Lélia Gonzalez

Dzieła

• 1984Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira (Rasizm i seksizm w kulturze brazylijskiej)

  Wykład wygłoszony w 1980 roku i wydrukowany w 1984: opierając się na Freudzie i Lacanie, Gonzalez odczytuje rasizm jako symptom brazylijskiej „nerwicy kulturowej” i bada postacie mulatki, pomocy domowej i „czarnej matki” (mãe preta), w których codzienny język zarazem ukrywa i ujawnia rasizm i seksizm.

• 1988A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade (Polityczno-kulturowa kategoria amefricanidade)

  Esej w czasopiśmie „Tempo Brasileiro”, który proponuje „Améfrica Ladina” w miejsce „Ameryki Łacińskiej”: kategoria amefricanidade nazywa wspólną dla ludzi pochodzenia afrykańskiego w obu Amerykach historię adaptacji, oporu, reinterpretacji i tworzenia nowych form, wbrew rasizmowi działającemu przez zaprzeczenie.

Stanowisko

Lélia Gonzalez is on the map as a founding voice of Black feminism and of the critique of racism in Brazil. In “Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira”, a lecture of 1980 printed in 1984, she took her “epistemological support” from Freud and Lacan: racism is the symptom of a Brazilian “cultural neurosis” that denies what it does, above all in the myth of a racial democracy born of mixing. She distinguished consciousness, the place of misrecognition where ideology speaks, from memory, the place where a history that was never written is inscribed, and read the figures of the mulata, the domestic worker and the “black mother” (mãe preta) as signs in which everyday language at once hides and reveals racism and sexism; the mãe preta, she argued, passed on to the children she raised the Portuguese of Brazil shaped by African languages, which she called “pretuguês”. In “A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade” (1988) she proposed “Améfrica Ladina” in place of “Latin America”: amefricanidade names a history of adaptation, resistance, reinterpretation and creation of new forms that people of African descent share across the continent, against a racism that in Latin America works by denial rather than by open segregation. In “Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano” (1988) she criticised a Latin American feminism that ignored racism. Long read mainly within the Black movement, her writings were collected in 2020 (ed. F. Rios and M. Lima) and are now a reference for Black feminism in Brazil and beyond; Angela Davis said in 2019 that she herself learns from Gonzalez. The term amefricanidade goes back to ideas of the psychoanalysts Betty Milan and M. D. Magno.

Życie i kontekst

Lélia de Almeida was born on 1 February 1935 in Belo Horizonte. After secondary school at the Colégio Pedro II in Rio de Janeiro (1954) she took degrees in history and geography and in philosophy at the University of the State of Guanabara (today UERJ); she took the surname Gonzalez on her marriage in 1964. She taught philosophy at the university’s secondary school in the late 1960s and later Brazilian culture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where she ended as head of the department of sociology and politics; she also earned a master’s degree in social communication and a doctorate in social anthropology. In the 1970s she studied psychoanalysis, above all the work of Jacques Lacan. In 1978 she was among the founders of the Movimento Negro Unificado; she also helped found the Instituto de Pesquisas das Culturas Negras in Rio and the Nzinga collective of Black women. With Carlos Hasenbalg she published “Lugar de negro” (1982). She stood for the federal parliament for the Workers’ Party and in 1986 for the state parliament for the Democratic Labour Party, both times becoming a substitute member, and from 1985 to 1989 she served on the National Council for Women’s Rights. She died in Rio de Janeiro on 10 July 1994.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Lugar de negro (with C. Hasenbalg, 1982)
• Racismo e sexismo na cultura brasileira (lecture 1980; Ciências Sociais Hoje, 1984)
• Festas populares no Brasil (1987)
• A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade (Tempo Brasileiro, 1988)
• Por um feminismo afro-latino-americano (essay, 1988; collected writings, ed. F. Rios and M. Lima, 2020)