XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

XII CONGRESSO INTERNACIONAL ABRALIC

Resumo:1082-1

Oral (Tema Livre)

1082-1	From Underworld to Avant-garde: Art and Criminology in Cuba and Brazil
Autores:	Rodrigo Lopes de Barros (UT - University of Texas at Austin)

Resumo

As Paul Gilroy posits in "Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness", the African diaspora has created a culture that can be understood beyond nationalities, ethnicities and even races. In two cases, the body of knowledge that emerged from that phenomenon is almost a reflected image of each other: Cuba and Brazil. In those nations, the intellectual elites were studying black culture from the end of the nineteenth century (focusing mainly on musical and religious manifestations) and at the same time exchanging their writings with the most advanced thinkers of Europe. First, the Italian founders of the anthropological criminology were their correspondents: Lombroso was amazed by the research of authors such as Fernando Ortiz and Nina Rodrigues. However, some years later Surrealists, Dadaists, and members of other artistic movements from the 20s and 30s became deeply interested in the findings of Cuban and Brazilian intellectuals. Alejo Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz, and later Gustavo Barroso and Pierre Verge (French-born but based in Brazil), to name a few, constantly sent collected data about black marginal culture to the Old Continent and this data were incorporated into the new European aesthetics. Alejo Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz started then to abandon the realms of criminology to join the new field of modern anthropology led by Franz Boas, while the Brazilians began to explore the utopian possibilities that African-originated rituals could provide to modernity. The new European aesthetics, by its turn, faced the crises of dimensionality. First, the African mask was the key to radically change the grounds of Western sculpture and painting (as said by the German critic Carl Einstein): starting with Cubism and reaching its pinnacle with the primitive art of the Cuban Wifredo Lam. But also the African Diaspora performance gave those continental artists new weapons to rethink their own traditional: the seminal book by George Bataille, "Eroticism", is based on photographs of a Candomblé ritual which were took by Pierre Verger in Bahia. This book is the culmination of its whole literary project, which began in the late 20s with "Histoire de l'oeil". Moreover, written by Alfred Métraux, "Le Vaudou Haïtien" is persistently questioning the dramatic and theatrical elements of ritual possession and, although concerned mainly with the island of Hispaniola, relies on the production of the same photographer, Verger. In sum, this article aims to study how black culture was the basis to create the field of anthropology in Cuba and Brazil and how this knowledge was used to forge the avant-garde movements in art and literature a few years later, not only in such very countries but also in France by means of the works of authors such as Alfred Métraux, Roger Caillois and George Bataille. Thus, we seek to show the way this black Atlantic culture were part of the construction of the idea of modernity even when it appears unveiled in the work of European intellectuals.

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