The Afro-Americas WG: A Field of Study Under Construction

ABSTRACT

This article stems from the debates held during the roundtable “The Afro-Americas Working Group (GT Afro-Américas)”, at the III Continental Meeting of Afro-Latin American Studies, which took place in July 2024, at the Law School of the University of São Paulo, organized in partnership with the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI - Harvard University). The roundtable aimed to introduce the GT Afro-Américas through the diverse academic trajectories of its members, who contributed to its creation and consolidation. The reflexions gathered in this article are based on the presentations given during the roundtable and address, from different perspectives, the relevance of the GT Afro-Américas and its potential to articulate and expand research on the subject in Brazil. Developed collectively, the text compiles the contributions of the researchers and seeks to introduces the GT, founded at ANPUH-Maranhão in 2023, to the academic community.

Keywords:
Afro-Americas; ANPUH; Work Group

RESUMO

Este artigo resulta dos debates promovidos na mesa-redonda “O GT Afro-Américas”, durante o III Encontro Continental de Estudos Afro-­Latino-Americanos, realizado em julho de 2024, na Faculdade de Direito da Universidade de São Paulo, organizado em parceria com o Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI - Universidade de Harvard). A mesa teve como objetivo apresentar o GT Afro-Américas a partir das diversas trajetórias acadêmicas de seus membros, que contribuíram para sua criação e consolidação. As reflexões reunidas neste artigo se baseiam nas apresentações realizadas durante a mesa e exploram, sob diferentes perspectivas, a relevância do GT Afro-Américas, bem como as possibilidades que oferece para articular e ampliar as pesquisas sobre a temática no Brasil. O texto, construído coletivamente, compila as falas dos pesquisadores e busca apresentar o GT, fundado na ANPUH-Maranhão, em 2023, à comunidade acadêmica.

Palavras-chave:
Afro-Américas; ANPUH; Grupo de Trabalho

INTRODUCTION

In July 2024, hundreds of researchers gathered at the University of São Paulo Law School for the Third Continental Meeting of Afro-Latin American Studies, organized jointly by the host institution and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute (ALARI) at Harvard University. The panels addressed a variety of topics related to the experiences of the African diaspora in Latin America, and one of the roundtables served to present the Afro-Americas Working Group (GT - ANPUH), organized by Brazilian researchers from universities located in different states of the federation. Despite the affinity between the research conducted by WG members and Afro-Latin American studies, the meeting provided an opportunity to reflect on the contributions of research produced in Brazilian institutions and the specificity of their perspective on the Afro-Americas.

Afro-Latin American studies have established themselves in contrast to “Afro-American” (or African American) studies in North American universities, creating two complementary but not always dialogical fields focused on the experiences of Africans and their descendants across the continent. On the other hand, Latin American and Caribbean intellectual traditions have historically been based on transnational perspectives that included North America within their analytical horizons. In this sense, the Afro-Americas WG harks back to this tradition and proposes an integrative agenda that dialogues with and contributes to Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-American studies. At the same time, the WG asserts the importance and originality of research conducted in Brazil and seeks to overcome the tendency toward the overrepresentation of the Southeast and Southeast-based studies by promoting dialogue among researchers from universities across the country. In short, the WG brings together researchers, each with their own perspectives and themes, but who aim for a diverse and integrative perspective of the Afro-Americas, without abandoning their Brazilian and Latin American cultural, intellectual, and institutional roots.

This article is the result of a joint effort by members of the Afro-Americas WG, written by ten authors and inspired by the presentations and debates held in July 2024. In the first section of the article, “Afro-Americas Working Group: Historicizing the Trajectory”, Kátia Cilene do Couto, the representative from Amazonas, presents an overview of the creation of the Afro-Americas Working Group, highlighting its importance for Afro-diasporic and Caribbean studies in Brazil. She contextualizes its formation based on previous academic initiatives and scientific events that strengthened collaboration among researchers. Next, in “The Black North and the Afro-Americas WG”, the representative from Rondônia, Santiago Andrade, proposes a historiographical renewal, connecting the Black North of the Amazon to the Atlantic and to the capitalist world system. He questions founding narratives of the 20th century, highlights ethnic diversity, and emphasizes the need for new theoretical and documentary approaches, stressing that dialogue in the WG and the maintenance of this network are essential to broaden the horizons of Amazonian historiography. In the session “The African Diaspora in the Arts”, the representative from Bahia Kléber Amâncio revisits the history of Brazilian art from a critical African-American perspective. His approach highlights the marginalization of black artistic productions and proposes a new historiography that recognizes the complexity of Afro-Brazilian art, connecting it to debates on the African diaspora and the Afro-Latin American experience. In the final session, “Afro-Americas: development and perspectives of a field of study”, the representative from São Paulo Letícia Canelas contributes with a theoretical reflection on the constitution of “Afro-Americas” as a field of study, addressing its academic and political roots and seeking to integrate historical processes, social struggles, and cultural identities, with an emphasis on intersectionality. The representative from Rio de Janeiro, Marcelo Ferraro, contributed by intertwining the reflections presented at the roundtable, as well as offering conclusions on the perspectives for the Afro-Americas WG field of study. Together, these reflections do not exhaust the group’s production or establish a unified theoretical program, but rather reveal the richness and diversity of a field under construction.

AFRO-AMERICAS WG: HISTORICIZING THE TRAJECTORY

The creation of a Working Group (WG) goes through a gestation process supported by previous work that is built on various trajectories; here, we will outline the one we have experienced over the past 26 years. Studies on the Afro-Americas within the History program at the Federal University of Goiás began with the creation of the Center for Caribbean Studies in Brazil (CECAB) in 1999, an initiative by Dr. Olga Cabrera, a Cuban-born professor in the university’s History program, who promoted and encouraged various research projects related to the Caribbean that continued throughout the 2000s within the PPGH/UFG and PPGH/UnB.

Several works resulting from research on Afro-Caribbean studies were carried out when the Caribbean - at least within the field of history at UFG - was not, in Brazil, the subject of extensive research as it is today. Theses such as Rastafari: Identity and Cultural Hybridity in Jamaica (1930-1981) by Danilo Rabelo (2006); Narrative and Geography in the Colombian Caribbean (1962-1984) by Dernival Venâncio Ramos Júnior (2009); Between Journeys: Coolies and Blacks on the Plantations in Trinidad, 1845-1890 by Alexandre Martins de Araújo (2007); and The Challenges of Cuban Society in the Face of Antillean Immigration (1902-1933) by Kátia Cilene do Couto (2006) were some of the works that analyzed Afro-Caribbean issues within a historiographical framework that enabled reflections on identities, race, migrations, and Afro-diasporic cultures.

Dialogue with foreign researchers from the Caribbean and Africa took place through symposiums organized by CECAB in 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2008 in cities such as Goiânia, Cidade de Goiás, and Caldas Novas (Goiás). The fifth symposium was held in Salvador from September 30 to October 3, 2008, with the support of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), under the theme Fronteras y culturas en movimiento: África, Brasil, Caribe (Borders and Cultures in Motion: Africa, Brazil, Caribbean). It was held simultaneously with the 32nd Congress of the Caribbean Studies Association. The following working groups were held during the event in Salvador: Comparative Analyses, Visual Arts, Literature and Music; Gender, Sexuality, and Generation; Heritage and Representation; Politics and National Identities; and Religion and Religiosity. The local committee at UFBA was composed ofthe following members: Antonio Luigi Negro, Cássia Maria Muniz Carletto, Florentina da Silva Souza, George Evergton, Joseania Miranda Freitas, Lina Maria Brandão de Aras, Marcelo Nascimento Bernardo da Cunha, Maria das Graças de Souza Teixeira, and Muniz Gonçalves Ferreira. The national committee was coordinated by Prof. Olga Cabrera and other members from various universities affiliated with CECAB.

Meanwhile, it is also worth noting the creation of the Revista Brasileira do Caribe¹ (Brazilian Caribbean Journal) in 2001, resulting from CECAB’s efforts to promote a historiography encompassing the Caribbean and its cultural boundaries. The journal has published various articles on Afro-American themes. Here, we highlight some of the most recently published dossiers: “Slavery, Freedom, and Processes of Racialization” (2023), organized by Iacy Maria Mata; “Ideas of Freedom” (2020), organized by Elaine Pereira Rocha and Kátia Couto; “Afro-Atlantic Borders, Movements, and Connections” (2019), organized by Jorge Chinea and Isabel Ibarra; and “Colonial Formation and Decolonialism: Polyphony of Voices in the Caribbean” (2018), organized by Isabel Ibarra.

The journal has been an important tool for disseminating knowledge about the Caribbean and Afro-diasporic themes. Today, it is coordinated by Soraia Sales Dornelles and Josenildo de Jesus Pereira, within the scope of the Graduate Program in History at UFMA. In addition, it has enabled frequent dialogue with researchers from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Currently, the journal has expanded its scope, focusing more on research dedicated to Latin America, while continuing to publish works focused on Caribbean and Afro-diasporic studies.

The creation of the Afro-Americas Working Group is of fundamental importance, as it enables researchers involved in the theme to promote constant dialogue through their investigations across various regions of Brazil, as well as with researchers from the Americas who are dedicated to Afro and Afro-diasporic studies. This is because some regions of Brazil lack more in-depth studies on the black presence and its social and cultural dynamics with other groups, as is the case in the northern region of the country. We felt the need to connect with fellow researchers from other regions of Brazil to discuss the creation of a working group focused on Afro-American themes when we began our work at the Federal University of Amazonas.

During the XXIX ANPUH conference in Brasília, held on July 24-28, 2017, we had the opportunity to speak for the first time with Dr. Eric Brasil, a professor at UFBA, about the need to create a WG on Afro-Americans. Prof. Eric provided the contact details of some researchers who are dedicated to studying Black populations in the Caribbean, such as Iacy Maia Mata (UFBA) and Letícia Gregorio Canelas (USP), and we took the initiative to invite Prof. Elaine Rocha, from the University of the West Indies-Barbados campus, with whom we had previously been in contact, so we could begin our dialogue through an email group.

Based on this dialogue, we proposed two panels that were held during the XIII Anphlac event in the city of Mariana, between July 24 and 27, 2018. The following panels were proposed: “Black Experiences in the Americas: Performances and Political Actions in the Diaspora”, with members Kátia Couto (UFAM), Alexsandro de Sousa e Silva (USP), Eric Brasil (UNILAB), and Elaine Rocha (UWI); and “African Americans: Abolitionist Struggle, Racial Identity, and Transnational Connections in the 19th and 20th Centuries”, composed of Letícia Canelas (USP), Luana Santos (UFF), and Iacy Maia Mata (UFBA). As a result of this initiative, and as we directed the Anphlac Electronic Journal at the time, we invited our colleagues from the group to publish a dossier on Afro-Americans. The dossier was organized by Eric Brasil and Letícia Canelas, and was published in 2019, in issue 27². Other activities continued to strengthen efforts to bring together researchers from Afro-America, since, in 2018, at the XIV Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association/BRASA, held at PUC Rio de Janeiro, the following panels were organized: “Race, Freedom, and Autonomy: Abolitionism and Transnational Black Experiences in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States”, whose participants were Iacy Mata, Luciana Brito, and Wlamyra Albuquerque; and “Reflections on Afro-Americans: History of the African Diaspora as Transnational History”, with participants Eric Brasil, Elayne Rocha, and Iacy Maia Mata.

In the northern region, especially in Amazonas, there is a Black presence that recent historiography has sought to analyze. Since the period of slavery, Amazonas, although not a region with a massive presence of enslaved population, has proven to be an important escape route for this group. Moreover, the presence of Caribbean immigrants can be observed, alongside transcultural relations, such as Afro-indigenous interactions, in addition to border studies, including research defining a Caribbean Amazon (Oliveira, 2020).

The works cited below are recent productions from the Graduate Program in History at UFAM, the university we have been affiliated with since our arrival in the state of Amazonas in 2009, and where we were able to closely observe the arrival of Haitian immigrants from 2010 onwards, a group that became the subject of our studies in the region, connecting with our previous research, when we investigated the presence of Haitian immigrants in Cuba during the First Republic for our master’s and doctoral degrees. Local historiography has explored regional archives and fostered new research possibilities, revealing a promising field in Afro studies - not only in Amazonas but throughout the northern region - highlighting international migration processes, including those from the Caribbean, to the Amazon region since the early 20th century, with the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railway.

We would also like to highlight other research produced in the context of graduate studies that refer to the Afro-related themes, such as Provino Pozza Neto’s master’s thesis Ave Libertas: Emancipationist Actions in Imperial Amazonas (2011); the work of Jéssyka Samya Ladislau Pereira, Por todos os cantos da cidade: escravos negros no mundo do trabalho na Manaus oitocentista (1850-1884) (2016); and Ygor Olinto Rocha Cavalcante’s A Living and Permanent Threat: Resistance, Rebellion, and Slave Escapes in Provincial Amazonas, published in 2015 as the result of his dissertation. Other important contributions to regional historiography include Tenner Inauhiny de Abreu’s Born into Society: Racialization and Miscegenation among Workers in the Province of Amazonas (1850-1889) (2012) and Sandro Amorim Carvalho’s work, which covers the presence of immigrants of Caribbean origin in Amazonas, entitled My Mother Was Black, My Father White, We Were Brown: Biographical Accounts of Barbadian Descendants in Amazonas (2023). Both works are representative of studies focused on Black issues in Amazonas and demonstrate historiographical innovation in the field.

In 2010, when we moved to Manaus to work at the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM), our interests turned to Brazil-Caribbean relations, Caribbean migration to Brazil, and Brazil-Caribbean border dynamics - topics that had been little explored in Amazonian historiography within the field of history. This also coincided with the arrival of Haitian immigrants to Brazil’s northern region (Acre, Rondônia, and Amazonas), as mentioned above, which generated several studies on the subject.

At the Graduate Program in History at UFAM, we had the opportunity to supervise theses that addressed the Black presence in the state and/or participate in committees that dealt with these topics. However, regional historiography still needs to focus on this migrant, cross-border, and cross-cultural Black presence. Today, Manaus hosts a Haitian community, in addition to receiving immigrants from other neighboring countries.

It was during the Anpuh conference in São Luís, from July 11 to 13, 2023, that the Afro-Americas Working Group was approved in Assembly, based on an initiative by researchers present at the event, such as Iacy Mata, who, as mentioned above, supported the idea of creating a WG that would bring together the various Afro-American researchers scattered across Brazil. Here, we have provided the history of its creation and highlighted its importance in expanding dialogue, promoting more research, and consolidating the field of studies related to the theme that encompasses the area, with the certainty that this will be a WG that will enable numerous contributions to the history of the Afro-Americas in the coming years.

As with other working groups at ANPUH, the activities developed by the Afro-Americas Working Group - such as the presentation table that took place during The ALARI 3rd Continental Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies (July 10-12, 2024), held at the University of São Paulo - provided opportunities that were lacking to intensify our projects, teaching and research activities, conferences, and publications that will consolidate a research trajectory that is already underway but scattered. This possibility for dialogue is necessary to respond to a series of regional demands that can only be met through the collaborative networks that we aim to build with this joint work, which has been carried out by the WG since its creation.

THE BLACK NORTH AND THE AFRO-AMERICAS WG

We are convinced that belonging to this group is an important step toward initiating a renewed reflection on the history of a territory that once belonged to Amazonas and Mato Grosso and has, since the mid-20th century, been known as Rondônia, an integral part of the Western Amazon.

However, this conviction is not based on intuition. We believe that this is an important moment - to join and participate in this WG - for three different reasons related to the unique conditions linked to the context and the potential for writing a historiography of Rondônia and that part of the Amazon.

The first of these concerns the specificity of the historical formation - mainly in its territorial, ethnic, and geographical dimensions - of what we have called, for several decades, Rondônia. Generally speaking, the territory that today, since 1943, became the Federal Territory of Guaporé and, since 1956, the Federal Territory of Rondônia, was until the mid-20th century part of the vast Amazonian hinterland. Part of its current territory belonged to the captaincy of Mato Grosso, while another part belonged to what is now the state of Amazonas. What does this mean? Well, it means that the socioeconomic, ethnic, and spatial constitution of what is now the state of Rondônia took place, in large part and over a considerable period, under the logic of colonial dynamics led by the Portuguese Empire. So, when we think of Rondônia - and this is, obviously, the perspective of someone who never gives up on the historical dimension of things - we must place it within a relatively long context, in which countless indigenous ethnic groups, a considerable number of enslaved Africans, as well as Europeans themselves and the non-human world, were inserted into the logic of colonization; that is, into the processes that placed the hinterlands at the center of colonial disputes and projects to control and populate the Amazonian frontier.

We would like to highlight two fundamental aspects here, which have generally been ignored by academic historiography in Rondônia: 1) the history of Rondônia is not the history of its official founding landmarks, which were fabricated in the 20th century; 2) the ethnic composition, the occupation and modification of space and landscape, as well as the circulation of diverse social groups (here referring to indigenous societies and quilombola formations in the Guaporé Valley, migrants from the Northeast, foreign workers, etc.), are elements that were historically constituted long before the official creation of the state of Rondônia, but which play a fundamental role in understanding its current contradictions. It is in this sense that we argue that reflections on the idea of race, the struggle for rights, the dynamics of Black territorialization, processes of racialization, Afro-diasporic connections, and related themes, produced and thought out by the members of this WG, are important for writing an alternative historiography concerning issues related to Rondônia.

The second dimension is a direct consequence of the formation process we described: the documentary dispersion of sources related to the formation of Rondônia’s socio-territorial space. Anyone who wishes to write about any aspect of Rondônia’s history today will have to search through public archives not only in Rondônia, but also in Mato Grosso, Amazonas, and, of course, the National Archives. This dispersion, so to speak, demonstrates not only the complex nature of Rondônia’s historical formation, to which we referred, but also reflects an element that is often ignored or, when noted, described superficially: the fact that the western Amazon, within analytical frameworks that seek to understand the formation of contemporary Brazil, needs to be considered beyond the classifications of “peripheral” or “regional”, and be thought of within a transnational, Atlantic, and capitalist world-system framework, in line with the proposal of this WG.

This dimension, which brought together the Amazon and the Atlantic world in a historical and conceptual framework informed by the transnational circulation of workers, capital, ideas, and goods, is easily illustrated when we refer, for example, to the documentation related to Caribbean workers who arrived in Brazil in the early 20th century. Among the life trajectories we have recently discovered, perhaps the most curious is that of the Barbadian Adolphus Collymore. Collymore left Barbados and arrived in Porto Velho between 1908 and 1909. He worked at the EFMM for some time, but soon became, in the words of his co-workers, “a complete vagabond”. Soon he began to lead a gang that called itself the “Dixey gang”, which seems to be a clear reference to the word “Dixie”, which refers to the collective identity of the “Deep South” of the United States of America, formed by the slave-owning southern states. On the night of April 24, 1915, Collymore attacked a Caribbean worker named George Russell with a razor, leaving him seriously injured. Soon after, about 15 Caribbean workers signed a letter to the police chief requesting that Collymore be expelled from the city of Porto Velho, describing him as an “undesirable” element. Collymore was expelled to Manaus, and the story could have ended here. But, by chance or luck, we came across records of Collymore that showing that he traveled from Manaus to the United States and enlisted in the Army, joining the Third Engineer Battalion in 1919. In the following years, Collymore worked as an Army cook and died of a heart attack in Arizona in 1929. The death certificate issued by the Army contained the following words: single and “of color”.

Recovering these and other stories was only possible thanks to the coordination of sources from various archives. Other examples include documentation on land conflicts in the Federal Territory of Guaporé in the 1940s, found in the Public Archives of Mato Grosso, and naturalization application processes of Barbadian citizens, among others, which are found in the National Archives. The fact is: thinking about and writing the history of Rondônia requires research that must start from the premise that its historical formation is fundamentally intertwined with the broader processes of the Atlantic world, encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas.

This brings us to a third and final element, which is the weakness of academic historiographical production on Rondônia. This is, of course, not meant as a disparagement or attack on my colleagues at the university. A quick glance at the historiography of Rondônia as a whole immediately reveals three main problems: 1) an attachment to official historical and chronological landmarks; 2) a concern with the “origins” of Rondônia and the naming of its founding landmarks - the best known being the Madeira-Mamoré Railway; 3) the circumscription of historical phenomena to a regionalism disconnected from the broader and more structural issues of Brazilian national formation, giving the impression that Rondônia has its own isolated history.

We are therefore left with the simple empirical observation that the analytical and conceptual tools used to date to write the history of Rondônia are outdated, inadequate, and insufficient, especially when compared to the historiography produced by graduate programs in Brazil in recent decades, with the exception of Elaine Rocha, Louise Cardoso, and Ana Carolina Monteiro Paiva. In recent years, Rocha has devoted herself to researching the migration processes of Barbadians to the Amazon and has published several articles on the subject (see, for example, Rocha; Alleyne, 2012); Ana Carolina Paiva, in turn, wrote a relevant master’s thesis on Caribbean workers in the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway. One of her main merits is having used the theoretical and methodological tools of the Social History of Labor to analyze documentation related to the subject, thus opening up a series of new possibilities for understanding the working class in Rondônia.

In this regard, we reiterate what we previously pointed out: thinking about the history of Rondônia based on the premises established by this WG is an excellent opportunity to explore new possibilities for the use of sources, the writing of history, and new theoretical and conceptual frameworks aimed at understanding the history of Rondônia and the western Amazon. We are convinced that dialogue with other colleagues in the WG and the maintenance of this communication network are fundamental to building new horizons for the historiography of the Amazon.

THE AFRICAN DIASPORA IN THE ARTS: CONTRIBUTIONS AND PERSPECTIVES OF THE AFRO-AMERICAN WG

The history of Brazilian art has traditionally been constructed as white-Brazilian (Amancio, 2021). That is, quite often, the most studied topics revolved around whiteness and the ways in which these subjects perceived the world from their own perspective. The agenda that made this phenomenon possible was shaped over the longue durée, supported by agents that shaped the art world, such as museums, galleries, the market, critics, and historiography itself (Bourdieu, 1996). The canon, therefore, was established in an extremely sophisticated manner, so as to create the impression that it was structured based on the potential and complexity of the works produced by artists who, naturally, established themselves as relevant, prestigious, and necessary, without, of course, political categories having any apparent interference in this process (Simões, 2019; Santos, 2019).

These canonical artists constructed narratives about the formation of the country and, among other themes, defined the places that Black people should occupy within this narrative (Christo, 2009). Black people, in turn, were repeatedly represented as laboring bodies, as part of the landscape, as sexual objects, or even as blemishes. From Frans Post and Eckhout to Tarsila do Amaral and Di Cavalcanti (Amancio, 2016). We understand that an effective concern with the process of individuation of these subjects - previously represented in a generic or stereotypical manner and now portrayed with their own identity, complexity, and subjectivity - would only be perceived through the work of Black artists (Bittencourt, 2022; Pinheiro, 2023).

At the same time, Afro-Brazilian art is a more complex subject than it may seem at first glance (Munanga, 2004; Conduru, 2007; Menezes Neto, 2018). It is a concept that has carried different meanings in different contexts. In any case, it is possible to assert that its first definitions were aligned with a colonial power project that sought to control, classify, interpret, and marginalize Black artistic productions (Rodrigues, 1904; Ramos, 1949; Valladares, 1968; Cunha, 1983). This process was similar to what occurred in the shaping of the concept of African art by European critics (Mundymbe, 1998). From this perspective, Afro-Brazilian art was generally seen as an appendix to a broader narrative. It was linked not only to Black authorship but, above all, to a specific theme, referred to as Afro-Brazilian (Conduro, 2007). But what exactly does this mean? In most cases, this idea was associated with the representation of the universe of Afro-Brazilian religions (Salum, 2000). Thus, artists such as Carybé and Verger, in some of these interpretations, are included in this context. This issue has certainly been problematized in more recent contexts, whether from the practices of Black artists, curators, or other agents who are part of the art world (Lima, 2024).

The historical environment for this change is well established. Highly relevant political issues, such as the Quota Law (Gomes, 2011; Munanga, 2004), which encourages the inclusion of Black students and teachers in Brazilian public universities, add to a global scenario of restructuring the narrative about the sovereign subject. This process is linked to the provincialization of Europe, resulting from the dynamics of capital circulation in the contemporary world and globalization, contributing to the reformulation of a Eurocentric canon (Chakrabarty, 2000; Mbembe, 2018).

It is in this context that a new historiography of Brazilian art emerges, allowing for the formulation of new questions, paradigms, epistemologies, and research agendas to address the demands of the present (Bittencourt, 2015; Squeff, 2018; Simões, 2019; Dantas, 2023). This is a growing movement, albeit still in its infancy, which we believe needs to be encouraged. The establishment of the Afro-Americas Working Group is a good example of this.

To the same extent that we have witnessed the emergence of other realities, dialogue has often been restricted to the national experience. This limitation stems from multiple factors: the country’s continental size; the recent movement of returning to the archives, which has allowed for the recognition of histories that have been systematically marginalized and silenced; our - supposed - monolingualism (Espírito Santo; Santos, 2018); and the difficulty, at times, of effectively recognizing ourselves as part of Latin America (Bethell, 2009). This situation is clearly a problem for several reasons, but we would like to highlight two:

First, it causes us to lose sight of issues related to the subjects we have been studying and that may resonate in other continental contexts, whether in the U.S. or, more specifically, in Afro-Latin America (De La Fuente, 2018). These processes, rather than being mere comparisons, deal with the same historical process. The separation we make stems from a reading that segments history from a national perspective. From this perspective, it makes more sense, for example, to look at phenomena that are so distant yet strikingly similar, such as the Nego Fugido in the quilombola community of Acupe, in Santo Amaro-BA, and the Negros Azules in Barranquilla, Colombia (Javier, 2019; Pinto, 2021)³. On the other hand, there are other phenomena in which we, as the researchers of the subject, have established connections between these contexts, promoting dialogue and collaboration in such a way that ignoring this facet of the past means giving up on understanding an important part of that historical reality and its possible contemporary reverberations.

There is a movement in American academia aimed at establishing the field of Afro-Latin American studies. From this perspective, Afro-Latin American art has gained particular importance, given recent publications and projects in which this dialogue is deliberately present (Garcia Yero, 2023; Santner; Meller, 2021)⁴.

In this sense, one of the challenges of the Afro-Americas WG is to connect researchers interested in unveiling these processes, because the interconnection we seek, goes beyond a political agenda of a group of researchers (which, in itself, would already be legitimate) and constitutes a more complex way of understanding the experiences of Black artists in the Afro-Diaspora, from a perspective attentive to a shared historical and cultural flow. In this way, we aim to construct an approach that reveals the articulations, influences, and tensions that shape these experiences, broadening our understanding of the circulation of ideas, aesthetics, and forms of resistance in this context.

AFRO-AMERICAS: DEVELOPMENT AND PERSPECTIVES OF A FIELD OF STUDY⁵

The field of study on the experiences and historical processes involving people of African descent in the Americas has established itself as a significant area of research, seeking to engage in dialogue with racially defined social, cultural, and political movements, in addition to responding to the growing demand for reflections on the African diaspora. In this context, the term “Afro-Americas” emerges as a theoretical and political construct based on academic debates, while also seeking to encompass the historical processes and social struggles that claim narratives and approaches to identity, culture, and resistance in the Americas from an intersectional perspective. In the following, we explain the choice of this term to refer to the recent development and perspectives of the field of study of the Afro-Americas Working Group of ANPUH (National History Association).

In the United States, the ethnonym African American was widely popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, largely due to leaders of the Black movement in the country, such as Reverend Jesse Jackson, who promoted it as an alternative to the term black. The ethnonym was officially recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary in 2001, which traced the documented use of the term African American back to 1835. However, recent research by Fred Shapiro revealed an occurrence recorded in 1782, in an anti-colonial sermon published by an anonymous author identified as an “African American”. In his article, Shapiro mentions that the analogous expression Afro-American enjoyed brief popularity in the 1960s (Shapiro, 2016).

In South America, the term was also in circulation, especially among intellectuals. Uruguayan anthropologist Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, for example, published the book Línea de color - Ensayos afro-americanos⁶ in 1938. It is interesting to note that Valdés used the expression “Afro-American essays” as early as the 1930s, while prominent American and European researchers - such as Melville Herskovits - still referred to the historical and contemporary presence of Africans and Afro-descendants in the New World as “Black America”. It was only between the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of the civil rights struggle of the Black movement in the United States, that African American Studies curricula were rapidly created in US universities (Mintz, 2003, p. 7).

In 2004, George Andrews published the book Afro-Latin America: 1800-2000 (translation published in 2007 in Brazil), in which he presents a comparative synthesis of the history of people of African descent in different regions of Latin America over two hundred years. The historian revisits the term “Afro-Latin America” and its conceptualization in the works of two intellectuals specializing in racial issues in Latin America: Anani Dzidzienyo (1978) and Pierre-Michel Fontaine (1980). The expression was defined by these authors and adopted by Andrews to designate the regions of Latin America where significant numbers of “people of known African descent” are found. In this definition, Latin America is understood as the group of American nations colonized and dominated by Portugal and Spain between the 16th and 19th centuries. Andrews establishes a “threshold of significance” of a minimum of 5 to 10% of the total population of individuals of African descent for a region or nation to be considered part of “Afro-Latin America”. According to the historian, this level seems to make “blackness” a “visible element in systems of stratification and social inequality, and the culture of African origin - patterns of sociability and group expression - becomes a visible part of national life” (Andrews, 2007, pp. 29-30).

The concept developed by Dzidzienyo and Fontaine has become a reference for several researchers who have used the term “Afro-Latin America” or the field of Afro-Latin American studies. However, it is fascinating to note that before that, the term was already used by the Unified Black Movement (MNU) in Brazil. While ethnonyms such as “Afro-Cuban” and “Afro-Brazilian” were created in the first half of the 20th century, the use of the term “Afro-Latin America” emerged in the 1970s in the city of São Paulo among a group of black activists and intellectuals, many of whom participated in the founding of the MNU in 1978 (Andrews, 2018). Neusa Maria Pereira was invited by the editors of the newspaper Versus (which sold 35,000 copies in 1977) to bring in other black journalists to publish issues related to the black population in a specific supplement of the newspaper. Neusa Pereira brought in Hamilton Bernardes Cardoso and Jamu Minka, and together they named the section “Afro-Latin America, and not just Latin America, because it better defines the importance of the African presence in this part of the world” (Afro-Latin America - First section - facsimile edition, 2014, p. 13). Other contributors to the publication included Thereza Santos (exiled in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola between 1974 and 1978), Abdias do Nascimento, who sent contributions from exile in the United States, Oswaldo de Camargo, Lélia Gonzalez, among others (Rodrigues, 2023, pp. 79-80).

Thus, in the supplement “Afro-Latino-America”, they published articles and commentaries on racial issues and social struggles, not only in Brazil but also in Africa and the African diaspora, across 20 issues of the journal between 1977 and 1979 (Rodrigues, 2023, p. 68). During this period, Dzidzienyo and Fontaine conducted their research in Brazil. The former, in particular, was heavily involved in the Brazilian black movement and was present and active at the 3rd Congress of Black Culture in the Americas, held by the Institute for Afro-Brazilian Research and Studies (IPEAFRO) in 1982 (Silva, 2020). Corroborating Andrews’ statement, “thus a transformative concept was coined that reverberated throughout the diaspora” (Andrews, 2018).

At the same time as the Afro-Latin America group, historian and sociologist Lélia Gonzalez shed light on another fundamental concept: Améfrica Ladina. The black intellectual and activist deepened the meaning of the term coined by M. D. Magno (1980) and developed the concept of Amefricanidade, from which she proposed an Afrocentric view of the Americas, emphasizing the historical, cultural, and political contributions of African and Indigenous peoples. The concept of Améfrica Ladina, proposed by Gonzalez, takes a critical approach to the expression “Latin America” for making invisible the contributions of African and Indigenous peoples in the formation of American societies. The term Améfrica highlights the African presence and the Black diaspora as fundamental elements for understanding American societies, often silenced or marginalized by colonial narratives. Ladina reinterprets the term “Latino” to value the cultural specificities that emerged from Iberian colonization and the resistance of Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples, who reinterpreted these influences (Gonzalez, 1988, pp. 69-82).

Gonzalez criticizes the use of categories such as “African American” and “African-American”, which originally restricted the Black experience to the United States, and “points to the unconscious reproduction of the imperialist position of the United States, which claims to be THE AMERICA” (Gonzalez, 1988, p. 76). It is in this context that Gonzalez proposes Amefricanity, a category that transcends territorial, linguistic, and ideological barriers, paving the way for a deeper understanding of the cultural and historical dynamics that shape the Americas, highlighting processes of adaptation, resistance, and cultural creation. In this sense, she emphasizes the construction of an ethnic identity that recognizes and values African and diasporic contributions, aligning with other categories such as Pan-Africanism, Negritude, and Afrocentricity (Gonzalez, 1988, pp. 76-77). For Gonzalez, Amefricanidade, more than a historical analysis, is a category of identity affirmation and resistance in the face of structural racism and colonial narratives. In addition to highlighting the impact of African roots on the sociocultural formation of the Americas, she also proposes that this heritage serve as a starting point for the construction of new ethnic identities. The valorization of these cultural roots does not mean denying European or indigenous influences, but rather affirms the centrality of Afro-descendant experiences and their forms of struggle and creation in societies marked by racism and exclusion.

Another fundamental aspect of Lélia Gonzalez’s work is her intersectional analysis. By combining the categories of race, gender, and class, she offers a pioneering approach to understanding the oppressions historically faced by Black women in the Americas, while also highlighting their role as agents of transformation and resistance. From this perspective, the theme of Black women becomes central, and reflections on Black feminism gain greater depth and representativeness in South America, broadening the debate beyond the predominant scholarship of Black American feminists (Gonzales, 2020, p. 11). It is worth noting that, although she highlights Amefricanity, Gonzalez does not abandon concepts such as Afro-Latin American when addressing feminist thought. As Flavia Rios and Márcia Lima state, “as a conceptual redefinition, the construction of an Afro-Latin American feminist thought”, which Gonzalez proposes, “is the result of the combination of the multiracial and multicultural character of the societies of the region, elaborated in Amefricanity, introducing the gender perspective. The situation of Amefrican women is the result of historical and contemporary processes of intersectional oppression” (Gonzales, 2020, p. 15).

The relevance of Lélia Gonzalez’s thinking is evident in our text, especially through the categories of Améfrica Ladina and Amefricanidade. However, it is important to clarify that the Afro-Americas WG avoids appropriating the term Améfrica Ladina to refer to the field of studies in general, recognizing the specificity of the concept developed by Gonzalez as not only a methodological tool but also a political tool for peoples who have historically experienced structural racism in the Americas. As the thinker herself states: “Améfrica, as an ethnogeographic system of reference, is a creation of ours and our ancestors on the continent where we live, inspired by African models” (Gonzalez, 1988, p. 77).

George Reid Andrews and Alejandro de la Fuente describe the field of Afro-Latin American studies as a dynamic and constantly expanding area of research. This field primarily focuses on the study of peoples of African descent in Latin America, analyzing their histories, cultures, strategies, and struggles. Secondly, it encompasses the study of the broader societies in which these groups are embedded, addressing issues related to blackness and “race in general, as a category of difference, as a driver of stratification and inequality, and as a key variable in the processes of nation-building” (Andrews; De La Fuente, 2018, p. 19).

However, Andrews points out that the definition of Afro-Latin America does not include English- and French-speaking countries that are part of the history of the African diaspora in the New World, such as Haiti, Jamaica, and Barbados (Andrews, 2007, p. 29), nor the United States of America. Therefore, considering primarily the point of view of Brazilian research institutions, from the perspective of the continent and its shared history, we believe it is more appropriate and broader to speak of the “Afro-Americas” - thus including studies on the countries mentioned above, among others - while maintaining an intrinsic relationship with the fundamental social history of the term “Afro-Latin America”. This perspective has proven comprehensive and useful for the field of studies in Brazil, allowing reference to regions where African and Afro-descendant presence has stood out in history, shaping the present of various locations in the Americas and the Caribbean.

The development of the field of African-American studies in Brazil owes much to the solid tradition of studies on slavery, post-abolition, and race relations in the country, with excellent research conducted at Brazilian universities on these topics. Since the 1970s, through the so-called “New History of Slavery”, a vast body of high-quality academic work has addressed issues such as the violence of slavery, revolts, manumissions, the organization of enslaved families, emancipation laws, abolitionism, and, more recently, the conditions of enslaved women and children, among others. The consolidated fields of study on the “Worlds of Work” and “Post-Emancipation” have contributed significantly to research on associations, the actions of black workers, strikes, the black press, political participation, and the meanings of freedom. These studies have broadened the debate on race, racism, and processes of racialization in Brazilian society, further enriching the academic landscape.

The Afro-Americas Working Group, developed through a broad network of researchers, seeks to contribute to these academic debates from a transnational perspective, based on research on the experiences of the African diaspora in the Americas. As a field of study, it aims to transcend national boundaries and expand the possibilities for comparative and connected historical approaches, seeking to add complexity to analyses of the Caribbean, North America, Latin America, and the Atlantic World.

The term “Afro-Americas” is still rarely used, although it appears in the singular in some important works. Notably, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price use the expression “Afro-America” in their classic work (1978), The Birth of African-American Culture, to refer to the set of locations in the Americas and the Caribbean where enslaved African populations created and recreated cultural elements derived from their African traditions. In 2008, CLACSO published the collection Los Estudios Afroamericanos y Africanos en América Latina: Herencia, Presencia y Visiones del Otro (Afro-American and African Studies in Latin America: Heritage, Presence, and Visions of the Other), edited by Diego Buffa and María José Becerra. In this book, Gladys Lechini uses the term “Afro-America” in the title of her introductory article, in which she explores the field of studies on “Africa and Afro-America in Latin America” (Lechini, 2008, p. 11).

In 1982, Ciro Flamarion Cardoso published a comparative synthesis of slave systems on the American continent, entitled Afro-America: Slavery in the New World. In this text, Cardoso states that it is appropriate to reserve the name “Afro-America” only for the part of the continent where African slavery became the predominant mode of production, and therefore the presence of Africans and Afro-descendants was of greater importance (Cardoso, 1982, p. 24). Cardoso’s perspective should not be ignored, but by returning to the term in the plural - seeking to connect it to the notions of Afro-Latin America and Améfrica Ladina, developed from Brazilian black social and intellectual movements - we aim both to make the boundaries that define the “Afro-Americas” more fluid and to deepen the perspectives of the field of study. In this way, we seek to engage in dialogue with theoretical frameworks rooted in the intersectional experience of race, class, and gender, as well as with more current research in African American and Afro-Latin American studies.

CONCLUSION

This article presents both a point of arrival and a point of departure. Its sections are the result of research conducted by members of the Afro-Americas Working Group, drawing on Latin American intellectual traditions and highlighting the advancement of studies in Brazilian universities on the African diaspora and the experiences of Afro-descendants in the Americas. At the same time, these sections, taken together, reveal the potential of a field of study in formation, which dialogues with Afro-Latin American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-American studies, while proposing an integrative perspective from an unapologetically Latin American and Brazilian point of view. Thus, this is not a programmatic article offering a unified theoretical framework shared by all members of the WG, but rather an invitation to dialogue and expand theoretical horizons, extending to all who investigate the Afro-diasporic experience in the Americas.

Data availability statement:

The entire dataset that supports the results of this study has been published in the article itself.

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• 1
  The journal can be consulted at Revista Brasileira do Caribe ([n.d.]).
• 2
  Issue n. 27 of the journal can be accessed at Anphlac Electronic Journal ([n.d.]).
• 3
  The Nego Fugido, as described by Monilson Pinto, involves a ritual of evoking ancestors and scenic figures, with strong links to Afro-Brazilian oral traditions. The Negros Azules, from the Barranquilla Carnival, are figures of resistance and celebration of black culture, focusing on artistic expressions that revere freedom and the struggle against oppression. Both are living representations of resistance, but in different cultural contexts.
• 4
  Beyond the bibliography, a good example is the Afro-Latin American Art: Building the Field project, organized by Alejandro de la Fuente and Thomas Cummins, with support from Harvard University and the Getty Foundation.
• 5
  Some excerpts from this section of the article were published in: Brasil and Canelas (2019); Mata et al. (2024).
• 6
  Valdes’ work is mentioned in the article by Fernanda Oliveira (2024, p. 13).

• Editor-in-chief:
  César Augusto Bulboz Queirós.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Jan 2026
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  11 Mar 2025
• Accepted
  25 Sept 2025