Translation, Race, and Ideology in Oriki Orixá

Abstract

In the midst of an influential career writing on Brazilian cultural production, the sociologist-turned-political marketer Antonio Risério publishes Oriki Orixá, a book of Portuguese re-translations of Yoruba oriki poetry (1996, reprinted 2013). Understanding translation as a partial and ideologically-motivated act of representation, the current article situates Oriki Orixá within an ideology of race in Brazil. I take into account textual and paratextual materials including the book’s introduction by Augusto de Campos; the editorial promotion of the work; its circulation within a literary network; and the highly mediated histories of the source poems. Oriki Orixá simultaneously promises a universal poetic “invention” and an ethnographic “recuperation” of a foreign text. Ultimately, the white author frames his translation as an affective encounter with an African literary tradition. This encounter participates in—and reinforces—a discourse of racial exceptionalism in which an abstract celebration of African-European contact occludes continuing histories of domination and inequality.