Book, History made by black hands, One[LS]

Historian, teacher, poet and activist, Beatriz Nascimento left a multiple and profound intellectual legacy. This collection offers a broad overview of his thought, bringing together some of his main articles, essays and reviews, written between the years 1974-94. An insurgent thinker ahead of her time, Beatriz Nascimento dedicated herself to rescuing the history of black people in Brazil — something yet to be built, she defended. A black story, made by black people, with the aim of breaking four centuries of invisibilization in a society in which they participated at all levels. With exquisite organization by anthropologist Alex Ratts, the 24 texts selected here reaffirm the central aspects of his work — racial and gender relations; the formulations about the contribution of black people in the construction of Brazilian society; the refusal of the discourse that reduces the racial problem to an economic and social issue, without an existential understanding of the individual; and, above all, research on quilombos in Brazil, their relations with Africa and how they were reconfigured to be not just a space of resistance, but an alternative social system. This set is also completed by the author's writings marked by political and social transformations from the 1980s onwards — such as the end of military governments and the validity of the new Constitution — and by personal inflections and memories — as in “Carta de Catarina”, text by maturity and synthesis in which she discusses the black movement, the diaspora and its poetics, in addition to the process of making the film Orí, a fundamental work to know, see and hear the power of this transatlantic woman. “With Beatriz Nascimento, we have a way of seeing and getting to know another side of Brazil.” — Sueli Carneiro “We owe the revival of the black movement in Rio de Janeiro in the 1970s to this woman. Please don’t forget that!” — Lélia Gonzalez