Movimento Negro in Salvador de Bahia: an alliance between things

Abstract

Walking through Salvador de Bahia’s streets one perceives the presence of symbols of the culture of struggle promoted by the Movimento Negro, which invites to encher o espaço (“fill the space”) with celebratory representations of Afro-descent, in response to local structural racism. An attempt was made to understand who or what the Movimento Negro was through fieldwork. The centrality of the material and sensitive dimension, as a space for struggle among economic and racial groups (Rancière 2004), has emerged. Both racism and the forms of resistance in response to it are visible and materially manifest in bodies, spaces, and objects. Movimento Negro is a hyperobject (Morton 2018). It’s a “multispecies assemblage” (Haraway 2015): caught in its sensual manifestations, it forces us to question the local system of meaning and the very epistemological paradigms on which Modernity is based (Gilroy 1993).