Book, Imagined diasporas: Black Atlantic and Afro-Brazilian stories[LS]

The kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people in Africa to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries deeply marked the nations of the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States, creating a black diaspora on the continent, with traumatic consequences for these populations and with lasting marks on social and cultural relations of these countries. Even when faced with racial insults of all kinds, however, black people built a strong resistance with cultural marks identified both with their lands of origin and, as Kim Butler and Petrônio Domingues show, among black communities on the continent, creating inter-Atlantic ties. To evoke “diaspora” is to historically affirm an identity that transcends the borders of the nation-state. This form of consciousness, commonly associated with the Jewish experience, has been progressively adopted by other people today. Evoking diaspora is not just remembering a history of dispersion from an ancestral land – it also implies alternative forms of power. In this work, historians Kim D. Butler (USA) and Petrônio Domingues (Brazil), in addition to highlighting how the notion of “African diaspora” is configured in academic theory and in the practice of activists, point out the mutual influence that exists between Brazil -USA in the first decades of the 20th century involving intellectuals, institutions and leaders, such as Marcus Garvey and the Frente Negra Brasileira, and the important role played by artists such as Josephine Baker and the Bahian carnival who, by transcreating aspects of African culture in unusual performances , redefined political-cultural and social paradigms and forged the features of the Imagined Diasporas.