Coloring your culture
What are the voices and stories you hear in your leisure time? The books you read, the music you listen to, the movies you watch?
In Brazil, we are 56.2% black, 42.7% white and 1.1% indigenous or yellow (PNAD, 2019). If what you read, watch and consume is done only by white people — who are the majority among workers in the cultural sector — , you are losing a lot of interesting and important things to enrich your points of view, don’t you think?
++ “Working with culture in Brazil is related to the privilege of class and race. Therefore, it is very difficult to work in the sector as a black and peripheral person. We have to create our spaces ”, says Andreza Delgado, one of the creators of Perifacon, a comic and geek culture fair held by peripheral people, in a interview for Gender and Number.
Blackening our cultural references is not a matter of activism, but of expanding our worldviews.
Sueli Carneiro, who has been calling on Brazil to blacken our feminisms for decades, said at the III National Forum of Black Performance in 2009:
“There is a need to overcome the fixed and introjected standards of presentation of black culture that, in most cases, inscribe them in the register of archaism. (…) Re-blackening what has been whitened becomes a strategic issue for the break with the fixation mechanisms, because black cultural production whitened by the white cultural industry becomes a national product and traditional cultural expressions become effective black representation, something of the dimension of folklore”
Question the culture you consume. This is one of the important paths that Djamila Ribeiro suggests in her Pequeno Manual Antirracista [Brief Anti-racist Manual].
You can make this diversifying movement regardless of your topics of interest. Black people don’t just talk about racial issues, but also about food, cinema, fashion, education, literature, business, environment, religion, music and so on.
If pursuing this diversification is not yet part of your routine, here is a brief list of cultural initiatives to get you started. An invitation to blacken your leisure moments:
+ Afroflix, created by the filmmaker Yasmin Thayná, is a collaborative platform that provides audiovisual content online with one condition: the productions must have “an area of technical/artistic work signed by a black person”. Afroflix offers films, series, web series, programs, vlogs and clips.
+ The Centro Afro Carioca [Afro Carioca Cinema Center], which promotes the Zózimo Bulbul Cinema Festival, offers some films and debates from previous festivals on Youtube.
++ The Brazilian Cinema Profile Survey (1995–2016) shows that, in the 219 most popular national films of these twenty years, no black woman served as director or screenwriter.
+ Geledés, Revista Afirmativa, Alma Preta and Blogueiras Negras are some important representatives of the black and national anti-racist media. Permanent Forum for Racial Equality (Fopir) launched in August 2020 the Mapping of Black Media in Brazil.
+ Flup — Literary Festival of the Peripheries, which won the Jabuti 2020 Award in the category of promoting reading, provides fantastic content with debates and performances on Youtube.
+ Still talking about literature, Editora Malê, created in 2015, publishes Afro-Brazilian literature in order to collaborate with the expansion of the diversity of the Brazilian literature market. With Editora Malê you can find the stories and poetry of Conceição Evaristo and Eliana Alves Cruz, for example.
++ “Any action that aims to democratize the expansion of readers will have to go through the issue of diversity and representativeness in literature,” said Vagner Amaro, founder of Editora Malê. A research coordinated by Professor Regina Dalcastagnè, from the University of Brasília (UNB), shows that, between 2004 and 2014, only 2.5% of the authors published in Brazil were not white. In the same period, only 6.9% of the characters portrayed in the novels were black, with only 4.5% being protagonists in the story. And, between 1990 and 2004, the top five occupations for black characters were: criminal, domestic servant, slave, sex worker and housewife.
+ The 2020 book, by the way, which is winning several awards and hearts and was the one that most fascinated me in this complex year, is Torto Arado, by Itamar Vieira.
+ If your thing is technology and innovation, dive into PretaLab, a platform of black and indigenous women in this field. In the PretaPod(e) podcast, PretaLab talks with the main Brazilian slam voices.
+ Innovation is also the focus of GatoMÍDIA, a media and technology learning network for young and peripheral blacks that focuses on maker culture and the production of new stories.
+ The Segunda Black [Black Monday] Festival is a collective of black artists, producers, curators and technicians who have created a space for black artists to present their creative processes and connect themselves.
+ In 2020, there was the 1st Edition of Motim Bafro — Online Multi-artistic Afro-Brazilian Festival, with the participation of about 40 artists who approach blackness in their works, including visual artists, musicians and performers.
+ The Black Money Movement listed 8 black content creators you need to know.
+ The II Women’s Front Festival will bring togethr black artists with performances on ancestry and afrofuturism in March on Youtube. Until January 24, the festival selects black artists for an exchange with British artist Marissa Lestrade.
I accept your tips too :)
