NOTAS ACERCA DA INVENÇÃO DO NEGRO NO BRASIL

Abstract

Since the late 1980s peoples, traditions and cultures of African origin have occupied the center of a deep epistemological debate. The postcolonial perspective, if not the major protagonist of this epistemic debate, has concentrated much of its preoccupations in the investigation of the ways in which the traditions of Western thought knew and, above all, represented the Other of the West (in our case the Negro). This article seeks to accomplish precisely this deconstructive task. It seeks to understand how anthropology, particularly in the figure of Gilberto Freyre, constructed the black in Brazil as an authorized theoretical object and started to provide a vocabulary capable of identifying and representing it. Through criticism from internal authors to anthropology itself and postcolonial authors such as Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Franz Fanon about Western representations of the Negro, the article concludes that, not deferring from other contexts colonized, to Freyre's formulations and, roughly speaking, anthropology unfold and reproduce the problematic epistemological relations that mark the colonial relationship.