Anywhere But Here

Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond

Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, Anja Werner, Kendahl Radcliffe, Jennifer Scott, Anja Werner

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626742888
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Afroamerikanische Studien

Contributions by Keiko Araki, Ikaweba Bunting, Kimberly Cleveland, Amy Caldwell de Farias, Kimberli Gant, Danielle Legros Georges, Douglas W. Leonard, John Maynard, Kendahl Radcliffe, Edward L. Robinson Jr., Jennifer Scott, and Anja Werner Anywhere But Here brings together new scholarship on the cross-cultural experiences of intellectuals of African descent since the eighteenth century. The book embraces historian Paul Gilroy's prominent thesis in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness and posits arguments beyond The Black Atlantic's traditional organization and symbolism. Contributions are arranged into three sections that highlight the motivations and characteristics connecting a certain set of agents, thinkers, and intellectuals: the first, Re-ordering Worldviews: Rebellious Thinkers, Poets, Writers, and Political Architects; the second, Crafting Connections: Strategic and Ideological Alliances; and the third, Cultural Mastery in Foreign Spaces: Evolving Visions of Home and Identity. These essays expand categories and suggest patterns at play that have united individuals and communities across the African diaspora. They highlight the stories of people who, from their intercultural and often marginalized positions, challenged the status quo, created strategic (and at times, unexpected) international alliances, cultivated expertise and cultural fluency abroad, as well as crafted physical and intellectual spaces for their self-expression and dignity to thrive. What, for example, connects the eighteenth-century Igbo author Olaudah Equiano with 1940s literary figure Richard Wright; nineteenth-century expatriate anthropologist Antenor Fermin with 1960s Haitian émigrés to the Congo; Japanese Pan-Asianists and Southern Hemisphere Aboriginal activists with Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey; or Angela Davis with artists of the British Black Arts Movement, Ingrid Pollard and Zarina Bhimji? They are all part of a mapping that reaches across and beyond geographical, historical, and ideological boundaries typically associated with the "Black Atlantic." They reflect accounts of individuals and communities equally united in their will to seek out better lives, often, as the title suggests, "anywhere but here."

III. CULTURAL MASTERY
IN FOREIGN SPACES

Evolving Visions of Home and Identity

Abdias Nascimento

Afro-Brazilian Painting Connections Across the Diaspora

Kimberly Cleveland

Until his death in 2011 at the age of ninety-seven, Abdias Nascimento was one of the most important individuals of the organized black movement in Brazil. He embodied the spirit and goals of the fight for racial equality that grew over the course of the twentieth century. A political nuisance for more than one administration, and jailed more than once for his oppositional views, by the start of this century, however, he had become an internationally lauded figure. In 2005 the Brazilian government was one of several sponsors that honored the nonagenarian with an exhibition at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro. Many Brazilians and U.S. Americans are familiar with Nascimento’s work as an actor, activist, writer, and politician. A smaller number of people know that, a self-taught painter, he also produced a significant body of acrylic on canvas paintings.

From the late 1930s onward, Nascimento’s cultural production was intrinsically linked to his wider involvement in national and international black movements and ideologies. When American artists and art historians were studying connections between African and Diasporic arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exhibitions of Nascimento’s paintings in the United States provided tangible evidence of African influences in Brazilian art. Over time, Nascimento even took on the role of cultural ambassador, educating blacks in the United States and Brazil about each other’s respective situations.

Through an examination of Nascimento’s artwork from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, one underscores not only how Nascimento chose to represent Afro-Brazilian culture to the international community at different points in his career but also how he shed light on the political side of painting Afro-Brazilian art at home and in the United States. In focusing on an individual who used his paintings to demonstrate cultural resistance in relation to national and international black movements, we may further our understanding of Afro-Brazilian art and its connections to African art and culture. Through the prism of art, Nascimento illuminated intellectual, in addition to artistic, connections that cut across the Diaspora. The growth of his incorporation of African and Diasporic references (as a result of his increased political and cultural contact with African and African-descendent communities) reveals that these connections are not static, but that they are forever shifting in the mind of the individual artist.

Nascimento in Brazil: Early Endeavors

Nascimento discovered the challenges inherent in fighting for racial equality in Brazil at a young age. Just sixteen in 1930, he left his small hometown of Franca, in São Paulo state, for the capital, Rio de Janeiro. There, he became active in Brazil’s first organized black movement, the Frente Negra Brasileira (FNB), or Brazilian Black Front. The group’s interest in Brazil’s African heritage countered the government’s promotion of a unified cultural nationalism. Intolerant of political opposition, the Estado Novo (New State) government (1937–1945) jailed Nascimento and other university students for distributing pamphlets against President Getúlio Vargas. As the FNB had gone on to declare itself a political party, the administration shut the FNB down in 1937 to dissuade the organization from any further such type of dissident action and competition.

Despite the end of the FNB, its members refused to forego their cause and remained undeterred by the Estado Novo’s repressive tactics. Nascimento realized that he could circumvent the administration’s aversion to other political parties by creating a cultural group. In 1944 he founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro (TEN), or Black Experimental Theater. Not only did TEN offer its Afro-Brazilian members—the majority of whom were unschooled domestic servants, laborers, and the unemployed—the opportunity to participate in the theater, but it also provided services such as literacy classes. Through their work in the theater and contact with Senegalese writer Alioune Diop’s journal Présence Africaine, Nascimento and the other group leaders learned about the philosophy of Négritude introduced by Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas in the 1930s. TEN actors and activists looked to Négritude as a means for Afro-Brazilian social liberation in tandem with valorization of African culture; they became the principal disseminators of this philosophy in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s.¹ However, given the country’s conservative political climate, their hopes and efforts generated few concrete results.

In 1968 Nascimento focused on a second major cultural endeavor in his attempt to end racial inequality in Brazil. In an open letter published in Présence Africaine, he expressed dissatisfaction with the way the Brazilian Ministry of Culture had excluded Afro-Brazilians from participating in various preparatory aspects for the first World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture held in Dakar in 1966, including the production of materials and the selection of national representatives.² This festival was, after all, an unprecedented opportunity for Afro-Brazilians to highlight both their African heritage and their place within artistic and cultural production in the Diaspora to the international community.

In an effort to counter marginalization on the part of the Brazilian establishment, since the 1950s Nascimento had been working on creating a Museu de Arte Negra (MAN), or Museum of Black Art, that would give Afro-Brazilians an active role in educating the Brazilian public about art from Africa and the African Diaspora.³ Unlike the National Fine Arts Museum in Rio de Janeiro, with its Yoruba-heavy collection of art from West Africa, Nascimento’s museum would include artwork produced by Brazilian artists of African descent. Numerous public figures recognized the possible benefits that could result from such an institution and supported the plans for MAN despite Nascimento’s somewhat controversial reputation and prior run-ins with the government. Various intellectuals, diplomats, and even some political officials publicly endorsed the idea for the museum, which, as scholar Eduardo Portela asserted, would “help promote understanding of African participation in the formation of Brazilian society” and “increase cultural relations with African countries.”⁴ In 1968 Nascimento managed to organize in Rio de Janeiro an exhibition of the pieces he had gathered for the collection thus far, although he was never able to fully realize his museum.

The political and social situation in Brazil deteriorated in the 1960s, causing many Brazilians to seek refuge abroad. In 1964 General Humberto Castelo Branco became president following a military coup and instituted a racist and tyrannical dictatorship. When Nascimento received an invitation from the Fairfield Foundation (New York) to visit several black theatrical groups in the United States, he therefore eagerly accepted. In 1968 he joined numerous intellectuals, artists, and other individuals who left Brazil due to the repressive social conditions. Nascimento’s initial plans for a temporary stay outside Brazil eventually developed into an extended period of self-imposed exile. He spent most of the period 1968–1981 in the United States, where he exhibited his artwork and lectured at institutions of higher education.

Painting Afro-Brazilian Religion in the United States

Although Nascimento had begun to paint just months before going into exile, reputable American museums and galleries demonstrated interest in his work soon after he came to the United States. In 1969 the Harlem Art Gallery, Yale University’s Malcolm X House, and Columbia University’s Crypt Gallery held exhibitions of his work. By the mid-1970s some of the museums and institutions with the strongest focus on black art in the country—including the Museum of the National Center for Afro-American Artists (1971), the Studio Museum of Harlem (1973), and Howard University (1975)—organized exhibitions of his paintings. By his own account, at the time he left Brazil in late 1968 he was fifty-four years old and had been marginalized his entire life.⁵ However, in the United States he was met with respect and admiration for his artistic work and perspective.

From 1968 to 1981 Nascimento divided his time between painting and scholarly activities. He taught at the Yale School of Dramatic Arts in 1969 and participated in Wesleyan University’s Seminar on Humanity in Revolt the following year. From 1971 to 1981 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In his first year there he founded the chair of African Culture in the New World at the school’s Puerto Rican Studies and Research Center. While on leave in 1976–1977, he taught in the University of Ife’s Department of African Languages and Literatures in Nigeria.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s Nascimento based the majority of his paintings on themes taken from the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé, which draws its primary influence from the sacred beliefs and practices of the Yoruba people of West Africa.⁶ Candomblé forms a deep spiritual and cultural bond between followers of Yoruba religion on both sides of the Atlantic, and is evidence of how enslaved Yoruba maintained their religious beliefs after arriving in Brazil. For Nascimento, this religion’s various orixás (deities) provided a wealth of subject matter with their corresponding symbols, colors, and characteristics. He had explained already in 1969 why he chose to focus on religious themes in his paintings:

I am not solely preoccupied with aesthetic forms, but of primary importance to me are the spiritual events of the Afro-Brazilian. The myths, the religious history, the fables...