Honoring Black Women’s Transnational Intellectual Production
This post is part of our roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea.
The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Tradition of Beatriz Nascimento (2023), co-edited and translated by Christen A. Smith, Bethânia N.F. Gomes, and Archie Davies, is the first English-language book to curate, collect, and translate Beatriz Nascimento’s writings. Nascimento left a substantial archive of unpublished work in the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro. I applaud the coeditors for the extraordinary amount of labor that must have gone into reading through Nascimento’s oeuvre of writings, selecting which texts to include in the book, organizing them thematically, and placing them in historical context. With its eclectic format that intersperses Nascimento’s poetry and prose with Smith’s interpretive essays that add intellectual, and historical context to her writings, this unique book is a model for collaboration, translation, and transnational Black feminist intellectual contributions.
From its opening pages, readers are welcomed with warm words from Bethânia N.F. Gomes, Nascimento’s daughter. The Preface, “Dear Mamãe,” offers glimpses of the life that Nascimento carefully crafted for her daughter—a life full of Blackness, poetry, community, and travel. In the introduction, we learn about Nascimento’s origins as a working-class Black Brazilian woman from Sergipe who grew up in Rio de Janeiro to become a historian, Black movement activist, transnational thinker, and “one of the most innovative Black intellectuals of the twentieth century in the Americas” (3). Nonetheless, Nascimento “has not received the global academic attention she deserves” (4). This is perhaps not surprising, when one considers the Anglophone dominance of discussions of the Black radical tradition, even though countries like Brazil and Colombia have the second and third largest Black populations outside of the African continent. As a Black feminist anthropologist who is fluent in Portuguese and who has been doing research in Brazil for nearly two decades, I applaud this book for introducing Beatriz Nascimento’s intellectual production to a global audience. I have long noticed that Black feminists in Brazil eagerly engage with US-based feminist scholarship. They love Angela Davis, and have read the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and others. I have often wondered why this transnational flow of Black feminist intellectual production seems to only flow one way. Why aren’t US-based scholars as familiar with the work of Lélia Gonzalez, Luiza Bairros, Sueli Carneiro, and Beatriz Nascimento? The Dialectic is in the Sea answers this call. It puts #CiteBlackWomen into practice by honoring Black women’s transnational intellectual production. As the authors state, “Seriously engaging the work of Black intellectuals from Latin America in the discourse of the Black radical tradition is long overdue” (19).
The book is divided into four thematic sections: 1) Race and Brazilian Society, 2) The Black Woman, 3) Quilombo: Thoughts on Black Freedom and Liberation”, and 4) Black Aesthetics, Spirituality, Subjectivity, and the Cosmic. In “A Note on Translation,” Archie Davies situates himself as a white male translating the words of a Black Brazilian intellectual. He elaborates on how translation can either be a “technique of solidarity” or a “colonial, expropriating act” (43). Emphasizing the importance of context, intent, and process in a translation project, Davies argues that translations are necessarily interpretive. This groundbreaking book is the result of a collaborative process in which the authors spoke weekly and sought input from each other to ensure they were able to do Nascimento’s words justice.
The authors summarize the goals of Nascimento’s writing: to dismantle and demystify anti-Black racism and sexism in Brazil, delegitimize the repressive anti-Black state and discourses of racial democracy (17). They also make an important distinction between Black Studies and Afro-Brazilian studies. While Black Studies involves Black intellectuals from Black Movement political spaces, Afro-Brazilian studies, which has a much longer history in Brazil, involves white-mestizo liberal intellectuals who study race and Blackness in Brazil. They argue that “Black Brazilian intellectuals have developed a unique Black Brazilian radical tradition in direct conversation with grassroots political organizing for Black liberation” (21). They also describe Nascimento as an “intellectual militante” whose “research and thinking were accompanied by a fierce commitment to organizing and dismantling oppressive social structures” (16). In other words, her research was intimately connected to her political work as an early member of the Black Movement (Movimento Negro Unificado, MNU).
In her writing, Nascimento often shares stories or reflections from her childhood to illustrate important lessons. For instance, in “For a History of Black People,” Nascimento tells a story about a white intellectual who told her that he was Blacker than she was because “he had written a piece on Afro-Brazilian religion, and I didn’t wear my hair in an Afro or follow candomblé” (84). She concludes that essay with the bold assertion: “I no longer accept any form of paternalism, especially intellectual paternalism” (87). In “Our Racial Democracy,” she tells the story of a young man in Salvador who wanted to convince her that Bahia was the greatest center of racial tolerance in the world. To prove his point, he showed pictures of his two mixed-race children with different skin tones. Pointing to one, he said “this one came out better; almost blond . . . this way, black people will disappear, and we won’t have racial conflict like in the United States’” (102). Nascimento does not hide her incredulity at the ironic fact that this young man was enacting anti-Black racism while trying to prove a point about racial tolerance!
The Dialectic is in the Sea uplifts Beatriz Nascimento’s careful and astute theorization of quilombo. Nascimento conducted ethnographic research on surviving quilombo communities in Minas Gerais and Maranhão, and did archival research on quilombos in Angola, Brazil, and Portugal. For her, quilombos were the representation of Black continuity (5). In “Black People, Seen by Themselves,” an Interview by Eloí Calage, Nascimento describes the quilombo as “a form of social and political organization with very profound ideological implications in the life of black people,” emphasizing that it still survives today “as a tradition of life for black Brazilians” (96). The concept of aquilombarse has been integral to my work on Black feminist activism in Bahia. One of my interviewees said, “When we aren’t able to aquilombar, we end up suffering… Bolsonaro being in power made it so that we had to wake up and aquilombarse even more—we will have to either take power or leave the country.” I soon learned that aquilombarse was a political strategy and act of resistance that meant to gather in a metaphorical quilombo. Aquilombarse allowed Black feminists to unite and join forces, to gather their strength to fight against enduring forms of racial injustice, as well as, sexism, lesbofobia, and other forms of social oppression.
In the Introduction to Part II, Smith situates Nascimento within the radical Black feminist tradition, noting that while she never explicitly defined herself as a feminist, she paid “deep, philosophical attention to gender” (112). Although she didn’t participate directly in shaping the early Black feminist movement in Brazil, she still became “one of the radical Black intellectual voices to address the intersectionality of Black women’s experiences in Brazil” (112). Smith says she was “quintessentially ‘intersectional’ in her thinking.” Nascimento contended that “telling Black women’s stories is a foundational step in writing a History of Black people’ (115). She even described her experience of being sexually harassed and called a João as a girl because of her short afro.
The last section gathers some of Nascimento’s unpublished writings that were fragments on a broad range of ideas. They were like reading a roadmap of her future scholarly trajectory. Nascimento had plans to rewrite and reinterpret the history of Black people in Brazil. The conversation among the coauthors in the Final Section of the book shows yet another side of Beatriz Nascimento. Here we learn that she was beautiful, funny, bright, played acoustic guitar, enjoyed singing and parties, and had a peaceful smile. She was an exciting mom with mental health challenges who shaped her daughter to be a warrior. Although she was one of the first to write about the challenges Black women face in love in Brazil (solidão), she was a “well-accompanied woman” who had several fulfilling relationships throughout her lifetime. We learn that there was no “down time” to her activism, as she would boldly call out racism and sexism anytime and anyplace that she witnessed it.
As I learned about Beatriz Nascimento’s life and work, I couldn’t help but lament the tragedy of her life being cut short. I was reminded of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as leaving Black people vulnerable to premature death. Nascimento was tragically murdered while defending a friend from an abusive partner in 1995. She was only fifty-two years old. With trips to Angola in 1979, Senegal in 1987, and Martinique and Haiti in the early 1990s, Nascimento was expanding her transnational connections. In what would be her last decade, she gravitated more toward writing poetry. Her film Ori (1989) had won international prizes. Who could Beatriz Nascimento have become if she had reached the full potential of her creative and scholarly mind? How many articles and books could she have written? How many more films could she have produced? What kind of impact could she have had on our world and our thinking if she had lived? The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento is an offering; a place to start. In this book, Beatriz Nascimento’s legacy lives on.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.
