Four concepts to think from the South

What is cultural studies?

What and where is cultural studies today? What is it becoming? What should or could it become? What is its meaning? What is at stake as we assess the ongoing development and maturation of cultural studies as field? The International Journal of Cultural Studies is soliciting provocative answers to these and related questions, from a range of scholars internationally. We will publish their responses as an ongoing series, across multiple issues.

Intersectionality, again – a disclaimer

In the first text, “Intersectionality: A challenge for cultural studies in the 2020s”, I defended intersectionality as a comprehensive and dynamic concept, useful for understanding, interpreting, and explaining social, economic, communicational, media, and cultural phenomena (Guimarães Corrêa, 2020). Patricia Hill Collins (2019) defines intersectionality as a critical social theory and, as such, an intellectual, political and ethical tool for knowledge, transformation and social justice. The possibilities of applications of intersectionality as a concept and as a methodological tool are very broad, as it is malleable, adaptable, and even, as noted by Davis (2008), incomplete, ambiguous, and open-ended. These aspects, among others, explain the success of intersectionality as a social theory.

Nevertheless, as the term has been spread much beyond the limits of activism and academic research, intersectionality has been appropriated and used in many situations and places (in academia, in corporations, in politics) to paradoxically depoliticize and to deracialize the debate about inequalities. It is important not to let the concept be diluted or whitewashed: intersectionality has its origins in the studies and actions of Black feminists, it has been created by Black women intellectuals and activists who had – and reflected upon – the experience of combined oppressions of anti-Black racism and misogyny. The concept of intersectionality cannot be used to neutralize its very Black and anti-racist core origins, which are linked to transformative ideas and practices, highlighting the collective aspects of the idea of empowerment, as understood by Paulo Freire (2005) and bell hooks (1994).

As race and racism are very uncomfortable topics, due to their role in the dynamics of power, especially within academia and other spaces of privilege, the term ‘intersectionality’ has been used as a buzzword to divert attention from anti-Black racism, in an ‘all lives matter’, ‘all oppressions matter’ way. Obviously, they do, but we must be aware of the repetition of historic processes of epistemicide. As Sueli Carneiro (2023: 97) notes, epistemicide is a way of kidnapping knowledge of vulnerable people in a double sense: by denying the rationality of the Other and/or by promoting cultural appropriation and assimilation. The result of these processes is the substitution or even the erasure of the original and political aspect of the term. In an interview about racial capitalism (Basu, 2020), Gargi Bhattacharyya said that, despite its contributions to transforming the debate about inequalities, ‘intersectionality (in academia) can be used to silence anti-racist voices, particularly the voices of Black and Brown people’. I also agree with Sirma Bilge when she points to the problem of making intersectionality ‘an empty shell onto which scholars of all stripes can conveniently project their own concerns...’, easily removing ‘Black feminists from their theoretical innovation, intersectionality’ (Bilge, 2020: 2298). So, by this disclaimer, I maintain that race and gender cannot be left aside when there is a claim or a legitimate will to carry out intersectional research or policy. I intend to bring to this discussion concepts proposed by Black authors, especially Black female intellectuals who wrote/write about race relations from a South American point of view.

Coloniality, race and the denial of a bond

To continue with my previous reflections, I propose some other ideas that will deal with dualities, ambivalences, and contradictions regarding race relations, by intellectuals from different places. Conflicts and displacements will characterize a kind of double place occupied by racialized people who speak from peculiar and potentially inventive perspectives to reflect upon issues of communication, culture, race, and gender.

We usually learn that the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, aimed at reason, freedom, progress, tolerance, fraternity, the separation of church and state, and even anti-colonialism. Nevertheless, the colonial system lasted until the 19th and 20th centuries, as did the slavery systems. The Enlightenment project was based on supposedly rational tools that enabled the dichotomic comparison and the hierarchical classification of peoples and groups, justifying the spoliation of exploitation of human beings and land, creating wealth for the colonizer. At first, religious and theological principles worked as justifications, as the absence of a soul or a unique god would mean that these people were primitive, less human, too close to nature. In the 19th century, the justification for the maintenance of the violence against racialized people was mainly based on scientific and biological arguments that would supposedly prove our inferiority through race theories. Nowadays, neoliberal ideologies and myths such as meritocracy will maintain and justify exclusions and privileges, many of them based on race and racism, according to a covert ‘racial contract’ (Mills, 1997), which enables the ‘narcissistic pact of whiteness’ (Bento, 2022), which I will address further on.

The coexistence and the simultaneity of the modernity and human rights on the one hand (in Europe) and, on the other hand (in the colonies), kidnapping, dehumanization, anomie, and all sorts of terrors related to colonization and slavery, is something that should scandalize anyone who studies past centuries. The idea of colonization, slavery, and racism as symptoms of neurosis, of a generalized pathology, is present in the writings of important Black and racialized authors throughout recent decades.

In the poignant Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire writes that ‘Europe is indefensible’ (2000: 32), weaving together acidic denunciations of hypocrisy and Christian moral relativism, and the selective, partial, and convenient humanism of many intellectuals in relation to the slavery that sustained colonialism. He argues that ‘no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased’ (2000: 39). From the American continent, Toni Morrison states that:

modern life begins with slavery[…]. You can call it an ideology and an economy, what it is is a pathology. Slavery broke the world in half, it broke it in every way. It broke Europe. It made them into something else, it made them slave masters, it made them crazy. You can’t do that for hundreds of years and it not take a toll. They had to dehumanize, not just the slaves but themselves. (Morrison quoted in Gilroy, 1993: 221)

This moral disease, as a separation, could only become possible through the denial of humanity, and the denial of any proximity or common human ground. Nevertheless, although invisibilized, this connection is undeniable, as the conqueror depended on the native and on the enslaved. The wealth in Europe was possible not only because of the Industrial Revolution and other ‘local’ factors, it was also and fundamentally enabled by the dehumanization that justified the exploitation of racialized people and land in the colonies. As Wendy Willems (2022) shows, the Habermasian concept of a public sphere in ‘democratic’ and ‘developed’ societies ignores the role and the concomitant existence of slavery supporting Western societies. Even today, coloniality organizes, as a rationale, the dynamics of many aspects in the extractivist relationship between societies in the global South and the global North. Coloniality is not buried in the past, it is in motion, renewing itself, in full swing, reproduced in the ways culture, knowledge and material resources are organized, valued, and shared.

Double bind, double knot, and racism in Latin America

Lélia Gonzalez, a philosopher, anthropologist and pioneer in reflections on racism and sexism in Latin America, wrote ‘The Black woman in Brazil’ (1995), exposing a cultural neurosis in the country, in relation to race. Quoting Marilena Chauí (1987), she uses Gregory Bateson's concept of double bind as a ‘double knot’ (duplo nó) to understand and explain the dynamics of racism in Brazil.

Gregory Bateson described the double bind in 1956 as a type of relationship that could lead to schizophrenia (Bateson et al., 1956). The double bind is a paradox in communication, in interaction, and it happens when a person, the ‘victim’, receives contradictory, conflicting messages from the same person: someone with whom they interact in an intense and important way (usually the mother). One of the messages implies love, closeness; while another message (which can be verbal or gestural) says the opposite, it speaks of an aversion and distancing.

Gonzalez identifies the two ideological trends that are contradictory and ‘define black identity in Brazilian society: on the one hand, the notion of racial democracy and, on the other, the ideology of whitening (branqueamento), ¹ resulting in a kind of double bind’ (Gonzalez, 1995: 324). She points out that the media will reproduce and perpetuate the ‘values of white western culture (as) the only true and universal ones’.

The myth of racial democracy will praise Blackness and justify the non-existence of racism, while the ideology of whitening will be marked by a eugenic desire to erase Black characteristics and a supposed improvement of the Brazilian population based on the idea of white superiority. At public and official levels, the myth of a harmonious racial democracy operates, but in private the ideology of whitening prevails. Gonzalez and Chauí added that, in the stereotypes and representations of racialized people that are apparently positive, praise is given precisely to what society downgrades, such as sensuality, passion, rhythm, nature, in opposition to attributes considered cultural, rational and intellectual, tightening this double knot even further.

This translation for the double bind as the double knot is revealing. In Portuguese, the knot, especially the one that cannot be untied, the blind knot, the Gordian knot, has a more negative connotation than a bind, and points to the insolubility of a problem. The conditions for establishing the double bind, in Bateson, in addition to contradictory messages, are: (1) the impossibility of metacommunication, such as asking which of the two messages is valid or saying that it does not make sense, (2) a communication field that the victim cannot leave, and (3) punishment for non-compliance with contradictory rules.

Therefore, interactions in a racist society (and their representations in advertisements) work as a game of marked cards (Guimarães Corrêa and Vaz, 2009), with no escape. For Bateson, a cure is only possible when the rules of this game, a game that cannot be won, are questioned. But the rules can change. That's why the best – and most difficult – attitude when someone tells us a racist, sexist, homophobic joke, for example, is to say: ‘I can’t understand this joke, can you explain it to me?’ This question breaks the paradox of double-knotted communication, questioning the rules of the game. The difficulty in this is that the double bind is established by those who have more power in the interaction. Bateson considers the bind between parent > child, but we can also think of other asymmetrical situational relations like employer > employee; teacher > student; or in relations that might involve oppressions and privileges like between man > woman; cis > trans people; white > racialized people, etc. ² So, untying the knot is not easy. Not understanding a joke also breaks the interaction order (Goffman, 1983) in a supposedly relaxed and friendly situation. For this reason, Black and Brown feminists (but not only us) can be considered killjoys (Ahmed, 2010) when pointing out injustices, inequalities and violence. Logically, whoever breaks this order is subject to social sanctions.

In 2018, sociologist Muniz Sodré also evoked and renewed Bateson's concept of double bind to think about the dynamics of racial relations in Brazil, identifying the relationship between the light-skinned classes in Brazil and the Black population as having a topological character: ‘I love/like/accept the dark-skinned person, but at the same time I love/like/accept that they stay away’ (Sodré, 2018: 15).

Thinking about dualities at a more micro level, that is, in the person who suffers racism in an ambivalent way, I consider it useful to bring the idea of ambiguity, duplicity, contradiction, and paradox in a famous concept of the American Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois. Historian, sociologist, pragmatist, activist, he published in 1903 The Souls of Black Folk (2008), considered a founding classic of modern sociology. He also understood racial inequalities as components of modernity. In this work, he brings the concept of double consciousness, which comes from the contradiction between being ‘an American and a black person; two souls, two thoughts, two irreconcilable fights; two ideals in dispute in a dark body, which only has its obstinate strength to not break in half’. The idea of double consciousness, then, comes from the perception of being different and similar. The challenge for Du Bois was to overcome this double consciousness, a source of internal division, conflict, and suffering.

In the middle of the 20th century, Richard Wright (1995) explored the idea of a ‘double vision’ and even a ‘third point of view’ provided by this hybrid identity, enabling him to be a privileged subject. This vision would be neither just a problem nor a constant privilege, but an intellectual asset. Sociologists such as Georg Simmel and Alfred Schütz also reflected on the privileged place of the foreigner due to the difference in their experience and perception. Patricia Hill Collins (1986), later, proposed the concept of the ‘outsider within’ to analyse the place and contribution of these ‘foreign bodies’ in academia.

Race has a symbolic existence, constituting, affecting, and being reflected in all fields: political, affective, economic, demographic. Thus, because of racism, race is a category with physical, tragic and quantifiable effects. And race, like gender, is relational, constructed in interaction. Race hierarchies and racism structure societies in the global North and South, especially the countries and regions affected by the slavery catastrophe, the ones enriched or impoverished by the effects of colonialism and the African diaspora. As a structural system, racism exists not only on the street where Floyd was murdered but also in homes, schools, universities, in political parties of all points on the spectrum, etc.

The narcissistic pact of whiteness

The word Négritude (Blackness) was first used by Aimé Césaire in a cultural, literary, and critical movement in the 1930s that questioned French-speaking colonial culture and highlighted the cultural values of Black Africa. The proposal reversed the pejorative connotations of the term ‘nègre’, proposing valorization and anti-colonialist resistance.

If the word negritude has become a current term, which does not require much explanation even in the common sense, the word whiteness is not so broadly used. In this silence about the term, lives the narcissistic pact of whiteness, a concept created by Brazilian intellectual, psychologist and activist Cida Bento (2022). She wrote that much has been said about the legacy of slavery and its negative impacts on Black populations, but that there is a silence about the positive impacts of the slavery system for white people, who, even today, still profit from that system.

Bento defines whiteness as ‘a place of racial, economic, and political privilege, in which raciality, not named as such, loaded with values, experiences, affective identifications, ultimately defines society’ (Bento, 2002: 7). Whiteness is not a colour, not even a race, it can be defined ‘as preservation of racial hierarchies, as a pact among equals’ ³ (Bento, 2002). Nevertheless, this pact is almost never explicit, and works well exactly because of its unsaid and narcissistic character:

It is obvious that white people do not hold secret meetings at five in the morning to plan how they are going to maintain their privileges and exclude Black people. But it is as if it were: the forms of exclusion and maintenance of privileges […] are similar and systematically denied or silenced. This pact of whiteness has a narcissistic, self-preservation component, as if the ‘different’ threatened the ‘normal’, the ‘universal’. ⁴ (Bento, 2022: 18)

As I pointed out in the previous text, lived experiences are deeply related to the drive to know, to research, to investigate. Cida Bento's thought and desire to explore this topic comes from her own experience as a qualified Black person who saw herself and her siblings being repeatedly denied jobs and positions. In her thesis (2002) and her book (2022), she investigated Brazilian corporations, government sector, workers’ unions, employers’ federations, etc. Having also researched centre, left- and right-wing parties, she found that all the organizations, with different political leanings, had similarities in structure and modus operandi when it came to race and gender relations.

The concept of a narcissistic pact of whiteness can be a key to cultural studies, as it can be useful to understand the persistent maintenance of privileges of certain strata of the population in the media and in the hegemonic culture, as well as the exclusions and distorted representations of minoritized groups in various communication products and platforms – not only in Brazil, but in many different societies.

Améfrica Ladina

Although 56% of Brazilian people identify as Black (comprising Black and Brown), Latin America is usually invisible when the topic is Blackness, especially when seen from the global North. In the United Kingdom, for example, the idea of Blackness is much more connected to Africa (obviously), to the United States and to the Caribbean, because of British colonization. Nevertheless, Brazil has the largest Black population of any country outside of Africa; Salvador, in the state of Bahia, is the blackest city outside the African continent. The very name Latin America hides the African origins of the continent's population, privileging the Iberian colonizers and their language.

Considering the important historical and demographical link between the African continent and the places of the diaspora, Black activists will even say that the contemporary and trendy decolonial concept serves to distract Black people from potentially revolutionary ideas of Pan-Africanism and anti-racist struggles. Black intellectuals originally from the South such as Custódio (forthcoming) will question the decolonial thought that comes mainly from the heirs of the privileges and the wealth of the European colonizers, that is, the people usually seen and treated as ‘white’ in the ex-colonies. While much has been said globally about decolonizing academia, the curricula, classes, etc., the power and the money tend to remain in the same hands. ⁵

Gonzalez (1988) wrote about the Améfrica Ladina and Amefricanidade, useful concepts to understand the context of African and Indigenous experiences and their resistance in Latin America and Caribbean. Even before Black feminists created and used the term ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw, 1989) in the United States, Gonzalez called attention to the triple discrimination of race, gender, and class.

Gonzalez analysed Brazilian society and stereotypes/representations of Brazilian Black women in culture and media. She proposed a Black perspective, with a potential for contributing to the social sciences, and for research from and about the global South, as it interweaves with Black studies, Feminist studies and what is today called a decolonial thought. Her thought brings to the surface the existence of a transatlanticidade, a concept proposed by Beatriz Nascimento (Nascimento, 2022), the importance of a South Black Atlantic (Henson, 2021), usually forgotten, broadening the concepts of Blackness (and of whiteness!) in a transnational perspective, and considering the huge role that race and gender play in these regions.

The idea of an Amefricanidade is very productive, but I am even more interested here in the second component of the expression, Ladina. The distinction between ladino and boçal was common in Brazil for centuries; both terms were used to describe enslaved people in official documents and in newspaper advertisements searching for fugitives or selling them as goods. The word boçal was used to designate enslaved people newly arrived from Africa and unfamiliar with the Portuguese language. Slavery was abolished, but the words remained in the lexicon: even today, boçal is still used to refer, in a derogatory way, to people who are considered silly, rude, uncultured, ignorant, and rough.

Ladino was the name given to enslaved people who could speak Portuguese, the colonizer's language; the term usually referred to Black people who were born in Brazil, already under the condition of slavery. Not being the first generation of enslaved people, ⁶ ladinos would be considered by the white population as socially and culturally adapted. The word ladino still exists in current Brazilian Portuguese, and nowadays the term means ‘rogue’, someone who acts dishonestly, usually betraying someone's trust.

By looking at the old and the contemporary meaning of these two words, it seems that there is no way out in this classification, as any possibility is negative: Black people are considered either stupid or dishonest. Nevertheless, ladino also has a positive meaning, although not completely detached from the negative one: it also means ‘wily’, ‘cunning’, ‘sly’, ‘crafty’, ‘artful’. These meanings make us remember the tactics of the weak described by de Certeau (1984) and Scott (1987), as clever activities of the less powerful that resist (or even attack) the power in the enemy territory, acting with creativity and astuteness. This ingenious character has to do with a double place, of being a foreigner in one's own territory, a way of understanding the diaspora as a place of identity instability, open to the invention of new ways of being, acting and thinking in the world (Appiah, 1992). As Leda Martins writes:

Black culture in the Americas is two-faced, two-voiced, and expresses, in its foundational constitutive modes, the disjunction between what the social system assumed that subjects should say and do and what, by countless practices, they actually said and did. […] In the Americas, African arts, crafts and knowledge take on new and ingenious formats. (Martins, 2002: 71) ⁷

Understanding that the Iberian colonization is a common denominator for a vast portion of the world, Gonzalez proposed an Afro-Latin American feminism and the concept of Amefricanidade as political and cultural categories. This approach might be useful not only for the study of Latin American societies but also for research in or about other postcolonial societies, as well as about their (economic, cultural, geopolitical) relations with the global North.

Impedance

The last concept I present here is impedance, an idea reframed by Pablo Saldanha, a Brazilian physics scholar. Impedance means the property of an electrical circuit which prevents an external voltage from producing a devastating current from destroying its elements; the total impedance is a combination of its resistive and reactive parts. Thus, impedance is the combination of resistance and reactance; and it is more complex than resistance because impedance varies with frequency. Saldanha, playfully, used impedance to define the resistance and reaction against the far-right government in Brazil which lasted from 2019 to 2022.

As resilience and resistance, concepts appropriated from the hard sciences, impedance comes from physics. The appropriation of impedance comes from a party (festa da impedância) created and hosted by Saldanha and his partner, from resistance + reactance through joy and solidarity, mutual support in a non-productive, non-capitalist gathering of individuals affected by a potentially destructive context. Sharing time and food, playing, singing and dancing to music in those gatherings was a way of impeding the authoritarian discourses from destroying our imagination about the possibility of another world at that time.

Used primarily in physics, and then as the name of a particular type of party, impedance can also be understood as impedant practices (Guimarães Corrêa, 2019). Applying this conceptual appropriation, Rodrigo Ednilson de Jesus (2019), another Black Brazilian scholar, said that the ‘Black population in Brazil (…), the indigenous people, the quilombolas, were never just people of resistance, they were people of impedance. If it weren’t for this active force to overcome inequalities and to build new alternatives, they wouldn’t have resisted.’ ⁸ I would like to call attention to the potentialities for the use of this concept to analyse human practices, especially in media and culture phenomena, with a stress on its active aspect to avoid destruction and annihilation.

In the case of Brazilian Black female intellectuals, some concepts come from their study of canonic theories (usually established by white men), in friction with their lived experiences as the other of the other, which resulted in an original (re)creation of concepts. Reading Lacan, among many other authors, Lélia Gonzalez applied the concept of denegation to bring to the surface some features of the (not so well) hidden racism in Brazil. Sueli Carneiro (2023) masterfully adopted and expanded the Foucauldian concept of dispositif to the invention of the dispositif of raciality, which explains a lot of Brazilian dynamics of exclusion. Reading Freud, Neusa Santos Souza (2021) analysed her interviews with Black people who have ascended economically in Brazil, understanding the processes of erasure of identity as survival in a racist society and the consequences to their mental health.

How to think intersectionally about binds (double, triple, multiple), about knots, constraints and creative powers, considering many categories of oppression? Our challenges are many. Ruptures with ingrained exclusionary dynamics are necessary. As Foucault said, ‘knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting’ (Foucault, 1977: 154). I argue that communication and knowledge have the power to untie, to understand and even to cut some tight knots which impede real bonds and the transformation of unequal societies. The concepts I briefly presented can provoke reflections and insights about oppressions and privileges, and not only about Brazilian and the Améfrica Ladina cultures. These concepts can help us, as cultural studies and communications scholars, to analyse and understand societies and contexts outside the global North, and even to perceive other facets of the relations between North–South, as well as South–South, and their reproduction in mediatized practices and discourses.