Lusotropicalism, ‘girl-butterflies’ and ‘the fact of blackness’: A neo-Fanonian reading of Esmeralda Ribeiro’s ‘À Procura de uma borboleta preta’

Abstract

Abstract Within the last decade Caribbean theorists have come to acknowledge Brazil as part of what Immanuel Wallerstein refers to as the ‘extended Caribbean’. In placing Brazil in comparative relation to other areas of the Caribbean, such theorists have noted similar patterns of slave economies and convergences of race and class. Yet, not as much attention has been paid to the issue of gender, which plays a crucial role in the Lusotropicalist myth of a Brazilian racial democracy. Engaging Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical interpretations of black women and what he terms ‘the fact of blackness’ in relation to the search for recognition from the nation, I analyse Esmeralda Ribeiro’s ‘A Procura de uma borboleta preta’ while considering the following questions about the status of black women in contemporary Brazil: How do black women manoeuver the Lusotropicalist space of Brazil? What are the stakes for them? How do they confirm, oppose and complicate Fanon’s rendering of black women in relation to white men and the larger nation? What psychopathologies become evident in Afro-Brazilian women when the ideals of a racial democracy fail to align themselves with ‘the fact of blackness’? By examining these questions, I seek to enlarge the scope of present approaches to the extended Caribbean, specifically, and to the Americas more broadly.