies of political action, but also how they are living them and practicing them through a series of radical relationalities with all their nuances, contradictions, and possibilities. Nascimento bestowed upon me a profound clarity about something I intrinsically knew but had at that time difficulty articulating: the importance of grounding Black cultures in Black people’s lived experiences and the spaces they create for themselves. With that, I had renewed energy as I transitioned to writing my book by situating poor and working-class Black communities in Brazil within a longer history of Black cultural and political resistance that dates to quilombos.

Without a doubt, it would be preposterous to pretend that my engagement with Nascimento is simply between her and I. Rather, I came to her first through Smith; both her ASWAD presentation and her article “Towards a Black Feminist Model of Black Atlantic Liberation: Remembering Beatriz Nascimento” aided my thinking in generative ways. She builds off Nascimento’s theorizing and helps us interpret how quilombos are “not just as independent societies of resistance, but also as resting places or espaços de fuga, where Black people could retreat in order to seek religious renewal (particularly through the practice of candomblé), commune with friends and family, or simply pause.” Drawing on the 1989 documentary Orí, Smith makes important readings on the cosmological interconnectivity between the body, territory, and spirituality. She also builds off the work that Alex Ratts, Nascimento’s biographer, has been doing for over two decades now with four books (one of them co-edited with Gomes) in Portuguese around Beatriz Nascimento.¹ I too turned to his work for engaging Nascimento’s works to understand his framings of Nascimento. His 2005 book, Eu Sou Atlântica: Sobre a Trajetória de Vida de Beatriz Nascimento, provides foundational interpretative and historical work so that Nascimento’s theoretical contributions, intellectual activism, and personal history would not be forgotten. This was no small feat then (and even still to this day) with the erasure of so many Black feminist intellectuals in Brazil. And finally, I would be remiss to not mention that others have taken up Nascimento’s work at various times over the past thirty years by scholars such as Antônio Bispo dos Santos, the União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas, Silvane Aparecida da Silva, Wagner Vinhas Batistas, and Diego de Matos Gondim.

I detail all this to underscore how other folks have dedicated substantial time, effort, and energy to understand Nascimento’s work and also expanding upon it. We simply do not think and write in isolation, but rather in concert with one another, with those who have come before us and build out a school of thought. So while I imagine many folks will turn right to Nascimento’s thirty-six chapters across the book’s four sections (and in some ways I cannot blame them), I would posit that it is equally important to turn to the pieces by Smith, Gomes, and Davies as well as Ratts and Muniz Sodré, Nascimentos’ friend and mentor, who each provide important contextualizations as well as their own keen insights, interpretations, and intellectual contributions to Nascimento and her Black radical thought. In other words, they also frame Nascimento and her work. It is safe to say that Smith alone wrote a book within a book, with her co-authored pieces and poignant introductions to each section serving as an intellectual history of Nascimento. In fact, it’s a tour de force. These supplementary pieces provide imperative pedagogical, interpretative, and contextual resources to understand the sheer depth and brilliance of Nascimento’s work more deeply.  They continue her work.

Why do I bring this up? Because Nascimento’s texts, like all texts, have no fixed or true meaning. As Stuart Hall notes, we only come to meaning through representation; through the various conceptual maps that we bring to a given text. But for many of us, it takes years to build up a conceptual map to even begin to understand Nascimento, her conditions, her positions, and her theoretical arguments. To varying degrees, Smith, Gomes, Davies, Ratts, and Sodré build a conceptual map and set of frameworks for readers to dive into the Black radical thought of Nascimento more quickly and, based on their framings, extract from the book key understandings, key meanings, and key contributions to a variety of fields that emerge from but are not specific to just Brazil or Latin America or the South Black Atlantic. And they do so in ways that ensure Nascimento’s contributions are not flattened in order to be made legible within the Anglophone Global North Black Studies academy. Their efforts, based on years of substantial archival work, are important to ensure the continuity of Nascimento’s  intellectual contributions without losing its nuance, its potentiality, and its interventions that we so desperately need.