Towards a Black Feminist Model of Black Atlantic Liberation:

Remembering Beatriz Nascimento

Christen Anne Smith

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, Volume 14, Number 2, 2016,

pp. 71-87 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/650689

Access provided by Brown University (24 Jan 2019 19:27 GMT)

Christen Anne Smith

Towards a Black Feminist

Model of Black Atlantic Liberation:
Remembering Beatriz Nascimento

Abstract
Black woman, scholar, and visionary—Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s
Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of
articles before she died and left only a few other recorded thoughts, her ideas about the symbolic
relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian maroon societies) and black subjectivity
encourage us to re-imagine the meaning of Black liberation from a transnational, Black
feminist perspective. This essay reflects on her life and intellectual contributions, making the
argument that Nascimento should be considered a key figure in the radical Black tradition in
the Americas. Not only did her ground-breaking theorizations of the Black Atlantic re-imagine
this important concept from a radical, Black, female, Latin American perspective, but the general
lack of knowledge of her theoretical contributions in contemporary theoretical debates in African
Diaspora and Latin American Studies underscores the need to deemphasize the United States and
English-speaking experiences in our discussions of global Black intellectual traditions, while
simultaneously foregrounding black women’s contributions to Latin American philosophical and
political thought.

Black woman, scholar, and visionary—Beatriz Nascimento was a critical

figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Her
ideas about the symbolic relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian
maroon societies) and Black subjectivity were ground breaking. She
encouraged us to re-imagine the meaning of Blackness, belonging and

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 14, no. 2 (2016): 71–87.

Copyright © 2016 Smith College. doi: 10.2979/meridians.14.2.06

71
 the Black Atlantic from a radical, Black female, transnational perspective
as early as the 1970s, nearly two decades before Paul Gilroy published
The Black Atlantic (1993). Yet, very few people know about the life and
intellectual contributions of Beatriz Nascimento beyond those who are
familiar with Black studies in Brazil. This essay reflects on her life and
her intellectual contributions as both a redress to that erasure and as a
provocation. Black women from Latin America have largely been excluded
from contemporary debates in Black and Latin American Studies because
of the unique ways that race, gender/sexuality and regional origin (which
is inherently a classed categorization) compound to mute their voices.
Black women are erased from Latin American studies because of the duality
of racism and sexism that is rampant in the Latin American academy.
Black women are erased from Black studies transnationally because of its
traditionally patriarchal structure. And Black women from Latin America
have been overlooked in the canon of Black women’s studies because of
the tendency to over-emphasize the experiences of English-speaking Black
women within this global project. As a result, there is a need to radically
diversify the discourses of each of these fields and to foreground Black
women’s contributions from Latin America to philosophical and political
thought in the Americas. Although theories generated by Black women
in Latin America have been muted or side-lined, there are hosts of Black
women from Latin America who have made significant theoretical and
philosophical interventions that could potentially change the way that we
think about gendered racial politics transnationally. The work of Beatriz
Nascimento is one example of such a body of thought. Although she
published only a handful of articles before she died and left only a few other
recorded thoughts, Nascimento should be considered a key figure in the
radical Black tradition in the Americas.
This essay takes a preliminary look at Beatriz Nascimento’s scholarly life
and work based on my archival and qualitative research. In 2009 I had the
pleasure of attending the re-release of the film Ori in São Paulo, directed by
Raquel Gerber and narrated by Beatriz Nascimento. Although I was familiar
with the life and work of Beatriz Nascimento from her biography, Eu Sou
Atlântica (2007), written by her principle biographer to date, Aléx Ratts, I
had never seen the documentary or video footage of Beatriz Nascimento.
The film immediately enamored me. The collage of reflections and

72 MERIDIANS  14:2
images—which are the result of 10 years of collaborative research between
Raquel Gerber and Beatriz Nascimento—was a window into the mind and
spirit of Beatriz Nascimento that I could not have imagined. From that
moment, I began researching her life and work, which eventually led me to
do archival research on her at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro and
interviews with her friends and family members. The information included
here is a result of this ongoing research.

Limbo: Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions

from Latin America

Black women across the Americas exist in a state of precarity. We are

always standing on the precipice of the social world; teetering on the
edge of invisibility, dis-ease and insanity, triply affected by gender/
sexuality, race, and class. As a result, our contributions to society typically
go unremarked. We occupy the space of what Joy James calls “political
amnesia”—“the gray area surrounding political agency, [that] partly stems
from the erasure of historical figures—particularly those female ancestors
who militantly fought as racial and gender outsiders for democracy,
only to be marginalized later from ‘respectable’ political community”
(James 1999, 44). Although Black women have fought for the principles
of gendered racial democracy1 globally since the colonialism/slavery
period, our historical figures—some of whom self-identified as Black
feminists and some whom we might consider, “protofeminists” (those
who “preshadowed contemporary black feminist radicalism”)—slip out of
memory (James 1999, 41). The task of Black feminism then, is, in part, to
bring these historical figures from the margins back onto the pages of her
story.
Yet within the reality of the Americas, Black women from Latin America
are more marginalized than their English-speaking counterparts. Afro-
Latin American women’s intellectual contributions are all but invisible
to those who are not familiar with Black feminism in Latin America. The
reasons for this are myriad. Most Black women in the region are poor and
working class, and are excluded from the higher education system (Wade
2009, Telles and Paschel 2014). When Black women do have access to the

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 73

 academy, they find it difficult to get their work published. As a result, Black
women’s written thoughts are often hidden away on scraps of paper in
closets and garages, or on old computers—in the world but not accessible
to the broader public. Black Brazilian feminist Luiza Bairros reflects on
this fact in her essay on the life and intellectual work of Lélia González,
a prolific Black feminist anthropologist from Brazil who contributed
significant theories to Black feminism and anti-racist studies regionally
in the 1970s and 1980s. She died with volumes of written ideas sitting
unpublished on manuscripts in boxes and on old computers scattered
across friends’ houses (Bairros 2000).
Beyond the question of accessibility (the degree to which Black women
have the opportunity to publish), there is also the language barrier.
Although many Black women intellectuals from Latin America speak
and read English and/or French, the reverse is not true of Black women
intellectuals from Anglophone countries. To date, most research on Black
women’s intellectual histories and Black feminism in the Americas has
focused on the United States and the English speaking Caribbean (e.g.,
McDuffie 2011, Boyce Davies 2007). Little research focusing on Black
women’s intellectual history in Latin America exists in English.2 The work
of Black women theorists like Epsy Campbell (Costa Rica), Andreia Beatriz
dos Santos (Brazil), Francia Marquez (Colombia), and Victoria Santa Cruz
(Peru), who theorize profoundly about gender, politics, and liberation,
is relatively unknown outside of their home countries. The exclusion of
Latin American Black women from the Black feminist canon is most often
because of the language barrier and a general lack of knowledge, not
malice. Nevertheless, the results are the same: an overwhelming erasure of
Black Latin American women’s intellectual contributions even by those who
tout the very political principles that these women uphold. Black female
intellectuals in Latin America occupy a space of limbo.
Limbo is a uniquely Black feminist space. “Limbos entail vulnerable
backbreaking postures as well as isolated states. Rarely ladylike, limbos
repudiate the gentleness of the cult of ‘true’ womanhood. . .” (James
1999, 41). “In limbos, shadow boxers, particularly historical women
or ‘protofeminists,’ who preshadowed contemporary black feminist
radicalism, provided models and strategies for resistance that rejected
strict black female adherence to middle-class norms” (James 1999,

74 MERIDIANS  14:2
41). Black women intellectuals from Latin America—feminist and
protofeminist—reside in the world of limbo. Bending and twisting to have
their voices heard, they often challenge the status quo on multiple levels
and at dangerous times. They are often radical, although not always. They
typically evade Euro-centric middle-class norms by the sheer fact of being.
And in most instances, their work provides models and strategies for
resistance.
Beatriz Nascimento was in every way a protofeminist in limbo. She
was a prolific radical thinker whose writings and recorded ideas mirror
deep reflection on the conditions of gendered Blackness in Brazil and the
Americas, the trans-Atlantic Black experience, and the politics of gendered
Black subjectivity. Looking at her life and her academic work we see a Black
woman continuously in the process of complex thought and reflection.
Her essays detail her aptitude as an historian, but her work on the film Ori
and her poetry (recently published by Aléx Ratts and her daughter Bethania
Gomes) transmit her soul and her presence. This essay focuses primarily
on her writings on quilombo3 and Ori. The film is without a doubt one of her
most significant intellectual contributions. She spent a decade working
on the project with director Raquel Gerber, and the conceptual framework
of the film is built on Nascimento’s master’s thesis project. Throughout
the film, we hear Nascimento speak on-screen and off. Almost the entire
documentary is accompanied by her narration, which is, in essence, a
recitation of the ideas she laid out in her graduate research on quilombos.
It begins with scenes from the Quinzena do Negro at the University of São
Paulo—a key academic conference on the question of race led by Black
activist-scholars during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985). Here,
we see Nascimento focused and deliberate, speaking eloquently about
quilombos as the only Black woman on a panel of men. Her softer, more
poetic narrative voice balances this more formal tone in the film. She
toggles between philosophical narration and personal reflection—the
pain and pleasure of memory. Her image also appears in the film. We see
her as a fervent militante do movimento negro arguing vociferously for the
decolonization of knowledge and the Brazilian university system. We also
see her at home as a quiet and reflective person that poetically ruminates
on what it means to be Black in Brazil. The transitions between vignettes in
the documentary deceptively lead the viewer to feel as if the events pictured

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 75

 occur in a continuum. Yet, the Beatriz Nascimento that we see represents
her personal and political growth over time.
Ori is a window into the brilliance of Beatriz Nascimento, but it is a
narrow one. It is narrow because the documentary itself reflects only a
fraction of the recordings that she made while producing the film over
the course of the decade from 1979–1989. There are hundreds of hours
of unedited audio and video footage from the film that contain countless
unpublished ideas on race, gender, life, and politics that should also be
analyzed.4 This in addition to the boxes of notes that she left in the trust
of Brazil’s National Archives is part of her intellectual oeuvre. Like the
boxes of unpublished papers and the worn old hard drives of so many
Black female intellectuals, these recordings constitute an archive of
Black women’s thought (in addition to the film itself, her published and
unpublished written work, and her poetry) that represents the intellectual
contributions of Beatriz Nascimento.

The Life of Beatriz Nascimento

Beatriz Nascimento was born in Aracaju, Sergipe on July 12, 1942 to a

mother who was a homemaker (Rubina Pereira Nascimento) and a father
who was a mason (Francisco Xavier do Nascimento). The eighth of ten
children, at age seven she migrated with her family from the northeast
region of Brazil to Rio de Janeiro, where she grew up in the suburban
neighborhood of Cordovil. She married twice. Her first marriage was to
Jose do Rosario Freitas Gomes, with whom she had one child, Bethânia
Gomes. Her second, common-law marriage was with Roberto Rosemburg.
An historian by training, she graduated with her bachelor’s degree from the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1971, interned at the National
Archives in Rio de Janeiro, and completed graduate work at the Fluminense
Federal University (UFF) in 1981. After ending her graduate studies at UFF,
she pursued her master’s degree in Communication from the Federal
University of Rio de Janeiro under the direction of renowned journalist
and sociologist Muniz Sodré. Her studies and her life abruptly ended on
January 28, 1995 when she was murdered while defending a friend against
an abusive partner.

76 MERIDIANS  14:2
 Throughout her adult life, Nascimento played a dynamic role in Brazil’s
Black Movement. She was a member of the Unified Black Movement (MNU)
and participated in and helped organize various Black student activist
organizations. While working on her degree from 1968–1971, Nascimento
helped found, among other groups, the Andre Rebouças Working Group at
the Fluminense Federal University (UFF). This was much more than just an
academic organization. Claudia Martins, Nascimento’s younger cousin and
former president of the working group, notes that the organization served
as an inspiration to Black students at the university and young Black people
in the community of Niteroi (the city where it was based). She remembers
Beatriz Nascimento as the, “first Black female professor with braids” that
she encountered in her life—an aesthetic that marked her politically for
years to come (Martins 2015). For Nascimento, the academy was yet another
colonized space of resistance for Black people. For this reason she sought
to create an autonomous safe space for the production of knowledge and
political development at UFF—a quilombo so to speak.
During the brief span of her academic and activist life, her research
incorporated a broad range of topics, including but not limited to African
and African-Brazilian history, and culture and social organization. Her
most substantive research was on quilombos.

Quilombo: A Radical, Black, Female, Latin-American

Perspective on Black Autonomy

The practice of quilombo—escape from slavery, resistance to slavery and the

establishment of autonomous spaces—occurred throughout the Americas
among enslaved Africans (Price 1973). From the cimarrones of Panama and
Peru, to the palenques of Cuba and the maroons of Jamaica, enslaved Africans
established a pattern and practice off flight and fight in response to the
injustices of slavery. Quilombos were the manifestation of this tradition in
Brazil. The most famous quilombo in the history of Brazil was Palmares
(Gomes 2005). Founded in the state of Pernambuco in the 16th century, it
resisted Portuguese attacks until 1695 and at its height had at least 10,000
inhabitants.5 However, most quilombos were much smaller in scale and did
not last as long as Palmares. In fact, as historian João Reis (2003) observes,

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 77

 the practice of quilombo could be as ephemeral as periodic escape for a few
days away from the city and/or down the road from plantations (2003, 68).
In this interpretation, we can think of quilombos not just as independent
societies of resistance, but also as resting places or espaços de fuga, where
Black people could retreat in order to seek religious renewal (particularly
through the practice of candomblé), commune with friends and family, or
simply pause. However, the word quilombo is the Portuguese appropriation
of the Bantu word kilombo, meaning war encampment (Lopes 1995). It
refers to the warrior camps of the Imbangala in the region of Angola during
the Portuguese mercantile era. Quilombos are simultaneously places of
escape and refuge and war encampments.
For decades Black Brazilian scholar-activists have looked to the liberation
model of the quilombo for political inspiration. Quilombos are the physical
spaces where enslaved Africans encamped to escape from bondage
during the period of slavery and the contemporary communities of their
descendants that still occupy these historic encampments. Yet, in the Black
radical tradition in Brazil, quilombos are not only physical spaces, but also
the practice of finding refuge from the total condition of slavery—including
those conditions that extend beyond the temporal boundaries of physical
bondage, like racism and the erasure of Black history. Quilombos are not
only physical and cultural spaces that are materially tangible historically
and today but also trans-temporal, trans-spatial spaces of Black liberation
that Black people in Brazil have articulated in response to the conditions of
subjugation.
Anthropologist Vera Regina Rodrigues da Silva (2008) notes that the
lively discussion that emerged in the 1970s around the significance of the
concept of quilombo to the Black liberation movement intensely reflected
the political climate of the moment. Situated squarely in the midst of
the fight against the repressive military dictatorship, Black activists were
passionately organizing against the state and in doing so, looking to the
quilombo as an anti-state model of Black social organization. At this time,
Black Brazilian scholar-activists began to look to the quilombo as a clear
example of a diachronic Black identity and a viable, uniquely Afro-Brazilian
model of social organization, state building and self-determination.
Scholars like Abdias do Nascimento (1980)6 and Clovis Moura (1987) wrote
extensively about quilombos as political articulations, for example. Beatriz

78 MERIDIANS  14:2
Nascimento played a key role in this debate, contributing her unique
perspectives as an historian and her keen social analysis of contemporary
Black Brazilian society.
Beatriz Nascimento defined quilombo as a multi-sited material and
symbolic territorialization of Black space from the favela (urban working-
class shantytowns), to the baile blacks (Black dance parties), to the terreiro
(African-Brazilian religious houses associated with the practice of
candomblé), and actual “remnant quilombo communities” (contemporary
maroon societies) (Nascimento 1982). For her, quilombo is not just a
place, culture or community, but also a verb—the ideological practice
of encampment and resistance against the oppression of slavery. But
slavery, in her configuration, extends beyond the temporal bounds
of the legal practice of enslavement. Instead, she identifies racialized
poverty, the disparagement of Black aesthetics, urban segregation,
and the erasure of history as contemporary legacies of the conditions
of slavery. Consequently, quilombo, for her, is a practice of escape and
refuge that has been passed down through generations and continues to
be practiced.
During the historic Quinzena do Negro in 1977, Beatriz Nascimento
articulated her preliminary ideas of quilombo. The debate surrounding
the historiography of quilombos was one of the principle topics at the
symposium, and Beatriz Nascimento served as an expert commentator.
The following excerpt from the transcript of that meeting presents her
definition of quilombo succinctly:
Question: What is quilombo to you?
Beatriz Nascimento: Quilombo is a social condition, fundamentally a
social condition. . .a grouping of Blacks by Blacks. . .who were never
accepted by society. . .the acceptance of Black culture.
Here Nascimento suggests that quilombo signifies Black autonomy and
space of escape. For her, quilombo is not just a physical space (the
geographic locations where enslaved Africans fled) but also the social
process of Black self-determination and organization.
Although Nascimento was not the first Black Brazilian scholar to engage
with the concept of quilombo as a liberation model, her insights carry
uniquely Black protofeminist interventions. This protofeminism emerges

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 79

 most distinctly in her articulation of the relationship between quilombo (as
practice), the Black body and the transcendentalism of African spirituality.
Nascimento engages with an age-old question for African Diaspora
scholars: in what ways does the body become the primary territorial
homeland for dislocated “Atlantic” African peoples in the Americas, and
how can the spirit then complicate this territoriality through ontological
transcendence? Embedded in her interpretation was the notion of the Black
body as a seamless extension of the land—the subject of Black migration,
escape, and liberation. Her conceptualization of quilombo is uniquely
gendered because she privileges the body as a political site. Moreover, her
theoretical engagement with the politics of trance and spirituality locate her
in dialogue with Black feminist discussions of the body as spiritual-political
portal, specifically, the work of Jacqui Alexander (2006).
In Ori, Nascimento articulates her territorial vision of the concept of
quilombo. She states,

Recapturing identity through knowledge of the land. . .as a person who

has migrated. Quilombo is a geographic space where human beings can
feel the ocean. . .all of the cosmic energy enters in your body. . . .I feel big
here. It’s a black thing, but it’s a black thing because of the connection to
the land. The black man [sic] is the one that knows the land best. . .just
like the Dogon people. The black man, the color of soil. . .the black earth
exists. It is that which we fear losing the most (Ori, 1:01:38-03:14)

For Nascimento, African people are an extension of the earth and vice
versa. We are the land, the land is us. The body literally becomes the territorial
continuity between Africa and Brazil. This grounding is symbolic and
material. Throughout the period of transatlantic slavery, Africans and
their descendants traveled back and forth from Brazil and the continent of
Africa. This is not to say that enslaved Africans were inherently mobile or
free to move. On the contrary, most were trapped by their bondage in the
Americas. However, there were some (like ship merchants and emissaries)
who did travel back and forth between the two spaces promoting economic
and political exchange. Quilombos—as zones—created the possibilities for
such exchange. Specifically, Beatriz Nascimento (1982) cites the historical
connectedness between Angola and the Kingdom of Palmares through
the organized meetings between Queen Nzinga’s court and the palmares in

80 MERIDIANS  14:2
the 17th century. She maps the two-way routes between Africa and Brazil
throughout the colonial period, noting the ways that Brazil borrowed from
Angola and Angola borrowed from Brazil.
Nascimento’s historical research with 20th century quilombo communities
records the memories of quilombola descendants through ethnography and
archival research while also geographically mapping these spaces. She
conducted her most substantive empirical research on three remaining
quilombo communities (comunidades remanescentes de quilombos) in the state
of Minas Gerais in the mid-1970s (Nascimento 1979). However, she was
convinced that quilombos could not only be defined as these “remnant”
spaces. Most poignantly, she theorized the favela (urban shantytown) as a
quilombo space, demonstrating how far her model of quilombo as anti-state
can go (Nascimento 1985). Her historical mapping of the routes between
Angola and Brazil are the basis for her framing of quilombos as escape
zones. The baile black, the samba school, the terreiro, the rural villages of the
descendents of enslaved Africans who escaped, are all spaces of potential
freedom for contemporary Black Brazilians that, like the quilombolas of the
colonial period, are defined by transmigration, escape, and refuge. Yet, at
the same time, these are also spaces of resistance against slavery and its
trans-temporal conditions—war encampments.
Despite Nascimento’s associations between quilombo and autonomous
black space, she also conceived of quilombo as a distinctly political
articulation. She considers displacement from the homeland not as rupture
from the land but as continuum. Relying heavily on candomblé cosmology,
she subscribes to the belief that the orixás (Yoruba religious deities) traveled
with enslaved Africans across the ocean,tangibly rooting the body of
displaced Africans to both the old land and the new—the spirits of the
rivers, mountains, trees, and fire, traveled with us across the Atlantic.
Two religious concepts anchor Nascimento’s thoughts on quilombo and
corporeality: ori (which literally means head, but is also a spirit in Afro-
Brazilian religious tradition), and possession/trance. For Nascimento, it
is, “As if the body were a document” (Ori, 41:30) “the language of trance
is the language of memory” (41:55) “slavery is present in our bodies our
blood and our veins” (42:29). She goes on to note that “. . .Quilombo
is the nucleus”—the ori. Building quilombo for her is like “getting your
head together” or, spiritually, making your bori (a complicated first rite in

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 81

 candomblé initiation which is a ritual to the head, the North of the body and
the community).
As she notes in her conversation on territoriality, the quest for Black
autonomous space is located first in the corporeality of the body. This
concept, like the concept of ori, is a fundamental principle of candomblé.
In the film, Gerber and Nascimento repeatedly show religious followers
in a state of trance and/or possession as a symbol of a liberated state of
being. To be in trance, to receive a spiritual entity is quilombo. The principle
document of transmigration is the body (Ratts 2007, 68). The body is also,
equally, the space of memory. It symbolically extends to its limits, mixing
itself with the landscape. The body is the territorializaion of memory. It is a
space of physical and corporeal realization.

Any investigation of the quilombo is based on the question of power.

However much a social system may dominate, one can create a different
system within it. And this is what quilombo is. . .Each individual holds
the power [is the power]. Each person is the quilombo. (Ori, 50:30)

Throughout Ori, Beatriz Nascimento toggles her narration between

philosophical over voice and personal reflection—the pain and pleasure
of memory. Quilombo becomes synonymous with Black humanity and
existence—a protofeminist insistence on Blackness as the right to being.
As Ratts notes, “What interests us about the thought of Beatriz is the
interrelationship between body, space and identity that can be rebuilt
by him who seeks to become a person (not a thing): in the maroon
society, the African-Brazilian house of worship, the meeting space and/
or entertainment venue, the black movement, in front of a mirror or a
photograph” (Ratts 2007, 66). Quilombo is the transmigration of the black
body from the senzala (slave quarters) to autonomy.
Understanding the cosmological logic behind her understanding of
quilombo is important here not only for charting the simultaneity of here
(Americas) and there (Africa) that Nascimento wants to evoke but also for
deconstructing this as a uniquely Black female reality. Jacqui Alexander
describes this as mojuba, a Yoruba greeting that Lukumi and candomblé
practioners use in the Americas. She writes,

Mojuba: an expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place,

bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map,

82 MERIDIANS  14:2
 encased in the physicality of body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum
(2005, 288).

This expansive memory is the Crossing, according to Alexander, the

palimpsestic collapsing of time and space that connects gendered African
diaspora bodies to the here and now of the Americas and the then and there
of the continent of Africa. The Crossing—the trans-Atlantic journey that
produce(s/d) the Black Atlantic experience—is quintessentially anchored
by the sea: Yemanja/Kaia, a deity herself. Like Alexander, Nascimento’s
territoriality is the Black body which is the medium of continuity between
Africa and Americas, and also home. In the oral history of candomblé, the
orixás and minkisi (deities) traveled with enslaved Africans across the ocean.
Thus it was possible to be both here (in the Americas) and there (in Africa)
at the same time.
Nascimento’s imagining of quilombo as at once a transcendental (spiritual)
and territorial (anchored primordially in the body and the space of the
Americas and Africa simultaneously) is part of what makes her ideas
protofeminist. Black feminist geographers like Katherine McKittrick (2006)
argue that Black women’s imaginaries challenge traditional notions of
geography and disrupt “social processes that make geography a racial-sexual
terrain” (xiv). As McKittrick observes, Black women create “oppositional
geographies” that reveal how subjectivities, activities, places, imaginations,
stories, and geography are “an imbrication of material and metaphorical
space” (xiv; see also Gilmore 2007.). In discussing the work of Caribbean
poet Dionne Brand, McKittrick writes, “humanness is always geographic—
blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, this is your land, your planet, your road,
your sea” (ix). She goes on to say, “she reminds me that the earth is also
skin. . .a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire
city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with. . .there exists
a terrain through which different geographic stories can be told” (ix-x).
McKittrick’s assertions speak explicitly about the alternate geographies
constituted by Black women’s global, diasporic experiences. Black women’s
imaginative and material lives unsettle the rendering of the Black body
as ungeographic and recall that space is not given but produced. Beatriz
Nascimento’s ideas of quilombo resonate with McKittrick’s articulations.
In Nascimento’s conversation on territoriality, the quest for Black
autonomous space is located first in the corporeality of the body. For her,

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 83

 the principle document of the transmigration of Black people between
Africa and the Americas is the body (Ratts 2007, 68). The body is also,
equally, the space of memory. It symbolically extends its limits, mixing
itself with the landscape. The body is the territorializaion of memory.
It is a space of physical and corporeal realization. Quilombo is becoming
human through the transmigration of the Black body from the senzala to the
quilombo (Ratts 2007, 66).
By conceptualizing quilombo as a space of transcendence and grounding
simultaneously, Beatriz Nascimento frames the Black body as the principle
site of self-determination. Yet, her narration of this idea—as channeled
through herself as a Black woman—also implies that the Black female
body specifically is the spiritual site of fuga (fugitivity: a potential safe zone
that is an escape from oppression and space for corporeal, mental and
spiritual freedom)and a war encampment(the space of retreat and political
re-organization and re-orientation). This is one place where the explicitly
radical political imaginings of Beatriz Nascimento become transparent. In
the middle of a brutal military dictatorship, Nascimento in essence argues for
political self-determination through the extension of the practice of quilombo
as fugitivity—escape from white supremacy—and political determination
in the contemporary period. In “O Conceito de Quilombola e a Resistência
Afro-Brasileira”, she writes, “the quilombo represents a powerful tool in the
process of recognizing Black Brazilian identity and its ethnic and national
self-assertion. The fact that it [quilombo] existed as a breach in the system
to which Blacks were morally submitted projects the hope that similar
institutions can act today alongside various other cultural manifestations that
reinforce [our] identity” (Nascimento 1985, 91). With the words “projects the
hope”, Nascimento argues openly for a contemporary “breach in the system
to which Blacks [are] morally submitted” – the contemporary subjugations
of White supremacy. Her implications here are clear: quilombo presents the
possibility of both spiritual and political liberation, temporary or long-term,
from oppressive structures of power.

Conclusions

Black women across the Americas have made and continue to make
significant contributions to the Black radical tradition in the Americas.

84 MERIDIANS  14:2
Yet, these contributions are often erased by a kind of political amnesia.
“Political amnesia, the gray area surrounding political agency, partly stems
from the erasure of historical figures—particularly those female ancestors
who militantly fought as racial and gender outsiders for democracy, only
to be marginalized later from ‘respectable’ political community” (James
1999, 44). The practice of Black feminist biography pushes back against
political amnesia, but Black women’s voices from Latin America are still
marginalized within this genre. Many Black women have contributed
substantively to the Black radical tradition from outside the Anglophone
world, and particularly within the Americas, there is a need to research
and analyze these voices, recognizing their unique contributions. This
expansion of our research can only enhance Black feminist scholarship and
scholarship on the Black radical tradition in the Americas.
Beatriz Nascimento’s thoughts on racism in Brazil, and belief that Black
Brazilians (descendants of enslaved Africans) articulate alternative social
and political models of survival by engaging in the sustained practice
of quilombo from the period of slavery onward, are radical, as are her
critiques of the interlocking forms of oppression that define the Black
condition in Brazilian society. They permit us to conceptualize her life and
contributions in Black feminist terms. Her insights gesture to something
far more complex than just historical reflections on the Black past or simple
critiques of Latin American racial exceptionalism. Rather, she challenges
us to consider the possibilities of Black autonomy beyond traditionally
masculine-centered approaches to liberation.

Notes
1. Gendered racial democracy is quite different from liberal democracy. Gendered
racial democracy emphasizes the “practice and principles of social equality” and
liberal democracy is best defined as a representational government based on the
principles of liberalism. Critical race theorists have heavily critiqued liberalism
as an inherently biased political framework. This approach maintains that
the color-blind rhetoric that often emerges from liberal discourse side-steps
important questions about the structural equality embedded within the liberal
democratic system. See, for example, Delgado and Stefancic 2001.
2. Two notable exceptions would be the work of Kia Lily Caldwell (2007, 2009)
and Keisha-Khan Perry (2005, 2013).
3. The term quilombo is both a noun and a verb. It refers to the maroon societies
established by Africans who escaped slavery in search of freedom during the

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 85

 colonial era. It also refers to the practice of temporary withdraw from slavery
in seek of respite or pause. Quilombo is everything from the establishment of
autonomous spaces of freedom in antithesis to slavery and the practice of black
fugitivity For more on the historical definition of quilombo(s), see Reis 2006.
4. This is one of the long-term goals of my current research project.
5. For a rich and detailed discussion of the quilombo of Palmares, see Flávio
Gomes’s Palmares (2005). For a more detailed discussion of the quilombo
tradition in Brazil, see João José Reis and Flávio Gomes’s Liberdade por um fio
(1996). Richard Price has done extensive comparative work on maroons and the
tradition of marooning throughout the Americas. Price’s Maroon Societies: Rebel
Slave Communities in the Americas (1979) remains an important reference for any
student of this subject.
6. To date, the most famous and widely read academic discussion of quilombo as
liberation model is accredited to Black Brazilian scholar and activist Abdias do
Nascimento, who in 1980 published a piece entitled “Quilombismo.”

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About the Author

Christen Anne Smith is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African
and African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin and
Director of Student Programs at the Lozano Long Institute for Latin
American Studies (LLILAS). She is the author of Afro-Paradise: Blackness,
Violence and Performance in Brazil (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and
editor of “Sorrow as Artifact: Radical Black Mothering in Times of Terror,”
Transforming Anthropology 24 no. 1 (2016).

Christen Smith  •  Remembering Beatriz Nascimento 87