Post-diasporic blackness:

between colonial captivity and sensible potencies in visual representations of Brazilian music videos

Abstract

This article aims to understand the black experience in a dimension of tension and signification (Zilberberg, 2006; 2011), located in the Brazilian music videos “Crime Bárbaro” by Rincon Sapiência (2018) and “A Cena” by Rashid (2015), in order to problematize the effects of racism in Brazilian daily life and the possibilities of black survival in contemporary Brazil. The main argument adopts an understanding that the visual-aesthetic strategies mobilized by black artists act upon the gaze to make racism against black people explicit, while the everyday life of blackness and sensitive possibilities are articulated and tensioned. The analysis employed the methodological proposal of tensive semiotics to describe the visual-aesthetic elements of the selected rap music videos. A critical exploration of the findings was then carried out, supported by the racial debate proposed by black intellectuals in the social sciences. A set of aesthetic-visual strategies was identified, such as the intensification of embodied emotions, the tonic progression of the representation of violence, the precise and closed frames, the spatial and temporal transitions and the acceleration vs. deceleration of pace and direction. It was concluded that the experience of post-diaspora blackness inhabits atemporal flows and overlapping places, trapped in continuous colonial captivity by the permanence of the effects of slavery, which prevent the full emancipation of the black population. On the other hand, the music videos also mobilized strategies of survival and resistance, such as flight and confrontation, to highlight the constant process of (re)creation, adaptation and negotiation present in the daily conflicts of black people within structures of racialization.