Black Ghosts in the Afro-Pampas: Haunting and Folklorisation in Aldo Locatelli’s “Negrinho do Pastoreio” Paintings

Abstract

In this article, I investigate how Blackness as spectre – a deathly presence – underlies contemporary life in the Pampas through artistic representations of the “Negrinho do Pastoreio” folktale in the work of Italian-Brazilian painter Aldo Locatelli (Bergamo, 1915 – Porto Alegre, 1962). These pieces folklorise Blackness and fix Black haunting in the Pampas through visual motifs of placelessness, timelessness, suffering, “martyrdom”, flight, and resurrection. The tropes and folklorisation itself confine and consign the Black population to the region’s distant past, denying contemporary existence, subjectivity, and agency in the present. This study forms part of a larger project engaging literature, iconography, and oral testimony in a racialised re-reading of the Platine Region. This racial-spatial project investigates the place of Blackness in the real and imagined transnational Pampas. While cultural hegemony in the Region predicates itself upon spatial and temporal displacement of its Black population, my work probes and contests this historical assertion precisely by locating Blackness in the region, in what I envision as a real and imagined space: what I call the “Afro-Pampas”.