Recriando áfricas: subalternidade e identidade africana no camdoblé de Ketu

Abstract

The history of Candomblé as a diasporic recreation originated from the forced migration of enslaved Africans involves the persecution and demonization processes that undertook the subordination of black people and the African culture in Brazil, as well as the cultural hybridity that enabled the reinvention and, at the same time, the maintenance of an African identity in the scope of this religion. Thence, focusing on the cultural negotiation dynamics developed by the povo-de-santo , the present paper purposes itself to analyze the way in which the principles of purity, tradition preservation and assertion of Africanness, characteristics of Candomblé, relate to the survival strategies developed by this religion which, throughout the 20th century, has ceased to be only stigmatized as primitive to become an expression of African cultural heritage, integrating the Brazilian cultural patrimony. In this study, we aim to comprehend how academic theories, the national artistic scene, as well as the different social and political factors of Brazilian history, articulate themselves to the agency of Candomblé in the celebration of the nagô Africanness and in the rise of the nation of Ketu. To understand this issue, it is relevant to search for a possible association of the refusal of syncretism and the African authenticity assertion that mark the referred nation‟s identity with the cultural negotiation mechanisms that allowed the expansion and survival of the Candomblé de Ketu in cities like Goiânia, in which the modernity speech segregated social and spatially undesirable subjects and cultural manifestations through the eyes of the reiteration of modern cities and societies‟ imaginary. Lastly, this paper has as its ultimate goal to perceive the likely correlations between the history of Candomblé and the constitution of new cultural identities forged in the scope of post-colonial societies, in which the cultural and religion tradition with Amerindian and African origins survives by means of a constant process of cosmopolitan reframing and appropriation of modern Western elements that, destabilizing the euro centered system of social representation, enables the insurrection of subordinated subjects and knowledge.