“Redesigning the Past”: Interview with Marcelo D’Salete

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this interview, Miguel Valerio (a scholar of Afrodiasporic culture in colonial Latin America and early modern Iberia) engages in a conversation with Marcelo D’Salete, a well-known graphic novelist whose works center on the experiences of Black people in Brazil. The range of topics they discuss include Palmares, the seventeenth-century maroon community that is at the center of D’Salete’s Angola Janga (2017); the history, future, and present of Black struggles in Brazil; the ability of comics and other art forms to re-desenhar (meaning both “redraw” and “redesign”) the past; Afro-pessimism and the central role of slavery in the formation of modernity; and the importance of Black joy.