Is Brazil a Postcolonial Country?

I The Cunning of National Reason^[1]

The first section of this essay is based on the text written by Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant entitled “The Cunning of the Imperialist Reason” (Bourdieu/Wacquant 1999, 41-58) in which they discuss the pertinence of transferring concepts regarding race from the American context to the Brazilian context. The authors maintain that this equivalence is a false friend because the same words are used to signify different things in places in which the concept of race is understood in different ways. That is why they refute the validity of this transfer of concepts, as I shall better explain in the pages that follow. To follow Bourdieu and Wacquant, I demonstrate the false friends in certain uses of “postcolonial theory” in Brazil in the field of art.

A key point of departure for this essay is the following contradiction: abroad, Brazil attracts a great deal of international interest due to its postcolonial condition and the power of its discourses of racial hybridity through concepts such as cultural anthropophagy. A Brazilian context encompasses all the elements analyzed from postcolonial theorization: hybridization, cultural/colonial difference, exoticism, afrodescendency, indigenism, slavery. This makes Brazil an appealing enclave from which to challenge Eurocentrism. But, internally, postcolonial studies have attracted little or no interest, especially in academic circles. Why? As respondent of this essay, Simon Sheikh posed the following question: is Brazil a postcolonial country? If we take the word “postcolonial” to mean something that is free of coloniality, then neither Brazil nor any other such country can be said to be postcolonial. If we understand “postcoloniality” as a space for critique, then I will explain here why I think this perspective has been misused or simply not developed in Brazil. The question would then be: what is hindering the adoption of this perspective in the Brazilian context?

In recent years a number of curators have begun to cite authors in their exhibitions such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos or Walter Mignolo in an attempt to rethink the histories of Brazil from its postcolonial condition. One could say that art (always blazing new trails) is one of the main paths to this discourse in Brazil.^[2] One such exhibition, entitled Histórias Mestiças, which was curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz for the Tomie Ohtake Institute of São Paulo opened in September 2014. It will serve as the case study for this essay, which I hope will help us gain a further understanding of these contradictions. Exhibitions such as Histórias Mestiças are symptomatic of how a certain Brazilian intellectual elite likes to present alterity and that is why I believe it generates a mistaken translation of postcolonial theory. Through the analysis of this exhibition offered here, I would like to show that this misinterpretation of these theories in the Brazilian context arises because the postcolonial perspective is incompatible with the celebration of the national frames that are advocated by this exhibition.

Histórias Mestiças is a contemporary art exhibition on the “History of Brazil” which established a dialogue between contemporary art works, colonial art, and ethnographic and religious objects, as well as artefacts from popular and material culture. It used a methodology that has been referred to as transhistorical curating and/ or museology,^[3] in which objects taken from material culture and various historical periods are mixed with contemporary art. The result is a superimposition of temporalities showing the complexity of the South’s (post)colonial history. This complexity has led many to argue that Latin America experienced a “precocious” postmodernism, as it had to come to terms with the coexistence of different economic and cultural forms, world views, subjectivities, and identities long before Europe (Bhabha 1994, 213). For this reason, it was felt that trans-historical curatorship could serve as a valuable tool for exhibitions on history in Latin America.^[4]

There is an ongoing and controversial debate surrounding the dialogue between ethnographic artefacts and contemporary art. This dialogue can be found in exhibitions ranging from Primitivism held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984 to shows such as Magiciens de la Terre by Jean-Hubert Martin, Art/Artifact by Susan Vogel, We the People by Jean Fisher and Jimmie Durham, or Room with Views by Fred Wilson or more recently the use of ethnographic objects at the 8th Biennale in 2014 and the renovation of the Humboldt Forum, both located in the city of Berlin. In another essay I argued that a problem arises when we isolate these objects from their contexts so that we can look at them and admire them for their aesthetic qualities. This isolates them from their history of colonization and/or the political difficulties of the present (Iñigo Clavo 2015a). These curatorial juxtapositions ultimately create a hierarchy between societies based on creating differences based on conceptions of development and subdevelopment.^[5] In the 1980s, anthropologist Joannes Fabian located the cause of this problem at the time as anthropological writing which situated the object of study in the past but also within the contemplative character of Western knowledge: “The hegemony of the visual-spatial had its price which was, first, to detemporalize the process of knowledge and, second, to promote an ideological temporalization of relations between the knower and the known” (Fabian 1983, 177).^[6] He therefore proposed that we preserve the moment the anthropologist enters into dialogue with the culture under study, the moment at which communication and listening occur. This is the concept of “learning from the South” which Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes in his proposal for changing academia to create epistemic diversity. This dialogue would then annul the division between the object under study and the subject of knowledge (De Sousa Santos 2009). The transformation of that object into the subject of the utterance, an interlocutor, is fundamental if we wish to overcome coloniality and it is this point which is at the core of this text.

This debate is complex and will be referred to throughout this essay, but I would like to put more of a focus on the specific characteristics of Brazil which were awakened by the exhibition Histórias Mestiças, as, unlike previous exhibitions, this dialogue between objects taken from material culture and contemporary art were used to show an identitarian national discourse: does this dialogue between objects and artworks lead us to challege the frame for an occidentalized narration, question hierarchies between colonizer/colonized, popular and erudite culture, objects of study and subjects of utterance? Or does this type of display actually support these hierarchies between cultures? Also, one must ask in which capacity contemporary art was used when it forms part of the narration of history.^[7]

One aspect that should be made clear at the outset is that this text will not offer a better definition of a Brazilian modernity. The dilemma here is whether we are talking about parallel modernities or a modernity of the North that was imported to the South, creating a backward copy of the former and becoming an aspiration that could never be attained due to a feeling that it was “undeserving” of it. In another article, I argued that before trying to define modernity in Latin America, we should first try to understand the counterdiscourses created at various moments in response to the subordination imposed by Eurocentric discourse (Iñigo Clavo 2015b). I agree with Frederick Cooper that the concept of modernity is not sufficiently clear to allow for a definition.^[8] Pedrosa’s text for the catalogue recalls John Kelly’s desire that we should not seek “alternative modernities but alternatives to ‘modernity’ as a chronotope necessary for social theory” (Kelly 2002).^[9] However, we will see here that it is questionable whether this was accomplished choosing the national as a theme and as a frame, or whether this frame is not in need of decolonization.

My point of departure is that coloniality and modernity are two faces of the same coin, with coloniality being hidden; one could not come about without the other. And the West is a local culture that prevailed and came to be known as a global culture. Its identity was shaped in contrast with non-Western – the “uncivilized”, “primitive” and “undeveloped” that needs to be redeemed (Mignolo 2000; Dussel 1993). When we ask what is national, or what is modern, we are speaking about coloniality. But this text is not meant to be an apology or defense of postcolonial theory nor is this theory its main topic. This article is a tool that shows how the colonial discourses of power are organized and offers some strategies for understanding and overcoming them. To put it more precisely: what are the specific ways in which colonial discourses are used in this exhibition? Is this consistent with the original concerns of postcolonial thinkers?

II Histórias Mestiças

The exhibition Histórias Mestiças opened in September 2014 at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo and was curated by Lilia Moritz Schwarcz and Adriano Pedrosa. The latter was part of the curatorial team of the 24th Sao Paulo Bienal of Antropofagy and exhibitions such as F(r)icciones at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in 2001, which also created a dialogue between objects of different natures. Histórias Mestiças brought together around 400 pieces, art works ranging from the colonial era to the present day, along with indigenous artefacts, African masks, religious objects, 19th century photography and prints and other objects of material culture to offer another perspective on the “History of Brazil”. The exhibition was divided into seven sections: 1) Trails and maps, 2) Encounters and “dis-encounters”, 3) Masks and portraits, 4) Rites, 5) Cosmologies and National Emblems, 6) Graphic inscriptions and weavings, and 7) Labour.

I cannot discuss each one of these here, but I would like to highlight that one of the most important efforts made by the exhibition was that of trying to evenly distribute the artistic production of the diverse social areas and mix them with works of the national canon that generally are not included in official narrations (religion, popular culture, Afro-Brazilian culture, etc). One element that ran throughout the different sections was the acknowledgement of the African diasporas and indigenous histories and world views. Thus, in Rites, the religious artefacts of Candomblé were placed alongside objects from the Christian imaginary, representations of African deities and modernist art works inspired by some of these motifs. This is significant, as Candomblé has not been recognized by the Brazilian state as a religion.^[10] Although the coexistence of such objects is commonplace in Brazilian homes, these spheres seldom come together within museums and national narrations where the references to afrodescendence are usually framed within the category of folklore. There was also a room devoted to Cosmologies and National Emblems, which displayed paintings as representing foundational moments of national history alongside drawings by indigenous people which were made at the request of anthropologists (as this is an unusual activity amongst the indigenous people). In this section, the curators critically examined the official images of the abolition of slavery and what these concealed.

In Historias Mestiças, a document could be admired for its aesthetic qualities and a work of art analyzed like a document, or even taken for an artifact. The Masks and Portraits room was arranged like a 17th century salon, with the paintings and objects tightly arranged on the walls around the visitor. The curators of Histórias Mestiças laid out sequences of photographs of slaves and wet nurses alongside African masks, modernist painting portraits of mestizos, royal portraits of emperor Pedro II or well-known mestizo intellectuals, contemporary artworks on afrobrazilianess, paintings by colonial explorers representing indigenous peoples, etc. The aim was to create a map of the African and indigenous presence in Brazilian society and history.

To further simplify an oversimplified trajectory of the history of museums: in the 17th century rooms, private collections were displayed, and it was here, surrounded by wall-to-wall works, where collectors held talks, gatherings and debates with visitors about art. In the late 19th century, museums began to arrange works in such a way that the viewer was given a guided tour through consecrated works, ordered according to the “scientific” criteria of the museum narration. This converted such places into virtual temples for adoration, rather than venues in which encounters might take place. Curators of Historias Mestiças chose a similar display type instead of opting for a disciplinary model that would encourage spectators to create their own connections between images. Yet the problem with this was that it was reminiscent of a Eurocentric model of ownership, bringing to mind those private collections that contained objects from the colonies.

In the section on Graphic Inscriptions and Weavings, the curators drew parallels between indigenous drawings and weavings and celebrated works of art from the Neo-Concrete movement such as that by artist Hélio Oiticica, generating dialogue between his parangole capes and white dresses worn by the Baianas painted by Jean Baptiste Debret, or Ghanian textiles. Besides these there were other national symbols: paradigmatic paintings by Manoel Araujo, director of the Museu Afro Brasil and Ruben Valentin, one of the museum’s most visible artists. Valentin works with symbols of African religions, simplified to form “European geometric abstractions.” Big names from the professional art world entered into dialogue with images of traditional body painting or patterns on textiles. This seemed to suggest mutual influences but in the end reasserted the canonical framework of Brazilian art, as if the indigenous drawings had to form part of this institutionalized, funnel-like narrative of big names. Indeed, in issue 11 of Exhibitionist, two of the guest reviewers of Historias Mestiças, Cristina Freire and Manual Zaya, paid tribute to Manuel Araujo by mentioning him in their short notes on the exhibition, making reference to his curatorial work at the Museo Afro Brasil which he has directed for around 12 years (Freire 2015; Zaya 2015). Highlighting this artist was a clear nod to the Museo Afro Brasil, which, from its inception, has been applying trans-historical curatorship like that used in Historias Mestiças. This museum could be seen as another 17th century salon showing a personal(ized) collection made up of works from Benin, as well as Gallery October in London and the collections of friends of the director, thus monopolizing the cultural representation of all those Brazilian communities that urgently need institutional spaces for debate, representation and reflection.

Histórias Mestiças is highly representative of how many Brazilian intellectuals approach the colonial otherness of their country. Either they represent themselves as the Other or they represent the indigenous/African other from either a romantic or folkloric position (sometimes a disturbingly nostalgic one) or a position of solidarity with the victims. Thus Histórias Mestiças is a record of the tradition of the representation of coloniality in Brazil. The exhibition catalogue contains just two curatorial texts and quotes make up the remainder: quotes, quotes and more quotes from prominent intellectuals of the history of Brazil. These were found on loose pages alongside photos taken from the exhibition. What Histórias Mestiças did not provide was a good portrayal of what is not visible in Brazil, that which is not taken into consideration, i.e. the agency of these groups without the mediation of anthropologists or contemporary artists or writers.^[11] What influence did the former slaves and escaped slaves have on Brazil’s struggle for independence? Why are there no references made to the abolitionist Malês revolt of Islamic slaves in Bahia in 1835? What contribution did they make to the nation’s formation? How are their ways of life able to challenge certain notions of citizenship? How do they challenge and enrich the ways in which the collective is understood? What about their view of natural resources? How would they wish to see themselves portrayed in an exhibition on Brazilian history? How might they affect our approaches to representation? How can we relearn modernity from the viewpoint of the South (not as a geographical location but as the place of utterance of the oppressed in De Sousa Santos 2007)? How do we work with the agency of other world views, far from considering them a mere object of study?

Walter Mignolo (2000) has insisted on the point that nationalism was complicit in covering up not just colonialism but, more especially, coloniality – i.e. of the past and present colonial structures and their relationships of power/knowledge. Again, is postcolonial theory compatible with a celebration of national narratives? The 19th century national models of Latin America were particularly inspired by those from France, but also by those from northern Europe, just at the time when colonialism formed an important part of their political project. In Latin America, these models of colonial nations necessarily led to the continuation of colonial structures in the wake of the wars of independence in their ways of understanding indigenous or Afrobrazilian culture. The latter were still thought of as goods to be traded. If we take the post-colonial perspective and examine the current and still living colonial power structures we would have to put a name to the types of internal colonialism (cf. Rivera Cusicanqui 2012) which would reveal its complicities with national discourses: one of these is the denial of the possibility of self-representation and political agency to minority identities (whether these are strategic or otherwise).^[12] This relates to what Fernando Coronil has described as one of the techniques of Occidentalism which involves the “Inclusion of the Other into the Self,” where the role played by non-Western peoples in the shaping of the modern world is hidden. This subtly reiterates the difference between the Other and the Self – a tenet embraced by European imperial expansion (Coronil 1998, 139).

Although his exhibition was based on the idea of mestizaje as an act of interracial dialogue, when Boaventura de Sousa Santos speaks of the liberating power of “nuestra America” (our America, that of Martí), that is, the power of the South, he always does so in transnational terms and in terms of the networks between social movements and minorities that existed in different countries which fight for justice and other forms of citizenship. This is one way of fighting against internal colonialism that is a part of national discourses. If the Nation-state crisis has shown us anything, it is the existence of various levels of citizenship – first class citizens and others who are second or third class. The latter groups tend to be associated with the natural-spiritual sphere (De Sousa Santos 2009, 261). This is why De Sousa Santos insists upon the transnational political agency of these groups acting as creators of a counter-hegemonic globalization that could transform the system.^[13] One of his main interests lies precisely in acknowledging this epistemic dialogue and political capacity both in the past and present. This is why placing a quote by Sousa Santos at the entrance to an exhibition where these social movements are invisible and where the Other is always represented via the perspective of Western erudition must be the result of a misunderstanding, another false friend. What sort of controversy could be brought on by the postcolonial perspective but which the curators of Historias Mestiças nonetheless failed to go in deep? Let’s start with the notion of Mestizaje itself.

III Some Magic Words: Anthropophagy, Mestizaje, Racial Democracy

Mestizaje has been an important path for Brazil and other Latin American countries, with each context exhibiting its own peculiarities in this regard. In the 19th century, the first thinkers of the new Brazilian nation saw, for the first time, mestizaje as a solution to the problems of Brazil, for it promised a widening of the people ensuring the appropriate building of a nation (cf. Ortiz 2006). As early as the 20th century, the notion of mestizaje in countries such as Mexico or Brazil was a way of recognizing the postcolonial character of its national projects. In the case of Brazil, Gilberto Freyre created the concept of “racial democracy” in the 1930s in his book Casa Grande & Senzala (1933). This became a fundamental notion in the political discourse of the Estado Novo (1937-1945) and the dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s. Racial democracy equalized differences between the rich and the poor, the masters (La Casa Grande) and slaves (who lived in La Senzala), and between the indigenous population and the Europeans. In the 1970s, this concept had already been discredited by Afro-Brazilian activists who sought recognition of existing inequalities.

In 1928, a few years before the advent of racial democracy, Oswald de Andrade posited his Manifesto Antropófago in the first issue of the official journal of the modernist movement of São Paulo, the magazine called Antropofagia. Probably owing to his references to a community indigeneity and his later membership in the Brazilian Communist Party, his manifesto did not gain much attention at the national level. It wasn’t until the 1950s that it would be taken up by a group of poets and Haroldo de Campos in particular. It was at this point that his thesis became one of the bastions of Brazilian identity; Andrade’s manifesto is the source of many often-cited quotes.^[14] If both Freyre and Andrade argued for a reconsideration of mestizaje in a positive way, it would be Freyre’s proposal that would help to maintain the traditional power structures of inequality, accepting, naturalizing and absorbing them as part of Brazilian culture and a certain sense of “Brazilness”. In contrast, the anthropophagic thesis deauthorizes European erudition, suggesting that it be mixed with indigenous elements in order to enact an epistemic change. The manifesto explains how the eager adoption of intellectual theories from the north is nothing more than a “swallowing” of these methods in a ritual that frightened Europeans the most, namely, cannibalism. This rite appropriated these intellectual approaches and reinvented them, turning them into indigenous forms. This can be said to represent a sort of decolonization of the European and Western discourses that negated the postcolonial condition of Brazil: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question.”^[15]

One cannot deny the fact that the notion of anthropophagy has generated productive analyses for a good many disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, art, theatre, music and political theory. Also in the 1960s, anthropophagy was a key and crucial argument to liberate artists from the Leftist debates against foreigner influence that demanded an impossible Latin American purity in the artistic and cultural production.^[16] Nevertheless, we can use the postcolonial perspective to shed light on how, in the Anthropophagy Manifesto, the strategy involving the incorporation of the Other would be substituted by its representations,^[17] thus negating its real and political presence. This is what Coronil would label “Destabilization of the Self by the Other,” in which the Other is used as a source of inspiration for the proposed changes. Coronil argues that this strategy reinforces polarization and obliterates historical ties, homogenizing any differences. Indeed, Oswald de Andrade made use of European ethnographic literature to explore the matriarchy of Pindorama (the original Tupi name for Brazil in pre-colonial times) or to declare that the indigenous did not understand ownership and were not really interested in the indigenous political processes that were taking place in close proximity. As shown by Antonio Riserio,^[18] anthropology in Brazil would act as a powerful filter that hindered any other ways of “incorporating” indigenous or African texts into the country’s heritage. This would be passed onto most of the appropriations that arose from the term anthropophagy during the 20th century.^[19]

Similarly, the concept of mestizaje has been accused of instrumentalizing homogenization in Latin America. Educator Ketwcha Armando Muyolema has focused on the violence contained in the nine letters that conform the word “mestizaje” for the word’s negation of indigenous difference. This is the argument put forth by Brazilian anthropologist Kabengele Munanga in his text “rediscutindo a mestizagem no Brasil” on mestizaje as a force that exterminates all that is black or “indian” (Munanga 1999). And the debate continues: the controversy involves two factions – those who defend the pertinence of defining political identities (the essentialists), albeit temporarily or strategically, in order to undertake more efficient political action against inequality, and those which deny the existence of a specific Afro-Brazilian identity, believing that it is an artificial notion implanted from the African American civil rights movement (Bourdieu/Wacquant 1999). The ideal of mestizaje has been defended and, for example, in its name many have questioned the implementation of quotas for black students at Brazilian universities (DaMatta 1987, 81). According to the logic of mestizaje, all of us are mestizos and black does not exist, this even though no one denies the fact that many black Brazilians come from the poorest areas of the country (cf. Munanga 1999; Ortiz 2006).

In their attempt to avoid a homogenizing notion of mestizaje, the curators of Historias Mestiças used the plural form in the exhibition title. In my opinion, this is insufficient and runs the risk of being taken for the liberal model which champions multicultural tolerance (cf. Žižek 1997, 28-29). In the case of Brazil, and running counter to Bourdieu and Wacquant, I believe we need to introduce elements that destabilize the established and endemic colonial regimes of power and their tools (anthropophagy/mestizaje) that maintain an order based on inequality.

The question Is it possible to decolonize mestizaje? was the title of a colloquium organized by Bolivian scholar Silvia Cusicanqui at New York University in 2015. And the nation? How do we de-occidentalize it? With regard to the notion of representation in museums, this can occur via the dialogue posited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, by defending epistemic diversity, new ecologies and relations with objects, by showing other forms of representation, and other image regimes. A good start would be to show the frameworks.

IV Displays and Time in the Museum

At times, the structure of the exhibition Historias Mestiças makes use of display styles taken from historical museography in its use of picture rooms or cabinets. This is in keeping with the topic of the exhibition as one of the key features of 19th century museums was the representation of national identity. But I agree with Sharon Macdonald that “the museum is not, however, merely a product of or a site for displaying the narratives of modern developments; it is also one of the technologies through which modernity – and the democratic ideals, social differences and exclusions, and other contradictions which this has produced – is constituted” (Macdonald 1997, 8). Just how do we use the museum – one of the greatest legitimizing apparatuses of nationalistic/modern, and, by extension, colonial paradigms – as an ideal medium for advocating a decolonial perspective? This is the great challenge that faces Western museums today.

One project that can serve as inspiration is the post-ethnographic museum concept developed by Clementine Deliss, who invited contemporary artists to intervene in Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen Museum collection. Quoting the Senegalese artist and curator Hadji Sy, Deliss proposes a transformation of the museum. “Anthropology is leaving these museums and something else is entering them, something that has nothing to do with ethnography. I am not sure what it is yet but I sense that there will be dicussions and confrontations around the question of functional objects, anthropology, and objects of performance” (Deliss 2015a). This is a fundamental point, given that the first misunderstanding of the West is to think that these objects can be understood by merely looking at them; in some cases, the communities that are demanding their ethnographic objects are seeking their reactivation and not their conservation. Its work with contemporary artists has been criticized for deflecting the museum’s responsibility in addressing its colonial legacy (Leeb 2013). Still, Deliss’ thesis rests on assuming the impossible redemption of the ethnographic museum (Deliss 2015b). I believe that it would be interesting to show the capacity of contemporary art to negotiate temporalities and transgress disciplines, creating an institutional critique, or, as Deliss observes, to show the complex work of the artist when he/she seeks “to integrate past ‘tribal art’ into his or her contemporary practice” (Deliss 2015a, 16). Other authors, such as Ivan Gaskell, curator of the Harvard Art Museum, believe that all objects – works of art, objects from material culture and ethnographic objects – are artifacts; if they are all artifacts, he then suggests that we ask ethnographers to curate an exhibition of European Impressionistic art (Gaskell 2009). In both cases, the strategy lies in breaking through disciplinary perspectives that have created hierarchies between forms of artistic production, or “high art” and popular art, to reveal and draw attention to the frameworks in which we learn about alterity. All this while interrupting the suspended temporality that is characteristic of museums and the Western “scientific” perspective.^[20] Contemporary art works by non-white artists can create a caesura in this suspended temporality.

In her text “Objets actanciels/Agent Objets”, Deliss highlights the work of contemporary artists (such as Hadji Sy) which make use of the collection of the Weltkulturen Museum, creating a translation between the past and the present. Once again, the difference between Deliss’ project and Historias Mestiças is that the latter exhibition is trapped within the temporality of nationalistic discourse. This is precisely what Homi Bhabha examines in his essay entitled DissemiNation,^[21] which explores the changing discourses surrounding cultural identification of former colonies during the period that saw the forging of the nation. Although historicism has dominated this revisiting of the shaping of the nation’s narrative (be it chronological or some other form), Bhabha does not want to speak about history. Instead, he is interested in the discursive mechanisms that uphold said narrative. Beyond studying its origin or “modernity as a whole”, Bhabha is interested in studying the idea of nationhood as a temporal process in the present. This is why he presents this narrative as an agonistic space where both temporalities are mixed together: the first one, the educational temporality, which has to do with continuity, accumulation and narrating the past. And a second one, the performative temporality, in contrast, is associated with the reiteration of this discourse in the present. This latter temporality is an uncomfortable one which disturbs the historical narrative while legitimizing it. It is the day-to-day proof of the coherence of national paradigm yet also represents an expansion of its subjects.^[22]

One of my initial questions in this text was in which capacity contemporary art is used when it forms part of the narration of history. In my opinion, performative temporality represents the role played by contemporary art in an exhibition such as Historias Mestiças ; even though it disturbs the narrative by criticising it, it confirms and builds upon it. For instance, Jonathas de Andrade bases his work on Casa Grande e Senzala by Gilberto Freyre to ironically revisit the visual representations of the work of slaves through the use of a pop-art style and educational elements. Another artist, Sidney Amaral, created the only work in the exhibition that deals with the abolitionist agency of the slaves. This composition of watercolour paintings includes reproductions of the photographs taken of slaves in the 19th century by Christiano Junior and celebrated portraits of insurgents along with revamped popular images. Both lie, to follow Bhaba’s statement, “between the cumulative educational temporality that maintains the status quo, and the repetitive, recursive strategy of performative temporality” (Bhabha 1994, 182).

In “Suplicio” (Torture), artist Jaime Lauriano reflects upon the museum cabinet and the barriers it creates to explore violence and coloniality that still exist today. This work was presented in 2015 as an answer to Historias Mestiças. Lauriano is a member of the History in Display collective project launched in September 2013.^[23] Since then, the group, of which I am a member, has undertaken visits to several museums in the city of São Paulo in order to hold debates on the types of representation of history and the official strategies for forgetting. We frequently invite writers or curators interested in these issues to engage in these discussions with us. The long-term aim of this group is to be able to make proposals to Brazilian history museums from the perspective of artistic and curatorial practice. One of the exhibitions we visited was Histórias Mestiças. We have found that museums generally do not recognize the agency of Afro-Brazilians or Indigenous peoples who are represented in their collections. This is carried out in two ways: a folkloric lens in the case of Afro-Brazilian subjects and placement outside of a timeline when showing indigenous objects. This means, for example, that Institutions such as the Museo Histórico Nacional de Rio de Janeiro create a sort of preamble to the national narrative in which they place objects from indigenous material culture, a practice which suddenly transforms the Museum of History into a kind of Ethnographic Museum.

Abb. 1/2

Jaime Lauriano suplício, 2015. Showcase containing chain, plastic rope, tape, plastic clamp, halogen lamps, iron bar. 80 x 80 x 60 cm.

Jaime Lauriano produced Suplicio (“Torture”, 2015) as a response to the cabinets on display in Historias Mestiças and the ethnographic display, particularly with regard to the slaves’ shackles which were shown in glass cases in the room devoted to Labour. This ethnographic display was one of the most thought-provoking items in the exhibition, as it possessed the remoteness of that which must be scrutinized by sight only. In the catalogue, the curators explain how “in the contexts of the recent past, in Brazil the very concept of labour was long associated with slavery, and therefore treated with prejudice [...] daily labour wound up being stigmatized” (Pedrosa/ Schwarcz 2015, 323). Therefore, the work of the slave had a great presence in the room, although there were other modernist and contemporary paintings of mestizo people at work.^[24] It was no surprise that there was a room for Labour, as Brazil has a long tradition of working class movements, but not one for struggles for political identity, which, as mentioned earlier, have dissolved into discourses of Brazilian identity, that “there are no blacks, all of us are Brazilian.”

Lauriano is chiefly concerned in his art production with how violence is linked with history and how ethnographic (or museological) displays ignore this violence or contextualize it as being in the past, not confronting a genealogy in the present. In 2015, he displayed in a modest vitrine various objects used in racist and homophobic torture practices, which are used today in various cities in Brazil: ropes, bicycle locks, fluorescent lamps and chains. In recent years, vigilante groups have begun to violently punish youths who have allegedly undertaken robberies. Supposedly, such actions derive from the desperation of the inhabitants of such areas in the face of repeated thefts. The taking of justice into one’s own hands does not appear to have generated great moral dilemmas in a country in which the poor are often judged to be responsible for their own predicament by the upper conservative classes, and where the police act with impunity in depressed areas. However, the techniques used by these groups have caused greater controversy, as they are inspired by 19th century images of the torture of slaves. The thieves are found in the morning, beaten and tied to lampposts or chained by the neck to bus shelters. Such images have become commonplace and show how these colonial imaginaries and the legacy of slavery are still latent in this society.

A discussion of the ethnographic display was one of the priorities because it is something that creates that distance between the thing to be studied by our gaze, keeping it away from the vivid emotion that comes with memory and separating it from the present. Lauriano’s contribution was to add this violence to the objective scientific glass case, updating it, contextualizing it in the present, to pull it out of its neutral position and to highlight it as epistemological violence. An artwork like this shows the problems inherent in the disciplinary frame of reference proposed by Gaskell. As Clementine Deliss asks, “How do we make the objects meaningful for contemporary significant identification?” Quoting anthropologist Paul Rabinow, she adds, “The exercise is how to present historical elements in a contemporary assemblage such that new visibilities and sayable things become actual, inducing motion and affect” (Deliss 2015b). It is precisely this work which makes reference to the current controversy caused by such incidents and contrasts it with the coldness and distance introduced by the glass case. Isn’t it obscene to try to look at and rationalize the racist violence that is taking place today? Its currency is the friction that arises when we see them as an object of study. Remoteness, inaccessibility and timelessness are questioned as they reveal themselves to be elements of political deactivation which prevent us from truly interacting politically with reality. These symbolic elements of slavery remain vivid in the imaginaries of the people of Brazil – sufficiently vivid so as to be reproduced in the context of criminal acts means that the imaginaries of slavery are still alive in real representation and violence, as is the humiliated body of the slave, the non-citizen, deprived of everything.

In my opinion, “Suplicio” by Jaime Lauriano challenges and interrupts that performative national temporality described by Bhabha. It breaks with its self-referential and epic representational framework. Its aim is not to point to the victim but to denounce the process of victimization. This is why this work becomes the site of enunciation. It doesn’t speak of race but of racism and its effects in the present day. At the same time, like Gaskell or Deliss, the artist makes visible the disciplinary atemporal frames of reference employed in the field of anthropology – which Johannes Fabian also denounces. This is precisely why this artwork can be seen as a counter-point to this desire for macro-discourses of national narrative and plays into the issue of identities which, as we have seen, the exhibition ignores. Lauriano speaks from the viewpoint of micro-politics and micro-identities and from the racial and gender perspective. This artwork represents a confrontation with the nationalist strategies of “culturalizing” memory, violence or political differences,^[25] in an attempt to move them to another plane of visibility, action or identification. The anthropologist Roberto DaMatta said that in a hierarchical society such as Brazil it is not being different which is a crime but rather failing to occupy the place allotted to you (DaMatta 1987, 79). This is what the African masks and indigenous drawings do in Historias Mestiças : they occupy the place allotted to them by the Brazilian intelligentsia. In this sense, we could go as far as saying that this is an exhibition that narrates the history of this elite and its school of thought regarding alterity.