Representation Of Black People Research Articles

O Folhetim e a Canção: A Representação do Negro e das Identidades Periféricas na Televisão Brasileira

Este artigo se propõe a oferecer uma discussão acerca da forma pela qual as trilhas musicais das novelas expressam, nem sempre em absoluta consonância com as narrativas a que estão vinculadas, a questão da representação do negro na televisão brasileira. Com esse objetivo, buscamos realizar uma análise da relação entre as telenovelas produzidas pela Rede Globo de Televisão a partir década de 1960 com as trilhas musicais que as acompanharam, formadas inicialmente por canções compostas especialmente para essa finalidade e, posteriormente, por coletâneas musicais. Por essa via, esse texto se propõe a analisar a produção televisiva nos termos de suas transformações e de sua função identitária, apoiando-se nos estudos culturais e nas teorias do discurso, além dos campos do audiovisual em suas formas verbais, visuais e sonoras.

O imaginário da branquitude à luz da trajetória de Grande Otelo: raça, persona e estereótipo em sua perfomance artística

Este artigo pretende esboçar a trajetória de mais de 70 anos de Sebastião Bernardes de Souza Prata, Grande Otelo, em diálogo com os diferentes períodos do cinema brasileiro e com os debates raciais no Brasil. Se no campo cinematográfico ele conseguiu, ainda que em meio a tensões, variar seus papéis conforme as novas tendências do debate racial, entre as décadas de 1940 e 1980 houve sempre um hiato entre suas opiniões e as reivindicações da militância negra. A partir de Grande Otelo, seus personagens e suas posições políticas, busca-se por um lado discutir os conceitos de estereótipo e persona em intersecção com raça, corpo e gênero para analisar os dilemas que distintas convenções do cinema brasileiro impõem à representação do negro; por outro, examinar certos debates raciais pelo contraste com as percepções de Grande Otelo.

O negro como personagem na literatura infantil, na obra de Maria Rita Py

Procurou-se ao analisar nas obras da Coleção História da Vó Preta, da autora santa-mariense Maria Rita Py, a representação do negro, demonstrando como as questões que o envolvem na sociedade, seus anseios, mágoas, vividas desde o século passado, estão presentes na literatura infantil contemporânea. A literatura tem evidenciado uma preocupação cada vez maior em apresentar uma identidade cultural que expresse as relações de inclusão social. A realidade brasileira mostra que o negro, após a libertação dos escravos, e mais recentemente com o crescimento do movimento negro assumiu uma nova visão, criando um novo discurso nessa literatura, quando passa a ser personagem da transformação da consciência negra. Neste contexto que se insere a literatura negra de Maria Rita, dedicadas ao público infantil, destaca-se a preocupação em buscar soluções para resolver os problemas dos seus personagens tais como: frustração, rejeição, desejo de ser branco, dúvidas e os anseios de crianças negras na sociedade, mas que afetam a auto-estima e a sua identidade.

The impact of ‘racism’ on the dissociative experiences scale

Despite the difficulty differentiating between the symptomology of dissociative disorders and schizophrenia, Black people of African and Caribbean descent in the UK continue to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and over-represented within the mental health care system. The reasons why remain illusive; however, some researchers have begun asking whether racism plays an integral part. Given that Black people often given racism as a contributing factor to their mental state, and the difficulty differentiating between the symptomology of dissociative disorders and schizophrenia, this study examined the relation between mental representations that might be indicative of the subjective experience of racism and dissociative experiences as evidence of a trauma-related response. A web-based questionnaire was responded to by 255 self-defined Black subscribers to an Ethnic Minority Research Panel. Results showed that youth, low academic achievement, mental representations of self in relation to people who made derogatory race-related comments about others and low self-esteem contributed significantly to the variation in reported dissociative experiences, overall. Therefore, processing of race-related information impacted on the Dissociative Experiences Scale and, therefore, might also explain the over representation of Black people within the mental health system in the UK.

BOOK REVIEW:Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800-1900, edited by Jan Marsh

Reviewed by: Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 Meaghan Clarke (bio) Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900, edited by Jan Marsh; pp. x + 208. Aldershot and Burlington: Lund Humphries in Association with Manchester Art Gallery and Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, 2005, £35.00, $70.00. The exhibition Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 opened in the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2005 and then traveled to its only other venue, the Birmingham Museum and Gallery. The innovative nature of the show is highlighted in the catalog's forward by David Dabydeen, who sees the exhibition as part of a long overdue acknowledgment of images of blacks in art history. This exhibition follows on some recent efforts to highlight these issues in UK museums, for example the Victoria and Albert Museum's Victorian Vision (2001) and more recent Black British Style, which toured to Manchester, Leicester, and Bradford in 2005. Although perhaps not immediately evident from the title, Black Victorians focuses on representations of black people—what the show is missing is representations by black artists. The black/Native sculptor Edmonia Lewis, for example, was not included in the show; unfortunately, the parameters of the grouping were works that were seen in Britain during the Victorian period, and although Lewis traveled to Italy, her work was not exhibited in Britain. A luxuriously produced hardbound catalog was published by Lund Humphries to accompany the exhibition. Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900 includes color illustrations of a remarkable range of objects, from photography and print, to watercolors, to oils and bronze sculpture, demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of images of black people produced across the century. The exhibition and catalog force the viewer to revisit and re-examine already canonical paintings such as The Beloved (1865–66), Dante Gabriel Rossetti's jewel-like portrayal of a bride surrounded by four attendants of differing ethnic types and an African child. The exhibit highlights recurring tropes such [End Page 137] as slave market scenes—in this case by William Müller, Eyre Crowe, and Frank Brangwyn—merging political outrage and voyeurism, as well as lesser-known artists and images. Some of the latter have entered art historical discourse quite recently, such as Thomas Baines's portrait of Shibante, a Native of Mazaro, Boatman and Pilot (1859) and Joanna Boyce Wells's Head of Mrs. Eaton (1861). Photograph portraits similarly range across class and profession—as well as degree of familiarity—from Sarah Forbes Bonetta (Queen Victoria's god-daughter) and the acrobat Mademoiselle LaLa, also depicted by Edgar Degas, to an early group portrait of Greenwich pensioners. The catalog also features the portrait of the black nurse Mary Seacole, famous for her work in Crimea, recently rediscovered and loaned to the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibit juxtaposes pieces of "fine art" with works associated with more popular forms of print, such as George Cruickshank's The New Union Club (1819) and an advertisement for Sunlight soap, the racial undertones of which been interrogated in recent scholarship. Such images offer a more representative, albeit disturbing, vision of the range of depictions of black people evident in nineteenth-century culture. In addition to an introduction and essay by curator Jan Marsh, the volume contains impressive essays by academics and curators who pursue themes arising from the selection of works encompassed by the exhibition. Radiclani Clytus examines lithographic prints produced in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, arguing that American attitudes towards black subjectivity were not dissimilar to British discursive and visual representations. As a result of archaeological discoveries, Victorian sculpture was divided into two opposing aesthetics, those espousing neo-classical white marble versus those experimenting with the more historically authentic color, as exemplified by John Gibson's Tinted Venus (1851–56). Charmaine Nelson considers the use of polychromy to denote race in sculpture, positioning Charles Cordier's dignified Vénus Africaine (1852) in the context of this debate and colonial discourses. Cordier traveled to Algeria and expressed contemporary concerns about miscegenation, but he also articulated a universal ideal of beauty. Briony Llewellyn considers artists who traveled in Egypt, specifically David Roberts and J. F...

Writing black back: an overview of black theatre and performance in Britain

Black people have lived in Britain longer than they have in the United States and yet, until the closing decade of the twentieth century, their contribution to British theatre has received limited and short-lived attention. In this essay I trace a trajectory of representation of black people in theatre from the early modern through to the pre-Windrush period to recognize that which has paved the way to the increasing visibility of contemporary black British playwrights of African descent in theatre of the new millennium.

Calixthe Beyala: Black face(s) on French TV

As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif ÉgalitÉ, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala herself who has become something of a minor TV celebrity in her own right. What emerges as an apparent contradiction between Beyala's own media representation and the Collectif's campaign will serve to illustrate the ambivalent positioning of black citizens in contemporary France.

Reading the Painterly Text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage"

Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to compelling identification of the as the originary moment of the black diasporic migration. In his well-known modernist poem Middle Passage (1945), Robert Hayden presents redemptive critique of the past through melange of imagined voices that ultimately articulates passage through suffering to affirmation. More recently, in her widely acclaimed novel Beloved (1987), Toni Morrison turns to the to chart the possibilities for individual and communal agency in the face of radical dislocation and systematic terror. Charles Johnson's controversial postmodern allegory of African American history, (1990), places its protagonist on mid-Atlantic voyage that radically alters his conception of personal identity, leading him to understand the self as fluid rather than fixed, formed by each person's confrontation with an Other. Finally, in an important recent critical work, Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy attempts to rethink modernity through the history of the black Atlantic, seeing in its process of cultural mutation and restless (dis)continuity challenge to established categorizations of history and nationalist definitions of culture (2). Contrasting with traditional narratives of the search for origins in some utopian or prelapsarian past, these figurative returns to the troubled history of the are suggestive of black writers' continuing struggle with issues of identity and representation in their art. In Slave Trade: View from the Passage (1994), Clarence Major makes his own distinctive voyage across the Atlantic in poem that is devastating in its attack on the discourse of empire and subtle in its analysis of the difficulties inherent in the project of fashioning an identity through art. In contrast to the speakerly text Henry Louis Gates describes as characteristic of fiction growing out of the African American folk idiom, Major's poetry typically offers instead what might be called painterly text - one that presents readers with complex collage of historical, literary, and philosophical allusions, street talk, cartoons, puns, folk tales, children's songs, advertising slogans, and references to international locales. A talented painter as well as writer, Major has recently described himself as a visual thinker, one who tends to make connections between things more on the basis of visual associations than verbal or logical ones (McCaffery and Kutnik 132). Building its critique through images drawn from specific art works and from repeated themes in Western iconography, Slave Trade draws heavily on Major's technique of associative collage to document European culture's normalization of its own history of conquest through the representation of black people in hierarchical history of progress. By drawing upon actual works of art to illustrate the various ways in which blackness has been framed by the designs of others and by offering its own reconfigurations of specific European landscapes, Major's poem ultimately raises difficult questions about representation, self-expression, and the emancipatory potential of art, while simultaneously delineating the special province of the painterly text. I. Hope, Fallacious Hope / Where is Your Market, Now? - J. M. W. Turner, from poem displayed with his painting The Slave Ship (1840)(1) Charting dizzying route over three continents and several time periods, Slave Trade is composed of four major sections that move from the African past, to Europe, to the Americas, and, finally, to the present-day United States. From this comprehensive vantage point the poem attempts to negotiate the crisscrossing conceptual routes of triangular trade whose operating principles are Christianity, commerce, and colonialism. …

Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840-1868

Blackface Nationalism, Cuba 1840–1868 Jill Lane (bio) When the strident blackface comedy of the Bufos Habaneros (Havana Bufos) made its debut in Havana in 1868, it not only inaugurated a theatrical genre—the teatro bufo—which dominated the Cuban stage for decades to come; it crystallized the relation between blackface performance and an emerging Cuban national sentiment which had been eminent for several decades prior. That the teatro bufo made its appearance in the same year as the first war for independence is, I venture, no coincidence. This article will concentrate on two major figures of Cuban blackface performance: the bozal, spectacularly embodied in the character Creto Gangá beginning in the late 1840s; and on the emergence of the figure of the catedrático, which became a signature of the teatro bufo through its inaugural play in 1868, Los negros catedráticos. The bozal and the catedrático mark a range in the representation of black people by and for criollo or Cuban-born whites throughout this period. I will examine how and why the anticolonial Cuban popular stage in the mid-nineteenth century made recourse to “black” stereotypes to imagine the meanings of its own nationalism. The shift in popularity from the bozal to the catedrático in 1868, in turn, marks a critical shift in white criollo uses and abuses of mock-black figures in the popular articulation of their own emerging sense of cubanía or Cubanness; I hope to demonstrate how the catedrático emerged as a significant counterfeit currency whose entertainment “value” helped to forge (in both senses, to make and to fake) an “authentic” Cuban national community during the era of anti-colonial struggle. The bozal and the catedrático were both defined at the intersection of race and language. The term “bozal” referred to an African-born black, usually a slave, who was notably “not acculturated” to life in Cuba, as opposed to a negro criollo, or a Cuban-born black. “Bozal” also referred to that African’s manner of speaking Spanish. Partly due to its dissemination in performances like that of the bozal character “Creto Gangá,” bozal took on the uncomfortable status of an “African” dialect of Spanish, purportedly based on the real speech patterns of African-born slaves, replete with the distortions of Spanish grammar and pronunciation of a non-native speaker. Representations in the popular press and in the theatre, however, invariably figured the bozal as [End Page 21] an inept fool, generating the term’s present connotations. Catedrático similarly referred to both a black persona and a mode of speaking Spanish, but unlike the bozal, the catedrático was strictly an invention of the stage with no “real life” referent. Negro catedrático, which translates as “black professor,” referred to a comic “black” pedant whose vain efforts to feign education and social status produce nothing more than a ludicrous parody of refined speech and aristocratic manners. To this day, catedrático speech refers to nonsensical or pretentious use of intellectual jargon. These seemingly opposite stereotypes—the uneducated African slave versus the overeducated urban black—both make their humor and, I will argue, their different political interventions through the characters’ inability to speak Spanish “properly.” The crucial difference between the two figures is that the creators, audiences, and press reviewers of the 1868 catedrático fervently imagined this figure as specially “Cuban,” 1 finding in this character a means through which to invoke a palpable—and, in 1868, dangerous—sense of cubanía. Regularly promoting their entertainments as “Comedies of Cuban customs,” “Portraits of Cuban types,” or “Sketches of contemporary life,” the Bufos Habaneros and their many imitators made an explicit appeal to allegedly “Cuban” forms and images at a time when the status of “Cuba” as a viable national or cultural entity was the source of acute civil tension and would, by the end of their first theatre season, become the grounds for war. Indeed, what came to be known as the Ten Year’s War—Cuba’s first and unsuccessful bid for independence from Spanish colonial rule—brought this first bufo season to a premature close in late January of 1869, because Spanish authorities had identified...

THE PROSECUTION AND DEFENCE OF BLACK DEFENDANTS IN DRUG TRIALS: Evidence of Claims-Making

Prosecuting and defence barristers' participation in trial is of principal significance in determining a case outcome. It is the intention of this article to examine the role that barristers play in shaping the representation of black people in the criminal statistics. Detailed observations of drug offence trails concerning black defendants demonstrate this role in the way barristers socially construct drug cases through the process of claims-making-an activity that entails an impressive utilization of language to persuade. The study describes how, within this claims-making process, racially imbued knowledge seemed to inform barristers' presentation of the defendants' cases before the jury. In conclusion, the findings question the authenticity of criminal statistics as an indication of guilt.

Ele Semog

Éle Semog Éle Semog (bio) CHARLES H. ROWELL: Have Afro-Brazilian writers, past or present, had any influence on your writing? ÉLE SEMOG: It is a relationship of identity, because of the historical nature of the relationship. There is a kinship with black writers. Someone I think is fantastic—and with a great ability to address the problems of the people—is Lima Barreto, who made a big splash exactly at the same time that Machado de Assis was ascending as a great luminary of Brazilian literature. And, for a writer, reading Machado de Assis is fundamental; it is a journey, a state of being, an idyllic place within literature. Because it is a competent literature, a profoundly ironic literature, a literature impregnated with racial issues, by means of the irony and subtlety of Machado de Assis. In Lima Barreto we find a more head-on, objective approach, but also a very important ironic content. They are writers who, if they did not influence my way of writing, at the very least are quite significant references, just like Cruz e Souza, Luís Gama and, more recently, Solano Trinidade, and the one-and-only Abdias do Nascimento are black authors that, in one way or another—and with the capacity that we have to reinterpret certain historical circumstances—have much to do with literature. I searched in the works of my contemporary authors in order to create our language, because what was assigned to this generation, the first generation of black writers—of which I am a part—was to establish a common language that derived from the issues or problems the black community faced at the time. We had to inaugurate a new way of speaking, we had to break away from a discourse, we had to break away from the educated norm, we had to create an ontological other within literature. It was as if we had to recodify all Brazilian letters. And it was the role of that generation. We began to articulate ourselves. It wasn’t just one writer writing alone and being celebrated, but rather we all were committed to creating a black literature that opposed the educated norm, that opposed white Brazilians’ representations of black people in literature, that opposed, fundamentally, the capacity to institute an outside literature among our people. Although we have illiteracy problems, although the habit of reading, and access to reading material, are problems in black communities, we promoted books and held readings at public schools, in slum areas, at clubs, at Carnaval groups, at associations, at confederations. In fact, poetry went wherever the black community went during the 1980s. There was a commitment of militancy. It was not a Black Movement; it was the writers of the Black Movement going to the community, just like the Black Movement itself would go to the community. But we had serious problems. It was a movement that had, on the one hand, a source of liberation in Africa and, on the other hand, a source of ascension in African Americans in the United States. The Black Movement in Brazil rebuilt itself during the dictatorship because it was excluded by class oriented white thought which said that there is [End Page 756] a racial democracy in Brazil. That liberal white thinking still says today that the resolution of class differences will resolve the racial issue. The Black Movement had one more annoying problem: it searched classic European literature for the issue of its political thought. It’s a contradiction for you to construct a discourse of liberation based on the discourse of the actual oppressor. And we, the black writers, began to perceive that there exists no social movement without literary expression, and there was no room for the political discussion of the issue of black literature within the Black Movement. So we started the black writers movement, which surges from the Black Movement as a whole. Our aim was to address specifically the issue of black literature, but we also wanted to fight alongside the community, upholding its poetry, its stories, its theatrical works. ROWELL: How does your work address the issues of race and class in Brazilian society? How do other...