ABSTRACT
Rewriting Brazilian history with an emphasis on resistance became central to the articulation of a black Brazilian subject. While many critiques of essentialism and authenticity have rendered Africanity a less appealing signifier of black desire, displacement remains a central trope in the attempt to describe the trajectory of the black subject. Black Brazilian emancipatory narratives of the 1980s reject black subaltern positioning while highlighting the importance of blacks in Brazilian history. In a critique of some anthropological and sociological accounts of black urban culture, Robin Kelley argues that they deploy a monolithic, essentialist view of black culture by selecting just a few aspects of cultural production with which to associate cultural norms, values and behaviours. The black Brazilian emancipatory narratives of the 1980s are textually and historically particular articulations of race as a political category. In this sense, these emancipatory texts are radically distinct from those which have become the model for black consciousness: the articulations of African-American desire.
