The Afro-Pampas: Black consciousness, cultural activism and queer subjectivity at Brazil's southern frontier

Since the nineteenth century, the greater Pampas of South America, spanning Porto Alegre, Brazil to Buenos Aires, Argentina, have received more European immigrants than any other territory in Latin America. Deliberate investments in the racial imaginary of the region through literature and iconography have transposed a constructed narrative of whiteness and racial exceptionalism upon it. In “The Afro-Pampas: Black Consciousness, Cultural Activism and Queer Subjectivity at Brazil’s Southern Frontier,” I use Critical Race Theory, Border and Frontier Studies and Black Feminist and Queer to situate Blackness as central to and transformative of the construction of the real and imagined Pampas. While cultural hegemony in this transnational region predicates itself upon spatial and temporal displacement of its Black population, my racial-spatial analysis probes and contests this historical assertion precisely by locating Blackness in the region, in a real and imagined space that I call the “Afro-Pampas.” Through literary, iconographic and ethnographic studies, I make two major claims. First, Black subjects and communities foster a historic and fundamental kinship with the geopolitical and epistemological borders of the Pampas, in their fugitive relationship to the nation-states of the region. These racialized bodies frame the “character” of the territory as scripted by hegemonic discourses of whiteness and racial exceptionalism, while these subjects destabilize and transform these same constructed consensuses. Second, Blackness and queerness work in tandem to subvert the racialized hypermasculinity of the transnational Pampean frontiers specifically, and the borderlands of the Americas more broadly.

Author dc:creator

• Morrison, Ryan B.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Leu, Lorraine
• Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor
• Roncador, Sônia
• Arroyo-Martínez, Jossianna

• Aldo Locatelli
• Wolfgang Hoffmann Harnisch
• Vasco Prado
• Djalma do Alegrete
• Oliveira Silveira
• Black frontiers
• Sopapo Poético
• Washington Cucurto
• Black consciousness
• Masculinity studies
• Black Queer studies
• Rio Grande do Sul
• Frontier studies
• Afro-Pampas
• Black Argentina

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/52569

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:tdl-ir.tdl.org:2152/126024