Online Roundtable–The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento


By AAIHS Editors 1

August 26th to September 3rd, 2024

Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Christen Smith, Archie Davis, and Bethânia Gomes. Beatriz Nascimento was an Afro-Brazilian woman intellectual who developed theories about race relations and racial inequality in Brazil and theories of the quilombo in relationship to race and Blackness. She wrote during a time when Brazil considered itself a society in which racial mixture eroded the lines between Black and white and thus erased the existence of racism. Nascimento was a committed activist with the Unified Black Movement and traveled widely to speak about racial inequality in Brazil.

The roundtable begins on August 26, 2024 and concludes on September 3, 2024. It will feature essays by Carole Boyce Davies (Howard University/Cornell University), Erica Williams (Spelman College), Daniela Gomes (San Diego State University), and Bryce Henson (Texas A&M University). At the conclusion the editors Christen Smith (UT Austin), Archie Davis (Queen Mary University of London), and Bethânia Gomes (Beatriz Nascimento Foundation) will respond.

During the week of the online roundtable, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:30AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter, like AAIHS on Facebook, or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.

About the Participants

Carole Boyce-Davies is Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita andProfessor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) on the internalization of Caribbean culture;  and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English.  In addition to over a hundred essays, articles published in major professional journals,  Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published fifteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture such as the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2); the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia Jones Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) and Pan-African Connections (2019) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). Her most recent publication is Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022/2023). She is a past president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016. Her popular essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian (London), The Washington Post, The Crisis, Ms Magazine, Ithaca Journal, The Black Scholar, Miami Herald, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian, Caribbean Today, Caribbean Contact, Newsweek.

Erica L. Williams is Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013). She is co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018) along with Ira Harrison and Deborah Johnson-Simon, and Speechifying: The Words and Legacy of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, along with Celeste Watkins-Hayes and Johnnetta Betsch Cole (Duke University Press, 2023). She has also published peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; and several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently writing an ethnography of Black feminist activism in Salvador, Bahia, and an autoethnographic travel memoir. She is the Book and Film Review Editor for Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), and Secretary of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Winner of the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, race and identity in Latin America, globalization, and feminist ethnography. She is an Advisory Board Member for VidaAfroLatina, an emerging international women’s fund that mobilizes resources and connects them with Afro-descendant women-led organizations in Latin America that address sexual violence.

Daniela Gomes is an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at San Diego State University. She is a Ph.D. in African and African Diaspora Studies with a certification in Women and Gender Studies by the University of Texas at Austin, M.A. in Cultural Studies with a certification in Media, Information and Culture by the Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and B.A. in Journalism by the Universidade Metodista de Sao Paulo. Gomes is an activist in the Afro-Brazilian and African Diaspora Movement and uses her work to connect people in the African Diaspora. The focus of her efforts is to build international bridges to fight against racism around the globe. Born and raised in a poor peripheral area of Sao Paulo, Gomes found inspiration in the Hip Hop movement to fight for new goals and perspectives. In her book manuscript, Hip-hop salvação: Afro- narratives of the hip-hop generation in São Paulo, Brazil Or how hip-hop showed us the way out! Dr. Gomes presents Brazilian hip-hop’s potential to work as a salvation tool—from racial alienation, conformity, lack of opportunity, etc.—for Afro-Brazilian youth within the hip-hop community in São Paulo, Brazil. Dr. Gomes has developed several lectures and participated in conferences focusing on race relations in Brazil and other countries. She has also been interviewed by different media channels, such as MSNBC and AlJazeera English, where she talked about pertinent topics to the African Diaspora community in Brazil and abroad. In 2016, Dr. Gomes presented the TED Talk “O poder do hip-hop” during the TEDxSaoPaulo, where she was able to talk about her activism and its relations to the hip-hop movement.

Bryce Henson is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University. He holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a double B.A. in Communication and Accounting from the University of Washington. Last year, he was the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. His research interests include African diaspora studies, the Black radical tradition, cultural studies, urban marronage, media studies, and critical ethnography. He is the author of Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil (University of Texas Press, 2023) which received honorable mention for the 2024 Roberto Reis First Book Prize Award from the Brazilian Studies Association. He is also a co-editor of Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020).  He currently serves as an advisory board member for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora.
About the Editors

Christen A. Smith is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-author of the book The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Black Feminist Constellations: Black Women in Dialogue and Translation (University of Texas Press, 2023). In 2017, she started Cite Black Women.—a transnational initiative that brings awareness to society’s gross tendency to ignore Black women’s intellectual contributions and not to cite Black women inside and outside of the academy. Additional affiliations: Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies, Center for Women and Gender Studies (CWGS).

Archie Davies is a cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. He is a Lecturer in Geography and Fellow of the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London. The first major theme of his research addresses food, hunger, nature, race, and embodiment. He has written about the coloniality of infrastructure, the racial division of nature, the history of landscape thinking, and the idea of socio-ecological metabolism. She is now taking this work forward through research projects on the history of meat extract, Oxo and Bovril, and the historical geography of painkillers. His second main research area is the history of twentieth century geographical ideas in Latin America, particularly the Northeast of Brazil. His first book, A World Without Hunger: Josué de Castro and the History of Geography (Liverpool, 2023), tells the story of Josué de Castro (1908-73), a Brazilian activist, politician and geographer. He received an MSc in Urban Studies from University College London in 2015, and a PhD from King’s College London in 2019, supervised by Alex Loftus. In 2019-20 he was a Visiting Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of London. From April 2020, he was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Department of Geography in Sheffield.

Bethânia N. F. Gomes is the daughter of Beatriz Nascimento. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she pursued a dance career in classical ballet, training at Maria Olenewa Municipal School in in Rio de Janeiro ( Brazil) . She joined the Dance Theater of Harlem School in 1991 as a scholarship student, joining the company in 1992 rising to the rank of principal dancer with The Dance Theatre of Harlem in 2001 becoming the first Afro Brazilian ballerina to reach such a rank . She was mentored and directed by Arthur Mitchel. She has also being part of Dance Company Complexions (1998) , Has worked with the late recording artist Prince ( 1997 ) as a ballet dancer In his project New Power Generation Dance Company. Between the years of 2006 and 2014 Bethania had worked in Brazil at many outreaches dance programs creating her own ballet program in one of the favelas ( Chapeu Mangueira / Babilonia ) in Rio de Janeiro. One of her formers students is Ingrid Silva one of DTH principal dancers and top dance influencer. She has also choreographed for BHM 2020 Nike campaign narrated by Serena Williams, Latino heritage month for Facebook 2020 as Ingrid Silva’s coach and recently ( January 1rst 2023 ) choreographed for the inauguration of the elected President of Brazil Luis Inacio “Lula” Da Silva Bethania also is dedicated to curate her mother the late civil rights activist and icon Beatriz Nascimento’s works. Her first work has been the book Todas as Distancias (2015), a collection of poems and aphorisms by Beatriz Nascimento, in collaboration with Dr. Alex Ratts. (Goiânia University, Brazil). In 2022 Bethania founded the Beatriz Nascimento Foundation, a nonprofit organization based on Arts and Education to empower Afro Brazilian Culture and History for the African Diaspora and citizens of the world.

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Comments on “Online Roundtable–The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento”

  • Avatar
    Rodrigo Ferreira dos Reis  |  August 14, 2024 at 11:06 am

    Congratulations on the initiative of the Online Round Table – The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, as a black researcher investigating the trajectory of Beatriz Nascimento, I look forward to watching this dialogue with different views on this Afro-dysporic intellectual.

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