Reflections on the Work of Beatriz Nascimento
This post is part of our roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea.
The world is on fire. It’s September 2024, and university students have been protesting the war on Gaza across the United States (and beyond to Mexico and France) for several months. These students, from Columbia University to the University of Texas at Austin, are calling for (among other things) divestment from Israel and an end to the genocide of Palestinian people. Our media streams flood with images of these students being beaten, dragged, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and zip-tied by police officers (called onto their campuses by university authorities to maintain “law and order”). History repeats itself. These violent scenes recall the similar repression that students like Beatriz Nascimento suffered during campus protests against Brazil’s Military Dictatorship (1964-1985). This protest played a critical role in the formation of Beatriz Nascimento’s young consciousness. As her daughter, Bethânia Gomes put it in The Dialectic is in the Sea:
it was during the dictatorship, and the student movement was the click to the start of her [Beatriz Nascimento’s] activist life. That was the key, the door. She was arrested during the riots. They arrested a lot of people. Some people got hurt, some people were tortured. Some people died. I remember her talking about her friends who never showed up again, who never came back. And I remember her talking about her experience of being arrested” (357).
Beatriz Nascimento’s political formation emerged from her oppositional relationship to what she declared to be the repressive, anti-Black, racist Brazilian state. Like so many others of the Black radical tradition, her theorizations and analytical musings—particularly regarding quilombo—had everything to do with her bent for justice. The struggle against colonialism, apartheid, imperialism, and gendered and racialized oppression is the backdrop of her life’s work. And although to date we have tended to locate the key voices of the Black radical tradition in the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, it is important that we not lose sight of the key role that the South Atlantic has also played in the Black Radical Tradition: particularly the voice of Beatriz Nascimento. This is one of the major contributions of The Dialectic is in the Sea and the discussions in this forum.
For us, The Dialectic is in the Sea is a multi-dimensional passion project. As we discuss in the introduction (31), the three of us came together back in August 2018 to begin the journey to introduce the words and life of Beatriz Nascimento through translation and “conjunctural analysis” (to cite Bryce Henson’s observations in this conversation). The three of us—all from very different backgrounds and time zones—had one fundamental thing in common: the conviction that the work of Beatriz Nascimento needed to be shared with the world. We knew, collectively, that Beatriz Nascimento had much to add to ongoing theoretical discussions in Black studies, Black Feminist studies, Black geographies, history, anthropology, etc. We also knew that we were uniquely positioned to do this. We are privileged to count among us Beatriz Nascimento’s only daughter, Bethânia Gomes, who has been a force in the preservation of her mother’s legacy and is fluent in both English and Portuguese. Her unique positionality as someone who has lived half of her life in the United States, gave us important insight throughout the process of writing this book.
We understand our work as a project of curation: a translation, meditation, and interpolation of Beatriz Nascimento’s oeuvre that hopes to demonstrate the breadth, depth, and import of her intellectual contributions. We frame this in a voice and cultural context that not only represents her words but also guides the reader (who may be unfamiliar with the nuanced history of Black Brazilian politics) on how to read her work in dialogue with contemporary academic and political discourses in Black studies and beyond. As a result, The Dialectic is a multi-vocal conversation about the life and work of an impactful but understudied Black woman intellectual that couples translation and interpolation, following the work of scholars like Carole Boyce Davies, who seek to bring attention to the forgotten contributions of Black women intellectuals transnationally.
We are profoundly grateful to Carole Boyce Davies, Daniela Gomes, Bryce Henson, and Erica Williams for their thoughtful and provocative responses to The Dialectic Is in the Sea. More than simply introducing the book, they constitute vital points of expansion upon Nascimento’s work, and open exciting glimpses of how Nascimento’s ideas might find new interlocutors and open new pathways in the English-language world and the discourse on the Black radical tradition. Perhaps the most moving feature of these responses are the forms of community that they enact, and to which they draw attention. As a collection, they manifest a type of collective thinking about the work and legacy of Beatriz Nascimento which is deeply appropriate to how Nascimento herself went about political and intellectual work.
We have been fortunate to engage in a collective throughout this project, and the way in which these responses open up our collective into a wider community. The act of publication always expands authorship into polyphony, but for this project in particular—grounded, of course, in the already polyvocal form of translation—this opening out is deeply rewarding.
The second form of community that these responses raise is that of the community of scholarship and political action which Beatriz Nascimento herself worked within, and which has emerged around her work. We hope these responses, and our book, situate the brilliance of Beatriz Nascimento inside the collective brilliance of Black Brazilian thought. We hope that readers of this forum will be directed to the wider work of Alex Ratts and Muniz Sodré (both of whom have essays in The Dialectic Is in the Sea), but also to that of major figures of Black Brazilian thought like Lélia Gonzalez, Clóvis Moura, Luiza Bairros, António Bispo dos Santos, and Sueli Carneiro, as well as overlooked and underpublished contemporaries of Nascimento’s including activists, artists, and writers such as Thereza Santos, Marlene Cunha, Hamilton Cardoso, and Eduardo de Oliveira e Oliveira. We hope, too, that this book, and this review forum, will lead readers deeper into the vibrant Brazilian field of contemporary interpreters of Nascimento, like Wagner Vinhas Batista, Diego de Matos Gondim, Flavia Rios, the União dos Coletivos Pan-Africanistas, Silvane Aparecida da Silva, and many more.
Finally, these responses place Beatriz Nascimento firmly into the community of global Black Radicalism. As Carole Boyce Davies notes, the title we selected for the book makes explicit our effort to place Beatriz Nascimento in a much wider world of Black thought. Indeed, Boyce Davies aptly points out the multiple entry points for considering parallels between Nascimento’s work and the work of Caribbean intellectuals also theorizing through the sea. The responses here take that project further through the conversations they establish with, among others, Claudia Jones (Boyce Davies), Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Williams), and Stuart Hall (Henson). One of the shifts we inspire to enact—or at least continue a conversation around—are in the linguistic and oceanic geographies of Black Atlantic thought. To date, as Boyce Davies notes, the voices that have been associated with thinking the Black Atlantic have been predominately Anglophone and from the North and Caribbean Atlantic. We hope to suggest that the intellectual, cultural, political, and artistic geographies of the Southern Atlantic have a great deal to say in reconceptualizing oceanic and diasporic thought.
The respondents comment variously on the methodologies and challenges which our work has made explicit. As Henson notes, we have attempted to offer what he calls (following Stuart Hall) a “conjunctural analysis” of Nascimento’s writing. To do so required not only slow linguistic and historical work, as the introductions make clear, but also required of us that we took intellectual risks, both in how we translated the writing and how we framed it. In both cases, we opted to be interventionist rather than withdrawn, aiming to make clear to readers the choices we have made, to better allow them to make their own interpretation. The responses here encourage us that we found a balance that worked.
Such a conjunctural reading was all the more necessary, we felt, because as a number of the respondents note, Beatriz Nascimento’s intellectual and political work remained unfinished. As Williams notes, her later fragmentary works read like a “road map” of the work that was to come. In translating her work into English, we have always hoped to unblock some of the lost futures of Beatriz Nascimento’s ideas, like the fundamental notion of body territory (corpo-território) that Alex Ratts elaborates upon in his analysis of Nascimento and which Daniela Gomes comments on extensively. With these responses, and the new readers that we hope will find her work in English, we feel that some of those lost futures are being found.
We have no doubt that the current wave of student protests will yield new radical voices, who, like Beatriz Nascimento, will continue to speak up against racist, colonial, and imperialist violence wherever it operates, whatever the risks.
We would like to close by thanking Reighan Gillam for organizing this forum and inspiring it with her own deep considerations of Black Brazilian culture. We would also like to thank, again, each of the respondents for the careful and thoughtful responses. This is a labor of love. We are delighted to be in this conversation.
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